The Muckrake Political Podcast - All Conservatives Are Fine With Fascism with Amanda Marcotte

Feb. 22, 2022 - The Muckrake Political Podcast

01:06:12

All Conservatives Are Fine With Fascism with Amanda Marcotte

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman welcome on the show author Amanda Marcotte, author of the book "Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself" To support the show and access additional content, including the weekly Weekender episode, become a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	And of course, the United States will not get into a shooting war with Ukraine, nor should we.
	But Americans will pay a steep financial cost, and Putin has a very good shot of breaking up NATO as a result of this in ways that we can't imagine today.
	You have the largest military buildup in Europe since the end of World War II.
	How do you expect NATO to react?
	You see that we did a lot of to withdraw our troops from various regions that are very close to Eastern European states.
	We withdraw a lot of troops from Kaliningrad area and nobody even said us thank you.
	Hey everybody, welcome to the Munkerik Podcast.
	I'm Jared Yates Saxton here with Nick Halsman.
	I've got a big episode for you today.
	We're going to talk a little bit later with Salon writer Amanda Marcotte, who is the author of Troll Nation, How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-Fucking Liberals, America and the Truth Itself.
	But before that, we are taping this on Monday, February 21st.
	Just a little bit ago, Vladimir Putin, the dictator of Russia, Gave a long, rambling, bizarre public speech.
	Uh, in which he announced that Russia was going to recognize two breakaway regions in Ukraine and basically set out an ideological path to invasion and possible war.
	Uh, we're watching this thing unfold and it is developing by the minute.
	Uh, but we need to talk about this, uh, because this is, it's a developing situation.
	So I gotta, I gotta ask first off, Nick, what, what, what's your take on this?
	Well, my take, I suppose, is, well, I guess the question I might have for you, Jared, since you've studied a lot of history is, when's the last time that NATO started a war?
	I mean... Started a war.
	I mean, I'm blanking here.
	Never.
	They don't start wars.
	No, because that's not what they do.
	It's completely reactive and defensive, right?
	It's always that way.
	I suppose if you want to say, like, in Bosnia, when they invaded in 1994, when their first air raid, like, there was a bit of a proactiveness, but it wasn't.
	It was to try and stop ethnic cleansing.
	So the point being that the, I mean, if the root of this is that they don't want Ukraine to go into NATO so that all of a sudden they'll have missiles on their border as if that's going to be a potential, you know, war starter, like, that's, that's completely, That's not what this is.
	That's not what this is.
	No.
	But today's speech becomes a whole other thing that talks a lot about like this actually reminds me a little bit of like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict where somehow I think that his take is that this is our land.
	It's always been our land and we're simply going to just take it back because we deserve it, I suppose.
	Lenin told us we could take it, like that kind of a thing.
	Right?
	Does that ring any way to you?
	I don't think Lenin's involved.
	I think it does reveal something that, and I gotta say this to be very clear, Putin has not hidden his intentions.
	Like, none of this is actually new, and as people scramble to try and understand what he's doing and what he believes, that's intellectually dishonest.
	This has been out in the open for a very, very long time.
	There is a synthesis of thinking within Russia that Putin represents, which is more or less a desire to merge this past Tsardom and also the Soviet Union together into sort of a new kind of retroist, but future facing empire.
	This idea that Ukraine belongs to Russia is an absolute cultural myth, right?
	Like he, the thing that he did today is the thing that everybody always does.
	He talks about tradition and culture and ethnic heritage.
	All these things are made up.
	They're all just fantasies and myths that are used to, you know, legitimize this type of aggression, this type of action.
	This is all smoke and mirrors.
	It's not about NATO.
	It's not about the possibility of a border being impugned upon.
	This is about thinking that you have a right to go into another place, take the land, take the resources and assert your power.
	This is a power grab.
	It's a power play.
	And that's all it's been from the very beginning.
	And it's been completely telegraphed for decades.
	This hasn't been hidden.
	They've always said that they believe that the Western order led by the United States of America was a crumbling empire, that there was going to come a moment in which they could strike back and take power for themselves.
	And it was going to involve taking Ukraine.
	It was going to be setting up a brand new Russian sphere of influence, which is not going to be just Ukraine.
	It's going to be pressure on all these former Soviet states.
	The question and the answer is becoming more and more obvious with every breaking day.
	The question has been, when would Putin do this?
	When would he feel like America was on the ropes enough to try and pull out something that he's been planning for years and years?
	And the answer seems to be, as this develops, that he feels like this is a pretty good time to go ahead and try and start this process.
	And this is all again rooted in the notion that like they deserve Ukraine and like all these things like even to hear Putin today Sort of disparage the democracy that is that's been growing in Ukraine with the democratically elected President is insane and it's exactly what you hear the right say now like you will hear right-wing pundits and people Convinced that like Ukraine is not really a democracy and it's just right for Russia to come and take over and
	The sheer Putin's description of like Ukrainians stealing gas from Russia is another one of these ridiculous notions that like as if everything in Ukraine belongs to Russia and whatever they're doing is not sanctioned.
	It's not recognized.
	And so they're just stealing stuff from us.
	Anyway, we're just going to put an end to that.
	It's dangerous and it's going to lead us into some sort of conflict.
	I don't know how widespread this is going to be or how intense this is going to be aside from us sending arms over to them and let the Ukrainians fight.
	Do you think that that's going to become an even bigger issue if it becomes a war?
	I have no idea at this point.
	I gotta be honest.
	The problem here, and this is going to be a larger conversation that we're going to have to have as time rolls on, and we've already started having it, We've been told that something like this was impossible.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, we were told, like, Vladimir Putin, yeah, he may be an authoritarian dictatorial thug, but don't worry, we've got this taken care of.
	He's not going to invade other countries.
	He's not going to create war.
	He's in the global market, right?
	And whenever you're all in a global market and you all work together, these things will never happen.
	You'll never have these moments of aggression.
	Right.
	That was a lie.
	First and foremost, that was never, ever true.
	There was always going to come a moment where somebody broke this global order.
	So what that means is not only are we in uncharted waters, like it's almost impossible at this point to predict what will happen.
