Hey Frames of Space listeners,
We’re back this week with a thoughtful, revealing discussion that goes deep into the state of American politics, the evolution of evangelical culture, public apathy, and how to keep your sanity in the age of endless outrage. I sat down with
—writer, attorney, and commentator—to unpack how the last decade has dramatically shifted the country, especially for those who thought they had it all figured out.Spotify Link:
Apple Podcasts Link:
Here’s what you missed (or might want to revisit):
1. If You’d Told David French in 2015… What if you could travel back in time and warn your past self about the shocking ways politics would turn? David admits he would have never believed it—especially Trump’s lasting appeal, and how wrong he was about the ideological underpinnings of the Republican Party. French dives into how he underestimated both the power of animosity over ideology, and Trump’s ability to tap into that.
2. Evangelical America: Who’s Leading Whom? David offers a heartfelt reflection on evangelical culture and its political symbiosis. Contrary to what he once believed, he says it turns out Republican leaders have shaped evangelical communities more than the other way around. Trump didn’t just get accepted by evangelicals; he changed them into something harsher, more militant—a shift David found both surprising and concerning.
3. The Power of Not Knowing (and Not Wanting to Know) We all know someone who’s checked out of politics—not because they don’t care, but because it feels overwhelming or too painful. David talks about the huge gap between the highly engaged (that’s probably you, if you’re reading this!) and the average American. Most people aren’t cheering norm violations; they simply don’t know the details and don’t want to know. French argues this mix of ignorance and exhaustion allows strongmen to act with impunity.
4. How to Stay Grounded Amid Chaos For those who do pay attention, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. David shares his own strategies for keeping perspective: limit social media, skip the notifications, and focus on positive relationships. I jumped in with my own routine for news: a physical newspaper, one hour a week, and more time with friends and family.
5. One Sci-Fi Recommendation You Need On a lighter note, David and I bond over our love for The Expanse. If you haven’t watched it, you’re missing imaginative world-building, intriguing geopolitics, and perhaps the most honest depiction of future humanity.
Takeaway If you’re feeling isolated by outrage—or exhausted by the state of politics—you’re not alone. This episode reminds us that we’re still made of the same “human clay,” and that honest communication (not just within our bubbles!) and kindness really do matter.
Catch the full episode for more on:
The real roots of populism and evangelical alignment
The dangers of defensively ignoring politics
What good people can actually do to resist the tide
Thanks as always for listening! Share your feedback or favorite moments from the episode; we love hearing from you. And if you appreciated David’s perspective, don’t forget to read his columns. ;)
See you next time,
Andrew
P.S. If you haven’t seen The Expanse, now’s your homework. Trust us—it’s worth it!
Andrew Xu:
David French, thank you so much for taking the time to come onto this podcast.
David French:
Super happy to be here, Andrew. It's great to see you again.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah, the feeling is definitely mutual. All right, first question. Let's imagine that I had time traveling superpowers. I had the ability to travel back in time. I traveled back in time to 10 years ago, and then I told the 10 years younger version of you everything that would transpire in American politics over the next decade. How do you think you would have reacted?
David French:
So that would have been August of 2015.
Andrew Xu:
Yes.
David French:
So that would have been exactly the month when I started to get worried that Trump was not going away.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah, he's not a fad anymore.
David French:
Yeah, right, right. So he comes down the escalator and was it June? June.
Andrew Xu:
Mid June.
David French:
June. Mid June 2025 (sic). Everybody's talking about him. And you could go back and look at my writing from National Review at that time. And I don't talk about him very much at all because quite frankly: this is one of the reasons why, Andrew, I don't do a lot of political prognostication Like, I don't.
David French:
I'm not a. I'm not really a political pundit. I do talk about politics, but I'm not like somebody who's handicapping races and getting into the, you know, the, the what. What's happening in Hamilton County, Ohio, or sort of the bubbling kinds of stuff thing, the things happening on the ground in electoral politics. Because in 2025 (sic), I thought Trump was a flash in the pan, that, yeah, there was some underlying discontent and all of that, but there was a deep bench, a good field of Republican candidates, and I just missed it, man. And it's August of 2015 when I began to realize I was missing it. And by November of 2015, I was very alarmed, and a lot of people around me were not alarmed, so I started to feel weird about being alarmed.
Andrew Xu:
Am I the only one? Yeah, yeah.
David French:
Am I the only one? And. And, you know, at this time, it was by January, I think, that Trump had said something along the lines, "if I shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue." It's only by the early 2016 that I began to realize that he has a certain level of support, that's just unshakable. But what I did not see, I did not know Trump's character in full. I, you know, I had followed him as a pop culture figure. I had even enjoyed The Apprentice. Like, I, I had watched.
David French:
I didn't get into Celebrity Apprentice. I enjoyed the original version of it that dealt with, you know, non celebrities. That's how what was her name, Omarosa, or became notorious. But the I, I knew Trump sort of casually, from afar as a pop culture figure. I didn't know him as a person. I didn't know what his character really was. And so even right after he wins in late November of 2016 and moving into early 2017, I didn't really have a full grasp because if you recall, what he did is he went to the Republican establishment for a lot of his appointments. And so part of me, by early 2017, even into mid-2017, I was worried about the Russia stuff, but I was encouraged by General Mattis.
