Chapo Trap House - Seeking a Fren for the End of the World: Episode 1 - This is Really Just the Beginning

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

In a new series by Felix, Josh (@ettingermentum), and Spencer, we ask: how did the Republican Party, once the dominant force in American culture for almost a generation, become a group of bowtied cosplayers and rapist streamers yelling about Litterboxes? We trace this development back to the empires built by two men—Paul Weyrich and James Dobson—as well as the failures of one Pat Buchanan. This episode draws from Dan Gilgoff’s The Jesus Machine and David Grann’s “Robespierre Of The Right.” For a full list of sources, check our works cited doc here: www.chapotraphouse.com/seeking

Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo goo syndrome. If you became angry at your children in the last 24 hours, you're unqualified, please sit down. Yes, I spoke a little negro dialect there. I can do that when I want to. I'm afraid of Mr. Hyde, wearing his ugly bisexual head, that was a short face. No, I'm kidding. Brand's genderism must be eradicated from public life entirely. It's about Roe v. Wade. It's about having judges on the court who are going to interpret the Constitution the way it's written. You've been a bad little girl and you're getting a vigorous spanking right now. It's the spring of 2022.

Brand inflation is at levels that could conjure the vengeful spirit of Paul Volcker. School boards the nation over are experiencing a series of blitzkriegs over critical race theory and imagined litter boxes for fictitious hordes of catboy junior high students. To say the conservative movement seemed descendant at this time would be an understatement. Everyone from Matt Iglesias to James Engleton-Greuper and even Theodoro Adorable were dead set on a red wave, the likes of which echo the midterm elections of 2014 and 2010. But when every person of varying degrees of idiocy makes the exact same prediction

you start to wonder. And many of us started to wonder once we heard this. No! No! Shit! No! Jimmy, give me that milk. Oh, I want you to cut! Jimmy, give me that milk!

I want you to cut! For those unfamiliar with the world of conservative media, that was a segment from the Steven Crowder Show where he had accused rapist and comedian Brian Callan dress up like a cow and get spanked by his wife torturing maniac of a host. Normally one would write this off as run-of-the-mill weird bullshit that happens in the conservative entertainment sphere. But this wasn't just some fly-by-night operation with a couple thousand viewers.

Crowder was a megastar, someone with a vast audience and tremendous sway over GOP elected officials. It did not matter that the bulk of this program was Crowder dressing up like a trans woman or a gay guy or whoever to prove some incoherent point, or that he was caught on video demanding that his wife start hot knifing dog chemo medicine or he'd kill them both.

This had become the type of person who ascended to leadership positions in the movement. What was once a battalion strength detachment of cigar-chomping sixty-somethings who were on message no matter rain, sleet, or pill problems was now a mere platoon of paraphilia-afflicted mercenaries born from the cesspool of the internet. In American politics, all things boil down to who can appear to be the most normal at any given time. The guys who were caught on camera abusing their wives and sexually tormenting disgraced friends of Joe Rogan weren't doing themselves any favors.

Much less so after they decided to kill the electoral golden goose that was Roe v. Wade. Months out, a scant few of us took a look at these wandering Ronins, their obnoxious approach to cultural warfare and wholly unpopular policies, and simply could not see a repeat of the great old bungler tea party midterm catastrophes of yesteryear. But to figure out where things went wrong, we must journey back to 1980, long before the great internetization of the party and its media organs, when the movement's media field marshals were more invested in policy and messaging victories than personal stardom. Now, years out, we recognized the 2022 midterms for what they were. Billed equally as a raucous celebration and triumphant coronation for the coming conservative

supermajority, it turned out to be neither of those things. Not even a party, it had more similarities to an awkward handjob solicitation issued inside of MatchLab's Audi. Certainly an event all involved would prefer to just forget about. It was a far cry from 1980, which was perhaps the greatest reactionary rager ever thrown. Whether it's an NDA worthy fumbling solicitation or a grand jubilee inaugurating the next couple generations of darkness, a good host makes all the difference. In 1980, our impressive triad of hosts is comprised of three men who laid the groundwork

