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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Later this morning, we will cover the wildfires in Southern California. We'll invite anyone with any personal connection to the devastating, really apocalyptic events out there to call in and help report the story or just express how you feel and what people you may know there, who can't be listening during the emergency, are going through on a human level. We'll do that in about an hour. We'll have an urban wildfire expert as well.

We'll play excerpts today from Jimmy Carter's funeral, which is taking place this morning and we'll open up the phones for any last eulogy, kinds of thoughts from you. We'll have WNYC's Nancy Solomon with excerpts from analysis of and to take your reactions to her ask Governor Murphy call in last night. Yes, plenty about congestion pricing, but other things, too, as the governor has begun his last year in office in Trenton. That's all coming up.

One of the things we always do on the show is try to be open to multiple points of view and go beyond our bubbles. For listeners who have joined us in recent years, you may not know we were honored to receive a Peabody Award back in 2007 for radio that builds community rather than divides, as they put it. We've collaborated with the group Search for Common Ground, which does what its name suggests. Today we'll do a Beyond Our Bubble segment for this moment in the transition from the Biden to Trump administrations with a journalist from the left and a journalist from the right who have been hosting a podcast together.

The podcast is called Counterpoints. It's a spin off of a larger podcast series called Breaking Points. With us now are Ryan Grim, a founder of the Left-oriented site called Drop Site News. He was previously a founder of The Intercept and Washington bureau chief for HuffPost, among other things. He is the author of several books including We've Got People and The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution.

And Emily Jashinsky, Washington correspondent for the site UnHerd, which describes its mission as when the herd takes off in one direction, UnHerd is for people who dare to think for themselves. She was previously with conservative media organizations including The Federalist and The Washington Examiner. Emily and Ryan, we really appreciate you both giving us some time today. Welcome to WNYC. Ryan, in your case, welcome back.

Ryan Grim: Oh, thanks, Brian. Good to be back.

Emily Jashinsky: Thanks for having us.

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask you first briefly to say how would you describe your political orientation so people know a little of who you are. In the context of your work, Ryan, would you go first on this?

Ryan Grim: Yes, I guess you could call me kind of a Bernie or FDR lefty, kind of instinctively anti-war and social Democrat. That's about where I'd put myself but others might disagree, but who knows?

Brian Lehrer: All right, that's a pretty shorthand way to start. Emily, how about you?

Emily Jashinsky: Well, just a correction to Ryan. I do disagree. I would describe him as a full communist. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Okay.

Emily Jashinsky: He described himself very accurately. I say I'm just a standard conservative with pretty anti-establishment bent. Maybe matched most closely on ideological-- If we had to plot someone on the ideological spectrum with a JD Vance, somewhere around there, but just a pretty standard conservative.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Just to follow up a little bit with each of you, again, letting our listeners know where your starting points are. Ryan, would it be right to say that you were a founder of The Intercept because you thought that what I might call New York Times liberalism was insufficient to meet the moment in today's world? Maybe whatever you identify as, that's on the left, you wouldn't use the word liberal. Would that be accurate?

Ryan Grim: Yes, except the part I would quibble with is that I wasn't actually there at the very beginning of The Intercept. They tried to bring me in, but I was having such a good time at The Huffington Post that I let them launch the thing for a couple of years before I finally joined. All the rest of the description, I would say yes, that I think that a milquetoast liberalism that only offers soft opposition to the right without actually putting forward a vision of what a better world would look like is going to both not deliver a better world and also get rolled over by the right. I would agree.

Brian Lehrer: To Emily's characterization of you, are you now or have you ever been a member of the comp? I'm kidding.

[laughter]

Emily Jashinsky: I ask him that every day.

Ryan Grim: She'll get me eventually.

Brian Lehrer: Emily, I read parts of your interview with Ezra Klein from his New York Times podcast where you were making distinctions between an older right, which you describe partly as Ronald Reagan fusion conservative, and a new right that's emerging today. You already said you identify with a JD Vance wing. Can you place yourself on that spectrum at all and talk a little bit about what makes this a different conservative era as you see it?

