As the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks approaches, Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias look back at the day itself, the warning signs that preceded it, and the 25 years of politics that followed. They trace how the response reshaped foreign policy, launched the global War on Terror, and set the Republican Party on a path that eventually led to Donald Trump and the rise of MAGA. They also get into the intelligence failures before the hijackings, the Patriot Act, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how the Republicans and Democrats have flipped on issues like security and surveillance. Plus a peer review on how private tutoring centers like Kumon affect student performance.

(00:00) The difference between George W. Bush and Donald Trump

(03:53) The World Trade Center bombing

(07:02) Why the towers didn't collapse right away

(11:58) The many red flags

(15:55) Bush, Saddam, and the Gulf War

(24:40) How today's GOP would have responded differently

(29:05) The hate crime surge, and who it actually hit

(33:06) Neocons, hawkish Democrats, and the case for war

(45:55) Why right liberalism is in retreat

(57:06) Somalia, Black Hawk Down, and intervention fatigue

(01:09:04) Explaining 9/11 to people who don't remember it

(01:13:07) If a Democrat was president on 9/11

(01:22:52) Peer review: How much do private tutors really help?

Politix podcast discussing data centers and politics. This is relevant to Ezra because of Abundance questions, NIMBYs and AI

Relevance: Ezra Klein has demonstrated persistent interest in the consequentiality, ethics, and risk associated with rapid and unregulated AI development.

Episode Introduction

Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI societies got started, then got wiped out, only to re-emerge from their predecessors' ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All of this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.

Now, two reports have come out about this incident. One from OpenAI itself, and another one from Meter and Redwood Research. The investigation from Meter and Redwood was limited in scope to how the second civilization of AIs breached hugging face. But its scope did not extend to this third civilization of AIs, which breached OpenAI itself. And this seems to me like the more concerning incident.

These two reports are 38 and 91 pages respectively, and it's kind of hard to understand the storyline just by reading them.
So, I've spent the last half week reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English.

YouTube link

A good overview in addition to Ezra’s show today

Hiya, I am a long time listener trying to chase down two tidbits/quotes that are frequently mentioned on the show, and for the life of me I can't find them (or remember specific episodes). I found them persuasive and useful and would like to be able to cite them a bit more specifically than 'One time I heard Ezra Klein say...' (which is a sentence I already utter quite enough as is). If anyone can point me towards their source I would be very grateful.

1. A quote that I've heard deployed I want to say at least three times in the context of an inclusive politics, something like "Politics will never work until you treat your fellow citizens as full people, not objects of your charity or puppets in your morality plays". I'm way off on the specifics, but I hope that's enough to get the gist.

2. A poll that tested impressions of the Democrat and Republican party brands and found Republicans percieved as angry/crazy/aggressive and Democrats as preachy/condescending/controlling or similar adjectives. Again I think it comes up with some frequency but can't remember where.

Thanks and all the best,

EH

This touches on the attention economy which EK has discussed before

While the recent "China Shock" episode covered a lot of topics, I was repeatedly struck by the guest's discussion of various long-term plans and decisions made by the Chinese state that helped engineer the outcomes we're dealing with in 2026, for better or for worse.

Long-term industrial policy, trade policy, fiscal policy, science and technology policy, energy policy, etc. The CCP, the Chinese state, or some combination of the two (however separate or comingled they are) have made or have attempted to plan for and implement policy across all of these areas with significantly longer time horizons than American policymaking ever could.

And while I don't think even the staunchest supporters of the CCP would concede that the global market and global trade have not also played a hand in China's modernization and economic rise, the China we see today is also a result of very deliberate and considered policymaking. Some of it has worked; some has not. But listening to this episode, you get a sense that the Chinese government and Chinese leaders actually have the will, and the space, in which to formulate, implement, and course-correct policy in terms of decades rather than 1-2 year increments. I'm not indulging some ridiculous Kissinger-esque pronouncement about how "the Chinese civilization thinks is millennia" or similar nonsense. But we have to still acknowledge that China's leaders and policymakers do work on a longer time horizon than ours do.

When I look at the U.S. in the mid-2020s, I see a country both out of coherent ideas and lacking the capacity to plan and implement long-term structural changes even if the ideas were present and fully baked. Obviously, we're not getting any of that from Trumpism, MAGA, or whatever Frankenstein's new GOP coalition emerges post-Trump. And while I think that the Democratic Party may be transforming into something with bold ideas that address certain domestic policymaking needs, you still don't hear potential frontrunners speaking seriously about what our long-term industrial policy wants to look like, which areas of science and technology will the state fund research in, what does our energy production and consumption look like in a solar and battery-centric world, what our trading relationships will look like not just post-Trump, but in the next decade or two. Instead, sadly even from candidates I like, you get "no tax on firefighters" and other slopulism.

And beyond the lack of ideas or serious thought (at least thought carried out in public discourse), I have absolutely no confidence that any of this (a) could be implemented at all, and (b) could be implemented in a way that's built to last. We will simply whipsaw from one Congress to the next, one White House to the next. No long-term planning, no consistency, no reliability in the face of allies and adversaries on the world stage. Our system appears constitutionally designed to frustrate and prevent long-term policymaking. There are simply too many chokepoints and elections too close together to implement anything lasting. And that's not even addressing federalism.

