AI Summary
5 min readIn a year defined by an "authoritarian resurgence," the pundit class responded not with clarity but with a reflexive contrarianism that often bent over backward to normalize the abnormal. The hosts of If Books Could Kill argue that the worst takes of 2025 share a common DNA: they are exercises in motivated reasoning that treat the obvious threat of democratic backsliding as a puzzle to be solved with clever, counterintuitive framing. The central argument is that the machinery of elite opinion-making—particularly at outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times—is structurally incentivized to produce takes that are "interesting" rather than true, and this instinct has become a moral and intellectual liability.
The Both-Sides Machine
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Episode Introduction & Setup** - The hosts preview the episode's premise: cataloging the year's worst public takes, with a focus on punditry that downplays authoritarianism.
- 2 (02:04) **Category 1: Brain-Dead Both-Sides Takes** - Peter introduces the first category: punditry that falsely equates criticism of Trump with partisan bias.
- 3 (05:14) **The "Parade" Take: A Case Study in Contrarianism** - The hosts dissect Corey Shake's Atlantic piece arguing that a Trump military parade "is just a parade" and not a threat to democracy.
- 4 (10:16) **Category 2: The "Hyper-Politics is Over" Delusion** - Ross Barkan's NYT Magazine piece from January 2025 predicted that Trump's return would lead to a depoliticized, "quieter" era of resistance.
- 5 (16:36) **Category 3: The "Wokeness" Obsession in the Age of Authoritarianism** - Peter highlights how centrist outlets like Persuasion continued to focus on college campus speech and DEI, even as a real authoritarian movement rose.
- 6 (20:28) **The "Wife Guy" Meltdown: The Most 2021 Take of 2025** - An Atlantic article by a man who was lightly teased for being a "wife guy" on Instagram spirals into a defense of his love for his wife.
- 7 (26:24) **Category 4: Blaming Trans People for the 2024 Election** - Charles Homans' NYT piece argues Democrats lost because of their stance on transgender rights, a claim the hosts dismantle.
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Show Notes
The boys catalog the definitive worst takes of the year, from the pundits who misunderstood our political moment to a guy who wants to have sex with a computer.
To hear the rest of the episode, support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod
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