The Post-MAGA Midterms? (w/ David Weigel)

Matthew Sitman (0:00)

All right, welcome, listeners, to episode 145 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sitman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here, as always, with my great friend, Sam Adler-Bell. Hello, Samuel.

Sam Adler-Bell (0:10)

Hi, Matthew.

I love that you call me Samuel sometimes, that you're really the only one. And my father. Do with that what you will.

Matthew Sitman (0:19)

Yes, yes. Most of the time, growing up, if anyone called me Matthew, it'd be my mother when I was in trouble. Because I was a real hellion of a kid, as you might imagine.

Sam Adler-Bell (0:29)

I really highly doubt that.

Matthew Sitman (0:31)

I know. I was not. I was very good.

But Sam, we're trying to get into trouble this week. We're putting out this episode with our friend, Dave Weigel. We're wading into politics, baby. We have been, I would say, Sam, especially on your part, you've been unusually interested in the upcoming midterms. And so we thought, we'll probably talk about them more for subscribers between now and early November. But to get things kicked off, a little midterm mini-series, we had on our friend Dave Weigel, who is, I think, one of the very, very best political reporters out there and a great writer. And you can read him currently. He's a columnist at the news website, Semafor. And I just, I followed Dave's stuff. I mean, forever, even when I was a young conservative.

Sam Adler-Bell (1:15)

When he was at Reason, right?

Matthew Sitman (1:17)

Wasn't he? Yeah, exactly. But he's just incredible and I had a blast talking to him.

Sam Adler-Bell (1:22)

Yeah, not least because he actually goes out and talks to people and gets on the ground. The columnist undersells what he does. He is a columnist there, but he does a lot of reporting on the ground, which is important. And I think the other thing about him, I've always thought this, is that I think that his political background, which is pretty unclear, it doesn't come through in his work at all really, but he's really truly not a partisan of either party at all.

Matthew Sitman (1:49)

That's true.

Sam Adler-Bell (1:50)

In a way that is actually just incredibly rare. Like he doesn't really have a rooting interest in a way that I think just really improves the quality of his work.

That wouldn't improve the quality of everyone's work, but I think that for Dave, it's like he's able to write about the factional conflicts between the parties without a rooting interest or without tipping the scales one way or the other, because he's just interested in it rather than like when I write about a conflict between Democrats on the left, I'm rooting for the left. And I think Dave, unlike a lot of mainstream reporters who on some level are acculturated into the world of like the serious people in the Democratic Party or the centrist wonks and the unserious people are our friends, Dave doesn't have that, so he's able to write about it in a more, I don't know, just in a more straightforward and realistic way. And I think the same applies to conflicts within the Republican Party.

Matthew Sitman (2:47)

Yes, yeah, he gets away with it because he's so smart. And I think has just been doing it for so long. Like people genuinely talk to him because they respect him. I think so. Yes, Dave was our guide to the midterms. We spent a lot of time talking about the Senate race in Texas. And also Texas was where the Republican midterm convention was held. And so we dug into that. But we also we kind of skip all over the map, talk about what's going on in both parties. The Michigan race, Senate race, we talk about as well. But it was a great kind of tour and I think a good prep. So you can follow what's happening.

Sam Adler-Bell (3:24)

Or you can listen to this and stop following what's happening.

Matthew Sitman (3:27)

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_3 (3:28)

Yeah.

Matthew Sitman (3:28)

Check back in in about a month. We'll let you know how it went.

But Sam, we're releasing this episode Monday, October 5th, Sunday, October 11th. People can come out to see the Know Your Enemy boys with some good friends of ours live.

Sam Adler-Bell (3:42)

Live and in person. Yes, we're doing a live taping of the podcast at Jewish Currents Live on October 11th at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, BAM, which I'm really excited about to be at BAM. But Jewish Currents listeners almost certainly know of as the premiere magazine of the Jewish Left. What they're doing this coming weekend is convening a bunch of thinkers and organizers, and artists for a full day of panelists and performances.