Dan and guest co-host Annika Brockschmidt begin by discussing this Tucker Carlson's handling of 40,000 hours of video from the January 6th Capitol insurrection. Carlson showed clips that he said demonstrated that JS six was peaceful and that the death of Capitol police officer Brian Sickney, uh, was not related to J six.
In the second segment they discuss the supposed rift in the GOP in the wake of this year's lackluster CPAC conference.
In the final segment, they breakdown how Republicans who have a real shot at the GOP presidential nomination at this point are running on ultra-MAGA policies - from DeSantis to Haley and so on.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
I am not joined by my co-host Bradley Onishi today, who is away suffering in Maui at present.
Our hearts and thoughts and minds and prayers go out to Brad and the suffering he's currently experiencing in paradise.
But I am joined today and very pleased to be joined by a special co-host, and I will toss it over to her to introduce herself.
Yeah, thank you so much.
I'm Annika Brockschmidt and I'm joining you from the very cold, very wet and very dark Berlin.
So my thoughts are with Brad in Hawaii and I cannot tell you how much I wish that the weather would be similar here because it is atrocious.
Yeah, I can't.
I've never had the opportunity to go to Berlin, but my understanding is that it's not the same as Hawaii.
Let me tell you, if you ever think about visiting, early March is not the time to come.
It's good to know, yeah.
I'm in New England, where we're about to come into what we call mud season.
That's how wet it is here.
They call it mud season.
So yeah, we're coming into that.
For those who've listened to the show before, Annika has co-hosted before, does a great job.
For those of you who were either present or viewed, The Denver event, she also chaired or sort of moderated one of the roundtable discussions, and that was really fantastic.
Does great work looking a lot at American religion, culture, politics, a lot of work on American Christian nationalism.
And of course, we're always delighted to sort of have this perspective from the non-U.S.
perspective on these issues and to recognize how significant and important they are.
Globally.
So thank you so much for joining us, Annika.
Of course.
- Of course, it's a pleasure. - I also want to say as we get started here in all memory of Brad and all seriousness that our new website is up and running for Straight White American Jesus, due largely to Brad.
It is just StraightWhiteAmericanJesus.com.
Folks can check that out.
Among other things, it's easier to search for episodes and topics.
Which is useful for me because I can never remember where or when I said the different things that I said.
And so this will give an opportunity, if nothing else, for me to remember what I've said and where.
Rather than saying at some point in the podcast, like in the last four years, I said that.
So wanted to throw that out.
And as always, thank everybody who listens, everybody who supports us in so many ways.
As I say in my series, it's in the code oftentimes, whether that is in financially, we can't do it without you, or whether it's just suffering through the ads, which nobody enjoys when they're online, including me.
So we thank everybody for that.
I want to just sort of dive in here.
I think we've got sort of a theme today, which is what I would sort of call, you know, MAGA nation and the myth of GOP division, right?
As we're in this kind of perpetual election cycle in the U.S., this question of What is the status of Trump for 2024?
If Trump is not the GOP frontrunner, what does this mean?
And so on and so forth.
And I think it'll be a good discussion.
I think Annika and I are of a like mind on this, but I want to start with sort of an illustration We've talked about this some, but it came up again this week.
Tucker Carlson on Fox News, his friend Kevin McCarthy released, I think it was like 40,000 hours of video from the January 6 Capitol insurrection to Carlson, said he had promised to do this, claimed it was in the name of transparency and so on and so forth.
But Carlson, earlier this week, aired very carefully selected segments.
Obviously, 40,000 hours is a really, really long time, and Carlson did not air 40,000 hours of this material.
It was just a few minutes.
But he showed clips that he said demonstrated that J6 was peaceful, that the so-called, as he would call it, insurrection, that the claims were lies.
And that the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was not related to J-6.
And the medical examiner of others have said that his condition was sort of exacerbated by the events at J-6 and that they contributed to his death.
Response to this, the Capitol Police issued a statement and they said they described his footage as cherry-picked, offensive, misleading.
Said, and I'm quoting now, last night an opinion program aired commentary that was filled with offensive and misleading conclusions about the January 6th attack and noted that Carlson, in their view, did not reach out to the police department to provide accurate context.
The GOP in the House and Senate has responded to this.
It was largely muted.
I read lots of headlines about how the GOP took Carlson to task and so forth.
It was fairly muted.
Almost no criticisms directly of McCarthy for releasing the video.
Again, lots of claims about transparency and so forth.
The lines I saw most said, well, this was strategically a bad idea.
This keeps this in the public light.
It doesn't help us in the GOP and so forth.
It makes us look foolish.
It keeps the conversation going and so forth.
And the White House, not surprisingly, rebuked this, but in a kind of a rare moment, rebuked Carlson by name in a White House statement.
The White House said, quote, we agree with the chief of the Capitol Police and the wide range of bipartisan lawmakers who've condemned this false depiction of the unprecedented violent attack on our Constitution and the rule of law.
Which costs police officers their lives.
We also agree with what Fox News' own attorneys and executives have now repeatedly stressed in multiple courts of law that Tucker Carlson is not credible.
So this is sort of what they said.
The reflections from it, I'm going to throw out some thoughts that I have, and then Anika, I'd love to hear sort of your thoughts on this.
is we know at this point that Tucker Carlson probably doesn't believe the things that he's saying about this.
Why do I say that?
