The culture war feels like it's going from cold to hot as Republicans try and resurrect the antisemitic America First Movement, attack so-called "Cultural Marxism," and intensify violent, apocalyptic rhetoric. Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman break all this down and welcome Greg Sargent of The Washington Post to discuss these disturbing trends. To support the show and access additional content, including the Weekender Episode on Fridays, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
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We've got to not only stay in the street, but we've got to fight for justice.
But I am very hopeful and I hope that we're going to get a verdict that can say guilty, guilty, guilty.
When I first went to Yale, I grew up in Florida.
I was a blue-collar kid.
I showed up my first day in jean shorts and a t-shirt because that's what we wore on the west coast of Florida.
It was a major culture shock.
That was not something that was received very warmly.
I've always had a really strong distrust of some of the elites in American society because I think they've gotten a lot of things wrong over the years.
But how much longer can this scam continue?
This scam where we pretend Brearley is an impressive place, and the rest of them.
Collegiate Spence, pick your school.
They're not impressive, they're poisonous.
So how long will we pretend they are impressive?
Not much longer, you've got to think.
Hey everybody, welcome to the McCrick Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates-Saxton, here as always with Nick Halseman.
Special episode today, we're incredibly lucky to have Greg Sargent of the Washington Post.
That's going to be later on in the episode.
We're going to talk about, oh, you know, joyous things like Tucker Carlson, replacement theory, the institutional and ideological rot of the Republican Party.
And speaking of Nick, We have a really special development that we have to talk about, which is one of your favorite subjects, I think, which is the Republican Party letting the mask go, not even worried anymore about pretending, not really even trying anymore.
It came across the wire this weekend, and it's become a little bit of a disputed thing what this is going to be, whether or not it's going to actually happen.
There is apparently a developing caucus within Congress with the Republican Party, spearheaded by Marjorie Taylor Greene and a few other people.
It is calling itself the American First Caucus.
which we need to get into the history of what America first is, the history of American fascism.
It's very inspirational.
Oh, man, it just sounds wonderful, doesn't it?
But in the ideology sheet...
I'm just going to run a couple things by you real, real fast, Nick.
When talking about immigration, it includes this quote, America is a nation with a border and a culture strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions.
It also talks about unique identity being put at unnecessary risk.
It says under infrastructure, which is great, the America First Caucus will work towards an infrastructure that reflects the architectural engineering and aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture.
And under education it says, our education has worked to actively undermine pride in America's great history and is actively hostile to the civic and cultural assimilation necessary for a strong nation.
What are your initial thoughts on this?
Are you going to throw in with these people?
I think that they're – yeah, for sure because I'm upset that the Third Reich's architectural style was destroyed and needs to be redone again, which is basically what they're arguing for, right?
They want to have what Hitler had built and that style.
Listen, I am no – I am a fan of colonial and Roman architecture like everybody else.
But to have this as a mandate, as some sort of political thing and then directly reference it as some sort of progeny of European architecture, this is not even code anymore, right?
This is not code.
And I was just blown away.
I mean, when Louis Gohmert Has to say, whoa, wait a minute, I gotta look at this for a second.
I'm not so sure I want to join.
You know you got something on your hands.
You know, this is, and by the way, I gotta tell you, Nick, so before we even get into what this is actually about, I've been so frustrated.
I know that's shocking to people.
How little our media and our politicians have really dug into what America First is and what they're actually talking about and what this infrastructure stuff and educational stuff is about.
When they say American First, like a lot of media outlets are like, a echo of Donald Trump's slogan.
And it's like, no, America First came before Donald Trump.
So let's talk about America First.
America First was a fascistic movement in the United States of America between the Great Depression and World War II.
While 20,000 American Nazis were rallying in Madison Square Garden, America first was like, okay, we don't have to call ourselves Nazis, but we're Nazis, right?
As Charles Lindbergh got up and spoke to the nation and became basically a presidential candidate, and by the way, tell me if this sounds familiar, was talking about how the media was controlled by Jews, the liberals were betraying the nation, and that people of color were dangerous, and so we should retreat to the ramparts and associate ourselves with Hitler,
and the Nazi Party of Germany in order to defend Anglo-Saxon culture, white culture, against the rising tide of color.
In fact, they would even go so far as to call World War I a civil war of white people that was created by Jewish interests trying to destroy the world.
That's America first.
And if that sounds like the Deep State and the New World Order and the big lie and all that stuff, that's not by accident at all.
Well, you know, when the Nazis were looking around for some ideology here, you know, early on, that's what they saw.
America First was a very inspirational concept to them.
They took that.
We actually, you know, boomeranged back into Berlin.
So this is without question what they are referencing.
And, you know, and they knew what they were doing.
Like, you don't just sort of drop Anglo-Saxon, you know, political concept, whatever they want to call it, without meaning.
We want white people in charge because we know better.
And the country's always been better when we have white people making all the decisions in their best interest.
I mean, that's what they're saying.
That's what's so crazy.
Is it going to resonate is the question.
I think it might.
Well, I mean, listen, you know, we've been on this beat for a while and I don't think it's an accident that we're seeing what we're seeing.
Just in the past month alone, we have seen Tucker Carlson, who again, I'm going to talk to Greg Sargent about all of this messaging that's coming from Tucker, Tucker Carlson has come out and said that January 6th was, you know, it wasn't as bad as everybody pretended that it was and that it was a totally legitimate sort of popular uprising.
You know, it's their house after all.
You know, he came out and said that within 10 years, the Republican Party would embrace an open fascist.
And it was just like, yeah, that's what's going to happen.
The Democrats are going to make us do it.
Has pushed replacement theory, which is the idea that liberal traders, and by the way, wink wink, the Jews, are working to bring in more people of color within America and to have people of color have more children and outpace the reproduction of white people in order to destroy their cherished Anglo-Saxon American culture.
Those are the things that have been coming up.
Meanwhile, you know, this happened right before we started taping.
Today is Monday, April 19th.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, who by the way, just is really shooting her shot, man.
Like she has decided She made it to Congress.
She's going to make the most out of it.
And she's not worried about what she's talking about or how she's exposing herself.
In the midst of trying to resurrect this, like, explicitly white supremacist, Nazi-istic movement, comes out today and goes after Maxine Waters, who they love going after her.
What is it about Maxine Waters that they just love going after?
I mean, it's got to be her hair.
Oh yeah, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact she's a black woman.
Maxine Waters, and this is the tweet from Marjorie Taylor Greene, is commander of the BLM domestic terror army, a year of burning down cities, looting businesses, and murdering Americans like David Dorn.
The language and the messaging lately have been really concentrated, Nick.
They're not messing around with this stuff.
They're not pulling punches.
Like they have ventured into, they have ventured from like a wink wink, nudge nudge.
There's a conspiracy.
We might have to take care of it.
Oh, here's this thing called QAnon.
We don't agree with it, but here it is.
Two straight-up fascistic conspiracy theories that are legitimizing preemptive violence.
And we all know why they're doing this.
It's because, again, it's the only hope they have to win an election going forward.