David French:
I was encouraged. Even though Tillerson wouldn't have been my first choice (he was an adult General), you know, General Kelly, you. You had H.R. McMaster after the very quick flame out of Flynn. So there were a lot of things that, yeah, if you'd gone back to me in 2015, even 2016, even 2017, and said to me a lot of what's unfolding in 2025, I would have been surprised. Yeah, I don't think there's any doubt about that.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah, but like, considering how surprising some events have been both this year and over the past decade, more broadly, maybe that suggests that some of our political priors were wrong in the first place. So from your point of view, what are some issues that you think that you were wrong about and that you've changed your mind about as a direct result of the rise of MAGA over the past decade?
David French:
Oh, for sure. I was wrong about how ideological the Republican coalition was. So, I was born in 69, I graduated from law school in 94. And it was in that period of the early 90s when I really began to develop my political personality and ideas. I was a Reagan conservative in high school. Does that even count? I mean, in college I was a Reagan conservative, but it was in Law School 91 to 94, where I really was out of my comfort zone. I was out of that Southern Evangelical culture at Harvard Law School, which was not Southern and Evangelical as many things. It was not Southern and Evangelical.
David French:
And so I really formed my political view in the face of harsh critique around particular ideas as a particular ideology. And if you went through the 90s, or in the first phase of the 2000s, you would think that the Republican Party was a highly ideological party. It was a Reagan conservative party. It believed in limited government and believed in a strong, forward deployed national defense, and it was socially conservative. And, you know, even into, say, 2008, 2012, the primary way of evaluating Republican candidates was how closely did they adhere to that sort of trifecta of ideas. And you had some people, like my colleague Ross Douthat, that you had Ramesh Ponnuru, you had Reihan Salam and some others sort of offering some, you know, very modest, more populist oriented reforms. I believe their, their book was like the Sam's Club Republicans, sort of, what can you do to, to reach the working class.
Andrew Xu:
Oh, like the reform cons, like those people.
David French:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were pilloried! You know, they were pilloried for deviating from this ideologically orthodox party. I remember Romney in 2012, or is it 2011 CPAC or 2012, when he says, I am severely conservative. All of this was about ideological orthodoxy. So for two decades, the way that internal discipline was enforced in the Republican Party was ideological orthodoxy. So Trump rises and he is about as ideologically heterodox as we saw in a Republican nominee or a Republican candidate. And here I am trained on a quarter century of relentless ideological orthodoxy and policing within the Republican Party.
David French:
And I'm thinking they're going to just chew him up. He's a celebrity now. But when everybody knows, and I very quickly, and I wrote this in 2016, that I absolutely overestimated the ideological commitments of the median Republican voter, and I underestimated their animosity. And so that's where Trump really scratched the itch of Republican primary voters, was that animosity, was that anger, that fury. And so, you know, I had grown up under Republican nominees and Presidents who really tried to elevate. You know, you go from Reagan's language to H.W. Bush, kinder, gentler nation, to George W. Bush, compassionate conservative, freedom, democracy, PEPFAR.
David French:
So you had all of these figures who are really trying to call America to the better angels of our nature, agree with them or disagree with them on their policies, but their rhetoric was, in general, really trying to elevate and call people to the better angels of their nature. And I just thought that the GOP rank and file would look at a figure like Trump and say, he's not conservative. He's not an inspirational figure. He is a vicious populist. More in the mold of Huey Long than Ronald Reagan. And then you forget that... oh, yeah, big chunks of the Republican base historically have been really vulnerable to populism, especially in the South. And so, yeah, I was very wrong about Trump's appeal.
David French:
I was very wrong about the ideological nature of the median Republican primary voter.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah. And I think one big part of that (you sort of alluded to this) is that I think Evangelical America plays a very large role in shaping Republican politics. And the reverse is also true. And like, you are, you're part of that culture very deeply. So how has your experience of Evangelical American culture changed over the past decade?
David French:
Yeah, well, I will put it this way. I got the leadership issue exactly backwards. Okay. So my assessment was that Evangelical conservatives were more influential on Republican leaders than Republican leaders were influential on Evangelical conservatives. And that's completely wrong. Okay. The reality is that decades of acculturation in the Evangelical church have taught your median Evangelical that part of orthodoxy, small O orthodoxy, is being a Republican that, you know, think of. And this is the true of lots of communities in lots of subcultures in America.
David French:
You jump into the subculture, and there's a lot that goes with it that's sort of maybe extraneous, but has become part of that subculture. And so, for example, let's suppose you become a Christian because you were lost in the depths of drug addiction and a Christian believer reached out to you, taught you about Jesus, taught you about repentance, second chances. You had your 12 step program that teaches you about a higher power. You find that in Jesus Christ and then you start going to an Evangelical church. Well, there's a lot that's going to go with that. So one of the things is there's a way in which Evangelicals speak. There's certain kinds of slang and certain kinds of ways and patterns of speech that you see in Evangelical America that you don't see elsewhere. And I'm reminded of that because I speak fluent Evangelical.
David French:
And so when I'm around people who are not in that community, sometimes my word choices are interesting. So, so that's a benign, that's a small thing. Another bigger thing though is for a long time you've been taught in an Evangelical church that you're a Republican (Evangelicals --> Republicans), and that if you're a Democrat, there's a kind of an air of suspicion around you. Wait, don't you know that we're supposed to, you know, don't you know that the Democrats are blah, blah, blah.
