Ezra Coates DESTROYS Ta-Nehisi Klein!!!

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by liberal japonicus

I posted about Ezra Klein’s piece entitled Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way and Coates’ reply. Well, Klein had Coates on his podcast. I’ll write more about it in the comments, (and thanks to GftNC in the comments, here is a gift link, thank you!) but you are welcome to post your own thoughts.

28 thoughts on “Ezra Coates DESTROYS Ta-Nehisi Klein!!!”

  3. Ezra does a lot of rationalizing when he ought to just say, “Yeah, I fucked up. He wasn’t doing politics right.”

  4. Although I do see where he’s coming from. It’s the same old debate: do you express ideas that only reflect exactly, purely what you believe, or do you modify your words so that people who might agree with most of what you believe do not feel demonised and despised, and collaborate with you and thereby help pass more progressive policies to benefit more of the people you care about. As Obama did.

    There’s no question that saying Kirk was “doing politics right” was a really careless and misleading choice of words (misleading even for what Klein meant), and I do totally see that someone like TNC from a historically (and currently) oppressed community might find it almost impossible to do that (although there are people who have managed it), but I think Klein’s intention has a lot of merit if what you really care about is getting power, and using it to benefit the most people.

  6. Without having read any of the links yet, I have to ask this: could anyone, even Ezra Klein, assert that Charlie Kirk was “doing Christianity the right way”?

    –TP

  7. …could anyone, even Ezra Klein, assert that Charlie Kirk was “doing Christianity the right way”?

    Tony, I believe there are tens of millions of people in the United States who believe in straight white male nationalism with a side of selective interpretation of biblical texts and assert that Charlie Kirk was doing Christianity the right way.

  8. First, thanks GftNC for the additional link, it’s really appreciated.

    I’m going to start categorizing posts and this one is Politics, though I think it is more (though isn’t everything nowadays) I wish Klein had taken a bit more onboard from Coates and not kept trying to nail Coates down on where he would draw the line. I appreciate that they must have had discussions before and Klein really must have taken offense at Coates saying that he whitewashed Kirk, but Coates could have asked what Charlie Kirk would have to had said before Klein would have to conclude that he shouldn’t write about Kirk. I also thought it was telling that Coates pointed out that MLK was actually speaking about love and he got assassinated. Klein should get credit for not hiding, but I still think he should take a dose of self-reflection.

  9. Thanks for sharing this LJ, I had not seen it. I have a lot of thoughts, I’ll try to boil them down and be concise.

    First, my general impression of the podcast is that Coates is very clear about his positions, but Klein seemed to be struggling to be as clear – to articulate the points he was trying to make. Some of this may be due to the different roles they see themselves in – Klein seems to see himself more as someone who is politically active, trying to find ways to persuade other folks to his point of view. Coates is very clear that he is not a political strategist, he is here to speak truth as he sees it. Those are really different jobs.

    I think Klein is correct to say the (D)’s as a party are flailing. My personal take on why they have lost “the heartland” – the “common people” – is that with very few exceptions they’ve kind of stepped away from the parts of the country, and the demographics, that we normally associate with those folks. I mean, literally – they have failed to fund and support local (D) organizations and infrastructure in lots of places. They’ve basically written off a lot of the country. That worked for a while, now it doesn’t. And hasn’t.

    Just show up and listen would solve a lot of problems.

    He’s also correct to say that a lot of folks feel that the institutional (D) party basically doesn’t like them. They don’t. Don’t understand them, aren’t interested in them, think they are idiots for voting for (R)’s and don’t seem highly motivated to figure out what those folks are about.

    There are a lot of places they could be winning, that they likely don’t even know exist.

    All IMO. And so, enough from me about the (D)’s as a party.

    Klein is correct to say that Kirk was “doing politics the right way”, if you assume the goal of politics is to amass power. Kirk was an ambitious, even driven, hard working dude, and he built an electoral organization that kicks ass. He was very very good at *politics*. At creating the conditions to win.

    What Kirk was absolutely *not* about was engagement and dialogue with his political opposites. After his murder, I felt obliged to at least watch some of his debates and other appearances. Kirk was not there to hear or understand any point of view other than his own, other than as a means of building his own counter-arguments. He was there to repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat his talking points. And he was there to make conservative young people feel like it was cool to be a conservative on campus.

    And much of what he had to say was straight-up bigotry. White supremacist sexist bigotry. Full stop.

    No amount of “civility” – a sort of observance of debate-team rules – can white-wash that.

    Folks say he was “reaching out to the other side”. He was not. He was reaching out to folks who agreed with him, or thought they might, and were uncomfortable out it in a campus environment, so that they could feel like they weren’t alone.