We've talked on this show before about the Dominion court case proceeding against Fox and the texts and other communications that came out from people at Fox, including Carlson, Showing that they personally, many of them personally, don't like Donald Trump, that they did not believe that the election was stolen or marked by widespread fraud and so forth.
I'm extrapolating from that that I don't think Carlson also thinks that January 6th was a peaceful protest or something like this.
So the question I'm going to get from people is, why do this?
Why sort of double down on this?
And I think that the answer is, he and the others at Fox News know what motivates their core audience, their core constituency.
They know that despite what they think, they have to keep this narrative going.
That's what they did with the language of election meddling.
It's what they'll keep doing.
I think it also shows, and this is a point that I've been trying to make for several years now, That I think it shows that the GOP that courted the kind of nationalist populist dimension in American conservatism and right-wing circles for decades is still learning now that that is who they have become.
They can't turn that faucet off.
And it sort of, it runs the GOP.
And so I think it highlights the centrality of that.
And I think it shows, and this is, you know, to tie in with our theme that we'll be developing here, That those MAGA nation lines are not going anywhere, and Carlson and Fox know that they need that storyline.
I don't know what they would be at this point without that.
So, Onagai, those are just some general thoughts.
I'd love to hear what you thought as you read and followed the revelations about Carlson and the airing of the video and everything else this past week or two.
Yeah, so one thing I found notable was that this was treated as this stunning revelation, which, as you said, yes, it is news.
We now know basically for sure that Tucker Carlson knows that he's lying, which, let's be honest, I think most of us have been suspecting for a while.
He doesn't strike me As a, you know, unintelligent person.
So I would say the fact that Tucker Carlson has been playing a role is not that surprising in itself.
Maybe you remember, I think it was in 2020, there was another lawsuit where Fox News lawyers literally argued you cannot believe what Tucker Carlson says because he's basically playing a character on his show.
So he deals, I think, the The verdict said something along the lines of, he deals in exaggerations and you can't take literally what he says.
So they have told us before, officially, in legal writing, that that's what they do.
But I think the second point that you made is sort of the central one and the one that's really important to understand.
The reaction from the GOP side to this, which have been kind of like weirdly muted in a way.
So no full blown rebuttals, even though, you know, various headlines claim that because I feel like at the moment, many journalists are just like scampering for any You know, a GOP statement that might be read as somehow in opposition to Fox News because it's so rare.
So that then ends up looking bigger than it might actually be.
This might turn out to be really costly for Fox News in the courtroom.
I think that's another level.
But I think the centre of this whole thing is the fact that the GOP is still in the process of learning what happens if for decades You cater to extremism within your base.
And there have been, you know, many historians who have now started to write about the, like John S. Huntington, about the sort of radical roots of American conservatism that have largely been forgotten You know, we all know the story of William F. Buckley, one of the sort of patron saints of modern conservatism in the US.
He kept the cooks at bay, is kind of the line that you always hear.
Whereas really, if you kind of dig deeper into the history of American conservatism and how it slowly becomes synonymous with the GOP in the second half of the last century, you notice that, yes, The so-called kooks were kept out of the spotlight, but they kept using their networks to get the vote out, to get the base mobilized.
And, you know, there's debate about when that started.
I think that can be here.
You can make a good point that it started with Goldwater, who I know you guys have talked about a lot.
And even though that was a crushing defeat, the long-term effects of that really changed the nature of American politics because they noticed, oh, we found something here.
And so what happens if you basically create a demand by supplying conspiracy, by supplying extremist rhetoric, that demand is eventually going to outrun you.
And I think that is what the GOP and what parts of the GOP are still grappling with, that it has gotten away from them, that it has overtaken them, and that they now have, at least if they still want to have a political career, they don't have a choice.
They don't have a choice.
They have to sort of keep supplying what the base wants.
Because the base has made it very, very clear, you know, be it with the gallows for Mike Pence or with the chants of January 6th, that they will not accept anything else.
So I think that's really the core of what we're seeing here, that we're seeing sort of an American conservatism, American right-wing culture, which has radicalized itself So far beyond the grasp of what I would call the old elites, who, you know, are responsible for it having gotten to this point.
I think that's that's all true and excellent.
And the only thing I would add, and I brought this up before, but it's been some time is to those historical pieces like Buckley and Goldwater.
And of course, we could add Nixon and the Southern strategy and Reagan and just sort of right up to the present.
But for me, one of the sort of emblematic moments was when John McCain tapped Sarah Palin to be his running mate and really brought this kind of extremist, populist, kind of perspective into the mainstream.
And I still remember at the Republican convention, the nominating convention that year, just the kind of uproarious response to the sort of red meat that she was feeding the crowd.
And it marked for me sort of symbolically, it didn't inaugurate anything, but it marked really visually and viscerally that kind of like, oh, here it is.
Like, we're going to bring this out in the open now.
And for me, I feel like that was one of those, we're going to crack open the door now and it's wide open and there's just no, there's just no shutting it again.
That's a fascinating red line that you see weeding itself through history because McCain was in Goldwater's Senate seat.
In a way, I'm writing a book on the history of the GOP within the last decades at the moment, so I really dove deep into reports of the GOP convention where Goldwater was made the nominee.
And it is startling.
This was basically a brawl.
You know, there were people hitting each other.
There were Republicans, you know, conservatives who said they felt like they were at a Nazi rally at their own convention.