Emily Jashinsky: Yes, it's interesting because fusionism in the conservative movement was known for bridging libertarianism, Christian conservatism, and neoconservative foreign policy. That worked. It's the three-legged stool that Frank Myers and others talked about for decades in the conservative movement. That was the blueprint for the movement itself and for the Republican Party. A lot of people in the new right say frankly, that just doesn't work anymore because we can't marry, for example, traditional conservatism with libertarianism.

Big business doesn't like traditional conservative values anymore and the adventurism isn't supporting the country in a way that makes sense at this point either. I think of myself as somebody who bridges the gap between old and new. I am evangelizing for that type of argument that we don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater on the right. That there was always a deep strain of populism in the conservative movement that the Reagan Revolution was called the revolution because at the time, it was very anti establishment and it had its roots in some really anti-big business sentiments.

Ryan would probably quibble with that and many people would, but the history of the conservative movement, Ronald Reagan was famously very inspired by Barry Goldwater. For example, does have some deep anti-establishment instincts. That's where I see myself floating between both of those worlds.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to get into adventurism, as you just called it, and Trump at the moment, with respect to Greenland in a few minutes. Before we get into particular areas of content from the news, for both of you, again, just to put a pin in this introduction, we live in this very polarized era, at least in the professional political world. Why did the two of you, who each hold strong opinions in your camps, we've already heard that, decide to host a podcast together. Emily, you want to go first on this one?

Emily Jashinsky: [chuckles] We have two great friends, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, who started doing a show called Breaking Points after they were hosting a show called Rising together over at The Hill. They had this vision to start a network. They do a fabulous job. They're both left and right and anti-establishment, left and right. They brought us in after about a year because we had been doing something similar after they left over at The Hill.

I don't know about you, Ryan, but after a couple of weeks, I think Ryan and I just realized that we had a deep respect for each other and that we could have some really interesting conversations without some of the sensitivities or pitfalls that other people fall into when they have those conversations, especially on air, because we just respect each other and we respect each other's perspective. We've clicked from the beginning. Ryan's incredible so I learned from him every day.

Brian Lehrer: Ryan, you want to keep the love fest going?

Ryan Grim: Yes, same. I think we're both fundamentally curious people and so it's been actually quite useful to me for the rest of my journalism to get the exposure through both Emily and Saagar to a much more layered view of the right than I think probably most people have, because you're just not interacting with it on a daily basis. There was a period through the 2010s where the idea surfaced that the term platforming became a thing, that you weren't supposed to talk to other people that you disagreed with because you would be then platforming their evil ideas and sort of like by saying the name Voldemort, that those ideas then would then burst out of the bottle and take over the world.

That the way to keep that from happening was to keep them off the platform. Just obviously, as a pragmatic prescription, didn't happen. Donald Trump is coming back into the White House and Republicans are controlling both chambers. Just pragmatically, if you're on the left, that's obviously not going to work. Also just from an intellectual level, it always struck me as just wrong and not the way I wanted to live my life. I like to be in conversation and engagement, especially because there are places where there is significant overlap between left wing populism and right wing populism.

It's very interesting to talk about where that overlap is and who the common enemies are and what the common solutions are, but then also to talk about where the difference is between those two perspectives.

Brian Lehrer: To follow up for just a second on what you just said, Ryan, at the beginning of that answer, about getting a more nuanced understanding of the right, do you, and Emily, I'll ask you too, feel like you've expanded your thinking by being in dialogue with another move toward the other on any issue that you can name, maybe with a concrete example, by getting out of your bubbles to engage officially in the way you do?

Ryan Grim: Yes, I think. I think, for instance, as I report on different immigration questions, I have a much sharper understanding of who the different players are and what the different positions are on the right when it comes to, let's say, immigration. For instance, when the H1B visa fight erupted between MAGA conservatives and the Tech Bros where Tech Bros are fundamentally probably open borders, if you ask them, but here they're just standing up for H1B and effectively indentured servitude for migrant labor so that if their workers give them any grief, they can just yank their visa and kick them right back out.

