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Late last week an inconvenient truth for Kamala Harris’ campaign, and the left as a whole, emerged: They have a man problem. Dudes just aren't into her. And the current Veep is losing ground with black male voters — as Trump is increasingly attracting demographics that traditionally leaned Democrat.

The venture capitalist Shaun Maguire is a particularly prolific poster. And lately, his takes have become almost unavoidable.Maguire manages Sequoia Capital’s stake in Elon Musk’s various companies, including the social network formerly known as Twitter, and he regularly amplifies and excuses Musk’s extreme political opinions. He’s also fond of sharing his own. Over the weekend, he posted a theory that “antifa” is committing mass voter fraud by having ballots sent by the hundreds to vacant houses; Musk signal-boosted Maguire’s concern with the message “Anyone else seeing this sort of thing?” Last week, Maguire advanced the perspective that “DEI was the most effective KGB opp of all time.” To his more than 150,000 followers, the VC has made it clear that he is “prepared to lose friends” over his choice to spit out the metaphorical Kool-Aid that caused him to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.On X, Maguire shows up in the feed alongside other prominent VCs who support Donald Trump—among them, David Sacks of Craft Ventures and Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures. They all express similar opinions in similar ways, and they do so more or less constantly. (Maguire, who did not respond to a request for an interview, posted to X dozens of times this past Saturday alone.) This is an example of, as Paul Krugman recently noted, the “tech bro style in American politics.” It is largely defined by a flat, good-versus-evil worldview. The good? Free speech, which Democrats want to eradicate. The evil? Immigration, which is a plot by Democrats to allow violent criminals into the country and steal the election. San Francisco? A once-great American city purposefully ruined by Democrats. Kamala Harris? Sleepwalking into World War III. Trump? According to Musk, he is “far from being a threat to democracy”—actually, voting for him is “the only way to save it!”A “vibe shift” is under way in Silicon Valley, Michael Gibson, a VC and former vice president of grants at the Thiel Foundation, told me. Eight years ago, the notorious entrepreneur Peter Thiel was the odd man out when he announced his support for Trump. The rest of the Valley appeared to have been horrified by the candidate—particularly by his draconian and racist views on immigration, on which the tech industry relies. This year, J. D. Vance, a Thiel acolyte and former VC himself, is Trump’s running mate. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of the legendary VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, came out in full support of Trump in a podcast episode released just before Joe Biden dropped out of the election. (Last Friday, Axios reported that Horowitz informed Andreessen Horowitz staff members that he and his wife, Felicia, will donate to support Harris “as a result of our friendship” with the candidate. “The Biden Administration,” his note continues, “has been exceptionally destructive on tech policy across the industry, but especially as it relates to Crypto/Blockchain and AI,” mirroring language from the podcast during which he and Andreessen endorsed Trump.)[Read: Silicon Valley got their guy]It’s doubtful that the thoughts of these prominent VCs reflect a broader change in the electorate—tech workers generally support Harris, and barring an unbelievable upset, California will go blue on November 5, as it has for decades. (Though as my colleague Adrienne LaFrance has pointed out, Trump’s vote share in Silicon Valley was 23 percent in 2020—small, but higher than the 20 percent he received in 2016.) And many well-known VCs back Harris, including Rabois’ colleague and Khosla Ventures’ namesake, Vinod Khosla, along with Mark Cuban and the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. This time around, Thiel has not thrown his weight behind Trump but has instead indicated that he would choose him over Harris if there were a gun to his head.But it is nonetheless significant that a number of influential—and very rich—men are eager to go against the grain. Silicon Valley has historically prided itself on technological supremacy and a belief in social progress: Now many of its loudest and most well-resourced personalities support a candidate who espouses retrograde views across practically every measure of societal progress imaginable. “We are talking about a few people, but I think this also reflects the political economy of the Valley right now,” Margaret O’Mara, an American-history professor at the University of Washington and the author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, told me. “There’s a great deal of money and power and influence concentrated in the hands of a very few people, including these people who are extremely online and have become extremely vocal in support of Trump.” (Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)If Trump wins, there is a nonzero chance that he would give some of these people major roles in his second administration—Musk is already lobbying for one, with apparent success. If Trump loses, the Harris administration will have highly visible and vehement critics to whom a lot of people listen. Silicon Valley’s main characters are entering the culture war and bringing their enormous fan bases with them.To some extent, this is just business as usual. O’Mara noted that although the tech industry used to claim to be apolitical, it has always had its fair share of lobbyists in Washington, D.C., like every other industry. More than anything else, the industry’s interests have simply followed the money. