Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman are pleased to welcome on the show author Wajahat Ali, whose new book "Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American" is available or presale on Amazon now, discusses his experiences growing up as a Muslim in America, plus offers his insights into where the right is going in its bigotry and intolerance.
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Listen, we got we got something special for you today.
We got we got we got fan favorite Wajahat Ali, the author of and I got to tell you this.
Listen, this isn't blowing smoke.
This isn't this isn't trying to to shill.
Watch this new book, Go Back to Where You Came, from another helpful recommendations on how to become an American out January 25th.
Just just right there on the horizon.
Is a beautiful triumph.
It's funny, it's smart, it's important.
We are so happy to have Walsh here today.
The Steph Curry of political commentary.
Dang!
The man cannot miss.
Walsh, thank you for coming on.
No, thank you so much, and I really appreciate those kind words for those who are just tuning in.
Like Jared, I gave Jared the book, and he said I finished it right before I came on, and I was like, oh man, I hope he likes it.
So to hear that, especially from you, means a lot to me.
Thank you.
Oh, I gotta tell you, and again, I'm doing the hard sell because it's true, this book is an emotional rollercoaster.
It's funny, it's sad, it's emotional.
Like, what a wonderful thing you've done here.
I hope so, man.
It's one of those things where you put yourself out there, and then after you put yourself out there and you read it, you go, oh, I wrote a book!
What?
It's like it was weird, strange situations where like, no one's going to read this, where I pour my heart out and like reveal my family's pain and tragedy and stories.
And then it's in a book form.
And they're like, oh, yeah, people are going to read this.
What was I thinking for the past year?
And then and then your editor is like, yeah, dude, you wrote a book.
And I'm like, oh, yeah.
And then and then you're like, oh, shit, everyone's going to read this.
And so there's these small moments where you go home once you put yourself out there.
And make yourself so vulnerable and share your pain, your tragedy, your words, your joys and your family's narrative and story.
How will that affect not just me, but also my parents and my kids?
And then I sat there and I go like, you know what?
There's a reason why I did it.
And I have to trust that instinct and I have to trust the universe that people will be able to invest in this journey.
And the intention was always to make, to have this story, tell a story of America and hopefully inspire enough people To commit to the hope of working for the American dream that is still elusive and an American nightmare for the rest of us.
So that's the hope.
And you have to do it with some sense of humor or else you'll just friggin' cry.
Well, Wads, let me ask you.
So it's safe to say in your book you describe moments where you perhaps were treated differently and negatively based on the color of your skin and your religion.
Is that safe to say?
Of course not.
We live in a post-racial society.
Where Barack Obama got elected president and all these darkies who whine and complain about racism.
They're just race hustlers.
I'm not a race hustler.
You know, I'm all about meritocracy and bootstrapping.
But of course, it's about, let me put it this way, it's about loving a country that doesn't love you back.
And it's also about deluding yourself into thinking you Are a model minority and this country slapping you in the face overnight and telling you, no, no, no, no matter how much you desire to chase whiteness, you'll never be white.
You go to the back of the bus and that type of conflict, right?
When you're both us and them, when you're a citizen and when you're a suspect, uh, when you're an axis of evil, but then you're also asked to, you know, fight ISIS, that type of The discord of the of the America that the rest of us know.
That's what I wanted to kind of explore in this country.
Well, I just want to make sure people understand that they're only listening to this and not seeing your faces.
You're not like one of those guys who's like 85 years old, but looks a lot younger, right?
You're actually, this all happened within the last like, you know, 20 years, right?
We're not talking about the 50s, but you're dealing, right?
No, man, this is this is this particular story.
I was born in the year of Empire Strikes Back, so 1980.
1980.
Jared knew that.
He's like, excuse me, 1980, I know this, the nerd factor.
And specifically, this traces the journey of the last 40 years in America.
And specifically, to answer your question succinctly, we're talking about the war on terror, right?
That real watershed moment for my generation, I think our generation, we're old enough to remember it.
I was a 20-year-old senior at UC Berkeley.
So we're charting, really, Like the last 20 years of America and how that connects to the past 200 years.
And I tried my best to connect the dots to explain why we are in the situation where we are right now.
Because a lot of people just sit there and go, how did this happen?
Huh?
Racism.
I thought racism was like the corona.
It just came out of nowhere.
But it's important, I think, to connect those dots and to see why so many of us Or have kind of gone through this journey where we have been told to go back to where you came from, right?
And so I get it every day.
I get lovely emails every day telling me to go back to Fremont, California, apparently, where I would love to afford the rent.
But, you know, also in the book, what I tried to say was, no, it was also Chinese-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Japanese-Americans.
Also, ladies and gents, the Irish and Italians were not considered white back in the day.
And so if I can take my very specific story, but hopefully reach a universal audience and tell a story of America, that was my goal.
Yeah, and I think it's really important for that reason.
I gotta tell you, Waj, I was reading this thing and, you know, on one hand, there's like the individual experience of this stuff, right?
Like on the ground, like what it's like to be a person who can be discriminated against, who can be treated like this.
But there's also another factor to it that I think is fascinating.
And I'm speaking here about an incident that you had with one Michelle Malkin.
And which is really fascinating the way that not only on the individual level, but the cultural level, we here have a conservative commentator who zeroes in on your situation at some point.
And more or less is just doing this for, I assume, hits on the Internet, possibly to do a thing on Fox and says, you know, America doesn't look like America anymore.
It's just this grifting project that we're going to talk about more today.
