YouSaid · the spoken record

Frank Bruni

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2024-05-02

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2024-05-02

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1. “Why do millions of Americans who pay no attention to professional football all season long tune into the Super Bowl and decide on a team to vote for because they yearn for that common experience? They want to be part of something larger. And if that can exist at a Taylor Swift concert, if that can exist to the Super Bowl, well, then there's a chance it can exist in our civic life.”

   2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “No, no, but in all seriousness, as her tour became the kind of phenomenon it did, right? And as she became the kind of phenomenon she is, it speaks not just to her music or her talent or the marketing. It speaks to something else. People began to rush toward that because it was common ground. It gave them a common language. They could talk. It was something everybody was, it showed to me that there is a hunger. For shared experiences, there's a hunger for a common vocabulary that gives me a lot of hope.”

   2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “No, no, I do, I do. But I wasn't entirely joking about Taylor Swift. I really wasn't. No, I was thinking about this as her. I'm nothing against it.”

   2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “It's great that the Ukraine vote finally happened. It's not great that it took so many months and how many lives were lost.”

   2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “We keep seemingly trying to shoot ourselves in the foot and yet hobbling forward anyway, right? That gives me an enormous.”

   2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “At some of the stuff that has happened during the Biden presidency that the description you just gave, one would assume nothing has happened. Yes. And that's not”

   2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Space Mountain, yeah, right there you go. But I mean, rather than just relieving student debt with a pen sort of indiscriminately, you could do a sort of GI bill version of if you do national service, you will get some money for college or you will have certain college loans forgiven or however you want to do it. You can build in incentives that I think would get more people.”

   2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “It's interesting. I think one of the reasons that conversation gets shut down is because we all assume it would be compulsory. I agree with you. It could never work as compulsory. But you could build in all sorts of incentives that would tempt people to go into national service and you could almost see a way if you did it correctly in which it becomes so, for lack of a better word fashionable that nobody doesn't want to be, nobody wants to be the person who's not doing it. But you could, first of all, National Service can take many forms and in kind of like vis- ⁇-vis each of those forms, you could give some of the people who do it sort of first in line, shot at certain job applications in interviews. You could relieve students.”

   2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “The public library is still, for those of us who still use them, the public library is still a place where you walk in and it's not all the same kind of person, at least not unless you're like in a very kind of particular enclave. So why aren't we putting more money into public libraries? Why aren't we putting more money into public squares when we have the opportunity to redesign or design cities? Why aren't we being really careful about placing the park not so that it's within one kind of community, but so that each side of the park touches a different kind of community and that park ends up becoming a crossroads. We can do these things if we prioritize them.”