	Right.
	Like this could be a moment.
	Where this linguistic, philosophical game that Putin and the people around him are playing, like you just said, like, whose resources are they, right?
	Whose land is it?
	Oh, we are culturally connected, and that's more important than democratic developments or whatever.
	Like, this is all bullshit, right?
	It's just fantasies and fictions and mythologies.
	That doesn't tell us where this thing's going to go.
	Like, Russia has now said that they recognize these breakaway regions, which gives them, quote-unquote, a legitimate reason to get involved in this thing.
	Well, the moment that that global order starts breaking down, right, and all of a sudden it's like, oh, you're not going to do that because you might suffer economic sanctions.
	Well, guess what?
	Those economic sanctions then hurt everybody else as well because of the global system.
	Well, all of a sudden, you come into what I'm calling a malleable moment, which is where Literally anything could happen, like literally.
	I mean all it takes at this point and the problem with Ukraine is you've got two groups of people.
	You've got separatists and you've got people in Ukraine who are fighting these separatists.
	They're shelling each other.
	They're firing rounds at each other.
	They're setting off explosions.
	God knows at any given moment what that could lead to.
	God knows what happens when all of a sudden tensions start ratcheting up, if a country will get involved.
	You know, an outside actor.
	God knows if the next thing you know, like this global geopolitical chess game, the type that, you know, assholes like Kissinger love to play, you never know.
	Because we're not supposed to be doing this.
	This isn't supposed to be possible in a neoliberal global order.
	Now all of a sudden, All bets are kind of off.
	If he goes into Ukraine, all of a sudden now you're playing a game where things can escalate.
	And I've got bad news for everybody.
	When these orders are created, and when the powerful think that they have created a permanent world order, when they fall apart, Nick, they fall apart hard.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, because those moving pieces suddenly fall in ways that they don't know.
	So it's almost impossible to predict what is actually going to happen here.
	Well, I mean, at the very least, we could say, well, these are the three scenarios that will happen, right?
	I would say you could pose a few of those things that would probably be reasonable.
	But here's what's interesting to me, is that you have to imagine there's an X amount of the percentage of motivation for Putin is to, you know, cause the United States pain, right?
	You know, more and more strife and eventually, you know, the falling apart of the United States like Russia or like the Soviet Union went through.
	So there's 20%, 30%, whatever it is, that's always the underlying thing with him is he's trying to figure that out.
	So this might explain a little bit about why he's doing it now.
	Because again, we brought this up a few times ago, was, you know, why wouldn't he have done it when Trump was in office and he would have probably received no blowback from the United States?
	But if you want to think about this as, you know, for maximum inflicting of, you know, internal strife of the country, this would be a better time because then it really shows, you know, a guy like Biden is weak, you know, if it doesn't go right.
	But either way, it doesn't go right, right?
	Biden can do everything he's supposed to do and this thing can completely fall apart anyway.
	And it all goes towards I just can't get over how the right has embraced Russia.
	I cannot get over that and how every time I think I never would have thought that we'd have a belief in science that cuts through basically the right and the left ideologies of politically here.
	I mean, the bingo card never had the right supporting Russia in an invasion of a sovereign country next door to them that wants to join NATO.
	But like, is the NATO thing even... because I guess the other point is, if they join NATO, then it's all bets are off.
	Putin would never be able to invade.
	But as far as I could tell, the NATO thing was always just sort of a very distant promise that never was necessarily going to happen.
	Certainly not like in the next couple of years, right?
	NATO, to be honest, had turned into kind of like the Freemasons almost.
	You know, back in the day, the Masons would meet and they would talk about like how to change society.
	And, you know, it was like this big influential group of people who met in private.
	And now it's just like, you know, a bunch of guys hanging out on the first Wednesday of the month.
	And NATO is sort of that, or it became that.
	It's this old groaning structure and this idea that they, you know, Ukraine was going to come in and somehow or another threaten Russia.
	And I think that was a, that's just a very useful fantasy and story.
	And when you talk about this idea, I, man, I want to go back to the 1980s to little Jared Yates Sexton watching Rocky IV and getting pumped up about winning the Cold War in a boxing match.
	And explain at some point there would be a bunch of Americans who are rooting for a, like, neo-Soviet takeover in Europe.
	Like, because that's, it's nuts.
	But it, the reason why it's happening now is because it, Trump was one of the methods in which this poison got distributed into the bloodstream, right?
	All of a sudden this authoritarian nature in the right was activated and accelerated And all of a sudden you look up and now you have, and this is a really terrible thing that we have to talk about, you have a possible fifth column in the United States of America right now that prefers Vladimir Putin to Joe Biden.
	It prefers Russia to the Democratic Party.
	I mean, they sell t-shirts saying this.
	The polls tell us this over and over.
	I don't know what the response will be, but again, and this is a thing that we have to remember, We've been told a geopolitical fantasy that there are right answers and wrong answers, right?
	There's one right move, one wrong move.
	They're all bad.
	They're all bad here.
	Like, I'm not sitting here telling you that I think that we should have boots on the ground having a full-scale war in Ukraine.
	I also don't think just looking the other way as Russia invades Ukraine is great.
	Every move here is bad.
	They're all terrible.
	And that's because Vladimir Putin doesn't play games that are left to chance.
	That's that's he has elections.
	But the only reason he has elections is because he knows what will happen in the election.
	This is a master manipulator in that regard.
	And we have been we've not just been backed into a corner.
	We've been backed into like one corner with a bayonet in our face and barbed wire around us.
	I mean, it is it is a really, really disadvantageous, disadvantageous Disadvantageous?
	What's the word?
	Disadvant... I have read that for years and I've never said it out loud.
	It's just simply not advantageous.
	It's not advantageous is what it is.
	This is most definitely not an advantageous situation.
	I'll just say that.
	Right.
	And again, just massive strife and pushing us more toward... And again, the idea that an impossible invasion of Ukraine of all places, it's like how much do we have to persecute them now?
	First we had Trump trying to shake them down.
	For political, you know, capital against Biden during the election.
	They had to get him impeached for that.
	Now here we are.
	They're stuck in the middle again.