for the prime and later not-so-prime conservative media machine more than anyone else during their respective epigies. Our first leading figure is someone you've probably never heard of, but his influence was so vast that it could only be stymied in part by his sheer unlikability. Meet Paul Weyrich. Now, most conventional recollections of history tell us that a sluggish economy at home and military humiliations abroad pushed Reagan over Carter. But this ignores the Weyrich-authored massacre in the Senate races of the same year. Left-liberal stalwarts across the country were edged out by Weyrich's marriage of the types of conservative old guard as depicted in Oliver Stone's the 1970s and 80s, and not just because he faulted away seemingly every single senator that was investigating

the CIA at the time. Starting out as a press secretary for Colorado GOP Senator Gordon Allott, Weyrich made a career altering great impression on brewing heir Joseph Kors. Prior to this fateful meeting, conservative think tanks were a far cry from their modern counterparts. In the 1970s, these were either poorly disguised industry groups that put out unconvincing pamphlets with titles like A World Without Asbestos, A Cautionary Tale, or The John Birch Society, which was so widely mocked within the upper echelons of the GOP establishment

that George H.W. Poppy Bush would jokingly repeat their catchphrases when he was losing a tennis match. Weyrich however, anticipated the mushroom cloud-like expansion of the administrative state. As such, he determined that a well-funded row of reactionary think tanks could essentially work as feeder organizations for right-wing representatives, senators, judges, and eventually presidents seeking to staff their offices. In order to rise to the occasion, they had to at least present as regularly as the Brookings

Institute and the like. In essence, he was creating a conservative mirror to the Civil Rights Coalition. Can you remember the first time you said to yourself, we need to start our own think tank? Yes. Senator Allott was invited to a meeting run by the Civil Rights Coalition, and he couldn't go, and I asked him if I could go in his place, and he said, sure, if they'll let you in. He was regarded as pro-civil rights, but he thought the pendulum had swung too much in that direction, but they didn't know that. So before my eyes, they rolled out a plan.

First they had a defector from the Nixon administration that had just taken office. I mean, he still worked there, but he came and he said, these are Nixon's plans with respect to housing. Before my eyes, they rolled out a plan to stop this, and every liberal group imaginable was there at that meeting. And I said, that's how they do it. I mean I had watched conservatives getting killed on the floor of the United States Senate and I didn't know how it was done. I mean you know I saw it happening but I didn't know the mechanics. All of a sudden I was granted the opportunity to see the

mechanics. With Coors's money and Weyrich's vision, the Heritage Foundation was born. Weyrich didn't just lay the groundwork for the modern right, he practically created it at whole cloth. In addition to Heritage, he also helped found the arguably more effective American Legislative Exchange Council, the organization you can thank for your state legislature making public sector union organizing an executable offense. You may have seen them on the news after one of their model bills called Castle Doctrine or more commonly Stand Your Ground drew controversy for turning Florida into punishment park.

He was also a co-founder of the Council for National Policy, a secret invitation-only organization that would become the vanguard and home base for the conservative movement for decades to come. One can only imagine what happened behind closed doors during the height of the movement's power, but it must have resembled a version of Obloch populated by Lemon Party participants. In the twilight of the Ford administration and the beginning of the Carter era, Weyrich furnished his resume with a chain of collaborations that began with an actual collaborator. In an adorable mini-paperclip operation, our hero recruited Laszlo Pastor, a one-time member

of the Hungarian Arrow Cross party who had spent time in prison. Ironically, everything is upside down in Hungary, so the former Nazi was forced to join the Jewish Brotherhood for protection. While he wasn't exactly Werner von Braun or Otto Skorzeny, he helped Weyrich run the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, a think-tankin' pack that trained everyone from state-level conservative activists to Gladio G-leaguers in Eastern Europe. And while SFC was lucrative, the conservative movement's greatest bounties were to be authored as a result

of Weyrich's work with Richard Viguerre, the man who all but invented right-wing direct mail. Viguerre used computer databases taken from the post-Goldwater years and copied the stored names and addresses by hand, sending mail that targeted right-wing voters across the country with an onslaught of apocalyptic warnings about social issues like children's rights laws or the terrifying new jazz music of the Sugarhill Gang.