Brian Lehrer: That's people with particular skills. Right? Highly educated people in tech who they make the argument there aren't enough Americans with that training to fill all the needs.

Ryan Grim: Right, exactly. When I saw that debate break out, it wasn't at all surprising to me. I understood all of the contours because I'd heard all of these arguments before from Emily, from Saagar, and from other people that we'd had on the show. Whereas I think in the past, say, before I had been doing this show, I might have just found it all comical, but not really understood the texture of it.

Brian Lehrer: Emily, same question.

Emily Jashinsky: I like how Ryan described that because I think part of it is we have very siloed media diets in the world now and just constant conversation with people like Ryan and our colleague and friend Krystal Ball, you hear stories that probably wouldn't have penetrated your media diet and other circumstances. Even if you try really hard, you just are exposed to so many more stories that really dimensionalizes the other side. Instead of having a very flat perspective of it, you can see more where people are coming from.

That sounds cliche, but in practice, it makes all the difference in the world because you've been following the same trail of breadcrumbs to that position as everybody else. I guess where I've definitely changed, and Ryan knows this and our viewers know this, just by more exposure to stories outside of my media silo is absolutely on the conflict in the Middle East and particularly the plight of Palestinians. There's been a clear probably evolution of my thinking just because I've followed different stories that a lot of people on the right, I honestly don't think are always aware of.

Ryan's a great foreign policy journalist, so I'm always learning a lot from him on all kinds of different conflict zones and American interventionism. Those are really clear examples in my mind.

Brian Lehrer: That's really int-- Go ahead, Ryan.

Ryan Grim: One other example, Brian, if this might be helpful, if I compare myself to my social group or other people who live in suburban Maryland, Northwest Washington, DC, fairly liberal people who get their news from fairly liberal media. The thing that I've realized I've been able to do among all my friends is let them know what the things are that they're missing. For example, years ago, I would ask them, "Have you been following this case about the trans-swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania?" Nobody had remotely heard of it.

I'm like, "It's one of the biggest things going on on the right right now. It's absolutely huge." When this cultural backlash swept Democrats last election, that was something that I had been able to see coming from a long time earlier, but that you weren't really allowed to talk about. Now, when I would talk to, say, friends privately, almost all of them would say, "You know what, that actually-- Wait a minute, when did she transition? That doesn't necessarily seem fair to me. I think they should have some different rules around that."

But they would never talk about it publicly but when you would poll it, you'd have 12% support for the idea that you could transition and then very quickly compete in women's swimming. On the left, they would say, "Who cares? It's not happening. Don't talk about this. It's bigoted. You're going to bring harm to people." It turned out that not talking about it doesn't work because eventually it's going to show up in the ballot box and Democrats paid a huge price for that.

Brian Lehrer: About people not even knowing that that was going on, it's one of the things that I notice as I always try to sample from different things. If I'm on cable television, watching cable television, and I go from MSNBC to Fox, I notice that it's not just that they're disagreeing on the same issues, they're not even talking about the same topics that they're trying to center much of the time. Good examples there.

Listeners, who wants to join the conversation with a comment or a question for our guests from the Left-Right podcast, Counterpoints, Ryan grim and Emily Jashinsky? 212-433-WNYC. You can express an opinion or ask a question about the topics in the news we're about to dive into, like why Trump won, what's all this about Greenland and territorial expansion generally. Also Trump in Gaza, Mark Zuckerberg ending the fact checking program on Facebook and other Meta platforms, Trump on the California wildfires. Maybe we'll see how many of those we have time to get into.

Or as we've been discussing so far, the very idea of having a Left-Right podcast in our polarized era. How can it be productive and not just a vehicle for listeners and viewers because they're on video and YouTube too, to choose up sides and hate your political enemies even more than before. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. All right, briefly, because this has been discussed a lot, but I'm curious to get your short takes, how much do you two agree or disagree on why Trump was re-elected? Emily?