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan supported defense spending and big contracts with the California tech companies. The result was that “Silicon Valley leaned Republican,” she said. “Silicon Valley started leaning Democratic in the Clinton years, when Clinton and Gore were big proponents of the internet and the growth of the internet industries.”Now many of these venture capitalists are holding on to huge bets on cryptocurrency. They fear—or enjoy suggesting—that Harris is plotting to destroy the industry entirely, a perception she’s trying to combat. Some of them have circulated an unsourced rumor that she would appoint to her Cabinet Gary Gensler, who has pursued strict regulations against the crypto industry as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. (Meanwhile, Trump has promised to save the crypto industry from “living in hell.”) Many in the tech industry worry about Harris’s plans to raise the top capital-gains tax rate. And her support for taxing centimillionaires’ unrealized investment gains has been particularly unpopular. Gibson argued that it would destroy the VC industry completely: “We would see the innovation economy come to a halt.” Even Harris’s supporters in the tech world have pressured the campaign not to pursue the tax; “There’s optimism that this can’t possibly be real,” Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, told The New York Times in August. Also at issue is the labor movement. The tech industry came up during an era of lower regulation and declining union power, O’Mara pointed out. Nonunionized workforces have been essential to many of these companies’ business models, and collective action used to be more rare in their perk-filled offices. Yet during and after the pandemic, contractors and employees of major tech companies expressed dissatisfaction en masse: They wanted more diversity in the workforce, fairer treatment, and protection from the layoffs sweeping the industry. Some of them unionized. The companies faced, as O’Mara put it, “discontent among a group of people who had never been discontented.” The new labor movement has clearly rankled prominent tech figures, Musk among them. He is challenging the nearly century-old legislation behind the National Labor Relations Board, with the goal of having it declared unconstitutional. [Read: Palo Alto’s first tech giant was a horse farm]But business doesn’t explain everything. The American public’s attitude toward the tech industry has curdled since 2016, in large part because of critical reporting—about labor abuses, privacy problems, manipulative algorithms, and the bizarre and upsetting experiences one might have on social platforms at any given time. When I spoke with Gibson, he suggested that declining revenue in the digital-media business may have created some “rivalrous envy” on the part of journalists. (And it’s true that the media industry can and does cite the whims of tech platforms as a source of its financial problems.) “We are being lied to,” Andreessen wrote in his widely read and rueful Techno-Optimist Manifesto last year. “We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.” This, he suggested, was not just wrongheaded but harmful. Andreessen Horowitz, at one point, launched a media publication with the stated mission of publishing writing that was “unapologetically pro-tech.”Meanwhile, the federal government has pursued antitrust action and bipartisan efforts to regulate social media, while state governments have won huge settlements for workers. This has been a major shock: Silicon Valley was celebrated by previous Democratic administrations and was particularly welcome in both the Obama campaign and White House. Now some tech leaders are being treated like villains—which seems to have led some of them to embrace the label. “These are some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, and they are presenting themselves, in a way, like Trump is,” O’Mara observed. They’re positioning themselves in public based on their grievances and their feeling that they’ve been unjustly targeted and maybe even embarrassingly spurned.Venture capitalists are public figures in a way they didn’t used to be. Many of them were famous founders first, and they have their own brands to maintain. “It’s part of the job to promote yourself,” Lee Edwards, a general partner at Root Ventures, told me. “I think you get in the habit of just tweeting your thoughts.”That might have hurt business not too long ago. In 2016, when Thiel endorsed Trump, Gibson had to worry about losing seats at dinners or speaking slots at events. That’s not the case now, he told me. He pointed to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent efforts to distance himself from Democrats. Although he has had a terrible relationship with Trump in the past—one that reached its nadir when the former president was temporarily banned from Facebook over the inflammatory comments he made during