    A thing that folks don’t seem to want to say, because it will seem like they’re being mean to college conservatives, is that the whole “militant Christian nationalist capitalist western civilization strong men do big things” mythology doesn’t stand up well to critical thought. Which is sort of the point, or at least one of the important points, of higher education.

    It’s meant to teach you to think. Some ideas don’t survive critical thought.

    I appreciate the good intentions of folks who believe the solution to where we are at is to let the marketplace of ideas play out. The best ideas will win out, right?

    But that requires an openness of mind, and a willingness to engage your opposites in good faith and with respect. And that is not on offer.

    I’m with Coates when he says there are folks who have crossed a line, and that a fruitful conversation with them is not likely to happen. I have my own lines, which are pretty much summed up in Coates’ “not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity”.

    I won’t, as Clinton did, call my political or social opposites “deplorables”. But I will say that many of the things they believe and say and so are, in fact, deplorable, and I’m not interested in debating them about it.

    Blacks are prowling the streets looking for whites to prey upon.
    Blacks have descended into criminality and dysfunction since desegregation.
    SCOTUS justice Jackson is intellectually inferior and is taking a white man’s place.
    Transgender people are mentally ill freaks.
    And so on.

    No. No to all of that. And no, I’m not going to debate about it with you as if we were discussion “who’s better, Beatles or Stones?”.

    There are conversations I won’t have, because I’m not going to give the time of day to that kind of delusional toxic nonsense. Not least because it supports and engenders some of the cruelest policies and actions we’ve seen in a long time.

    I also second Coates when he points out that political violence is absolutely nothing new in our national history. The folks who say “this isn’t who we are” are… mistaken.

    And so, I fail to be concise.

  10. To Tony’s question, and Michael’s reply, yes, there are likely millions who think Kirk was “doing Christianity the right way”.

    And there are many, likely millions, who see Christianity in it’s nationalistic form as falling somewhere in the range from harmfully misguided to plainly idolatrous.

    So, no single point of view there.

    My own perspective, FWIW, is that Kirk’s America is not my America, and I do not hear the voice of Jesus in anything he had to say.

  11. Reading through that transcript, I can’t help but notice that Klein’s fixated on determining what it is that Dems have done to lose “the center.” What he thinks of as “the center” seems fairly hard to pin down. Sometimes it seem like he means “the Midwest” and “rural voters.” Sometimes it’s “people scared of radical change, like LGBTQ+ stuff.” He never seems to linger long on any one such group, or to try to dig in and get to the deepest urges that drive each of those groups fears, and I think that’s because his question is what can be done to “win them back.” He reminds me a lot of the campus Christian groups I was a part of back in the day whose conversations revolved around how to “win hearts for Jesus.” We were all looking for ways to appeal to the others around us, to be cool and relatable, to listen to them and find the needs and hurts that they were expressing so that we could understand how and when to convince them to join the team – being all things to all people so that by all means we could win some.

    It was a transactional view of people. We cared to the degree that we thought we might be able to win them over. We were nice to everyone, but we didn’t really want to spend any time in community with them unless we thought they were “on the path” to our way of things.

    I see this most clearly when Klein muses over needing more Democrats in the midwest who will not alienate anti-abortion people. He’s adjusting the sales pitch, trying to get a sale by avoiding conflict. It’s a good way to win a sale in the short term, but it does nothing to build coalitions or to create understanding across differences. It leaves marginal communities on the margins and makes it seem tactically acceptable to abandon those communities for the sake of avoiding conflict when solidarity becomes hard.

    Coates is coming from that margin and knows the peril of it. He’s lived his entire life feeling like he was a target for political violence that saw him in that instrumental, transactional way, not as someone to be won, but as someone to be feared for the sake of winning that same centrist that Klein wishes to add to the D column. Coates sees that the problem for a lot of people is not political violence per se, but rather that political violence was threatening *to touch them.* “Getting out of hand,” “spinning out of control” implies that what came before those dangerous moments was not a threat and was happening in a controlled and acceptable manner. Eric Brown? Not *political* violence. Not a sign of a society that had lost its way and was dangerously polarized.

    I don’t want to tip things over into the same conversations we have had about “white fragility” because I don’t see that those conversations have been particularly productive, but I will say that I think the sort of tactical approach that Klein seems to want to take makes it nearly impossible to have a deep conversation about our shared issues that does not turn transactional.

    I’d like to say more, but I can again feel this threatening to turn into something that requires examples and footnotes and explanations that I don’t have the resources or the time to support on the night before I start my Fall teaching, so I’ll have to be satisfied with this quick stab at what nibbles at me when I read Klein.

