With Jared Yates Sexton off today, Nick Hauselman hosts the show and welcomes Jason Neidleman, political science professor at the University of La Verne, and author of the upcoming book “Frameworks of Time In Rousseau," to discuss how Donald Trump's campaign is openly discussing how they want to de-construct the government in such a way that would clearly lead to authoritarianism. They draw some historical context back to Watergate and Nixon, and try to figure out why so many Americans seem to want fascism.
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I am your co-host, Nick Hauselman, and Jared Yates Exit is not with us today.
He is a little bit busy.
So he left me in my own devices.
And of course, when that happens, I need to bring on a good friend of mine, Jason Needleman, who you've probably heard before on the pod.
And if you haven't, he is a professor of political science at the University of Luverne.
And right now, he's also editing a book called Frameworks of Time in Rousseau, coming out next year through Rutledge.
And Jason, thank you so much for coming on and joining me.
Great to be here.
Thank you for having me again.
Absolutely.
Well, you're coming back because the other times have been so good and informative and layered, and in definitely an interesting way that complements what Jerry likes to bring into the equation as well.
But I'm excited to get into some stuff.
And I think we need to kind of jump off here with a New York Times article that was written today by the usual suspects, Maggie Haberman being one of them, that sort of outlines what a Trump presidency in 2025 or beginning of 2025 would look like.
And it sounds like you might be a little bit frightened by what you read.
Is that a fair assessment?
I think it's like you guys talk about on the podcast all the time.
I think it's stuff that we already knew, but when you see it in print with the specific plans, it just, yeah, kind of focuses the mind.
And that's a little bit like what they're trying to do right now with the interviewing Jared and all the people around Trump to get them to say that he knew he lost the election.
We all know that already, but it makes a difference when you see it, you know, on paper, through witness testimony.
And this article clearly doesn't get published unless people in and around the campaign are willing to talk to the press.
And I mean, we even have this guy Is it John McEntee?
John McEntee?
Who, yeah, is just going on the record saying that the plan is to essentially dismantle separations of power.
He says in the article, quote, our current executive branch was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies.
There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner.
It is not enough to get the personnel right.
What's necessary is a complete system overhaul, unquote.
That's basically a euphemism for saying we're going to undo the constitutional structure of the United States of America.
And if you read the rest of the article, it becomes clear that the intent is to concentrate power in the executive branch.
So yeah, seeing that on paper, it's something of course we suspected, but seeing that on paper coming from the mouths of people close to Trump, it's pretty frightening, yeah.
Yeah, and John McEntee, remember, had come up a number of times during the Trump presidency.
He had gotten fired because of clearances with the FBI background check and his finances.
And yet, even though they perp walked him out of the White House with the stuff and that was part of John Kelly's thing, he was still, as what happens a lot in the Trump world, you still hang around and you're still part of everything.
In that same way that, you know, his campaign manager, Manafort, you know, was supposedly fired, but then was still hanging around and doing all sorts of stuff with them because the grift was real.
I do think it's interesting.
This is a piggyback on what you said.
Yeah, these articles don't get written in a vacuum.
Clearly, the campaign is strategizing on how to get out certain messages and certain code words to people to make sure they understand where they are.
And also, you know, the general public and the voters.
But, you know, the real key passage I think I wanted to read here that I grabbed was from Russell T. Vaught, who had run the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House.
He wrote, quote, what we're trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.
When you hear words like seize, you know, and these are not just random words, it's whatever, these are probably written out answers, I'd almost think, you know, to the authors and stuff of the piece.
You know, is there any way that you can look at this as, you know, non-nefarious?
Or is this simply a description of what authoritarianism turns into?
I mean, I think it's the latter.
I mean, the only way you could see it as non-nefarious, if you're a kind of a MAGA supporter, and you believe the American people, and then I guess you're gonna say, yeah, you go, John McEntee or Russell Vought, and you find those pockets of independence, and make sure they get purged, so that nothing stands in the way of the MAGA agenda.
I mean, you know what's motivating this, right?
It's the fact that The first time they came in, they didn't have complete control over personnel, especially in certain key departments.
So they're trying, they're announcing that they're going to get out ahead of that should they win.
In 2020.
And I mean, the other scary part of the article is that they're doing these reviews of personnel and key departments, especially justice.
So they'll have a list ready to go of people, the so-called pockets of independence that they're looking to purge.
And of course, pockets of independence just translates into people who will push back against the authoritarian agenda.
That's what pockets of independence denotes.
I want to explore that for a second, because what does it look like to figure out who these independent thinkers are?
What methods do you use to figure that out, right?
They started to do this, and we'd heard Bannon, which is why this isn't necessarily new.
Bannon, when they first took over, they were so fucking disorganized, right?
They didn't even show up.
You'd hear the stories of all these departments during the transition just waiting for the Trump Administration people to come in and assume the control of whatever, and no one showed up.
It sounded like something out of, I mean, it reminds me of, what was the Sean Penn movie where they're working, and Timothy Hutton, and they end up being spies?
There's a title of a, there's a, anyway, they, but, but you see them working, like, probably for, like, the CIA, and they're underground, whatever, and they're just partying the whole time.
Like, there's no oversight, there's no nothing, and it kind of felt like... The Falcon and the Snowman maybe?
The Falcon and the Snowman, that's right.
I knew there was an animal in the title, and Well, that's the Michael Lewis book.
Michael Lewis did a book about the weather service and how they're just waiting and nobody shows up.
Yeah.
