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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his reaction to the shooting at the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Ontario on Yom Kippur. David discusses the rise of violence against Jews around the world, and why condemnations of anti-Semitic violence ring hollow when they come from people who spread myths about Jewish conspiracies.
Then, David is joined by Jessica Tarlov, the co-host of The Five on Fox News and the Raging Moderates podcast. They talk about her new book, I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends, and how her upbringing helped shape her ability to disagree cordially. David and Jessica also discuss when to debate someone versus when to ignore them so as not to give them a platform.
Finally, David ends the show with a review of the novel Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Jessica Tarlov, co-host of the Fox News program The Five and author of the new book I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends. She’s also the co-host with Scott Galloway of the Raging Moderates podcast. The book for discussion this week will be a much-acclaimed new novel, Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, and I’ll be discussing that at the bottom of the program. But before either my dialogue with Jessica Tarlov or the book discussion of Yesteryear, I wanna open with some thoughts about an outrage that happened in a place very close to me, just this, these past days.
On the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the most holy day of the Jewish year, a gunman opened fire on the synagogue in this Canadian town, the Ontario town of Belleville. Many of the details of this incident remain a little murky, but what we do have is: The alleged gunman, the apparent gunman, is in hospital, and so is a police officer who gallantly came to the rescue of the synagogue. None of the worshippers in the synagogue were injured. The alleged gunman apparently used a shotgun, which discharged a lot of pellets, did a lot of physical damage, but it was not the kind of high-powered rifle that would’ve shot up this building. And so the people inside were safe.
This story has become a big story in Ontario, in Canada, and around the world. It is one of a many of a long series of incidents of intensifying violence against Jewish worshippers all around the world since October 7th of 2023. To read about it in Belleville is very striking, however, and not just because it’s so close to me. I have worshipped at the synagogue, Sons of Jacob Synagogue, where the crime took place. I’ve spent a lot of time there. It’s near where I live in Ontario. I see this street in my mind, and it’s such a powerful symbol of how life has changed for North American Jews.
The Sons of Jacob Synagogue is a congregation that dates back to the early 20th century, but the building was built in the middle 1950s. It’s a piece of modernist architecture, quite small, and it faces directly on a road in a residential neighborhood. There are no security precautions other than a locked door, because it was built at a time when it never occurred to the Jews of North America that they could face violence from their neighbors. That kind of threat was something they remembered, but from across the ocean and from a different time, not here and not now. But, of course, it is here, and it is now. And it is striking all over the continent, all over the world.
When these kinds of incidents happen, a certain kind of speaker, a certain kind of politician, a certain kind of online influencer, a certain kind of journalist will say, It is very important not to conflate the Jews of here—wherever “here” is, Ontario and Canada, the United States, New York, wherever it is—with the Jews over there. We should not be blaming the Jews of Belleville for the crimes of the state of Israel. Now this kind of remark is intended to be a defense of the Jewish community that is under attack, but it is, in its own way, a form of incitement. Because when you say we must not conflate the Jews here with the Jews there, we must not blame our Jews for those Jews, what you’re doing is suggesting that there are some Jews who deserve the kind of violence just that happened.
And what you’re also doing is offering safety to certain Jews on condition that they disavow others. We see a lot of this in remarks by some people who are disaffiliated Jews, who will say, We can be safer if only we separate ourselves from the Jews in Israel who are under attack. We can buy some safety for ourselves. I hear that, and I think that that is the counsel of cowardice. To buy safety for yourself by abandoning others, by separating yourself from others who equally deserve safety, that seems to me a reprehensible thing.
But as a strictly factual matter, it’s just wrong. That the no-conflation argument—Don’t attack the Jews here for what the Jews over there did—begins with the foundation upon a lie. And the lie is the lie that we are hearing again and again that Israel committed genocide, that is, Nazi-like atrocities, in its war of self-defense that began when it was attacked so atrociously on October 7th, 2023.
I once made it a project to dig back through the archives to find who was the first person who compared the state of Israel to the Nazis, and when did it happen? And as best I can tell, the first, or the first prominent person, to do it was the British historian Arnold Toynbee, who makes the point in a book published in 1954, the eighth volume of his Study of History. Within six years of the independence of the state of Israel, Arnold Toynbee is publishing a comparison of the state of Israel to the Nazis.
Now, what makes the comparison extra piquant is that Arnold Toynbee was pretty Nazi-adjacent himself. He had been invited to meet with Adolf Hitler in 1936. He took the meeting, and he came back from the meeting praising Hitler’s good intentions and recommending that the British government find a way to learn to live in peace with Adolf Hitler, who wanted nothing more than a better deal for Germany and Europe.
So the tradition is Israel is accused of being a Nazi state from the very beginning, by someone who is kind of Nazi-adjacent. And this is a pattern that I think many people who are involved in Jewish life have noticed never ceasing to stop. Because for so many people, what a convenience, what a mercy, what a gift it would be if only we could prove that the Jews were the real Nazis. What a relief. What a burden discharged. There’s a joke, I’m sure you’ve heard it, that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. I’m happy to report in the modern state of Germany, which is a state that is, in fact, where friendship with Israel is a principle of the organization of the state, the Germans have forgiven the Jews for Auschwitz.
But around the rest of the world, lots of people haven’t. Auschwitz is the ultimate nightmare reflection of modern civilization, and specifically of Western civilization and of the Christian culture on which that Western civilization was built. Auschwitz invites a burden of reflection and of guilt that understandably people chafe at. And the way to escape that burden of guilt for many people is to transfer it and to say, The people who are victims there, they deserved it in some way. They’re the culprits, or they deserve it now. Maybe they didn’t deserve it then, but they deserve it now. And so while Germany has forgiven the Jews for Auschwitz, the rest of the world is angrier than ever at the Jews for Auschwitz and so wants to make Auschwitz not just a thing the Jews suffered, but a thing the Jews did.
And sad to report, there are Jews or people of Jewish origin who play this game by identifying themselves with the Jewish people and the Jewish community only in order to act as fellow accusers of the Jewish community and the Jewish people. A Democratic nominee for Congress, Brad Lander, who did an event on Yom Kippur where he accused the Jews of the state of Israel of genocide, and a man who’s always separated himself from the state of Israel when the state of Israel was in need, but is rushing to identify himself with the state of Israel when he can blame the state of Israel for Nazi-like crimes. In Canada, the place where the Belleville shooting took place, the leader of the small left-wing party, the New Democratic Party, is of Jewish origin, from a famous Jewish political dynasty in Canada. He opened the Yom Kippur holiday by again saying, as someone who separated himself from Israel always in its time of need, I will identify with Israel to accuse Israel.