  12. Listening to Kirk, I hear the echo of voices from my youth:

    +9
    The Ku Klux Klan has historically used distorted and manipulated religious language to justify its white supremacist ideology, but these quotes and interpretations are universally rejected by mainstream Christian denominations. The KKK, particularly its 1920s incarnation, used a specific brand of Protestantism to fuel its hatred of Black Americans, Jewish people, and Catholics.
    Examples of religious quotes and distortions by the KKK
    Twisting scripture to promote racism: KKK imperial wizard Chris Barker once misquoted Leviticus 19:18 (“Love thy neighbor”) by adding the phrase “of thy people,” arguing that the Bible only required him to love white people. This selective and dishonest reading of scripture is a common tactic among hate groups.
    Elevating the white race to divine status: A 1920s Klan publication claimed that the “distinction among the races is not accidental but designed” and “indicates the wisdom of the divine mind”. This “racial exegesis” asserts that God created a hierarchy of races, with the white race at the top.
    Sanctioning the KKK’s actions as holy: In her 1925 book The Ku Klux Klan in Prophecy, Bishop Alma Bridwell White rationalized that the KKK was sanctioned by God “through divine illumination and prophetic vision”. She even suggested that the Apostles and the Good Samaritan were members of the Klan.
    Depicting the fiery cross as a Christian symbol: The KKK uses the burning cross—a symbol of racial intimidation—and portrays it as a sign of Christian sacrifice and service. One KKK leader described the fiery cross as driving away “darkness and gloom” with the fire of the cross, “purif[ying] and cleanse[ing] our virtues by the fire on His Sword”.
    Weaponizing Christian nationalism: KKK dogma often intertwines American patriotism with white Protestant Christianity. The Klan’s platform in the 1920s claimed, “Jesus Christ is the Klansman’s criterion of character,” and stated that the U.S. “must be preserved” as a “Protestant Christian democracy”.

  15. Hi Marty!

    I agree with pretty much everything russell says @11.12 (the possible exception is to do with “power”, and the necessity to win). But I find nous @5.56 extremely fascinating and thought-provoking, particularly the comparison with his college God squad and the whole concept of a transactional view of people. And when he says “I think the sort of tactical approach that Klein seems to want to take makes it nearly impossible to have a deep conversation about our shared issues that does not turn transactional” I really see what he means.

    But, my problem is that (probably because of the personalities of who raised me and how) I find it hard to think about having a “deep conversation about our shared issues that does not turn transactional” while there are such deep, terrible practical issues which need to be addressed as a matter of urgency (I am thinking, for example, of the imminent loss of health insurance from millions of people). It’s not that I think deep discussion about our shared issues is not worthwhile, it is that my instinct is to save the lives first, get the people vaccinated and fed etc etc, and that this should be the urgent priority. And that obviously to do this you need electability, and power.

    Maybe it is a difference of personality type? Maybe some people are “problem-solvers”, and some “theorisers” (loose terms)? And maybe both are necessary? I long for a world where immediate problems are not so urgent that polarisation and suspicion, even among people who share many essential attitudes, is not so automatic.

  17. The malevolent racism comes first: the KKK was not going to be led to righteousness by scholarly exegesis.

    Conversely, one hopes that theists do not seek to do good merely because scripture says they should.

  18. I find nous @5.56 extremely fascinating and thought-provoking, particularly the comparison with his college God squad and the whole concept of a transactional view of people.

    seconded

    It’s not that I think deep discussion about our shared issues is not worthwhile, it is that my instinct is to save the lives first

    I’m not sure it’s always possible to save the lives without engaging in the deeper discussion.

    My thinking about where we’re at as a country took a turn a while back, based on two events.

    The first was during a (R) candidate’s debate in 2011. The topic was health insurance, and Wolf Blitzer posed a hypothetical scenario – a healthy 30 year old man declines to buy health insurance, has an accident and falls into a coma, requiring intensive care.

    Ron Paul said this was an example of people taking responsibility for themselves – “That’s what freedom is all about – taking your own risks”. To which Blitzer replied, “So should society just let him die?”.

    And the room erupted in a chorus of “Yeah!” and applause.

    Paul’s response to Blitzer was more measured – he felt that this was where charity (not government) should step in. But that was a room full of people who were very enthusiastic about the guy being left to die.

    The second was an interview in the NYT with a guy in the upper midwest who was opposed to government involvement in health insurance. The guy’s sister had a chronic illness and was being kept alive through a federal health insurance program, I forget if it was Medicare or Medicaid.