And this is what Trump laid out as the blueprint, and they are now refining it, and we are getting the more efficient version of this.
And it's, I mean, there is no other way to project what this is going to happen until it's just going to get worse, right?
There's no getting better on this.
They're not going to suddenly become enlightened and then be like, oh, yeah, you know.
We've won a few elections now.
Everyone trusts us that we're going to be the party of the people.
That is really what they're doing here.
They are continually trying to stir the people up who would never normally be in the process of the government elections and find whatever random votes they can in very key strategic places.
You can read into that what you like.
Would you?
Fine.
Poor white people.
Go ahead.
And that will eke out a few of these victories.
By the way, I want to say about Tucker Carlson, I saw one of these screeds or monologues.
I guess we'll have to call it a... I like screed.
Screedologue?
Screedologue.
Screed's a good word.
I like screed.
It's very descriptive.
To me there's a little bit of a hysterical notion to Escri which he doesn't seem to have because again he's powerful and in the way he presents these things and what sounds somewhat rational but he did acknowledge it like we are there's a progressive notion to how our country has evolved over these years but he says it has to be slow
That's what he says and it's like and that's a fact like we know it needs to be slow because people just can't handle really quick change at all and it's like that's what's so dangerous about him is when he will say that's a fact when it's not a fact that's just some random thing that you thought about and are trying to present it as you know what your opinion is.
So he even acknowledged this past week that there is this we will get there I mean listen look gay marriage is not a bad example where it took a while, but like here We are it's not even a thing.
No one's really gonna argue that whether we should get rid of that or not, right?
I think we've kind of settled that one.
It took a long time as a big argument is a big issue wedge issue That's what we're moving towards, but he demands some sort of random arbitrary timeframe that takes so much longer and then people have to suffer with that needlessly For years, decades, until we somehow get to where we think we should be, you know, next year or tomorrow.
Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff to unpack there, but that's exactly right.
So, the right in protecting its power, and, you know, let's just go ahead and lay all the cards on the table.
This is white patriarchal supremacy, is what we're talking about.
People who have wealth and power and standing, and they have for a long time.
I mean, just to be frank, The right is about protecting people, and we're going to talk about some power and privilege, hereditary power and privilege, here in just a couple minutes in the next segment.
But they are interested in protecting it at all costs.
And the ways that they do that, there are a few strategies, right?
One is to create a cult of meritocracy, right?
The idea, oh, we have a hierarchy in society, and it's because some people are better.
And if you work really, really hard and you are one of the elect, don't worry, the American dream will lift you up and you will, I don't know, soar on eagles while, you know, choirs sing, right?
Well, guess what?
That's a fucking lie.
That's not true.
That's not how this country works.
Like occasionally some people can move in classes, but we've become a completely stagnant hierarchy.
You America hater.
You just hate America.
Yeah, this is all terrible.
It's not at all actual and factual.
The second thing that they do is when there's a call for a reform, right?
We shouldn't be shot in the streets by police.
We should be allowed to vote.
We shouldn't, you know, have to beg you for health care or raise money on GoFundMes.
All of a sudden they're like, OK, OK, OK.
Maybe you have some valid concerns.
Maybe things aren't perfect.
And by the way, you'll notice that all this is happening as the system erodes, right?
As you can't really deny it anymore that that system of meritocracy doesn't work and it's not fair and it's prejudiced.
You're like, OK, I get it.
I get it.
I get it.
But don't don't be upset about it.
Like this will work over time.
Work with us to dilute what you're doing.
Oh, by the way, we'll take radicals from the past like Martin Luther King and we'll say, look at how he did.
He would not be right.
They start actually recycling old icons of reform and change.
That's the second strategy.
The third strategy is the people who want change, they're not being genuine.
They're part of a conspiracy to destroy us.
And so as a result, we have to destroy them first.
We are under attack.
This is a war footing.
We can't listen to what they have to say.
Those are the three stages.
We are sort of, in case people listening at home haven't looked between the lines, We're straddling two of those stages right now, and we are hurtling into the latter.
And that's the important thing to understand here, is that the right always does this, and that they're doing it right now, and the winks and the nods and the nudges have all been trying to hide that they are heading towards that third strategy.
Well, we've heard the vocabulary of, you know, absolute destruction of the country for a while now.
I would say probably even in the mid-2000s, that was what was coming up as far as like, you know, like Obamacare in 2010 and whatever when they were putting that in.
You know, certainly the notion of the progressive movement, these liberals, and when they say destroy the country, they literally mean Yep.
destroy the country like I swear like as if there's be rubble and buildings you know crash to the ground from this that wet amidst the rubble you know people getting free health care on top of the Statue of Liberty in debris Yeah.
I've had Republicans tell me that when they were trying to pass Obamacare.
When I say this, I mean this.
Literally destroy the country.
Obamacare itself was going to destroy the country.
I can't even follow that line of reasoning and I pride myself on being able to get into their head and understand what they mean.
When they say those kind of things.
But we keep seeing this language.
And what that leads me to believe is that the base of people using this language and believing in this ideology is growing.
And that's the goal of this.
The Republicans don't necessarily want this to happen overnight.
This is planted from years and years ago.
And it's now coming to fruition as we see Trump as being one of the afterbirth of this.
And now we're Sorry, Trump was the birth and now we have the afterbirth?
I don't know.
And here we are.
It's now taking hold.
There's no question.
It's much more mainstream than it ever has been.
And it's a powerful use of language to convince a whole swath of people to follow them.
It's apocalypticism.
is what it is.
And apocalypticism has its roots, of course, in, like, Christian apocalypticism, right?
And this entire mindset is this idea that, like, if these people over here, if they get their way and we don't get our way, I'm telling you, it's going to lead to the end of the world.
And it sort of preys upon this feeling of persecution and powerlessness.
And that's exactly all they're talking about.
They literally believe And by the way, so many of these people have been raised up, like myself, in these, like, white identity Christian cults, where we were taught every Sunday, and oftentimes on Wednesdays, that people were coming for us.
The New World Order, a one-world government, Satan and his troops, and eventually it's going to lead to an apocalyptic showdown.
This is part of that.
It's the same story, which is, if those people over there get their way, we are going to be killed and we're going to lose to the forces of evil.
It's irrational.
It makes no sense whatsoever, right?
But it is fear-based and it is like reptilian brain, right?
Which is, oh my god, they're going to get us, we have to get them first.
Which is how white supremacy and white patriarchal supremacy has continued to take things over.
They're able to tell the story, which is, if we don't stop the quote-unquote rising tide of color, we're done.
That's it.
That's a genocide of white people.
Race suicide, which is something that they continually talk about all the time.
The America that we knew and that we loved is going to go away.
Meanwhile, America just sort of changes over time and through movements and stuff.
It's not a fixed thing, but they're trying to make it a fixed thing, which is the project of the right and always has been.
Right.
And we're now seeing across the country legislation trying to be passed to outlaw protests.
And I was thinking about this.
Now, in Florida, DeSantis actually, I believe, signed the law that would make people ineligible for certain benefits from the state.
Who would that be?
Poor people.
Black people.