	I would hate to be, you know, Zelensky right now having to deal with all this either.
	He's not a seasoned politician who's been there for decades and knows how to really navigate this.
	In fact, I believe he was meeting with Anthony Blinken maybe like in Munich.
	And it's like, I was thinking to myself, this was a few days ago, it's like, is he even going to go back?
	Like, is he going to risk trying to get back into the country while this is all going on right now?
	It's crazy.
	I mean, we were talking about maybe going to, you know, visit Europe this summer with my family.
	And I'm like, I don't know how great it is.
	I mean, listen, Italy is not very close to Ukraine, but it's a lot closer than where I am now.
	Well, I'm glad that we have landed on the real victim in all of this, which is the Haussmann family vacation plans.
	It is.
	It's truly the first world problems.
	But I will say, Putin, Zelensky, Biden, Trump.
	We're talking about the so-called, you know, actors of history.
	The thing here that's terrible is you have the Ukrainians.
	Who have been absolutely brutalized, kept in this terrible environment constantly.
	But you've also got the people who are going to have to go to war.
	You've got the people in Russia who are being sent into this situation.
	You have a lot of lives and a lot of livelihoods that are going to be interrupted.
	It's an absolute tragedy, is what it is.
	All right, everybody, we're going to come back in just a second.
	We're going to keep following this story.
	But for right now, we're going to go talk to Amanda Marcotte, who is a senior political writer at Salon and the author of Troll Nation, How the Right Became Trump Worshipping Monsters Set on Ratfucking Liberals, America and the Truth Itself.
	We'll be right back.
	Hey, everybody, we are back, and I got to tell you, you are in for a real treat.
	We've got Amanda Marcotte, who is a senior political writer at Salon and the author of Troll Nation.
	Amanda, thanks for joining us.
	"Trump Worshiping Monsters Set on Rat Fucking Liberals: "America and the Truth Itself." Hardly a better title to be found out there in the world.
	Amanda, thanks for joining us. - Thanks for having me. - So this is overdue, and there are so many things to go over, But we've been talking about in the opening of the show, and we'd be remiss if we didn't ask you, what are your reactions so far on this developing situation in Ukraine?
	Vladimir Putin coming out today saying he's going to recognize two of these breakaway regions and this possibility of war on the horizon.
	How are you feeling about all this?
	I mean, it's just tough to know.
	Like, I'm far from an expert on international politics.
	Obviously, I just don't trust anything Vladimir Putin says.
	He's obviously just looking for the thinnest pretext possible, just any pretext to invade Ukraine.
	And I just feel that at least the coverage I've been seeing makes me feel like this is almost inevitable.
	And I feel Deeply sorry for Joe Biden and everyone in the White House, because it is an open question to me of whether or not Putin would have felt powerful enough to do this if he hadn't had four years of Trump setting him up for it, you know?
	I mean, maybe.
	Well, and on that note, I just want to ask, because, you know, something that we've been following a lot in our coverage has been This Putinization within the United States, in which the Republican Party has just lauded him.
	Fox News has raised up Vladimir Putin as some sort of a counterbalance to Joe Biden and Barack Obama for years.
	They've been laying the foundation for this sort of illiberal authoritarianism.
	To the point where if this does come to pass, it feels like we'll be looking at what I described more or less earlier is almost a fifth column in this country among Republicans.
	Do you see the same thing and do you have the same sort of concerns?
	Yeah, and it worries me a lot because I think it would be one thing if Russia was invading Ukraine in some kind of previous prior to Trump time, I think.
	But now we definitely have a fifth column in the U.S.
	We have an international rising fascist movement and these are the kind of circumstances for which world wars do break out because this isn't about just two countries kind of fighting.
	It's not about a country that falls out of the NATO alliance even if only by Putin getting in there before they they had a chance to join NATO and avoiding a situation where we had to defend them.
	And yet I don't.
	This is one of those things where it's like I can't see a clear path to that because the situation is so complicated.
	But all these pieces are kind of moving in different ways that You can see this sort of thing happening in World War I. You can see this sort of thing happening in World War II.
	You can see this happening in the Cold War.
	Just a lot of different pieces on the board kind of moving in different directions, a lot of different agendas.
	And that can lead to very, very serious situations.
	Well, you know, you mentioned the fascistic movement that's growing in America, and I'm even trying to picture the typical, you know, male who's wearing the t-shirt that says, I'd rather, you know, have Putin than a Democrat or something in the White House, whatever that is.
	You have to imagine a lot of those people have some sort of deep-rooted, you know, John Wayne version of like what America is supposed to be.
	But like, I wonder if you have insight into how do you get so twisted that you're going to embrace someone like Putin Well, yeah, because those people have always been in the United States.
	still feel like you're some sort of a patriot.
	Have you been able to mix those two together in your head?
	Well, yeah, because those people have always been in the United States.
	I mean, if you look at the Madison Square Garden fascist rally that happened prior to World War II, there were a lot of German Nazi speakers at it, but then they were also waving the American flag and singing American songs and trying to align fascism but then they were also waving the American flag and singing American songs and trying to align fascism with American patriotism, even And, you know, we've always had an anti-democratic movement in this country.
	We had the people that rebelled in the Confederacy and started the Civil War.
	You know, we had The southern whites that rejected the right of black Americans to vote.
	And over and over again, we've had these problems and these people have always wrapped themselves in the flag, even when they were segregating from the rest of the country.
	So I mean, that's just how these that's just kind of how authoritarianism works, right?
	It steals the symbols of the larger culture for its agenda.
	You know, the damnedest thing that I found was the story of, like, Vichy France.
	And prior to the outbreak of World War II, you actually had a bunch of, like, French right-wing anti-democratic authoritarian movements.
	And they were thrilled that France lost.
	And was invaded and they welcome the Nazis and they wanted nothing more to than to collaborate with them.
	But meanwhile, they had been wrapping themselves in the flag because it's I mean, speaking to what Amanda's talking about, it's not about patriotism.
	It's about what the country can do for you.
	Right.
	It's it's it's whether or not the country like serves your interest.
	Does that sound right?