With a scheme almost scientifically calibrated to take money from the elderly, Weyrich and Viguerre had enough capital not just to raise funds for their candidates, but support an entire parallel right-wing institution not reliant on the establishment GOP. All throughout the 1970s, Weyrich had one goal in mind. Bringing the historically nonpartisan evangelicals and the democratic leading Catholics in the country over to the Republican Party. Weyrich himself had left the Roman Catholic Church because he thought it was too liberal after Vatican Jew, and he saw enormous potential for the ward cleavers of this country to become

stormtroopers for his new Rhodesia. All he needed was the right issue, and when the ruling on Roe v. Wade came down in 1973, not much happened. The ruling outraged Catholics, but Protestants throughout the country largely saw the issue as nothing they needed to be involved in. Now, Weyrich's golden ticket came in 1978 when the IRS declared that segregated private schools would not be considered tax exempt. Private Christian schools had been a haven for white flight families, making sure that their kids got to pray in class and learn that hell is filled with cavemen and dinosaurs, but federal courts had been ruling against them since as early as the Nixon administration. This practically irradiated America's growing population of Protestant fathers who had relationships

with their daughters that could only be described as alarming. The breaking point came in 1976 when the IRS targeted Bob Jones University. Weyrich, working with churches, pastors, televangelists, and the other religious right power players, helped organize the media blitz, getting so much mail sent to the government that the IRS backtracked their decision. Imagine the climax of Miracle on 34th Street, but every letter is a section of the Turner Diaries. With his greatest victory yet, Weyrich began working with Jerry Falwell and James Robinson

in co-founding the Moral Majority and preparing for a bloodbath. Weyrich wasn't just a wizard for the moneyed elites of the GOP, but a uniquely galvanizing force for the jug hooters. Working closely with Weyrich's organizations was the National Conservative Political Action Committee, or NCPAC. NCPAC was the brainchild of a few men, including the aforementioned direct male wizard Richard Viguerre and a young swinger by the name of Roger Stone. But before they had unlimited Mooney funds to hire Chicago Klansmen to run their satellite organizations, they set their eyes directly on helping Republican candidates in congressional

elections starting in the 1970s. Here, context is important. By the time the 70s came to a close, the Democratic Party essentially held a monopoly on Congress that grew out of the New Deal Coalition. Absent fluke Republican waves in 1946 and 1952, they had held both chambers, year in, year out, continuously for decades on end. And Democratic dominance was more entrenched in the Senate than it had been in the House. Mid-century voters in middle America loved nothing more than splitting their tickets between Hitler for President and a good boy with a D next to their name and an inexplicable sympathy for Fidel Castro for Senate. The true liberal firebrands of the far-flung western states, the Fenian sanitation consultants of the Northeast, and the glad-handing shit-kickers of the South all came together in the Senate to comprise the Death Star of the Roosevelt

Coalition. If there was ever going to be a conservative majority in this country they had to go. For a case study in the exact type of Democratic senator that was about to become an endangered species we'll take a look at Dick Clark of Iowa. Clark was a fairly typical figure for his time. Elected by a solid margin in 1972, he was one of many Democrats of that era who managed to win a state that frequently went to Republican presidential candidates. This specific type of figure, a liberal in a red state's congressional delegation, almost invariably had a singular

left-wing cause that held personal significance for them. Clark's was apartheid South Africa. As chairman of the Subcommittee for Africa on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Clark took U.S. policy towards the country and the region to task well before the development of full-scale anti-apartheid campaigns around the globe in the 1980s. Most significantly, he passed the Clark Amendment, which barred aid to South African-supported rebel groups in Angola, greatly annoying George Bush's CIA. Keep in mind at this point, Iowa wasn't a left-leaning or even a swing state. FDR had only won the state during his first two campaigns, dropping the state to Wilkie and Dewey in 1940 and 44 respectively. After that, the only two Democrats to win