    The interviewer pointed out that, if the guy’s preferences were enacted in policy, his sister would die. The guy said he understood that, and still felt programs like the one keeping his sister alive shouldn’t exist.

    Long story short, I realized that a large number of people in this country were not operating from the same basic moral or ethical basis as, for instance, me. The differences were not matters of policy, but were much, much deeper and more fundamental.

    It more or less gets back to Thatcher’s idea that “there is no such thing as society”. People sharing a polity have no obligation toward the safety or well being of others.

    Root hog or die.

    That is the divide that you have to cross if you want to save lives. If you want public policies and actions that get folks fed and housed and gets them access to health care, you have to get past the millions and millions and millions of people in this country who are basically OK with letting their neighbors die as long as it isn’t government helping them out.

    You might be able to do that a la Ezra Klein, by trying to meet them halfway – “just run some pro-life (D)’s”. Or similar. But as Coates calls out, you can’t get very far with that without throwing some set of folks under the bus.

    So who gets thrown under the bus, and who gets to have their life saved?

    In the podcast, Coates calls out the history of the social safety net stuff introduced by the New Deal. The way FDR made that happen was basically to make it available to everybody *but* black people. That was the transaction.

    It’s good that it happened at all, for most people, but a lot of folks were screwed.

    I guess we could continue to try to inch forward, expanding the scope of “who counts” bit by bit. But we’re going to continue to bump up against the folks who think the idea of a guy having an accident and dying because he was foolish is an applause line.

    You can only get so far without having the deeper conversation. The harder conversation.

  19. You can only get so far without having the deeper conversation. The harder conversation.

    I suspect this is true. And in no way was I suggesting that either approach was better, or more moral, just maybe a difference in personality/temperament/turn of mind. russell, I’ve found your stories about events which changed your idea of America and its people very resonant. And (as I have said many times) it’s not just America: we see similar manifestations of selfishness and punitiveness in lots of places, including the UK – the only difference so far being the enablement or otherwise by the government in power. My hope is that when and if economic conditions for the majority improve (which I take to be more likely under the Ds), certain kinds of empathy and human fellow-feeling may rebound, in which case the deeper conversations will no doubt provide the fertiliser and the seedbed.

    You might be able to do that a la Ezra Klein, by trying to meet them halfway – “just run some pro-life (D)’s”. Or similar. But as Coates calls out, you can’t get very far with that without throwing some set of folks under the bus.

    I suppose I was thinking that, in this example, to run some pro-life Ds or similar in red states, you might end up with various more D-type policies being enacted, and (since I’m assuming that many fewer Ds than Rs are pro-life), that this would not materially change federal laws about abortion, or perhaps eventually the makeup of the SCOTUS, so would not really end up throwing pro-choice folks under the bus (and anyone who has been reading my comments here for years knows I am militantly pro-choice). But maybe that’s a bit of a stretch? I certainly don’t know. But I can hope…

  20. My guess is that people who prefer preventable deaths over government assistance have been convinced that resources are so scarce that we can’t afford to have a government that prevents those deaths. The “we” excludes, whether those extreme “small government” people realize it or not, the percentage of people among us whose wealth is unimaginable to many of us “regular” people.

    It’s not the poor schmucks without insurance who are hoovering up our national wealth. Look elsewhere, says me.

  21. My guess is that people who prefer preventable deaths over government assistance have been convinced that resources are so scarce that we can’t afford to have a government that prevents those deaths.

    Maybe. But what I take away from all of it is less a concern about scarce resources per se, and more a feeling that folks don’t want their money going to help “that person over there”. For various definitions of “that person over there”.

    So less a matter of scarcity, and more a matter of “why should I pay for that guy?”.

    And to GFTNC’s point, I do think all of that is related to folks feeling (correctly or not) that government is helping “that person over there”, but not them. So, not that *government* lacks resources, so much as *they* lack resources, and nobody is helping *them*, so why should they support it?

    That doesn’t really explain the guy who’d throw his sister under the bus, but I do think it applies to a lot of folks. And they’re not always wrong.

    I do think that a lot of working class people were left behind by the neo-liberal triangulation stuff of the Clinton and (to a lesser degree, but still) Obama administrations. And I also do think that the (D) party of those years was tone-deaf to those folks’ concerns.

    I guess it was a way to win elections, but a lot of folks got left out in the cold.

    Don’t believe me, let Senator Chuck Schumer break it down for you.

    He was making a transactional bet. A bad call, all of the “college educated moderate (R)’s in the Philly suburbs” did not suddenly decide to vote (D). Some likely did, many did not, because tax breaks and 401k’s.

    Schumer made a bet, and lost. As did we all.