   2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “We can do that. We can do national service. We can design. There's a wonderful book written by, I'm going to mangle his last name so I'm not going to say it. But the book is called Palaces for the People. And it's basically about how if you invest in certain sorts of public infrastructure, you create meeting grounds for diverse people. Yes, yeah, you wrote about.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “We especially don't have shared experiences and shared missions that cut across lines of region and class and education level and race and allow us to have conversations with people we wouldn't normally meet, to understand them not as caricatures or stereotypes but as flesh and blood human beings. Because almost always when you see squabbles that devolve into epic battles that have no business being epic battles almost always you see people who have ceased to regard one another as complex human beings and just see them as sort of combatants and stereotypes in a war.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “It is, and it's not just we talked about how people get siloed and atomized on social media, it's also true in terms of where we live. There's been a lot written about this. This is proven. Yeah, we're sorting ourselves in every facet of our lives. So obviously what we need to do is we need to figure out some ways in which we kind of unsort ourselves. And those ways exist. I mean, there's a reason a politician that both you and I admire you introduced me to him years ago when he was still the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, but there's a reason Buddha Judge spends so much time during his presidential campaign talking about a national service program because we don't have those sorts of shared experiences and shared missions.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “It didn't exist in the same way before, and so even as we're worried that our economies not growing and that it's a zero sum game, we are constantly face to face with the people who have it a little better than us and the people who have it a little better than them and then the people at the tippy top.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “In the book But I mean, look at like when I mean, when I was young, I had very indulgent parents. And so I went to a lot of amusement parks. I don't remember a cut-the-line thing. There was no cut the line dynamic. I don't remember all of these different things you could pay extra for so that while somebody else was on a two and a half hour line sweating in the sun for space mountain, you were zipping to 20 different rides in three hours because you could pay for it. These things happen in front of you. When you go to the airport, you see whether someone's going into TSA or CLEAR or just the line for everybody else. You see who gets on the plane and doesn't have to worry about the overhead bin and who ends up having to check their bag at the last minute. Our service economy has these gradations.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “The rich and famous and all of that. These promote envy, and we've also in our service economy, and I write about this in the book too, we've developed these tiers of coddling and these microclimates of privilege that never existed before, right? I mean, look at the model.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “This is a phrase I think I borrowed from Tom Nichols, who writes for The Atlantic and wrote a very good book called Our Own Worst Enemy. We have these engines of envy, right, that when you add them to pessimism or a real problem, we talked about various problems with social media, another problem with social media is people go on their Instagram feeds or whatever, and they get this completely false sense of how charmed everybody else's lives are. I mean, on Instagram, somebody is always clinking champagne glasses on a tropical island as the sun is setting at a wedding, right? I've never been to a wedding like that, but apparently everyone else is going to them. Or that's what people think, right?”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “used to be easily a majority and often a big one, not anymore, r When people no longer have a sturdy faith in the future, When they don't trust the economy to grow, when they don't think the metaphorical pie is expanding, they invariably get much more possessive and petty and competitive about their piece of the pie. They become much more sensitive to the idea that I'm not being given a fair shot at my piece. If you think everything is a zero-sum game, your relationship with your fellow country people is going to be entirely different. And that, as a result of many of the events that you just mentioned and ticked off, is a big part of why we're so dyspeptic and so furious, right?”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “No, it's good. I mean, one of the chapters in the book that I don't know if most enjoyed writing, but I was most interested to write speaks to this, which is everything you're talking about is part and parcel of a turn in this country, in my adult lifetime, toward a magnitude and a depth of pessimism that are so different from 20, 30, 40 years ago. The idea that we are a The idea that America is a land of optimism tomorrow will be better than yesterday was the endless frontier and all that. There's a lot of truth to that in terms of the American psyche. That is not where we are anymore. If you look at poll results over time, there's been a big change in the percentage of Americans who, when you say, do you expect your kids to do better than you could?”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “That people, students, will try to change once they're made aware of it. So we have really interesting discussions in my classrooms about how did you kind of set up your newsfeed, like how much intention has gone in to whom you're following on the various social media platforms, into what's bookmarked, et cetera. And if you get people, in this case students, to kind of pause, reflect at it, to ask themselves, well, what kind of person do I really want to be? What am I really trying to accomplish here? Is the information scape that I'm striding across doing that for me? You can, they will make adjustments sometimes. They will change. But nobody's having that conversation with them. We're not having that conversation with one another.