the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021—he has made tentative overtures to the candidate recently. The two have reportedly spoken one-on-one a couple of times this year, and Zuckerberg complimented Trump on his “bad ass” reaction (a fist pump) after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Zuckerberg hasn’t said how he’ll vote, but it’s a sign of change that he would talk about Trump in these terms at all. “The chill in the air has warmed up,” Gibson said.When I spoke with Kathryn Olmsted, a historian at UC Davis and the author of Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism, she said she’d be interested to hear whether this turned out to be a California story or “a very rich-person” story that happened to be taking place in California. Maybe it wasn’t so much about Silicon Valley or the tech industry as it was about billionaires. From another perspective, it could be a really rich-person story taking place on a social-media platform owned by one of those really rich people. And those people, despite their increasing public vociferousness, might actually be cloistered in their own world—isolated and deluded enough to believe that migrants are somehow a threat to their livelihood and that radical leftists are really going to steal the election. “What I’m seeing from VCs around the country is different from what I’m seeing amongst the Twitter VCs,” Candice Matthews Brackeen, of Lightship Capital, told me. “Some of us live … off of there.” Others I spoke with pointed to an effort called VCs for Kamala, a loose organization with hundreds of signatories on a letter supporting Harris’s candidacy. That group was organized by Leslie Feinzaig, a venture capitalist and registered independent who says she has never before made a political donation.The recent media coverage of Silicon Valley “was creating the impression that the entire industry, that all of venture capital, was going MAGA,” Feinzaig told me. “In my conversations, that was just not the case.” She wanted someone to step up and say that a lot of VCs were supporting Harris and that it wasn’t because they were on the far left. Many of them were registered Republicans, even. They simply had different priorities from the rich, angry guys posting on X. “I’m at the beginning of my career,” she said. “A lot of these guys are at the pinnacle of theirs.” She couldn’t say exactly what had happened to them. “There’s a cynicism at that point that I just don’t share.”

Seventy Miles in the Darién GapFor the September 2024 issue, Caitlin Dickerson reported on the impossible path to America.As a Colombian American, I was deeply moved by “Seventy Miles in the Darién Gap.” Thank you, Caitlin Dickerson, for your courage. I had the deep fortune of migrating to the United States legally with my parents in the 1990s, so I didn’t experience the Darién Gap personally. Recently, I’ve been helping a Colombian refugee who traveled through the Darién Gap. He began to tell me of his experiences there, and I was astounded by his story. He is understandably still processing what he witnessed, and I am letting him go at his own pace. Dickerson’s reporting offered a remarkable window onto a harrowing journey undertaken by the most desperate of people. Thank you for investing in such solid journalistic work. Now I’m going to go hug my dogs and wife.Carlos Enrique GomezUnion City, Calif.As a citizen of the United States and an avid consumer of its news, I’m saddened that most mainstream-media coverage of our immigration woes focuses on controlling our borders and not the underlying reasons people risk, and even lose, their lives in their attempts to immigrate here.For those who only listen to sound bites, the word immigrant conjures frightening notions—outsiders on a quest to thwart our border security and take some of what we consider to be ours. In Donald Trump’s view, they are murderers, criminals, and rapists.Caitlin Dickerson’s article reveals that these are mostly just normal people forced to flee their countries due to conditions beyond their control. I can’t imagine how dire circumstances would have to be for me to leave my home! It’s telling and sad to see that U.S. policy to discourage immigration has had the effect of increasing death rates among those who are already so helpless. Not to mention driving new profits for drug cartels.I hope we can have more coverage centered on the root causes of immigration. After all, U.S. policy created many of the problems that plague countries in Latin America.Peter BrownLyman, MaineI teach high-school English in Columbus, Ohio. Last year, one of my students wrote an essay about his experience traveling through the Darién Gap. It was the first time I had ever heard of it. This student was hardworking and kind, and I was amazed by his story. When he wrote it, he had been in the United States for just over a year. It’s 288 words, with minimal punctuation and no paragraph breaks.He left his home country in South America with his mom and sisters. After passing through the Darién Gap, they spent time in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, before eventually ending up in Ohio.He concluded his essay with this: “It affects me in what? I got a lot of depression and stress and I won’t do something like that again.” I feel lucky to have taught this student, and I appreciate that The Atlantic covered this topic.Chase MontanaColumbus, Ohio‘Lord, Help Us Make America