Andrew Xu:
But like a lot of the time they wouldn't say that explicitly. They would just be like passive aggressive.
David French:
Towards you or it's just in the air. So you, you, let's say you're a part of a group of 10 people and they start talking about politics, there's going to be an assumption that everyone's Republican. There's just a total assumption. Unless you're in like you're say, at an urban church in Chicago or in New York or something like that. But let's say you're in a Baptist church in rural Mississippi. There, there's just going to be an absolute assumption that you're Republican. People would be shocked if you weren't. So it's just kind of part of the air that you breathe.
David French:
And so when, however, when Trump came along and Trump had personal values contradictory with traditional Republican Presidents, he had political values that were contradictory with traditional Republican. When he was contradicting the ethos and the ideology of Republican Presidents, I thought that the Evangelical church would have no patience for it. I was completely wrong about that. In fact, Trump has made the church more like him then the church has influenced Trump. That in fact, the marriage between the Evangelical church and the Republican Party had grown so intense and so close, that in many ways, the Republican nominee becomes the de facto political religious leader of the Evangelical church. Did not see that. Did not see that coming.
David French:
But it's very much the case. I mean, the church, as a general matter, is a much more cruel place right now than it was 10 years ago. It's much more vicious in its rhetoric. It's much more militant than it was 10 years ago. And this is a reflection of the impact of the most important political religious leader in Evangelicalism, which is the President of the United States, Donald Trump.
Andrew Xu:
So you mentioned something that I think is kind of interesting. Like, a lot of the time, Evangelical culture is shaped by whoever the head of the Republican Party is. Yeah, but that's. I would say that that's a trend that's existed long before Trump. So maybe. Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Xu:
One sort of critique that I've heard about kind of Evangelical conservatism is that there are some structural factors that made it a lot easier for them to support someone like Trump in the first place. Like their predisposition towards obedience or deference to authority. Like, some of it can be fine, but, like. They've been sort of trained to think in that way, such that if they are told to obey a demagogue or an authoritarian, it is a lot easier to convince them to do so than it is to convince a liberal. Would you. Would you accept that premise?
David French:
No, no. I think it's different. I think that. I think that one of the big issues [is] that Evangelicalism is very disproportionately concentrated in the South, and the South has its own unique culture that a lot of people confuse, especially if you're in Evangelical America, with Christianity. And so one of the things that's very interesting to me is that the South has long been a hotbed of American populism for a very long time. And I grew up in a very short aberrational period, which I now understand to be aberrational, where what you would call Chamber of Commerce conservatism overtook the populism of the South. And this was very much tied to the person of Ronald Reagan. Let's be clear, because going back to the formulation I just talked about how personalities are more important than ideologies and theologies.
David French:
So a lot of this was tied to the person of Ronald Reagan, and that. And that the impact that he had as a human being on the Republican Party was very much zagging away from the populism. And Reagan had populist elements. All politicians have some populist elements. But zagging away from this sort of big government, Huey Long, George Wallace, you name it. The history of politics in the South is populist demagogue after populist demagogue after populist demagogue, turning and often using identity based appeals to rally their constituency. So this is a very long history. And when I was growing up, I thought we had turned the page on that history, that that was the way we were, not the way we are.
David French:
And then when I saw Trump interacting in the South, you know, in the run up to Super Tuesday in 2016, I had this sense of, oh, we are so screwed. Because he has unlocked and sort of re unleashed something that was latent and that was this populism. And look, you know, if you go back to antebellum times, a lot of this Southern populism, the Southern shame, honor culture, the Southernism is wrapped up in the religiosity of the South. Let's take for example, the Southern Baptist Convention. I had thought it had changed a lot more than it had actually changed. This SBC was something that was founded in part to defend the institutions of Southern Christianity, including the Southern Christianity's defense of slavery. This was an institution that was totally fine for decades and decades and decades with Jim Crow.
David French:
And, you know, I had thought when this SBC had sort of looked back on itself in the 90s and the early 2000s and it really tried to sort of step forward and say "that's not who we are anymore," that that marked something truly significant. No, no, I think what you're seeing is a remarkable re-embrace in parts of Evangelicalism of identity based and group based animosity, [and] a severe lack of concern for the plight and the humanity of political opponents. You know, the, the way in which your median Evangelical who my meet has zero concern, zero concern for the treatment of, say, migrants who are being sent to detention facilities and things like that is pretty shocking to me. Just, it's really remarkable to me. And so I, I have seen that maybe in fact a lot of these institutions that I thought had changed a lot had not changed that much, and that some of the underlying cultural realities that I thought had shifted dramatically had not shifted as much as I had hoped.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah, or maybe a lot of the time people have sort of convinced themselves that those reactionary tendencies could not be easily unlocked. Maybe that was the case.
David French:
Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. I think that, you know, it is very hard to avoid when you are growing up In a time of what you would say as progress and renewal, it's very hard to avoid the conclusion that you're in some sort of evolutionary process. That we are, we have learned. Right. Grown.
Andrew Xu:
This is like the whole Star Trek, the Next Generation theme of like, humanity has evolved.