People who would probably be upset and protesting right now in favor of Black Lives Matter, for instance.
In Minnesota, in response to the unrest from the George Floyd killing last year, they also are trying to pass a law that would make college students ineligible for student loans.
If they were arrested for protesting.
Now remember, you could be part of a human chain that stands in front of a highway to make a peaceful protest and make sure you make your voices heard.
Of which, by the way, in Florida they did that.
The mayor came out and agreed to a council with representation from the community and they were like, great, thank you, and they moved out of the way and the traffic resumed.
But imagine if you wanted to try and do something like that in Minnesota in a very peaceful way, non-violent, and they arrested you and you were a student at University of Minnesota, for instance, you would then lose your student loans, the ability to actually go.
This is like, we didn't even have these kind of laws.
in the 60s when we had these kind of counter protests and protests every week.
And it was very unruly and lots of destruction and lots of rioting and lots of general unrest.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not what was happening in the 60s. - I assume that there were probably some laws that sort of paralleled this thing, but it's that it's taking away the benefits of a citizen, which basically says if you behave in this way, you're really not a citizen anymore.
Which, by the way, for everyone who's listening, you want to have a quick moment of radicalization?
That's why they do it to felons.
That's the entire system.
You make people criminals, and then you take away their rights, and that's how you sort of filter out this stuff.
That's how you filter out radicalism.
You've also passed laws where, oh, you're on a highway or you're in a street?
Well, guess what?
If you're in a big jacked-up truck and you run over one of these people?
Wink wink!
Nudge nudge!
You're not going to be liable for that, right?
And isn't it weird that that's being passed as like there are these caravans of Trump supporters in big giant trucks going into cities and picking fights with people.
It's almost like they're trying to legitimize preemptive violence against you.
But there's another part to it, and I'm glad that you brought that up in terms of education, because I've been waiting to get into this for a while, and I've been waiting to talk about this aspect of it.
And I want to go ahead and talk about the fact that, like, the right, who are losing their minds, and they're talking about education that undermines love of America.
They've been pushing all of these policies and a revised history, which is fabricated and completely unreal.
It's a mythological narrative that is meant to make people, you know, slavishly devoted to the United States of America and not question what's going on.
So now, all of a sudden, we've reached this point.
And by the way, like, when you Sure.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny because it kind of came out of some random Twitter, you know, thread that I was reading about, you know, there's just a notion of like private school students, like when they get to college, if they were at the private school in the high school, They kind of assume that you must just know about them and know about their schools already.
And so one guy was like saying, my favorite thing I did in college was pretend or just acknowledge I had no idea what school that was or who they were and to see the reaction.
Because, you know, some of these New York schools, you know, we know Dalton, we know Horace Mann, like, you know, whatever.
You don't know.
You must know.
I don't even have a clue.
I don't know.
Like what we're talking about are organs of institutionalized hierarchy and power.
I mean, that's what we're talking about.
We're talking about the rich people, where they go, and how they traffic through.
And we've seen the scent of a woman.
We've seen school ties, right?
We know what happens behind closed doors.
But nonetheless, and especially, you know, I have friends who hear about it when they're trying to get into these different schools.
So there's a father in Brearley, which Brearley, apparently, you know, I hadn't heard of Brearley.
And I had gone to school in Wisconsin with a lot of New Yorkers who come from all those schools.
I had never heard of it.
All girls.
And by the way, includes students who are the progeny of, you know, commoners such as Chelsea Clinton, Sina Fey, and this man that we're about to talk about.
Yes, and so, and we'll dive into exactly what his grievances are, white grievances are, we should make that clear.
And he's, you know, but he takes, he's taking his daughter out of school after this year, and he wrote a, we'll say a screed, right?
He wrote a screed, a letter.
And I think he actually snail-mailed it, is what I understand.
It wasn't email.
He snail-mailed this letter, this long-winded letter, to every single family at this school.
I'm not sure.
I guess you get the handbook and they give you all the addresses.
I don't know.
Did he pour some wax on the seal and then, like, put down his family coat of arms on it and have his servant take it to them?
I mean, like, is that what happened?
I think he had Mike Pompeo's assistant do it for him, too, you know, since...
Their assistant was so used to helping them do their personal stuff anyway.
And so, you know, basically, you know, if you want to just sort of hone in on exactly what his issue is, it's a common refrain we've heard for a long time of the notion that our kids are being indoctrinated.
But there's so many different things that we have to pull apart in this letter that are diametrically opposed to each other that don't make sense.
But he is being celebrated in the right.
He is.
This thing has been like, I agree he tells everybody, oh there's a lot of people in our school who agree with me, but it's written In an intelligent way.
It's written well, I suppose.
The verbs and the nouns and the adverbs are written in the right order and they agree with each other.
So that's good.
It was not written on the back of a Denny's placemat.
And it wasn't Comic Sans font.
So it was written well, but let's pull this thing apart because it basically lays out the entire argument for why these white people are so upset with the progress that the country is going through right now.
Yeah, so this was from April 13th.
And the reason we're talking about this is because this has been made a cause celebrated by Barry Weiss, who used to be an infuriating columnist for the New York Times.
But now she has made it like her one-person crusade to go after privileged institutions that are having anti-racist training, which we've got to talk about that and we've got to talk about what all this is about.
And I've got some thoughts on all this.
But before we do, let's go ahead and jump into the letter a little bit in which this asshole starts saying why he has pulled her out of Brearley.
I don't feel like you can just say Brearley.
I feel like it has to be a very heightened, waspy kind of a Brearley.
Right?
So he says, you know, it's that she's being indoctrinated and that she's, you know, through all this.
I'm going to read this paragraph.
And, you know, he has this list, it's a very Martin Luther-like list of objections, right, to what's going on at Brearley and how the classes are being arranged and how the institution is being arranged.
And a reminder that Brearley is, I think I read it's like $50,000 a year to send your kid here?
54.
$54,000 a year.
- A year? - To send your kid here? - 54. - $54,000 a year.
Which by the way is more than my family has ever made in a year at a job.
Like, to send your little privileged ass of a kid to this place.
And he says in the middle of his objections, "I object the charge of systemic racism in this country and at our school.
Systemic racism, properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters.
It is the interning of Japanese and the exterminating of Jews.
Systemic racism is unequivocally not a small number of isolated incidences over a period of decades.
Ask any girl, of any race, if they have ever experienced insults from friends, have ever felt slighted by teachers, or have ever suffered the occasional injustice from a school at which they've spent up to 13 years of their life.
And you are bound to hear grievances, some petty, some not.
We've not had systemic racism against blacks in this country.
And get ready for this.
Since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years, to state otherwise is a flat-out misrepresentation of our country's history and adds no understanding to any of today's societal issues.
If anything, long-standing and widespread policies such as affirmative action point in precisely the opposite direction.
You see, you can't lead with that if you want to maintain any amount of credibility, right?
You have to say that for the P.S.
after you sign your name.
Otherwise, everything after what he says has to be just not taken seriously.