Great Again’In the September 2024 issue, McKay Coppins considered the most revealing moment of a Donald Trump rally.McKay Coppins’s close reading of Trump-rally prayers was unsettling, even frightening. I was concerned less by the apocalyptic fear and strange theology that the prayers mobilized, and more by the unnerving similarity I saw to the rhetoric marshaled against Trump and Republicans by their adversaries.I confess to seeing in Trump’s opponents—and I count myself among them—the same tendency toward exaggeration (Trump is a modern Hitler, Trump is an existential threat to democracy). Conservatives have been quick to argue that many progressives behave with a quasi-religious zeal: Popular slogans echo liturgy; cancel culture exists as a penalty for heresy.I’d like to think that there are differences between Trump and his critics that I’m not discerning. Could The Atlantic do a similar sort of analysis of the weirder expressions by Democrats and progressives?Gary GaffieldFort Myers, Fla.My Mother the RevolutionaryFor the September 2024 issue, Xochitl Gonzalez considered what happens when fomenting socialist revolution conflicts with raising a family.As a mother of young children and a committed socialist organizer, I found that Xochitl Gonzalez’s recent article presented an unrealistic and at times bizarre portrait of the lives of people like me. The bulk of the article is a slippery mix of memory, feeling, and fact—understandable if its purpose was to explore the bitter process of reconciliation between an absent parent and her child, but unsatisfying if it aims to provide an accurate political analysis.What moved me to comment was the strange choice, 6,000 words into an almost-7,000-word essay, to pivot to a discussion of the presidential campaign of Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia, who are running on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Although the author conducted an interview with the candidates, the only remnant of that interaction was a physical description of them (They are—“not that it matters—beautiful”) and a hasty reduction of their political platform (Burn it all down. Start from scratch). What a shame to silence these women and conflate their candidacy with the aberrant personal experiences of the author.Polls show that more and more young adults like me have positive attitudes toward socialism. We see the failures of capitalism all around us, and we are eagerly dedicating ourselves to building a socialist future. Although the article depicts socialist activism as a kind of personal obliteration, a subordination of our individual selves to the menacing whims of “the party,” the reality, in my experience, could not be further from the truth.I proudly support Claudia and Karina, not just because their politics offer the only viable path out of poverty, imperialist wars, and ecological crisis, but also because they are working mothers like me. When they speak about inflation at the grocery store, it is from experience. When they speak about the astronomical cost of child care, it is from experience. When they speak about fighting for a world that truly nurtures our children, it is proof that our identities as mothers are an asset, not a liability, in this struggle.Moira Casados CassidyDenver, Colo.Behind the CoverIn “Washington’s Nightmare,” Tom Nichols revisits the life of George Washington, whose bravery and self-command established an ideal that all future presidents would, with varying degrees of success, attempt to emulate. All, that is, save Donald Trump, a man who shares none of Washington’s qualities and exhibits the kind of base motives that the first president saw as a threat to the republic. For the cover, we turned to Gilbert Stuart’s The Athenaeum Portrait. The unfinished nature of the work suggests the ongoing American experiment, but also the existential danger that a second Trump term poses.— Elizabeth Hart, Art DirectorCorrection“You Think You’re So Heterodox” (October) misstated where Joe Rogan’s home is located. It is west of Austin, not east of Austin.This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

Vivian Zink/SyfyVice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has opened discussions with Joe Rogan that could see her sit down for an interview with the controversial podcast host who counts an army of impressionable young men among his listeners.Officials from the Democratic nominee’s campaign met with Rogan’s team this week, according to a report by Reuters.Harris’ outreach to Rogan suggests a significant shift in her campaign following a panic of sorts among Democrats who worried her previously light, cautious schedule was scuttling her chances in the election.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Rebecca Noble/Getty ImagsImpervious as ever to irony, Donald Trump is trying to weaponize his opponent’s medical records against her while staunchly refusing to release his own.In his latest unhinged tirade on Truth Social, the former president posted on Monday that he’s “far healthier than Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, but especially, Kamala,” adding that he is naturally “far too busy campaigning to take the time” to, you know, prove it.His comments come amid mounting pressure to provide evidence of his physical and mental health, not least after a letter was released on Sunday by Doctors for Harris, a group of pro-Democratic medical professionals, warning “Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Author Ta-Nehisi Coates during the Alight Align Arise: Advancing the Movement for Repair conference on June 7, 2023, in Atlanta, Georgia. | Carol Lee Rose/Getty Images for Decolonizing Wealth Project I’ve always believed that the world is complicated and that our desire for simplicity is understandable but dangerous.  