But I just wondered if you could talk about that experience, because I think this is a uniquely modern American thing.
So what happened was the 9-11 terror attacks happened.
I'm a 20-year-old UC Berkeley student, senior, undeclared, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.
I'm about to turn 21 in two months.
As your listeners might know, I'm of the Muslimi persuasion.
And the brown skin.
And we're at UC Berkeley now.
Right.
And if you guys remember back in the day, UC Berkeley was at the forefront of these protests because we kind of knew what was going to happen.
We protested the war on terror before the war on terror actually even began.
And so as I guess you could say a student leader of the Muslim Student Association, about like a couple of days after 9-11, Darren Bell publishes this cartoon in the Daily Californian, or rather Daily Californian takes this cartoon where he shows like the hand of the devil and it's apparently in Hellfire and the hand of the devil or rather Daily Californian takes this cartoon where he shows like the hand of the devil and it's apparently in Hellfire and the hand of the devil is cradling two brownish Right.
And so this was like right after 9-11 there was a hate crime, a sick man was shot and killed in Mesa, Arizona because he looked Muslim-y.
Muslim women in California Alright, even though this happened in 9-11, the reverberations were global.
In California, Muslim women were saying, should we go to school?
I, overnight, became an accidental activist, right?
So I go, nice, friendly, neighborhood Muslim Spider-Man, to Daily Californian, and I say, hey guys, let me open up a conversation, and let me tell you why some of my community members are a bit, like, sensitive about this inflammatory cartoon.
No one comes to speak to me.
I wait one hour, two hours, three hours.
After five hours, there's a hundred people there protesting, right?
Next thing you know, 20-year-old Wajahat Ali is sitting in front of 150 people giving speeches, and I'm like, why am I sitting here giving this speech?
Like, I'm having this out-of-body moment experience.
I'm like, what just happened?
And someone takes a quote of mine where I say, this type of Islamophobia shouldn't be tolerated.
They have to be held accountable.
It ends up in Michelle Malkin's townhall.com article.
And this townhall was, at that time, just starting off, right?
The internets were a new thing.
But you see what you're seeing, this phenomenon of this right-wing media ecosystem, where overnight Michelle Malkin cuts her bones as an Asian-American woman attacking not just Muslims and people of color, but she says, look at Berkeley, this This strange friggin' Agrabah of Marxism.
This is not real America, and they should be patriots.
And then I get this quote in her article, and the next thing you know, I'm on Fox News, and Bill O'Reilly's talking about me, and I get hate mail.
And the next thing you know, my professor, David Yagubian, history professor, takes me out of class.
The next day he goes, hey, man, I gotta talk to you.
I'm like, what?
He goes, check this out, check this out.
He prints the copy of Town Hall and he goes, yo, my grandfather was like this hard right, my father-in-law, hard right conservative guy.
He's like, look at these students of yours at UC Berkeley.
And I said, that's my student.
He's one of my favorite students.
And he goes, this is awesome.
And the next thing you know is this, this right wing ecosystem, how it works in this rapid fire moment where one talking point From Michelle Malkin and Town Hall ends up as a talking point on apparently Bill O'Reilly show, which at that time was the biggest show.
Next thing you know, it's all over Fox News.
And next thing you know, as a 20 year old, I'm getting all this hate mail that I hate America.
And next thing you know, I'm like, yo, I'm one guy at UC Berkeley, like literally just doing a peaceful protest.
I made this one quote, but this is what's wild.
Overnight after 9-11, all of this thing called Islam was suspect.
And anyone who looked Muslim-y, and I had to be perfect, because any representative of this thing called Islam, if I made a mistake, Jared, not only was I wasn't the one who was an extremist, it was everyone who looks Muslim-y and this thing called Islam, which is why you had to be perfect, and the moderate Muslim, which you still have to be perfect.
Like Ilhan Omar.
Look what happened today, real quick.
Ilhan Omar does this tweet against AIPAC, right?
We're still talking about it.
You agree with it, you disagree with it, whatever.
Donald Trump, as of today's recording, comes out with this, just this beautiful, exquisite, like just the bouquet of antisemitism, right?
And Jews control New York Times.
Jews don't love Israel.
You know, when I was there, I tried to have people of Israel, but these Jews, any more than all of Israel, like every antisemitic trope, and we're going to forget about it, Jared, by 9pm.
But Ilhan Omar, because she's a Muslim, a black woman who wears a hijab, becomes the symbol of Radicalization.
Well, I'm glad you brought her up, because your friend and mine, Marjorie Taylor Greene, had a tweet the other day.
Friend of the pod.
Friend of the pod, hopefully, one day.
And she actually said, I kind of want to hear your take on this, because it's not irrational to fear Islamic terrorism or a religion.
States.
Its goal is world domination and the death of infidels.
I kind of, you know, had to hate to break it to her that, you know, if she's worried about that, there's a lot we can talk about it, about these things we call the Crusades.
But did you happen to see this tweet?
And do you have any kind of reaction to how they frame this argument?
I'm still trying to get over the fact that Paul Gosar asked for the destruction of Al-Aqsa Mosque, which, by the way, is if anyone would have said that, if the squad would have said that, that would have been 24-7 news.
That wasn't even in mainstream news, guys.
I'm not making this up.
He said this three days ago.
And then I'm still trying to remember Lauren Bobart, who apparently has never met a gun that she doesn't want to make love to immediately.