So I think what Bannon had said on his program, which no one had ever needs to listen to, was, you know, and this is a while ago, he's like, yeah, we are going to now from day one, be ready and have all these things ready to go so that everyone's purged out of there ahead of time.
So again, what does that look like?
I guess they're going to have to do a questionnaire, like how would you end up ascertaining how They've done it.
So that's the thing.
They've done it.
I believe that that's why election denialism is so central to the Trump campaign.
It's not just that they believe it, that they can't accept that Trump might have lost.
It's that that's a good test of loyalty, right?
So the way you know if someone's a pocket of independence, as if they say, well actually it was adjudicated 60 times in front of You know, federal courts and it was determined every single time that the election was legit.
If you're still willing to say in the face of that, that the election was stolen, that shows that you're not a pocket of independence.
I think of it like a gang initiation, you know, where you're told to do something that will bind you by virtue of the, you know, illegality of the act to the gang no matter what.
You kind of give them something that they have over you.
So I think they probably have it already with the election denialism.
You just go through and you look for the people who won't participate in that discourse.
And that's the pocket of independence that you purge. - Well, okay, let's go through that for a second 'cause okay, in theory, they'd be scouring social media posts, right?
That's a good way, or any kind of quotes they might share.
Sure, exactly.
Or just talking to people, I guess.
I mean, the thing is, it is so public and people did go on the record either supporting or...
Yeah, well, I mean, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, those guys, somehow, I don't even, I shudder to think what they did to kind of get back on the side of Trump.
But, well, Lindsey, we know, right?
At any rate, we can put that in another discussion.
But what I'm getting at is, and I don't think it's a far-fetched notion, is that it might not be enough To be scouring quotes and whatever.
If they get into power I don't think it's far-fetched to assume that they would then use the other tools of monitoring citizens to discover whether or not they can trust quote-unquote the people in the government.
Oh, sure.
I mean, is there any indication that Trump would respect kind of these norms of privacy and rule of law?
I mean, he's a lawless man.
I mean, that's ultimately what this article is, this Jonathan Swan Haberman Savage article.
It's just kind of documenting the lawlessness of this man and this movement.
And that lawlessness goes all the way to, of course, the Constitution.
You know, there was I think it was Thomas Massey.
He was this week saying, well, sir, I forget who he was questioning.
He says, you know, your your your actions.
Your actions may be lawful, but they're not constitutional.
Something like that.
And of course, the Constitution is the law.
It is the higher law.
You know, if you violate a civil statute, or if you violate the Constitution, that is a violation of the law.
The Constitution is the controlling law of the country.
And Donald Trump and Trumpists have no respect for either one.
I mean, that's the way you get to authoritarianism, is by trampling the rule of law.
So fundamentally, like at the root of all of this, is lawlessness, is a refusal to respect The idea of the rule of law, and it's all done in the name of the people.
You know, that's why we refer to the movement as a right-wing populist movement.
In the name of the people, no law, you know, should be allowed to stand in the way.
And that's kind of the tone of this article, is these guys are saying, you know, we can't allow these artifacts of American legalism and constitutionalism to stand in the way of the, you know, what they take to be the will of the people.
Yeah, and that's January 6th, right there, right?
They felt like they were in the movie The Patriot.
I think Mel Gibson, that's The Patriot, where they're standing up to the evil British Empire, you know, who they didn't want to pay those taxes anymore, and these were the real Patriots, right?
And that's why it's so frightening when you have the leaders who understand this.
They know, like Trump knows he didn't win, but By the way, do we want to explore that really quickly?
Because it's been popping up a little bit as far as what the plan was.
Jack Smith is sort of probing this.
And I talked about this before, but didn't it seem like they were trying to attack this from all different angles, right?
To get Trump to stay in the White House.
And it seemed like the biggest thing that they wanted with January 6th was a delay in the counting of one day.
And I'm sure you're familiar with the articles in the Constitution that it dictates that the Vice President needs to certify the electoral accounts on a very specific day.
Does it resonate with you that that was the key here?
And that if the tumultuousness of January 6th, which was inspired by Trump, had delayed it, then they would then have some sort of bizarre illegal John Eastman-like argument that they can now stop the count and go back to the States?
Right, probably it was, I mean, you know, do we want to ascribe like rational intent to these guys?
I don't know, but if it was something more than just like let's break democracy, if there was some kind of rational strategy, it was probably something like that.
Let's delay the certification so that we can go back, buy ourselves some time to go back and try to make this argument for the alternate electors or convince state legislatures that they have the power to You know, alter the outcome of the election that most likely would have been the plan from the more rational actors.
It could also just be, you know, an insurrection against democracy, probably that Trump wasn't thinking much beyond that would be my guess.
Sure, well okay, so that was a detour, but I wanted to get back to what we were talking about as far as the Unitary Executive Theory, which is sort of like they're trying to obliterate the equal branches of the government, right?
That's sort of what, and it's laid out pretty clearly in the article, and you know what it reminds me of?
It's almost like, so you know how a lot of these right-wingers sort of sat there in their chairs seething for eight years of the Obama administration?
Probably related mostly to maybe racism, just the fact that they had a black man was elected to the White House and he's now carrying out which ultimately ends up being some of the more centrist at best, you know, policies, right?
This was not a left-wing president that was radically, you know, And I almost feel like that seething could be linked to the same feeling that I think a lot of conservatives had back in 1974 when Nixon resigned.
And I almost feel like that same notion of how angry they were that Nixon gave up and resigned, like he let these congressmen talk him into resigning when he should have fought back.
And your friend and mine, Dick Cheney, was directly involved in this because it seems like he's the architect of this, right?
