In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk, Francis Fukuyama, Sabina Ćudić, and Dan Williams discuss Donald Trump’s firing of a federal prosecutor and what this means for democracy in the United States, what the discussions around the assasination of Charlie Kirk tell us about misinformation, and the impact of RFK Jr.’s recent autism announcement.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
Sabina Ćudić is a member of the National Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where she is the president of the Naša stranka political party club. Ćudić also serves as vice president of the Foreign Relations Committee, and is a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, where she is a vice president of the European Liberals.
Daniel Williams is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He writes the Conspicuous Cognition newsletter, which brings together philosophical insights and scientific research to examine the forces shaping contemporary society and politics.
Note: This episode was recorded on September 23, 2025.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Frank, there are many remarkable things going on in the United States at the moment, but perhaps the most remarkable is the extent to which the administration is seemingly trying to take over the most important neutral institutions in the country, firing prosecutors that have displeased the administration either by who they did or did not prosecute, apparently stopping an investigation into the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who stands accused of having taken significant bribes, and then sending a remarkable message to Pam Bondi, the attorney general. It’s unclear whether that message was meant to be public or was meant to be a private message, basically instructing her to go after political opponents. How worried should we be about the possibility of the administration actually managing to undermine the course of justice in the United States?
Francis Fukuyama: Well, I don’t think that the effort to prosecute Trump’s enemies should be any surprise to anybody. He’s been telegraphing that he would do this during the campaign, and he was clearly focused on revenge. In fact, I would say it’s a little curious that it’s taken him this long to try to get around to that behavior. But, before I talk about that, I think the other important thing that happened this week was his passing into a different kind of authoritarianism with the actions against ABC and Jimmy Kimmel, because a lot of the authoritarian sorts of things that he’s been doing, like firing different agency heads without authorization and the actions taken against immigrants—a lot of that actually could be justified on policy grounds that he needs authority to do certain things to carry out his policy agenda. But moving against Jimmy Kimmel, the only issue is just his feelings. Only a real authoritarian cares whether a late night comedian is making fun of you or not. To want to shut that sort of thing down moves you into a different territory in terms of following up on your authoritarian instincts.
Now, I actually think that what happened in the course of the week is not bad because Jimmy Kimmel was reinstated. There was a huge pushback. And what was interesting was there was pushback on this even from some of his right-wing allies like Ted Cruz. Brendan Carr, the head of the FCC, made the statement, if you’re gonna make disparaging statements, we’re gonna take action against you, we can do it the easy way or the hard way. Ted Cruz said, this is the way a mafia don talks, and that’s exactly right. I thought that was quite remarkable—that you actually started seeing some cracks in his support.
Thanks for reading! The best way to make sure that you don’t miss any of these conversations is to subscribe to The Good Fight on your favorite podcast app.
If you are already a paying subscriber to Persuasion or Yascha Mounk’s Substack, this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!
And if you are having a problem setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email our podcast team at leonora.barclay@persuasion.community
The other authoritarian thing is obviously going after Letitia James and James Comey and various other relatively minor players for their perceived wrongs against Trump during the Biden administration. Like I said, this should not be of any surprise to anybody. They had a pretty good prosecutor that looked at the evidence and he just couldn’t find any legal basis to take action against any of these people. He told Pam Bondi this. Pam Bondi on her own didn’t have the authority to order him to go ahead and do this. And then Trump criticized her. It’s very hard. Any government can come up with some infraction, a traffic ticket or something that they could hold against somebody. But in these cases, they have to just completely make up charges to merit a federal investigation into them. It does seem to me that this is simply going to lead to Trump doing what Nixon did, which is hiring and firing prosecutors who successively will tell him, we can’t make this stuff up. He’s gone to a very low-level person. We’ll see what that new prosecutor does, but it’s hard to see this really going anywhere except as a matter of intimidation, that he’s just showing that he’s going to go after you regardless.
Mounk: Sabina, you come from a country where politicians and others are often lectured by the European Union and other institutions about what kind of changes you have to make in order to live up to the expectations of the rule of law. Are you seeing and observing this with some satisfaction? Some schadenfreude?
Sabina Ćudić: Well, you already know me well enough to know that that is a little bit the case.