There is one thing that he says that I think is really, really interesting, and we'll talk about it in a second, but I just want to point out that what he has just advocated for And this goes back to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican Party, and the right in the United States of America, is they want their kids to go to school, whether it's elementary school, junior high, high school, college, they want them to go and never ever get taught actual history.
They want the story of the right, which is about exploitation, white supremacy, white patriarchal supremacy, to be continually reaffirmed.
They never want that narrative to be changed.
What we're talking about here are conflicting stories of reality, and the reality he's talking about doesn't exist.
It's a fairy tale.
It gets worse because I'll quote him again on this next level next paragraph if the administration was genuinely serious about diversity it would not insist on the indoctrination that's the big code word of its students and their families to a single mindset most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Instead, the school would foster an environment of intellectual openness and freedom of thought.
So we have to remember here, let's discuss a little bit exactly what Brearley is trying to do and what he is so upset about.
They are trying to create an environment that feels safe for as many people as possible, that's rooted in language and behavior.
And that is what schools would need to focus on when you have so many different kind of kids crammed into a building like they do without air conditioning or AC.
You know, they're all packed in this room, this building.
They need to learn how to better communicate with each other.
This is where we are going.
This is what he is so upset at.
But all right, you have a point to make before I cut you off.
I do.
group.
There's a there's a there's another dimension of all of this that adds to it, right?
Because right now, what we're talking about, this is OK.
So like every time that we have conversations about this and again, what are we about on this podcast?
We're about context.
We're about deep politics.
What's actually going on?
Right.
As opposed to that stuff.
So you have like the two-dimensional culture war stuff, which is BLM is bad and anti-racism is good or bad.
That's like two-dimensional stuff.
Let's take it one extra level on all of this.
For your kid to go to a private institution where somebody like a Chelsea Clinton's child and you're paying $54,000 a year for this child and which, by the way, after 12 years, I'm not great on math, that's a lot of money.
It's a million bucks.
It's a million bucks.
You are not sending them to get an education.
Sure, they're getting an education and they're being taught by like really, really qualified people.
You are putting them in the pipeline to be quote-unquote leaders and wealthy people and influential and powerful people in the future, correct?
Mm-hmm.
You want them to graduate from there and probably go to either an Ivy League institution or an institution that is specifically focused on creating leaders, tech people, moguls, all of that, right?
Right.
Okay.
If you are a public figure or a leader or a wealthy person in the United States of America, aren't you expected to at least say the right things and not go around saying slurs or saying that systemic racism isn't real?
Right?
These people are being trained to at least in the future know how to talk about this stuff.
Whether they believe it or whatever, they're getting They're getting trained for their future careers and their future trajectories.
He is fighting a losing argument because there is no way that any of these people are going to rise to places of power and influence without at least being able to espouse these things.
And let's connect this to what we've seen with all these different companies, you know, disavowing these law changes in Georgia, for instance.
So Major League Baseball, who, you know, it's in their best interest to appear as open and as nice to people as possible, and all these companies are.
Whether they believe it or not, it is.
And, you know, so that's what these kids need to learn in that environment so they can then thrive when they get hired by these companies and exist there.
And I want to read what I think is the actual one thing from this letter that has any value.
You're going to beat me to it.
Let's see what that's what I'm going to say.
Maybe it's different.
Go ahead.
You go first.
OK, so this letter, there's a lot happening in this letter.
I mean, there really is.
It's pretty incredible.
I object to Beardsley's vacuous, inappropriate and fanatical use of words such as equity, diversity and inclusiveness.
If Brearley's administration was truly concerned about so-called equity, it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets.
He ain't wrong.
Right.
He ain't wrong.
He's exactly right.
He is pointing out that these people are hypocrites, and they are hypocrites.
And a large part of what a place like Brearley is doing is what you were just talking about.
It's the wealthy and the privileged saying the right thing, right?
Oh, how could you accuse us of being racist?
We have this anti-racist training.
How could you ever say?
Meanwhile, they're bringing in $54,000 a head from the white and the wealthy and the privileged.
He is right that they are hypocrites, but he's also fucking wrong.
They're both disgusting in this situation.
Well, I'm sure Brutley would be able to say that they have 10% of their student body comes in on stipends.
On what you call it?
Scholarships.
Scholarships.
Right?
I mean, whatever.
I mean, listen, I went to a school a little bit like this in Chicago.
I went to the private schools on my whole growing up.
So I kind of know what this environment is.
I taught, I coached basketball there.
I was a substitute teacher.
I mean, I've been in that on both ends.
And so I kind of get it.
And, you know, for what it's worth, my school, yeah, we did.
We have a lot of people who were on scholarship and it was a part of their thing.
In 1984, they were in on inclusivity and having, you know, A melting pot of different students.
What actually I think caught my ear and eye in this is that at some point recently, and this is probably what triggered this guy, first of all they wanted you to sign a contract that you were going to pledge yourself to being anti-racist.
What's wrong with that?
Why wouldn't you?
You know you're not a racist.
I'm going to put my name on paper and say yeah, you're darn right I'm not.
Well, that bristled people.
They didn't want to deal with that.
They didn't want to sign that.
So the next year, They put it into the contract to allow you to come back into school, which is like smart on the school's part of you, but they went one step further, and this has to be what triggered this asshole.
It said that one of the parents needed to participate in this kind of training.
It probably was what one night two nights a couple hours here or there and that had to be what triggered this guy the fact that he would have had to have gotten out of his house and driven down to the school and like in his mind wasted two hours of some sort of BS training that was the step too far.
I don't want to get too much in the brain.
We don't know this guy that well, but I feel like I know this guy.
And I have to think that that was the thing that set him off, because that was what was most recently coming up.
And this is what's in the time frame.
He's been there for years and years.
The kid's been there from kindergarten to fourth grade.
What triggered this?
This had to be it.
Wait, you're talking about Andrew Gutmann, a wealthy former investment banker who now heads his family's chemical business?
Well, you know, listen, times were tough, baby.
Wealth management isn't what it's cut out to be, man.
You got to fall back on, you know, your plan B.
It's amazing how all these letters are like, the letters are always like, racism ain't real, privilege ain't real, signed, a wealthy white person.
I mean, it's an incredible thing.
And that's what we're dealing with here is the whole point is that the people who truly, honestly, and he even brings it up in here, he brings up the Marxist part of it, right?
The radical Marxist part of it.
This goes back to the Marjorie Taylor Greene, it goes back to the America First stuff, the American culture and education, and even this argument that like, Jews are in charge of the media and they're brainwashing you.
You should break down every segment of a show and find the hidden symbols, right?
This is all cultural Marxism.
The idea that there is a conspiracy between Jews, Marxists, leftists, and people of color who are being manipulated, that they are intentionally saying bad things about America to make Americans feel bad about themselves so they'll lose trust in America and that they can take over the country and lead to the apocalypse we talked about.
Guess who else believed that?
That's right, the fucking Nazis.
They called it the Jewish question, right?
They called it degenerate art.
They said this was this giant conspiracy and that they were coming after German pride and something had to be done.
This isn't a German thing.
This isn't an American thing.
This is a human thing.
This is what right-wing reactionaries always fall back to.
It is just as transparent as anything.