When he got into become a VP with Bush II, it seemed like that was his MO from the beginning and it had to be rooted in what happened with Nixon, right?
Wow.
It does seem like one of the lessons that the right learned coming out of the Nixon impeachment and resignation was that it would help them if they could build a kind of information an ecosystem where they could control the flow of information.
You know, a lot of people do say that if you had Fox News and you had right wing talk radio in 1974, maybe things end a little bit differently for for Richard Nixon.
And that I think is.
Probably the biggest change we've seen in the Republican Party over that span of two generations.
It's this movement from, you know, kind of a reality-based information ecosystem to one in which you can, you know, control what your supporters believe.
And, you know, to some extent, I think that has metastasized to the point where it hurts them.
Because, you know, they haven't done well in the last few elections, and it can be inconvenient when you've got to cater to constituents who are completely untethered from reality.
Because sometimes you might want to say, actually we really do need to do this, but you've now kind of created this Frankenstein's monster that is set on believing the fantasy that you've sold them over years or decades or whatever it's been.
But yeah, I mean, I do think that, you know, it's been and you can track it across like different sectors of American politics, right?
You can tell a parallel story with respect to Roe v. Wade, which was around the same time in the early 70s and what's happened on the Supreme Court.
It's this concerted movement on the right to Create separate institutions, especially around ideas and information to create like their own ecosystem for information that isn't tethered to what they would call the mainstream media.
And that then creates for them the kind of constituencies that they need to support their agenda.
So, in that sense, yeah, I do think there's a story you can tell going back to the early 70s.
You know, I also think this is the act of a desperate party right who on the margins needs every single last vote they can possibly stir up from everywhere, which is probably the other reason why no one wants to alienate Trump, because they need all every last little bit of that plus these other What would you call, I guess, normal Republicans who would just vote Republican because they can't stand Biden, right?
They can't stand how all the policies and all these different things.
So you can mix that together and somehow find a path.
And even though you want to say that, you know, Biden won by 10 million votes or whatever, you know, what does it come down to?
Is it like 30,000 votes across three states?
Yeah, something like that.
A little more, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that's really where we're at.
And interestingly enough, even just to reflect on Hillary's campaign, the fact that they didn't realize that, right?
They didn't seem to understand that this was really going to come down to, you know, less.
That was less.
That might have been 30,000 votes in three states.
You know, it was a colossal failure that you only hope that won't be made again.
But I do feel like the Yeah, the notion of what they're looking for to do is rooted directly back in the fact that Cheney and those guys thought that Nixon could have survived Watergate and should have survived Watergate.
And it was a deep state and all that stuff.
By the way, it was a deep state, right?
Mark Felt, number two in the FBI, realized what was going on and went to the, you know, Woodward and Bernstein and basically was the backstop of democracy as the deep state.
Like, maybe they're not so wrong in sort of espousing that idea, right?
Well, what I find interesting is this new notion that the deep state is somehow weaponized against the right.
It's like every single leader of the director of the FBI in the history of the country has been a Republican.
There's never been a Democrat.
If you look at the targets of the so-called deep state over most of the history of its existence, it's been people on the left.
You're right that in the case of Mark Felt, that's an example of where it was, if you want to call it the deep state, led to bad news for Republicans.
But for the most part, I mean, if you read any history of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, intelligence more broadly, It's targeted forces on the left.
So this notion, and I mean Christopher Wray was mocking it two days ago or whatever when he was in front of Congress, this notion that somehow the FBI, led by Christopher Wray, a lifelong Republican and a conservative one, a member I think of the Federalist Society, and just a track record of conservative activism and involvement, that somehow that so-called deep state is weaponized against the right is really ridiculous.
But yeah, I mean, this notion of a deep state has been popular historically on the left as a way of criticizing the way that regardless of administration, there's policing and targeting of left-wing activism. there's policing and targeting of left-wing activism.
So yeah, I mean, I don't think it's ridiculous to talk about the idea of a deep state.
I do think it's ridiculous to talk about the idea of a deep state that's somehow weaponized particularly against conservatives.
Yeah, great point.
I mean, by the way, being on a campus, the other notion of this woke campus thing, a virus across the entire country, Jared rails against it all the time.
I think you could probably weigh in as well.
I think the notion that like every professor across every college is this radical left-wing, you know, commie trying to indoctrinate is also a ridiculousness of which though, Rhonda Sanders has very successfully made this a wedge issue, right?
And he's going to Yeah, they want to run on it.
I mean, I think it's like an indication that they don't have much else to run on.
But it's a wedge issue that seems like it can be sort of effective at times.
I mean, the dominant force at universities is, you know, neoliberal economics, but it is, you know, I mean, there's a there is a kernel of an issue there in terms of the prevalence of I wouldn't call it woke politics, but DEI, diversity, equity, inclusivity, is prevalent on college campuses and elsewhere throughout the society, right?
Like you just saw it in the negotiation over the The funding for the Department of Defense, you know, they're really committed to DEI policies as well and practices in the Pentagon, because they know how important it is to having a unified, integrated, military, diverse Diverse military.
But yeah, so I mean, it's like there's DEI on campus.
Yeah, for sure.
You know, it's not the caricature, of course, that Ron Santus makes it out to be.
And, you know, but there's a kernel of an issue there.
Of course, I would disagree with him as to whether DEI is like a force for justice.
I think on the whole, DEI is something that is beneficial to institutions and universities.
In particular, I mean, I just started teaching a class in the last couple years called Power, Privilege and Resistance on White Supremacy.
I don't think it's bad that the students at the University of Luverne are taking a class like that.