It’s a footnote to history here that I sometimes think about. The phrase blood libel refers to a myth that the Jews use blood in the making of matzah. And as far as historians can tell, the myth originated in England in the 1100s, when a boy disappeared and a local mob became convinced or was persuaded that the boy had been abducted by the local Jewish community and his blood used to make matzah, and then massacres then followed. This outrageously false accusation was recorded in a book written by a local monk who claimed to have been told that Jews did this by a man named Theobald of Cambridge, a converted Jew who revealed the secrets of the Jewish world, among them that Jews met once a year to pick a Christian child and condemn that child to death for his blood to be used in the making of matzah.
Now, it’s not clear whether Theobald of Cambridge actually existed, or whether the monk who told the story invented him or distorted his words in some way. The history of Theobald of Cambridge is a little murky. I like to believe that he did exist. I like to believe that Theo—I like to imagine Theobald of Cambridge saying in the 1100s, As a Jew, I’m here to tell you that the Jews really do use blood in the making of matzah, and you’re right to go out and massacre them all to punish them for the crime I just invented to defame my own community. And what I want to say when I hear people saying, As a Jew, I accuse the Jews of being Nazis, is—we had one Theobald of Cambridge already. He did enough damage. We don’t need more.
But the modern progressive left, whether its members are of Jewish origin or not, tends to identify the Jews as privileged and powerful, and therefore as dangerous. And they often will see the Holocaust itself not as a source of suffering and misery, of trauma, which continues to affect Jewish mentality and Jewish life all these years after it happened; they see the Holocaust as a source of Jewish power and privilege, and therefore something that needs to be redistributed from the Jews to someone who is more deserving, who needs their share of power and privilege, and the kind of power and privilege you get by having a Holocaust of your own.
And that is what is going on with this conflation lie. The conflation to say, We are going to accuse the Jews of the very thing that was done to them. Of the thing that was done to them not only in the 1940s, but of the thing that was attempted against them on October 7th, 2023, when there was a Nazi-like atrocity against the Jews of Israel—mass murder, mass kidnapping, mass rape, mass torture. That was how this war started. And so to redistribute the odium for those offenses, we redistribute it to those who need to have the history of the Holocaust redistributed away from them.
And that brings us to the shooting in Belleville. And whenever I make these points, which are very close to my heart, I’m asked the question, Well, are you saying that all criticism of the state of Israel must be anti-Semitic? Can’t somebody say things about the Jews and not be anti-Semitic? And obviously, that’s true. People do it all the time, including many Israelis. Israelis criticize their own state. But If you say, I want to criticize the Jews without being regarded as anti-Semitic, one of the great ways of criticizing the state of Israel without being anti-Semitic is not to be anti-Semitic. It’s not so hard. Not to have paranoid fantasies. Not to engage in ancient anti-Semitic tropes, not to deploy myths of Jewish conspiracy and secret power and privilege. Not, above all, to say, We are going to accuse the Jews of doing the thing that was done to them, because they don’t deserve the credit for it, and someone else needs it as a resource for their power and privilege. That is the path to the shooting in Belleville, Ontario, and to so many other crimes that we are seeing and suffering in our modern world.
And now, my dialogue with Jessica Tarlov.
[Music]
Frum: If you’ve ever caught the program The Five on Fox News, and who hasn’t, you know exactly what Jessica Tarlov does for a living. She regularly sits down at a table with four people who disagree with her, and she does not flinch. Four against one, cameras rolling, millions watching, and somehow she walks away having made her point, without losing the room or her colleagues or her sense of humor about the whole thing.
She’s fond of putting it simply: “I am outnumbered.” What most people don’t see is, was what led her there. In the same stretch of months that Jessica got engaged, got married, and became a mother, she also said goodbye to her father, who was fighting cancer. She learned he was dying while she was standing in her wedding dress, trying it on for the first time.
He made it to the wedding anyway. She’s written about that year now in her first book, I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends, out this month. A fusion of memoir, political analysis, and cultural advice as to how all of us can be better citizens and better people. Tarlov is also co-host with Scott Galloway of the Raging Moderates podcast. Jessica, thanks for joining The David Frum Show.
Jessica Tarlov: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.
Frum: So you are quite a circumspect person in your public appearances, and this is a kind of a novel thing for you to be so open about your story. So for those who have not had a chance yet to open the book, tell us the story. Where does it begin, and where are you now?
Tarlov: Well, it begins at my dining table growing up. The tale of Jessica Tarlov as you see her today begins around a boisterous, frantic table full of loud characters with different politics than the ones on The Five, but with a lot of personality and a lot of desire to engage and tussle with ideas. And one where equality was at the center of it all, i.e., my sister and I were always treated as an important element of the table, equal to others, with our seats that were ours no matter who was over for dinner that night, even big movie stars. And it really imbued this sense of, I’ve got something to say, and it’s worth your time, and I’m gonna make you listen to it.
So that’s where it begins.
Frum: Tell us about your father, your life with him, and your loss of him.
Tarlov: So my dad was the coolest. He had this incredible career that went everywhere from being a speechwriter for Warren Berger to being an entertainment lawyer, then deciding he didn’t wanna do that anymore—that he wanted to produce movies and direct a few. Went into that.
And his final career—when he passed away, he was a winemaker. So zigging and zagging all over the place. And he and my mother had an incredible love affair. And I write in the book about how even at the end when he passed away from tongue cancer—which he got from 9/11; we lived nearby to the towers—there was still romance to it.
And he was just an enormous character in and of itself, but a really dedicated dad and someone who I think made it so clear to me that there were good paths to go on, and some not-so-good ones. And it doesn’t mean you don’t always go down the not-so-good ones, at least for a little bit. But that there’s this strong sense of right and wrong to things, of black and white. I guess a lot of lawyers feel that way. And that he wanted me to go out in the world and to try everything, even if it felt unorthodox.
Frum: So you emphasize the disputatiousness of your family background. How disputatious was it?