You know, all these schools and all these teachers and you're paying all this money and you've mentioned how you expect to have this great education.
I don't know.
I keep coming back to that.
You know, there is a particularly infamous teacher at one of these schools in New York that's been in the news, you know, had been in the news a couple of years ago, if we all remember.
Jeffrey Epstein.
Oh.
Taught at Dalton.
I think it was Dalton, right?
Like these are sometimes the people that they're hiring as well.
With no credentials.
Whatsoever.
But that is a conversation for a different time.
Fair enough.
But yes, but yeah, that's the other thing.
And listen, I taught, I was a sub without, I went to my school, but what do I, you know, I didn't have a credential at that point either.
Uh, yeah.
So that's interesting.
But, uh, the bottom line is, is, Oh, and here's the thing that he says in the letter, which ties really nicely back to what we had talked about earlier in the pod was how he is convinced that what they're teaching the kids in terms of acceptance in the proper language, Will destroy the city and the country.
I like how he wanted to separate those two things.
It's going to probably destroy New York first and then all the rest of the country will follow.
Again, he is just showing his cards and we're seeing where he's getting this ideology from.
And I love the fact he's like, oh yeah, there's a lot of people that have reached out to me and are telling me, you know, that they all agree with me.
Yeah, there's a lot of those people out there, you know.
No names, but they're out there.
But this is what he thinks, and it's pervasive, that language.
I haven't talked about this, but I've been thinking about this a lot.
So this will be the opening salvo of something that I'll just bring it up offhandedly near the end of a podcast, and I assume we'll have a segment on it within the next couple of months as it plays out on TV.
Do you remember when Trump started telling everybody New York is terrible?
It's been ruined.
I'm never going back.
And then he like moved his official residence to Florida.
You remember that?
Yeah, I remember that.
And then all of a sudden he was on Hannity and Hannity's like, I'm almost done with this godforsaken city.
I'm thinking about leaving.
And all of a sudden, all these Republicans started talking about relocating to Florida or whatever.
I have to tell you, there is a weird shift in not just this reality and the way that they view the danger of cultural Marxism or whatever it all is, but this idea that certain states are lost, you know, your California's, your New York or whatever.
And the fact that they are like sort of immigrating to different places in the country as they keep identifying themselves as different people and different countries, it feels so much like whether they realize it or not that they are pushing towards a divorce that they are really talking about.
You'll go your way.
We'll go ours, which is the American South, right?
And the American South into the American Southwest, give or take.
And you can be over here.
And I mean, it reflects like not just divisions in America, Read between the lines there in American history, but like divisions in like other countries.
I mean, it feels it feels like something is developing there.
Is it would you say to say that there are neighborhoods in America where black people can't go?
Yeah, for sure.
And probably also on the flip side, there's probably right neighborhoods where white people can't go.
Well, there are segregating communities for sure.
And by the way, they have been helped and everybody laughed about this whole thing.
Pete Buttigieg said that highways were like racist or whatever.
Like a lot of that stuff is intentional.
A lot of that stuff has been constructed.
It just feels it feels like it's going from neighborhood to neighborhood into national.
Do you know what I mean?
It feels like there is some kind of, as they're starting to lose power, as I'm going to talk to Greg Sargent in a second, as they start to lose power, it feels like they're coming around to the idea that they might have to change their expectations of territory, which is weird and scary, actually.
I don't know.
Maybe that sounds okay.
By the way, the hundred year projection of this would then be two separate countries, right?
That have their own laws and have their own border if they want.
You know what I mean?
I really kind of feel like, and at this point, we talked about this before, it's like maybe the Civil War should have just ended with like, let them have their little section to be in so we don't have to like, That's not what I said.
No, that's what I said.
I'm saying this.
At this point, I'm embarrassed to be an American alongside a lot of these Americans.
And that's probably the beauty of the American experiment.
But still, at some point, if they're going to try and change these laws and make it illegal to protest, You know, that's the thing about the 60s.
I felt like we've still had a connection to the past and, you know, it was close enough, even though it's been 50 years between then and now.
But in the 60s, we were still like, you know, people were almost maybe alive during the Civil War around, you know, still.
And there was this notion that, I mean, it went old, but like the notion that like we have this constitution and we have to uphold the rights of people to assemble and to protest.
Now, though, you know, so far on from those values when they were originally constituted in the constitution, like that We don't respect that anymore, right?
And they don't seem to have a notion of that.
There's no idea of how we're supposed to serve in government anymore.
There's no ideals like we used to maybe have.
I'm not sure.
So at least certainly people don't care as much about when we violate all of these norms that we had held sacred for so long.
So that's where we are.
And at that point, it's like, fine, if that's what kind of government you want, if it really is because you don't want democracy, they do not want democracy, then I don't want them to be part of this country.
Well, I, you know, I said before when we had this discussion, countries do not just divide, you know, they don't just go to their separate quarters and are like, good luck.
I hope we have passports to see each other.
Like they don't just, they don't just, yeah, they don't just split, you know, like a cell.
Like, uh, it usually turns into, that is a precursor for violence to see who takes back the reunification of the country.
So that's, that's upsetting.
I, but I will say that there has been an evolution, uh, and it's been happening rapidly.
Like, we've been on this beat for a while now.
We've been talking about this.
It used to, again, like, yes, Trump would come out and say some really disgusting things, right?
But they have taken those disgusting things and they have just, they've built their armor out of it.
They've built their entire existence around of it and pushed it and pushed it and pushed it.
And, I mean, like this Marjorie Taylor Greene, she is talking.
about a rival in Congress, who by the way sits like right there.
You know what I mean?
Like she's here and she's there.
She's calling her a commander, a military commander of a murdering, thieving conspiracy to destroy the country.
We have this apocalypticism that they're gonna reduce the country to rubble.
If that's true, if they truly believe that, then you have an ethical responsibility to stop them.
Through violence, right?
To defend yourself and the people you love.
Including this idiot who wrote this idiot letter.
Like, if they truly believe that, they are advocating for violence.
They are advocating for some sort of a radical shift.
And it feels like that's the direction we're heading in.
And meanwhile, they're advocating for, oh, we have to slow all this down.
We can't have change very quickly.
Yet, if they had their way, they would radicalize the entire government in like a week.
And they don't care about that, and that's where we stand.
And you're right, it's heading to something that isn't pleasant.
So my pacifist in me just wants to say, yeah, give them their little bubble, and let's let them carve out a little bit of Mississippi and Florida, whatever they want.
You know, have the panhandle or something.
It looks like a confederacy, would you say?
Yeah, give them their confederacy.
Maybe a confederacy, they could call it.
Maybe like the Confederate States of America, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, right.
And then we don't have to kill anybody.
Nobody dies.
They can have their thing.
And we can help.
Come.
If you're one of us and you can't stand being among people who are against free speech and a democratic government, then we'll relocate you.
We'll help you.
And we'll make this society the way we want it.
And then let the other people just... By the way, that would be an interesting movie.
Let's write this script.
What do you say?
I think it would keep me up at night.
I don't like it.
It makes me so itchy because it just, it doesn't.