There's certainly nothing, like, woke about it in the sense that, you know, it's going to in some way prejudice students against, I don't know what, white people, maybe?
I don't see how learning the history of race and racism inherently leads to a prejudice against white people.
That's certainly never happened for any of my students, I'll say that.
Right.
Well, and you know that, but that's the insecurity.
I mean, there's a lot of people in the GOP are like, they're just not well, right?
They're not people who have self-reflection.
They're not people who have any kind of sort of deep thinking about these issues.
I mean, the real weighing you have to deal with is whether or not like a DeSantis believes what he's saying.
You know, he says it with such conviction at this point that you kind of feel like, okay, I think he is He's whipped himself up into believing this stuff, having already been to Harvard.
He's a well-educated person who should know a lot better and certainly should recognize the value, just rationally, of approaching situations where maybe you're unfamiliar, uncomfortable, in a way that's respectful to other people.
I mean, that's really all this is.
And I never thought, I guess, in theory, by 2023 in this country, that we'd get to the point where you could whip up So many people against this and that I mentioned this in the last podcast when you start seeing like and maybe I just have an interesting impression of women in general of just sort of being nicer.
Nicer people and like you know but when you see sometimes especially on the Twitter feeds are popping up and it's these women who are really angry and channeling it in a way that and again it's not that like women can't be angry um I just sort of in my you know in my small sphere of my life I guess I like to think that women are more rational and they're nicer and whatever and so they've been able to tap into across gender here on this thing and that's what's so scary to me is that people want this right people are going to read that New York Times article
And say, yeah, we got to get Fauci out of there.
We've got to stop the CDC from spreading, you know, from doing all this damage.
The WHO is out of control.
We have to somehow, you know, because we can prove that this COVID came from a lab in China.
Well, then that's everything.
That's the whole thing right there.
We have to do all the other things to control all this stuff.
That's what's so frightening to me, and I suppose it's rooted in some sort of a personality trait that a lot of people on that side have that doesn't allow them, I think, to sort of think any more rationally.
Well, you know what I wanted to mention?
I don't know if you saw this ad that came out.
I think it's from the DNC this week.
But I think a lot of what you're talking about is fueled by the kind of carnival of it all.
And, you know, Trump, yeah, he's a clownish figure, but he's an entertaining clown for the people who love him.
And that's why Ron DeSantis can't get any traction, because if you see him in these one-on-one interactions, he's just not fun.
Um, if you watch a Trump rally, like, people are having a good time.
And I guess, you know, hey, you never thought that, like, people like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene would advance the feminist cause.
But I guess for Nick Hausselman, they've shown that women are equal to men in their ability to be obnoxiously offensive.
Well, it's really offensive, really.
I'm going to hijack this for a second because, you know, DeSantis, you know, tanking here.
And I know it's really early and we have to remember that, like, even, you know, Joe Biden, I said this to you on the way out yesterday at my house, you know, Joe Biden was done, right?
And in South Carolina, until, you know, Obama went to Buttigieg and Klobuchar and said, get the hell out of the race.
We'll give you a, well, actually, Klobuchar didn't get anything, but Buttigieg got a cabinet position.
And they galvanized behind him.
I mean, I think that's been proven, right?
To resuscitate what was clearly a completely dead... And you know what?
From what we're seeing even now, there's some reasons why he wasn't doing well.
But Dennis is losing money, right?
They're almost out of money.
They're firing a lot of people now.
He really is...
Psychopathic is too mean of a word, but there's something personality-wise with his laugh and the whole thing.
It's really off-putting.
And the anger on the national stage doesn't work as well.
Sadistic.
I would say sadistic with what he did with the migrants.
One sec, I'm just letting out my dog.
Okay.
That whole thing is a real problem that people are not going to... What's interesting is they're not even galvanizing around him in the primary, which you'd think you'd have some leeway there.
He's way down.
But I did want to bring into the conversation, we haven't talked about this person yet before, but Vivek Ramaswamy is kind of coming out of nowhere to sort of insert himself.
And I got to give him credit.
Whoever his comms department is, is really good because they've gotten him on very high watched shows, right?
He's getting booked on all these shows.
He's from the Harvard ecosystem, right?
I mean, I believe he went to Harvard.
So he sounds smart.
He speaks fast and he renunciates and he has energy and he's younger.
I want to play you a little quick clip.
He went to Tucker Carlson's white nationalist hootenanny and racist hour to speak at this conference he had.
I'm going to play a little clip of this.
This is sort of impromptu.
I just wanted to bring it in.
I wasn't even prepared.
Let's see how this sounds and I'll try and edit it live.
Here we go.
It's pretty scary.
So let's just go through this.
One thing you can't say is that maybe January 6th, while appalling on one level, maybe it was not an insurrection.
So let me talk about, I haven't talked about this much in the campaign.
I'll be very honest with you.
You want to know what caused January 6th?
There's such a temptation to say that there's one man whose name is unspeakable.
No, first of all, it's QAnon.
It's QAnon.
You want to know what caused January 6th?
Is pervasive censorship in this country in the lead up to January 6th.
You tell people in this country they cannot speak, that is when they scream.
You tell people they cannot scream, that is when they tear things down.
And so the reality is, we were told that you could not question where the virus came from when we all knew it came from a lab in Wuhan, which now they admit.
We were told that you could not send a private message to someone on the eve of an election that Hunter Biden's laptop story was actually a true story worth considering before an election.
You were systematically suppressed.
So this is, think about this.
You told you had to be locked down, had to take a vaccine that was mandated and forced down your throat, stay locked down in your home while Antifa and BLM roam and burn the streets of this country.
