Conservative New York Times columnists have historically occupied a peculiar place in the discourse. They have to intellectualize conservative positions, but in a way that flatters the sensibilities of a center-left audience. This has created a strange genre of writing from the likes of Bret Stephens and David Brooks (who now works at The Atlantic) that will often employ personal anecdotes to highlight positions like “Trump Just Reminded Me of Why I’m Still a Neocon” or “I Detest Netanyahu, but on Some Things He’s Actually Right”. While this approach may come wrapped in more elegant packaging than a Fox News rant, it ultimately serves a similar function: to manufacture consent for a right-wing—and, in the case of Netanyahu, an openly genocidal—agenda while creating enough moral distance to placate the Times’ readership.

Ross Douthat, the paper’s current leading conservative writer, doesn’t quite fit this mold—if only because his brand of conservatism is a little different than the Stephens-Brooks version. For one, Douthat is markedly more socially conservative. His rise as a columnist hinged on his anti-abortion Catholic views, and he still distinguishes himself as a heterodox religious voice within the liberal institution.

But while his religious takes are quite confident, his political views present as more searching and less self-assured. For example, Douthat refused to take a position in the 2024 presidential election between President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, hedging his choice in a column days before the vote. These two modes complement each other. By playing his political cards closer to his chest, Douthat is able to create the appearance that he is carefully thinking through hard choices, which has helped to bolster his credibility with a wider audience. And by leaning on his faith, including in his most recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, he positions himself as politically skeptical of various groups—namely liberal institutions, Silicon Valley, and MAGA.

All of these strains of Douthat’s public persona have come together in his most prominent forum yet—his podcast Interesting Times, which, somewhat improbably, has turned Douthat into a liberal darling. A recent profile for Slate explained that the podcast creates “a communication line between us embattled liberals and the barbarians at the gates”; the piece’s headline called Douthat “the one conservative liberals will actually listen to.”

But appearances can be deceiving. In the inaugural episode, Douthat introduced the show as “a set of conversations that attempt to map out the new political order with people at the forefront.” And Interesting Times certainly does feature conversations; Douthat has conducted over 50 interviews since the show premiered this past April, with the likes of billionaires, politicians, political operatives, activists, and others of many political stripes. But while Douthat loves to have a left-leaning figure to spar with every once in a while, like Hasan Piker or Chris Hayes, the show’s guests skew, by my calculations, overwhelmingly male (83 percent of guests) and right-wing (83 percentof guests). Rather than a rolling debate between all sides of the spectrum, the audience has instead mostly been treated to a nightmare blunt rotation of seedy characters like Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and Christian nationalist Doug Wilson.

According to Slate, “Douthat finds plenty of disagreements” with all of his guests, and “examines those fault lines and probes moments of tension…without ever fully tipping over.” But Douthat’s good-faith interviews often fail to grapple with bad actors acting in bad faith. One recent interview was with the Claremont Institute’s Jeremy Carl about his book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart. (Carl was nominated for a State Department post but was forced to withdraw in March because his white nationalist views were too extreme even for Senate Republicans.)

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Over the course of the interview, Douthat pressed Carl on his positions about “cultural genocide” and legal bases for “anti-white discrimination.” After establishing that American in-groups have always shunned outsiders, Carl was asked why he opposes wholesale immigration, and claimed that “visual differences in many groups that are coming over create more challenges to assimilation.” In response, Douthat credulously asked, “What do you mean by visual differences—clothes?,” as if to imply he didn’t understand his guest’s euphemism for skin color.

Despite discussing the supposed negative influence of racial and ethnic minorities on “American culture” for an hour, the minority that bankrolls Carl’s work remained completely out of focus. The Claremont Institute is funded by right-wing billionaires, including the Scaife, Bradley, and DeVos families. As the think tank’s profile has grown alongside the Trump administration’s rise to power, the group has invested in muddying the waters on election-fraud claims and creating intellectual justifications for fringe positions on race and immigration. In Douthat’s theory of the world, Carl’s views might be a little odious, but they help his audience make sense of the new right.

Douthat frequently engages in these kinds of good-faith interviews with bad-faith guests. His inaugural three episodes featured Steve Bannon, Christopher Rufo, and Marc Andreessen—three guys who, like Carl, are well-funded anti-woke crusaders. But Douthat gives these characters a fair shake and plenty of space to air their views, yet fails to map out the financial interests or scandals that might compromise their credibility. Shortly before appearing on the podcast, Bannon pleaded guilty to fundraising to build a portion of the southern border wall and ultimately pocketing the money, raising questions about where Bannon’s political arguments end and grifting begins. Yet, as Bannon railed against immigrants on Interesting Times, Douthat failed to ask him about how he defrauded his audience.

Rufo, like Carl, is a compromised think-tank operative and beneficiary of right-wing dark money, but Douthat focused on how he came to harbor his own views on gutting the Department of Education, and not the powerful backers who share them. Andreessen, the Silicon Valley tycoon, blamed his rightward evolution on the children of elites who attended “politically radical institutions” and learned how to become “America-hating communists” who infiltrate and “capture” Silicon Valley companies. Douthat mostly let these strawman arguments float by. And he hardly scratched the surface of Andreessen’s heavy pivot toward defense tech—funding companies and start-ups that stand to clean up from instability.

While Douthat plays the good-faith skeptic to some of his guests, his persona recently crumbled under the weight of an investigative reporter. In February, journalist Seth Harp announced that Douthat had invited him to the podcast for a foreign policy “debate,” but canceled the episode after, Harp says, he “defeated him so decisively that he refuses to air the footage.” Harp’s book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, has been a New York Times bestseller and he has been subpoenaed by Trump’s Justice Department. Douthat responded, explaining that Harp’s appearance was canceled due to an “overcrowded schedule” and missing the “ideal spot” in the news cycle.

In an interview with The Nation, Harp said that Douthat defended “US hegemony” in the discussion, saying it had brought decades of global peace after World War II. “I quickly pointed out that that was a preposterous thing to say,” he told me. “There was massive violence all over the Third World—in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and there were millions upon millions of people killed by capitalist empire.” Harp said that it seemed Douthat “had never met an informed anti-imperialist in his life, and he was only used to [engaging with] the most milquetoast liberal critiques of American foreign policy.”

It would be easier to dunk on Douthat if he were just a well-funded operative like many of his guests, but listening to him engage them, even when they disagree, one gets the sense that he is earnestly trying to understand their points of view. Is he lost in the sauce of his beliefs? Does he think that while he is making a good-faith effort in his own work to advance a cogent, moral conservatism, the people at the Claremont Institute are just doing the same? If we are to take Douthat at the same face value he affords his guests, everyone is advancing their own politics, and he is just skeptical enough to offer a fair hearing. A structural media analysis would suggest that a “reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions and self-censorship” manufactures consent for capitalism, imperialism, and the other woke variants Douthat’s guests eagerly rail against, as the scholars Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman argued in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent.

Harp recalled the discussion the two men had, explaining that the book had come up in their exchange. “His understanding of that book’s thesis was very confused, and then he held himself up to say, ‘Look at me, I oppose wars, and I still work for elite media, therefore the thesis of Manufacturing Consent is wrong.’” Here, Douthat makes a compelling argument. It’s hard not to take him at his word.