Ezra Klein’s Blindspot

The prominent podcaster wants to moderate, but he can’t see the problems on his own side.

Courtesy Jim Bennett/WireImage/Getty.

Last week, New York Times columnist and podcast host Ezra Klein interviewed essayist and far-left tweeter John Ganz about antisemitism on the right—Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Kevin Roberts, etc. Ganz was an odd choice: he is neither on the right, nor a consistent opponent of antisemitism. He routinely engages in the “genocide” libel, while offering apologetics for antisemitism’s left-wing practitioners.

The conversation played out as you’d expect—two people who agree with each other diagnosed the political sickness of everyone else. Eylon Levy neatly summarized the problem: While Klein and Ganz “accurately describe antisemitism as ‘blaming every social problem on the Jews,’” and call out far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories, they completely ignore the prominent antisemites on the left—including, Levy argued, New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

“Antizionism is a hate movement,” Levy wrote. “It builds coalitions on both extremes—and increasingly between them—by mobilizing politics against Jews. It poisons democracy. And it needs to be called out wherever it appears.”

Most of Levy’s point is fair. But in my view New York City’s mayor-elect is not the most appropriate analogue for Fuentes on the left. That distinction belongs to Hasan Piker, the pro-violence streamer Mamdani eagerly partnered with throughout his campaign. Piker, who once said “America deserved 9/11,” recently embarked on a propaganda tour of Communist China that neatly mirrors Tucker Carlson’s tour of Putin’s Russia.

Klein’s interview demonstrates the left’s inability to police its own antisemitism problem—unlike the right, which has produced an endless barrage of criticism of Fuentes since his appearance on Carlson’s show. Following Klein’s assertion that there is nothing remotely antisemitic about Mamdani, Ganz insists with a straight face that Mamdani “does not Jew bait.” That’s an unserious thing to say about a man who refuses to condemn explicit calls for a global campaign of violence against Jews and Zionists, and who famously declared that “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” To claim that this is not Jew-baiting empties the term of meaning.

What makes all of this even stranger is that Klein knows how to do this better. In recent weeks, he’s hosted genuinely thoughtful conversations with conservatives—Amit Segal, Spencer Cox, Ben Shapiro, Yoram Hazony, Ross Douthat, and, further back, the smartest conservative of them all, Reihan Salam. Those episodes actually engaged with the right as it exists, not as a caricature.

So why, on the one topic where the pathologies of both coalitions demand real symmetry and honesty, did Klein choose an interlocutor who cannot acknowledge antisemitism on his own side? Why pick someone who will dutifully diagnose every fever on the right while insisting the left’s own roiling climate of anti-Jewish hostility is nothing but a mirage?

Those earlier episodes convinced me I should give this one an open-minded listen. After all, I ought to be able to grapple with someone like Klein, if for no other reasons than that the horseshoe-types in our respective coalitions are increasingly chummy. Megyn Kelly happily hosts pleasant exchanges with Ana Kasparian and Glenn Greenwald. Tucker Carlson is using his newsletter to run interference for Zohran Mamdani. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ro Khanna, and Thomas Massie appear to be forming a weird little anti-Trump gadfly caucus that earns them glowing coverage from corporate media.

If those (not so?) cross-ideological friendships can exist, surely a relatively normal right-of-center person like me should be able to glean something useful from a conversation with Ezra Klein. That’s especially true given that Klein, despite voting for Mamdani, is habitually treated by the hyper-online left as a centrist squish and technocratic sellout insufficiently committed to the socialist crusade.

But even approached in good faith, the episode collapses because they can’t acknowledge this symmetry. Klein and Ganz are desperate to understand the antisemitic fever breaking across the right without admitting that a structurally identical fever has been burning inside their own coalition for years. And they skate over the fact that Mamdani’s movement and Fuentes’s movement are now using the same libel to pursue different but overlapping political ends.

Fuentes is at least transparent about his goal: use a strategic alliance with the left to blow up the GOP and seize whatever debris remains. In 2024, he campaigned aggressively against Donald Trump. He is now openly attempting to force a negotiation with Vice President JD Vance, demanding that Vance refrain from condemning his followers—the Groypers—ahead of 2028. He ridicules Vance mercilessly and has used vulgar slurs against the vice president’s wife.

Fuentes’s strategy is a version of what movement conservatives did after Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss: blow up the old party and rebuild it around something more ideologically pure, even if it takes decades to materialize. The difference is that Fuentes is explicit about wanting to build his new coalition with the far-left.