David French:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That we've learned, that we've grown, that we're somehow better than we were in the past, when the reality is we're just all the same human clay and we're as, as previous generations and we're extremely susceptible to the sins, flaws, temptations that you've seen in previous generations. And, and so when, you know, when the Trump era began, it really, it was very helpful for me to go back and to look at American history. And yeah, I will say that we have, we are a lot better off in 2025 than we were in 1825. Absolutely. 100%. Part of that is because the principles of the founding of the country were so strongly and clearly stated that they create a tension with injustice that thankfully, we have often resolved, sometimes after bloodshed and lots of years of pain in the favor of justice. But what you're seeing is, I think in the absence of these enduring principles that generations of Americans can go back and hearken to and look back to, we're not any better than anybody else.
David French:
It's just that, you know, thankfully, in the wisdom of the founders, they did create a kind of a moral standard in the founding documents that every generation of dissenters is able to call back to. But we're just people, and people can do terrible things.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah. But maybe it's time for us to go to the present day and talk about some of those terrible things that are happening, because I'm sure that you're a journalist and you've been at this for years. So what do you think are some examples of those terrible things that are happening that you think people just are not aware of?
David French:
Yeah. The first thing you have to understand is by and large, your average podcast listener is way on the power curve of civic knowledge. Let me put it this way, if you know who I am, just like, if you know my name, you're a nerd.
Andrew Xu:
Go, you're either a nerd or like one of your friends. Yeah, right.
David French:
You're either my friend, family member, or you're a nerd. So right there, you're kind of in a self-selected group of people who know more than the average person if you know the name of even one pundit, okay, you are on the power curve. And so I'm constantly saying this to people because my audience is people who pay close attention to politics. And so they are constantly in the mode of, how can Joe Blow, John Smith, whatever, support xyz? And I'm like, they don't know about X, Y and Z.
David French:
They don't know about X, Y and Z. And so, you know, one of the difficulties that we have is that a lot of the things that have been going wrong or these decisions that have been made, such as pardoning all the January 6ers, such as lifting security details and announcing it publicly, such as firing people who did nothing wrong in prosecuting January 6ers, or publicly announcing targets of investigations before you even know if there is an investigation, using the bully pulpit of the presidency to accuse people of crimes or to hint that they're guilty of crimes. I mean, sending people off to foreign prisons where they're subject to conditions that would be violations of the Eighth Amendment in the United States, placing political litmus tests on law firms and other private entities as a condition for receiving security clearances or receiving federal funding. I mean, you could just go down the line, list after list after list, and what you'll find is: once you move one inch from the political obsessives, people don't know about it. People don't know about. They don't follow it. And so it's just not the case that you have a whole lot of Americans who are sort of saying, okay, this is a norm violation. This is a legal violation, this is a constitutional violation, but I'm okay with it.
David French:
What you're dealing with is really, people are saying, "well, I think there's too much Crime in Washington, D.C. i'm glad somebody's doing something about it."
Andrew Xu:
Assuming they even know about it at all.
David French:
Right. Or we have too many illegal immigrants. And I'm glad to see somebody who's doing something about it. And so this is one of our problems, [which] is that you have an enormous number of people, the people who actually constitute the critical mass who make the decisions ultimately in electoral politics, who are really far removed from it, quite frankly. And in that circumstance, it becomes very difficult to hold a politician accountable if the politician also understands that and understands that they have a freedom of action granted them by sort of public ignorance and apathy. That's ridiculously broad. And so Trump has figured that out, and he is engaging in actions that would have been unthinkable in prior presidencies.
David French:
But he has figured out, that as long as his actions are directionally in the orientation where his base wants, they don't care about the details. They just want him to get stuff done. And the people who do care about the details often very much care about imposing political retribution. They very much want him to do everything that he's doing. And so he's doing precise things that are very much what his hardcore MAGA base wants, but are also directionally in the direction of where he thinks the people, that larger group of people who voted him, wanted him to go. And so he's really able to exploit public ignorance at a just an industrial scale.
Andrew Xu:
Do you think some of that public ignorance might be willful ignorance? Like, I know some people where, sometimes I try to talk to them about something that's going on, or I suggest reading the news. But maybe their response would be like, "I can't. It's too painful for me. I don't want to take it in. And I have so many other problems in my life. It's not my responsibility." Like, do you.
Andrew Xu:
Do you get that response some of the time?
David French:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And so people will check out in many cases because it is legitimately, it's just too stressful. Like, I remember talking to a guy that's a doctor, very good guy, like the kind of person you want engaged in politics. And he was like, David, this is after January 6th. He's like, "I turned off cable news. I've stopped reading the newspapers. Now I'm just ESPN and, you know, Netflix, and my blood pressure's gone down. I'm a better husband, I'm a better father."
David French:
"I'm just not as agitated." And I had this thought of well, good for you, bad for us. Because good for you. I'm glad you're under less stress. I'm glad you are, you know, taking care of your family. But we need good people engaged in politics. So a lot of people check out because of fatigue. But I've noticed something else, Andrew, something that is kind of troubling, and that is: I've noticed people checking out when the facts are too difficult for them to wrangle with. But they still want to be MAGA or they still want to deal with.
David French:
They still don't. They don't want to leave the tribe. Okay, so this happened. I've had this conversation a thousand times. Not at that. I mean, I'm Exaggerating many times. "Hey, David, did you hear about this outrageous thing?" And I say that outrageous thing that you're talking about didn't happen. That's not true.