And I think, even though I knew that Goldwater kind of, you know, Got the ball rolling, in a way.
I think the sort of The intensity of how extreme that must have been wasn't clear to me.
And so I think there's a really interesting red line that goes from Goldwater to McCain of people who think that out of political necessity, they are willing to make this bargain with the extreme right wing, thinking that they will be able to control it.
And both Goldwater and McCain regretted it on their deathbeds.
I think it's great, and I'm glad you bring that up.
I had forgotten about the McCain-Goldwater connection, so thank you.
I'm going to pause for a minute here.
We'll take a break and then we're going to come back and talk some more about these themes of the GOP radicalism and sort of where it goes from here.
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At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
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You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
All right, so welcome back.
We noted briefly in our last episode that CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee, had their annual meeting, big, you know, always a big to-do for the contemporary GOP.
It was interesting this year because numbers were sort of down.
There were many headliners, people who had been headliners who weren't there.
The ones who did, it kind of felt like they were mailing it in a little bit.
The speeches Topically, it's going to be no shock to anybody that I never find the speeches great, but they can be energetic and energizing and just, I guess, from a rhetorical perspective, well-crafted and so forth.
They sort of weren't.
And there was a lot of talk about the significance of this.
There's a narrative that has sort of emerged that, well, maybe there's division within the GOP now, that there's a distancing from The hard right.
Danielle Lee Thompson wrote a political opinion piece, which is well worth a read.
I'd recommend people take a look.
But the way that she put it, and I thought this was a good way of putting it, is, you know, the vibes are off with the Republican Party, that there was just sort of like things weren't quite right.
My view is, though, that that narrative has been overblown.
No doubt they're concerned about, you know, Accusations of sexual assault and harassment on the part of, you know, the leader of CPAC and different things like this.
But I think that there were some other dynamics there.
And Anika, I know that you, we were just discussing, you know, spending like a deep dive hours in front of the TV and watching all of this live and on online things and different sort of things like this.
I'd love if you would take us through, you know, what were those observations?
What were your takeaways?
And what do we do with this narrative?
Is it the case?
Because this is a thing that we've been revisiting.
I know that you and your work and the people that you talk to are revisiting this sense that I think is often a sort of wishful thinking, frankly, either among liberals or progressives, that this Christian nationalist moment in the U.S.
has just been a moment, that it's in the rearview mirror.
Among even some conservatives who want to get back to what they view as traditional conservatism, and they were the ones who made that bargain with the far right, but think that there's a way out of it.
I know you've got your finger on the pulse of European commentary on this as well, and particularly, obviously, German commentary.
Walk us through CPAC this year.
What did it show us?
What did it maybe not show us?
What do we make of that kind of narrative that's been emerging?
Yeah, so especially I think the sort of German correspondent beat has been very excited about a possible shift within the ranks of the Republicans.
But I think, honestly, after having watched all, I think, how many days was it?
I think four days of CPAC in the live stream, which I cannot recommend anybody ever do.
But after having watched all of that, I'm not so sure.
And I have been doubtful of that narrative of GOP division for a while now, because first of all, it feels too comforting in a way.
Now, but even, you know, setting emotions aside, if we look at the facts of what happened at CPAC, and if we then compare that with the ringleaders of the would-be Republican opposition, quote unquote, within the Republican Party.
I think we're going to see a lot more similarities than we're going to see differences.
So I think when it comes to the question of why were so many people who are sort of the big names of American conservatives and why were they not at CPAC, I think there's a couple of very good explanations for that when it comes to sort of how did this, you know, speakers list come about.
So I would say it's not surprising that Aaron DeSantis doesn't turn up at CPAC.
CPAC has been very Trumpy, that's very well known.
Mike Pence surely won't turn up at CPAC if he, you know, can't be sure if the attendants were maybe on the side or even amongst the ones calling for his public execution on January 6th.
So they don't have anything to gain from, you know, speaking at CPAC.
And I will say what I do agree with is the vibes were.
The attendance didn't look too impressive.
Sometimes the camera would cut, you know, into the audience.
Journalists who were there shared photographs of the audience.
You saw lots of empty rows of seats.
So there's certainly something afoot.
Now, maybe that is Trump losing momentum.
Maybe that is people kind of getting bored of his, you know, of his shtick.
That all might be the case.
I, however, still don't think it means that there's a cause for us when it comes to GOP politics.
And then, as you said, Matt Schlatt, the head of both CPAC and the American Conservative Union, has been denying claims of having sexually harassed a male staffer.
So, There were media reports that a lot of sort of big-name Republicans used this basically as an excuse to not have to go.
And then there was the curious case of a Nikki Haley, you know, presidential hopeful, which again many European journalists have been excited about, I think.
You know, without really any reason to be because I think we can pretty much agree that she doesn't stand a chance to actually become the presidential candidate.
I think she was there because she is gunning for either, you know, a better book deal and some publicity or the VP slot.
And my thesis would be basically She was there to get her MAGA credentials.
You know, she's not very well liked with the MAGA crowd, so she has to show that she is on their side.
So she got a pretty stern reception, there was not really much audience reaction, and she didn't really go against Trump publicly, because you know in the media she's often been portrayed as, oh she is the one who could, is she maybe the one who could take on Trump?
She did say that she was for presidential candidates of a certain age completing a mental fitness test.
Stony silence.
Nobody reacted.
So that was very awkward.