	Yeah, I mean, you and I think of French patriotism as, like, the revolution and Bastille Day and everything, but they've also always had this, like, small group of people that were monarchists, that were ready to switch over to fascism, that felt like they were speaking to a deeper, truer France.
	And, you know, in a sense, like, these kinds of fights are always a definitional.
	It's preposterous to me, this idea that the United States of America could be A not-democracy, we were founded as one, but the thing is, if it does fall in this way, they will still be waving the stars and bars, so it's definitely a kind of situation like that.
	Are you trying to tell me that there are people in France who would watch Les Mis and be appalled by what side they're telling the story from?
	I don't know nowadays, but certainly up until at least World War II.
	Wow.
	But you're right.
	I have a feeling we're getting closer to that situation here, right, in some weird way.
	Everything seems so backwards to me that it's hard to wrap my head around.
	I had an illuminating conversation with somebody who appears to be sane, but on the right, who, you know, had the litany of things on Friday, which was, you know, masks don't work.
	You know, the The profound effect it has on kids because they can't see the lower half of people's faces psychologically in their development.
	It's devastating.
	I mean it kept going on and on and I just it's almost like to me what it's like maybe that's how you felt when you're writing the book.
	It kind of feels like you want to go like you're going to a zoo when you're going to observe people in the wild and see how they behave when they're speaking freely.
	Is that how it feels like to you?
	Oh, to an extent.
	I mean, I grew up in right-wing America, so these people never seem that foreign to me.
	It's my family.
	It's like the people I grew up around.
	So how they think and what they're doing is never that mysterious to me.
	And in fact, what breaks my heart about this is one of the reasons as soon as Trump kind of, as soon as Trump won, I was really, really worried we would end up in this place is because Not that I think the people that I grew up around are fascist necessarily, but I could see that they would go that way if that's what it took, right?
	That they were never going to stand up for democracy.
	And sure enough, I think that's kind of where we are.
	Yeah.
	And if you listen to them, when I first realized it was back in 2003 in the run up to the Iraq War, And I started to realize that like the the worst tendencies of my family, because I grew up in the same sort of environment.
	I grew up in a very, very poor, conservative, rural area.
	And what I noticed was that those inherent prejudices and problems, all of a sudden, when you entered into the realm of the possible Iraq war, you brought in September 11th.
	All of a sudden you started talking about executing people.
	You started talking about dropping bombs on other countries, eliminating populations, just killing innocent people left and right.
	And I feel like and I would love to hear you talk about this.
	I feel like the idea of an America that doesn't have that has been a fantasy all along.
	And it's just been sort of a paving over like the very, very real and obvious things that I think people like you and me have seen and pretending that that's either not real or so isolated that it can never have any sort of momentum in the body politic, but it turns out that there are a lot of people who feel this way, and it turns out that America has always had this, and it's always been a thing that we've had to fight against.
	Yeah, I mean, you have, you go back to Andrew Jackson, and you see that mentality there.
	Obviously, it was what drove the Civil War.
	I think a lot of people don't understand that the KKK, which was a fascist party, was an actual political party in the United States.
	It never had much representation in Congress, but it was very powerful on state legislative levels.
	Obviously, Donald Trump's father got arrested at a Klan parade.
	It turned into a riot so it's always been there and it takes on different kind of faces and in fact I would say one of the things that authoritarianism, fascism, whatever you want to call it is very good at is kind of re-skinning itself for every era and so people can kind of tell themselves it's different and it's not different at all.
	I'm kind of curious, historically then, because I think at some point after enough time, maybe, you know, from the 70s, 80s, whatever it was, you kind of got the sense that we were living in a country that really we're not really living in, that Trump allowed us to really, it became clear.
	So I guess my question is, throughout history in the United States, have we always been this close, razor thin, to falling into this kind of situation, depending on who happened to be in the White House every four years?
	I don't think so because like and also in a lot of ways we're still not in a way which is like the majority of people have never voted for Trump.
	The majority of Americans hate Donald Trump.
	The majority of this country and in fact I would say one of the reasons that this kind of fascist movement is growing in power and strength and fury is because more than any time in history they recognize that they are the minority and that yeah they're a shrinking minority and like
	You know, just like Putin is making his move on Ukraine, because in a lot of ways this is his last chance, I think that here right-wing authoritarianism is rising for the same reason, which is they feel it's now or never.
	Either they seize power or they will just be outvoted till the end of time.
	It's interesting because I think weirdly the fact that conservatives were able to have legitimate power in the past somewhat had a moderating force on them but now they're just they feel like they're losing even when they're winning because of like all these kind of social cultural reasons.
	And that's driving, I think, a lot of this radicalization.
	Would you argue that that also is why Trump was so crucial to this melting pot of things?
	Because it feels so desperate to them.
	Without him, during those four years, this is what really opened up the floodgates.
	Does that sound fair?
	Yeah, I mean...
	It's always tough to say I'm usually kind of repulsed by this like Notion that it was either one thing allowed it to happen.
	Maybe it would have been somebody else but Trump, but he does have this kind of Sociopathic and ability to bring out the worst in people and that that certainly didn't help things Yeah, and I think along with that and and I wanted to talk about this in a second, you know fascism authoritarianism
	It's it's always this state of mind that also includes Constant abuse and warfare at every level of society Everything has to become a battle and a life-or-death apocalyptic struggle and it has to be recognized that everyone has to suffer But you have to quote-unquote suffer for the right reasons, right?
	And I was really interested in an article that you wrote that I thought was It really kind of stopped me in my tracks because when we talk about When we talk about masks, we talk about the pandemic, we talk about education, we talk about all these things.
	So many people who write about this, it's like a bloodless, like, technocratic conversation about who does what and what legislation does whatever.
	But I thought you nailed it in Salon.
	You had said that this entire anti-vaccine movement was child abuse, which I think is really, really an important thing because on so many levels now, You know, I talk to students, my students and other students, and I talk to teachers.
	I read these articles.
	I read these cases.
	Schools are battlegrounds now.
	And these public arena debates about vaccines and mask mandates, you have kids who are, they're being abused.
	They're going through trauma consistently.