Mounk: I would have thought more highly of you. I thought you were about to deny any such charge.
Ćudić: Having said that, in the region I come from, I’m always trying to censor myself not to be that hammer to whom all problems look like a nail such that everything looks like a pattern of Balkanization, that this is all that has been seen before and so on. So sometimes I even exaggerate my optimism in order to regulate my tendency to look for patterns. However, I do have to say that this micro-dosing of optimism that we hear now, that last week has been a moderate success because ABC is reinstating Jimmy Kimmel and so on, is in a way showing where we are and how little satisfies us and how normalized the situation is.
I think we are experiencing in terms of the use of tools for prosecuting your enemies—and as you said coming from a country in which the United States has heavily invested in securing an independent judiciary—looking at what is going on, it seems like we are experiencing not a paradigm shift that we usually like to talk about, but a full paradigm breakdown in a sense. That not only are the institutions attacked, which is obvious, and like Frank said at the beginning, nobody’s surprised that the president who said he would do that is going after the enemies. But what is surprising is how little people care. I mean, sure, in conversations like this, people care, and sure, there was an outcry over Kimmel. But I think the larger question is about democracy. Democrats were right when they said that democracy is at stake on a ballot in 2024. I think we can all agree now that absolutely democracy was on the ballot, but the bigger question is do enough Americans care about democracy and do they care enough that they value it above certain other things? And is it a question of taking democracy for granted? Is it a question of the complexity of bureaucracy that has failed on delivering on the policy front? Or is it simply people enjoying power and demonstrations of power in its most rudimentary and primordial sense?
Dan Williams: I think people do care, but I think it’s easy to overlook two things. One is the extent to which many conservative Republican voters basically inhabit a kind of different epistemic universe, where from their perspective, it’s really Trump who’s been the victim of political persecution and so on. But I also think we shouldn’t underrate the extent to which many people recognize the corruption and the character flaws of somebody like Trump, but they think of it very much so as the lesser of two evils. They think the liberal establishment that he, as a strong man, is opposed to and is fighting against is so corrupt and has been so antithetical to democratic values that they personally cherish that they’re willing to tolerate some of those what seem to us like incredibly egregious violations of the rule of law.
I think part of that sort of worldview—where you recognize that Trump has these character flaws, but you view them as the lesser of two evils—part of that I think is just rooted in sort of misperceptions and misunderstandings of what’s happened. But at the same time, I think you do also have to acknowledge that there are contexts where there are legitimate grievances there. So for example, the failure of what they perceive as the liberal establishment to enforce borders and control immigration, the extent to which what they perceive that the liberal establishment has upheld certain kinds of conspiracies of silence around connections between, say, immigration and crime, or Biden’s cognitive decline, and so on and so forth. So it’s not to say that I agree with that general perspective. And I think Trump’s behavior is absolutely egregious, but I think you sort of have to put yourself into the mindset of people willing to tolerate this behavior, not necessarily because they don’t care about democracy, but because they’re just viewing the world through a totally different kind of lens.
Mounk: How far is this actually going to go? So we’re seeing prosecutors who were undertaking prosecutions of friends of Donald Trump being fired. And that, of course, is a significant break with the rule of law. But the much more dangerous form of this would be if Donald Trump is actually able to successfully prosecute and perhaps put somebody behind bars on spurious grounds. But of course, there are a number of checks to his ability to do that, including juries, including judges, including the ability to appeal judgments. How far are we from Donald Trump actually being able to find trumped up charges to effectively go after political opponents? Of course, even the process is the punishment, and even the fact that people might come after you in this way is really scary. But how far is this going to go, Frank?
Fukuyama: I think that we’re being a little bit too pessimistic here, and I don’t think it’s fair to say that the American people don’t care about rule of law or any of these issues. If you look at poll numbers, Trump has been dropping very remarkably over the last few months. A lot of that has to do with the economy, but even on something like corruption, it’s quite remarkable. A very large majority of Republicans think that he’s corrupt. The big check is going to be next year’s election, and I think that although the Republicans can manipulate the outcome of that to some extent through gerrymandering, it’s going to deliver a verdict. I think that’s why he’s moving as quickly as he is on some of these issues, because he realizes that he’s only got about another year where he’s got the freedom to act as he sees fit, and he wants to try to get as much done before then. I do think that you’re not going to see demonstrations in the streets over Pam Bondi’s firing of a prosecutor, but I do think that there is still going to be a mechanism of accountability there that should continue to function.