But when does the impulse to embrace ambiguity become its own pathology? Sure, the world is complex, but sometimes we have to pass judgment. We have to be willing to say that something is true and something is false, that something is right and something is wrong. So how do we know when things really are that clear? And how do we avoid the impulse to lie to ourselves when we know they’re not? Ta-Nehisi Coates is an author, essayist, and one of our most celebrated living writers. He’s just published a new book called The Message that has stirred up quite a bit of controversy because the longest essay in it is about his trip to Palestine. If you know almost nothing about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the one thing you’d probably be comfortable saying is that it’s complicated. This is an assertion Coates challenges directly. For him, the moral arithmetic is simple and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian population is fundamentally wrong. So I invited Coates on The Gray Area to explore where he’s coming from and why he felt it was important to write this book. But the point wasn’t to have a debate or an argument. I invited Coates because I think he’s smart and sincere and doesn’t write anything without seriously thinking about it. This conversation is really about the role of the writer and the intellectual and what it means to describe the world with moral clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing What’s been the most surprising thing to you about the reaction to this book so far?  Ta-Nehisi Coates I’m surprised at the surprise. So, the CBS interview was the first live interview. I was not surprised by the aggression, tenacity, whatever you want to call it. Or, I should say, I knew that was going to happen eventually. I didn’t know it was going to happen there. So I was surprised in the sense that, “Oh, it’s right now.” And it took me a minute to catch up with it and realize that it’s actually happening right now, but this is what it is.  I’m surprised that people are like, “I can’t believe that happened.” I understand I am going to go into some arenas where you don’t usually say the state of Israel is practicing apartheid. That’s just not a thing that you usually hear people saying in places like that, and so I am going to say that. And what’s going to come out of that, I have no idea, but I hope people understand that this is what’s happening. Sean Illing You made a deliberate choice to write about Palestine, which, as you know, is an impossibly charged issue. Why wade into these waters? Why this conflict? Why now? Ta-Nehisi Coates I don’t think it’s impossibly charged. This is so clear. It was so clear. And when I saw that — and maybe this is naive, maybe you’re right, maybe it is impossibly charged — but I was just like, “Oh, this is easy.” Not easy like easy to do, easy to write, but the math is clear. You know what I mean?  The word I used at the time when I saw it was Jim Crow, because it was so obviously Jim Crow. You tell me you got one set of roads for one group of people, another set of roads for another group of people, and the roads you have for the other group of people are impossibly longer. They take more to get from point A to point B. Those roads have checkpoints, and the checkpoints sometimes materialize out of nowhere. This is all fact.  Whatever you think about it, maybe you think that’s the way it should be, but this is what it is. This is actually what it is. You’re telling me that one group of people has constant access to running water, and the other group of people don’t know when their water might be cut off?  You’re telling me that that other group of people, depending on where they live, if they’re in a particular area on the West Bank, it might be illegal for them even to collect rainwater? You’re telling me one group of people has access to a civil system of criminal justice, so that when they get arrested, they know their rights, they’re told why they’re arrested, lawyer, etc. You’re telling me the other group has no access to that? That they can be arrested, that no one needs to tell them why they’re being arrested? No one needs to tell their families that if they are killed, you don’t even have to return their bodies? What is that? Sean Illing So when you compare Palestine to the Jim Crow South, my reaction is that these are both moral obscenities, but they’re different. And I do think it’s complicated — Ta-Nehisi Coates Tell me why you think it’s complicated. Sean Illing I think it matters that many Palestinians still support the attacks on October 7. I think it matters that Black people in the Jim Crow South wanted to be treated as equal citizens in a fully democratic America.  I don’t think it’s generally true that Palestinians want equal rights in a fully democratic Israel. And if they had that they might vote to end its existence as a Jewish State. And you know what? If I was a Palestinian who was pulling my friends and my family out of the fucking rubble, I’d probably vote the same way. I understand that.  