But I would say she also didn't openly attack Trump because we don't know who's going to get the nomination.
And if she maybe wants to be vice president, she knows that Trump needs someone from the quote unquote, you know, normal camp of Republicans.
Not saying that these people are less extreme than he is, but they might be more coherent or more, you know...
The establishment might be more comfortable with them, like a Mike Pence was for Trump.
So that's, I think, why she was there.
Mike Pompeo, interestingly, was also there.
And he gave a weird speech, gave a really weird speech.
He was blasting the Trump administration that he was a pardo for racking up massive debt, which, by the way, was true, was one of the, you know, A few times I actually agreed with Pompeo, but, you know, acted like he was not really a part of this at all.
So these were the two who kind of gambled with audience reactions from time to time, but they didn't get much of any reaction out of it.
I think people, I got the feeling that people were just kind of sitting there because, you know, it's like 10 minutes speaking slots.
It's going to be over rather quickly, even if it feels Like, it's a long time sometimes.
But what I found really poignant was that there were sort of three big themes at CPAC, I would say.
Because, you know, the list of speakers is basically now a who's who of conservatives, influencers, grifters, and then the odd big name of the GOP.
And we could see that white Christian nationalism really was at the forefront of this whole thing.
So this is continuing a trend that we've seen in a long time.
It's not subtle.
It's just ours in the open.
Throughout the four days, many references to the Bible, God needed back in schools and government.
So that's all kind of the stuff that you would accept.
What I found interesting was the appearance of Carrie Lake.
And that was really one of the speeches that stood out.
One, because of the reception that she got.
She was one of the few people, apart from Bolsonaro and Trump, I think, who got, like, name chants.
So people yelling, Carrie, Carrie, Carrie!
So people were excited to see her.
And then there was Lauren Bobert, who gave, I think, one of the most bizarre speeches I've ever heard her give, which is saying something, where she kind of went into Bible study mode, but a very incoherent Bible study, where she If I remember correctly, she implied that wokeness was the mountain that American patriots need to command to move, but then pivoted and said, sometimes the mountain is just laundry.
Quote, M.I.Mamas.
So that was somewhat of a, you know, anti-climactic end to her speech.
But Carrie Lake, I think, really showed a brand of female Trumpism that works without Trump.
She didn't yell, unlike many other speakers at CPAC.
She spoke in very soft tones.
I know you guys talk a lot about performing gender.
So she performed this sort of glowy, soft-spoken, Christian femininity that didn't seem threatening.
And when she attacked, she always friended within her role as a mother.
So she called herself a mama bear.
I'm sure you know the mama bear apologetics.
A book.
And so that was very on brand.
A second theme that I think is really telling was the blatant transphobia.
I'm sure many of your listeners have seen the headlines that Michael Knowles called for an eradication of transgenderism and is now very upset that journalists are reporting this Accurately as him calling for the eradication of trans people.
His argument basically is, I didn't call for trans people to be eradicated.
I called for transgenderism to be eradicated.
I think if you basically model that same argument with anything, any other ism, if you're saying Oh, I didn't call for the eradication of Jews.
I just called for the eradication of Judaism.
You know, you see that this argument is really nonsense, but he was far from the only one, you know.
The disgraced Brazilian President Bolsonaro was there, got a ecstatic reception, which I found quite stunning, especially because the audience was kind of, you know, mellow for most of the other talks.
Marjorie Taylor Greene really leaned in heavy into the transphobia.
I think this is a sign of what we've been seeing within, I would say, the past two, three years.
That transphobia is really becoming one of the uniting factors of the right, not just in the US, by the way, but in Europe as well.
So, German politicians, both, you know, both German conservative politicians, but also on the far right have picked up on transphobia.
As, you know, they're the next horse they're betting on in the culture war.
So that was the second thing.
And the third, and well, maybe not surprising, but quite stunning thing was the anti-Ukraine and anti-NATO sentiment.
I think it's not a surprise that a, you know, very Trumpy conference is going to be anti-NATO.
That's been, you know, Trump's beat for a long time.
Who I found quite stunning was Tulsi Gabbard.
So, you know, former Democrat.
She really laid it on thick.
Also Marjorie Taylor Greene.
And the way that they're arguing, I think because they know that they can't openly argue pro-Putin, you know, with the pictures that we're seeing coming from Ukraine.
They basically all follow this argument structure.
They all say, basically, they all give us a 2023 version of, you know, early 20th century conservative isolationism.
Americans shouldn't die in foreign wars, implying, therefore, that President Zelensky has asked for American boots on the ground.
And then also, you know, pivoting into the anti-NATO sentiment, painting NATO as both an aggressor, but also as useless and weak, you know, and leeching off the US's budget.
So it's not necessarily really openly pro-Putin.
They're not lauding him by name.
Unless you're Trump and holding that closing speech at CPAC, then you might be doing that because that's what he did.
But they're basically echoing Kremlin propaganda.
And that is Quite terrifying.
And I think one of the, oh, when it came to Trump's closing speech, there were many moments that were terrifying because it wasn't, even for him, it was a very incoherent speech.
Um, but one of the most stunning moments was, you know, there was the thing where he basically promised concentration camps for homeless people.
That was stunning, uh, where he alluded to martial, uh, martial law in democratic cities, sending the National Guard, but also where he kind of fantasized of the Russians blowing up the NATO headquarter.
I think he said something like, just a straight shroud from a tank, that'll do it.