Mounk: I find it very hard to gauge just how damaged the rule of law is so far. German public television said in a program for children that many people in the United States now are afraid of criticizing the president. And I just think that’s wrong. If you look at virtually all of the traditional media, which may have a diminished role because of a changing ecosystem, but the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Boston Globe, MSNBC and CNN, I just don’t think it’s true that people step around criticizing Donald Trump in the way that the media in Hungary do, the media in India do, the media in Venezuela certainly do. In the same way as Frank is saying, are we really going to get to a place where someone’s going to be put in jail on trumped up charges or aren’t there still many steps on the way there?
I think the way that the FCC commissioner used mafia-like language to say we can do this the easy way or the hard way was absolutely outrageous and a very clear attack on free speech. But it’s not just that he made fun of Donald Trump. It’s that, without basis of fact, he very strongly implied or perhaps you could even say stated that the person who killed Charlie Kirk was part of the MAGA crowd. So he created, in some form, misinformation himself. He’s now been reinstated. I’m sort of torn between thinking that clearly the amount of attacks is much worse than the first Trump administration. They’re clearly willing to go very, very far, even in ways that go beyond what Trump’s allies were willing to do in the first Trump administration, or perhaps were capable of doing in the first Trump administration because they were much more disorganized back then. But how far is this going to go? I must say that, like in many other things right now, I feel like I can give you a point estimate, but that’s pretty useless. The confidence interval, the range of reasonable guesses as to what kind of result we might get is really, really wide right now.
Ćudić: We are less than a year into this administration and we are having this conversation about the level of potential damage or real damage done to institutions. We have Stephen Miller saying that the Western civilization is on the line and that when choosing between essentially Western civilization and the First Amendment and freedom of speech, we need to kind of take what he calls necessary and rational steps to save Western civilization. You have senators who say, I used to believe that the First Amendment should come on top of any argument, but these are not normal circumstances and I no longer believe that. And then you have Steve Bannon, who said, we took two scalps and there will be more scalps. The most interesting statement I heard coming out of the last week was saying, I get invited to all these debates on the First Amendment, but they (meaning liberals) don’t get it. We no longer debate. We now take action. So time for debate is over.
Fukuyama: Talk is cheap though—everybody’s really upset because of Charlie Kirk and they’re saying all of these horrendous sounding things. Let’s just wait and see whether actually any of this materializes. I strongly doubt that any of these threats are actually going to be carried out.
Ćudić: I don’t think they will, but the question is, does that language in itself create a certain reality of the possibility of political violence? How do you measure these statements against the potential outcomes that will not be systemic or political, but that will be taken up perhaps by individuals?
Williams: I was just going to echo something sort of Sabina has alluded to there, which is we’ve been talking about Trump, and I am extremely alarmed about Trump’s behavior, but Trump is not, at least in my view, first and foremost an ideologue. I think he’s a narcissist and he’s self-serving and I think he’s dangerous. But I think there are segments within the MAGA coalition—Steve Bannon, Elon Musk—that are pushing an extremely dangerous political worldview and political agenda, which sort of extrapolating that into the future is very alarming. And I suppose the other thing I’d say, just in terms of forecasting the future, I think if Trump and the sort of MAGA coalition have demonstrated one thing, it’s how bad liberals are when it comes to predicting what’s likely to happen. If you went back to 2015 and you tried to predict the next 10 years, the events have just been radically different from what anyone would have expected. I’m quite pessimistic about the future, partly because of these segments of the coalition, but also partly because I think it’s just so difficult to forecast how the future is likely to unfold.