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Right, and it's so insidious because I know so many people, and I've seen this with some of my students who feel that they're very deeply informed because there are these 20 different sites they check out, but they never kind of pause and say, wait a second, each one of these 20 sites is an anagram of the other one, right? But here's where I think, and I think University of Chicago is a paragon of doing this well. I think more.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “But this strikes to the problem that includes social media but isn't just social media. Once the internet came along, once the cable dial became hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stations, we are able to search, we are able to curate the information. And the news we want. And it turns out to be our nature as we go about that curation to choose things that tell us exactly what we want to hear. And that's the same script.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Yeah, against Fox. And why? Because it was proven in internal emails, internal texts, that as they were putting these people on the air saying, oh, the voting machines were rigged or the voting machines were corrupted or whatever, they knew it was ridiculous. They were talking with each other, you know, this is just crazy, whatever. And then they kept booking the people because, as was said in those texts, in those emails, and that's why Fox was like, we've got to settle this and get the hell away from it. It was literally said, if we don't do this, they'll go somewhere else. Like if we don't do this, one American news will do it. Or Breitbart will do it or whatever. And I mean, this is such a bastard. I mean, bastardization is not a strong enough word. This is the opposite of what news is and is supposed to be. They were basically like, we know what the truth is. Our audience wants a lie. So let's go on in on the lie because that is the only path of economic sanity.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “You're not only getting an audience, let's take Fox News, you're not only getting an audience by being skewed, you're keeping your audience by letting them tell you what the truth is and then giving it back to them. I mean, the Dominion voting system story is so scary. 787.5 million dollar judgment. And why? Because it was proven against.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “An entirely different America. I know I'm not the person I was when I'm a teenager, and I assume Mitt Romney isn't. So I would say, like, let's condemn this. Let's say it should never have happened, but let's also recognize that it doesn't necessarily tell us a whole lot about Mitt Romney today in a much more enlightened world, 40, 45 years more mature. And I got an email really shortly after saying, you know what, we don't need you anymore for the panel tomorrow.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “The Mitt Romney story, and I knew why they were calling me first openly gay comments in the New York Times. I wrote a lot about gay rights. I said, sure, fine, yeah, I'll be there. And then, as you know, sometimes this happens, sometimes not. Someone called to give a pre-interview. And they said, well, what would you say about it? And I said, well, I would say it's a really sad and distressing story. And your heart goes out, your heart goes out to the student who was the victim of this bullying. And you certainly never want to see this happen. But I would also say it's 45 years ago.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “And you want that person to be predictable, which means that person can't be intellectually honest because they're reading off a script. Jason Horowitz, who now works at the Times, was then working at the Washington Post. He wrote this long story for the Washington Post where he had been looking into Mitt Romney's child to just in the course of doing profiles. And at the Cranbrook Academy in suburban Detroit, where Mitt Romney went to private school, some people remember that he and some other students had bullied this fellow student who was somewhat effeminate. They didn't call that student gay at the time. It was a different time, but it was clearly a kind of gay harassment. And, you know, obviously it was not something that was kind or to be admired or whatever. This kind of blew up the way stories blew up. It's an easy one to talk about. CNN, MSNBC, everybody's talking about it. Somebody at MSNBC called me, I forget which show it was or emailed me and said, would you come on a panel tomorrow to talk about?”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “I told that story as an example of how many of us, how everyone seems to kind of choose a brand, feel they have to play to the brand. I think it's a problem in the media. And now I'm talking about conventional media, not social media, where I think so many people are rewarded for having one lens with which they look at the world. And you go to read them or you listen to them because you know they're going to put that lens over every situation.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Deeply offensive. Right. And it enables them to tune you out when you're actually saying something that they need to hear. It kind of diminishes your credibility as someone coming into the public square with something important to talk about when you're waging these really kind of petty invented, you know, marginal whatever word you want to put on that.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “If you want to tell me you think I have blind faith in something, I'm not going to go report you to the censors or whatever. I'm just going to tell you no on that thing I actually have cited faith or whatever. It just gets really ridiculous. And the problem is when we're fighting these silly battles, right, when we're taking it into these dimensions, it enables people to kind of, A, they lose sight of what's really important and urgent and what's not. And it enables.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “But I'll give you a good example. I mean, there's so many versions of this forbidden language list. Sierra Club has won various universities have them. One of the things that always makes the list always is blind study, blind faith, anything blind, because that is insulting to people with vision disorders and vision impairment. Okay, I'm half blind and I live in danger of going blind. I know a metaphor when I hear and see.