So that's the lead-up of one full year of telling people you have to shut up, sit down, and do as you're told.
And then you tell them, okay, there's an election where you didn't get the information that you needed, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story being real and suppressed.
I'm sorry, we don't need to keep that.
Ironically, he even tried to preface it saying, well, I haven't talked about this on the campaign much.
This is all he talks about.
This is everything he does.
Have you seen this person before?
Oh, yeah.
But, you know, Everything he said is bullshit, let's just say that.
But put that aside, let's just bracket that for one second.
This idea that people with millions of followers and 4 million viewers on Fox saying that over and over every night are censored.
Are not allowed to speak.
I mean, you're complaining about how you're not allowed to speak in front of 4 million Fox viewers on Tucker Carlson or whatever he gets, you know, more than anybody else in cable news or used to before he got fired.
So that's just funny in itself that people like Vivek and Tucker will complain about what you're not allowed to say as they're saying it on a show that's watched by more people than any other news program.
Yeah, I mean, it's the grievance.
It's the grievance.
No one's listening to me as I'm speaking, you know, 10 million people are watching at the same time.
But it sounds good and everyone's like, yeah, no one's listening to you, even though I hear you, like all those people at those rallies.
Also, it's bullshit.
We know why they stormed the Capitol, right?
Because there have been convictions, they've been interviewed.
We know that they stormed the Capitol because they believed on the word of their great leader, Donald Trump, that the election had been stolen.
It's nothing to do with censorship or what you're allowed to say.
They have said that the reason they stormed the Capitol was because they were ordered to do so by the person they trust most, Donald Trump, because the election had been stolen from them.
So this idea that it was because they didn't want to get a vaccine, I mean, it's just complete fantasy.
I agree.
But what I'm interested to hear is, you know, what he's saying is what DeSantis is saying, is what Trump is saying, but there is something a little bit different about him.
First of all, is there any world that you can picture the GOP, the Republicans, choosing an Indian American man to be the presidential candidate?
I don't think he's running to get the nomination.
I think he's running to be Trump's vice president.
He's doing a pretty good job of that.
Okay.
You know, but I gotta tell you, I think that everyone who's running against Trump is simply waiting for all the indictments, hoping that at some point it'll be so untenable for Trump that they'll be like, oh, hey, I've been here.
Here I am.
You remember me?
Now, let me just do this, because he's, you know, he's polling April 1st.
Can we use 538?
Is that OK?
Sure.
I don't want to, you know, offend anybody.
But let's just use it because it was the first thing that popped up on Google search.
April 1st, Trump had 46%, DeSantis was at 26.6%, and Vivek was at 1.2%.
By May 1st, Vivek is at 3.1%.
Now, again, it's tiny, but it's triple.
By June 1st, he's at 3.5, and now, as of today, he's 5.5%.
So, I don't think you can overlook, even though the aggregate is not high, that's a five-fold increase over a few months.
There's something going on here, and I guess I'm worried about it in a way, because here's the guy that we were worried about DeSantis was going to become.
He's going to be- Well, you know what Vivek has?
Yeah, I think what he has, I don't think he's going anywhere, but at least not this cycle, maybe next, but I think what he has, he's probably the Pete Buttigieg of this cycle, you know, running to get some cabinet posts, maybe VP, I mean, he's doing well, but I think what he has, for example, like you say, he's saying the same thing as DeSantis, right?
But if you compare Vivek to Santus, even though they're saying more or less the same thing, it's all this anti-woke stuff, DeSantis comes off as like resentful and angry and Vivek comes off as like the happy warrior and the story he tells is, you know, I've made it in this country as a person of color and along the way I learned a lot of lessons.
I saw that like the greatness of the American economy was being corrupted by this emphasis on DEI and Wokeness or whatever.
CRT.
But it's a kind of like a Sunny Rosie story and so you it's a happy warrior so if you think like oh that yeah that that that that's a beautiful thing to get behind whereas DeSantis every day it's like you know oh these people are destroying our country.
Substantively it's not different from what Vivek is saying but like the if you want to you know be happy I guess but Vivek is kind of your man.
If you want to be angry which seems like There's more of a constituency for anger in the GOP than it's Trump or DeSantis.
You remember that Eddie Murphy sketch on Saturday Night Live when he dresses up like a white person?
Yeah, it's one of my favorites.
Yeah, and he goes, you know, I noticed that when white people are alone together, they give each other things for free, you know?
And what I've noticed, I think, is that certain white people out there, like when they can find a person of color that will dispel, you know, affirmative action, or they'll try and pretend like there isn't systematic racism and like helps them feel better.
They can't get enough of that.
Oh, I know.
And they love it when they can find, like, a Tim Scott or someone else like that.
Clarence Thomas is the poster child for this.
You know, in a way that it must make them feel better.
It must confirm this notion that, like, you know, everyone is equal here.
By the way, the whole Obama thing, the C thing, is also the fuel they have.
It says that racism is over.
John Roberts, I think, is convinced that there isn't any racism in America because we had a black president.
I can't explain it any other way, because the guy is supposedly rational, a very smart scholar, and yet, you know, has made some of these ridiculous decisions with the Supreme Court that just flies in the face of what the reality is.
You know, the irony is that they say they're against affirmative action, and yeah, they actually love it.
They love when they can get someone on Fox who's, let's say, African-American, who will, you know, trash liberal policies and support all their stuff.
Like you said, they just delight in that and will give kind of unlimited airtime to people who are willing to do that.