Still, like, you know, spitting that bullshit story about Ilhan Omar and saying, oh, wink, wink, see?
She's She wasn't wearing a backpack.
Get it?
Get it?
Muslim woman who wears backpack.
Suicide bomber.
And the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene then doubled down on that.
So I'm still, my mind's still stuck in that, right?
So I haven't even had time to process this, but it's not surprising because what happened after 9-11 was the unleashing of the war on terror.
And many of our fellow Americans were like, you know what?
F them Muslims.
I'll give up my civil liberties.
Go ahead.
Patriot Act.
Go ahead.
DHS.
Go ahead.
Surveillance.
Go ahead.
Beefing up the military-industrial complex.
Go ahead.
Brown those brown countries.
And what we were saying is, yo, you don't realize that this will be turned against you one day.
And the narrative that we had to deal with was, overnight, you're the suspect.
Prove your loyalty, Darkie.
Prove that you're not an ISIS member.
And what I call the condemn-a-thon, to this day, Muslims have to condemn violent acts done by violent people in countries we've never visited.
Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene literally supports a violent insurrection and a conspiracy theory, the QAnon, which is a domestic terror threat, and she is a patriot, because she has the right complexion and the right religion, right?
So I want to tell Marjorie Taylor Greene, if you are really concerned About terrorism and violence, why don't you look at your own base?
Yeah, head on down to Georgia and talk to your constituents.
Talk to the people who stormed the Capitol, and are pressuring school boards, and are pressuring healthcare workers, and are taking over... Remember that they took the... Remember they tried to intimidate the Michigan governor?
They came armed and nothing happened to them?
Like, can you imagine if black and brown folks were like, we're just gonna arm ourselves up and Just yell at the security and like threaten the governor?
Dude, there'd be chalk lines everywhere.
I was talking about this the other day.
It was back during the Obama era.
Man, I want to say that they were calling him the new Black Panther Party.
One person showed up outside of a polling place and all of a sudden Glenn Beck rolled out 15 different chalkboards.
Oh, the chalkboard days.
Old school throwback.
This is Stalinism with Mao.
This is all combined.
It's done.
It's over.
Wrap up America.
Sign seal delivered.
Black Revolution, race war.
And that was one person standing outside of a polling place.
Well, it's the election of Barack Obama itself.
The trigger here, and people forget this, is what catalyzed this reclamation project of white supremacy in particular was the fact that a black man with a Muslim-y name was allowed to ascend to the White House and replace 43 previous white men.
A black man with a black wife with tan and toned black arms was able to sleep in the White House.
That was to many of us the American dream, but to them it is the American nightmare.
It is literally the replacement theory.
And for them it's like, how did we allow this to happen?
And another subsection of that is there's no way that a black man has the intellectual capability to do this on their own and to beat us at our own game.
Aha, it's a conspiracy.
You know how this happened?
The Jews.
The Jews are a part of this international cabal that have secretly been using the blacks and the Muslims and the gays and the vegans and the feminists to weaken the white race.
And that explains why they were able to... Oh, and also, by the way, Barack is a Muslim and he's going to implement Sharia.
Remember that shit?
That is completely... Look, you take the 9-11 war on terror.
You take the mainstreaming of Islamophobia, you take the election of Barack Hussein Obama, you see the tainting of Obama as potentially being Muslim through the birther conspiracy, you see, just like now, in 2010, right before the midterm elections, the bullshit anti-Sharia boogeyman that was created, right, which was successfully used against Muslims for Republicans and Tea Party folks to get in power, the same exact strategy that's being used with CRT,
You see the mainstreaming of that, then you see Donald Trump emerge, and how does he emerge?
Birther conspiracy.
You take that to 2015, and you see the Muslim ban.
It's a direct connection, guys.
It's a direct connection to what we're witnessing now, and to bring it full circle, the Islamophobia and the anti-Semitism of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump as of today fuels the white supremacist narrative.
Yeah, you know, we did a show last night.
Actually, we were talking about the war on Christmas and how it's basically a veneer that hides a Jewish people of color conspiracy.
Oh, yeah.
It's basically a big story that hides all that.
And, you know, I think one of the things and we've talked about this before, what keeps people from understanding the actual threat, what's actually happening?
People really, truly want to live in denial of the fact that those conspiracy theories are what promotes all of this.
It is the literal foundation of the conservative ideology.
The idea that Jews, the Illuminati, Freemasons, in league with liberal traders and people of color, are conspiring to overthrow the natural hierarchy.
And for anybody listening at home, that is white, wealthy, Christian men.
That's exactly it.
White, wealthy Christian men are under siege.
It's this perpetual victimhood.
I'll give you a quick example.
I was going to take it back to the 1950s.
We don't have to go to the 50s.
I think every American and every one of your listeners should watch this movie called Birth of a Nation.
1915, directed by D.W.
Griffith.
It'll blow your hair back.
Yeah, yeah.
Birth of a Nation crystallizes just exquisitely everything that you mentioned.
The fear.
The Reclamation Project for White Supremacy.
In 1915, that movie helped inspire the resurgence of the KKK, ladies and gents.
That movie was aired in the White House.
Woodrow Wilson loved that movie.
Based on his writings!
Yeah, it was based on Thomas Dixon's writings called Clansmen and Leopard Spots, a white nationalist and a white supremacist.
That movie was the avatar and the Spider-Man of its day.
Like, everyone loved it.
And in that movie, what they show is the following.
These blacks in the 19th century are getting emancipated.