Tarlov: I mean, nothing violent. I think for your listeners, and it’ll make sense for you, like kind of normal Reform Jewish vibes, right? Working it all out all the time, and a lot of conversation. A lot of pushing and pulling. My parents, they would talk to us about their work problems. And my mom—she was a lawyer as well; they met as lawyers at Warner Brothers—and when she stopped working in law and she started writing, they became creative partners in basically everything that they did. So their work life was, in a lot of ways, the centerpiece of our discussions and our tables. So on the disputatious scale, certainly not a 10, but a good amount of friction, and my parents bringing their lives to the table for all of us to engage together.
Frum: When did you become aware you had political views?
Tarlov: 9/11 was a very seminal experience, I think, for all Americans, New Yorkers in particular. I spend a good amount of the book talking about this. What it was like to be evacuated. And then you come back, and seeing, which has really stuck with me, the flood of first responders from all over the country coming in, having fire trucks parked on your block with license plates from far-flung places, like Idaho. And that it really contextualized my life as part of the American experience, more than this New Yorker silo that I had been living in quite happily.
Frum: But you’re on television to express clear, distinct, sharp points of view in a pointed way. When did all of that come into focus?
Tarlov: I don’t think until I started actually going on TV and doing it, and maybe not even until I got my regular co-hosting role on The Five, which is about four and a half years ago now. And I’ve been a contributor at Fox for a little bit less than 10 years in total.
And you do TV segments regularly, so you know that when you kind of dip in and out, it’s very different than "this is your job,” and you’re thinking about it all the time. And you’re building your arguments throughout the course of the entire day, which is essentially how I see my life. From the morning I wake up, until I go to bed, I’m thinking about building these arguments, and how I’m processing whatever’s going on in our political landscape, and how I can make a solid argument about it that I could get out in 30 seconds if I’m gonna be interrupted, which is what happens regularly on The Five.
So I think it’s a new thing for me. But having a background in research and political polling, I was already thinking about the best formulation for a particular sentiment anyway, because that’s the kind of question that you wanna go out into the field to ask people, right? To find out how it is that they think about, or what it is that they think about X, Y, or Z issue.
Frum: Well, I’ll just say personally, since you mentioned it, I don’t actually do television all that often.
I used to do it more. I’ve really dialed it back. And among the reasons I’ve dialed it back is—and I upset bookers—a booker will call me and say, Will you come on? And I’ll say, I haven’t thought about it, or, I don’t have a strong view on that subject. Or worst of all—
Tarlov: Oh, they hate that.
Frum: I don’t know enough. I remember a booker once said to me—I said, I don’t know enough about the subject. And she said, If people took that view, television would cease to exist.
But do you feel like you’re cast into a role? Are you able to express what you think, or is there something that the drama that you’re a part of needs you to do, and therefore you are called upon to do it?
Tarlov: I don’t like to be guided by the drama.
I sit in the liberal seat on The Five. It is one against four. If I don’t say it, nobody else is going to. I mean, there are rare moments where there’s a good amount of consensus, or somebody takes a contrarian view, like on tariffs, for instance. So obviously someone like Dana Perino, who you know, is going to talk about the reality of what tariffs are, and that they’re a tax on the consumer, and it’s going to be passed down to us, et cetera. But in general, I am the one who is going to be taking the contrarian position. It does make it when I either agree with the others—or have a position that might not be certainly the Republican or the MAGA position, but isn’t necessarily the position of Democratic leadership—it would stick out then.
If we’re talking about sometimes around immigration, for instance. Where I think that I was tacking, I don’t want to say to the right, but was certainly very hyper-aware of how open our border was in I’d say year three, really, of the Biden administration. And then the changes that he put in place to clamp down on it in his last year, and then obviously what’s happened since Donald Trump came in.
But in general, yeah; it’s me.
Frum: Let me ask you about the analytic part of your book and how you engage in, as you call it, storytelling, or disputation, or whatever you do on television.
I don’t know how seriously to take the social science, but there’s a lot of social science that purports to claim that Americans are—as individuals and as groups within the national polity—more divided from one another than they were before. So in a world in which people, it seems, are more hostile to one another, or Americans are more hostile to one another than they were before, how do you do what you do? And what do you think you’re doing?
Tarlov: What do I think I’m doing? So obviously I’ve seen all of those studies. I used to focus on specifically Gen Zs and Millennials. I was the head of research at a big women’s digital lifestyle publication. And so I would do surveys, quantitative and qualitative, of young Americans. And that trend line is very much real—that young people don’t want to date others with a different political point of view, or party affiliation, because for them it’s about morality. And I think that that’s actually core to the way people are reacting even to the subtitle of my book. Which I knew I was going to get, because it’s I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends, and a lot of people are very happy to lose those friends. This is usually liberals who feel like Trumpism is a moral stain, and that if you don’t share the same kind of values with people, why do you really need to be having a conversation, let alone sharing a Thanksgiving table? If you can get past the idea that you should just be nice to people because you’re blood related.
So I do think that those trend lines are real. But I think that they also do not capture something that is also very real, which is our desire to continue to be in each other’s lives. But one of the main reasons that I wrote this book, and it was really two-pronged, but one of them is that I hear from viewers of all political stripes. So we have about 3.5 to 4 million viewers on a daily basis. Half are Republicans, so that’s MAGA to Romney Republicans. Then 30 percent independents, and about 20 percent Democrats. So a real spectrum of people are tuning into The Five, and that doesn’t even mention the folks that see clips of it that are all over the internet. But people were reaching out, and continue to, where they just say, How do you do it? I don’t know how you can do this. And these are folks who love Jesse Watters and people who detest Jesse Watters.
And the people who want to know how I do it want to also know how they can do it, too.
And you see this in focus groups a lot as well, that you talk to people especially. I’ve listened to a lot of them through Sarah Longwell, and in other venues. You listen to these swing-state voters where their vote actually matters. I don’t have that. You know, I vote in New York City, so we’re denominations of blue. But there is a lot of sadness in people’s stories and in their voices when they’re talking about the relationships that they have lost. And that the politics matters, but what matters more is finding a way to be able to communicate the politics and keep the relationships. That there has to be a way where we can do that.
Frum: Okay, so give us the action plan. How do we do it? Our anti-vax uncle has been invited to Thanksgiving one more time. How are we to do it?