And so I think.
That, from a European perspective, is especially worrying because I don't think that the majority of our politicians have really caught up on what the possibility of a Republican president in 2024 would mean when it comes to both support for the Ukraine, but also to NATO.
Because I'm not convinced that, you know, Ron DeSantis is a rampant NATO fan.
Yeah, so many things there.
Thank you for that.
And thank you sincerely for, you know, wading through all of that and spending so much of your life doing that.
Yeah.
Right.
It really was, was interesting.
You know, I, I've spent a lot of my life delivering conference papers and for people that aren't in, in the Academy, I know that sounds pretty lame and it kind of is.
Um, and sometimes people are like, it's cool, but like, if you deliver conference papers, you're used to talking to mostly empty, like, you know, hotel meeting rooms and ballrooms and like the 12 people who are interested in what you're doing are there.
But, and that's what CPAC sort of looked like when I saw a photo of like somebody who was asleep on the chairs and so forth.
And so there was that piece, but there's the other piece that you're highlighting and like sort of just zooming out on some of the points that you talked about.
One was.
The explicit embrace of authoritarianism, which we've seen over and over and over.
And that's part of what this is.
It fits, right?
It's the logic of Christian nationalism.
But it's become a CPAC thing yearly now to have like some authoritarian person there.
So Bolsonaro this year, Trump saying really, really, really openly scary authoritarian things.
And I don't know what to make of that in the sense that sometimes it's hard.
I think it's good that the media has stopped listening to everything Trump says and repeating it and giving that megaphone.
But it also means that there's sort of a deafness to the radical nature, like the kinds of things that he's saying.
We run into people all the time.
We're like, well, it's just rhetoric.
Well, OK, but like that rhetoric, like why that rhetoric, you know, of what that means?
And as you say, for European countries and allies in the NATO alliance, this is this is not perhaps going to bring it.
Oh, it's just rhetoric.
It sounds sort of terrifying.
Other things, you know, the embrace of Putin, which I think, as you say, was like muted and weren't coming out and saying, oh, we love Putin, but it's anti-Ukraine.
It's, you know, this is something we've talked about for years.
That is a striking thing to me, having grown up in American evangelicalism when I'm old enough that it used to be the Soviet Union, and then it was the Russians were always the, you know, the bogeyman, the enemy, you know, at the gates and so forth.
And to see the reversal of that with this kind of embrace of authoritarianism.
But I think that's specifically what sort of makes it so hard for, I would say, the classical European politician to understand, you know, no matter what party they're in.
But I think so many of them still have this notion of, OK, you know, Americans, you know, they were against the Soviet Union.
So why would they be pro-Russia?
So I think that is why it's so easy for so many GOP politicians To sort of wave off concerns with a bit of sort of, you know, Cold War saber rattling and then, you know, put the saber back in the drawer and go back, you know, to the anti-Ukraine rhetoric, to back to the signaling to their base.
Yeah, you know, Putin, you know, he might be doing some things we don't agree with, but, you know, he's got the right idea.
And I think now they've pivoted to Orbán.
And I think we were probably going to come back to Orbán later when we were looking at what, you know, Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida.
But I think that's very, that's a very important point that you're pointing out, that this has shifted and the war in Ukraine has not reversed this shift, in my opinion.
What do you think?
No, I think it's true.
And I think it ties in because, you know, I hear people all the time like, OK, so I connect the dots.
Like what what's the relation?
And one piece of this is and we've talked about this, you know, in other episodes that people can now search on the new website.
They can search for keywords.
But things like, you know, within the kind of Christian nationalist social imagination, the kind of muscular, hyper-masculinist vision of leadership and rule and so forth.
And so you had the shirtless Putin on the horse and you had And that's why you get Orban and Putin and Bolsonaro in speeches, sometimes in English, appealing to what?
To the family, to anti-trans issues, to a marriage between a man and a woman and two genders and so forth.
And it's a theme that ties through all of these.
And I know that we who are in academia sometimes, discussions of things like patriarchy and all of this kind of stuff can seem very abstract or get very theoretical, but on the ground, this is what they look like.
And it's this sense of this kind of vision of the strong, masculine ruler taking care of the nation through the family and so forth.
And it's a theme that really does run Through all of these, and I think we ignore it at our peril because again, that hasn't gone anywhere.
And so sometimes I'll hear people say, well, what does religion have to do with, you know, Bolsonaro being there or whatever?
And I think this is part of it and a whole separate episode to go into stuff about the Russian Orthodox Church and religion in South America, Latin America, you know, places like this.
But those themes are there, and I think it's also why the transphobia issue that we've talked about a lot on the show that is very much there and is a hallmark now of the American GOP.
We'll get to talk about that a little bit more in a few minutes.
But I guess my last sort of reflection on this is to the idea of like, why, you know, why were some people there and some not?
You're exactly right.
Nikki Haley needed to get some MAGA bona fides in there to be sure that, you know, to try to win people over.
I think that that weighs against those who are like, oh, she'll be the moderate Republican candidate who will bring us back.
Like, she has to go and show that she's not to try to get any headway.
And I mean, she literally, and this quote really stuck with me, she literally said, quote, the woke mind virus is worse than any pandemic.
And to say that, to use those words, woke mind virus, that one thing, saying it's worse than any pandemic, After more than 1.1 million U.S.
Americans who've died of COVID is another, but I think that sentence shows you what she was there to do.