David French:
"Oh, well, it's so hard to know what's true." And you're like, "okay, no, the answer to that is not, oh, it's so hard to know what's true. The answer to that is, well, interesting. You know, maybe I need to revise some of my priors in my political commitments." And instead what people will do is check out rather than revise their priors. And so they don't actually necessarily change who they support in an election. They don't actually necessarily change what policies they're okay with. They just change their level of detail.
David French:
And it's almost sort of like, well, "don't blame me. I'm not paying that close attention. Don't blame me. I didn't know about that." And so there's this kind of, it's almost like a defensive ignorance that people adopt a posture of ignorance that people adopt, but that doesn't adjust the underlying sort of level of commitment they have to their tribe.
Andrew Xu:
So I'm sure that approximately 0% of those types of people are listening to this podcast right now.
David French:
0.00%. Yeah.
Andrew Xu:
Yes. But it's probably still a worthwhile thought experiment: what would you, what do you wish that you could convey to those people if you could actually get through to them? Like the people where they don't follow politics, but they still want to have that strong moral intensity about thing A or thing B.
David French:
The first thing I would want to convey to them is you're wrong about your political opponents. So this is a really huge point. One thing that surveys have found is that your median American, I'm not talking about you're a hyper committed partisan, but your median American is wrong about their political opponents and they're wrong about them in a very specific way. They think that they're more extreme than they really are. And so this creates a sense of distance and separation and animosity that is almost impossible to bridge so long as the person continues to hold the mistaken view about their political opponents. And so, you know, it was very, very, very clarifying to me. Because I've never voted for Trump, but in both 2016 and 2020, I voted third party. So I wrote in somebody, rather than vote for Trump or the for Hillary or for Joe Biden in 2024 post January 6th, this was the first election post January 6th, post Ukraine war, I made a, for me, a very, very difficult decision. And that very, very difficult decision was to vote for a Democratic nominee for President.
David French:
Oh, also because the Republicans had watered down their platform on life. Like the parties are changing a lot. Democrats in many ways, especially in foreign policy, were moving towards me. The Republicans were moving away from me. So as much as I was discontent with Kamala Harris, I decided to vote for her. And the way in which various people then ascribed all of the most extreme far left views, not just to the far left, but to me, as a result of making a tough choice. Where (in the piece where I said I was making the choice that I'm still pro life, I still, you know, et cetera, et cetera, I'm making this difficult choice) they ascribed to me all of the extremism that they see from the far left, which they ascribe to the median Democrat.
David French:
And often you'll see Democrats ascribe to the far, to the median Republican all the views of the far right. And so what ends up happening is that people have this view of the median Republican or the median Democrat as being some sort of caricature that they've seen on Twitter. And so what that means is there's no circumstance in which they're going to cross the aisle or sit it out, because as upset or suboptimal as they might view their own candidate, well, at least they're not some sort of whacked out extremist like the person on the other side. And this is, if there's one thing that I could correct, it would be this view that people have that the median Republican or the median Democrat is some sort of whacked out extremist. Now, you have seen some pretty whacked out extreme actions from the Trump administration for sure. But if there is one thing that I would talk about with your average Democrat communicating with your average Republican is that you're not as different as you think you are. You're really not. And that understanding and that realization could calm down our politics.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah. But I am glad that you're willing to concede that there's a lot of, for lack of a better word, extremism coming from the Trump administration right now. But then, so like, let's, let's assume like your premise about how the average Democrat and the average Republican are not as different as, like they might think they are. One thing that I would say is that: the Trump administration is doing tons and tons of like. Like, illegal or immoral things, but maybe maybe part of the reason why the Trump administration is able to get away with so much evil authoritarianism these days, is not because so many people support him, but because there's just a large group of people that's just so tired and apathetic that they just don't want to follow what's going on, rather than following it with enthusiasm.
David French:
Yeah, well. And part of it is also there's a very interesting process that takes place where the less engaged people defer to the judgments of the more engaged people. I think this is something that you see in families all the time. Like, I used to have it years and years ago, family members would say, David, who should I vote for? You know, because they knew I was super interested in politics. They knew I was paying close attention. Who should I vote for, David, who should I vote for? And so one of the things that's happened in sort of the MAGA world is that the people who follow very closely, like the core MAGA people, are very, very happy with all this. They love the retribution, they love the vengeance.
David French:
They. That's why they voted for him. They wanted all of this stuff. They don't like vaccines. They like what RFK is doing. And so when your most engaged member of your faction is enthusiastic, that enthusiasm radiates out to the less engaged members of the faction. Because why? It's a very human thing, because you trust people who are in your broad tribe more than you trust anybody else. And so if your most engaged members of your tribe are saying, this Trump administration is awesome, and you know about critics, don't listen to those critics.
David French:
They are squishes. They are apostates, they're heretics. I mean, I've been called a heretic more times than I can count. They're heretics. Well, you're a normal person. Who are you going to listen to? Your fellow Republican who's super happy about the Republican President, or some guy that you've been told is a heretic and a squish? Right. You don't go into the details.
David French:
You don't click the links. You don't read closely and say, "don't listen to him. He's a heretic. He's a squish." And they don't follow. They don't do any independent investigation. It's just, oh, my fellow Republican has told me that this guy's a heretic.