What does that mean?
And then it's a hilarious, but just tragic montage where they show literally all the white folks get replaced.
And these black folks take over Congress, right?
Eating fried chicken, taking off their boots.
And then a white man comes this gallant night with a beautiful white woman.
And he's looking at them from the top balcony.
And at the same time, all the black men look up leeringly at this white woman.
And the camera, ISIS is in.
And literally, there you go.
That's it.
That's a beautiful image of what drives all this.
And to protect the purity of that white woman, these white men in Birth of a Nation don white robes.
And at the end of the day, what do they do?
They save the purity of the white woman because she was just about to get raped by a black savage.
But they came and saved the day and beat him up.
It's just the same narrative with a new update.
Instead of robes, they wear suit and ties.
Well, I did want to apologize to both you guys on behalf of the Jews for anything we might have, any problems we might have caused.
There's a meeting tonight.
Don't worry.
I'm gonna make sure I'll tell everybody.
Well, real fast, Nick, I gotta say, we were doing this show last night.
We were talking about these conspiracy theories and Nick was like, you know, I've always been interested in Freemasons.
I was like, no, Nick, don't!
Don't do it, Nick!
I tell you, there's a Masonic Temple nearby and there's this weird thing on the ceiling, on the roof, I'm convinced I can teleport to the pyramids from there, but either way.
No, I mean, you know, to take over the White House and replace the Constitution with Sharia is only number seven on the Muslim agenda.
Yeah, we've already succeeded with number five, which is we mainstreamed Hamas and halal carts.
So, you know, we're getting there.
You can't argue with those results.
No, I'm, listen, put that higher on the list.
But here's my question, and perhaps in the book you describe this is, have you ever had a moment where you've, converted isn't the right word, word, but like had some sort of interaction with somebody who clearly had the issues that you described and then somehow saw the light and realized the folly of treating Muslims as a whole group of people, as these terrible infidels coming to attack everybody as these terrible infidels coming to attack everybody in America.
I was on a podcast last week with Joe Walsh.
You guys know Joe Walsh?
Former congressman who ran for president.
He's like a never-Trumper now.
Joe Walsh Ten years ago was a Tea Party Republican who parroted the worst anti-Muslim stereotypes and really caused a lot of pain and damage, right?
Like, he said the same thing that Marjorie Taylor Greene was saying, and he was saying, these Muslims here in Chicago where I'm at, you can't trust them.
They're stealth jihadists.
And the Chicago community is like, yo, this is causing hate crimes.
A mosque was harassed and there was, I think, kind of violence done against the mosque when he said that.
And so I had this conversation with him.
And he, you know, we disagreed on certain things, but I kind of connected the dots with him on on his podcast.
And he says, I appreciate you still being in connection with me and conversation with me.
And I appreciate that you were still able to forgive me and talk to me because I did say hurtful things and hateful things.
I didn't know any better.
And that to me was pretty profound.
You know, and I think I feel like there's something there where you can, you know, have faith in some people doing that.
Some people can change some of the times.
But I've also seen with this new age of like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebart, they're rewarded for their ignorance and Islamophobia.
I think that's what people aren't realizing.
There's no penalty anymore, right?
I'll give you an example.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy hasn't condemned them, hasn't condemned Gosar, hasn't condemned Boebart, hasn't condemned Marjorie Taylor Greene.
When Marjorie Taylor Greene last year, last February, Yeah.
Let me apologize for that, too.
I'm sorry.
Can we correct the record on that?
Yeah.
Can we borrow it?
Can I borrow it after Jared?
I need a good space laser.
Yeah.
Well, listen, we have a meeting.
I'll ask about it then.
Ask him in the meeting if a Muslim can take the space laser.
At the free Mason.
At the free Mason.
I'll give you the Death Star on Sunday.
And then you give me the space laser during Sabbath.
You guys aren't doing anything anyway, and God doesn't want you to use the space laser on Sabbath.
So, you know, we laugh about it, but this is what she believed and she promoted violence against Democratic officials.
The House Republicans gave her a standing ovation.
And that's the difference between now and then.
Like the difference, Joe asked me this question.
Well, are things better now, right?
Because more people are speaking out against Islamophobia.
You see the election of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, you know, you see more mainstream Muslims like myself and Medhi and Ali Velshi and others.
And this is what I've said.
I said yes and no.
Yes, for reasons that you've mentioned.
No, because if George W. Bush was running for a presidential Republican candidate in 2024, he would be rejected for being a Muslim lover.
And I say this without hyperbole, because after 9-11, he came out and gave some really nice words.
Islam is not the enemy.
You know, I don't want any Muslims to feel a fear.
His policies were terrible, but he said that.
But now you can literally inspire, incite violence against Ilhan Umar and your base wants more.
And so when one of the two political parties traffics an open antisemitism and Islamophobia without any pushback, that is terrifying, guys.
That's terrifying.
And speaking of terrifying, I want to talk about this because as it happened, Walsh, I wanted immediately to press an emergency button on my desk that got you in a live podcast to talk about it.
Bat signal.
And I'll say this.
I'm not in the practice of complimenting Cheney's.
That is a general rule of my life.
Liz Cheney can do a lot of things.
I'm not going to give her a lot of credit, but I will give her credit for something that she did recently.
Which I thought was a masterstroke, actually, was at the January 6th Commission meeting, where she read the text messages of a few members of the right-wing ecosystem that were to Mark Meadows, that were saying that the January 6th situation was getting out of control, somebody needed to rein it in.