the state were somehow Harry Truman and then Lyndon Johnson during his 1964 blowout performance against Goldwater. If the Democratic vice grip on Congress was ever to break, the first order of business would be deposing liberals inside of these more conservative states. To prove their worth, Weyrich and his friends would have to find some way to crater the local appeal of liberals like Clark. Their strategy? Innovative and intensely negative campaigning. With essentially unlimited funds through the use of independent expenditures, basically in early form of what's now known as a super PAC, NC PAC pilloried Clark during the final

weeks of the campaign. While the centerpiece of their attacks was abortion, foreign policy proved to be just as deadly. They went after Clark for his support of the Panama Canal Treaty and opposition to apartheid South Africa. His opponent, Roger Jespin, even went as far as to call him the Senator from Africa, somehow finding a way to racebait in a nearly 100% white state. And it worked.

Despite trailing by massive margins just weeks before the election, Jespin, with help of $250,000 from the South African government, managed to beat Clark by four points, knocking off one of the Senate's most prominent left-wing members. How did abortion become such a salient issue overnight, especially as the moral majority was only a glint in Weyrich's eyes? Well they had help from the work of Francis Schaeffer, a theologian that ran a shockingly inclusive Christian commune until the Roe decision turned him into a fire and brimstone televangelist, and even worse,

a documentary filmmaker. With funding from Amway founder and Opie and Anthony guest comedian Rich DeVos, he and his sons anti-abortion films and books made their way through evangelical communities during the late 1970s. Schaeffer also personally lobbied future Moral Majority Leader Jerry Falwell to embrace the pro-life cause. One can only imagine how frustrating it was for a way-rich to spend two decades trying to make abortion a salient issue, only to have an acoustic guitar playing Christian who hung out with Jimmy Page and Timothy Leary beat him to the punch. Looking ahead to 1980, NC PAC found themselves in a target-rich environment.

That year, Class 3 seats, a category that included 34 seats as opposed to Class 1 and 2's 33, were up for grabs. The Class 3 Senate elections that occur every six years from this point on are actually a very reliable indicator for the historical position of the then ascendant religious right. In 1988, the class was coming off of the 1974 elections held only a few months after Richard Nixon's resignation. Predictably, the 74 elections were an absolute bonanza for Democrats. By both retaining in strongholds and winning in previously unwinnable states, Democrats had a net gain of four Senate seats when all was said and done, raising their already considerable majority to a shocking 61. But now, with Jimmy Carter as unpopular

as ever heading into 1980, such a multitude of vulnerable races gave Republicans plenty of opportunities. No matter what, there are going to be quite a few GOP pickups in this environment. Still, just a few wins wasn't going to be enough to change the country. After all, the decade had been so brutal that Republicans had only 41 senators to their name going into 1980. To get the smallest majority possible, they would need to pick up a massive nine seats. And that was assuming they also won the presidency. It was a daunting task, but they were feeling themselves in a major way after having taken

down Clark. So, NCPAC decided to go for it all. Wayrich and his allies weren't going to settle with low-hanging fruit, like ancient drunkard Dixiecrats or one-termer red state liberals elected on backlash to the Nixon party. They were targeting the heart of Congress congressional liberalism, highly accomplished senators who had served their states for decades. In South Dakota, there was George McGovern, the left-wing standard bearer made infamous by his landslide loss to Nixon in 1972.

In Indiana, there was Birch Bayh, author of Title IX and champion of the Equal Rights Amendment. Idaho had Frank Church, bugaboo of the CIA. Washington had Warren Magnusson, another liberal who had served since FDR was in office. Iowa had John Culver, Dick Clark's former boss and mentor. Wisconsin had Gaylord Nelson, a leading dove during the Vietnam era. In New York, the Democratic nominee for Senate was Elizabeth Holtzman, a leading liberal during the Vietnam era. In New York, the Democratic nominee for Senate was Elizabeth Holtzman, a leading liberal in the House.