	They're being betrayed by their parents in a political battle.
	I think that's going to have long term consequences.
	And I think we're already starting to see that, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, I think it's like you said, it's almost easier to think about it, not think about it in those ways, because it's so scary when we think about it.
	But when I say that they feel like they're losing, even when they're winning, it comes down to that.
	It's the sense that they've lost the Debate they've lost the kind of cultural struggle.
	And so the only way to sort of reassert themselves is just through sheer brute force.
	And it's not a coincidence that the schools have become the battleground because what are we debating really if not the future and like who owns the future right and who and so much of of that just kind of symbolically plays out in like This space of like childhood and family and all these other things.
	And it's like, the kind of authoritarian right has always been really hostile to public education because, and I don't know if you guys remember how angry they were in the 90s when Hillary Clinton wrote this extremely innocent book called It Takes a Village to raise a child.
	They're going to take your children.
	Yeah, but the profound anger at that moment really kind of drove home like what's going on with a lot of these people, which is one of the appeals of authoritarianism is it promises to a certain kind of man the assertion of every man is his castle, that the idea that this like patriarchal authority over the family is absolute
	It allows every person, every man who's just an ordinary guy, just with a job and a little house, to feel like a king because he's the ultimate authority in his little house and that the family is the ultimate building block of society.
	And so when you deny that, when you say actually citizens matter more, that individuals matter more, that every member of a family is a person before they're a member of a family, right?
	I'm not saying you're not a member of a family, it's just, you know, a wife, a child, they're not property, they are people.
	And their personhood comes before their relationship to the husband-father figure, right?
	The patriarchal figure.
	that becomes a, you know, that's a very serious and I think central point of contention that is always talked around, but very rarely directly because everybody starts rolling their eyes and thinking that you're sounding like a ridiculous academic feminist.
	But I think, you know, You know, when we think about the public school as a symbol of the idea that society has both an obligation and a right to have a place in a child's rearing and it's not just daddy's choice.
	You can kind of see where that contention point kind of comes up.
	Well, and that patriarchal control is so essential to what's growing.
	You know, we keep talking about it on this podcast that, you know, Trump was a symptom of something larger and more or less was a bulldozer that allowed people to enter.
	And now they're reverse engineering it for this authoritarianism, this liberalism.
	Of course, we have this growing national conservative movement, which is just the ideological intellectualization of this, these liberal ideas.
	It's not a coincidence that they're talking about, you know, getting out of the global order or whatever, but they're also going ahead and bracing it around the idea of masculinity, right?
	That men can't be men anymore and that they need control over this stuff.
	Meanwhile, part of their plank is the women, they should be allowed to stay at home, right?
	The economic arena now makes it to where that can't happen.
	And they're sort of, they're doing this ballet dance of trying not to come out and be completely
	misogynistic and and reactionary and all this but the point always ends up at the same place which is masculine white patriarchal and evangelical control over everything right I mean that that that's what all of this is based on it's just a bunch of fancy philosophy and talking points to try and not say the quiet part loud at this point yeah like I said they always know how to reskin For the kind of lingua franca of the day, right?
	And a lot of this really kind of also points to why they have more loyalty to Vladimir Putin than the US of A, because it is a transnational movement where it's that ideological restoration of like patriarchal power that is really what's driving this.
	But yeah, like, I mean, obviously, like just by asserting
	Women get to stay home is embedding an argument which is that, like, which is always very common in these kinds of authoritarian, you know, snake-eating-their-own-tail kind of ideological arguments, which is, like, nature dictates these male-female gender roles, yet somehow they still need to kind of be forced upon us to live as we naturally, supposedly desire.
	And I mean, I think a list of people really want to kind of read about some of the incoherence but the emotional nature of fascism.
	I definitely always recommend Umberto Eco's writings about this because he really is good at describing how there's this emotional sense of reclaiming the natural, the classical, the truth from what is seen as a decadent modern society that is alienating the man from himself.
	And yet, despite this, it's like the amount of force that has to be employed to get us back to nature is always interesting to me.
	You know, for however idiotic we might term a lot of the, you know, the ideology of the right, There always seems to be some sort of you know diabolical genius behind the scenes that's controlling this and one of the things we mentioned you just mentioned about the public schools which seems to enrage a lot of people we've seen this across you know school board meetings all over the place is that I suppose the genius part of that
	is that what you mentioned is yes you can now you know educate these children the way you want to can we explore that a little bit more like maybe where you see that happening and where that may be going um and is that is is the real is what's triggering to them so much the just the notion that they can become Free thinkers?
	Or are they really convinced at this point that perhaps whatever truth that wants to be injected into the curriculum that we're talking about, 1619 Project, things like that, that's just not truth?
	And are they convinced of that?
	Does that make sense?
	It does.
	And the way I'd reframe it a little and say they want to present this as a debate between the left and right over how to educate children.
	But in fact, when you scratch just a little bit below the surface, and I recommend our new reporter, Catherine Joyce at Salon, she's written a lot about this, especially with the religious right that's kind of funding and fueling a lot of this.
	It's actually a debate about the right of the child versus the right of the parent, right?
	So I would say that It's easier to present this as left versus right and say things like critical race theory and you can just get people riled up, but when you actually think about it, it's the assertion that the child is a person in their own right who is deserving of certain things.
	So when we talk about the education that the left supposedly wants for children, we want it to be true because that's only fair and right to children.
	Right?
	And we're not trying to indoctrinate anybody.
	The truth of society, the truth of who we are is about serving the child, eventually.
	And when we say, yes, we want them to become critical thinkers and stuff, part of that is that's your right as a human being is an education.
	Part of it is just pragmatic, which is this is a complex, increasingly complex world.
	It's very difficult to be a person who's going to be successful professionally, personally, etc.
	unless you have a grounding with a complex education that really reflects the nature of reality.
	Now, this is not I can't even remember the last time a child only needed reading, writing, and arithmetic to survive, but certainly not for decades and decades to be a full citizen of the world and a full citizen of the United States.
	But, of course, such things really undermine the patriarchal control of the child.
	So that's the conflict there, and I think if Democrats were smart, they would reframe it like that.