She pulled back the curtain on the difference between the performance in right-wing media and the reality and the idea that it can move and people get scared of it.
And then later on they reconcile and they come through it.
You have Sean Hannity, you even have Donald Trump Jr. saying this is too much.
Somebody needs to do something.
Of course, all of these people have now shown support for it.
They've laundered the conspiracy theories.
They recognize that they should endorse it and they shouldn't continue to force against it.
I thought that was a really revealing moment of how this situation works, how these brifters work, how radicalism works.
What were your thoughts on that?
Well, yeah, first and foremost, yeah, the fact that we have to praise a Cheney, it shows you like how we are in DEF CON, too, because Liz Cheney voted for Donald Trump 93% of the time, 93% of the time.
She was the third highest ranking Republican and her name is freaking Cheney.
And just to give you an example of the radicalization, I call the GOP a radicalized, weaponized death cult.
People think I'm being extreme, but I'll break it down and prove it to you if you want.
I don't consider them a normal political party, and we shouldn't see them or refer to them as a normal political party, because Liz Cheney, who's number three ranking Republican as of last year, the reason why she got kicked out and is no longer seen as a Republican, as voted by the GOP Republicans Wyoming, is simply this.
This was the lowest bar for her.
I am against a violent insurrection to overturn a free and fair democratic election where me and my colleagues will be killed by a violent mob.
That is a step too far, ladies and gents.
And because she said that's a step too far, look how they have canceled her, number one.
So now you have Liz Cheney using the very, I give Republicans credit too, they're good at messaging.
The Newt Gingrich strategy of using the camera, using C-SPAN, you know, claiming that airtime to spew your garbage.
Well, she didn't spew garbage.
She knew everyone was watching every cable news channel, except Fox was covering it.
Boom.
She read their own words, right?
That's what was so damning.
And it shows the hypocrisy and the entire projection project.
It's all projection.
Anything that the right wing grifters project onto us, they're accused of doing.
We're First Amendment warriors.
Let us cancel books.
We're against cancel culture.
Let's cancel CRT.
We're about freedom and liberties.
Let's get away with women's rights.
We love democracy.
Let's kiss the ass of Viktor Orban and Hungary and Putin, right?
We're against violent terrorists and extremists.
Oh, let's cozy up to the Oath Keepers and violent insurrectionists.
And it shows you the elitist grift of Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and Don Trump Jr.
They know how dangerous it is.
They know they've created this Frankenstein, they know that Frankenstein has escaped the lab and turned on its masters, and now they have to keep feeding Frankenstein or else Frankenstein will eat them instead.
So that's where we're at right now.
So do you think that the Fox News thing is really just about studying the demographics and what the viewers want and just re-engineering their content around that?
Because I mean, like what you just said is, it's clear Ingram and all those people don't believe what they say about it.
But is this the driving force here has to be, I guess, capitalism and the bottom line of what their audience wants to watch, right?
I want to say real fast for you to answer, Walsh.
I think part of it also is seeing the opportunities it presents.
So for instance, Tucker knows that Trump is full of shit, but he also knows that this is a wonderful way to try and push replacement theory and liberal democracy.
So I think it's column A, column B, a little bit of column C. It's all the above, I think.
Well, it's all the above.
And let's start backwards with what you said.
Trump is a vehicle for them.
Look at evangelical Christians.
When you ask them, why do you support Trump?
They say, he is our Osiris, our Persian pagan god, whom God nonetheless used as a divine instrument to do good things.
He's flawed, he's uncouth, he's politically incorrect, but God has given us this instrument to use for our goals, number one.
For Tucker and others, who I sincerely believe he's a racist, I can mainstream my nationalist project through Trumpism.
And then once he dies or goes to jail, grifters come in, opportunists like DeSantis, who's smarter than him, I can take over the reins, right?
And then third is opportunism, Nick, what you were saying is the color that trumps all colors in this country is the color green.
We worship money in America.
Good ratings, good business.
For business, I love Trump deregulation.
I love Trump tax cuts.
For Fox News, it gives me power and control in influence and ratings, and they realize that... You see, what I said, and Jared said, and others said, and we were seen as crazy, is that the Republican Party is not going to moderate after Trump leaves.
And I was hit on it, and they said, you're just a sensationalist and you're hysterical, I'm like, what makes you think that they will moderate?
What makes you think there are any adults left in the room?
What makes you think that once Trump is gone, this fever dream that they've installed in the radicalized base will all of a sudden disappear and people will become normal again?
I said they'll further radicalize and weaponize.
And specifically for Fox News, they have competition now.
They got Newsmax, they got One American News Network, they got 4chan and 8chan.
So Fox News is like, well, if we moderate, we lose the base.
So let's just Shovel all the shit into their mouths and double down and let Tucker say whatever he wants.
Back in the day, I'm old enough to remember, when Tucker in 2020, in 2019, used to say racist shit, he used to go on vacation for a week.
And when Judge Jeanine said that Ilhan Umar is radical and against the Constitution because she wears the hijab and wants to implement Sharia, remember she got a slap on the wrist?
Now, no slaps on the wrist.
It's free-for-all.
And that's where we're at right now.
And just for context, you know, 10 years ago, the radical congressman we had to deal with were guys like Trey Gowdy, right?
Those guys, that kind of thing.
But look at the exponential growth.
It's not just Boebert, right?
We're not talking about like a couple here now.
We're not talking about Joseph McCarthy as one guy screaming and holding up a bunch of people.
