Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the leaked opinion from the Supreme Court outlining their intention to overturn Roe v Wade, and how damaging it is to have so many Originalists on the court. Then, they interview Dr. Jennifer Mercieca, who is a professor of communication at Texas A&M University and the author of Demagogue For President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump and has particular insight into Tucker Carlson's diabolical genius.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nick and I have already recorded an episode today and it just came over the wire that Politico has gotten its hands on a Leaked opinion by Samuel Alito, a really, really repulsive leaked opinion.
It looks incredibly legitimate and real and likely that the Supreme Court of the United States of America has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and take away protection of a woman's right to choose within the United States, which would leave it up to the states themselves to determine the legality.
We had to scrap this episode so we can talk about this.
This is obviously one of the bigger news stories that we'll see in a very, very long time.
Nick, we have a few details we need to go over, but initial reaction so far.
Well, you always have to wonder why something like this gets leaked when almost never do these things get leaked like this.
So, one possibility, which I doubt is really the case knowing how ideological some of these assholes are on the court, but one possibility could very well be is they're going to leak this, see what the reaction is, And then, you know, they have time between now and June, I think, when the actual opinion is going to be released to maybe adjust this thing.
They certainly are concerned about the public reaction.
They mentioned this in what was leaked of how, you know, controversial the decision is and how it continued to cause, you know, a lot of people anguish.
So, they have their ear to the ground on that.
And so, it's maybe, you know, 10% chance that they're floating this out there to judge the reaction.
I don't know.
Or there's a possibility that this is being leaked in order to exert pressure on the court.
There is a possibility that maybe we might be looking at something of a hung court.
We might have one justice who's trying to figure out where they stand on this issue.
This is being leaked in order to exert pressure.
Alito might have already, you know, worked on this thing.
And again, we'll get into details here in a second.
We do not know exactly what this is.
I have some thoughts on what the reactions and the consequences might be coming out.
Some hopeful, some less hopeful.
But I just want to go ahead and say before we jump into the specifics of this document, this is what we talk about, man.
This is what we're reporting on, which is that there is a right wing movement in this world right now.
Which is dedicated to rolling back protections and rights having to do with women, people of color, gay people, trans people, you name it.
This is a big one.
And we could very well be looking at a country where women who are already treated like second class citizens are going to be treated even worse through the power of the state and states around the country.
There's a lot to swallow and digest in terms of what this means and what the future might look like if this is actually the case, but it's it's sickening is what it is.
I'm good.
I'm pissed off and I'm sick.
Well, if you're wondering why it makes people like us wring our hands when we encounter other people who want to interpret things as when they were written and be originalists and be fundamentalists, this is the reason why.
One of the arguments is that, you know, the Constitution itself, before any amendments, like, never mentioned abortion, ergo, It's not protected at all, and there's nothing you can interpret as the Constitution that would protect this, which is basically going along with how it was conceived in the beginning, which was that women had no rights to begin with.
Well, and by the way, real fast, it just occurred to me that I forgot to mention that we have a really good interview with Jennifer Mercier tonight, and we were really, really excited about this, and we want to give her proper due.
I think it's a really, really good interview.
Stick around for that in a little bit, even though we've had to scrap the original episode.
Nick, you're exactly right.
There are... I had to speed read this damn thing.
Thank God I can do that, but it was repulsive.
There are points in this document where it's complete originalism.
He says at one point, nobody wanted to talk about the right of an abortion until the 20th century.
Well, guess what?
People of color didn't have the same rights until the 20th century.
Just a few years before this thing came down.
And neither did women.
No, women didn't have the equal rights, still don't have equal rights.
And people are still being discriminated against and oppressed.
From the very beginning, this Constitution basically said that the only people who matter, the only people who were actually people, were wealthy white men.
That's it.
And this is, I don't know if you saw it, in the actual paragraph that says that Roe must be completely overturned and the decision turned over to the states, he fucking quotes Scalia.
Like, because obviously you got to give a hat tip to the king of originalism who got this in place.
This is dripping with language that appears in all of these red states that have been attacking abortion over the last few years because that's being done by the same think tanks who are working on these same legal opinions to get all the stuff to the Supreme Court to try and do this.
This is the culmination.
Not just of the Supreme Court being stolen in 2016, but it's the culmination of decades and decades of work and funding and power by absolute power-mad misogynists.
And if this is what's actually happening, they're getting their way and they can go to hell. - Now, the other one thing they can do is, they might actually be able to hide behind a guise that it's not related to religion.
A lot of these guys are really religious, and so a lot of people wanna use that as their basis for why they wanna outlaw abortions.
But I think that part of this is what makes them upset is that the argument that they use in Roe v.
Wade originally was a right to privacy, which was supposed to protect a woman And that's enumerated in both like in the First Amendment, Fifth Amendment and the 14th Amendment.
So it was a novel approach to argument of that thing.
And I think that these guys like Alito are so upset with that because it was like a circumvention, you know, and it was never it was never a good argument.
So rather than have it be about women or women's rights at all, I think it's like a part of their game that they feel like, you know, as if it was just a violation of like, it really isn't.
It wasn't a good argued case.
The words weren't right.
The argument wasn't compelled, you know, compelling at all.
And this is not about any particular issue.
And that's where they're trying to hide behind.
That's what's so disgusting about this is that they don't necessarily understand what the context is and what abortion represents in this country as far as endangering women's lives.
But it's not about law at all.
It's about power.
I mean it really truly is.
I mean you know we've been talking about this over the past couple of weeks.
The root of liberalism as a political system was to navigate where my life ended and where your life began, and how we interacted in the same space.
The ultimate kryptonite, if you will, for all of that was the issue of abortion, in which women had to carry a fetus within them, and basically you had to decide where life began and where life ended.
And the whole point of that is that that original tradition that you're talking about, which is racist, sexist, Never, it never would have occurred to anybody who framed this document that women deserved any right whatsoever.
Meanwhile, the idea of abortion has been around as long as human civilization has existed.
I mean, this is an absolute power grab.