	I think there's another part to this, too, when you move the lens a little bit.
	So you're right, because on one hand, it's about giving a child an actual education that prepares them for the world, as opposed to giving their parent a cultural victory, right?
	Like they want like a non-existent cultural victory.
	But when you actually look at who's funding this and who's directing this, You have an incredible network of very, very incredibly wealthy donors who are the ones who are funding the institutions and think tanks that are going to provide the curriculum, that they're also going to take over public education if they get their way with all of this and privatize all of it and probably open up a trillion dollar market for themselves in public education.
	But in the process, For that cultural victory of feeling like your kid is going to go to school and actually get indoctrinated for what you feel, your child is going to make less money.
	They're going to be manipulated by those same people who will employ them, not give them benefits, and probably wipe out the minimum wage if this thing keeps going down the same line.
	So what we're actually talking about is a multifaceted movement that is actually going to go ahead and hurt those people in the long run.
	But it's a hell of a front in the meantime.
	Yeah, I mean, okay, let's think about who's the biggest, most famous advocate of basically gutting public education in the United States, right?
	It's Betsy DeVos.
	Right.
	And her family money comes from Amway and from mercenary armies, right?
	Well, you know, you say that like it's not a respectable way to live.
	I mean, those are two industries that would benefit Mildly from a society that's collapsing and has an uneducated, disempowered workforce.
	Well, wait, hang on.
	Would she also, they also have health care, a big portfolio of health care supporting, right?
	Like we can't... For a crumb nation, yes.
	All right.
	Keep going.
	I didn't mean to interrupt you.
	Sorry.
	No, no, no, no.
	That was all I was going to say is just, yeah, imagine a society where everyone's just trying to sell Antway to each other when they're not killing each other for money.
	Yeah, well, you might not know, once an episode, we have our shit on Betsy DeVos segment of the show.
	So this is it.
	Can we pile on more?
	Because we really don't.
	She doesn't deserve any kind of praise, I don't think.
	Yeah, I don't have much else to add to that outside of, you know, I really don't know that a lot of these people, her family maybe has thought this out, but I think a lot of these people are ideologues who haven't, even the wealthy don't understand.
	Well, maybe they do.
	I'm always kind of fascinated by the way that a lot of the rich people in this country would be perfectly fine living like.
	Rich people in just collapsing, like, countries do where, yeah, you have money, but you have to live behind, like, walls of security and have all these armed guards and, like, you're the king of a shit pile.
	Great for you, you know?
	Well, I was wondering if something that I'm always really pleased whenever you lean into this, which is The fact that as this is happening, and I feel like everything that we're talking about here is pretty apparent.
	It is pretty obvious.
	If you go and look at what DeVos says, if you go and look at what the National Conservatives say, even these people pushing quote unquote CRT, they even admit as much.
	They don't hide this at all.
	This is all very, very apparent It doesn't take a lot more than some attention and basic comprehensive reading skills to understand what this is.
	But when you call out the media for how they cover this, how they try, I was getting ready to say try, I don't even think there's much trying to it.
	I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about why you think our media fails so spectacularly.
	And I think there are plenty of reasons, but why is this entire situation So misrepresented and so miscommunicated.
	How do you think that this this happens?
	I think both a lot of journalists and a huge percentage of their audience are in denial.
	I really I mean, that's very sympathetic, but I think ultimately true.
	I you know, whenever I tweet about this or write about this, I get a lot of responses of people that have conspiracy minded thinking, which is that This is all everybody's serving some kind of rich master.
	And I'm like, I promise you, I live on the East Coast.
	I've been a journalist for a long time.
	I don't think so.
	If I think I would have noticed, I think it's really just.
	You can tell, like, I think it's like, again, a snake eating its tail kind of situation is.
	Say that you were working for the Washington Post and you were probably quite aware that Betsy DeVos is tied deeply into a religious right movement that wants to end public education.
	But imagine trying to say that to people.
	I mean, they're going to write you off.
	There's already, the right has already done a really successful job at just hammering day in and day out this liberal media bias and Trump says fake news, fake news, fake news.
	And it's so idiotic and yet it's very effective because it primes people to be constantly skeptical, constantly worried maybe he's right.
	Just even 5% of you worries that he's right.
	And then what happens is that It does create this hesitancy to tell the truth because the truth is so crazy that people are going to reject it.
	And so, I mean, I also think there are journalists who are human themselves and also don't necessarily want to believe it or say they want it.
	They want it to be like Bernie Sanders is socialism, right?
	Which is he calls himself a socialist.
	But when you actually look at his policy ideas, He's really just kind of a left liberal from the 70s, like social safety net guy.
	He doesn't want to nationalize most of the country's big industries or anything like that.
	But the thing is, it's the opposite with the right.
	They are not calling themselves one thing and then they're actually more moderate than what they're saying.
	They are presenting as moderates, but they're actually just crazy radicals who are counting on the fact that you don't want to know and you're not paying attention to not notice.
	And I don't, they hide in plain sight extremely well.
	And I think they understand this dynamic better than anyone.
	I mean, it's why Christopher Rufo can just run around claiming credit for inventing critical race theory and this hoax about it.
	And he knows that no one will ever, ever, like the number of people who will ever know his name or know what he's doing is like always going to be really small.
	So on on on this, and I think part of it also is it's really hard to be part of a what what I would term a bourgeois institution, right?
	Like you're making good money in a country.
	And in order to understand the problems, you have to take a really long, hard look in the mirror at the role that you play within it and how you've reached where you are and what you've done.
	But I will say, you know, I appreciate what you do and a colleague of yours, Chauncey DeVega.
	And this is something that I have felt as I've tried to chronicle this.
	And I was wondering if you could talk about if you've what you think about this, because I find this endlessly fascinating, which is within the journalism community, there are pressures to not seem hysterical and not diagnose these things and be explicit about what they are.
	And there's sort of like a very narrow sort of I think Gramsci would have some things to say about this, but there's a very narrow sort of a road that you can be on, right, in which you can talk about, oh, democracy's in trouble, and, you know, and then all of a sudden you're sort of persona non grata.