This is an exponential growth, right?
So that's what makes me really concerned for me is that it's Teague Green and Gates.
I mean, the Murderers Row, Gosar, it's, you know, For a minute it was Steve King, and it was like, well, Steve King, if you don't talk to him about Western civilization, maybe he can make it through an interview.
But if it comes up, all of a sudden we're talking about ovens, you know?
And this whole situation, like, Trump showed the way, which is the people want the grift.
They want the crazy.
It's the biggest show in town.
This new generation Literally has no actual ideology.
They have no political project.
There's nothing they literally want to accomplish beyond becoming famous, gaining money, gaining power.
Wherever the winds take them, and the winds are all authoritarian, fascistic, and racist, they'll go with it.
And then meanwhile, you have assholes like, I'm sorry, but Ted Cruz went to an Ivy League school.
You know, your Halleys, all of them, they recognize... DeSantis went to Yale and Harvard.
They all know what's up, but they also know which way the wind blows.
They're smart in that regard.
They don't want to get overrun by it the way Boehner did and the way that Paul Ryan did.
They're going to go with it.
They're in.
And so I'm glad you mentioned Steve King, not the author, because just a couple, just to show you, Nick, even to your point, forget 10 years, three years, Steve King, our re we used to be our sole resident open white nationalist and white supremacist replacement theory racism like yeah all of it and they finally got to a point where it was so embarrassing because like uh jared was saying he couldn't stop and so mitch mcconnell at that time had to publicly come reprimand him and then the republicans in the house stripped him of his committees right
and then he finally lost his re-election because it was so embarrassing guys that was just like two years ago yeah steve i feel bad I do this dark joke where I'm like, man, I feel bad for Steve King because he's probably sitting at home.
He goes, ah, I was the original.
Man, they're stealing my act.
Man, I get no respect.
I get no respect.
Like, he's probably like, I was doing this before all of them.
And now people are like, yeah, there's no penalty for it, right?
Like Donald Trump showed you in 2015.
I can say the Muslim ban.
I can call Mexicans rapists and criminals.
I can talk about grabbing women by the pussy.
And my base loves me more for it.
What do you think Al Franken must be thinking right now?
He's like, why did I resign?
F my life.
I was at the 2016 Republican Convention in Cleveland and it was on the media row where they have all the cable news channels and all that stuff.
And I'm sure, Wajih, you remember this.
Steve King had a very memorable appearance.
I want to say it was on CNN.
And he got on there and they got on to the topic of Western civilization, because of course they did.
That's his favorite topic.
And of course he says Western white civilization is the only thing that has ever done anything, which apologies to our Muslim guests, And, you know, he's on there, and as this is happening, I'll never forget this.
There was a group over here that was like, oh my God, can you believe he just said this?
And then meanwhile, the alt-right that was in town for Donald Trump, for his coronation as the Republican nominee, and the MAGA people were in complete concert.
They clapped for it.
Yep.
That moment was the moment where they realized if the Republican Party was going to survive, even for a few more years, it was going to have to merge with these assholes.
They had no choice.
Well, what they think... Look, this is what's been happening.
It's nothing new.
With the Southern strategy in particular, specifically with the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education that ruled that segregation was unconstitutional, and then with the Civil Rights Act, you guys have discussed this on your show before.
Republicans said, OK, there's a way to win over these disaffected Southern white Democrats who refuse, refuse to acknowledge that black and brown folks dare have equality with them.
So on racial anxiety, we're going to do the Southern strategy, specifically do these dog whistles where we win over these aggrieved whites.
And then as you in 1980, the Lee Atwater, who used to be this right wing strategist, said openly, you can go hear his quote.
We can no longer say the N word, N word, N word, N word.
It becomes too politically incorrect.
So now we've got to come up with different words that mean the same thing and invoke the same type of rage.
But we've got to give them welfare queen.
We gotta give them a bussing, right?
Make it more obtuse.
So now we have birther conspiracy.
We have invasion.
We have caravan.
We have Muslim ban.
We have Sharia.
We have, ladies and gents, CRT.
It's the articulation of the same fear, but Republicans, such as the adults in the room, McCain, Romney, all of them, realize we need this to get that base, but we can control it.
We can control Frankenstein.
We can keep Frankenstein at bay.
Now what we're witnessing is Frankenstein, through Trump, has escaped and taken over the lab.
And he's attacking the masters.
And so they, Mitch McConnell, like, I don't know if you guys saw the news today.
Trump is trying to attack Mitch McConnell.
He's trying to dislodge him.
But Mitch, the money behind the GOP protected McConnell.
That was news of the day.
But how long will the McConnells even last, Jared?
- Two years? - Well, and that's the thing.
I think McConnell sees that writing on the wall, right?
Because what you just said, the Frankenstein thing, I think is really, really interesting.
And I always think about the GOP fusionism of the 1950s, which is what we're talking about, right?
Where they make the decision that they can harness extremism, radicalism, white supremacy for their own purposes.
It's almost like Frankenstein's over here in the cellar, right?
And they're out here having a party.
And here's the thing about the Republican Party.
They believe the same things that the extremists do.
They literally do.
They literally believe in all these Jewish conspiracy theories.
They believe that civil rights, the civil rights movement, was a plot.
It was a Judeo-Communist plot in order to make populations of color get upset.
Just take a break sometime, Nick.
Hey, I'm the hardest working man in Judaism.
But they knew when not to say it.
There you go.