Even North Carolina had Robert Morrigan, a member of Church's committee investigating the CIA. Their opponents, boosted by NC PAC and trained by Weyrich, targeted them on abortion, inflation, national security, even Fidel Castro. All issues that previously hadn't featured as prominently in the hyper-local campaigns of many of these senators were used to running. And they took them all out.

Every single one of those senators or senate candidates lost. With Weyrich and NCPAC specifically targeting many of the senate's leading left liberals, the GOP managed nothing less than a red wedding of an election. If you have a baby boomer liberal parent or grandparent, this is one of the foundational traumas of their political life, and probably the reason why they supported Hillary's Blood and Soil 2008 campaign. Remember, they needed nine seats to win back the Senate. They ended up netting 12, making 1980 tied for the second most seats ever flipped by

one party in one cycle. It's impossible to get a truly quantitative answer for how much the nascent institutional social conservative movement affected things, versus how much you can lay blame on Carter inviting a confused Christopher Lash to the White House in 1979 or Operation Eagle Claw. Regardless, Weyrich and his friends immediately took credit and started getting attention. The day after the election results,

ABC News hosted a recap of the results that featured Weyrich and MC Pack prominently. The segment started with a beleaguered Carter faith advisor comparing the religious right to Nazis. Then it cut to a Christian activist saying we need to protect our children and our families. It was clear that they had hardly spent any time actually getting to know this strange man in his Jimmy Stewardess role. When introducing him, Frank Reynolds actually got his organization wrong, saying that he worked for NCPAC. He really worked for the committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, though it was

probably a distinction without difference. But if this mistake got to Weyrich, he didn't let it show. During his first interview during the segment, he started by openly threatening George Bush, the vice president-elect, promising death to his political career if he didn't follow the hard-right line. This wasn't just a shot across the bow to Poppy, who Weyrich never supported, but also to Reagan. Bush was his partner, after all.

When Reynolds asked him if he was exaggerating his power by threatening the newly incoming administration so early, Weyrich didn't back down, saying his movement cared about principle, not people. Reynolds obviously wanted to get him on something, but the way the results were, he couldn't. So he gave him the softball. Mr. Weyrich, the groups that are behind it. Let me just ask you, out of 24 Democratic incumbent senators, 12 have been knocked off. I don't know who wants to take credit for knocking them off whether it's the reagan landslide or whether it's

conservative political action groups or moral majority or a combination of all these things do you feel you've accomplished what you what you want to do is this the culmination of it or is this just the beginning all know this uh... this is really just the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning.

This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning.

This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning.

This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. This is the beginning. But for as capable as Weyrich was, he was also detestable on a personal level. He even noted to an interviewer that people in his native Wisconsin would cross the street when they saw him, and that he was mystified by all the nice things that his employers were saying regarding his incredible accomplishments. Even GOP senators found him odious. Trent Lott of Elvira fame revoked his Senate parking privileges following a car accident. John McCain refused to speak to him.

Orrin Hatch, of all people, said that he had mental problems. And even Poppy Bush, the reigning God King of the Deep State, feared this utterly freakish man. John Pedoritz, yes, that one, recounted that H.W. had to assure Weyrich that he'd be a conservative enough president. And then when he won, John Sununu sent Weyrich a letter thanking him and letting him know that any concerns he had would be listened to. While his contributions to the modern right are almost beyond quantifying, Weyrich's

own detestable nature stymied his own personal media efforts. His television network, National Empowerment Television, failed due to its founder's own repulsive personality and almost universal alienation of everyone he had ever met. Launched in 1993, Weyrich ran his organization with a mix of iron-fisted totalitarianism and utter neptitude. An entire network run by what The New Republic described in a hilariously vicious article as, sound technicians who could spout the pro-life line but not plug in the microphone.