But picture, let's say that happened and they had their own country.
Can you imagine how horrible that they would run that thing?
Oh, it would be terrible.
No, it would be absolutely terrible.
But that's, I mean, that's the whole point.
It's like they truly and honestly, and the more that I research history, they are so interested in hereditary power.
Right?
Like, it would be Donald Trump Jr.
It really would.
It would be like Jerry Falwell Jr.
before he fell from grace.
Like, they are so interested in genetics and bloodlines and all that, and we see how that works.
But I would rather we fix this and de-radicalize it.
Alright.
I don't know, man.
I think there's something there.
I'm interested in that, but I hear you.
All right, well I'm going to talk to Greg Sargent about this material wrought within the Republican Party, columnist for the Washington Post, and we'll be back in just a minute.
All right, we are live with Greg Sargent, one of the best writers out there about current politics.
When people ask me who they need to read, who they need to keep track of, Greg is the guy.
Greg, of course, writes for the Washington Post and is the author of An Uncivil War, Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics.
I'm having Greg on here for a couple of topics of conversation.
But I wanted to start with one of the more disturbing things that we've seen, and Greg has a really good article over at the Washington Post called, Tucker Carlson's defense of his replacement rant gives away the game.
I was hoping you could start by kind of giving your thoughts about this developing situation with Carlson, who over the past couple of weeks has both Embraced Replacement Theory, which is a white supremacist conspiracy theory that's been around for about a century now and has led to some really ugly stuff.
He's also laundered the January 6th incident at the Capitol and has more or less said that the right will embrace an open fascist within the next 10 years.
What's your take on what he's up to, what he's saying, what he's not saying?
What does all this mean to you?
Well, one thing that I've tried to focus people on is beyond the Great Replacement stuff, which is obviously extremely serious, he's actually making a real argument about democracy, right?
In that rant and in his defense of it, essentially what Tucker was really saying is that the polity or our democratic, you know, our democracy is closed to outsiders.
Now, He doesn't say it quite that way.
What he says is Democrats want to let in immigrants to turn them into voters, right?
But to me, one of the most glaring problems about this argument is that if Congress decides to expand legal immigration and admit more people into the polity as citizens, then that's a Democratic decision.
And what's important to me about the underlying message that he's sending is that he's saying that there's no way to expand the polity to immigrant outsiders in a fashion that's compatible with democracy.
It's fundamentally undemocratic by definition.
And that's an incredibly reprehensible message.
And I think that is really something that isn't getting enough of a focus.
We talk a lot about the Great Replacement stuff, but this is a very particular vision of heron-bolt democracy that I think Yeah, and it's one of those things where we don't really talk about the fact that the Republican Party and the media apparatus around it has, and I mean, I think you saw this as well, the National Review had an article, I believe it was last week, that said, why do we want more voters?
Maybe we need better voters.
This has been a bedrock principle, the idea that some people are better suited toward democratic responsibility, some people make for better citizens.
I mean, this is a really old idea, and every time that this pops up, it's always about maintaining hierarchical control.
It's about, you know, it's been a tool of white supremacy over and over and over again.
But what we're actually talking about is who deserves to have a vote, who deserves to have a say, and who is actually an American.
Right.
And the problem with that, the argument, of course, is who gets to decide who gets to vote.
Right.
And, you know, I mean, this is actually what they believe.
And it was kind of useful in a way for National Review to expose it so explicitly, particularly right at the moment when we're all trying to figure out exactly what Tucker is up to.
Right.
And I mean, you know, there are all kinds of counterarguments to this that I think actually underscore how reprehensible it really is.
And one, which I get into in my book a bit, is that, you know, Even if you were to agree that some people are maybe not as knowledgeable as they should be before casting a vote, well, we want people to engage in politics precisely for this reason, because they can actually grow as citizens, become more engaged, learn more about the world.
And to me, it's an act of incredible and very profound contempt for other human beings to essentially say, well, they can never cross that threshold into becoming good citizens.
Because that's what they're really saying, right?
They're not just saying, oh, this person isn't fit to vote.
They're saying this person could never become fit to vote.
This person won't become a good citizen, won't, you know, become civically aware in a way that will entitle him or her a say in the direction of our country.
Yeah, you know, a lot of people, when we talk about the modern Republican Party, I feel like a lot of people sort of still see it through a lens as if something fundamentally hasn't changed here, that this party hasn't become something that maybe it was trending towards in the past, but it has definitely taken on a new shape.
And for those people, a lot of the time I go ahead and show them what we've now called the autopsy report after the 2012 election, which is where the Republican Party released Basically, an examination of how they lost in 2012 to Barack Obama, and they were told over and over that they had become too narrow, they had become too isolated, too white, too old, and that they needed to broaden their appeal and broaden their electorate.
And for a while, it seemed like there was a part of the party that wanted to push things, but of course, Donald Trump's rise in 2016 just got rid of all of that, destroyed it, scattered it to the winds.
And I think one of the things that people need to come to the conclusion to, and I'd be interested to what you have to say, is that this is no longer a political party that is actually interested in winning democratic elections.
It's interested in restricting what a democratic election is and what democracy is, as opposed to growing its base, which is what we've always believed political parties were supposed to be pursuant of.
Yeah, I actually, I completely agree.
I want to go back to where you started, though, because it's an important point that I think we don't talk about properly, right?
Our discussions about, you know, how radical the Republican Party is and what role Trump has played in it are all too often framed as a kind of binary choice between either Trump was just a symptom and, you know, this has been the Republican Party all along, or it was Trump completely hijacking the party.
and turn it into something fundamentally different from what it was before.
And the truth is it's both, right?
Trump is both symptom and exacerbation.
And I think your point about 2012 actually illustrates this quite neatly.
If you think back to 2012, right?
Okay, Romney lost.
And do you recall a single Republican questioning the outcome in the same way that we're seeing now, let alone run primary campaigns against people who accepted the results and legitimized them publicly?
There weren't any, and now we've got this going on all over the place, and that's plainly a very different thing than what we saw in 2012, right?
I think what we can conclude from this is that Trump has brought his own poison to the brew.
He's added his poison, right?
The poison was pretty bad, And it had to be pretty bad in order to receive the Trumpian poison, but I would think that these two things have come together into something much worse.
And so, to get to your second point, it does seem to me that what we're looking at is a party that is fundamentally certain, or maybe not so certain, gambling, put it that way, that they can win back power in 2022 and 2024, Without being part of the conversation at all about what to do to move the country forward in the face of epic challenges, right?
I mean, here we are.
Democrats have forged a kind of uneasy but functional alliance between center and left.
They're working together more smoothly than we expected, I think, to produce these major proposals to move the country forward.
And the Republican Party is off talking about Dr. Seuss and telling people not to go to baseball games, right?
They're just talking to a completely isolated and hermetically sealed off audience.
And yet they still can actually win back power because they can win the House in no small part through extreme gerrymanders.
I mean, they're on record saying this, right?
So I think that, really, you're right.
On some basic level, it's hard to generalize about a whole party.