She was there to very openly, not just signal, but to persuade basically the MAGA base.
You can trust me.
I'm not who you think I am.
I'm not sure if she succeeded, but, and this is sort of the second point where I would, that I would add onto Your reflection is, there was a lot of talk about sort of rival conferences being held or rival meetings being held.
But if you look at it more closely, what was it actually?
So one was a summit called the Principles First Summit held by, amongst others, Bill Kristol and The Bulwark, co-sponsored.
And, you know, if you look at the roster, most people who came to that as speakers, I would say you would probably call centrists or moderate conservatives, but those people in that conference, that conference advertised itself as a gathering of traditional liberals.
So we're seeing even a shift amongst sort of the Bill Kristols of the world, people who we would say are classically conservative, But because they are now moving on from the term conservatism, I think that shows you, if nothing else, that even they know they don't have a future within this Republican Party anymore.
They might call it the Principles First Summit in order to, you know, show, oh, we're different from America first.
Yeah.
But that they're calling themselves... Adam Kinzinger was there at the gathering of traditional liberals.
You know, that shows you they know This train has left the station.
It's done.
They don't have a chance anymore.
And the second meeting where, you know, you could find Ron DeSantis was at a meeting from the, I think, I think it's called Club for Growth, which is sort of an anti-tax advocacy group with, you know, really big pockets, which is where you want to be if you're planning on a presidential run and, you know, don't need to rub shoulders with a MAGA crowd.
And so that's where he was.
Yeah, I think related to that, so Nikki Haley has to earn her MAGA credentials.
But I think another piece about the people who weren't there with the shows is this is mainstream GOP stuff now, right?
You don't have to go to CPAC to have these ideas, to hear these ideas, to state these ideas.
They have become mainstream.
So there's a sense in which CPAC Perhaps somewhat ironically, right, has kind of worked itself out of a job, in a sense, as it tries to carve out the niche.
What was radical four or five years ago is not radical now in the GOP.
And so I think there's also a sense that it's sort of, so to speak, with the exception of Annika Brockschmidt, it is not must-watch TV.
It's not Something you have to tune into and have to go to because you're going to hear this everywhere in the GOP, which will bring us to Florida in a minute.
But I want to throw it your way and see if you have any just sort of final reflections on this before we move on.
I think that's a really fascinating point.
And I think I think you're right because I think the question, why would somebody go to CPAC to speak there, is really the central one.
If we are looking at Ron DeSantis, who has not declared that he's going to run yet, but who, according to every poll I've seen, seems to be the only one who has a chance, and whose, let's say, book publishing behavior seems to make it pretty clear that he seems to intend to run.
Don't know when he's going to announce yet.
He doesn't have to go to CPAC because he is out-culture-warring Trump on the right with such speed that Trump felt it was needed to put forward, I think this was in January or February, I'm not sure if I could call it a platform, but a promise of what he would do to basically destroy public education.
Because Ron DeSantis is already doing it in Florida.
So Trump is the one who has to act.
And Ron DeSantis is in the position of just having to lean back and watch it unfold because he has the credentials.
He has them in his legislative agenda.
He's already passed laws that Trump has only fantasized about.
I think it's exactly true.
We're going to come back to that point.
Before we do, we'll take a break.
All right, so coming back to that, I'm going to talk about DeSantis.
I want to head off the emails and the people are like, why are you always talking about DeSantis?
It's not really about DeSantis as much as it is for me that DeSantis is this figure of something bigger within the GOP.
But as you say, he's out culture warring Trump.
DeSantis doesn't need to be a CPAC because he has the kingdom of Florida that he is now building and refashioning in the MAGA image, right?
Lots of stuff in the news about this.
This is not hard to find.
As you say, he has not said that he's running for president.
I think anybody who observes American politics would be shocked if DeSantis does not run for president.
He's significant, I think, as you say, because he's the only person right now that probably has a good better chance of maybe displacing Trump as the nominee.
And how's he doing it?
As you say, he's doing it by outflanking Trump, but he's outflanking Trump to the right.
He is out-MAGA-ing Trump.
This is Trumpism without Trump.
And this is something I know Brad and I have been talking about, and you and I have talked about.
So just to lay this out a little bit, people will remember the so-called Don't Say Gay legislation that came out about not teaching about gender and sexuality.
Or I guess what they would consider non-traditional, quote-unquote, gender and sexuality in, like, grade school and so forth.
The AP African American History course issues and the things that came out with that.
Banning gender-affirming care for minors and just the general spate of anti-trans and gender non-confirming issues that have, you know, become, as I say, kind of a conservative staple around the U.S.
I wrote a piece, I'll just plug it in there.
People Google it, they can find it.
with Canopy Forum back in 2021 when some of this was really taking shape about why this seems to be such an issue for the GOP.
So he's been doing this for a while now, but the Florida legislature is just sort of setting him up and paving the road with gold for him to be able to Announce that he's going to run for president on a platform that is Trumpism beyond Trump.
As you say, the stuff that Trump only could have dreamed of or maybe just didn't dream of or didn't get around to or whatever that goes so much further.
So, for example, there's a raft of proposed legislation that says that, for example, school staff, public school staff, would not be allowed to ask students about preferred pronouns.
Nor would school staff be allowed to share their pronouns if they don't quote-unquote correspond to their sex.
In other words, denying any reality of trans or gender non-conforming people.