The result was something that could best be described as Fox News without the sex appeal, or The Daily Wire if it had an entire show dedicated to the commuter rail. It burned through money so fast that not even the bottomless checkbook of Philip Morris could keep it afloat, and Weyrich confusingly said that he had to rape money from the Free Congress Foundation to keep it alive, his words. While it arguably paved the way for more successful iterations of conservative broadcasting, it

folded in 1997. As much as Weyrich accomplished and created, and it was a lot, he was never able to recapture the success of his 1980 bloodbath. Early in the Reagan years, Weyrich had a string of legislative failures, both with bills he helped shepherd into the world and bills he helped revive. These included an act that would make it so that minors could not get federally funded contraceptives without parents' notification, or the 1981 Family Protection Act, which also would have removed protections for battered women against their husbands.

Over time, the Reagan administration proved far more interested in funding fascist death squads abroad and gutting every public institution than indulging the religious rights agenda, consistently treating them like the famous freak cousin who is invited to every Thanksgiving but is unknowingly affixed with an air tag lest they do something weird and upsetting. Reagan kept in correspondence with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, but when it came time to pick a Supreme Court candidate, he ignored their pleas and went with the pro-choice Sandra Day O'Connor, the first of many Republican justices who would shank the religious right when given a chance. A deeply bitter Wayrich

responded by spending the 1988 primaries working on Pat Robertson's campaign. Aside from trying to launch the American Hutu Power Radio, Weyrich's other adventures included trying to organize a Christian boycott of the US military because of Wiccan Covens and Fort Hood. He also spent time on the board of Amtrak and trying to make Metro a reality in the US, which only kind of cancels out all the other stuff. He was just way too much of a freak. An austere religious nutjob who also had zero charisma and told maybe a single joke in his entire life, which was when Pat Robertson claimed God had told him he would be president, and Weyrich retorted,

did he tell you when? Because it's certainly not going to be this year. But nonetheless, he had laid the groundwork for several successors, maybe most notably Steve Bannon and Leonard Leo. But Weyrich wasn't the only guy glowering from outside the party of the Reagan Bush years. More well known and less accomplished, we have former MSNBC host Pat Buchanan is now mostly spoken of as a man ahead of his time, a candidate who tapped into nativist anti-immigration policies and a quasi-isolationist foreign policy, the truth is a bit more complicated. Buchanan certainly wasn't a marginal figure from the get-go. He was a veteran of both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, but in those posts, he had

always represented the rightmost position, resulting in lonely, baffling stands like rallying for Reagan to lay a wreath at a memorial for fallen SS veterans, or working with Nazi groups to stop OSI from deporting elderly concentration camp guards. When the 90s came, Buchanan found himself further outside of GOP circles of influence than he ever had been. During the Gulf War, he alienated scores of more normal conservatives stalwarts by claiming a Zionist-occupied US government had intervened at the behest of Israel. This schism only deepened after the fall of the USSR.

Without a grand overarching evil that Republicans of all levels of relevance could link any and all policies to, the ideological core of the party had splintered. Such circumstances would have already been fortuitous for any figure attempting to challenge the brand of governance that the right had settled into since the 1980 election. What truly allowed Buchanan to transform from a gadfly bureaucrat into a household name was his opponent, President George Bush. To say that Poppy was distrusted by the activist right would be an understatement. We've already gone over how one of Weyrich's first acts after the 1980 election was to directly

threaten him, but that only scratches the surface of their antipathy. Bush represented everything they hated about politics. They hated his privileged patrician background. They hated his insider outlook and ultra-establishment resume. And most of all, they hated and feared his constant opportunism and reinventions, from Goldwater right to Nixonite to anti-Reagan liberal Republican to Reagan's own VP. As a matter of fact, Bush was never supposed to be on the Reagan ticket in the first place. As far as Reagan's team was concerned, at the time of the 1980 RNC, Bush was completely untrustworthy. According to Richard Allen, Reagan's 1980 campaign foreign policy advisor and national