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Which kind of says it all about the age of grievance. Like, we're itching for offense. You know, we want to find the worst possible interpretation of something so that we can then play the role of victim and feel as wronged as we see other people telling us they feel because we don't want to lose out on that competition.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Because according to Stanford, that was a Nazi chant. And a journalist with inside higher ed, it was that publication slash website went out and interviewed several rabbis and they're like, that's good be news to all of my congregants. I mean, it was like this search, this search for things to be offended by.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “A year or two ago, Stanford came out with, I think it was called The Harmful Language or the Hurtful Language Glossary. There were words on there like brave. Brave is not allowed because some people hear a kind of reductive caricature reference to Native Americans there. That's not what I hear when I, you know, you have to educate people on why the word might be bad so they know to be offended by it because otherwise they weren't. There's an example in there. There was the, I think it was, I think it was higher ed. One of the websites ran a hilarious story about one of the banned expressions was hip hip hooray.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Oh, the forbidden language glossaries. Yeah, so I mean, many organizations have lists of words that they say they want no one speaking anymore. Some of them, I did.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “We grew up way too late. But, you know, I mean, I can't remember the exact. I mean, so that means if you don't, I mean, I've taught students and they're just living in this world and trying to get through it, but I am blessed and compliment enough that I have a lot of STEM students who when they have to take a humanities class will take one of my classes. And my classes tend to be somewhat writing-centric, writing-based, and some of them that's not their strength. And they get a first paperback and it has an 86 or an 87 on it. And it's like an existential crisis for them because they know that if they want to get into med school, the difference between a 3.99 and a 3.83 could be make or break. And they didn't invent that system, but they're living in it. And you think, I mean, how do we get out of this? Because that's insane. I mean, they're not, you know, whatever.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Think we spend way too much time worried about never offending them. Never. I mean, the trigger warnings are the cliched example of this, and trigger warnings are not as common in the classroom as people think, but they do exist. And in a kind of metaphoric and emblematic way, they kind of say it all. Life is triggering, right? I mean, you are going to meet all sorts of people who act in ways and say things that aren't to your liking and that sometimes may be insult you. You're going to encounter circumstances that call into question your competencies at times because we're all not good at everything, et cetera, and on and on. And there is something about education currently in many places. There's something about the modern campus that I think too often sends students the message that everything should be clover all the time. Great inflation is a great example of this. I mean, everyone, I'm sure has read the stories. But, I mean, the normal grade at an elite university right now is an A-”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “But just, I mean, if you're a Jewish student and you're hearing chants and cries that are glorifying Hamas, that I mean one of the worst chants that I saw repeated whatever was like October 7th every day, are you freaking kidding me? Yeah. Like if you can't understand that saying that. Is, I mean, deeply offensive isn't a strong enough term. If you can't understand what that means to a Jewish student who's hearing it, or really to kind of any moral person who's hearing it, to me, if I'm hearing it, but I'm not personally threatened, there's something wrong with you. But as you said, to not be able to understand that a 20-year-old, seeing on his or her TikToks feed, the devastation in Gaza, you know, the toll in Gaza, of course you have to be bothered. And this is a really morally complex situation.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Nobody wants to pause and say, okay, bringing the police in, calling for the National Guard, these things are extremely emphatic and they seem to run counter to principles of academic freedom. This is really tough stuff, but nobody is trying to engage in it with that recognition. Nobody is trying to talk about it within a nuance. It becomes a competition for who's most victimized. Right.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “No, it's distressing to watch. It is tough stuff, as I said before. It's distressing to watch because the various people engaged on, you know, just for Eza's sake, opposite sides of this, I don't see anyone trying to understand how the other people feel. I see, I see what I too often see in our political and cultural debates. I see each side saying, I am being wronged here because of those people. And here's how deeply I'm being wronged here. And here's how furious I am. And if I convey my fury at a volume and with a vocabulary that is more intense than the other side's the way I'm going to win the day and that's the way I'm going to get the most attention, nobody seems to want to pause and say, well, why do these students feel so unsafe and why are they so kind of deeply hurt and offended and destabilized by what we're saying? Nobody seems to want to pause and do that.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “If people had clicked with the same eagerness and frequency on stuff about John Kasich as they did on Donald Trump, within a week or two weeks' time, you would have seen a bevy of John Kasich coverage because we know.