Mehdi has never backed down from a good ol’ Twitter feud, especially with centrist, contrarian pundit Matthew Yglesias – the author of ‘Slow Boring’, one of the most popular political Substack newsletters, and one of the most-read writers inside of the Biden transition team.
In this ‘Mehdi Unfiltered’ segment, the two finally take each other on, in-person, for the very first time.
As per usual, Mehdi brings the receipts, with Yglesias even telling Mehdi at one point, “you’re a tough interviewer.”
In a high-stakes showdown, Yglesias meets the hard questions head-on and delivers sharp answers. The IRL clash takes place in four parts:
PART 1: Mehdi presses Yglesias on why he thought pro-Israel Democrat Haley Stevens, who lost the Michigan Senate primary despite massive outside spending on her race, would have been a better candidate against Republican Mike Rogers than progressive Abdul El-Sayed. “I don’t think that skill at winning primaries is correlated with skill of winning general elections,” Yglesias says.
PART 2: The two also get into a heated back-and-forth over ‘Abolish ICE’ and Yglesias’s criticism of Democrats visiting a wrongly deported man in El Salvador last year. Mehdi asks Yglesias directly if he thinks Democrats “should not speak out against the president sending migrants who have committed no crimes to be tortured in a foreign gulag?” Yglesias replies: “Yeah…You got to win first.”
PART 3: Mehdi confronts Yglesias over his comments on Israel and Gaza – including his claim that there “wasn’t any genocide” in Gaza and that Israel’s war was “just.” Mehdi asks why Yglesias has said Sudan is a genocide but Gaza is not, to which Yglesias responds, “Wait, did I call Sudan a genocide?”
PART 4: The two debate whether Yglesias’s political advice to Democrats amounts to pure poll-driven pragmatism, with Mehdi wondering whether Yglesias would have told JFK and LBJ to slow down on civil rights, and saying to him: “You just want to follow the polls… Don’t you want to try and persuade people?”
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