security advisor during his presidency, the campaign viewed Bush as a liberal, and others were almost unanimously against him, some even contemptuous. Reagan himself was still angry at Bush over his pro-choice primary stance and attacks on supply-side economic policy. To the extent that Reagan wanted a moderate on his ticket, it was Gerald Ford, his former rival from the 1976 primary. Also, according to Allen, these talks with Ford reached serious headway until they abruptly broke down over the 38th president's increasingly excessive demands. At one point, Ford essentially declared on live TV that he was demanding nothing less than a co-presidency with Reagan. A really funny demand for someone who became president by default and then proceeded to

write his old boss a get out of jail free card. When these talks collapsed, Reagan was left to decide a running mate at the literal last minute. This is not an exaggeration. At one point, he and his team actually sat silently around a table, completely out of ideas. Allen, as the story goes, suggested Bush as a last ditch effort to advocate for his friend, expecting to get shot down immediately.

As it turned out, though, nobody objected to him. They were just at a complete loss. Hearing no objections, and with the guy who shot Harvey Milk presumably unavailable, Reagan called Bush and asked if he was willing to endorse the hard-right GOP platform in order to be his running mate. Bush said yes, Reagan announced him as his running mate, and movement conservatives suddenly had to contend with an alien entity right at the heart of their leadership structure. This proved to be a position that would earn Bush little favor with the Hard Right, even

as he spent years dutifully serving under their beloved leader. Because of the nature of his position, this was always going to happen. It was inevitable that the Reagan Revolution would fail to bring the benefits, both political and personal, that the hard right felt that they had earned. While a handful like Weyrich turned against Reagan and eventually accused him of being a KGB stooge, most of them needed scapegoats, of which there were none better than George Bush. From day one, Bush would always be singled out as the culprit for everything that went

wrong under the 40th president, causing distrust towards him on the activist right not only to persist, but grow over time. Bush himself paid back this disdain in spades. According to his own associates, Bush aborted the dirty work of politics, making a personal distinction between campaign mode and governing mode. While he probably never could become

a Reagan-style great leader, he never really made the effort to be one in the first place. He was perfectly fine with letting them side eye him, because his true priorities were elsewhere, to say the least. Thus, it was no surprise that by the time of the 1988 election, Bush had failed to unify the party, and especially the party's right around himself. It's important to remember that Bush Sr. was, in fact, a hard-right candidate. His campaign team was

staffed with Nazi collaborators, including Weyrich's right-hand man, Laszlo Pastor. Despite his classic poppy flip-flops on issues like birth control, he still had his religious bona fides that the divorced former Ronald Reagan did not. He was, at least on a personal level, a significantly better candidate for the religious right than Reagan was. But it didn't matter. They'd spent eight years getting burned and had no interest in Bush whatsoever. In contrast to the usually deferential treatment incumbent vice presidents get when they mount their own bids after two terms, Bush faced a robust suite of challengers in the 1988 Republican primaries, all of which ran to his right.

While he managed to beat them, his totals weren't impressive, and he struggled in contests where the activist wing of the party held the most influences, like the Iowa caucuses. In that race, he only managed an embarrassing third place show, finishing behind both Senator Bob Dole, an establishment conservative without the baggage, and televangelist Pat Robertson, one of the first candidates to be an outright member of the evangelical right rather than just a proxy of their movement. Still, it's worth noting that Robertson's ultimate numbers weren't especially impressive, and Bush's campaign was ultimately able to outmaneuver his campaign.

One of Poppy's greatest masterstrokes involved going to the mega-churches that had tables out for Robertson, and getting a church board member to ask for a table for Bush, too. Most pastors would then shut down both tables on the spot. Regardless, the fact that Robertson was capable of mounting an extended campaign in the first place was proof that quite a lot had changed in the Republican Party. By the time the Republican convention came around, things had become outright dire. Bush had been trailing in the general election surveys by large margins coming into the convention, putting him in an intensely vulnerable spot. While he may have

wanted to campaign on the CIA platform, he was in no position to dramatically break away from his party and chart his own course. He needed to get the base behind him, and he needed to do it immediately. This was the culmination of the threat Weyrich made all those years ago. His wing now had the power to make or break Bush's candidacy. And with this in mind, Bush pivoted hard. And I'm the one who will not raise taxes. My opponent now says he'll raise them as hard. My opponent won't rule out raising taxes, but I will and the Congress will push me to raise taxes and I'll say no, and they'll push and I'll say no, and they'll push again and I'll say to them, read my lips.