So it is kind of an irony that they're the greatest practitioners of this thing that they claim to resent.
Right?
If you're a black man who's willing to stand behind Trump and his rallies, and they're going to put you, you're going to be on TV, right?
That's amazing.
And you might actually be able to parlay that into, you know, selling shirts or becoming a celebrity, right?
Like, you know, Diamond and Silk are a good example of that as well, right?
I think we got to recruit a black man to tell America that actively recruiting people of color is the destruction of the country.
Right.
Yeah.
And by the way, like, you know, not to put you on the spot, but like, you know, California had gone away from affirmative action, right?
And I needed, I looked into a bit more clearly.
And do you, are you familiar with what the results of that were after enough years?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, more or less, more or less.
But you know, the, the, Yeah, so it leads to a decline.
And I mean, it leads to a decline in the enrollment of African American students and I think Hispanic students as well.
But I was reading something about how, in the aftermath of the Affirmative Action decision, Universities will essentially have to show declining enrollment among historically marginalized communities.
Otherwise, it'll be hard for them to say they're adhering to the decision of the court.
If African-American enrollment stays the same or increases, let's say, or Native American or Hispanic American, How are you going to demonstrate in the face of a lawsuit that you're abiding by the court's decision in, I forget the name of it, but the affirmative action decision.
So it almost guarantees that you're going to see declining enrollments among historically marginalized.
But one thing they won't stop, you know, because I work at a university, is I can guarantee that they won't stop the commitment at universities to diversity.
Because that's now part of the culture.
So you can say you can't do affirmative action, but what you'll never be able to do, at least not for the foreseeable future, is get us to stop kind of actively trying to cultivate a diverse community.
So we'll just find other ways to do it.
Sure.
We know that's important, right?
The college experience is enriched infinitely more with a more diverse student body, right?
I think they know this.
And the other thing that they don't want to bring up, which is frustrating to me, is that really what it should be about is, okay, if someone had benefited from affirmative action, and by the way, women, I think, benefited as much as black people did.
It really, to me, is, okay, they got there.
How did they do?
Now, you might want to argue, OK, schools aren't going to let you fail out or whatever.
They're going to do everything they can.
But in theory, you're still going to see instances, especially where you hear the disgust that's dripping from the GOP about affirmative action, is that they're not qualified.
They should never.
But meanwhile.
And they're as good as every other student that makes it in.
Did you ever see, there was a thread, I know this is anecdotal, but there was a thread by a guy who had gone to UCLA as an undergrad for a couple of years and then transferred to Harvard.
And wait, did you do that?
What did you do?
Undergraduate at UCLA and then PhD at Harvard.
So yeah, my trajectory kinda, yeah.
So he did this, but he did his undergrad.
I think he went for a couple of years at UCLA undergrad, and then he went to Harvard undergrad.
And his description, again, I know this isn't like scientific, but he wanted to make it out like UCLA was so much harder and rigorous academically than Harvard was.
In the sense that, you know, once you get in the door, it's like, hey, there's this, you know, whatever.
But in reality, you know, but like, And I said this in the last podcast or a couple times before, like my dad was a professor of law at IIT Kent in Chicago.
Whatever he's teaching is exactly what they're teaching in Harvard Law School.
So I found that interesting as well, the notion of, you know, like, There's this whole thing about how, you know, the benefits of these schools that you get by going there, but in reality, I don't know if the rigorousness of the academics is merited compared to like other good schools that are not in the Ivy League.
Yeah, I mean, it's complicated.
I only have the experience at the places I've been, but one thing you can look at is, for example, in a PhD program, which is what I did, you can say like, okay, we're going to use affirmative action to ensure that we have a diverse pool of admitted students.
And then, you know, the students matriculate over whatever, five to eight years, they do their PhD, you can then go and look at the final product, you can look at the dissertations.
People do that.
And what they find is that these are of comparable quality.
So the idea, which is of course just doctrine on the right, that this means a degradation of quality is actually empirically false.
Like that thing that they take without even questioning that it means it's a degradation of The quality of whatever it is, you know, the corporate world or the academic world, it's just not true.
And there's a lot of evidence, as you mentioned earlier, that having a, you know, diverse, let's say, student body actually contributes to the academic experience.
So, but this is stuff that, like, you can look at, you know, we don't have to just, like, guess.
You can actually look at it and see whether, you know, let's say a diverse incoming class Results in a decline of academic quality.
You can study it.
Yeah, and I think they have, I'm willing to go on record as saying that there's a reason why they're doing it.
Because they see benefits to it.
By the way, I actually like From the beginning, I would have argued that we should do affirmative action completely independent of the question of diversity or whether it's beneficial to have more.
We should just do affirmative action because of the history of white supremacy.
We should do it for remedial reasons, for the same reason you might pay reparations.
I mean, Bryan Stevenson has this I guess several, but one of his proposals is for reparations, you know, because Black people, let's say, were excluded from institutions of higher education for X number of decades, why don't we have half tuition for Black people at those same public institutions for the same number of decades as a kind of reparative measure?
I would support that and actually think that It'd be easier to defend affirmative action programs now if we hadn't premised them on this diversity rationale, and from the beginning premised them more on like a social justice argument that it has to do with decades and centuries of exclusion and exploitation and it's a way to kind of remediate
Some of that wouldn't let John Roberts make the argument that he always does, which is premised on this idea that affirmative action is just as racist as Jim Crow segregation.
That's that's kind of the I teach institutional law and reading all their their stuff on race is just like excruciating because the premise of all their arguments is that the evil is in a racial distinction itself and not in white supremacy and that's how they get to this idea that any racial classification is equal to any other so if you do it to advantage Historically marginalized people.