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “But to your point about the market, a great illustration of this is so after the 2016 election when I would be in a kind of public setting like this as someone who'd been writing about that election for the time and had been at the times for a long time, I would constantly get the question from groups of people like this, why did you all write so much about Donald Trump? And I said, it's a great question. Let me ask you a question. Why did you all read so much about Donald Trump? So you talk about the market. We're getting the news that we deserve or that we want more than ever before because we have ways to measure what the audience is doing.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “So you're right. So, the other people have to step up and engage with as much passion for dispassion. But to your point about a market, a great monetary”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Give it a try. I'm four. You can use the thing. I mean, there's a real, I think we all end up surrendering to or just kind of snapping back to our worst impulse or our most tribal instincts. But I mean, I know, and I'm guessing it's most of the people in this room with us right now, I know it's you. I mean, I know an enormous number of people. It feels close to a critical mass who do not want to go on like this, who do not want to be fighting constantly with people who have slightly or somewhat different political opinions, who recognize that compromise should not be a dirty word, that common ground is sacred ground. I mean, these people exist in large number. And maybe if we develop, maybe if we recognize that market is there and we're just smarter about developing products, platforms, whatever you want to call them for that market, I mean, let's give it a shot.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Some sort of like analog to Twitter, some sort of offshoot where the stuff that would rise to the top and that you would most likely see weren't just the posts that got the most likes or the most shares, but the post that got the most likes or shares from a diverse group of people. Like so this post weirdly got as many shares from people whom we can profile as being on the right as people on the left. This post seems to represent some kind of consensus. Let's put that at the let's make that the trending thing. We can do all these sorts of things. We have the digital and the technological abilities. And I think we need to try.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “I think it's with an effort that involves a lot of different fronts and a lot of different facets of society. And I devote a chapter, at least one chapter of the book to this. But I mean, I think we need to look at certain matters of political reform. If we did things differently, we might get a different kind of politician who's not a slave to the incentive structure you just mentioned. I think we have to work on it in the classroom. And I know we'll come back around to that because we're here at university and I now teach. I think there are people who are studying who need to be encouraged. Different ways you could set up social media platforms. You know, the social media platforms in favor at a given moment or changing all the time. It's a really fluid situation. We don't have to have a social media platform that incentivizes things the way the currents one do. In fact, before Elon Musk bought Twitter, a professor, a Duke who's in the forefront of this was working with Twitter people. It all went away when Elon bought it about coming up.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Well, we're sitting here less than a week after Mike Johnson brought the Ukraine aid and the Taiwan and Israel aid, et cetera, to a vote less than a week after it was passed. I don't think Mike Johnson has any business being speaker of the House because he was assertive in trying to overturn the legitimate. No business being speaker, but let's congratulate him for that.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “When on the record, in support of marriage equality, and yet by two thousand fourteen, if you listen to the kind of progressive Democratic conversation some sixty eight year old woman in Alabama who wasn't yet on the train was a deplorable. She was an irredeemable bigot. She's only one year behind Hillary Clinton, right? I mean, there's no grace anymore. There's no allowance for where people have come from, what it might take for them to get to a different place. And the problem with that. Is Yeah, and the problem is that when you cast those judgments, when you vilify and damn people before you give them a chance, you've guaranteed they're never going to get where you want them to go. You're undermining your actual goal when you make it an all-or-nothing black and white thing in real time.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “We're great at casting judgment and we're really bad about giving people kind of some time and having some faith with people coming along. Well, I mean, go back. Let's talk about someone whom you worked for with whose political career you helped make happen, which is President Obama, right? It wasn't until he was running for re-election, what was that, 2012, that he did publicly what everybody knew was the private case and he came out in support of marriage equality, right? It wasn't, people forget this, it wasn't until early 2013 that Hillary Clinton.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Yes. I don't think it's a really tough thing to write and talk about because I don't want to get into false equivalences and I don't think I commit them in the book. And I don't think when we're talking about grievance and recrimination and vengefulness and all that sort of stuff, I don't think the dangers are the same on the right and the left, or at least I don't think right now each side poses the same sort of risk. January 6th was an act of the right. Organized political violence in this country is predominantly, overwhelmingly on the far right. Election denialism. It's much more prevalent, and we've seen the examples of it on the right. That said, this sort of dynamic where you enter the political arena with a sense that you're us versus them, they're evil, and I'm virtuous. This is a kind of Manichaean battle. I have been uniquely wronged and I need recompense and redress for that.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “I'm going to start slitting throats on day one when I get into office. Great. Let me cast a vote for you. I can't wait for the blood.”

    2024-05-02 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 578 — Frank Bruni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source