weinstein is a kind of tragic figure. he’s not a sellout like harris, whose podcast became one more mouthpiece for nyt opinion years ago. for eric, any conversation short of those taking place on his podcast is insufficiently nuanced. he’s a romantic - and vain in his romanticism https://twitter.com/ericrweinstein/status/1334208821871341569

he takes as axiomatic that the american people must necessarily be as curious and circumspect as his friends, or his audience. if they’d only listen to his audio essays, they could finally stop being confused by low-resolution legacy media analysis of the issues!

this isn’t because he’s dumb - he’s one of the only semi-mainstream people out there even willing to acknowledge the existence of conspiracies. but rather than acknowledging that the public is and always has been stupid, he wants to “fix” them. And he sees himself as the antidote

that’s why he likes to coin his own new witty acronym for everything, complete with polysyllabic vocabulary and obscure historical anecdotes. it’s a tendency that any amateur online intellectual falls into. verbal pick-up-artistry, preemptively setting himself above his listeners

trump is offensive to eric because his political rhetoric is crude, ambiguous, and - above all else - more effective at mobilizing the public than eric’s four hour podcasts. this deprives eric of his self-styled role as sherpa to a promising but as-yet untrained demos

eric is here to tell you that trump’s claims of fraud are unsupported, but that dismissal of election tampering is wrong as well. eric is - as always - ready with a third, more nuanced option that no one else except him is smart enough to see

in this case, it’s that the *real* fraud was against andrew yang (who happens to be the only candidate willing to come on his podcast).
somehow “make america great again” is unsophisticated jingoism but “math” is the slogan that will finally bring democracy to its full potential

eric never really thought that his brother’s “articles of unity” campaign to successfully run a third party candidate would go anywhere. he doesn’t really believe that dave rubin is a thought leader. he doesn’t think the average joe rogan listener can be a theoretical physicist