It's about reestablishing, as we keep talking about, the power, the patriarchal power of white evangelical men.
It has everything to do with that hierarchy.
That's all this is about.
It has nothing to do with the law.
Literally anything that they can figure out in order to get this done, that's why they would do it.
Yeah, I want to quote one of these things, one of the bullet points that they include in the article, which is, quote, in the years prior to Roe v. Wade, about a third of the states had liberalized their laws.
But Roe abruptly ended that political process.
It imposed the same highly restrictive regime on the entire nation and it effectively struck down the abortion laws of every single state.
So think about that.
In their mind, Roe v. Wade was restrictive because it made these states, a majority of states, strike down laws that were restrictive.
But that is restrictive in their minds.
This is the essence of the argument we have between the right and the left.
And that's, you know, at least argue the correct argument, right?
At least be transparent with what you want to do.
You think that it's a murder, and the Bible told you that you shouldn't do that, and that's why we're passing this law.
I mean, that's where they are coming at, and women shouldn't have the right to choose.
By the way, yeah, go ahead.
Well, I just want to say, I mean, what you just said I think is both right, but there's also something to drill down on there.
I don't like maybe the story they tell themselves is that they think it's murder, but that's just an ideology to hide the fact that they want to control what women do and when they do it and where they do it and how they live their lives.
I mean, everything else is just sort of trimming on that tree.
But yeah, it's that that's what this is.
It has nothing to do with law.
And by the way, the founding fathers are completely contradictory in so many different ways.
They're absolutely racist, sexist and classist.
But when you actually take a look at what's happening in terms of our laws, they didn't want religion to decide these things.
They literally wanted to create a situation where you would have a so-called enlightened society.
But yeah, I just want to point that out from what you were saying.
Now, the other thing is, you know, the second most, you know, the second biggest issue that anti-abortion people will talk about is, you know, these late-term abortions and these full fetuses, whatever.
I don't know if anybody realizes, but in Roe v. Wade, it was made clear that it only protected the right to an abortion through the first trimester.
So, this whole thing about You know, late-term abortion has never been a thing.
It's not a thing anyway.
So few of those happen after the 24th week anyway, that it's not really a thing that should rile anybody up.
But that's always what I always hear.
Do you agree with that?
On top of that, over 70% of Americans support Roe v. Wade as established law.
Over 70%.
Good luck finding anything that most Americans can agree on at over 70%.
This is a power grab by a minoritarian authoritarian movement.
That's all this is.
Very quick, very quick Google search on whether the Bible mentions abortion.
And it appears that it does not.
Yeah.
So that's the other issue here that like, you know, they're going to want to fall back on this notion of what this is motivated in.
But Nick, this was the original issue for the evangelical right was not abortion.
It was segregation.
And what happened over time was segregation became less and less of a popular and palatable topic.
And then whenever we start moving into the 1970s and this, I mean, Roe v. Wade wasn't that controversial of a decision.
I mean, if you go and look, it's a 7-2 decision.
It was completely more or less agreed upon everywhere until the evangelical right decided that it was a hell of a cudgel.
And why is it a cudgel?
Because it plays on all of these fears, right?
It's the evangelical fear.
It's this fear that men aren't going to be able to control their women.
It's a manufactured issue and in this case it is going against the Vast majority of settled opinion in this country.
And the point you just made about the evangelical resistance to abortion doesn't happen for like a decade, at least after Roe v. Wade, if I'm not mistaken.
I think that it's at least 10 years.
That was part of the conservative revolution of the 1980s when that really, really took off.
And that was all weaponized and it was all very, very focused by the right.
Right, we had a guest on at some point in whatever time is where we talked about that where it was like evangelicals had no problem with abortion until they realized they could weaponize it and again this is all this is about is and we talked about this ad nauseum about how the fear and the stoking of the and triggering the the right-wing people to vote right like that has always been the issue and again the argument ended up being when they repeal it then they lose a really big you know marketing tool for them
So then they might end up losing elections going forward because there isn't that thing to get them off their seats to go vote.
They're going to find something else.
Well, they'll find something else.
Listen, I want us to talk about what this is going to look like going forward, but I also don't want to trivialize by talking about a midterm election.
You know what I mean?
Who knows?
Who cares at this point?
Women are going to be oppressed.
What do you see the fallout from this being?
Because I see it going across a couple of different paths at this point.
Well, okay, half the states will allow it.
The other half won't.
Now, what's really nefarious is that some of these states are passing laws that will criminalize it if you go to other states, and if you help people go to other states to get an abortion, which is again... And that could be brought up in front of the Supreme Court as well.
yeah yeah and it would be it's really it would boggle my mind even at this point if they would upheld the law like that but who knows right because again it is ideological it's not just okay and I you know what I'm gonna go back on what I said as far as the procedural aspect of how Roe v. Wade got you know passed or was upheld or whatever decided
was what triggers a lot of these people because it's like it's just not the way you you're supposed to argue a case and you know but uh we do know that there is this notion that like they clearly with a religious background just disagree with the notion of abortion and want to just not let anybody be able to do it uh you know here's the other the other question is will it still be viable as a disabled woman's life that's that was always sort of in the background even when it was outlawed in the 50s 40s before that there were exceptions in the law for what disabled woman's life what do you think is that even going to be protected
I got to tell you, man, I think that this power grab that's taking place with the right wing, I would be really shocked if they don't go for the whole ball.
I mean, really, you know, in conversations you had with experts about Roe v. Wade, you know, a chunk of them would just tell you, I don't think the Republican Party will ever outlaw it.
You know, they'll just, you know, sort of eat away at it, which always seemed like the conventional wisdom on this thing.
But I do have to say that if this is real, if the decision has been made and it comes down from the court, I mean, this is a legitimate reversal of history and progress.
I mean, it is it is a literal attack on women.
And it's also a metaphorical attack on progressive liberal democracy, to be honest.
I mean, they stole the court and then they would be able to do this.
I think you're right, it would be outlawed in half the states.
I would not be shocked if the more extreme red states would probably go ahead and get rid of any protection for the mother.