Emily Jashinsky: I think we agree just about 100% on why Trump was re-elected. I'm sure Ryan may have different opinions why those reasons exist but we agree basically, that a lot of this lies with the fault of the left to mount a sufficient argument. This goes back to 2016. Everyone wondering and I still wonder how it was that the former secretary of state and a fixture of establishment Washington and American politics lost to someone who at the time was the host of the Celebrity Apprentice.

It sounds like satire, it sounds like something from a movie, but it happened. A lot of that has to go to the establishment Republican Party for failing to be responsive to the concerns of the working class and of middle America and a failure of the establishment Democrat Party to mount a response that was superficially and in substance sufficient for voters to trust Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton. I think, Ryan, we're pretty much in agreement on that.

Brian Lehrer: Ryan?

Ryan Grim: I think we both probably buy into some of the standard answers, too, that people were frustrated about price increases and they felt like they were treading water or they were actually falling behind and they had a nostalgic look at the years 2017 to 2020. Then COVID gets extricated from that and not assigned necessarily to either party, but ironically, perhaps if it got assigned to one or the other, it was more to Biden. I think we probably did, basically, agree on what happened.

Brian Lehrer: Let's talk about a particular issue. Your latest podcast episode, which came out yesterday was partly about Trump's stated desire to make Canada the 51st state and somehow acquire Greenland. Here is the stretch of Trump's news conference from earlier in the week where he talked about why Greenland?

Trump: Well, we need Greenland for national security purposes. I've been told that for a long time, long before I even ran. People have been talking about it for a long time. You have approximately 45,000 people there. People really don't even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do, they should give it up because we need it for national security. That's for the free world. I'm talking about protecting the free world. You don't even need binoculars. You look outside, you have China ships all over the place, you have Russian ships all over the place. We're not letting that happen.

Brian Lehrer: Trump from his news conference earlier this week. He also refused to rule out what the questioner called military coercion with respect to taking Greenland. Emily, what's this really about? Acquiring Greenland was certainly the furthest thing from just about all Americans minds, I think it's fair to say, as they cast their votes for president in November.

Emily Jashinsky: Yes. There are a lot of national security arguments or benefits that would come with folding Greenland somehow, whatever the legal mechanism is, into the US Empire. Now, whether those are outweighed by the disadvantages is an entirely fair question but I think from the perspective of people in Trump's inner circle, it's not just about the crude imperialism that I think we've heard some in the media ascribe it to. I think there's a lot of rare earth minerals, for example, a huge supply of rare earth minerals in Greenland, there's key shipping routes. Especially as more ice melts in that region of the world, those shipping routes become even more important.

I imagine that Trump's advisors, like national security advisors, have laid some of these out in a way that makes sense but it also happens to dovetail with Donald Trump's idea or Donald Trump's pledge to "Make America great again". It feels like, I think, to Trump, something that he can pitch as a sign of renewed American vigor, renewed American strength. To the extent, those two things go hand in hand in his mind. I think that's what fuels this new move.

Brian Lehrer: That's interesting because, Ryan, Trump ran on what a lot of people have called an isolationist America first platform against foreign entanglements and getting involved in wars, what Emily called adventurism before. This strikes me as the opposite of that. He's threatening multiple wars in our backyard. Where does it fit into a bigger America first game plan? Then I'll ask Emily, I'm curious how much you support it or not? Ryan, what's your take?

Ryan Grim: I think this is where the experience working with Emily and Saagar has actually really given me, I think probably more accurate perspective on this than I would have had previously. Donald Trump, I would not say is an isolationist. I may have thought that maybe through 2016 or so, what he is, he doesn't want to get entangled in military conflicts. He didn't successfully get out of Afghanistan, but he was trying to get out of Afghanistan. He didn't start new wars.

He did lots of drone strikes so it's not as if he's against killing people. He killed Qasem Soleimani, Iranian official so it's not as if he's a peacenik, but he's quite okay flexing American power. In fact, he enjoys flexing American power, particularly against China and also against Japan, pushing them and Korea to pay more for military bases, pushing NATO countries to pay more into defense. All of that is using American muscle and pushing it around.