In a monologue this week, Fuentes laid it all out: “What do you think has a 90% approval rating? If you add progressive Democrats and nationalist Republicans working together, let’s say to compel the release of the Epstein files—what kind of approval rating do you think that has? 90%.”

“This is gonna be the compromise,” he added. “Very simple: The left has to give up immigration. … we can have equity and we can have equality in the country. We can have civil rights. We can have all those things. But we have to close the damn border. … And the right has to give up on the free market. If the right can come down on healthcare and on a social safety net, maybe on some subsidies for education, and if the left can come down on anti-white, open-border stuff, and they can agree that we have a country—that party will win 90% of the vote and rule for a century.”

Fuentes describes a political program that is explicitly anti-nonwhite, anti-market, anti-meritocratic, anti-engagement, and anti-normal. He believes the moment is ripe because the center-left is vulnerable, confused, and too invested in protecting its own ideological flanks to confront the rot within.

This is where Klein’s own project—the famous agenda associated with his book co-authored by Derek Thompson, Abundance—becomes relevant. His coalition building is monomaniacally focused on working within the left, which not only forces him to ignore his more odious allies, but also is a self-defeating project.

Klein’s attempt to articulate a forward-looking, pro-building liberalism is noble in theory. But as my colleague Charles Lehman argued in his review, it is ultimately incoherent. An everything-bagel coalition of climate maximalists, union enforcers, NIMBY homeowners, racial-equity bureaucrats, environmental litigators, and boutique-progressive process addicts cannot deliver abundance. A coalition built on incompatible goals can’t produce growth, only paralysis.

In reacting to the Klein-Ganz interview, another one of my colleagues, Chris Rufo, went further:

This was always the insoluble problem for the “abundance Left”: there is zero appetite for this politics within the Democratic Party, and they will dutifully vote for a mayor who wants to open government grocery stores and “seize the means of production”—pure anti-abundance.

Which is too bad, because the Clinton-style “abundance” program would be a massive improvement over the Left’s current platform. But the problem they have to solve is not an economic problem, it’s a political problem. White guys peddling neocapitalist economics is a hard sell for modern Dems.

That is why “abundance” has already been supplanted by a new fancy, progressive A-word: “affordability.” Borrowing the catch phrase from Mamdani’s campaign, every Democrat now insists they are laser-focused on lowering costs. Blue-state governors are ripping up their own climate commitments and reopening gas plants because the politics of affordability have turned brutally against them. The “affordability agenda” is simply the “abundance agenda” shorn of its utopian edges.

If the left now has its competing A-words—Abundance (theoretically) and Affordability (politically)—the right probably needs its own. The obvious choice? “Assimilation.”

As Saagnik Basu argued recently in Pirate Wires, assimilation is the one civic idea capable of grounding a multiethnic democracy in real common purpose. It rejects both Fuentes’s racial panic and Mamdani’s decolonial resentments. It insists that if people want to join the American project, they must actually join it—not treat it as a stage on which to litigate the politics of their parents’ home countries. And it creates exactly the kind of civic solidarity that the extremes on both left and right find threatening. (Smart folks have said this before!)

All of this is unfolding against the backdrop of what can only be described as Rapid Onset Political Realignment. The coalitions are shifting faster than cable news network bookers can keep up. And Donald Trump—who is middle-of-the-road on many policy questions but incandescent in his style—has become an improbable moderating force in American politics, dragging the GOP away from Romney-Ryanism without surrendering it to Buchananism.

In particular, Trump has made inroads among working-class voters of all races. His gains among nonwhite voters outpaced his margin of victory in many key swing states. That outcome alone should be jolting liberalism toward a more grounded, saner, assimilationist politics.

Ezra Klein is making that harder. In leading the charge for Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential election, Klein proved he has the instincts, talent, and platform to tell Democrats hard truths. He could have in this case said that left-wing antisemitism is real; that Mamdani’s worldview is a dangerous Third Worldist turn; and that the realignment underway requires his coalition to confront its own radicals. Instead, by outsourcing his analysis to someone like Ganz, Klein gives his audience permission to believe the comforting fiction that antisemitism is a right-wing disease and that the left’s mirror-image version is nonexistent.

The minority group of grievance-oriented extremists on the fringes of the right and left are learning how to work together. It might be wise if the majority group of success-oriented pragmatists attempted to do the same.