Mounk: Our second segment for today is thankfully somewhat linked, so it may feel like we’re continuing the discussion. We are now nearly two weeks after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. We saw a few days ago the memorial service for Kirk, and people trying to assess where we are at in terms of how Americans think about political violence at this stage, and also whether they are forming factual beliefs about what has been happening. I’ve been really struck by two polls that I’ve seen in the last couple of days. One shows that only 10% of self-described Democrats believe that the assassin of Charlie Kirk was motivated by left-wing ideology, something that I think there is pretty strong evidence for. The other is a poll commissioned by the New York Times that I came across because Shashank Joshi, our sometime co-panelist, posted about it, according to which, first of all, about 20% of liberals think that political violence can be justified, while only 7% of conservatives and moderates believe that violence can be justified. When you break out this poll by age groups, you see that conservatives and liberals over the age of 60 have nearly the same amount of agreement about this. They both are very unlikely to agree with political violence. But young liberals, left-leaning Americans between the ages of 18 and 39 are much more likely to say that they support violence. In fact, among them, nearly 30% say that violence for political purposes can sometimes be justified. Sabina, you’ve been watching the response in the United States over the last couple of weeks. What do you make—as somebody who well knows what political violence looks like—of the current state of the United States?
Ćudić: Looking back now with a bit of a couple of weeks’ distance, I still believe what I thought on the first day: that the level of dehumanization on both sides, dehumanizing narratives of justification and celebration on the other side, with the call for revenge and so on, which reached its peak, I would say, with the ceremony where the president himself says, I hate my opponents—in a sense this is something that really calls for analyzing patterns. And what struck me in the New York Times, as you mentioned, the polls came out and there was an attempt from the academia side to relativize those numbers to say, well, once we asked in polls, ‘is it ever justified,’ then of course people start thinking about instances in which potentially violence may be necessary and so on. But I even find this relativization not only not helpful, but a kind of wishful thinking that will lead us nowhere.
Then something that really drew my attention was the conversation that Ezra Klein, not in the position of the host, but as a guest, had with his fellow, but conservative, columnist at the New York Times where they started a discussion on who is more likely to commit political violence in the future, extreme right-wing or extreme left-wing, and they were comparing the potential scenarios, but also expressing individual fear over what might happen. But in a sense it was—I don’t want to sound too crude here—a festival of victimhood, of who feels victimized more, while recognizing that this is our new reality. And in this new reality, particularly with the numbers of young people supporting it, one of the elements that we need to look at is the propensity of young people. We’ve seen in Nepal last week, politicians set on fire while still alive by young people as a result of a policy to forbid social media. Even the media said, look how inspiring the Nepalese youth is in taking violence and setting politicians on fire and expressing their disdain.
One of the avenues to analyze that is the assumption by the younger generation that policy solutions will not provide the answers. And I think another example of that, and I’ll finish with that, is not only the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but it was the assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of the health insurance company, where the internet and social media erupted in celebration, particularly young people, because it was stemming from the assumption that no policy solution for fair and just healthcare will be provided by the establishment.
Mounk: Dan, one of the things that I was wondering about for the last two weeks is the role of misinformation in this. I go back and forth on this, because on the one hand, I feel like the principle mechanisms by which people have allowed themselves to engage in what Sabina rightly calls this festival of victimhood was not misinformation. The principal driver was simply that the right has said the assassin is left wing—as he does appear to have been—and this shows that the left hates us and that in the extreme words of Elon Musk, either we vanquish them or we’re going to kill us all. And parts of the left have immediately gone to saying, well, in fact, Charlie Kirk was terrible in all of these ways. Let’s focus on people like Ezra Klein, who went a little bit too far and said nice words about him. That is the real scandal of this moment. Neither of those responses really particularly necessitated or involved misinformation. Now, it’s also true, as this poll shows, that only 10% percent of Democrats recognize that the assassin likely was motivated by left-wing ideology, and that misinformation somehow enhanced that, but there certainly was large-scale misinformation that was happening over the last weeks. But how important is misinformation to this kind of spiral of violence?