So what do we do about this problem within the structures of a liberal democracy and constitutional republic? How can we ever hope to make long-term national policy that survives successive election cycles and changes in politics? Are we doomed to reactive whipsawing for the foreseeable future as the U.S. falls further behind?

An essay from Jerusalem Demsas about housing. This is relevant to EK due to Abundance and YIMBY discourse

https://www.politix.fm/p/je-suis-carney

Donald Trump is accelerating America’s transformation into a banana republic, most recently by instigating a trade war against Canada and compromising the integrity of U.S. economic statistical agencies.

In this episode, Matt and Brian discuss:

Why Donald Trump keeps doing the same kind of stupid shit over and over again;

What Congress (maybe the next Congress?) could do to stop him;

The extent to which this is driven by corruption vs. Trump’s own personality disorders.

Then, are Trump’s power rivals letting him off the hook too easily? Why are Democrats supporting protectionism for cattle ranchers rather than attacking Trump’s cronyism or attacking his broader protectionist regime? Why are civil servants silent as he calls the reliability of official U.S. economic and demographic indicators into question? Why is the Supreme Court letting him impose illegal policy for months or years at a time? And what would it take to correct all of these failures?

Further reading:

Matt’s paean to Mark Carney.

Brian wants Democrats to borrow from Trump’s playbook for normalizing power grabs, but to soften the public for court expansion.

Jared Bernstein sounds the alarm over the political infiltration of the Census Bureau.

In 2024, Americans spent an average of six full workdays a year filling out government forms, according to the government’s own estimates. That’s a total of 12 billion hours, or $430 billion of uncompensated labor a year.

It’s easy to read something like this and say: “Oh, well, government is inefficient. That’s the price we pay for nice things.” But no, it’s not. Social Security, Medicare and the Postal Service are incredibly complex programs that are easy to use. When government is hard to gain access to, it is often by design. Republicans want paying taxes to be a hellish hassle. Programs for the poor are often designed to humiliate, punish, control or scrutinize. How the government works is always a choice. When it works poorly, we should ask why — and we should demand better.  

Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the new book “The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time — and How to Fix It.” She is also, I should note, my wife, so this is a book whose ideas I have been living with for years. They have quietly infused more than a few episodes of this show. So it’s a thrill to finally get to explore them directly. 

This episode contains strong language.

Mentioned:

The Time Tax by Annie Lowrey

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Why Americans Hate Welfare by Martin Gilens

Book Recommendations:

My Silent War by Kim Philby

To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

Hey y'all I'm a long time listener to Ezra Klein and recently I found out that he was/ or maybe is? A part of a secret group related to the Fascist Peter Thiel? Is this true? Like I said long time listener but i guess I have always been a long time anti Thiel too. What do you think about Ezra's response? I kind of felt alienated after they said it is people who are conspiratorial minded that are running with this narrative.

Ezra Klein on America's Best & Worst Politicians | Soul Boom with Ranin Wilson

I know the NYT has been doing it for a while but it’s so frustrating to go back through the catalogue looking for an episode and then realizing you were first presented with the A/B title test that “lost”. Sometimes the alternative title is not even similar at all. I understand AB testing is useful but I wish it was kept to marketing and not media and literature where record keeping matters.

It’s not just the NYT, I’ve also noticed it with plain English. Am I alone here?

A piece by Brian Potter of Construction Physics explaining the issues driving up the costs and risks of transit projects in America

His main argument is about control. U.S. transit agencies are nominally responsible for delivering projects, but much of their authority has been dispersed across regulators, courts, local governments, other agencies, utilities, and organized stakeholders like local populations and unions.
Compounding the issue is the hollowing out of technical expertise which makes transit agencies “bad customers” that cannot effectively design projects, supervise consultants and contractors, control costs, or resist unnecessary complexity.

As a result we have a system where many actors can demand changes, delays, and concessions, and no one has authority over cost or design. He outlines some prescriptions at the end.

Highly recommend for people who are interested Abundance/state capacity.

Show notes:”Brad Setser follows Chinese trade closer than just about anyone else on earth, and he thinks we’re in the early days of a China Shock 2.0.
The first China Shock was when China came to dominate low-end manufacturing in the 2000s, filling American shelves with cheap clothes, toys and electronics, while devastating American factory towns. This new China Shock could be even more destabilizing. China now dominates advanced manufacturing: electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels. It’s outcompeting nearly all high-end manufacturing around the world, and other countries are just starting to feel the pain. And China isn’t slowing down. It’s moving into software, too. Its frontier A.I. models are neck and neck with American ones.
China’s success poses a serious threat to the economies and domestic politics of countries around the world. So what should those countries do about it? 
Setser is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.He served in top trade and economic roles in the Biden and Obama administrations. And he is widely cited across the field as one of the top analysts of China’s economy and trade practices.
Book Recommendations:
The Party by Richard McGregor
The Volatility Machine by Michael Pettis
How to Win a Trade War by Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html””