Tarlov: So, some of my answer I think will be very hard for people when you are talking to people whose views are so aggravating and run so counter to how you see the world. But what I argue in I Disagree, and what I really believe in, is starting with listening and understanding when those moments have to happen. And anti-vax is hard, because the health thing is bad there—I made the joke, if you have a newborn baby, that uncle just cannot come to your event and expose the new one to whatever they might be bringing around.
But we have really stopped being able to listen to one another. And you will find, actually, when you let people talk, not only do they feel better about the interaction because they were heard—and we’re all desperate for that, frankly—but a lot of times they will tie themselves in knots. They will proverbially hang themselves as they continue down these roads, especially if you are just carefully interjecting little pieces of your reality, and certainly the science.
So knowing when to listen, and when to talk. I have something in the book that I call “the soft start”—which if you watch the way that I interact with my colleagues, I use almost all of the time. Which is: Before you get into your point of view, which runs counter to how they’re seeing the world, that you find some kind of connective tissue. This reminder that we are sharing this space with one another, that they matter to us, that you really want to understand their point of view and how they see the world. So an olive branch of some kind. And also humor helps a lot with that. Being able to make a joke or create a moment of levity before you go in with your proverbial haymaker.
One of the tips of the book is to think in averages and not in anecdotes. I think back a lot to what Ben Shapiro said when he said, “The facts don’t care about your feelings.” And it kind of became the motto for the Trump era, and this idea of the hysterical liberal that can’t keep it together. And having a background in data and research obviously helps me with this, but making sure that I curate the way that I talk about an issue so that the emphasis is on the trendlines more than it is on the personal stories.
And that doesn’t mean that they don’t matter, and I use them regularly. Either something about me—I just had a big back-and-forth a couple months ago with Jesse, with my colleague, about the Save America Act, where I was using the data. But I used my personal story of how hard it was for me to get my Real ID—I had to go to the DMV three times to be able to accomplish that—to make the case that you are going to be disenfranchising voters. And it’s going to be more Republicans than it is Democrats, frankly, when that happens.
So those are just some of the techniques that I use in being able to do this. And they work at the table on The Five, and they would also work at a family gathering. But it does require—and not in the Michelle Obama “when they go low we go high” way, because that’s very Pollyanna, and I don’t think that it meets the moment, necessarily—but there is a lot of generosity and kindness that I think needs to be infused in the way that these conversations take place, that will make them much more productive. And, frankly, that we’ll be able to have them after a several years’ hiatus if we do it right.
Frum: So I get how this applies to a family situation. That maybe your crazy uncle is in other ways a kindly person, anyway you’re related by blood, and anyway your grandmother cares that he be there, and you care about her. So you indulge the crazy uncle, and we just try to work around him.
But outside the familial context, what are we trying to accomplish? When you point out to Jesse Watters the Save America Act will disenfranchise people, if you’re being candid, you say, That’s the point. That’s the point. We want it. Of course, of course—we want to disenfranchise.
Now, what I’m worried about is: I am living in a mental world where Republicans had their papers more in order than Democrats did, and that was probably true when George W. Bush and Romney were Republicans. Today, actually, Republicans are messier than Democrats. So the disenfranchisement may backfire. It may not just be minorities; it may be my people too. But when you’re dealing with people who are nonrelatives, what is the reason we try to preserve the conversation rather than get to what is really being talked about?
Tarlov: Well, there’s an emotional component, which I was trying to get at with talking about the amount of outreach that I get from people who do want to be having these conversations. People talk a big game about how comfortable they are with their reality, but when you peel back layers, there’s oftentimes a lot of hurt feelings, and a genuine missing that they feel for these people.
The second part of it is that there is an underlying level of persuasion, and a different kind of persuasion that can take place. And I make it clear in I Disagree that I don’t see my job as changing minds, but opening them. And I want to go back to the Save America example, because what happened there in Jesse’s reaction was actually a direct extension of being educated about what the bill actually said. It wasn’t a, Oh no, we don’t want this to happen. We don’t want these people to vote. There’s so much misinformation and disinformation about what’s going on in our politics that you need to have these piercing moments to actually break through it.
So the right has branded the Save America Act as a voter-ID bill, which is not fair. That is not what this is. It’s a bill where you have to show your birth certificate or a passport to be able to vote. Now, more Democrats than Republicans have passports. The number of people who have their original birth certificate, very few and far between. But you’re looking at people who have changed their names, you’re talking about married women, certainly kids that are away at college and want to be able to vote. They’re not traveling with their birth certificates, et cetera. And so pointing out that the right was being actually pretty craven in saying that this was a voter-ID bill to make it look like we just want to have a bunch of people who are here illegally vote, which is their favorite fraud claim. But instead recentering it on what documents you have to actually show to do, it caused Jesse to question out loud, Oh, is that true? And he does this thing where if Dana Perino confirms it, then he believes me, and she confirmed that that was the case. And he said—I don’t remember the exact words—but like, Oh, that’s messed up.
Frum: When you say, Here’s this thing you did that looks pretty immoral, and you did it because you thought it would hurt people you didn’t like. But it turns out, with better information, you realize it hurts people you do like. And then he says, Oh, okay, in that case, I change my mind. What has been achieved? That what you’ve done is—yes, he now has better-informed prejudices. Oh, I didn’t realize that the passport rule was going to hurt my folks. I thought it was going hurt your folks. But what have you achieved?
Tarlov: Well, you have told 4 million people what’s actually in the Save America Act. So you’re having this conversation in an air-conditioned studio in midtown Manhattan, but it is being projected into households all over the country, where a lot of people who are watching think that the Democrats are opposed to a run-of-the-mill voter-ID bill, which is not the case, and it makes you seem insane.
I’m very much in the business of making liberals seem less insane, and I do this on a wide variety of issues. But if you have a representative of the left that is talking in a way that makes sense to them, about everything from the Save America Act to immigration to trans issues, for instance, it is seeping into their minds that you exist. That is very important for people to see, and for that to register to them—that the caricature of the left that they are being fed is not reality. And I’m sitting right here. Does that mean there aren’t some people who you might deem as crazy, and I’m in the more center wing of the party anyway? For sure. But you become a regular facet or feature of their life, and it has impact.
Frum: Let me ask you a more pointed question about the purpose of it all. And I’m going to be biased here, because I come a little bit from the podcast world now. As I say, I do less television. You see this very much in this medium, that podcasters all the time are—there are many podcasters, and many successful podcasters, who give large audiences to ideas that shouldn’t have large audiences. Whether they are just plain crazy—the pyramids were built by aliens—whether they’re vicious in one way or another, whether they’re anti-Semitic, whether they’re conspiratorial.