	I was wondering if you could talk about how you sort of navigate that, because I have to say, in your writing, I think you are accurate.
	I think that you portray this as it is, but I wondered if you felt pressure with this, because I know I certainly have in my work.
	Yes and no.
	I would say at Salon I get a lot of support from my management and my audience, right?
	But we are in such a narrow realm.
	I feel like we're the Cassandras in this situation.
	I felt the same way at Salon, by the way.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	No, they're great.
	And, you know, we have a lot of, you know, not to
	Talk out of school, but we have a lot of meetings where we talk about these problems very honestly with each other about how to Tell people the truth without turning them off how to And and it's actually a real problem right now because I think our audience has Largely been more open to this message than say the New York Times's audience and the Washington Post audience and yet even then
	Um, there's a huge tune out going on.
	I think we've all seen it.
	If you have any kind of traffic meter on any website, we've seen it across the board where people just are burnt out.
	They don't want to hear it.
	Um, they're just kind of hoping things work out on their own.
	Um, I think there's a lot of breath holding going on.
	Um, I think that there is a sense that Biden won and if, if it's going to be fixed, he's going to have to be the one to fix it.
	And when you say, well, that's not going to work because mansion cinema, blah, blah, blah.
	I think there's a tendency to just completely freeze up because what we're getting a lot of is people who are just like, well, then.
	I don't know, like the way I put it is like.
	Sometimes you have a symptom of cancer and you don't go to the doctor because you don't want to know because you're afraid that if you do, you're just going to die.
	And so you're going to die one way or another, but at least you don't know.
	I think the country, a lot of the country, a lot of left, a lot of Democrats, which is the majority of this country, is in that mental space right now.
	And I actually feel really bad for people.
	I often feel the tug of that myself.
	A couple things about that.
	When you read your articles, the thing that jumps out at me is how strong your voice is.
	And you are telling us, without sparing a word, exactly how ridiculous a lot of these things are.
	And you even had said the truth is so crazy that it's even hard to wrap your head around.
	So I'm kind of curious, when we're talking about the truth and how insane it's gotten, What does it mean to have some of these insane people that we have in Congress who are winning elections?
	Let's just call out Marjorie Taylor Greene.
	What kind of a threat is she to our democracy?
	Is that indicative of something else?
	Or is that one of those things where we can just sort of shrug our shoulders and be like, this is just the typical congressional crazies that we've had throughout our history?
	Well, if she was a marginal character, I would not worry about it that much.
	But the fact of the matter is she's very normal.
	But she's not the problem.
	I mean, she sucks.
	Don't get me wrong.
	But what she symbolizes, I think, is the larger problem, which is that someone like her, there's no check against her.
	There's nothing to stop someone like her.
	No one can do anything about that.
	There might be a lot of people who don't like her.
	I mean that's what they're thinking.
	her because it's better than voting for a Democrat.
	Am I reading into that?
	Is there another appearance that we're talking about as far as the other person that they wouldn't vote for?
	I mean, that's what they're thinking.
	Obviously, it's better to vote for a Democrat.
	I think that when you actually look at a lot of other countries that fascism took over, it had a very similar dynamic, which is the problem is not that all conservatives are fascists, it's that all conservatives are fine with fascism.
	And that is that's what someone like she represents, or Trump to a certain extent.
	You know, like 60 percent, 50 percent of their voters might be like gung ho for them.
	But the problem is the reason they win is that the rest of their voters are like, you know, better dead than red, I guess.
	I don't know how that's how they think about it, honestly.
	And that's that's kind of the doom we're on.
	And I think it's one of the reasons that they hide in plain sight, because You know, a lot of the head-in-the-sand Democrats that we were just talking about, they're Republican neighbors and friends and stuff that they know are not necessarily like Nazis, right?
	And they don't realize that even Nazis, most of them weren't Nazis, you know?
	I don't know how else to put this.
	There were a lot of people, for instance, if you kind of read the histories of it, in the Nazi party who We're just sort of ordinary conservative people who were like, well, this is the route to power.
	They weren't necessarily.
	A lot of middle class white collar voters who were just like, yeah, fine.
	I'll go along with this.
	That's that's totally fine.
	And the problem, I think, is that Overton window that shifts.
	And this is one of the reasons why we know it's getting worse.
	And it's not just fixed because Joe Biden got elected.
	And, you know, the the inauguration had this theme that everything's fine now.
	Go back to what you were doing.
	You know, Marjorie Taylor Greene just went on InfoWars with Alex Jones to say, I'm not crazy.
	Now, that is itself crazy, but that this person with such a high profile can go on Alex Jones and not even for a moment worry about the consequences.
	Says that things have shifted.
	I mean, it's the same thing with Tucker Carlson, who now is talking about white replacement theory and saying over and over, Alex Jones is a better journalist than the people at the New York Times.
	Like, that's just a shifting window that tells us, you know, it's almost like one of those levels, right?
	Something is off and it's slipping in the wrong direction.
	Yeah, there's a concept in campaigning called the permission structure.
	And it's really important to think about, which is like the kind of the classical version of is like giving people permission to vote for your candidate.
	Right.
	And it's usually pretty innocent.
	Like under Obama, it was like giving the swing voter permission to vote for this black candidate with a weird name.
	He had all these kinds of ways of Making himself seem normal to those people.
	And unfortunately, something as innocent in that situation as that can become extremely toxic in these kinds of situations because what Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene are doing is not necessarily deleting their audiences.
	What they're doing is they're creating the sense that it's okay to behave this way.
	They are creating permission structure to be a liar, to be a troll, to be a fascist.
	And I think that it's so important to understand the role of bad faith and authoritarian rhetoric, because it's not delusions and it's not crazy.
	She's right.
	She's not crazy.
	She's just a liar.
	And there's a tendency to like, it's less that they're Like, even a lot of QAnoners and people like that, they know that what they're saying isn't necessarily true.
	It's just saying false things constantly is about undermining the idea of rhetoric, undermining the idea of truth, and replacing it with power as the only thing that matters.
	And that's kind of what they're doing.
	Like, Tucker knows That he'll say a neo-Nazi thing on air, and then the left will say, wow, you just said a neo-Nazi thing on air.