Just because he says that he's not ruling out military force in, say, Panama or Greenland, do we really seriously think he's going to send the Marines to Panama or Greenland, or is this just more of Trump's bloviating? He did rule out, it seems, military forced with regard to Canada, which is a bizarre question anyway, since we are literally the country that guarantees Canada's defense. What does it mean that we would use the military against a country that we're defending?

That's the difference. I think he is totally fine using American power around the world for what he sees as America's benefit but he does not see the military as the first tool where I think a lot of neoconservative Republicans and a lot of neoconservative Democrats are much more trigger happy than he is.

Brian Lehrer: Emily, do you want to add to that or contradict it at all in terms of what kind of isolationist, if any, Trump is?

Emily Jashinsky: Yes, I don't think he's an isolationist at all. I think it's sort of a slur that's thrown at him because there are particular conflicts that he would prefer the United States relatively isolate itself from because they aren't, in his mind, reflective of American strength. We saw this when he was reportedly shown pictures of kids in Syria. He sided with neoconservatives during his first presidency after seeing the suffering of the people of Syria. He wanted America to look like a hero.

You hear a lot of people in Trump's inner circle talk about kinetic conflict in the South China Sea or in Mexico, and that has been a huge litmus test for me, as somebody who does tend to be less interested in foreign interventionism. I've been to Mexico, I've covered the immigration in Mexico. We hear people in Trump circles say, "Let's bomb the cartels." That's not isolationism at all, whatsoever.

Maybe someone could make a very nuanced argument that it's the Monroe Doctrine. Interest in conflicts like that is very real in Trump circles. There's nothing isolationist, I don't think, about him except for in maybe the Middle East and Ukraine, but those are just relative to where this foreign policy establishment is.

Brian Lehrer: Well, what about the Middle East? He's warning there will be hell to pay his term or all hell will break loose, maybe that's how he put it, if Hamas doesn't return the remaining hostages by Trump's inauguration. Again, it seems more like the George Bush's than Donald Trump to be threatening a US Military campaign or whatever that term or hell will break loose in the Middle east means but is that what he's threatening, Ryan?

Ryan Grim: Well, it's absurd to be threatening to unleash hell on an area that is already hell on earth. There have been a lot of gallows jokes from people in Gaza who were like, "What in hell or what on earth is he talking about? There is no hell left."

Brian Lehrer: What isn't Israel doing that he would do?

Ryan Grim: There's 10 trucks getting in. You're going to take it down to zero. You're bombing almost all of the Gaza Strip around the clock. Now, you're going to bomb all of it around the clock. You're going to continue to not let in medicine. What could you possibly do to unleash more of this? I think what this is, is, again, his bombastic language. That's always who he's been. His advisors will say that he loves this language. He thinks it gives him a good negotiating position and we'll see.

He has been very clear with Netanyahu that he wants this deal cut by January 20th so he has laid down a marker. If he doesn't, that's egg on his face. That's a failure on his part. When he says it's going to be hell on earth for Hamas and for anyone else, he's also referring to-- That's a veiled threat at Netanyahu. It's not a violent threat against Netanyahu, but he's telling Netanyahu that he wants this wrapped up. Whether he can actually do that, remains to be seen, but that's the goal he has set for himself.

Brian Lehrer: Emily, maybe what Ryan just did that I maybe failed to do in my question, the way I set this up was include the end of that quote from Trump that all hell will break loose or there will be hell to pay for Hamas and anyone else. Part of that is aimed at Netanyahu?

Emily Jashinsky: Yes, I think so. He also said in that same press conference, I believe, that it won't be good for anyone, frankly. He said something it won't be good for Hamas, but it won't be good for anyone, frankly. I think that's absolutely true. I think Trump wants to have a Reagan ask-release of the hostages on his day one, day before day one, something like that, for many reasons, but I also think what he's saying very clearly is that he does not want to abide the state of the conflict on his watch as it is right now. The status quo will not be acceptable to him.