And if and when pressed: Why did you do this? Why did you have this “Jews: should we kill them all?” debate on your show? They went, Well, we need to air views. A discussion is good. We need to have civil conversations. And I said, So, the things that make civil conversations are not just the behavior of the civil conversants, but the boundaries. You have civil conversations within certain limits, and they vary from society to society and time to time. And the tendency of a sort of the most modern forms of media—and here cable TV is a little old-fashioned—is to open the doors to all kinds of things I wonder whether we should be opening the door to. And, whether the ideal of civil conversation becomes a kind of rationalization for simply letting the crazy win.
Tarlov: I agree with you in theory, and I don’t want to have those conversations myself. Like, I don’t want to talk to a Nick Fuentes or a Candace Owens. I’m not interested in Tucker Carlson, et cetera. And likewise, there are some people on the far left who I’m not dying to sit down with. Otherwise, I would invite them on Raging Moderates. But your question, and the way that you are seeing the world, I think is based on an outdated view of “legitimacy” in media, and this idea that there are true gatekeepers anymore.
So there are vaunted institutions, right, that still matter: New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker. I had this conversation with David Remnick, too. But the rest of the world is moving on while a lot of us are sitting around saying, I don’t want to dignify that kind of view with a conversation. And again, I don’t want to do that.
Frum: I’m going to interrupt there because, it’s precisely because I don’t believe there are gatekeepers anymore that each of our individual decisions becomes more important.
So in 1972, if the local AM radio station invited on a Holocaust denier or an anti-vaxxer or a neo-Nazi, that would be upsetting to people who listen to that local radio station. But that would never happen on a nightly news program. That would never happen even on a local news program. So it wasn’t really such a big deal. It would never happen in the local newspaper.
Today, all those those institutions are gone—and so everything is the equivalent of the old AM radio station. And so every person is called upon, is constantly making, these moral choices about what to do and what not to do. Every person with media—which is everybody who’s got a social-media account on any platform, we’re all in it—and we all have to make these choices. And we all have the goal, this ideal civil conversation, as an excuse available when we’re really doing something that we, not the gatekeeper, we should not do.
Tarlov: But, and sorry if I’m not getting it perfectly, but I mean, I think that we’re both in agreement that you’re not gonna be inviting Nick Fuentes on the David Frum podcast. Correct?
Frum: Yeah. But that’s too easy a call. If, for example, there’s someone who says the election of 2020 was rigged for Biden, I’m happy to talk about that subject.
Tarlov: Yeah.
Frum: That’s an important subject, and obviously the president of the United States believes it, and just—
Tarlov: Sixty percent of Republicans do.
Frum: Sixty percent of Republicans. But I’m not going to talk with them, I’m going to talk about them, because I think they’re wrong.
Tarlov: With them sitting there, though?
Frum: No.
Tarlov: Or just their existence?
Frum: I’m going to talk about them. I’m going to bring on people—when I’m booking my program, the way I would do it for this little piece of real estate, I will have people on who understand the phenomenon. Can discuss what the people who say this thing say it.
But I’m not going to help them. Because the problem is: Since there are no gatekeepers, and since we all have little patches of grass, we all are minding our own gate. And then we have a question to decide, about How am I going to mind my gate to my little piece of grass?
Tarlov: Okay; so I did understand, or probably then, maybe just the way that I said it wasn’t right, because of how you actually see the gatekeepers issue too. But my point stands that the person, the election denier, that you’re not bringing on—and I don’t wanna talk to them either, I’d rather talk to Mark Elias about all of the cases that he won in court, and how he’s continuing to protect and safeguard democracy—my point is that that election denier, who you’re not having on, is going to go and build an audience 10 times the size of yours. And that’s what I meant by—this idea of legitimizing or platforming, I think, is quite outdated in the way that media works today.
Frum: But what then happens is that election denier then goes on, builds a podcast 10 times the size of mine, and then it becomes tempting to say, Well, why don’t I piggyback on him?
Tarlov: Mm-hmm.
Frum: And I will justify what I’m doing. And you see this a lot with a lot of quite big shows. This is how Hasan Piker entered the mainstream, where he now is. A lot of people said, I will invoke the excuse of, well, we’re debating to conceal my true motive. And so I think we all have to think about—I mean, I don’t get invitations to go on Fox anymore, and every once in a while I do, and I always respond by saying, Sure. But just tell your executive producer you booked me and see what happens. And then the call will come in 15 minutes later, Oh, we’re taking the show in a different direction. So I don’t go on Fox anymore. But if I were invited, I would think very hard about doing it. And there are things I do—
Tarlov: Really?
Frum: Yeah, I would think very hard about doing it because—
Tarlov: If you were given the opportunity, if Bret Baier wanted to have you on to talk about—
Frum: Right. Well, as I say, I’d think about it. And the reason I’d think about it is, I would say: “All I control is me, and I’m not thinking about platform.” I just think, Well, in my one and only and rapidly shrinking, dwindling life, where do I want to be? What conversation do I want to have? And whatever little matchstick of credibility that I’ve got, what am I doing with it? I would think about that. And so I might go on a Bret Baier show, but there are many shows that I say, Not going to do this—because I think I’m using them, but they’re really using me. I would worry about that.
Tarlov: I understand that as a set of considerations, and I could tick through a number of hosts at Fox that I think would be worth your time to go on with this mentality—Martha MacCallum, or Shannon Bream on Fox News Sunday, or Dana, who you would’ve known from the Bush years—but I think that we are very much in a moment of media for the sake of mutual benefit. And you look at the interview that Abdul El-Sayed did with Jesse Watters a couple of weeks ago. So, 25 minutes of airtime with millions of people watching, and then probably tens of millions of impressions that happened by extension of it, where Abdul got to say the things that he wanted to. Some of them joking, like about circumcision for instance, but then others very serious—about the issues that matter to voters, and talking about the toll that this war is having on Americans, what he’s hearing from everyday voters. And Jesse got to talk about the things that are of value to him.
And maybe I’ve just been doing it a very long time, and so I don’t see it necessarily in that kind of trade-off. But I have certainly seen the implications in the plus column of showing up and tussling with people who think differently than you about important ideas.