Williams: I think of it as sort of illustrating the limitations and the inadequacies of the misinformation framing as a way of understanding what’s going on. As you mentioned, there has been misinformation in the aftermath of this. On the left there was Jimmy Kimmel’s suggestion that the killer was motivated by right-wing views, and also the gross misrepresentations of things that Charlie Kirk had said, which were going viral on certain parts on Bluesky and progressive social media. And also I’d say on the right, sort of base right-wing anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing in the aftermath, suggesting the assassination has something to do with Israel. But for the most part, what you found is people responding to the actual event and the effects of the event, but filtering it through these incredibly Manichaean tribal narratives that they’re independently attached to. So when Elon Musk sees this event and says, well, the left is the party of murder, it’s not the case that he’s encountered some bit of misinformation. He’s doing what is generally happening in this space, which is taking certain parts of reality, certain matters of fact, and framing them through predetermined ideological narratives, ideological templates.
I think the fantasy of the misinformation frame has always been, if only you could remove these bits of misinformation or these bits of fake news, you would solve many of our political problems. And I think what it illustrates is you really won’t. I mean, there’s a deep sense in which Elon Musk saying that, and that sort of general us versus them Manachian worldview, is utterly misperceiving the nature of reality in a very dangerous way. It’s not rooted in exposure to misinformation. It’s rooted in this underlying polarization, this sort of us versus them psychology, which is ancient and long predates the emergence of social media. And I just think misinformation plays a role, as it always does, within the context of these sorts of big political events. But it’s grossly inadequate as a way of understanding what’s actually going on.
Fukuyama: Well, if I could change the framing a little bit: something really important happened this past week that has gotten almost no commentary, except I must say for a blog post I wrote about this, which is the consolidation of a huge number of media channels under the control of Larry Ellison and his son David. I think that’s actually one of the underlying really big problems. I call this the Berlusconi-ization of the American media space, where somebody with a political agenda takes over a big media channel, uses it to manipulate politics, and then of course uses politics to protect their business interests. That was the Berlusconi pattern. That’s what Musk did in his takeover of Twitter. But the Ellisons are going to control an unbelievable number of media channels. It’s Skydance Global, it’s HBO, it’s CNN, it may be Bari Weiss’s Free Press. It’s much, much bigger than Elon Musk taking over X, if they want to use this in a political fashion.
We already had Grok and Musk trying to influence our politics through that one internet platform. But now you’re going to have two right-wing oligarchs, or one of them is a kind of a right-wing oligarch family, that will have this kind of concentrated power. I just think that this is really dangerous, and people are just not paying attention. The other thing that has escaped attention is TikTok. So Trump acted completely illegally in not enforcing the law that was passed on a bipartisan basis forcing the divestiture of TikTok from ByteDance. Now he apparently has cooked up a deal. And again, the Ellisons are gonna be one of the major shareholders in this new platform. And people should pay attention to this. We have way too much concentrated power in the United States, and I think that that is much more important than any particular hothead spouting off on the internet.
Ćudić: It’s hard to say when that started. When you describe the concentration of media power, my mind goes to the meetings between Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch and the liberalization of the media space then in exchange for support for her policies, and so on and so forth. So it’s been going on for decades and in a way one wonders: at what point is there a point of no return?
But going back, I just want to add a question to this discussion of extreme right wing versus extreme left wing. In my political experience, extreme left wing and extreme right wing, particularly youth branches, have one thing in common. They do not believe in the system we’ve built and they think that the solutions will be found outside of it. So when we talk about the use of violence by the extreme left wing and right wing, it stems from the exact same assumption: that solutions will not be provided within the system, that the solutions need to be imposed from the outside through violent acts, terrorist activities, organizations outside of the system.
Mounk: I had a remarkable experience this past weekend. I was invited to speak at a festival in London about liberalism and whether the liberal conception of freedom is the only conception of freedom worth defending, in which I was faced with two discussants or two co-panelists. One was Curtis Yavin, the man who’s now infamous for being supposedly the kind of philosopher behind the second Trump administration or behind JD Vance, and for his various versions of this claim to prefer some kind of CEO or monarch over our democratic system. And the other was a kind of woke feminist. But the remarkable thing was that, as I kept pointing out, they sounded very similar to each other—a point that they both hated, but the audience agreed with. They both blamed every bad thing in the world on the idea of liberalism and then argued for some imaginary alternative that was rooted either in the past or the future or on the left or the right as the system that is going to somehow be much, much, much better. When in fact, for all of the real problems that our system has, I haven’t yet seen in the history of the world a system that delivers better for people than the imperfect set of liberal democratic institutions that we inhabit.