They could say it at their cocktail parties.
They could say it in quote-unquote polite company.
It was the people they kept in the basement, the crazies, who didn't have that modulation.
They couldn't go into other polite company and not talk about Judeo-Communist conspiracies.
That's done.
The rude group has gotten out of the cellar and they have no ability to modulate and they have no financial or political reason to modulate.
The analogy I give is, and you guys might appreciate this, it's like Luca Brasi.
You unleash Luca Brasi to do the dirty work and to keep your hands clean.
And, you know, and if Luca Brasi gets sacrificed, eh, you know, we can distance ourselves from them.
What happens when no one's a Corleone and everyone's a Luca Brasi?
And I feel like Marjorie Taylor Greene is the base.
I agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
A couple of weeks ago, she went on Steve Bannon's show.
In defense of her defense of Lauren Boebart's anti-Muslim bigotry.
And on the podcast, she said, we are the base.
We are the base, not the fringe.
And she was doubling down on her anti-Muslim bigotry in support of Lauren Boebart's Islamophobia against Ella Homer.
And that's the only thing I agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene with, that she is the base.
I've been saying this for almost a year.
I wrote about it, that this is the present and future of the Republican Party and conservative movement.
And when I said that last year, Usual pushback from those in the establishment.
Oh, watch, that's not the case.
No, they're the fringe.
You'd want them to be the base.
I'm like, you guys aren't paying attention.
You have to take them literally and seriously.
You have to pay attention to where this movement's headed.
And I still think there's this deliberate, willing disconnect for those in power to acknowledge where we are right now, because it would make them uncomfortable and make their relationships uncomfortable.
You know, we spend a lot of time trying to predict where this is going, and even though it sounds alarmist, you know, every single time Jared's done that, he's been right on the money.
My thought is, is that you mentioned, like, the N-word in Lee Atwater and Willie Horton and all the shit he did.
I'm starting to think that with people like Marjorie Taylor Greene around, like, they're gonna start saying the N-word again.
Right?
Like, doesn't it feel like we could actually get back to that?
I mean, why not?
As abortion's going away, we're kind of moving back into this other weird thing.
Do you see a future where it gets that bad?
Well, here's some dark humor.
And I joked with this with some of my black friends.
I'm like, you know, how desperately do they want to say the N-word?
Like, maybe, like, let me put it this way.
If they gave us voting rights for the N-word, would you guys make that deal?
And they were like, ooh, harsh, watch.
I'm like, and I say this, I say this to rather comment on their desire, their deep-seated desire to say the N-word.
Because what does the N-word mean to them?
The fact that they can't say the N-word, to them, is victimization.
The fact that they can no longer say the N-word, but black people can, is to them, oppression.
And what does that mean?
You took this away from us.
We used to be on top.
We had the power to use that ugly word to keep you in your place.
And we can't say it, but you all can.
And I really do think That some of them, oh my God, if they were given one of the three wishes on a genie lamp, one of them would be, fee-fi-fo-fum, please God, give us the N-word again.
I will also say very, very quickly that, I don't know if you two remember this, but there was that moment where people were searching desperately for footage of The Apprentice where supposedly Trump had used racial slurs.
And everyone was like, that'll be the silver bullet, that'll be the silver bullet.
If that would have been revealed, What Nick is talking about here probably would have come to pass.
They would have reclaimed it.
It would not have been the end of Trump.
I think when Trump said, John McCain is not a war hero, I want war heroes who weren't captured, who didn't lose wars, it made it very apparent for these people there are no guardrails.
The only guardrails that there are are in your mind, the worries about what people will think of you, and as a result, it's weaponized that offensive sort of nature.
There's also a Louisiana judge, a judge, you know, a local magistrate in Louisiana who was caught on her own video using the n-word a couple different times.
And then she tries to say, well, I was on a sedative and I didn't know what I was saying.
But that's the other thing.
That's the key.
They don't need to say I'm sorry or you shouldn't have said it.
It's like, oh, I was just like, I was a little high.
Forgive me.
People think we're doing this hypothetical exercise.
And I again want to stress that all of us, Understand the history of that word and the pain that word causes and I'm not saying any of this lightly I think and I've thought about this a lot I think it'll take three to five years For that word, through the Overton window, shifting, shifting, shifting, where they say, we're just having a debate.
We're just joking.
We're just teasing this out.
Do you not care about free speech?
Yeah.
What about free speech?
How come black rappers can say it?
How come a white rapper can say it?
How come some Latinos can say it?
How come we can't say it?
Wait, wait, wait.
I got to interrupt you, because I got to take you back to an era where little Nikki Houselman grew up in the Midwest.
Taking the second grade class to go see cannonball run and correct me if I'm wrong But I'm pretty sure within the first seven minutes they drop at least a couple n-words in there And I'm not they don't say the n-word the n-word did not exist in the 70s in my lifetime growing up I remember People saying the actual word and didn't not until you guys were like four or five did the n-word actually become my family said it openly Wow
No, what ended up happening was that the door got closed, people thought that the door was closed, and Donald Trump kicked the door open.
It made it clear that you could act however you wanted and the only consequences were consequences that you decided to accept.
And I think the n-word and the discussion of it goes back to the themes we're talking about where I have said that they want to drag this country back to 1953.
And people say, Waj, why do you say 1953?
It's the year before Brown v. Board of Education.
That romanticized vision of this idyllic past with Leave it to Beaver, black and white, white mom and white dads, and men were men and women were women, and there was only two pronouns, right?