Certainly, in some general sense, many of them are operating as if they can simply withdraw from the conversation, talk to a hermetically sealed off limited audience of voters, and rely on manipulation of the system and disinformation to take back power anyway.
Yeah, it's the damnedest thing, you know, and it's funny, like, even as you were saying that, like, the Democratic Party has more or less created this coalition between the center and left, they've even started to bring in the right.
I mean, you know, like, I never thought in the world, like, every now and then I'll look at Twitter and I'm like, oh, Will Kristol follows me.
That's odd.
You know, like, I never, I never ever thought I would be involved in a coalition that would somehow or another function like that.
And meanwhile, you have a party that the Republican Party is, like, historically unpopular.
You know, and one of the only ways that they're able to carry out power is that we have so many anti-majoritarian structures in our country, including the Senate and the Electoral College.
And like you were saying, we have this gerrymandering, we have these Bills and laws, they're constantly being pushed to disenfranchise or at least to make voting harder to do.
We also have a party with the Republican Party that has given up on empirical evidence and if an election doesn't look the way that they want it to, it means that that election was rigged and carried off as a conspiracy.
And I have to ask you, as someone who's been documenting this and I think that you I think your eye on this has been very prescient and very strong and noteworthy.
What does this continue to look like?
Because it doesn't feel like there's going to be some sort of a, you got us, you've won the elections, you've gained power, you've created this coalition.
It feels like they've continued to recede in on themselves.
And it doesn't look like there's an ability for that necessarily to just give up without some sort of monumental shift.
Yeah, I mean, I would think, and thanks for the kind words, I would think that maybe what would be required is a series of defeats, right?
I mean, the unfortunate fact of the matter is that the system really does confer a whole lot of counter-majoritarian advantages on them.
And in, you know, purely cynical and pragmatic terms, they're not wrong to calculate that they can win back power without being part of the conversation, or I should say the mainstream conversation at all.
I don't know what brings it back.
One thing that's kind of interesting is that at the end there, after January 6th, right, after that horrible display and sort of series of major revelations about how radical this movement really was, you sort of felt as if there was kind of a window for a bit of a shift.
McConnell went out there, he gave a pretty forceful speech even though he Completely airbrushed out his own role in sustaining the lies about the election.
But it was still, for a Republican, it was pretty good, right?
He was pretty harsh on Trump.
He said explicitly that Trump was the reason for the storming of the Capitol.
Which, by the way, I think is an important threshold that a lot of them won't cross, right?
That happened.
I think McCarthy did something, although he's got to be more careful because the House is tougher.
Right.
There are more, you know, crazies in the house for him to worry about.
And so you sort of felt as if there was kind of a moment there where maybe they were going to essentially say, you know what, this is not working.
I think even Lindsey Graham said, count me out, something like that.
Right.
Wasn't that the quote?
Count me out of this.
I'm done.
Right.
And then, of course, he wasn't done.
Like a couple of weeks later, right back shilling for the whole lie about the election in some form or other, you know.
And so I think it's very disheartening that they've backed off of that.
One interesting thing that I noticed about this was that when Lindsey Graham started to try very tentatively to work the party a little bit away from Trump and then took some blowback and tried to bring it back to, you know, Trump again, the excuse he essentially made was, well, you know, we can't win future elections without Trump.
And I think people misunderstood what he was really saying.
To me, what I was hearing was, we can't win future elections without the voters that Trump brought into the coalition, right?
Which is a different thing.
It's not like you need Trump's endorsement of this candidate or that candidate.
It's, we've got to figure out how to keep that type of energy, right?
And unfortunately, what it looks like is keeping that type of energy and keeping those voters in the coalition requires a fundamentally anti-democracy posture.
And so I don't know how we get out of that loop.
They have to give up on that way of winning. - Well, and we're really grateful for your time I want to ask you one last question.
And this, you know, when we're on the podcast, we're looking at this a lot.
And we're talking about the fact that this is not politics as normal.
Something has shifted.
There's something sort of dangerous and rotten that has sort of occurred here.
And it's really hard sometimes to put your finger on it.
Sometimes you want to be careful on how you talk about it.
But like, there's odd little things that have happened.
Like, you and I know that in the past, something like the infrastructure bill or something like the stimulus spending would come up.
In the past, the party that was not in power would at least present an alternative.
Maybe it wouldn't even be a good faith alternative.
Maybe they wouldn't even expect it to really get a glance, but at least it would be seen as some sort of participating in politics.
What you have just said is exactly right about the fact that we're in the middle of like multiple crises in this country, and meanwhile, you're, as a Republican, you're knocking people down to get photographed reading Dr. Seuss.
I mean, it is a completely other reality that they are currently living in.
You work at the Washington Post, one of the most must-read people of that paper, and in that sort of a responsibility, you still have to cover politics.
You can't obviously sound an alarm bell every day and be like democracy is in trouble and we're in a real issue here.
How is it?
How is it possible to cover this decline and the danger of the moment while also navigating this politics-as-usual narrative?
How do we talk about this and portray this as the dangerous thing that it is while still maintaining objectivity?
What's that look like?
What's that feel like in trying to navigate that?
Well, I guess the answer to that is just to be as fact-based as you can, right?
There's all sorts of very solid empirical evidence of this drift into very profound radicalization on the part of the Republican Party, and often this evidence speaks for itself.
I mean, I work for the opinion section, so I'm allowed to have opinions about these things, fortunately for me, I guess.
But, you know, I get your broader point, which is that what's the right I think that's a really interesting question.
I don't have an obvious answer to it.
can maybe sound over the top to a lot of people who aren't necessarily paying as close attention, who don't necessarily see signs day in and day out of serious danger and so forth.
I think that's a really interesting question.
I don't have an obvious answer to it.
I think the only thing that I would say right now is, and I mean, you know, the people you like to read probably all do the same thing.
And the people your listeners like to read probably all do the same thing or try to anyway.
You know, as close as you can to adhering to facts and evidence.
I mean, unfortunately, we had an incredibly vivid demonstration of what's happening to this movement and to this party.
I mean, I should say, beyond January 6th, everything from From Election Day onwards, the three-month span or so was just a demonstration of extraordinary radicalization and a demonstration of a really frightening and really malevolent turn against democracy.
The facts speak for themselves.
I mean, you know that.
You're trafficking these facts every day yourself.
Yeah, and it's really hard to talk about.
I was having a conversation the other day, which is like, you know, most of us had like a civics class or history class.
We were taught how the government was set up.
We were never taught about late stage democracy.
You know, we were never taught about What does it look like when a government becomes dysfunctional or dangerous?
And meanwhile, I mean, the entire point of what is happening on the right, and you write about this quite well, is the disinformation that says, don't believe what people are saying, the warnings aren't real, this is a conspiracy, this is happening.
It's really strange waters to navigate, I'd say.
Yeah, you know, and I mean, it's often said that voter suppression as a Republican strategy and anti-majoritarian tactics have been around for for a long time.
And that's all true.
I mean, obviously, it was that the Republican Party really took a very sharp turn into into a form of madness.
