David Frum: Sociopaths and Political Tribalism
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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is our first episode of 2025. And so I'm delighted to be here with favorite of the pod, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of 10 books, most recently Trumpocalypse. It's David Frum. How are you doing, David? All right. Thank you.
Although I think we have to take, since you're in New Orleans, a moment of horrified silence for this terrible incident. More details are known, but just the carnage just looks horrifying. And what a terrible thing for your city.
It is horrible. And it's a sad wintering in the new year. And we had 15 are dead here and many more injured. So TBD on a final count there. The perpetrator was driving a truck with an ISIS flag and turned onto Bourbon Street off of Canal Road. They're usually bollards there to protect against us, but they were replacing them for the Super Bowl. So unclear whether that was bad luck or timing on behalf of the perpetrator. Also, there's a Cybertruck attack in Vegas. There was a mass shooting in Queens last night at a nightclub. The CNN headline, I was just making sure I had my facts right this morning looking through everything, was New Orleans attacked deadliest since Maine mass shooting. I don't even remember the Maine mass shooting, which I think tells you a little something about American life. So I'm just wondering if you have any other top line thoughts based on what we know now.
It's a violent society, more violent than peer nations. And there are reasons for that that Americans, I think, probably do not want to change, which is the country has just got weaker interior policing than its European peers do. I remember being in Britain at the time of one of the Conservative Party conferences and going into the police control room that was monitoring the safety of the city. And looking at the feeds from all the closed circuit TV cameras that fed into the police station, they could say, you could pick out somebody that the camera wanted to follow and just follow him over the whole course of his itinerary for as long as you wanted to follow that person through one camera after another. Americans don't want to live like that. Americans are also very attached to guns.
That's not the murder weapon in New Orleans. But it is a deep national commitment. And to those – I grew up in Canada. It seems unreasonable to me. I understand why if you're a farmer trying to protect your chickens, you need a shotgun. I understand why if you're a hunter, you need a rifle. I don't understand why if you're an urbanite, you need to carry a personal arsenal that would impress an Afghan warlord. But – A lot of people seem to disagree with me on that. And there has been no move, if anything, over the past 20 years, gun laws have become more permissive, not more restrictive. I'm going to forget now the writer who said this, that it's a big, raw, rough, unpoliced country and violence is the price Americans pay for it. But that seems to be, that's the verdict. And there are enough different kinds of violent people that whatever sociological or political conclusion you want to draw, you want to draw that rednecks are bad, Muslims are bad.
You want to draw schoolchildren are bad, schoolchildren are good. You want to draw any conclusion you want. There is a crime, a mass crime, a horrifying crime that will support whatever theory you want to propound.
Yeah, I think the darkest part of our soul that is revealed to me, I mean, the violence itself is obviously the greatest problem and it's horrific, but I think it's a window into the soul that when an event like this happens now and you get online, you get on your social media of choice or even unintentionally you're on social media and what you see is Not really.
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