Blacks and Browns knew their place.
And when you do the research on this and they say, well, when was America great again?
What do they say?
The 1950s.
And the N-word specifically, it's tied to that.
That's the weapon, right?
How dare you take away that weapon from us?
How dare you take away our status, where we can use that with impunity, where we didn't have to apologize, where we could be politically incorrect?
And when I went to a Trump rally about a month before the election, there was every white under the sun in Maine.
Young whites, old whites, bald whites, veteran whites, biker whites, women whites.
None of them had economic anxiety.
When I talked, I spent nine hours talking to them.
You know what they said?
Speaks from the hip.
Speaks from the heart.
He's not politically correct.
He's not censored.
He takes on all of them.
He doesn't care.
He's an equal opportunity offender.
And like Jared was saying, he gave them permission to finally say out loud what they say in their WhatsApp threads.
And that N-word, I'm telling you, man, that's part of the Reclamation Project.
They're gunning for the N-word.
If they can say the N-word again, the last 50 years, the last 70 years of progress is gone.
And I want to say with the 1950s, and this is something that I talk about all the time, they will use violence.
They would much rather have a society where the violence is implied or used as a last resort.
They want there to be pressures on people to conform to white patriarchal ideas, to not trouble their powers.
You know, they basically want a situation where people of color Any sort of minorities, women, LGBTQ people, they're too afraid to be themselves or assert themselves and then there's violence as a last resort.
That's how conservative reactionaries work.
They want to create, again, the 1950s where there is so much pressure that people feel like they're not able to either be themselves, express themselves, use what rights they have under duress of the possibility of violence.
Well, can I also say this real quick, Jared and Nick, for your listeners who are white and consider themselves white, People say, oh, well, why should I care?
Because this project and this movement that Jared's talking about, they also will use violence against white people.
The whites like Jared or Nick, if Nick is considered white, which he isn't because he's Jewish, so they won't consider him white, by the way.
I'm being serious.
They won't consider him white.
If you are a race traitor, there's nothing worse.
And if you are a race traitor who helps these blacks and these browns and these women and these gays, then you are deserving of death.
That's what used to happen in the 50s and 60s.
And I'll give you another example, current example, if you think I'm exaggerating, Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people, killed two people.
He killed white folks.
Listen to what they say openly on social media about these white victims.
They had it coming.
Leftist scum.
That's what you deserve.
That's what you get.
So even white folks, are not safe from this white supremacist endeavor.
And what do the fascists do?
The fascists use racial anxiety and fears and then they immediately crush any sort of labor, any sort of a movement on the left.
They make sure that people aren't paid anything.
They make sure that they don't have rights.
They take away any type of resources that they have.
It is an all-encompassing project.
You're exactly right.
Anybody who is taken over by flirtation with this needs to understand they're going to be underneath the treads too.
They're going to be underneath the boots as well.
How does this all connect, though, with the attacks we've seen on Kamala Harris recently and what she stands for?
Because she hits all those checkboxes that you rattled off earlier, Jared.
And so I wonder what that's going to mean, because they obviously picked her thinking that she would be a suitable replacement to run for president, right, and carry on what Biden is doing.
So I'm concerned about that, about what the state of the United States is.
In the face of a woman of color, you know, running for president now.
Can I mention, well, we know what the Republicans are doing, and I want to talk about the Democrats' weakness here.
Republicans are already doing the playbook that they used successfully against Clinton, weakening her up to her 2016 run.
And we know now that Steve Bannon very deliberately used both the 4chan and the 8chan and, like, the Swamp, and he seeded the narrative of corrupt Clinton into the mainstream media.
Weakener, weakener, weakener.
So that's what's happening right now.
And you see political and mainstream outlets carrying water, literally laundering this fictitious narrative against Kamala Harris to make her appear weak and incompetent and out of touch.
Democrats, the weakness of the Democrats, the Democratic base is the following, 90%, 85, 90% black voters, 70% Jewish voters, 70% Muslim voters, 70%, 65% Asian American voters, 65% Latino voters, minority 40 to 45% max white voters.
70%, 65% Asian American voters, 65% Latino voters, minority, 40 to 45% max white voters.
But Democrats are still chasing Chad and Nick and Travis in the Rust Belt at the expense of their base.
I'm still thinking that magically this Rust Belt voter who hasn't voted for them, the white woman hasn't voted for them since 1952, guys.
A white woman in Dayton, Ohio who's made uncomfortable by civil rights.
There you go.
And we cannot, Kamala is too black and too ethnic, and oh God, they're hitting her.
So instead of taking the page from the Republican playbook and literally defending our freaks, because that's what they do, they ban down the hatches and they defend their freaks, Marjorie Taylor Greene and others, we're going to put Kamala on an island.
Pretend that she's not our VP, not take her out, put her in the basement, and pray to God that someone else emerges in four years.
That's my fear.
All right, that has been one of my all-time favorite guests, one of my favorite human beings out in the world, Wajihat Ali, the author of the forthcoming book, Go Back to Where You Came From, and other helpful recommendations on how to become American.
Waj, where can the good people find you?
At Wajahat Ali, I write a column for The Daily Beast, like three or four times a week.
Now I'm going to do something for Medium on friendly podcasts such as this, and the book is out January 25th, and you can pre-order it now.
I hope you dig it.
All right, everybody.
We're going to be back here soon.
Happy holidays to everybody.
If you needed us before, we're back in full swing.
