Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines

with Ta Nehisi Coates

9/28/2025

Recommended books

The Brothers

by Stephen Kinzer
Race and Reunion

by David W. Blight
The Sirens’ Call

by Chris Hayes

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates was harshly critical of my response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. In an article in Vanity Fair, he suggested I was whitewashing Kirk’s legacy, comparing it to the whitewashing of the Southern cause after the Civil War. So I wanted to have Coates on the show to talk out our disagreement, as well as some deeper questions that I think exist underneath it about the work of politics. What should the left do about the fact that so many Americans share Kirk’s views? What kinds of disagreements should we try to bridge? When is that work moral and necessary, and when is it a betrayal?