That's just as bad as when you had Jim Crow and slavery.
Meanwhile, it's Asian people who are the ones getting the most.
That quality of argument would fail my like, you know, Laverne 100 level power privilege and resistance class.
Like on the first day, we sort of define white supremacy in a way that excludes that interpretation.
So it's just crazy to read, coming from these like brightest minds in the republic, an analysis of race that is so weak that it doesn't even have traction in like the opening chapter of any history of race or book on race and racism.
This is immediately Eliminated or immediately exposed as a tool of white supremacy, which is really what that is.
That kind of color blindness that Roberts uses is an instrument of white supremacy at the end of the day.
And by the way, it goes back to like Reconstruction.
That kind of argument that all racial classifications are equal goes back to the Reconstruction era.
Yeah, you know, to piggyback on how to fix this notion, we had slavery in this country for almost 250 years.
So I would argue it's probably going to take at least that long to kind of overcome these things.
And we're only, what, 1865 till now?
1865 till now is we're getting whatever that is.
I don't know whatever that is.
It's a hundred. - I mean, I would really date the attempt at a true multicultural democracy from, let's say the civil rights act.
So the mid sixties.
Because yeah, it's true that we abolished slavery, but we then had a hundred years of just, you know, explicit white, you know, legally enforced white supremacy.
And we only began to dismantle that, and of course we haven't completely, but we only began to dismantle that in the mid-1960s.
Yeah.
So, you know, you could say 400 years of white supremacy is going to take maybe that long to dismantle.
And that's assuming that we're committed to the project of dismantling it.
As we're discussing, there's a lot of forces in society that don't want to see it.
Dismantled.
Sorry, this wouldn't be that polarizing in a weird way if we had more racists across both parties, right?
But what's interesting... Which we used to.
Thanks Nixon, and thanks Ray.
But also Obama, if you look at the data, what happened was, not because of anything Obama did, but just by virtue of being a black man who got elected, That polarized the electorate more around race, which is kind of amazing to think about, but a lot of white Democrats For the first time, when Obama got elected, came to think about politics through the prism of race.
That was the kind of first time they thought, oh, we're the party of Black people.
And then that sort of finalized that thing that started with the Southern strategy and polarized more dramatically the electorate around race.
Wow, yeah, that is really something we're going to have to study for years and years to come.
What the effect of Obama being elected really had.
Hope versus, you know, whatever the opposite of that is, you know, because in reality, I've heard it said in liberal circles that sometimes people think that, you know what, I would have taken Romney in 2012 if it would have prevented Trump from taking over 2016.
Well, yeah, I mean, we kind of have that question now, right?
Like, that's really what's motivating a lot of these third-party candidacies, which are almost certainly going to help Trump.
It's like, their logic must be that Trump isn't that bad, right?
If you're doing the no labels thing, it has to be in the back of your mind that if Trump won, it wouldn't be that bad.
Otherwise you wouldn't do it right otherwise you do what we really need now I think you and I probably agree is like a united front against fascism.
I mean that's, you know, you and Jared talked about that in spirit, all the time that we have to like focus on this movement.
As the real threat to democracy and anyone who's doing like a third party candidacy or that logic of, you know, wait, maybe I would take Romney if it meant that we could prevent this deeper threat to democracy.
That's, that's, you know, a pressing question in our politics right now.
Just how seriously do you take this threat of fascism?
And I take it really seriously.
I do believe we should do a united front, but I'm on the left and a lot of people on the left Still argue that Trump isn't a unique threat to democracy.
He's more kind of a continuation of things that have preceded him.
So maybe they don't mobilize completely.
Maybe they aren't willing to go into an alliance with someone like Mitt Romney.
Interesting.
I mean, yeah, or you do it where you get Mitt Romney as, like, the vice presidential candidate next to Joe Biden, some really radical thing like that.
I mean, I remember even thinking back in the day, McCain and Russ Feingold, right, who had the McCain-Feingold bill, like, that came together for that.
Like, why not put him on a ticket when they were running, when he was running originally, versus what the, God, I mean, we're old enough to remember who they forced him to take, right?
Sarah Palin?
Is that what you're talking about?
Yeah, well, I would go the other way, though.
I don't know if we want to get into this, but I would go the other way.
See, I think that kind of concession, that kind of movement to the right, isn't what's going to ultimately defeat fascism.
I think, I'm a Sanders supporter, you know, when you were talking about Biden in South Carolina, it's like they did that to marginalize Bernie Sanders.
I think the way to finally and definitively defeat Trumpism is through left-wing populism.
He's a right-wing populist.
I think you beat him through left-wing populism.
I don't think you beat him.
I mean, you can win individual elections, but I think in the long term, the thing we have to beat is not just Donald Trump.
He's going to die.
Mega fascism is going to live on if we want to beat that thing that thing that's the real threat to democratic principles.
I think we have to do it by appealing to people like not just to cynicism and fear but actually like a positive agenda that will speak to some of those same people That are attracted to Trump.
I wanted to mention earlier this ad that the, I think it's the DNC, but you know, Trump has fun.
Trump's funny.
Like you go to it, if not for us, we've probably revolted.
But if you watch people at his rallies, they're having a good time.
It's like, it's a carnival.
They dress up.
And this ad that came out this week was one of the first ones where I thought, okay, so now we're the ones having fun.
I don't know if you saw it.
It's this, like maybe in their third adults, like thirties or forties, man and a woman in bed.
They start to get it on.
She gets on top, climbs on top of him.