You'd probably see some leaning purple states starting to push it in that direction.
My God, the showdowns that would come from this.
What I want to say though to our listeners about this, and this is my concern, and I want to make it very clear.
This is going to be really ugly, man.
This is weird.
I keep saying we're going to go through some really ugly stuff.
This is another one of those moments.
This is like one of the uglier, uglier moments.
And the blue state, red state idea, that paradigm that, I mean, if you live in red states, good luck, everybody.
Like I'm telling you, if you are in a blue state and you're listening to this and you're like, thank God I don't live in a red state.
This might very well be a 50-50 split, but I gotta tell you, this is part of something larger.
And if we don't stand up against this, and if we don't make some noise about this, and we don't fight like hell, I mean, we're getting in some really gnarly territory, man.
I mean, really.
If we find out this is true, we're in the shit.
And I'm afraid that a lot of people will say, well, that's a red state problem or something like that and look the other way as it just sort of grows and grows and grows.
There's no room for that.
There just isn't.
I mean, this is an all-hands-on-deck type situation.
This requires a million-person march, millions of people march.
My wife was even talking about it when we walked in, but then part of her feels so deflated already at this point.
That it doesn't, I don't even know if we're going to get that kind of anger.
I mean, it was fierce, because I know you said it wasn't like a big deal when it passed, but like, it certainly was, it engendered a lot of energy on the left to get this thing passed.
And there were marches, and there were, you know, it was a really fervent movement to make this happen.
I hope we can recreate that to some degree, if not more, leading up to the actual decision coming out.
I do want to bring up one of the points, the other bullet points, because it's interesting.
I just want to say, I keep hoping that with all of the legislation and all these power grabs, that it's eventually just going to be too much.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, it's just like, listen, not only is the Republican Party nuts, and not only is it the party of conspiracy theories and white supremacy, it is so Extreme and so outside of anything palatable to anybody and it's just like enough having a real heavy no sense of decency moment because this is Yeah, I'm with you.
I I think that this is like one of those moments that it's like This is a very very emblematic of where we are.
It can beat us down it can it can really tear your heart out and I just I hope that this is a One of those moments that makes people finally maybe take stock of this stuff.
Yeah.
Because it's awful.
I mean, I hope that they had people who just silently like surround Alito's house or something, you know, all these conservative Kavanaugh.
Just stand there and hold the candles and stare at them all night.
And by the way, I would be remiss if I didn't mention another time, like this is the thing, the Supreme Court completely made up this power.
Completely made it up.
And for the majority of its existence, it has been a reactionary body that has oppressed people.
So the Supreme Court has no power unless you give it power.
I'm just, I'm just telling you.
Yeah.
That's the straight up truth of the entire situation.
All this shit is made up.
All of it was a power grab by the, by the Supreme Court.
I'm just saying.
And remember, I had said this before, but like the whole genius of McConnell is that he realized they don't necessarily even have to have control of the Senate or the House to get past things, you know, through.
They can just ultimately strike things down with the court, you know, and make the court as activists as anything that they had accused the left of being for all these years.
They're gonna steal the court and they're gonna do this.
I'm sorry at this point pack the court Yeah, either don't listen the court pack the court bring in Puerto Rico, Washington DC I mean really if if this is what we're looking at again, it's an all hands on deck type situation, right?
They have to do something and again, even those things feel like it's just you know Putting a finger in the dike and and hoping that that holds it's not been enough.
Yeah, I gotta say the people who are paid and expected to Protect liberal democracy and the rights of the people.
They've been asleep at the post and they better wake the hell up.
The first question that most of these guys, men and women, get asked when they're doing the Supreme Court nomination process is, do they believe in stare decisis?
And obviously that question is really, are you going to uphold Roe v. Wade?
And everyone of them says, oh, I believe it's a very fundamental part of the court and that we really need to focus on that.
And of course, one of these bullet points in Politico says, quote, we have long recognized, however, that stare decisis is, quote, not inexorable, not an inexorable command, and is, and it is at its weakest when we interpret the Constitution.
It has been said that it is sometimes more important that an issue be settled, that it is settled to be, let me just again, It has been said that it is sometimes more important that an issue be settled than it be settled right.
But when it comes to the interpretation of the Constitution, the great charter of our liberties, which was meant to endure through a long lapse of ages, we place a high value on having the matter settled right.
You want to unpack a little bit of that?
Oh, God.
It's, you know, and again, we got Jennifer Majia here in just a second, and I'm so glad we do because this is like, man, the idea of right and wrong.
You know what I mean?
It really is.
It's like, no, you can say that you're right, but you're not right if it's not my right.
I mean, it's this is a literal war on shared society.
It's what it is.
This is a literal domination of shared society and rejecting.
For years, Nick, we've been told everything's fine, everyone's overreacting, whatever.
This is literally a small group of people who have dedicated their entire lives to warping And perverting the law based on those same ideas, which is that their worldviews are unabashedly correct.
There's no way to argue against them.
They've created their entire legal opinion around being able to dominate society.
And what you just said translates to that.
Yeah, and the fact that someone or people, enough of these people on the court have this prism that they look through this lens of like originalism is what's so fundamentally wrong with all of these things.
It's like religious extremists.
You know anybody who doesn't understand that the Constitution is not a dead document and that you can't interpret it any other way but exactly how the founders wrote it before any of these things existed that they're trying to judge on is ludicrous.
There's no rational basis for approaching any of these cases like this and yet Here we are and it's with a wink wink when they nominate these people because they tell them in the closed, you know, behind closed doors that this is exactly how they judge and this is their philosophy.
And listen, they tell us the public now too.
There's no shame.
They don't care that they tell anybody in public these things too.
And that's just, you know, people are rolling in their graves now.
Some of the greatest minds of our time, the greatest judges of our time must be thinking of this.
Even the ones who are probably conservative will be looking at this thinking it's ridiculous what they're trying to do now.
It is.
I mean, it's an affront.
It's an actual abomination, and they should be ashamed of themselves.
I mean, they really should.