That could be for better or worse. That could mean that a really bad deal is reached or it could mean something that's at least a step in the right direction so we'll see. He had a very telling moment. This must have been like a year ago where it was in reports that Trump had suggested Netanyahu had a public relations problem. As one of the closest presidents that we have ever had to Israel, and that's a high bar, Donald Trump has been very, very, very close with Israel, to hear that, for people like Ryan to hear him just talking about the public relations is grating.

I think for him, that's significant. That he doesn't want to see a close US ally responsible for a humanitarian catastrophe along the lines of what we have seen come out of Gaza over the last year and a half. That I look back on all of the time as a very telling moment about what we could see from a Trump policy towards Israel in the future.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we'll continue in a minute with our guests from the Left-Right podcast, Counterpoints, Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky. We'll start to fold in some of your calls and texts and get to a few more topics. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with the beyond you'd bubble segment with Ryan Grim, founder of the Left-oriented site called Drop Site News, and Emily Jashinsky, Washington correspondent for the site UnHerd. Together they host a Left-Right podcast called Counterpoints. Rocky in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Rocky.

Rocky: Hi, Brian. Hi guys. I have a question for Emily. Are you comfortable aligning yourself with JD Vance considering his antiquated ideas about women's place and autonomy in society? Also a comment for all of you. I feel like I listen to radio and I read media and everyone is sane-washing Donald Trump. I just don't understand how everyone can talk about his bombastic comments as if they make any sense and as if it's something that we as citizens of the United States have to just say, "Okay, that's who he is," and just go on with it. It's incredibly disconcerting and shocking to me. Emily, that question please.

Emily Jashinsky: Sure. I'll even just say on the second point that Trump is an enduring mystery for everyone in media. I don't disagree at all that it's not normal. The way that he talks is not normal and I don't think it will ever be normal for most politicians. What we do, to the extent maybe it sounds like sane-washing, is try to piece together that puzzle and try to understand. We're trying to solve the mystery [chuckles] and that can be a hard thing to do.

On the first point about JD Vance, I imagine this is about the childless cat ladies remark. Maybe there's something else as well but I'm actually a pretty standard evangelical Christian conservative. I think that's one of the things that makes Ryan and my conversations interesting. It's very unpopular in Washington, DC. I would say it's maybe the hardest part of my own worldview to defend on a daily basis or to discuss on a daily basis.

That's where conversations get really uncomfortable but I certainly don't have what I would consider antiquated points about women in the workforce or women in marriages, but they tend to be a bit more traditional. If it's about the childless cat lady remark, I've said that I don't think that was a good way for JD Vance to describe women, many of whom I think are-- What's that?

Brian Lehrer: Rocky, go ahead.

Rocky: That's his perspective. He's coming in. God forbid anything happened. Well, something might happen to Trump. He's old. This man is coming in with this idea. I just hear him speak constantly about, basically, women have no autonomy in his worldview. Unfortunately, that evangelical Christian perspective is the problem with the Republican Party. The party has been hijacked by people who have this narrow view about women and their role in society. It begins with our own reproductive autonomy and goes forward. All of us are sitting here wondering what's next on the agenda. Women are bleeding out in parking lots because we don't have reproductive rights.

Brian Lehrer: Emily, go ahead. I'm sure you'd like to respond to some of that.

Emily Jashinsky: Yes. It sounds like that point about his position on women's autonomy is very specifically about the issue of abortion, maybe about the way that he talks about women in culture more broadly. On abortion, that's just a complete gulf. I don't see-- I'm way more pro-life than the average American, and I'm open about that. I'm way more anti-abortion than the average American, and I'm open about that. It's something that I have to defend and have to be comfortable and transparent about arguing, but most pro-life people, most anti-abortion people don't see that fundamentally as a question of autonomy for women.

That's one of the-- They see it as a question of autonomy for the baby's life. To me, I put that in a separate category, but that's one of the hardest conversations to have between the two sides because we have this very foundational disagreement about whose autonomy is in question. Does that fit into a larger worldview from JD Vance, as a Catholic that-- I'm not Catholic, but he is, that takes autonomy away from women. I disagree with that completely.

