Jonathan V. Last and Robert Kagan: Marco and Miller Go Full Fascist

**Jonathan V. Last** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, JVL, sitting in for Tim Miller. He'll be back next week. I am joined today by a very, very good and old friend of mine, Bob Kagan from The Atlantic.
Bob, it is good to see your face again, my friend.

**Robert Kagan** (0:31)
Same here, although I see it every day, JVL.

**Jonathan V. Last** (0:34)
That's very kind of you. So we have a lot of Big Think stuff to do today because that's what Bob Kagan is here for. We're going to talk about fascism coming to America and an amazing, amazing event that happened last week where members of the administration gave a talk about the dangers of political violence in the United States. Wow.
But first, we got to do some news of the day. Bob, you and I were talking in the green room a moment ago. Today, Anthony Fauci was up on Capitol Hill testifying before the Senate. And this was something that you have basically zero opinion on, correct?

**Robert Kagan** (1:17)
That's probably strong. I mean, my general sympathy is with people who said that you needed to take vaccines to deal with COVID and not with people who said that you didn't need to. So in the big picture, I'm on the Fauci side, but I can't speak to all the details of what he said or what he didn't say or et cetera.

**Jonathan V. Last** (1:36)
So I wanted to bring up Fauci only to recapitulate something that my colleague Andrew Ager wrote some years ago, which struck me as exactly correct. Part of the problem with where we live today is that we live in this place with these intense asymmetries. And one of the asymmetries is that a figure like Anthony Fauci is judged by the least true thing he ever said once regardless of the circumstances around it. And so if Anthony Fauci said in the day 10 of the pandemic, we're not sure if this was airborne or not. It turns out that COVID is in fact airborne, then it's, well, can you believe this guy? And the thing people harp on with Fauci is the very lawyerly claim he made early on when he told people that respirators and masks were not necessary right now. And this was a piece of highly lawyered misdirection meant to try to preserve the stocks of masks early in the pandemic to use them for healthcare workers when it was highly localized in the Northeast.
And the fact that this was a lawyerly thing and not a fully transparent and true statement has led people to say, well, see, you can't trust anything he says.
So that is how one side is treated. The other side is treated so that if anything they ever said was true, then you have to treat seriously every other claim they make. And so, if Bobby Kennedy in the course of all of his quackery says, I feel like it's good for people to eat vegetables. He'll say, well, see, you agree that it's good to eat vegetables. And so, how can you just dismiss his claims about autism? And this is how all of political life functions in the age of Trump.
Don't pay attention to the fact that Trump said that if we try hydroxychloroquine, or inject yourself with bleach, or shine a UV light inside the body, don't pay attention to any of that crazy stuff. Because in this other case, he did say this one thing that turned out to be true. So, see? But then the elites are judged by a totally different standard, even though President Trump is the definition of an elite. He's the President of the United States, the leader of the free world, free air quotes. I don't know, have you noticed this? Does it bother you? Is it just me? Am I a crazy person for caring about these things, Bob?

**Robert Kagan** (4:15)
The list of things that bother me is so long that I don't know where this one would exactly fit, but I'm not sure it's at the very, very tippy top today. But I agree with what you were saying. Absolutely. Okay.

**Jonathan V. Last** (4:28)
Well, thank you for indulging in my little rant. It just drives me crazy. The other big piece of news today is that last night, the Iranians fired missiles at a number of US bases in the Middle East. And I'm curious as to what you make of this. What is the strategic point of what Iran is doing? Or maybe there is no strategic point that these decisions are being made because command and control has been dispersed to the mosaic level.