I mean, the people responsible for this should be ashamed of themselves.
I don't know, man.
It feels... I mean, obviously it feels bad, but it feels like this is another step.
You know what I mean?
Like, it really does.
We're going to go to this interview here in just a second, and please stick around for that.
It's not going to be the smoothest transition that we've ever done on this podcast, and then we'll get out of here.
But we thought it was important to talk about this, and I just want to say, you know, be kind to the women in your life tomorrow.
They're getting kicked around once more in a way that they totally, totally don't deserve.
And this is egregious, Nick.
It's just totally, totally egregious if this is what's taking place.
All right, let's go to that interview with Jennifer Merchia.
Hey, everybody, we're back and we are really, really lucky to have a special guest with us.
I want to go ahead and pull back the curtain.
I am still the kind of person that when I'm reading an article or I'm watching a segment on TV and one of my favorite people, their name shows up or their face shows up, I cheer like an absolute idiot.
So today we got Jennifer Murtia, a scholar who studies the relationship between democracy and the nation's communications practices.
Her most recent book, which is really, really good, and if we want to understand how these things work, we have to get deep into these things like Jennifer has, is Demagogue for President, the Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.
Currently, she serves as a professor of communication at Texas A&M.
Jennifer, thank you for joining us.
It's my pleasure.
So, Jennifer, there I was, Sunday morning, drinking my coffee, trying to fend a cat off of my lap.
I'm reading this deep, deep dive in the New York Times on Tucker Carlson, his rise as a white, nationalistic, fascist, propagandist.
And one of the slides comes across, there's your name!
I cheer wildly, my cat jumps off my lap.
And immediately I ran to DM you because we got to talk about all this stuff.
But real fast, in terms of like this, this project, you'd read this thing.
How do you how do you feel about this?
And what do you think are the main points to sort of boil this down?
Just as we get going in this conversation?
Yeah, so they did such a great job with that.
I had a really minimal part in it.
Karen Yorish, who's the one who did The interactive, which is like the third part, where my name's on that slide.
She reached out to me and they had already been working on this analysis for at least a month at that point.
So, you know, it's really them more than it is me.
But yeah, I thought it was fantastic.
I thought it was really thorough in explaining, you know, sort of the business side of Tucker Carlson's fascism, the political side of it, the linguistic side of it, right?
It's multifaceted.
And so I thought that it did a good job of, you know, being as comprehensive as possible.
So in this sort of environment, and I think you and I both have looked at this for the past few years, a lot of people have sort of looked past the threat of what's happening in the country, sort of imagine that things are going to be fine and everything will work itself out.
You particularly have been studying the communication strategies of a lot of this stuff, the rhetoric of how it works.
How do you feel about the fact that this is starting to gain a little bit of traction, that people are like, hey, language actually does things and it actually affects the reality of how we live and where we're going?
How's that feel to be an expert and sort of watching people finally kind of wade into this?
Yeah.
So that's exciting.
And I think it's really great if more people are interested in how language works.
You know, it's interesting because in my work, As I was mentioning, I've been teaching a grad seminar this semester on the dark arts of communication.
And what I have really come to realize over the last few months is that so much of how language works is actually precognitive.
And that it isn't actually the things that, you know, that I sort of study about, you know, how words are being used and deployed, like all of that, you know, of course, is important.
But so much of how we process information happens before anyone, you know, is even really processing the words themselves.
So I think there's so much to learn about how our cognition works, how our psychology works, how language works, how politicians and people who are interested in coercing others are able to take advantage of our cognitive and emotional weaknesses.
They're really, really good at it, and I think that they know a lot more than we do.
You know, I suspect that the future of journalism and reading out of a newspaper digitally will be what we saw in this article, which people might not have seen, which is a really great mix of multimedia with video clips of Tucker Carlson and then text to bolster that, almost to like maybe combat what he does, which is purely visual.
So my question to you is, what do you think about the medium of Tucker Carlson's show itself is so alluring to a very, very specific demographic of people.
I would actually maybe say age more than anything else.
Yeah, it certainly does.
It certainly does attract a boomer plus audience.
You know, one of the things that I've written about with Tucker's show is the way that he uses conspiracy theory, the way that he You know, uses fear appeals to hijack our amygdalas, right, which activates the fight or flight response, which makes it difficult for us to pay attention, you know, critically to what he's saying.
He's so good at, and this is a part of the analysis they did, you know, sort of looking right at the viewer, you know, eye to eye and being like, they are after you, right?
That there is this conspiracy, You know, he, he will, you know, of course, constantly use very dramatic, scary visuals that are running in a loop.
The way he's just asking questions, it's all about that activating that conspiracy frame, right, which there's something going on, and they won't tell you.
It's all them and they and which was another thing that they highlighted in the New York Times analysis.
And in all of that, You know, really, I think appeals to a news viewer who sees the world changing in a way that is incomprehensible to them, right?
And the explanations that they're given for how the world has changed and why they feel left out or behind is, you know, It's this plot against you.
And of course, you should be feeling more, you know, in control of the world than you are.
And the reason why you're not is because of them.
And so you have to listen to me, Tucker Carlson, so that I can tell you all the things that, you know, they're trying to do to get you.
It's very fascist.
Oh, it absolutely is.
And so we've been covering the Tucker Carlson beat now for a hot minute.
And one of the things that we always talk about is how Tucker's show becomes sort of, and I thought the phrase that you used was dead on.
I believe you said a central node, which I thought was dead on because one of the things that happens in this show, as you're well aware, he takes a lot of these nationalistic, white nationalist ideas that are happening in this very specific ideological space.
A lot of it is the extreme right online.
And when he says they, he's talking about Jews.
I mean, it's a refashioning of that instead of coming out and saying, Jews are running the world and they have decided to replace you as white people and this is how things are going to happen.
So he takes that space, he then sort of packages it Into something that can be sold to people who, you know, he, one of the things he continually says is, you aren't racist.
You aren't awful.
You aren't, you aren't seeing the world through a racist lens.