Increasing funds for charter schools and homeschooling, that's kind of the one piece of like the classical decades-old conservative agenda that's still there.
Following, we talked about Idaho on the show last week and these rules about libraries.
They've got the same thing, banning, quote, you know, objectionable library books.
But the way that these laws are written is that all you have to do to get it banned, it's sort of the burden of proof, is to show that a library book should be included.
All it takes is a parent to say, oh, I'm upset about the content of book X, Y, or Z, and, you know, it's off the shelves.
Including the school, the classroom libraries, because as people know, there's the school library, and there's often like this section of books in the classroom, that that's included.
Restrictions on teachers unions.
Additional efforts to combat quote-unquote wokeness in higher education.
This is the buzzword for the conservatives.
Within higher ed and colleges prohibiting funds for diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives.
Banning so-called critical race theory.
banning majors and minors in gender studies, labeling school board races as partisan, as political races and so forth.
So why do I bring all this up?
I bring it up because I think it does show that there's real competition in the GOP against Trump.
And we see polls that show sort of, it seems conflicting data, but it's clear that Trump is not necessarily the hands down front runner in the GOP.
As you say, Nikki Haley's call for mental competency or age-based competency tests and things like that fell on sort of deaf ears, but it's clearly a shot at Trump.
You had the same thing with Sarah Huckabee Sanders calling for a new generation of candidates.
So you get some of that.
But for me, the significance is, as you say, he's out culture warring Trump.
He is out trumping Trump.
It's on Trump's right flank that Republicans who have a real shot at political office at this point are making that.
It is MAGA intensified.
And that's the part that I think is of interest.
And that's why I find DeSantis interesting.
It's not because we just want to talk about DeSantis all the time, but it's because of what I think what he represents there.
And so I think that this is This is still the overarching theme as I look to 2024 and contemporary American politics and Christian nationalism, is that it is now so mainstream that the way that you make political hay is to intensify what half a decade ago, a decade ago, we would have considered sort of unthinkable.
Most Americans would have considered unthinkable.
Again, I'll climb off my proverbial soapbox and take a breath.
Would love to hear your thoughts about DeSantis and what's going on there.
And if this fits, if it fits into and undermines that narrative, as we say, that sort of comforting narrative of, oh, look, CPAC didn't have, you know, there were empty seats.
The MAGA moment is behind us.
Yeah, I think DeSantis is a really dangerous figure precisely because he knows basically how to play respectability politics if the audience is right for that, you know?
So he'll change his tune, he'll change his tone depending on who he speaks in front of.
And I think this is really hard to notice while we're in the sort of maelstrom of the 24-7 news cycle.
It's hard to notice this, but I think it's important that we sort of try to remove ourselves time and time again from the news cycle and try to look back.
You know, Trump announcing basically 10 cities for the homeless.
That barely made the news.
I think I saw a tweet by Jeff Charlotte who said, That he was watching the speech back and couldn't believe that he hadn't read anything about this point or about the martial law stuff.
Because we have become, even I would say us, the people who, you know, do nothing but listen to these people and read their texts and articles all day and study them.
I think it's so hard not to become desensitized to this shift and to this shifting of red lines.
And I think that what DeSantis is doing five years ago, that would have been Builders extreme.
Now we're at a point where Trump's antics have dominated the sort of GOP politics for so long that even political journalists whose job it would be to recognize what this is Very often sort of say, oh, but, you know, he seems like a return to the GOP.
And I think in a way that is true, but not in the way that the return to the, you know, former GOP means moderation, but rather in the way that we've overlooked for far too long
How extreme and how far to the right the political project of the GOP had already gotten before Trump because, you know, you guys have talked about this a bunch, Trump didn't just happen, you know, he was the result of the process that had been a long time in the making.
And I think DeSantis has found a niche That seems to be working really well for him, where he doesn't attack Trump directly because he doesn't have to.
What he does is he picks fights with the Biden administration.
You know, he does his cruel stunts where he sends asylum seekers across the country because that'll get him on Fox News, that'll get him points with the MAGA crowd.
And he kind of just has to let the record speak for himself.
And he's now written a book.
as well, which unfortunately I'm in the possession of.
And in that, he lays out what he calls the Florida blueprint.
So all of these authoritarian laws that you've just listed, he is already sort of advertising that as the goal to implement those nationwide.
Now, whether or not that's realistic is another question, but the fact that this is the end goal should really wake all of us up.
And And I think the latest addition to this list of laws, which then also will pop up in other red states, because this is how this works, you know, we saw with the Texas abortion bill, we see it with other bills, criminalizing trans health care, gender affirming care.
This is how this works.
And they're now openly calling it a blueprint.
The latest authoritarian law That literally echoes a law that Putin passed, I think, in 2014.
It's this blogger's law where every blogger who has more than X number of followers or whatever has to register or would have to register if they want to cover what, you know, the Florida legislature is doing, what DeSantis is doing.
That is authoritarianism at best.
And at worst, that's fascist stuff.
And so in a way, and I think I'm guilty of that as well, I think the term cultural Even though I'm very used to using it because it's, you know, what we've called this for so long, is in a way too timid to describe what's happening.
So I think our culture warring kind of goes into a better direction of describing what is happening because culture war kind of still presumes that we are in the framework of a small d democratic society.
And once one side completely abandons that, that's kind of the logical conclusion from one side believing that they're fighting a culture war, which either they will win or the country will die.