I think Our culture of fourth wave feminism that we're in, actually, causes a lot of problems for women's autonomy. It's a really long discussion. I'd be happy to have that in a long space but if I'm sketching out how I think about this, I don't think talking about childless cat ladies is good because I think those are-- The women that he's talking about there are people who are suffering immensely. When we look at the rates of depression among younger women, I'm a millennial, you look at rates of depression among women my age, rates of use of antidepressants, very high.

Dissatisfaction with life, very high. Happiness has gone down in this country as our material comforts, on average, have gone up. Arthur Brooks has some really good work on that. I think people are really suffering. I don't think it's a question of starving women of their autonomy but I think sometimes the Right does talk about it in ways that give in to that. Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Orlando in Kew Gardens, you're on WNYC. Hello, Orlando.

Orlando: Hello. Hi. Good morning. I really appreciate you all speaking. I feel like this kind of effort really can help the world and society because when I look at Congress or whatever we see in the normal media, you just see politicians sounding very guarded, very unwilling to really-- I think reach across the aisle is not even the right word. It's more like get to the nuance, do the hard work of finding more than common ground, but finding the textures that you were talking about.

For instance, like what we were just talking about with the cat lady, and JD Vance, and abortion, that's a very, very, very difficult topic. People on probably all sides feel the same way, even though they disagree. It's about respecting that people are so-- You're talking about people's values so you're not really just going to win them over but how do we get forward-- [crosstalk] Oh, sorry. Well, I'll just finish. How do we get going forward with policies and treating people as human? Again, with the war in Gaza, you're talking about hundreds and thousands of years of being persecuted, over bombing children and women, and it's just like everyone is suffering. How do you see people as human?

Brian Lehrer: Orlando, thank you. I'm going to cut you off there because I think you got your thought out and we're starting to run out of time in the segment. Ryan, you want to pick it up.

Ryan Grim: Yes. To take the first one which dovetails from the last caller's question, I think you're exactly right that when it is a question of values, you're not going to defeat the other person and get them to express different values as a result of defeating them on that question. What we often do in the show, we will debate back and forth in some segments, but often what we'll do is we'll say, "Here's the news and here's how I see this from the Left." Emily will talk about how she sees it from the Right.

We will look for some inconsistencies back and forth but then move on to the next thing because I think people want to be heard and also want to hear what the other side is saying about something. Then they want to decide for themselves where they come down on that. When it comes to solutions, for instance, what I might say in a conversation like this is the depression rates, the anxiety, the over-medication rates you're talking about, there's something we can agree is an actual problem.

The evangelical Right is big into family formation. Actually, studies show people do seem to be happier when families are stronger and doesn't mean it has to be a traditional man-woman family. Might be two men, might be two women but family formation is an important goal. If we all actually share, we disagree on what the family looks like, we disagree on what the laws ought to be about when you can start a family, but we do agree that family formation is a good thing.

Are there policies that we can implement like a child tax credit that hits your bank account every month to make life a little bit easier for you? Because so many of the fights that families have are over money that they can't pay their bills by the end of the month? Let's start there and then maybe work backwards down the road?

Brian Lehrer: I think a follow up to that whole topic is do either of you think that it should be imperative as a matter of government-- I think this is part of what JD Vance gets at in the topic that we're discussing, as does Elon Musk, that there's an imperative for government to encourage or even coerce Americans to have more children? Because there's another side of that that would say, "Why push people away from the freedom to choose the lifestyle that they would find most satisfying at the same time that you're restricting immigration, all these people who want to come here and improve the worker to retiree ratio?

You're telling one group you have to have more kids. You're telling other people who want to come here and be young people, you're not allowed to come here and be young people. Some people read that as a kind of reverse eugenics. Ryan?