Having said that, while I was at the festival, I ran into a listener of the podcast who said I should share more about my own life. I’m not sure that I’m going to do that in the podcast, but I am going to share the one story that I had from last week, which relates to the discussion we have. I was on the morning show of France Inter, a radio program that has 45 million listeners in a country of 60 million. And there were two people who were on the show with me. The first, who actually works for a center-right think tank in France of American origin, said before she sat down on air, as we were chatting in the green room, Kirk was such a terrible racist as he kept using racial slurs. And I said, I hadn’t heard of him using racial slurs. What are you referring to? And she says, well, I mean, I couldn’t possibly pronounce a word that’s so horrible. But it begins with “ch.” I saw some of my co-panelists looking into the air like they’re trying to figure out which word it is—which took me a second as well—and I realized she must have been she must have meant the word chink, which indeed is a derogatory term for Asian Americans that certainly shouldn’t be used in polite company other than when you’re mentioning it, as I just did, because I believe in the use-mention distinction.
I googled this for a second and very quickly found that there is a debate which Charlie Kirk had done with Cenk Uygur, a very well-known progressive influencer, in which repeatedly he interrupts Cenk Uygur to say, Cenk, Cenk, I’m going to say something. So it is unambiguous that he did not shout this word at somebody in the audience to insult them. He was saying the first name of a co-panelist of somebody he was having a discussion with. So I explained that, having found that, and the woman more or less believed me. Then we went on the air, and the second question is, tell us a little bit about Charlie Kirk. And this question is directed to a woman who was for a long time the political director of Le Monde, a very senior French journalist. She says among the first sentences, well, he was a horrible racist. He said that black women don’t have the brainpower to do all kinds of jobs.
Now, anybody who’s been online for the last week knows that there was a big debate about this in the United States because a number of people have said this, including Karen Attiah, who was fired from The Washington Post, perhaps in part because she misquoted Charlie Kirk in this way in social media. But the actual story is that when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, a number of women said, I wouldn’t be in my position if it weren’t for affirmative action. And Charlie Kirk, whose political style I often disliked, said in a way that I find to be needlessly mean and cruel, well, if that’s the case, then perhaps you don’t have the brainpower to be in that position. Now, however you feel about the details, there’s a huge difference between saying that about specific people who themselves have said that they got certain positions due to affirmative action, whereas the quote was, black women in general don’t have the brainpower to do X and Y, something that Charlie Kirk very clearly never did. So I did something that I rarely, rarely do on air, which is to interrupt this lady and to say, I’m sorry, but that’s just not true. That is not what he said. And I gave the explanation of what had actually happened. She then said in a slightly unfortunate tone of phrase, well, it was to go faster and to move the conversation along, or something like that.
That went very viral in France because it indicated some kind of attitude towards the truth for somebody who should be a very serious journalist, somebody of tremendous authority and after the commercial after this part of the show was over, she didn’t ask me, am I sure that she had misquoted it or anything like that, she was mad at me for interrupting her. And I said, again, I try not to interrupt, but I feel like the main concern should be whether or not we just spread misinformation to four or five million people, not whether you interrupt in the course of doing so.
So I go back and forth because I guess one way to prove this is that the story about misinformation is usually quite simple. The story about misinformation is there’s an enlightened establishment in the trustworthy media. And if you listen to them, then you know what’s going on in the world. You know what’s happening. The problem is that there’s low IQ idiots out on social media, who out of their stupidity or for partisan gain or for financial gain are spreading these terrible forms of misinformation. They are the real problem, and if only we could stop them, somehow the world would be set to rights. I guess I’m both skeptical that misinformation is what drives political views rather than that political views drive people to engage in misinformation. And I’m skeptical about whether we can consistently avoid what Matt Yglesias calls elite misinformation. I’m struck by the extent of elite misinformation I have seen over the last few weeks.