Although the essence of the message is a white centric, white supremacist, anti-Semitic idea.
Can you talk about the laundering of that message and what he is able to do that makes this so effective?
Because I think this is what makes him one of the most powerful people in the world right now.
Yeah, absolutely.
And narrative laundering is such a great term that I have, you know, sort of learned in the last few years, comes from propaganda studies and analysis.
And it's so apt for what is happening, right, which is taking, you know, like you said, dirty, polluted ideology, things that are tainted by white nationalism, white supremacy, conspiracists, like InfoWars, You know, really extreme right wing fringe content and repackaging it for the mainstream.
So making it clean, just like you launder money, right?
Money laundering.
And Tucker Carlson is like the quintessential narrative launderer for the right wing.
Donald Trump also occupies this space and did during the 2016 campaign.
Donald Trump was very much targeted by the white nationalist community.
Every day they would tweet at the guy.
They called it Twitter hashtag happy hours.
And they would try to get him to retweet their content.
And he did.
They would celebrate.
And Tucker Carlson is someone who, you know, if you go to Daily Stormer, if you go to their website, You know, they're celebrating Tucker Carlson pretty much every day.
They're like, hey, Tucker Carlson's talking about, you know, the right stuff.
And Tucker Carlson is is right where we need him to be.
Right.
They see him as an ally, which I think says a lot.
And yeah, I mean, so I don't know how deeply they are trolling, you know, the right wing ecosystem, all of his producers and writers.
But it's clear that they are doing that.
They're taking narratives that originate there.
And, you know, they're mainstreaming them in a way that, like you said, makes the audience feel like it's palatable and that it's right and just and good for them to hear those things.
So I'm kind of curious, when you do an article like we saw in the New York Times, which is very compelling, it's using, obviously, we said elements of what, like, Tucker Carlson is saying in your face with context.
I guess my question then is, is somebody who is a Tucker Carlson watcher Yeah, this is for us.
It's definitely not for a Tucker Carlson viewer.
like that or who is the effect on who is it for is it just for us to kind of scream and yell and throw our hands up yeah this is for us um it's it's definitely not for a tucker carlson viewer tucker carlson viewers are immune to criticism the same way that donald trump supporters you know are immune to criticism of donald trump like the the way that that frame works is it's us versus them i I am on your side.
So you have to owe me your allegiance and your loyalty.
You know, who do you want to believe?
Essentially, it's us versus them.
And I'm with you.
So you have to be with me.
Yeah.
So that that article isn't for Tucker, but maybe it's I mean, who knows?
You know, who reads The New York Times?
Maybe it's for investors.
Maybe it's for people who are buying ads on that show.
Maybe it's for people who are moderate and not so sure, really, what's going on or how to understand, you know, the free speech wars or, you know, any of the things that they talk about with censorship or any of that.
You know, that's all a part of the way that his conspiracy frame works.
And so I think that, you know, the more that people understand it, because I think a lot of people on the left and in the center avoid Tucker Carlson's show.
You know, the better it is.
But yeah, I don't think his audience is actually going to read it and be persuaded to stop watching.
I'm now going to construct in my mind a fantasy of like a deep, deep Tucker Carlson viewer just yelling in the other room, Honey, you're not going to believe what is actually happening.
You know, Jennifer, I wanted to talk to you about something which When this happened, you know, I watched it percolate in the far right online and over the past few years sort of start to grow almost like an ivy along with QAnon.
And eventually, you know, when these things sort of pop up through the surface.
And all of a sudden they become mainstream.
This rhetoric that, you know, this groomer thing.
The idea that gay people, trans people, teachers, any opponent is grooming children to be abused.
The idea that there is literally a conspiracy of satanic proportions.
And this has now become GOP mainstream ideology, the way that everything is framed.
For me, it was the awareness that this thing, like I said, had finally broken through and that it was no longer a subcurrent.
For someone who studies rhetoric the way that you do, when that pops up, when that suddenly becomes sort of a mainstream GOP tenant, what do you think?
How do you see it?
And obviously, what are the repercussions and the consequences of this stuff?
Yeah, so it's an intensification of previous anti-democratic strategies that we've seen.
And it's a really dangerous one.
And so, you know, my research has really shifted a lot in the last, you know, five or six years.
I used to be someone who sort of studied citizenship and like how we imagine citizens and presidents and, you know, who's a hero in our political fiction or imagination or whatever, you know, sort of mainstream political discourse.
I thought I was, you know, super critical of it, but whatever.
It was, you know, it was what it was.
And then with Donald Trump, I got really interested, obviously, in the way that the right wing fringe had started to manipulate our political discourse.
And when I was trying to sort of understand some of the things that he did in his 2016 campaign, I had to revisit work that I hadn't looked at since grad school, communities that I hadn't looked at really since grad school.
I had taken a seminar on Christian identity movement in politics in the 90s, right?
And so I had written a lot at that time about the Aryan nations and, you know, groups like that.
And so, yeah, so I had to go back and look and sort of catch up to see how they had changed.
And what I saw was really smart communication strategies and smart, but like diabolical, right?
Being used by the extreme right wing fringe to move the Overton window to mainstream their ideas and content.
They were determined to do it, right?
Like, like they had a real battle plan in 2015.
In 2016.
It's just, you know, flourished since then.
And so yeah, so when I look at the groomer discourse, for example, the rhetorical critic in me says that's a devil term, meaning that it's an unquestionably bad thing.
It's not something that you use to start a debate or discussion, right?
If you call someone a groomer, that can't be defended, right?
There's no like, well, but actually groomers are great.
You know, unless we're talking about our dogs or whatever.
You know.
That's a terrible joke, but yes.
Yes.
I tried to make that work on Twitter.
It didn't go for me.
Anyway, you kind of have to be there.
You got to repurpose these words, right?
But it's a it's a devil term, meaning that it is a part of war rhetoric.
It is something that you level against a people or a community in order to destroy them.
There is no free speech around the issue.
There's no debate discussion.
It's just bad.