Personally, I hate the idea of a state based entirely on religious or ethnic identity. But I’m not Jewish and I don’t live in Israel and I understand why the people who do live there would have these concerns. And I also think it matters that Jews are indigenous to that land and have nowhere else to go. I just think that complicates the picture in other ways. Ta-Nehisi Coates I am of the mind that discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion is never acceptable. There is nothing in this world that will make separate and unequal okay, and there’s nothing — and I’ll use this word — that makes apartheid okay. That’s not complex for me. It’s like the death penalty is not really complex for me, because you cannot guarantee to me that the state will not execute an innocent person. You just can’t. So I’m against it, period. There aren’t any exceptions to that.  Sean Illing I haven’t been to Palestine but I know it’s bad and I know what you saw there is wrong. And I don’t believe there is any such thing as a moral occupation, because whatever the reasons for it, you cannot occupy a people without visiting cruelties upon them.  But for me, the main question isn’t necessarily the badness of the situation, which is incontestable. It’s how the hell do we end this? And all these complications that I was mentioning earlier, that’s the stuff that has to be accounted for if there’s any hope of a way forward.  Ta-Nehisi Coates We are sitting here asking ourselves why we don’t have a workable solution, while we exclude one of the two significant parties, and I guess my politics would say the most significant party, because that’s just where I come from in terms of the oppressed.  How can you decide what is going to be the solution when every night when I watch reports from the region, I can name only one person who is of Palestinian heritage, who I regularly see articulate a solution or an idea? How do we get to a solution when our journals, our newspapers, our literature that dominate the conversation is not just devoid of Palestinian perspectives, but it’s devoid of Palestinians themselves?  We are not having a conversation about solutions because we’ve basically prevented a whole group of people from entering into the frame. And so it’s like we’re putting the cart before the horse. We’re frustrated that we don’t have a solution, but we’re not actually talking to somebody.  Sean Illing I agree that our moral imagination needs to extend in both directions as far as possible. I understand writing this as a kind of corrective, feeling like there was a lack of empathy for the Palestinian experience because their story hasn’t been told enough, hasn’t been represented enough. I can understand that, I really can. And if I’m being honest, I think if I went there and saw the suffering firsthand, all of this would feel a whole lot less abstract to me and it would hit differently. And I don’t know how that would change how I think about it — Ta-Nehisi Coates So when are you going to go, Sean? Sean Illing It’s a fair question, and the only honest answer is I don’t know. Ta-Nehisi Coates You should go. I know it’s hard. And look, I’m putting you on the spot, but it was extremely hard. First of all, you are a journalist. That’s the first thing. That’s my first case for you going. The second case is this is being done in your name. And we’re going to pay for it. We’re going to pay for it one way or the other. We will pay for this. We will pay for this.  God, now I think it’s your responsibility to go. I’m sorry, but I really do believe that. I really do believe that because you are someone who is obviously curious, obviously wants to know things. And the reason why I’m pushing you is because that vague sense of injustice is exactly what I had. That is exactly how I felt, man. Sean Illing But I’ll push you a little on that because it runs in both directions. If I went to Israel and toured the villages that were plundered on October 7, I’d feel this same kind of indignation and rage. Ta-Nehisi Coates You should, though. You should see that, too. I don’t think those feelings are contrary. Sean Illing No, I don’t mean to say they’re contrary. I’m just saying I would still be left feeling the sense of hopelessness at the tragedy of it all. Ta-Nehisi Coates I think you would know more, though. I think you would know more. You sound like me. This is what I thought. Even on the eve of the trip, I was like, “Boy, this is going to be really complicated.” I thought the morality of it would be complicated. And there’s a reason why I began that chapter in [World Holocaust Remembrance Center] Yad Vashem, and it is because the fact of existential violence and industrial genocide brought to the Jewish people of this world is a very, very real thing.  