Impromptu Interview with James Fishback

Something very strange just happened. I was doing a livestream on James Fishback, and the man himself joined us midway through.

This began as a stream with Nikos Mohammadi (X, Substack), a student at Columbia University whose work has appeared in UnHerd, The Spectator, and elsewhere.

As everyone knows, I’ve been fascinated by the Fishback phenomenon. Nikos wrote one of the articles I cited as a sign he was getting a respectful hearing in the right-wing press. My argument has been that those inclined toward populism on the right who are not Groypers have proved too eager to claim Fishback as their own, given his many scandals and shortcomings.

About forty minutes in, someone with the profile name James Fishback showed up in the chat. I was skeptical that this was the real thing, but then I saw one of his campaign staff vouch that it was actually him. Before long, Fishback, sitting in Starbucks, was taking questions on the stream!

I didn’t know exactly what to do with this, and it’s always awkward facing someone you’ve criticized harshly. There were a lot of angles that I could take, but I decided to focus on policy questions. I asked him about school choice, taxes, and crime. Fishback sounded more like a conventional Republican than I expected. On housing, I pushed back on his lack of enthusiasm for removing supply-side constraints, the one thing we really clashed over. I thought this would be more fruitful than fighting him on immigration, where he was less likely to budge. My view is that anti-immigration sentiment is too fundamental to populism to shift people on, but nearly everything else is more incidental, so I could maybe move him and his followers toward YIMBYism. I gathered that racism-related questions would be pointless, as I rarely find it informative when journalists focus on bigoted statements in interviews.

Still, I felt the need to ask about By’rone. I was surprised by the candidness of his response.

Having now personally experienced Fishback’s charm, I can confirm he’s very good at this. He said my name a lot, claimed to have read my book, and complimented me as a keen scholar of the conservative movement — particularly amusing since I have been arguing that his rise is a sign of its decline. After Fishback left, Nikos said he sounded more pro-market with me than he did during the discussions for UnHerd, which gets back to the idea that he is a talented politician. Fishback talked about learning economics from Mankiw’s textbook, which I have mentioned reading before. Maybe it was all coincidental, but the whole thing felt eerily micro-targeted.

Fishback ended up inviting me to come cover his campaign in Florida. I hope to take him up on the offer. Even in the likely case that he loses, I’m quite confident this guy is not going away, and we’re seeing the rise of someone who is going to be a major force in Republican politics for years to come.

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