David French:
Ye. At the very least, they're going to be very skeptical of anything that I say. At the most, they're just not even going to listen at all. That's why character assassination is such an effective tool of political rhetoric. You inoculate people against the. Against even openness to their position. It's one of the reasons why I will often say yes to podcasts with people who are otherwise pretty hostile to me. Because sometimes that's the only way someone will ever hear anything out of my own voice. That all the time, people make judgments, for example, about me without ever reading me or listening to me.
David French:
I had this really interesting encounter not long ago where a woman came up to me at a speaking engagement in D.C. and she was pretty angry with me, and. And she said, I want to talk to you about your position on trans issues. And I said, well, before you do, tell me what my position is. Like, I. I want to know if you know what it is before you tell. And because I knew. I knew she didn't.
David French:
I just could tell. And so she just comes out with all this crap that's on Twitter that's completely false. And I'm like, "where did you get that? Did you read me?" "No." "Who'd you read?" And she went through some person from the Daily Wire and somebody from this or that. And I said, "you know, if you're going to confront somebody over their work, you should read their work first. That would be effective. Much more effective." And so.
David French:
But the people they trusted told them things and they assumed it was true and then turned around and go after me.
Andrew Xu:
Maybe part of the reason why they didn't want to read your work is because it would be too painful for them in the same way.
David French:
Oh, I know. I'm so triggering. I'm very triggering.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, where part of the reason why authoritarianism is so successful when you consider the median American opinion is: it's not even that that many people are open to it. It's just more that the vast majority of people don't care, so they just defer to the people on the right that are too terminally online.
David French:
Yeah. Oh, 100%. And. And so, you know, and then also, Trump's a shrewd guy. I mean a lot of people say that he's ignorant. He's ignorant of many things, but he's also politically very shrewd. Like, you don't win two Presidential elections, you don't maintain very high levels of support with your base. Where we've seen even the most beloved Republican Presidents like Reagan, he began to have some loss of support in parts of his base over his second term. And he's a very shrewd man.
David French:
And one thing that he's very shrewd about is he takes on very unpopular targets. So there's not a lot of people who want to get in the streets to protect Harvard from unfair treatment. There's not a lot of people who want to get in the streets to protect a big firm from unfair treatments. A lot of people are very frustrated with illegal immigration. People hate crime. And so when he takes on illegal immigrants, when he cracks down on crime, when he cracks down on elite universities or elite law firms, he's taking on institutions that a lot of Americans don't like, and it's just us civil libertarians jumping up and down going, "hey, wait a minute, the Constitution here." People don't know those details or necessarily care about those details.
David French:
And so he's very directionally shrewd in his targets. And so this is the way smart authoritarians come to power all the time, is they take on unpopular targets. And people are not bothered by the details, by that until it's way too.
Andrew Xu:
Late, or they don't want to know the details because there's so much. There's been so much political strife during both Trump 1.0 and Biden's term. Like, there's been so much political turmoil at that, at this point, they just. They don't want to follow it anymore. They just think it's pointless.
David French:
Yeah, no, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. It's. It is. It is. People are almost immune to any tales of outrage. And it's an interesting thing because you would think it is. You would think that one outrage piling on another would build public anger.
David French:
Actually, it inoculates the public against anger because they get tired of being angry. They don't want to be angry. They are tired of everything. And so they just, as you said, sort of check out leaving the field to the people who are most engaged. And the people are most engaged are very, very happy about vengeance. They're very, very happy about the retribution.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah. Like, if. If everything single thing that happens in politics is something that makes you prone to anger, then most of the reasonable people will check out, and the only people that remain are the people that get high on like being angry or like saying nonsensical things or being reactionary and so on and so forth.
David French:
Yeah, yeah. You know, it's interesting because you can really, when you're, when you're sort of part of the conversation, you can see how the tactics work. So, for example, let's sort of stick with what I've talked about, the way in which people will try to prevent other Republicans from reading me or listening to me. And there's a very clever thing that they do, which is whenever I write about something negative about Trump or the Republican Party, they will blast that all over Twitter and say, "there he goes again. Look at him. He always punches."
Andrew Xu:
He want. They want, they want people to inculcate an eye roll every time they see your name.
David French:
Every time they see my name. Right. And then. But if I write something against the left, they don't put it out at all. If you're reading their Twitter feeds, you would never think I've ever written anything against the left in my life. And so it leaves their followers with an impression that's completely false. That is, I only take on Trump. I never take on the left.
David French:
And then to understand what the left thinks about me, you sometimes have to go to other places and see that they hate me like that, you know, that they feel like the New York Times never should have hired me. They protested when the Times hired me. But in this situation, it's a tactic, it's a manipulation tactic. "We're only going to show you the things that will make about David that will make you angry, and we're not going to show you anything else." And when, once you see this pattern, you can't unsee it. Because, because part of the whole approach is to tell all of these Christian people around the country that if you're pro-life, if you're religious, if you support religious liberty, if you are not in favor of identity politics, if you don't believe in, like race-based affirmative action, et cetera, there's only one option, there's only one way, and that's the Trump way. And then you have all these other people who are pro life, who support religious freedom, who are quite socially conservative and who don't support Trump, and they have to be discredited in some way because there's only one way to be pro-life: Trump. There's only one way to be pro religious liberty: Trump.
David French:
And so it's a manipulation tactic and it's remarkably effective.