And winning elections is very important to me. And I don’t work for the Democratic Party, but everyone knows I’m a partisan. And I think we have better outcomes across the board in issue areas—in the economy, health care, et cetera—when Democrats are in office. And I know where the eyeballs are. I know where the pressure points are that I can emphasize or push on to make sure that I am putting together a cogent argument that might live somewhere, even in the recesses of someone’s mind who votes differently than me. And I also know that in modeling a kind of back-and-forth—I don’t want to just call it civic discourse or civil discourse, because sometimes it’s not particularly civil, right? Sometimes you can be yelling at one another, which is a part of real life too. But that I would rather be doing this than sitting around talking to people who largely agree with me and see the world the same way. That is not interesting to me. It feels kind of dull on a comparative basis, and I also just don’t think it’s the frontier where elections are fought and won anymore.
Frum: So how would you guide someone who’s thinking about this? Someone who had a public profile, and they’re thinking, I’ve got the invitation from Tucker Carlson. I’ve got the invitation from Mehdi Hasan. I have an opportunity to bring Hasan Piker on my air. I’ve got the opportunity to bring an election denier, an anti-vaxxer on the air. And, let’s put aside public officials—because once the anti-vax crackpot is secretary of health and human services, then yeah, then you have to, he’s got power. Once the election denier is president of the United States. But how would you think? What are our limits? When does one say yes? When does one say no? How does one think about this question? I don’t have ready answers, so I’m looking for yours.
Tarlov: I don’t, about all of it, about every single option that you threw out there. I’m not going to go sit in Tucker’s cabin in Maine for three hours. And likewise, he doesn’t want to have me come do that. I would rather talk about Hasan Piker and his impact on the party than go on his Twitch stream and talk to him directly about these things. Though I was on a panel with him, which a lot of people attended, and in clip world continues to live on.
So, I think that there are personal calls to make. About not just how you want to spend your time, but what you think you’ll be able to get out of it, and what some of the pitfalls of it will be. Because a lot of these people who have views that you or I might not agree with are also very, very good debaters, right? And are good at controlling the conversation and pushing in whatever direction they might want to go in. And so I don’t have a perfect answer to that.
I do have one when it comes to, certainly, the kind of engagement that I do with people who are far less offensive or peddling in some of these conspiracies that offend both of us. But even when those do come up—like a little flirtation with, Oh, well, there was some fraud, for instance, even though the cases have not found that to be the case—that I am there with a well-thought-out answer to that reality. So that the 60 percent of Republicans who aren’t completely sure about what happened in 2020 can see that a reasonable person is pushing back against it.
And I’m sure that’s not a good-enough answer for you, because you maybe want to hear, Yeah, I’m down to sit down with all of these people. And that isn’t how I feel about it. I think there is a mental-health toll on people. That matters. Which is why the book also isn’t about forcing you to talk to people who you absolutely hate, or feel like you can get nowhere with them.
But to consider that life is long, and it is complicated, and that you can prepare better for those moments when you do sit down than maybe you thought in the first place.
Frum: Yeah. I wrestle with these things.
Tarlov: No; me too! It’s a part of my own disappointment. Because I think that some of the branding around what I do—not self-branding, but what other people think—is that I’m just someone that wants to do these debates all the time, and I’m desperate to go on a show like Surrounded where it’s, like, one person versus 20 people who think something different. And I’m not.
I enjoy the dynamic of the table at The Five, and the relationships and the rapport that I have with these colleagues, and the way that I’m able to talk about these issues in a long-term sense. And I think that that’s a much more realistic way to be having these conversations with people who are ideologically different, than to sit down for a one-off couple-hour conversation with someone who has a lot of views that you might find really repellent.
Frum: One of the themes I hear in your answer is: You have this powerful and admirable trust in the reach of reason. If you can seem reasonable, if you can use reason, you can make an influence. I often find myself as I get older wondering how much human beings are reasonable creatures, and whether reason is what moves them.
And a story here, when you talk about being with 20 to one. I was in a situation a long time ago at the beginning of the Iraq War. I’d gone to London to watch the debate in the House of Commons about whether Britain should enter the Iraq War. And there was a big march, and I wanted to watch the march. So I changed out of my House of Parliament clothes into ordinary street clothes, and just counted on being obscure enough that I could join the march, and I was in Trafalgar Square. But somebody recognized me from one of the TV shows, and a quite large and quite hostile crowd gathered around me. It was quite aggressive. And it was getting, it was getting a little testy. And so I … after a few minutes of sort of people yelling at me and me yelling back, it became clear they were not going to let me escape so easily. That there might actually be, you know, a little punch thrown. So I stood on the lip of the fountain in Trafalgar Square and said to the group of people—there were now probably about 40 of them—I’ll tell you what, I will stand here for exactly 20 minutes. Or whatever the figure was; 30, 20, 30. And answer whatever questions you have, and about President Bush and what I know about Prime Minister Blair, and then I’m going to leave.
And I did it. And as I spoke to them, they did become calmer. And when the time came, the appointed time came, they did part and let me go without any altercation. And at the time, I thought what I’d done was I had shown the power of reason. But in retrospect, I look back and just say—what I’d done was, I sort of escalated the confrontation. Said, you know, If you want to turn mob violence on me, you’re obviously going to win. But I’m going to give an account of myself. And just somehow there was a kind of subrational communication, that meant that we could talk for 20 or 30 minutes or whatever it was. And then they parted and let me go, which they were not going to do if I hadn’t engaged with them in the first place.
And I think about that story. And what did I learn about my fellow human creatures there and the power of reason, or the non-power of reason?
Tarlov: That’s a great story also. And I’m not sure that I would’ve thought to do that. So good quick thinking at that moment, because I know how tense it was.
But I think that that story is about what we were talking about earlier on in this conversation. Not necessarily reason, or not reason, or the ability to tap into someone’s rationality. But this universal desire to communicate, and to be heard and recognized as having a set of beliefs or a perspective worth your time. And that’s what you told them. You said: What you think and what you believe right now matters, and it matters to me. And yes; you gave an allotment of time and said, It doesn’t matter to me for more than 30 minutes. But 30 minutes when you don’t really know what’s about to happen does feel like a good, you know, chunk of change there.