But I think it's getting more and more prominent that that is really What this is and where this party is going as they seem to realize that demographic change is not on their side, that they're losing voters, that all of these positions that we've discussed now, none of these would have a majority amongst Americans if you're polling Americans.
They're not for, you know, restrictive abortion bans.
They're probably not for restricting the freedom of the press massively.
All of these things are not popular.
So if you're not willing to change your positions as the GOP, But you're also losing support.
What you have to become is more and more authoritarian.
And I think what will be the sort of fine line that we're seeing and where we're seeing cracks maybe within parts of the movement is how far you're willing to go to use state power once you have it to get your agenda across and to enforce it.
Yeah, I guess my final thought would just pick up on that just briefly to say, I think you hit the nail on the head or I guess one of many nails on the head of that last line about state power is that the goal at this point seems to be to just be the most extreme, right?
To out extreme one another, which does give the lie to this other, this kind of mantra of The GOP of being so-called small government.
That's what makes authoritarianism authoritarianism.
One component is that state component.
And what DeSantis does in this blueprint is very clearly showing, here's how we can use the power of the state and in particular, the executive and legislative branches working in conjunction To bring these things about.
Yeah.
So on that bright note, I have no great segue, but it feels like maybe a time for hope, as we do try to end on a brighter note.
So I'll throw out what I've got for sort of a reason for hope, and it may sound a little paradoxical or even hypocritical, given what we say about Tucker Carlson, but I continue to take hope in the sort of I don't know, the look behind the curtain that we're getting at Fox News.
I've talked about this for a couple weeks.
I think that there is value to unmasking the fact that this is just hypocrisy at Fox, right?
When we're having our barbecues with our Uncle Ron and they talk about Fox, we say, well, look, I mean, here's what Carlson actually says about Trump.
And here's what he said about election meddling and so forth.
I'm under no illusion that that changes things.
I'm under no illusion that that suddenly makes Fox go away.
Because I'm also under no illusion that people who believe that believe it because they're looking for a good argument or they're looking to be rationally convinced.
And I think that's the key, is it shows the real mechanisms involved.
And I think that that's something that as we talk about journalists who miss this, as we talk about those of us who do this like all the time, just becoming numb to it and missing it, as we talk about regular people Who I think are just take things, you know, these politicians and others too much at their word.
I think showing the level of what we're dealing with and the very deeply emotional and cultural force behind these, I think that that's key.
And I think it, so I do take hope in the fact that Fox seems to not be able to get past this, that for several weeks now, this has been like a standard talking point.
of, oh, here's what the Fox people really think about their constituency and these ideas.
So that's my reason for hope this week.
Were you, Annika, able to find anything hopeful this week?
Actually, I did.
I had to dig a little bit, but I found one.
And I know that during this episode, I've criticized in media, especially German media who covered the U.S.
a lot.
And I still stand by those criticisms.
However, there has been a slight shift when it comes to sort of The general taking the temperature of where the American right is headed, which might not sound like much, but if I try to sort of remember the, you know, the talks that I've had with colleagues, with people who
People who, you know, for their whole lives have studied American politics and who still kind of had the blinders on.
I'd say some, even after January 6th, something seems to have shifted.
I'm not sure what it is.
I'm not sure if it was Roe.
I'm not sure if it was, you know, any of the shenanigans and the authoritarian fever dreams that we've talked about being actually implemented on a state level.
But something seems to have permeated the sort of, oh no, if I'm not looking at it, it's not there.
That's been occurring in a lot of German media in the way that, you know, and I remember this, I think a year ago I wrote, you know, something banal.
Was it like a Twitter thread?
On the danger that not only same-sex marriage but also potentially interracial marriage would be in should, you know, Roe fall and should they decide, should the SCOTUS decide that essentially the right to privacy didn't exist.
That got me a lot of ridicule from German media.
And today I saw reactions to the latest bill coming out of, I believe it was Tennessee, which would allow, which defines basically marriage and what it would mean to deny a marriage certificate to a couple, basically just in personal release.
So therefore opening the door on the state level for a challenge to the Supreme Court, to challenge Same-sex marriage, potentially interracial marriage, doesn't mean it has to happen, but the potential is there.
And so I think this ties into your reason for hope in that by the things that the American right is now doing out in the open, They're in a way making our job a bit easier because now we don't even have to interpret anymore.
We just have to quote and that is happening more and more.
So I have some hope that sort of even big media outlets who might not have that much time for coverage of the US rather than, you know, covering the president's speeches, that they're slowly Getting to the point of realizing, oh, we might have overlooked something.
I don't think they either acknowledge it.
Maybe they don't have to, as long as they realize it's going on.
Not sure if that's a reason for hope.
It's a reason for... Well, it's not a reason against hope, I guess.
That's right.
Yeah.
It was just not as snappy if we call it like reasons not to not have hope.
Reasons not to despair.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Annika Brockschmidt, I want to thank you so much for joining us today and stepping in.
Always a pleasure.
Really great analysis, really great insights, really great perspective.
So thank you so much.
Thanks so much for having me on.
Yeah, and as always, thank you to all of you who support us, listen to us.
We can't do it without you.
Please keep the communications coming.
We will be back with another Weekly Roundup next week.
Brad will have to return from Maui to the cold confines of California, so maybe not.
Maybe not so bad.
And I will be back with It's in the Code Wednesday next week.