And it’s like, how do you confront that and reconcile that with Israel? Because you want that group of people to be okay. You feel like maybe that group of people is entitled to certain things. And I mean that in the best kind of way. They’re entitled to a kind of safety, given what happened to them. You feel deep, deep sympathy. And so before I went, I was like, “Wow, this is going to be morally dicey.” I think you should go. I’m not even saying you’re going to agree with me. I’m not saying you’re going to end up where I ended up, but I think you should go. Sean Illing Do you think both sides of this conflict can tell a story about it that makes them right and the other side wrong? Because there are so many victims and perpetrators on both sides, because the cycle of violence and retaliation stretches back so far. Ta-Nehisi Coates I don’t think it stretches back that far. It’s 1948. It’s not even 100 years. I mean, I interviewed people that were very much alive in 1948, so I don’t even think it’s back that far. I think that when we say things like that, no disrespect, but I think we say things like that to make it harder than it actually is. It’s a lifetime that is not even over yet. And what I would say is my opposition to apartheid, to segregation, to oppression, does not emanate from a belief in the hypermorality of the oppressed or even the morality of the oppressed. The civil rights movement kind of fooled us with this because it was kind of a morality play and it was a very successful strategy. But whether Martin Luther King was nonviolent or not, segregation was wrong. Even when Malcolm X was yelling “by any means necessary,” segregation was still wrong. It was still wrong. So for me, it’s not even a matter of sides being right. The system that governs both sides is wrong. Sean Illing I remember once hearing you talk about the vulgarities of punditry. Pundits are not in the truth-seeking business. Pundits make pronouncements. That’s the whole stupid, mindless game. But you’re not like that. You have never been like that.  One reason I retreated into podcasting is that I don’t feel that pressure to pronounce in that way, and even doing it in a serious way for me felt futile. But I don’t have your stature and I don’t have your reach, so it’s different for you, I imagine. Do you think you can make a real difference here? Or is that not even part of the calculus?  Ta-Nehisi Coates I needed to write what I saw. This is uncomfortable to say, but I think this moment matters. I was talking to a good friend yesterday, a colleague, a very intelligent and sharp young writer. And we were actually sitting around a table. It was a Muslim woman and another writer there, and we were all in sympathy in terms of our politics. And she’s making the point that this thing that’s happening right now, it actually matters, it’s making a difference. And I was saying, I want out.  I’m doing this book tour and then I’m out of here, man. I’m going back to my French studies. I’m out. And I’m not out because I’m scared to say what I want to say. I’m not out because of the heat. I am out because it just feels unnatural. And part of it feels unnatural because I’m not Palestinian, but it also feels contrary to writing, which is always seeking, always trying to learn, always trying to figure it out, always asking questions. So when you’re making these pronouncements, as I admit I am now, you wonder, am I actually betraying the craft? Should I have just written a book, put it out, and be done with it? There’s always that voice in the back of your mind. But when I was over there, man, what they said to me over and over again was, “Tell them what you saw.” Sean Illing I come on this show every week and I praise the virtues of doubt and uncertainty and I believe in that. But refusing to describe things simply and clearly can become a kind of moral and intellectual crime. You’re right about that. And I still think sometimes things really are complicated and not so neat and maybe the challenge of being a writer and or just a human being is being honest and wise enough to know the difference. But it is hard sometimes, and I do think this situation is complicated, and it’s also true that sometimes withholding moral judgment can be its own kind of cowardice.  Ta-Nehisi Coates Yeah. And again, I just want to take it back. When that day comes, when the Palestinians are back in the frame, when they’re invited to tell their own stories, when they’re invited to take their place at the table, I have no doubt that what will come out of that will be quite complicated.  South Africa’s complicated. They defeated apartheid, but did they change the basic economic arrangements? My understanding is not as much as a lot of people would’ve wished. Better than apartheid, but it’s not done. It is indeed quite complicated. The victory is indeed quite complicated, but the morality of apartheid is not. What is hard for me is I’ve been on a couple of shows now where I’ve had some debate about this with people, and they never challenge the fact of what’s going on. So when I say half the population is enshrined at the highest level of citizenship and everyone else is something less, they don’t say, “Ta-Nehisi, that’s not true.” But perhaps this is just where I sit. It’s like when your parents grew up in Jim Crow, when they were born in the Jim Crow, that is an immediate no-go. I feel like I don’t know what comes after this, but that is wrong. That’s wrong. You know what I mean? What is after that might be quite complicated and quite hard, but that is not the answer at all.  I’m sitting in a cave in the South Hebron Hills [in the West Bank] with a group of people, and they’re telling me about their fears of being evicted out of a cave, man. When I look at — “Hey, that’s complicated” — when I know full well it’s not. What to do about it is probably complicated. But you begin from the basis that this is wrong and the very difficult work of figuring it out can proceed after that. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.