	And he'll be like, you're the real racist.
	And he and his audience know the game that he's playing.
	And the point is to play the game.
	It is not to confuse anybody, I don't think.
	Are you sure the audience knows the game?
	Some!
	I would argue some know, and a lot of them are just along for the ride, right?
	I have no idea what the percentage is.
	Right, because you know that birds aren't real, right?
	And when you see something like that, it just makes me wonder.
	And I know it's a direct reaction to that, but it really kind of accentuates where we're at with audience members and people who want to follow along with these things.
	And I know it's a small percentage and it probably feels to them like it's shrinking.
	but clearly it's allowed a very, they have a lot of influence and a lot of power.
	I guess the crux of the matter to me seems to me, we've talked about this before in our pod, is that it's like a lot of these people probably hadn't voted much before, right?
	And then activating this now opens up a whole section of people that they wouldn't have counted on getting votes from.
	And that's the only hope it sounds like for them to ever get enough votes to win elections again.
	Does that sound fair?
	Yeah, I think so.
	Certainly what's interesting to me about the bad faith Trumpian politics is it drew in a lot of people that were bored with the old fashioned values oriented politics, Values and facts oriented and policy-oriented politics.
	That's why my book's called Troll Nation, right?
	I think that... I wrote it once and I thought it was kind of a funny phrase and I gotta remember it was, oh yeah, I said Trump has the dirtbag bat signal.
	Wow.
	It's true, like, there is a, especially like Tucker Carlson's audience, there was a good piece in The Atlantic where they interviewed Tucker Carlson viewers who were vaccinated, and every single one of them was the same exact shitbag, which was like, and you've met this guy, you know, loves conspiracy theories, doesn't believe half of them, just likes fucking with you.
	And they just think he's funny.
	And really at the end of the day, they're not interested in facts, truth, policy, anything.
	They just want to trigger the libs.
	Yeah.
	And there's a lot of people and you know, I wanted to ask you about this.
	There are a lot of people, I assume, who at January 6th or at the Ottawa protest, that probably never expected in their lives to run into a capital and try and interrupt an election or, you know, try and bring a capital city to a standstill.
	And meanwhile, there were tons of people at these places who wanted nothing more than this and have always wanted to do this.
	And then it's sort of a matter of how you move that one group to the other group over time, right?
	Like how you take somebody who, I don't know, flew on a private plane to January 6th and broadcasted, you know, that you should use them as a real estate agent ends up becoming an insurrectionist, you know, trespassing in the capital.
	And one of the things that I've noticed that makes me fearful, and I've seen this in your writing as well, is that we're increasingly watching more and more people move from one camp to the other, almost to the point that you can track it at this point.
	Well, in a sense it makes, it's so weird to watch it happen in real time, but when you think about it logically, it actually makes a certain amount of sense, which is People get attracted by the trolling, they get attracted by the games, they get attracted by the bad faith, and there's a playfulness in fascism that's very difficult to accept, but it's obviously there.
	Because it's fun, it's like playing a game, it's like winning, it's about power, it's about destabilizing, it's about destabilizing facts and replacing it with power.
	But the problem is, once Power is the only thing that matters.
	You've become radicalized.
	And you may not have even realized it.
	Now you are a fascist.
	And when power is the only thing you respect and power is the only thing you honor, then violence follows night, you know, like night follows day, right?
	They're one and the same thing.
	You know, I've written a lot about masculinity working in that exact same way.
	You have a lot of insecure men who have to pretend to be big, strong, tough and invulnerable.
	And over time, like their emotions start to die off and suddenly they're not playing a character anymore.
	And I think so much of this is built off of that idea.
	You have a bunch of men in America where masculinity feels like it's changing or quote unquote threatened.
	Meanwhile, they're dressing up as paramilitary operators and You know, they're driving like, you know, these big giant trucks that have been turned into basically, you know, instruments of war.
	They're buying all these guns and all these things.
	I feel like so much of it has to do with playing a character until you wake up one day and you're no longer playing that character anymore.
	Yeah, I mean, who was it that said, you become the thing you pretend to be?
	Like, we're seeing that happen before our eyes with a lot of these people.
	And I think the internet has made it significantly worse.
	I think when historians go back and look at this time, they're probably going to say, and I know that pains us all because we made our careers on the internet, but it's also just like, you know, the invention of the printing press invited both the Renaissance and witch burnings, right?
	We're seeing a similar thing happen, this huge technological leap in communication And it's allowing people to pretend to be something with the safety of their own home on the computer.
	They can kind of role play.
	And then eventually, yeah, you just become the thing.
	All right, everybody, we cannot thank Amanda Marcotte enough.
	And again, we've been talking with Amanda Marcotte, a senior political writer at Salon and the author of Trill Nation, How the Right Became Trump Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-Fucking Liberals, America and the Truth Itself.
	Amanda, thank you.
	Where can the good people find you?
	I'm on Twitter just under my name, Amanda Marcotte, and you can always read me at Salon.com.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you for having me.
	This has been great.
	Alright everybody, again, that was Amanda Marcotte, a senior political writer at Salon and the author of Troll Nation, How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters, set on rat-fucking liberals, America and the truth itself.
	And if you were listening and you think, I think Jared just likes saying the title of that book, you are correct.
	Oh, I'd buy any book that has rat-fucking in the title because that's just, it's, you know, it's a great term.
	We're going to have to do a Patreon episode at some point on the history of rat fucking because it's way too interesting of an idea and it has way too rich of a history.
	And if you want to listen to our next Patreon-exclusive show, which will be The Weekender, that will air this Friday, all you gotta do is go over to patreon.com slash schmuckreggpodcast.
	You'll gain those extra shows every week, including a live show every now and then.
	We did one last week, had a great time, had a bunch of people come out, ask questions, and interact with us.
	You also gain access to our Discord.
	It's one of the best social medias out there with good people talking and sharing information.
	That is patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
	And again, that next episode will be on Friday with The Weekender.
	And if you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me, SMH?
	And you can find me at J.Y.
	Sexton.
	Things are getting hairy out there, everybody.

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