And so to see a mainstream political party get taken over by the extreme right wing, willingly taking their talking points and deploying them on policy questions against teachers, against schools and libraries and against, you know, the gay and lesbian community, like all of that is is so
Worrying in anti-democratic because it's war rhetoric and because you can go nowhere except for warfare from there You rattle off a few issues.
I think that they obviously want to have an effect on in the country Is it do you have a sort of the top-down?
Big-ticket items like as it sounds a little bit like handmaid's tale is what the ultimate goal would be in theory when you look at what they want But can you do have a sense of like what the order is and what how you know?
What the most important issues are going down?
Yeah, so it seems to me that the main driver of a lot of the discourse is the sort of notion that education is indoctrination, right?
And so one of the things that Rush Limbaugh said, in the 90s, I think, was, you know, the four horses of the apocalypse.
So it was the media, it was teachers, it was I think the Democratic Party, but I don't remember who the four were.
I think labor unions were somewhere in there.
Maybe.
Feminists, yeah.
Feminists, yeah.
So one of the things that the right has really been trying to do, probably for the last decade, but is to really sort of invade the education system and to Use it for indoctrination purposes, right?
But to use it for their own indoctrination purposes, right?
Education has always been political.
You can go back to Daniel Webster, you know, in 1807, I think he said that education is a wise and liberal system of police, whereby we prevent the extension of the penal code, right?
You know, people who wanted state sponsored education in the 1820s, they said that It was, you know, the golden ticket and that, you know, we could use it to improve individually and improve the nation.
Whereas other people said, if you're going to have universal white male suffrage, you need to have universal white male education to indoctrinate citizens into, you know, the American way or certain thing.
I actually wrote my dissertation about this a long time ago.
But so, Education's always been political, and it hasn't always been political in the service of democracy, right?
So it always pays lip service to, you know, American exceptionalism, but not necessarily in a, like, strong democratic way, which would be, like, massive equality of people, you know, participation in the political process, things like that.
And it has become more democratic.
Our education system has become more democratic in what we teach and how we teach it, which is incredibly threatening to those people who don't want democracy.
And so that's why I really see this as an anti-democratic project.
You know, so talking about like critical race theory in universities and then having that sort of trickle down into, hey, maybe we could be critical of the way that, you know, slavery drove national expansion throughout our history and say, like, with some remorse, maybe that wasn't so good or fair or just.
Maybe, you know, including voices of women where they hadn't been or, you know, just all of the things that have been done to kind of democratize what we learn and what we teach.
You know, Howard Zinn, like all of that's super threatening.
To the Tucker Carlson fan.
Let me ask you this, but they're not saying that they're against democracy, right?
How are they rationalizing that, real quick?
They won't say that out loud.
Yeah, that's the... I can't think of the word for mind.
F. That's the mind.
That's the thing.
The rationalization.
I don't know if I'm allowed to say that word.
But that's the thing, right?
And this is one of the points that Jason Stanley makes in his propaganda book, is that Anti-democratic or anti-democratic propaganda is propaganda that undermines democracy while claiming to promote or advance democratic ends.
Right.
And so this is why, you know, the free speech wars exist.
This is why they won't let us say what we want.
This is why they attack CRT and call people groomers and attack librarians and schoolteachers.
And, you know, all of that stuff is because It's really about political power.
It's a really an anti-democratic political movement that says we're going to seize control of education because democratic education is threatening to us.
You can't say that.
So Jennifer, I want to academic out for a second because I think you're the perfect person to talk to about what I'm getting ready to bring up.
And this is something that makes people really uncomfortable, but it remains nonetheless true, which is that I think in a consumerist society, especially when we're bombarded by consumerist propaganda, people want to believe at all times that they are not affected by rhetoric, that nothing ever makes them think a certain way.
And when they think about propaganda, that's not something that happens to them.
It's something that happens that their enemies do to other people, right?
And it's funny the way That Republicans now and this authoritarian movement has used this, which is, oh, I'm strong and I'm a realist and I know what's going on.
But when my kids go to school, they're being indoctrinated.
They're being brainwashed.
All this stuff is out there.
Culture is out there doing all of that.
Academics know, particularly anybody who studies rhetoric, that we are all affected constantly by rhetoric, by propaganda, by appeals, all these different types of things.
It sort of feels like this moment that we're in is almost a war over who gets to control the rhetoric, who gets to control the reality of the moment.
And this is something that I don't think most Americans, I think that they sort of shudder when they think about it and how it works.
And it feels like all this is sort of happening under the hood.
Does that sound about right?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's called the third person effect, what you described, which is to say that, oh, yeah, that affects them, but not me.
And so a lot of media effects research understands that when we talk about agenda setting or framing or any of those things or any of these persuasion strategies, that a lot of people and it's a kind of reactance, really.
But anyway, a lot of people will say, no, not me.
It's them.
Right.
It affects them.
And so we should therefore protect them or it's not a big deal, whatever They want to say based on that.
But to your second point, absolutely.
This is what I have been wanting to write about.
I wrote a little bit about and I thought I was going to read a book about it, but it's not going to work out.
I don't think about how we've all been turned into propagandists and that essentially there's been an agenda setting war for controlling our public discourse and our public sphere.
You know, it's was set in motion in the 1960s, really, but intensified Along with participatory media.
And, you know, you can really see that effect in 2016.
Right.
So between 2012 and 2016, you had a near diffusion, complete diffusion of participatory media where everybody in the U.S.
was online.
And that allowed everyone to be vectors of propaganda.
And so Jacques Ellul wrote in the 1960s about Vertical and horizontal propaganda and he said that you know most propaganda comes from the top and goes down But he said you know in some occasions you have horizontal propaganda and he was thinking of like face-to-face meetings where people would go in and you know try to use sort of talking points and Persuade people to believe a certain thing you thought that was super limited, but very effective, right?
And so what we know is that political campaigning, starting with 2008 and Barack Obama's campaign, used horizontal strategies, right?
They wanted peer-to-peer persuasion.
They used the community organizing model to get people to, you know, get out the vote, to talk to their friends and family about Barack Obama's campaign.