Williams: I’ll just really quickly add something there. I think it’s not just extraordinary that there’s such a progressive liberal establishment echo chamber, such that those quite egregious misrepresentations of the facts can occur in these quite mainstream spaces. I also thought this of the Jimmy Kimmel scenario. But I think what you also have to factor in is anybody within the conservative information environment is acutely aware of the degree to which those things get misrepresented. So when they see it, they then think that’s even more evidence of the degree to which the “liberal establishment” is just egregiously lying. So it’s an informational problem, but it has these really damaging political consequences and tends to increase polarization as a result.
Mounk: This in a way leads us naturally into the third segment of this conversation, which is the remarkable press conference that RFK, the Secretary of Health and Human Services—incredible to say—gave recently about the issue of autism, which is obviously a topic that he has cared deeply about for a very long time, making over the course of decades a set of spurious claims about the link between vaccines and autism. It really appears to be one of the issues that drove him into politics and that he’s most obsessed with. At this press conference, he did not stipulate a direct link between vaccines and autism, though he suggested that there might be one and we’re going to continue studying it. But he did, among other things, say that there’s a connection between pregnant women taking Tylenol and autism. Now, once again, I felt two things about this. The first is that this was deeply irresponsible, and it’s very shocking that we’re now in a place in which most senior health officials in the country are spewing lies that in this circumstance really do have a direct negative impact. I mean, I think a lot of the time when people say wrong things, that’s bad for public culture. And you can tell stories that are quite indirect about why that’s concerning. But advising people not to take vaccines or not to take certain kinds of drugs that may be useful to them because of a spurious link to negative outcomes, has a much more direct way of negatively impacting people. And so I’m very concerned about that.
I’m also once again struck and concerned—I’m not an expert here—by how bad the information is if you read the mainstream coverage about it. I read the article about this press conference in The New York Times, and it just didn’t give any of the necessary background information. There is in fact one study which links the use of Tylenol to rising autism rates. It was done by the Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. There’s reason to think that it’s a really bad study. If you go around Substack a little bit and look at a medical expert who actually really knows this stuff, they will explain to you why that was a really bad study. The Dean of the Harvard [School of Public Health], which is itself remarkable, appears to have excluded the key study that has the most robust design from consideration in his matter analysis for reasons that clearly misstate what the methodology of that study had actually been.
But The New York Times article kept using weasel words like, without new evidence. It doesn’t really explain the background story. And so if any slightly skeptical reader is going through this article, they’re going to say, well, what do you mean with little evidence? I mean, you google it for one second and you see the Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health published a study which says there is this link. And do you think, well, why is The New York Times lying to me? Which it’s not. But it just creates such an open door for people to mistrust the information.
The other thing that I find really striking is that, again, from what I understand, what’s really going on here is that there’s a very serious reason to doubt that rates of autism are actually up in the United States, or at least they’re up as much as the headline statistics suggest. You go back to the beginning of the criteria for diagnosing autism, and they’re extremely onerous and very little known by doctors. So they basically say that you have to be very incapable of communicating with others and that you have to engage in behaviors that require a lot of intelligence, like very elaborate, repetitive patterns of behavior. Both of those things have to be true at the same time, as well as a bunch of other conditions. That’s a very onerous diagnostic criterion. Since then, we have gone to diagnostic criteria where there’s something like 16 possible indications, many of which are duplicates of each other. And if you qualify on six of them, then you can be diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. And we have made it mandatory for all kinds of institutions to report autism in various ways. And we have told people that if they are diagnosed as being on the spectrum, they’re going to get extra time on tests. They’re going to get extra resources for help with children who really may need some extra help. So there’s a very strong incentive to classify people as autistic. And so there’s at the very least a serious debate about whether we actually are faced with an increase in this disease or whether we are simply classifying the world in a different way, which creates this weird statistical artifact.
Once again, you look at the mainstream coverage of that, there’s no indication of this. And so I am just frustrated with the world. Sorry to go on this rant. On the one side you have RFK spewing just absolutely irresponsible things that quite possibly will lead to people dying because they’re not vaccinated against important diseases, and on the other hand, you can’t trust The New York Times and other key institutions to actually explain what’s going on to you in a way that helps you understand the world and that isn’t open to the most straight up conservative challenges.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha, Francis, Sabina, and Dan discuss why there is mistrust in institutions on the right, the shared beliefs around autism between the extreme left and extreme right, and why the United States has so many ridiculous rules. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