Ryan Grim: I do regularly make fun of the Elon Musk side for its twin fixation on fertility rates and declining population and hostility to migration because, to me, the two things are just in complete conflict with each other. Wait, you're claiming that the number one biggest problem in the world is that the population is shrinking, and then the number two biggest problem in the world is that there are too many people and we need to crack down on immigration? To me, that doesn't make sense.

What I would say from the Left when it comes to families, I think that strong future generations are a good thing, that raising kids is not just something you do for yourself, but something you do for all of society and I think all of society ought to make it as easy as possible to raise those kids. The phrase it takes a village, goes back millennia because it's profoundly accurate. If the left is rejecting the it takes a village kind of slogan, an idea, then I think they've lost their way.

Brian Lehrer: Emily, you want to have one last go on that?

Emily Jashinsky: Yes. I think the way the Left and Right in American politics look at these questions is how do we maximize both freedom and flourishing, the individual and the government? I'm not super in favor of punishing people in the tax code for not having children, but I think it's also true that the majority of Americans aspire, younger Americans, you can look at this across polling, to have children and families and so our economy should be structured in a way that maximizes that without encroaching on anybody's freedom.

I think what we lost for a long time, we were way heavier in the freedom direction, saying that you can't have or that we have to allow private businesses to do X, Y and Z, even if it's making it harder for people to have families and get married and buy houses and all of those things. We see homeownership is incredibly important. For people when they talk about families, student loan debt is cited as one of the reasons that people don't get married as quickly as they do or as they want to.

That's another thing I'm telling the Right all of the time, that these economic problems that have been chalked up to matters of individual freedom, corporate freedom for a long time by the Right, are weighing in negatively on the values that they want to see people have. I think people should have more children because they want to have more children. I think there are things the government can do to help people with that without necessarily creating incentives that also punish people for making their own choices of their own volition.

Brian Lehrer: We're almost out of time, but let me ask one more question from a listener that came in, in a text, and it follows up on the last caller, Orlando, who I think was very much appreciating the tone of the way the two of you interact. Another listener writes, "Thank you for this discussion, but I am left feeling even more that the nuanced policy debate here has almost zero to do with the real divide in this country." I wonder how either of you would react to that. Your tone is very different from the old Left versus Right, almost cartoonish pairing like on CNN's Crossfire show and things like that. Emily, then Ryan, then we're out of time.

Emily Jashinsky: Just quickly, we or, at least I, have always believed that the famous Jon Stewart moment taking down Crossfire, it's been seen as heroic when actually I think there was a lot lost when we ditched the Crossfire model. Now, they did tend to be overly theatrical and we try not to do that. We are completely ourselves. We're basically just two kids who ended up in journalism from relatively rural places and we try to give voice to the people we grew up with. I guess I don't know what that means about the real divide. I think both of us see the real divide as a class divide and to that extent, we're trying to represent people who aren't represented in media. We do the best that we can at that.

Brian Lehrer: Ryan, here's another one like that listener writes, "Having a conversation reaching across the aisle is nice, but I don't see the point when Republicans will never cooperate in compromise."

Ryan Grim: Nothing is static. The world's always changing. One point I would make is that our show has met with just a shockingly large audience. I think our show, not just ours, but Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar, is reaching millions of people and it is becoming, I think, the kind of broadcast news program for the independent media space, which itself now represents something like half of news consumers. I would say that the partisan brittleness that you see in Washington is probably not as firm as you think it is.

It's a lot more malleable, that things can change more quickly than you think they can, that just because something is the way it is now doesn't mean it always will be. Washington is reactive to the culture and I think the culture is shifting and moving away a little bit from the more dogmatic decade that we came out of.

Brian Lehrer: Ryan Grim, see his individual work on the Left-oriented site called Drop Site News. Emily Jashinsky, see her individual work as Washington correspondent for the site UnHerd. Together, they host a Left-Right podcast series called Counterpoints, which is part of a larger series called Breaking Points. Emily and Ryan, we really, really appreciate you coming on and doing some of this with us and our listeners today. Thank you.

Ryan Grim: My pleasure.

Emily Jashinsky: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We turn the page. More in a minute.

 

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