And it was super effective.
And persuasion research says that we trust our friends and our family more than we do, you know, the media or a political campaign.
And so all other campaigns have done what Obama did, you know, since 2008, some more effectively than others.
And then the way that the media changed so that we could all do that online has meant that essentially we've, every time you go online, you're participating in the information wars.
And some people know that, right?
Some people are like the generals who are controlling the conversation every day.
I don't know if your trending topics have changed as much as mine have on Twitter in the last week, but I'll tell you the number of times that I've clicked on a trending topic and it has been controlled by the right wing has really changed in the last week.
And I think that that's because so many conservatives have come back to Twitter.
I don't think it's actually that Twitter has changed the algorithm so much as so many more have come back and seen it as a battle space, right?
That we can, oh, we're invited back, like we can control this battle space again.
You know, people who wrote in 2014, 2015 about using information warfare to attack ISIS, for example, ended up being instrumental in Donald Trump's campaign in 2016.
Right.
And so the info wars have been going on for a few years now.
And I think you're right.
Like most people don't know that that's what is happening every day.
Well, I think the right figured that out way ahead of everybody.
Because, you know, it's like when you look at something like Twitter, I mean, I think people are really thrown off by, like, how pleasant the colors are and, like, pictures of dogs and memes.
But, like, underneath the hood is, I mean, easily one of the most, like, intricate and powerful machines ever created in terms of narrative.
And we've reached this point.
And if you listen to the far right, and I've made Nick listen to these people, unfortunately.
I've drug him through this muck as well.
They understand that we're at like this apoca moment where whoever controls those, those notes, whoever controls that machinery kind of controls the future at this point.
And I think the right was way ahead of the curve on this.
And I think that liberals and the left are sort of both like starting to wake up and realize that they're, they're many years behind in this battle.
Yeah, and it's also because the battle is anti-democratic, right?
Like, so participating in the Info Wars and trying to control the public discourse is anti-democratic, and so I think that the left, even if they realize it, hopefully they realize it at this point, but even if they realize it, they're reticent to engage in that battle, right?
Like, one of the things that Like I said, I've been sort of realizing over the last few months while I've been teaching this dark arts class is that so much of this stuff is precognitive.
And liberals want to engage in our, you know, critical thinking and cognitive mind.
They want to persuade, not coerce.
They want to make good arguments based on evidence.
And that's democratic.
We want them to want to do that.
But it's asymmetric when one side is Using you know, our limited critical thinking abilities and the other side is using our precognitive Reacting and emotive abilities And so that's a problem and it's a problem that I don't have an answer to Because I certainly wouldn't advise them to use unethical anti-democratic communication strategies to defend democracy And yet that's where we're at
You know, they always cry to back up your point that, like, you know, all these social media platforms are silencing the right and we don't get amplification.
And when it turns out, if you look at the actual numbers, the science, the math, it proves that there's something, some sort of siren song, right, that can kind of, you know, it gets amplified more than any left-wing propaganda you can imagine.
Are you aware of, like, what this effect is in terms of the growth of this movement?
Is it growing exponentially as we go, you know, year over year?
That's a great question.
Um, so I don't, I don't know how to quantify that.
I mean, you can say that the ideas of the right wing fringe have become more mainstream over the last seven years, right?
You can you can see that you can see it in policy proposals, you can see that in the elected officials, who, who Who run and what they say and the fact that they're reelected.
When you say seven years, this is Trump from the beginning of Trump?
Yeah, I mean, so really, yeah.
And this was the plan, like I said.
But I mean, if you went back and looked at VDARE, you looked at other really, you know, white nationalists and right wing chat blogs and things like that, you will see them talking about Trump and trying to figure out if he's one of them you will see them talking about Trump and trying to figure out And deciding, and it's really interesting because they're trying to resolve, you know, some cognitive dissonance, but deciding, you know, sort of F it.
It doesn't matter.
We can use him.
Right.
And so they're like, wear your red hat out in public.
Use it as a wedge.
Start talking to people, you know, about Trump and then, you know, move the conversation along.
Right.
And so they're practicing all kinds of, you know, Overton window moving strategies to try to mainstream and platform their ideas using Trump as a stooge, you know, and a lot of these groups use Trump as a stooge in 2016.
Yeah.
And that's go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Well, no, I was just going to say they understood that he was a buffoon.
And, you know, it was just he was a really useful buffoon.
Really, really useful.
And I mean, Alex Jones is another one.
You know, he was able to get Trump to say all kinds of things.
There's a couple of places in my book where I trace out, you know, for example, on refugees, on Muslim refugees in 2015.
Initially, Trump said, it's a humanitarian crisis and it's terrible what's going on and we should do something to help these people.
Right.
Which is like the opposite of where he ended up a week and a half later.
And it was a lot of pressure from the white right wing fringe, including Alex Jones and people he had on his website or on his show, you know, telling him that this was a Trojan horse and, you know, that he needed to rethink his position.
And maybe he wasn't the guy that they thought he was.
And it didn't take him, you know, a week before he went from, oh, this is a humanitarian crisis.
We should treat these people, you know, as humans.
And right to like, this is an invading army.
These, you know, reifying them, treating them as dangerous objects that were threatening, you know, and that were essentially a plot.
So before we let you go, I have to ask, because this is something that I've wanted to ask you for a while.
Right wing rhetoric is incredibly powerful.
It is so visceral and and and almost Simple in its intricacy like it is just so Deeply born and I think Democrats and the left sometimes suffer because like you said they want to appeal to logic They want to use statistics I think one of the biggest means that people use for a while is what I call the daily show method which is to show clips of people contradicting themselves and
Which I think for a while sort of exposed the fact that these principles weren't real and that they were cudgels for power.
But I have to ask you, in all of your time studying this, what inoculates, what defeats, what even challenges?
Because what we're talking about, like you said, it's very primal what we're dealing with.
Like, what have you seen that does anything?
Yeah, so the research would say pre-bunking can work, and that it's more effective than debunking, right?
