Andrew Marantz
speaker
381 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 10 Apr
Andrew Marantz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Breaking that news here. But I do think that it's important to have that framework. It gets to this point of ambiguity, hybridity, plausible deniability. What are you? Are you anti the Jews or are you for the Jews? You know, it cuts against this idea of a kind of clean, quantifiable checklist. And also it cuts against the idea of
you know, did Columbia fully exceed and did Harvard fully join the resistance, right? Before Harvard became the hero of the resistance, they adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. They kicked out the head of their Middle East study center. All of this, you know, what Tim Snyder would call anticipatory obedience. And then the administration pushed them too far, maybe by accident.
And then they joined the resistance, right? So it's always hybridity all the way down, I would say.
Look, I used to, we used to call it the alt-right. Now it's called the right. And they are playing with taboos in ways that I think are multiple things at once. Some of it is just the old-fashioned troll, you know, can't you take a joke? You know, this isn't actually what you think it is. Or can't you take
Yeah. Are you too scared to talk about taboo things? Can't we just push the boundaries, right? Those things all kind of redound to the political benefit of the movement that is, you know, transgression and the thrill of forbidden knowledge is one of the most appealing things in the rhetorical playbook.
But just to stick on the Hungary example, first time I did a reporting trip to Hungary was 2022 when they announced that CPAC was going to be held in Hungary, the first European CPAC. And I first heard that and said, that must be a troll. Like, that's too on the nose. You wouldn't have CPAC in the only authoritarian country in Europe if it's 2022 and you're trying to win re-election. But they did.
And I went. And there was this whole saga about whether they would let me in. And they kind of, again, with the sort of gaslighting and the hybridity, they were like, sure, sure. We love independent media. You can surely come in. And then in the end, they didn't let me in. And then I had to sneak in. It was a whole thing. But... While I was there, Orban had just been reelected.
The resistance, the sort of popular front against him thought they had a chance to beat him, and it turned out they really did not.
And one of his first speeches in Parliament, he did a whole thing about the Great Replacement Theory, which used to be this fringe alt-right idea that the international Jew, among others, are trying to engineer this whole conspiracy to let in these scary brown hordes and overwhelm majority white nations with invaders. That used to be like crazy, crazy fringe 4chan stuff.
And over the time that I had been covering it, it went from... the fringe discredited theory known as great replacement theory to the thing Tucker Carlson is saying every night on his show to the thing Victor Orban is saying in parliament to now the things that members of Congress are saying in the US.
I mean, so to be clear, I would agree with Zach's broad point that Trump is not doing it the Orban way and that Trump is impulsive and that the tariffs hurt him. And so I think we all broadly agree that the laws of political gravity have not been suspended.
I mean, one of the important points that people made to me over and over again while I was reporting this piece is even if you call it authoritarianism, and many of the people I spoke to did, many of the political scientists I spoke to, including some of the, we spoke to some of the same political scientists, they told me flat out, America is currently not a democracy. And yet in the next breath.
Well, so it was interesting. So Stephen Levitsky, who was one of the co-authors of How Democracies Die, he also was a co-author of this really seminal paper where he defined, he invented the term competitive authoritarianism. I spoke to him and his co-author on that paper, Lucan Way. And when I talked to both of them, and I said, where are we on the map of history right now?
They said, we have crossed the line. We are no longer a democracy. They had written this piece called The Path to American Authoritarianism, and they said, we are on that path, and we are, in fact, past the line. They didn't say we're past the point of no return, because the definition of- But what is the line? It's a little squishy what the line is.
To back up, one thing I said, because I was thinking about metaphors, and we were talking about, you know, where in the Schrodinger's cat of democracy are we? One thing that I think is a real flaw in the metaphor is, you know, we're writers. We think about metaphors.
democracies don't die. They can always be rebuilt.
When people— When you have to think twice before you speak up.
And on that point, you know, we were talking about we're sitting here in the citadel and we're not afraid to call it out. And that's true. I will say—and again, these are very early signs because we're not far enough into the timeline to know— No, the New Yorker has not been compromised. And no, free speech is not dead. And yes, it does matter that we have a First Amendment.
I will say, though, when I was reporting up at Columbia, people were giving me anonymous information. And they were saying, we're actually sort of scared to give this to you because we don't know what all the harboring laws are. We could be sort of making you an accessory to someone who's on the run from ICE or something.
And I gave the spiel that journalists always give, which is, if you're an anonymous source, I will go to the mat to protect you. We are willing to go to jail to protect our sources. And when those words came out of my mouth, I said, How willing to go to jail am I, actually? That was the first time I'd had to think about that.
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