And she says, I mean, it's fun, right?
And she says, do you have a condom?
And he reaches for a condom.
And at that moment, it cuts to a 70-year-old white guy in a suit standing in the corner saying, no, can't do that.
We're in charge now.
We're banning birth control.
And she does all the talking, right?
She says, this is our life.
You can't tell us.
what to do.
And he says, Oh, yeah, I can because we won the election.
And I'm just going to sit here and watch and make sure you don't do anything illegal.
It's a really good ad and it like, allows us to have some fun at their expense.
I mean, they've been having fun at our expense for eight years with all the trolling and the memes and the dressing up, and we're trying to counter that with, like, well, but we're the serious people who will save the democracy.
That's fine, like, for now, but ultimately, we gotta beat them by going on the aggressive, you know?
Yeah, I'm glad that you're here.
You're definitely channeling Jared Alger would be a lot meaner to me for even suggesting, you know, having a split ticket like that.
So yeah, you're right, because there are so many more of them.
And we're seeing that like with Biden trying to get rid of student debt, for instance, that's a real left wing populist idea.
It makes them look so bad when they try and strike this down, right?
I mean, it can't be a winning thing for them.
And they're not to talk about it.
And they can't wait to talk about Hunter's laptop again, to hide the fact, you know, you know, we got to go.
But like, you know, even the fact that they, the guy that did the whistleblower, right, who they couldn't find for a while, who was supposedly going to blow everything up, this Israeli guy who's like indicted for arms with China, and then, and then they're like, well, he's just being, that's the deep state putting him away.
And then it turns out that he had been, that was the charge had been filed from in November, you know.
They don't care.
They still do the narrative of the deep state, even though, yeah, it happened even before Comer started.
You know what's going to happen is the Trump people, when they go and interview them at the rallies, they'll have some, you know, vision or some notion of a sentence about a whistleblower and being arrested.
That's all they need to know.
And that's all that matters.
I thought it might give them pause a little bit because on the right they love to do the fear-mongering around China.
So when it comes out this guy's actually a spy for China I thought oh okay that's really bad for them they're gonna have to like back off a little bit but no they just say oh that is a charge filed against him by the deep state because he's a truth teller.
When you have the conspiracy mode of thinking, which of course they do, then nothing ever counts as evidence against your point of view.
It can all be inscribed into a deeper level of the conspiracy.
Yes, you know, there's this notion that, like, if you're in an abusive relationship, you know, you could show one of the people pictures of the spouse having an affair, and they wouldn't believe it, right?
That's not him, I can't be him, it's not, it's a fake, whatever.
Like, they just can't go there, and they're abused.
These are this is an abusive relationship.
And it's one way.
And it really is sad for the country.
And I don't know what's going to happen.
I mean, I do feel like some of these indictments are going to start piling on.
It's going to become I like to think it's going to become untenable for Trump to actually continue his campaign.
Or they ultimately say we will drop these charges if you don't run, which I'm not even sure would be a thing that they could do as a legal deal.
Right.
But, you know, because in my mind, he'd be like, sure, I'll do that.
He won't run.
And then a month later, he'll he'll start running again.
You know, even though they whatever the ballots won't have his name.
I don't know.
But that would be, you know, then he'll do a whole writing campaign.
Write my name in if I'm not in the ballot.
Yeah, you can't.
I mean, even if he were to agree to that, it wouldn't be enforceable.
So he could just run.
Yeah, that's not an option.
Isn't it clear to you that the only reason why Jack Smith is involved is because he declared his presidency, or running for president again?
Right, well Merrick Garland, I think Merrick Garland was inclined to kind of let it all go.
Just to save the country from the long national nightmare or whatever, which is terrible, but I think he was inclined to let it go.
But then when Trump announced, he had to kind of force Garland to appoint a special... Trump is thinking, of course, that his only way out is to run and win, and we haven't even talked about that, but that's also completely lawless, and then just fire everybody who's doing the investigations and pardon everybody who was involved.
Total lawlessness, you know?
And he'd get away with it.
And he would get away with it if he won the election, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm also old enough to remember that there was 10 counts of obstruction of justice that, what you said, Mayor Garland had no intention of prosecuting despite the fact that he was now green, white, ready to go, and Mueller had even said so.
And I know Mueller even tried to walk that back, but that was the truth.
That was the truth, but I mean, forget that.
I mean, Garland was just going to let Jan 6th go.
Yeah, I mean, they were going to get the people that actually they could identify who were in the Capitol.
But for Trump, I think he was going to let Trump go on Jan.
6.
But like you said, it was when he announced that it sort of forced his hand.
Then he picks this guy, Jack Smith, who seems to be a bulldog.
Thank God.
Yeah.
Well, we'll see what happens there.
We'll see if Kennedy is going to delay the trials after the election, which is, you know, not out of the realm of possibility, and that might trigger something bad for her.
But either way, listen, I can't thank you enough, Jason, for coming on.
This was a great conversation.
It went places I didn't even anticipate, but we're much smarter because of it.
So anything else we need to be aware of that's out there that you want to call attention to?
I guess your book again, you want to just throw that out there?
Yeah, Frameworks of Time and Rousseau co-edited with Masano Yamashita at the University of Colorado.
And then in the next, I don't know, few years, look for my book, which is tentatively called Rousseau's Cultural Politics.
Okay, so there's something to be said.
There's a theme here.
I'm tense.
I work on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Check it out at Needleman.com.
All right, thank you so much.
Needleman.com.
Okay, you got it.
And thanks everybody out there for listening.
And Jay will be back again for our Weekender later this week.