  22. Firstly, the essay GftNC linked above is really and expresses pretty much my view on the matter:

    What the Public Memory of Charlie Kirk Revealed

    For those who felt denigrated by his rhetoric, the bipartisan tributes to him as a champion of free speech augured something dangerous: the mainstreaming of formerly extremist views.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/magazine/charlie-kirk-rhetoric.html?unlocked_article_code=1.pU8.E_Qk.vE_VAYwg6Chi&smid=url-share

    Secondly, I have started working at a school recently and I wonder more and more what this mainstreaming of extremism will do to our kids one day – to those who will be victims, to those who will just live in a world with different values than previously accepted and to those who will be perpetrators. This reactionary hate speech Kirk peddled is just diametrically opposed to any humanism and basic decency. Basically we spend half the day in one form or another telling kids to show respect and empathy for others and maybe some manners. And then these crazy people come along telling everyone the opposite is true:

    You can tell the pupil sitting next to you she’s stupid because she’s black and her mother only got that job because she’s black. You can crash the LGBT meeting and tell them they are disgusting child molesters. You can tell the Jewish boy that he’s part of a vast conspiracy to rule the world and subdue the white race. You can tell the girls they are inferior, cannot get an abortion under ny cricumstances and have to submit to their husbands. You can tell the boy from Sudan, Ukraine, Mexico or wherever that he and his family are disgusting parasites feeding on the body of white America.

    And then Klein tells us that we should somehow get onboard with all this because the Overton window has shifted and we have to embrace some weird version of doublethink. Let’s just ditch all the values people have thought about and fought for hundreds of years and move to the ever rightward drifting “center”. I rather think it’s time for a “have you no decency” moment (though that was actually staged … but pretty well).

    /rant

  23. Re. the Blitzer scenario: I’ve just remember Obama’s attacks on Hillary Clinton over her well-thought-out position on mandatory healthcare insurance. That’s the sort of realpolitik Klein approves of.

    If you do think strictly voluntary healthcare insurance is a good idea, which of course I don’t, then you have to make healthcare meaningfully worse for anyone uninsured who could afford to be insured, otherwise why would anyone go to the expense. So chapeau to Blitzer’s audience for intellectual consistency, if not for compassion.

  24. Apropos of nothing in particular:

    I think it must be a weird time to be Ezra Klein (or similar). His gig is basically to have insightful things to say about where we’re at, politically. And I’m not sure anyone can really make sense of it all.

    We’re dealing with a very strange group of political actors at the moment, people driven by weird and somewhat opaque personal agendas. Or maybe not opaque as much as inexplicable.

    They really are a crew of weirdos. I guess that may sound kind of judge-y, but it would take a much better mind than mine to make sense of it all.

    Better days, y’all. They will come. We’re mostly olds here, so maybe not before we peg out, but they will come. In the meantime, hold fast to what is worthwhile.

  25. We can only hope the kids we’ve kicked off our lawns, when we weren’t too busy yelling at clouds, will get things straightened out.

  26. Ha, I’ve only just parsed PB’s last comment properly (I think) to see that he is throwing shade at Obama for torpedoing HRC’s mandatory health care proposal in the cause of realpolitik. Now, I was a supporter of HRC, and (obviously) of that proposal, but on the other hand the US electorate wasn’t (for various infinite mirror variations of reasons), and Obama managed to pass at least a watered down version of the ACA. So, incremental progress as a result of realpolitik, or a failure? Very hard to say in my opinion.

  27. IIRC correctly, Obama made an attack point of HRC’s insurance ‘mandate’, during the primaries. Then, when he actually came to try to pass the ACA, the wonks explained to him that it was necessary, so he adopted it after all. I was a supporter of Obama, but I was deeply unimpressed.

    In the end, the Rs torpedoed the ‘mandate’ as part of their performance theatre of opposing ACA while not being willing to take the electoral consequences of abolishing it. But they protected the insurance companies with restrictive enrolment periods instead, which turns out to be an inferior but workable solution.

    (I think it wise to review how things have worked out after the row has died down. One might sometimes learn something.)

  28. I’d note that Bill Kristol wrote an internal memorandum for the Republican party essentially saying that passing health care under Clinton would mean the end of the Republican party. The memorandum is here

    “The President’s health care proposal is the most important domestic political event of his presidency. Its defeat is the most important immediate goal of the Republican party. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.

    So it was shitty that Obama undercut Clinton, but Republican opposition was pretty much a constant, so one could argue that it wasn’t a policy choice, it was what Obama had to do to undercut Republican opposition. This isn’t to give Obama a pass, it is just to acknowledge that these policy arguments were not playing out on a blank slate.

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