So that’s what I heard in that story. But you recognized their humanity and the universal desire that we all have to be taken seriously and as rational actors, right? With a point of view worth tangoing with. And that is very much what I’m talking about in I Disagree, and that a lot of relationships can be resuscitated or built from focusing on exactly what you did. Which is: You’ve got something to get off your chest. Likewise, I’ve got something to get off my chest. Let’s find a way to do this.
Frum: Let me ask you one last question, with something you said a minute ago. You talked about how many of the people with crazy views are very good debaters. And that’s clearly true. And in fact, one of the reasons I have pause with the whole concept of “debate” is: I guarantee that if any normal person debates an anti-vaxxer, the normal person will lose. And the reason that the normal person will lose is because if you’re a normal person, you have a beautiful new baby; you go to the doctor and say, What shot should I give the baby? The doctor says, You should have this schedule of shots, and you do it. And you don’t ask too many questions why, because you’re not a nut.
But the nut goes and spends two hours researching vaccines on the internet, which is not enough time to understand anything in a way that a scientist gives his life or her life to understand it. But the nut gives 10, 20, 30 hours; certainly enough to overwhelm the normal person. When you step onto an airplane, how does the jet work? You don’t know. I mean, vaguely, maybe you remember something from a book you read once or Popular Mechanics, but you don’t really know. Someone who believes that jet engines don’t fly would overwhelm you in argument. Only, they do fly. And then the project of debating “the jet engines don’t work,” “vaccines aren’t real” becomes kind of a doomed undertaking. Because the crank knows not-enough, but knows more than you.
Tarlov: Yes, and feels more passionately about it, or that you have to defend it at that level.
I find that parsing the crazy helps a lot. And I write about this in the book—the importance in engaging as much as you can. And again, this is my job, right? This isn’t purely for fun. So obviously that’s a factor in this, and I want that out there.
But spending the time to understand what is going on within the anti-vax movement. Or I think more generally or more appropriately, we need to spend time understanding the MAHA movement, which this is a dangerous facet of. But I happen to have friends who are very smart and rational people who were very interested and had been talking about a lot of the things that RFK Jr. was discussing, vis-à-vis the dyes in our food, and what this was doing to kids. And I’m not a good-enough mom that I have stopped all macaroni-and-cheese intake. But those aren’t a bunch of crazy people. Those are people who are doing the vaccine schedule, absolutely everything the doctor tells you to do—but are also saying, like, the impact of Big Food, or whatever we’re supposed to call it, is completely damaging to all of us, and especially our kid. They’re concerned about microplastics, all of this. And this is how you have these strange bedfellows, politically speaking.
And so I do think tussling with that is worthwhile, because at least you can call the balls and strikes within it. Like, I went through the “Big Beautiful Bill” to see where the good points were, because Lisa Murkowski, for instance, is someone who I think is a rational actor. I think that she is a moral, good person. You can’t say you’re one of six that voted to convict Trump after the January 6th insurrection and have spoken out against a lot of the enormous overreaches of this government, and Donald Trump personally, and she found a way to yes. So what is in this bill that is at least decent? And so I guess that would be my response about someone who is an anti-vaxxer. You know, to talk to parents who do exist that think that the schedule has gotten too full, and that we have—it’s too close together.
It’s too much for little kids. I mean, I go to a very, like, liberal pediatrician. You know, downtown Manhattan. And they talk to us about the vaccine schedule, and whether we wanted to go at their recommended one, or these were the shots where the option was to split it up. Like, do you want to do this, and then come back a week later? Sometimes that’s all people want to hear, and it gets lumped into this anti-vax sentiment. And it’s questions around what a baby can take at that moment.
Now there, of course, there’s the bullshit components of it. About, you know, that we’re just adding vaccines willy-nilly, and we objectively don’t need these things—and we know that is not true. But engaging with their arguments, and spending time with it outside of the bounds of debating with them live, but for your own personal education, I think is very valuable.
Frum: Well, let me tell one more anecdote that sort of would be my counter to engaging with the vaccine schedule. This is probably before you became very politically aware, but 1992—this is before 9/11—1992, the election of Bill Clinton. And [George] H. W. Bush on running for reelection, and Ross Perot. There were a series of debates, and the last was a town hall moderated by Carole Simpson of ABC. And people stood up and asked questions of the three candidates. And this is the political story I think about maybe more than any other.
So one of the people who stood up to ask a question was an older woman who was obviously very nervous about being on TV the one and only time in her life, in front of tens of millions of Americans. And she asked, I would like to ask each of the candidates how you personally have been affected by the deficit. President George H. W. Bush unfortunately has to go first, and he tries to explain interest rates, and it doesn’t work. And then Ross Perot goes second, and he says something characteristically insane. And then it’s Bill Clinton’s turn, and he moves that giant body of his as close to the woman as the setup will allow. And he answers, I will answer your question, but before I do, let me ask you a question. How have you personally been affected by the deficit? And as she spoke, it became clear that—either because she was nervous and got confused, or maybe she’d never known the difference in the first place—she didn’t mean the deficit. She meant the recession that was also happening at the same time. She’d mixed them up. She wasn’t speaking her native language of human beings. She was speaking political speak, or economic speak.
And once Bill Clinton understood the real question, well, he hit it out of the park. I’m the governor of a small state. If people lose their jobs, I probably know them or know their families. Bango. And that was the moment that came to be known as the “I feel your pain” moment, although Bill Clinton never literally said that.
And one of the things I learned from that is: You have to hear the question behind the question. So when I hear a mother of a precious newborn talking about the vaccine schedule, I mean, you can engage with that and say, Look, this is crazy. This idea that the vaccines are too close together, no reputable scientist would give that even two minutes of attention. But if I engage with you on that, I’m actually not only not helping the discussion, I’m not helping you—because I’m not talking about what you really care about. Which is: You’ve brought this beautiful creature into an uncertain world, and you’re full of fears. And your fears have latched onto something they shouldn’t latch onto, which is the vaccine schedule, where you just do what the pediatrician says and not ask questions. But you have these other fears, and they are deeper, and maybe we can address them. But understanding that you may not yourself understand why you are saying the things you say. And if I answer the things you say, I’m not serving either myself or you.
Tarlov: So I think there is a way to do both. I totally agree with you about the underlying issue, which is that you’re afraid because you have this incredible precious cargo now, and the idea that they’re going to get pricked. But I think that you can do both things to say, I can sense that you’re afraid and that you don’t want your little baby boy or your little baby girl to be in any pain.