And after Obama was elected, when they got a real serious demographic shock, and the 2010 takeover of all the state legislatures across the country paved the way for, you know, the first big wave of some of these tactics, gerrymandering and the first big wave of some of these tactics, gerrymandering and voter But it seems to me that while that's all true, we're seeing something a little bit materially different, don't you think?
Yeah, no, I really do.
And I don't know if you've had a chance to look through the John Boehner comments of his new book.
But one of the things that I always get, and I think this was, oh, I can't remember what it was.
There was a book not too long ago that sort of talked to Boehner about this.
And I think Boehner had a front row, like, you know, seat for this when he went to see Roger Ailes.
It was when Obama had won re-election, and he went to see Roger Ailes, who had always been a propagandist, right?
I mean, he had always pushed a particular perspective.
And he suddenly realized that Roger Ailes was, like, building a panic room and believed that Barack Obama was, like, a secret Muslim traitor who was planning on killing him.
And he suddenly realized that Fox News over the years had created its own echo chamber to the point where, and I think we've seen this, where it's like all of a sudden you have the Tea Party candidates who watched Fox News and believed Fox News, and you had a lot of Republicans who before that had watched it and knew that it was propaganda, and they sort of like doubled back on themselves.
And I think that moment, particularly with Boehner, who again had a front row seat, I think that is right around the time where they started to sort of swallow themselves.
Yeah, can I just say, figures like Boehner and Paul Ryan, in retrospect, are much more interesting than we might have thought at the time, right?
I remember covering the debates over comprehensive immigration reform.
The Democrats were able to move a bill through the Senate after Obama's re-election that got something like 68 votes.
I can't remember exactly how many Republicans, but like at least a dozen, right?
And many of these are the ones who ran against Trump, or some of them are, ran against Trump and tried to move the party in the direction you initially brought up, the autopsy direction, right?
And then got mowed down by Trump.
But to get back to the point I wanted to make, Boehner actually, to all appearances, I'm convinced to this day that Boehner and Ryan both wanted to get comprehensive immigration reform done.
Now, in the Trumpist right-wing Tucker Carlson imagination, that just shows that they're part of the elite establishment, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
But in fact, they were actually trying to orient the party in the right direction in some fundamental way, partly because business interests wanted it, but that's, you know, I don't think that's necessarily a strike against it the way the populists do.
I think they're wrong about that.
But what's interesting in retrospect is how they were doing it.
Boehner and Ryan were being incredibly careful in explaining immigration reform to their voters.
They had to tread so carefully, using all kinds of code words to try and get the base to accept that, you know, the best solution for the country is to legalize the, you know, 11 million that are here.
And you'll get a bunch of border security for it.
I even remember Rubio carefully trying to do some of the stuff.
And in retrospect... Hannity was on board.
Hannity was on board for like two weeks.
Right.
Yeah.
And, and so, you know, they were like, they were, in retrospect, we're seeing that they were kind of sitting on a volcano, weren't they?
I mean, it's really a sad situation we're in.
And now you see, To go back to where this all started, now you see Tucker Carlson saying it absolutely explicitly.
None of these people can ever be part of the polity.
They're a threat to your self-rule, you know, and so forth.
And in retrospect, you can now see what kind of forces people like Boehner and Paul Ryan were navigating.
Well, I think there's plenty of room for criticism of Boehner and Ryan, but I think any good faith interpretation of their time in Congress would say they were trying to create a future.
Whether you agree with that future or you don't, they were trying to lay the foundation for an America that continued to function.
Tucker Carlson and the people around him, Trumpists, it's apocalyptic.
It is the end of the world.
Somebody is going to win.
Somebody is going to lose.
Somebody is going to be in the grave.
Somebody is going to rain over the ashes of everybody else.
It is a recipe for what happens when America falls apart.
And it seems like the Republican Party has already said amongst themselves, America is going to fall apart.
It's going to be who wins post-America, more or less.
Right, right.
One way to think of it is pulling up the drawbridge, right?
Right, right.
I think that's exactly right, yeah.
Yeah, and so now, in that context, the Flight 93 election metaphor obviously, you know, turned out to really At the time, this was, I guess, during the 2016 campaign when that essay came out, right?
It looked like really, really wild, crazy stuff.
But now, it's on Fox News, coming out of the mouth of the biggest host they've got.
And there it is.
I mean, like you say, it's a really interesting point you make, that Ryan and Boehner and people like that had at least some conception of some kind of inclusive future, right?
They were willing to say, you know what, these people who are here illegally, you know, maybe I don't really like the idea that they came in illegally, but you know what, it's an imperfect situation, let's try to manage it, let's try to do the right thing on behalf of the country.
This is no longer an option anymore.
They can't talk like this anymore.
It's a terrible situation to be in.
Yeah, it's already started to bleed over.
We were covering this in the episode we taped yesterday.
Like, we're already seeing Republican congressmen basically launder Tucker Carlson's iteration of replacement theory in committee meetings.
And this is one of those things, it's like Fox News back in the day would talk about the New World Order but never say New World Order.
They would, you know, they would always sort of like hint around at it in dangerous forces and America doesn't feel like it used to, right?
With a wink and a nod at the camera.
But it seems like this is definitely an escalation and a normalization of that.
I think we're going to see a lot more of it in the next couple of weeks and months and years.
I think it's going to be a pretty regular part of that messaging.
I agree that that was a really terrible sign when Republicans started to echo the Tucker stuff in Congress.
I mean, that is highly alarming.
It really shows you that there's a real caucus among congressional Republicans that really sees the world this way.
And it's easy to sort of laugh at Marjorie Taylor Greene or Boebert or whatever, but There's really a real contention here and then of course it's not, I don't think it's, this won't be lost on you or your listeners, but there's a straight line from what we're saying right to the fact that well over a hundred House Republicans voted to overturn Biden's electors right after the rioters stormed the place at Trump's direction.
You know, it's a little hard to, they all condemn, many of the Republicans condemn the rioters and the violence, and I don't really have any doubt that in some sense they're being sincere about that, but it's a little alarming to think that the worldview that the rioters have and the worldview that House Republicans have, there are some, you know, points at which they shade into each other, and I think we're really getting at that right now.
Yeah, it used to be that Steve King would pop off and say a bunch of things about Western civilization and white culture, and they'd be like, all right, Steve, move to the back of the room.
And now we have a new generation that I think even Steve King would be like, these are my people.
I think that's a definite change.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thank you so much, Greg.
Again, we've been talking with Greg Sargent of the Washington Post, one of the best people out there.
Where can the good people find you?
Oh, I'm on Twitter at theplumlineGS, T-H-E-P-L-U-M-L-I-N-E-G-S, and at the Washington Post.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much, Greg.
Alright everybody, that was Greg Sargent of the Washington Post.
We're really, really lucky to have him.
Like I said, he is one of the best people out there in terms of actually getting to what's going on in this country and calling it like it is.
So thank you to Greg for coming on.
Yeah, what do you say we finish out this week without dividing the United States of America and having a new Civil War, Nick?
Alright, I'll make it through this week at least before I advocate for that.
All right, good.
So if we manage to maintain a union, we will be back on Friday with our Patreon only.
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