Jonah Goldberg

I don't want to get, I can get in the weeds on it, but basically we're the only advanced industrialized democracy in the world whose parties have given up the ability to pick their own candidates.

Instead, we farm it out to the angriest people on the left and the right who, you know, if you're running in a very blue district and you say, if you send me to Washington, the first thing I'm going to do is work with anybody, including people across the aisle, to do what is best for my district and my state.

You will not win a primary.

If you say in Texas, I'm going to go, I don't care what party you are, I want to do what's best for Texas, you will not win.

If you say, if you send me to Washington, I will tear off the

I will tear the skull off of our enemies and use their heads as a victory goblet, you will get the nomination, right?

So the incentive structures internally, which are backed up by Fox News and MSNOW and all of that, is to pander to a non-representative voter.

And the other mistake we made was having to do with the campaign finance stuff, which basically, you know, Bernie Sanders and that crowd thought we were going to have mass participatory democracy with lots of small donors.

And it turns out what we had was mass participatory populism with very small donors.

The biggest fundraisers in the Democratic and Republican part in the House for a long time were AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

They didn't do any legislating, but they were really good at like getting people to give them 10 bucks, give them 15 bucks a month on their credit cards.

That incentive structure has messed things up.

And then you add in the narcissistic psychosis of Donald Trump, who literally thinks he's a war president and the enemy is really the other party or the people who don't like him.

And that messes all sorts of things.

So take the Colbert FCC stuff.

I think the FCC, I think the equal time rule should have been abolished a long time ago.

I kind of thought it kind of had been for all intents and purposes.

Stupid law written in 1936 when we basically only had radio and now you're going to apply it to broadcast television when broadcast television is dying.

This podcast probably has more viewers than Stephen Colbert on a given night.

You know, the idea that somehow you're free to say whatever you want, but Colbert can be policed by the state.