Category: Active

Does Donald Trump help or hurt himself by using the weapons of the presidency as personal tools for revenge? This is apart from the question of whether his doing so is simply turnabout-as-fair-play or simply an outrageous misuse of his power. Give a listen.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Subscribe to Bad Faith on Patreon to instantly unlock this episode and our entire premium episode library: http://patreon.com/badfaithpodcast

Matt Stoller, Director of the American Economic Liberties Project and king of anti-monopoly discourse, returns to Bad Faith podcast along with former Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, who was recently fired by President Trump, to explain how Trump is weaponizing ostensibly independent federal agencies to advance his censorship agenda. As Matt argues, oligarchic control over the media is impossible without media consolidation, and the Jimmy Kimmel cancelation fiasco is in some ways secondary to the bigger problem of an undiversified media ecosystem. Bedoya, who is also the founding director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University Law Center, broadens the conversation into one about the founding fathers' original conception of the corporation, and the need to impose limits due to its fundamentally anti-democratic potential. Will Democrats finally trust the anti-trust pros to break up the powers that are buying America?

Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube for video of this episode. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod).

Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates was harshly critical of my response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. In an article in Vanity Fair, he suggested I was whitewashing Kirk’s legacy, comparing it to the whitewashing of the Southern cause after the Civil War.

So I wanted to have Coates on the show to talk out our disagreement, as well as some deeper questions that I think exist underneath it about the work of politics.

What should the left do about the fact that so many Americans share Kirk’s views? What kinds of disagreements should we try to bridge? When is that work moral and necessary, and when is it a betrayal?

This episode contains strong language.

Mentioned:

“Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“My President Was Black” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Book Recommendations:

The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer

Race and Reunion by David W. Blight

The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.