Andrew Xu:
So if you're someone that is essentially considered Persona non grata because of like the way that people sort of paint you... Have you found any kind of reliable ways to try to communicate important political points to people that are genuinely checked out of politics? Like they don't want to because it's too painful or they want to be part of their community? Like, how do you communicate these points to them?
David French:
It's, it's really you, you do it actually by communicating to the people who are checked in as to how to communicate to the people who are checked out.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah. So maybe that's the one good use case of this podcast.
David French:
Yeah. Because the checked out, you're not talking to the checked out people like they're not reading my column. It's really interesting. If you look at the Presidential election in 2024, amongst people who follow the news closely, Kamala Harris won them in a landslide. Amongst people who don't follow the news at all, Trump won them very considerably. And so one of the interesting things is people are saying, well, Harris needed to change her messaging. Well, change your messaging.
David French:
If you're losing with the people who are not paying attention to the messaging, how are you changing your messaging and reaching them? And a lot of the answer is changing how you reach the people who are paying attention, which influences how they talk to and communicate with people in their social circles. And so one of the things that I try to do is I try to communicate to people because I have spent the entirety of the Trump era living in Trump country, and being surrounded by folks who are quite MAGA and listening to them and hearing them for years and years and years. I feel like I can explain where they're coming from to people in a way that, say, somebody who's been spending all their time in Manhattan or D.C. or wherever can't do it. And so part of it is trying to get people to understand where MAGA is coming from, what is their worldview, what is it that is motivating them and then that allows you to adjust how you talk to people based on your actual understandings. And then also doing things like urging an end to animosity and hatred and rage based communication that, that is unpersuasive to people. It's embittering. And, you know, MAGA is going to learn this.
David French:
I mean, I think that the far left spent a lot of time in the 2000 teens running up through 2020 shaming and mobbing and bullying people rather than reaching them and persuading them. And now they are experiencing the natural and inevitable consequence of when you build a movement (and I'm talking about the far left here) that is intolerant in bullying and self righteous and, and vengeful people for a while are cowed by it, but then begin to, then they begin to respond. And I think MAGA is going to figure this out. I mean, you know, we had this whole moment a couple of days ago where Cracker Barrel changed its logo. It was from an old guy around a barrel with the words Cracker Barrel to just the words Cracker Barrel in a more modern font. And MAGA, parts of MAGA exploded online. Like, how dare you? What are you doing? That's woke. And your average normal person is looking at that going, I mean you can like or dislike the logo, who cares? But all of this anger, what is going on? All of this intolerance, all the boycott this boy.
David French:
What? And I think that you're. They're going to, with their own rage and their own intolerance and their own bullying, they're going to find out what the far left did, which is: that's fool's gold. It's a sugar high because it does work for a bit. It does work for a bit and then it doesn't. And when it stops working, it stops working good and hard. As you know, as the Democrats have found out.
Andrew Xu:
I would say that a lot of the people on MAGA, probably not rank and file, but I think a lot of high profile members of the MAGA movement, I think they subconsciously understand what you're saying, which is why they want to do as much damage as quickly as they possibly can.
David French:
As quickly as possible. Yep.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah, like a lot of them go ahead.
David French:
A lot of them think they're on a two year clock. That the midterms are coming and they're going to, they're going to face a different Congress. So yeah, they're. What's that? Make hay while the sun shines.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah, yeah, it's like, like we have to, we have to do this as quickly as we possibly can because we're probably never going to have a better chance than like this two year window. Maybe that means that our priority should be to try to contain the damage as much as we possibly can within that two year window.
David French:
Oh, absolutely. And, but the problem is because of the thoroughness. Now Trump did not win a landslide by any stretch. It was a close election, but it was thorough. Republicans won the close election thoroughly. In other words, they have small majorities in the House and small majorities in the Senate, and they won the presidency by small plurality of popular vote, small majority of the Electoral College, but they're all majorities. Right. And so what the.
David French:
What Democrats are learning and what I think Democratic rank and file voters are now absorbing is: your ability to stop a party that controls the House, the Senate and the presidency is very limited. And courts are not always going to be there and be able to do that. Um, and so I think what people are learning is that elections have consequences. And there's just not as much that the Trump and that the Democrats are going to be able to do. There's not a lot unless they get the House or the Senate, if not both. And getting both would be quite a feat.
David French:
But if without the House, there's just not a lot that they can do.
Andrew Xu:
Without the House, they can still continue to nominate completely nonsensical nominations of like they can still nominate Kash Patel figures if they just have the Senate.
David French:
Well, that with the Senate. Yeah, with the. If they only have the House, at least you can block some. There can be no big beautiful bill 2.0, for example. But in the Senate, you're absolutely going to have a giant amount of, you know, in the Senate, you're absolutely going to have a giant amount of nominees pushed through. Thankfully, so far, with the exception of Emil Bovo, Bove, the judges have been good nominees. But when you're talking about agency heads, I mean, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr. You know, the idea that Matt Gaetz was actually put forward as an Attorney General candidate is stunning, just stunning.
