Welcome to the Quillett Podcast. I'm your host Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at

Quillett. Quillett is where free thought lives. We are an independent

grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

If you'd like to support the podcast, you can do so by going to quilett.com and becoming a paid subscriber.

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articles and early access to Colette social events. This being the first

podcast of 2023 I'd like to start off with some big picture thinking about one of the problems that we editors

at Colette will be facing this year, which is related to Newton's observation that an object in motion

tends to remain in motion. Of course Sir Isaac Newton was referring to physical objects, but unfortunately the same principle is often true of politics.

These days you may have noticed people who start is often tend to just keep moving rightward in their politics often tend to just

keep moving to the right and people who start moving leftward similarly often tend to keep moving leftward.

I'm sure most listeners can think of their own examples, especially in cases of friends and family

members who spend way too much time falling into internet rabbit holes. Maybe it's your coworker or an inlaw who starts getting

slightly more progressive or conservative in their Facebook posts, but then starts talking

more and more about their newfound convictions

until the months and years pass and they've become full-fledged radicals or even conspiracy theorists.

This can be a special problem for an editor like me because sometimes you find that writers and podcast guests who write and speak eloquently about being disaffected liberals or disaffected conservatives proved to be so disaffected that they

eventually disaffected themselves right out of your political orbit.

I'm not going to name names here, but it's become a real problem. Well, maybe I'll name one name because he's

the subject of this week's podcast, so I have to. And that name is David Rubin, a former comedian

and left-wing YouTube news personality, who began moving rightward along

the political spectrum a few years ago, and never really stopped his rightward shift.

...