But I do think that it is incumbent upon us to talk to people about what they think, and where they are getting that information. And then to find a way to say, But the science says, without seeming like a total jerk, and that we’re not particularly good at that.
This is what has happened to a large degree in the debate about climate change, for instance. You notice how even people like Bill Gates, who were out front in terms of talking about the deleterious impacts of climate change and rising sea levels and temperatures and all of it, has even backtracked somewhat on what he said was going to happen. And obviously there was tons of hyperbole around it from electeds, and even people in the scientific community.
All of that wears on people, and I don’t think that it is worthwhile. It’s one thing to be dismissive of having a conversation with the king vax crank—so like RFK Jr., pre-HHS secretary—so, you know, before he was somehow responsible for all of us. Which is a travesty. But the person who is following along, or who has this different kind of source material than you, I don’t think it should be beneath us to engage in that. Because again, if you take them seriously and you show them and their views some level of respect, it makes room for them to hear a counter opinion. And I’m not saying, again, that you’re going to necessarily change their mind. But you might open it up to the idea that perhaps more research should be done.
And that’s how you get these moments, right? All of these people who say like, Oh my God, and then I realized X, Y, or Z thing wasn’t reality. Or, He wasn’t really on my side. So all of these Trump voters right now that are having regrets about it. And if you don’t make a gentler space for that to happen, that’s where you really lose people. And then they have no interest in even talking to you, let alone listening to a program that we might host.
Frum: Jessica, you are so good at what you do. Thank you for joining me today on The David Frum Show. I’m so grateful to you.
Tarlov: Oh, it was fabulous. Thank you for having me.
Frum: Bye-bye.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Jessica Tarlov for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top of the show, my book this week is a novel: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke.
I sometimes think if I ever had to teach writing, and I hope I never will, but if I ever had to, I would want to assign my students novels that were almost good. How much, after all, are any of us going to learn from reading Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past? Those are works of unique genius, and we’re not going to ever manage to achieve anything like that. But we can write better books, and the way to write better books is by looking at books that are pretty good but not quite there and trying to figure out what went wrong.
Yesteryear is a novel that has been a big commercial success. Much praise; it’s in book clubs. It’s been profiled on television. And indeed, it is very clever and engaging. I enjoyed reading it. It is the story of an online influencer who leads the life of a tradwife and is very commercially successful. Sells products, has millions of followers on Instagram. Who is, by some trick of—well, I won’t go too much into the trick, because this is the hinge on which the novel turns, but is catapulted back into the past and finds herself on a farm that looks very like her own farm with a family that looks very like her own family. Only in the year 1855, where the the trad in traditional becomes a little more sinister.
I think a lot of people have this fantasy about what it would be like to go back into past, but they never think what would it be like to not have dentistry, to not have antibiotics, to not know why chickens and cows get sick. And of course, to be completely isolated in the country without roads, without cars, without any access to the outside world. So that’s a very ingenious gimmick, and it’s won the novel a lot of attention. And apparently the novel has been optioned for the movies, and I’m sure it will make a fine movie. And as a novel, it’s entertaining, amusing, interesting, provocative. But it’s not quite a good piece of writing. And it’s worth, I think, some time to think about why not. Why does it just fail? And what is the consequence of that just failure?
To my mind, the difference between good and almost good is we can enjoy an almost-good novel in the here and now. We can enjoy its cleverness. We can enjoy its satire. We can enjoy its reflections on contemporary society. And then it will be forgotten, and 10 years from now, 15, no one will return to it. Books that are good are famously described as “news that stays news.” Yesteryear won’t stay news, and here’s why.
The first problem, and the least of the problems, is the way the book is written. Yesteryear is constructed as a first-person narrative. The central character is also the person who tells the story. So anytime the writer wants to write, the writer has to remember that she’s writing in the voice of her principal character. Well, Caro Claire Burke loves to write. There’s writing all over this book, and what she especially loves are similes and metaphors. Again and again, a thing is compared to another thing. At one point, the sound of a camera clicking is compared to the closing of a prison gate. A depressed woman who is slumping a little bit in her chair is compared to shriveled fruit. A gloomy face is compared to a lunar eclipse. People left behind in a room after a more powerful person has exited the room are compared to fallen puppets. And so it goes. I mean, there’s one of those on every page. Obviously, the writer enjoys them and admires them and thinks they’re very clever. And some are okay; some are less good. But the question she doesn’t stop to ask is: Would her narrator, in fact, talk like that, and talk like that all the time? So in order to advance her own idea of writing, she is losing her connection to her character.
The second and more important strike to the book is a lack of object permanence. Why do things happen? People have different relationships to each other on one page of the book than they have later, as the author’s satirical purposes require and her polemical purposes require. The author has very strong points of view, so every once in a while she needs to slap somebody she doesn’t like. And then things happen that are in no way indicated or built up to by any previous buildup, or any previous characterization.
Finally, there is a kind of lack of sympathy through the book. Now, there’s nothing wrong with having an unsympathetic principal character. Thackeray did it in Vanity Fair. But Becky Sharp, although she’s not a very likable or admirable character, she’s a fascinating character. She’s someone we inhabit from within, and she’s not a completely horrible-in-every-way character. She has certain excellences and attributes, and so do some the people around her. We feel sympathy for her victims, because many of them are nicer people than she is. If you hate everybody and make everybody the butt of your humor and your satire and your polemical points, then we end up living as if we were this unlikable narrator.
One of the questions that fans who praise the book will say is, You have to understand; you have to enter into the spirit of the book. And the spirit of the book is “the main character’s nasty, so everybody in the book is nasty”—and that’s the author’s art. But you’re left wondering after a while, maybe it’s not just the characters who are nasty, principal and secondary; maybe the author’s kind of nasty. I’m not sure—I mean, she’s clever, and she’s got funny things to say. I’m not sure I’m enjoying spending time with her and not just with her character. But the book is famous. I’m sure you’ll have a chance to read it for yourself. See if you agree or disagree with me.
That’s it for this week’s edition of The David Frum Show. Thanks so much for watching or listening. As always, the best way to support the work of this program is by subscribing to The Atlantic. That way, you get my work and all of my colleagues’. I hope you will consider sharing and promoting the program on whatever social-media platform you use. See you next week here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.