David French:
But I don't know what the difference is with Pam Bondi. She's doing everything that Trump would want her to do. So this is, this is a situation where the Senate is absolutely more important than the House. But if you get the House, at least you can stop some things and you can conduct proper investigations.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah. So again, then my question is maybe there are a lot of the individuals who listen to this podcast are probably politically engaged. Do you have any advice for them for how they can stay grounded? Because I sometimes I look at news headlines and I notice that it's having a negative effect on my mental health. So one. One thing that I've done is I've. I've sworn off all news consumption through social media. And nowadays I get like, a paper. Newspaper delivered to me that I just read for one hour a week because I think that that allows me to stay informed but having better mental health.
Andrew Xu:
Do you have any advice to people who want to stay politically engaged but they also want to stay grounded where the effect of following politics doesn't have that negative of an effect on them?
David French:
Oh, I think that, I think getting off social media, if I felt like I could do that and still would do my job well, I would do it in a heartbeat. I would remove myself entirely from Twitter. I would only follow like sports and entertainment figures on Instagram or whatever, follow your favorite shows, follow your favorite basketball players or football players. So remove yourself as much as you can from receiving news through social media because I think that form of news consumption is uniquely difficult, is uniquely difficult for people to consume and to self regulate. And you see this all over Twitter in particular. And what's sad is a lot of the folks who are sort of more well grounded have followed this advice. I talk to an awful lot of people who follow politics closely who don't follow Twitter at all. There are a lot of well grounded people who are on social media.
David French:
So not everybody is who's on social media in a volume poster on social media is mentally troubled in some way. But I will say that I do feel like: we have a disproportionate number of mentally troubled people engaging on social media. And so what's happened is that you then have a political class, from journalists to staffers to law clerks to politicians who are on social media and get a disproportionate amount of feedback from mentally troubled, angry people. And I think it's having a negative effect on the political class. It's shifting how they view the public, it's shifting how they view themselves. It is. And so I think that social media has really ramped up and amplified the voices of an awful lot of people who used to be the kind of folks who would write like 70 letters to the editor a month, and might get one published and you wouldn't even really know about them.
David French:
But now they're posting 700 times a month and that is giving them clout and influence that they never would have had [before] the social media era. And it's warping and distorting our politics.
Andrew Xu:
So if like you mentioned that if you could quit social media and it would still be good for your job, you would do that. So then if you can't quit social media, like how do you stay grounded? Do you like, do you like deliberately take breaks do you like, like get emotional support from friends and family? Like, how do you do it?
David French:
It's an evolving practice. The number one way is I just don't read the notifications. So if, when you post something often, especially if it's on anything relating politics and increasingly even if it's not about politics, so I post about Aquaman. I used to be able to safely interact with posters when I'd post about like NBA basketball or superhero movies and I'd have fun interacting with people. Now then people figured out that, you know, "oh, he'll interact if he's talking about Aquaman. So now I'm going to drop a little nasty gram in there about politics." And so I just, I post my thoughts, I read my feed and I, that's it. I rarely, rarely interact with notifications. Because even to find the thoughtful, good faith interaction, you have to wade through an ocean of sewage and it's just not worth it.
David French:
Especially when I have a working email inbox and somebody wants to engage thoughtfully, they can email me. So I think part of the tactic is don't get sucked into the beefs. Don't, especially don't get sucked into the personal attacks. And that is, that's a big challenge. Now you can't hold to that all the time because of if somebody who has a very, very large platform takes you on sometimes you have to defend yourself. But what often happens is that people will take you on just so that, try to trigger your response so that it can create a beef that other people will watch. And so, I would strongly advise, do not follow, do not be on social media unless you absolutely have to for your, for your job.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah. One thing that you mentioned that I thought was kind of interesting is like you mentioned that like even Superman, the reason why someone like Superman had the potential to be virtuous is because of how much love and support he gets from his friends and family that give him the motivation to stay grounded so that he can do all that good work. Maybe we should take a cue from that and try to like focus more on like the support that we get from our friends and family as a way to.
David French:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You double down on the people who are kind in your life as it's good general life advice.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah. Final question. So to the people in this audience that have never seen the Expanse, can you explain to them why they should watch the Expanse?
David French:
It is one of the best long. It is one of the best science fiction series I've ever seen, and for a couple of reasons. One, it is very imaginative in the sense that it is true science fiction. I mean, there's. There are elements of this that are fantastical, but it's also quite grounded so that a lot of the physics you can understand. It feels real. It feels like, okay, this is how space travel would actually develop. This is what it would look like.
David French:
It feels like some of the most thought through realistic science fiction paired with a wild story that kind of comes in and upsets all of this. And so it's really well done. It both has the tremendous personal stories centered around a crew of a particular spaceship, but it also has the geopolitics. So in that sense, you're like, you don't want to throw around comparisons to things like Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings too lightly, but it has both that small band and the backdrop of the larger politics that I found to be the best. That's the happy place for me.
Andrew Xu:
Yeah. It does an excellent job showing just the scale of the universe and how no matter what you're seeing, it's just like one small part of a much larger puzzle.
David French:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And then the whole world building is phenomenal. Yeah. It's one of the main reasons why I want, you know, I want Elon to get out of politics and focus on getting to Mars. Because we got to have the Martian Congressional Republic like that. We. We need that.
David French:
We need the MCR, the MCRN. They have the coolest ships, the best tech. Yeah. Gotta have it.
Andrew Xu:
David French, thank you so much for taking the time to come onto this podcast. Wow.
David French:
Thanks so much for having me. I enjoyed it.