So, and I think that's the Daily Show effect that you're thinking about, you know, it's like, like, you can see these patterns, and you can see how it works.
And that gives you a kind of immunity, it prepares you for it.
And so, you know, One of the things that I tried to do before the 2020 election was to show how Trump was going to reject the results of the election.
Right.
You know, my my little impact wasn't great, obviously, but, you know, there are a lot of people trying to do stuff like that.
And and that can help.
But essentially, like what all the research on, like the rise of fascism or the rise of democracy, you know, historically,
and around the world shows is that people are going to turn towards autocrats when they feel stressed, when they feel like survival is a question for them, when they feel stable, when they feel, you know, enlightened in a way, right?
Like they're able to devote time to other kinds of issues Then they want diversity.
Then they want democracy.
They want, you know, equal rights and they want to share power.
And so, you know, I end my Trump book with this.
Max Lerner wrote a bunch of stuff.
I really like Max Lerner.
He wrote a bunch of stuff in the 1930s, in the late 1930s.
You know, it's later than you think.
Ideas are weapons things like this, you know trying to show how the right was rising around the world And what he says and I sort of give him a really long quote at the end of my book is That you can't really prepare like you can't make a constitution that's strong enough to defend against this you can't make a You know, you can't you can't make something that really defends against it.
What you have to do is make a society that is resilient to it.
Right.
So that's a society in which people have what they need.
It's a society in which people are treated with dignity, where they have educational opportunities, you know, and they they see a world that is just and fair.
And if you can make a world where people think That things are just and fair, they will trust and they will be more democratic.
But if you purposefully create a world that's not, you're creating the conditions for autocracy, for fascism.
All right, and we've been talking with Professor Jennifer Marchia, one of the smartest people out there that there is.
The book is Demagogue for President, which I cannot recommend highly enough.
I think it's a really, really seminal work from the time period.
Where can the good people find you?
Nice people can find me on Twitter.
Don't send meanies my way.
Thank you so much.
All right, we are back.
That was Professor Jennifer Murchia at Texas A&M, a professor of communication, the author of Demagogue for President, a wonderful rhetorical analysis.
I recommend highly that you pick up this book.
I'm glad we got into the specifics of rhetoric, propaganda.
This is all stuff that we're We're, as a culture, we're pretty uncomfortable with, but we're kind of drowning in at this point.
You know, the phrase he uses, I think, probably to the most effect is, shut up and obey.
And he keeps trying to make it clear that that's what they are telling you.
And, you know, that phrase has to be a triggering one for people, because obviously nobody wants to shut up and obey, although that's all they're doing for these Trumpists and stuff.
But I think that's a phrase that's really powerful.
Man, if you haven't read this New York Times deep dive, I really recommend it because I actually, we didn't get a chance to talk about this, but I thought it was really fascinating the way that they basically were talking almost about how Tucker Carlson's appeal not only is in this rhetoric, but in this deep, deep examination of financial appeals, like what people are watching, what they're staying for, what keeps them, because this is an industry.
This is, it's almost like, I don't know if you remember a few years ago, there was this article that somebody wrote and it was like, why are Doritos so addictive?
Right?
And it was like, Doritos are just absolutely the most perfect addict worthy sort of snack because it plays on this, it plays on that, it does this, this is moving, this is moving.
Tucker Carlson in this modern age is just the perfect fascistic narrative delivery tool.
And if you read this article, it becomes very clear very quickly that this is like some really overwhelming stuff.
I mean the power that it packs, I'm glad that Jennifer got into it, is just, it's really formidable.
And in a perfect encapsulation of where we are in our society today, they changed the Doritos.
And they're not as crispy as they used to be.
The taste is a little bit different.
So I'm convinced they're not as addictive as they used to be.
At least to me, as a connoisseur of Doritos.
And it's the same thing I think we see here.
The hope eventually is that this will peter out.
Where can you keep ratcheting up at this point, you know, with Tucker Carlson and that kind of thing?
I had said to a buddy of mine a few weeks ago, as the January 6th information slowly coming out, and it just feels like we're going to end up having, you know, red flags, alarms, whatever.
I said, you know, there are people on the right who are going to really have to sort of be confronted and deal with in their face incontrovertible evidence.
And he was just like, it's just a big shrug.
And I think Jennifer was a big shrug, too, when I asked her, like, you know, does this have any effect if people who are Tucker Carlson fans see this and realize what he's doing, you know, even if you took him backstage, right, to the production vehicle of Tucker Carlson's show, right, what would you be hearing?
You'd be hearing them talking about Daily Stormer and all these different things and how they're going to manipulate, hey, use this phrase tonight, it'll really work.
That wouldn't, I don't think it would have an effect.
That's what's so sad about where we are.
Well, and it's a large part of it is because it's confirming something they already believe.
You know, we know this from studying history.
There's no such thing as brainwashing.
Like, you can't make people think things that they aren't predisposed to believe.
It's just about what latches on to their... I mean, that's ideology.
We've talked about this ad nauseum.
Like, that's what's happening here.
He is giving people a narrative that builds off of a narrative that they already have, that they already believe.
The question is how you counteract that, and how you move that away, and how you create something new that can be better and healthier.
And that's exactly why they're attacking schools and education, because they realize that that is the moment when you can get that ideology built into the brain at an early age.
It's really diabolically Whatever the word is.
It's about the genius.
Genius.
Yeah.
It is.
Yeah.
And I'm glad we got a chance to have that conversation.
It's a larger one we'll have to keep having.
And on that note, I'm going to use all of my power, all of my sway, all of my platform to try and get Doritos to bring back the Buffalo flavor.
Real sad that that went away.
Make it happen.
Buffalo Flavor.
I'm unaware of Buffalo Flavor.
Oh, I can't get into it without shedding a couple of tears, Nick.
I gotta be honest.
All right, everybody.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
A reminder, we will be back on Friday with our Weekender Edition.
If you want access to that, go over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
Your support ensures that we are ad-free, editorially independent, and this show continues to roll on, and we are so grateful for you.
Again, that's patreon.com slash my great podcast.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