No new taxes. This may not seem like much at all. By itself, a Republican promising not to raise taxes is hardly anything atypical. But in the political context of 1988, this was a major, major commitment. Following a blowout 1986 midterm election that saw liberals reverse many of the gains made by Weyrich and CPAC in 1980, Democrats had solid control over both houses of Congress, which they were expected to maintain no matter how the presidential election went. And after two terms of Reagan's economic policies

exploding the deficit, one of the Democrats' highest priorities and biggest promises to the voters was reducing budgetary shortfalls. Any serious attempt at that inevitably was going to require rescinding at least some of the massive tax breaks given out under Reagan. Movement conservatives saw this impending clash as nothing less than absolutely existential. If their leaders couldn't hold the line for the centerpiece of Reagan's legacy, then they'd be no better than the Democrats, and Bush being the sort of gutless uniparty loser to do this had been their exact fear this entire time. By delivering this line, Bush made the ultimate concession to them. He pledged not to let governing mode rule over

the commitments he had made while in campaign mode. He promised to be their champion, their guy, and he lied through his teeth. When that great moment of confrontation with Congressional Democrats finally came, Bush did what the right had always feared he would do. He folded. He put the hard realities of governance and the actual interests of the deep state ahead of the ideological crusades of movement conservatives. He did not shut down the government for the right-wing cause.

He went to the table, he negotiated a deal, and he raised taxes. It was at this moment where Pat Buchanan saw and took his opportunity. Drawing on a deep sense of betrayal supercharged by an economic recession, Buchanan launched a protest bid against Bush in the 1992 primaries that saw truly historic support for a candidacy of its kind. At the crowning moment of his campaign and career, he won nearly 40% of the vote in New Hampshire's primary after forcing Bush, an incumbent president, to actively campaign for his own nomination.

This was nothing less than a Eugene McCarthy-level historic performance. Something that seemed to establish him as a dominant player in the party for years to come. And after Poppy's presidency abruptly ended after only one term, he looked like nothing less than the future of the party. Except he wasn't. Buchanan showing in the 1992 primary proved to be more of a ceiling than a floor.

As it turned out, the loss Buchanan took from no longer being able to run against an unpopular George Bush fresh off a tax hike was about equivalent to the benefit he got from no longer having to run against an incumbent president. When he made his second bid in 1996, facing the juggernaut campaign of Bob Dole, he actually received a lower percentage of the total vote than he did in 1992. Rush Limbaugh, who'd endorsed him four years earlier, turned on him so sharply he effectively banned his fans from calling into his show. This is where Buchanan, as a proto-Trump, starts to fall apart.

He found some purchase, rallying against elites and the usual far-right bettenoirs, but no one, and I mean no one, was buying any of his actual policies. He only managed to get any popular appeal at all by representing the far-right's dissatisfaction with Reagan and Bush. Following that, Al Buchanan's attempts at a confused economic nationalism combined with nativist immigration policy

and a jumbled isolationist foreign policy were met with bored disinterest. Just like today, when Blake Masters or someone tries the same shit, no one can bring themselves to pay even a second of attention, lest their job is to write articles about this type of thing. He could certainly piss off some of the jug hooters, and spoke to at least some small part of the GOP that was frustrated with what they saw as a set of betrayals by the party.

But when it came down to it, he just did not have it. Generally, people may have liked one or two things he said, be it his anti-elitism or strict border policies, but his wholesale vision of politics went absolutely nowhere. And while he may be remembered for this attempt at being an American Garrett Wilders, he was much more animated by bog-standard far-right social issues

than people like to remember. The only difference between him and someone like Ralph Reed was that Buchanan was much more liable to turn beet red and screech about homos in the military in a way that positively freaked out most voters. In his last outing in presidential politics, Buchanan attempted a third run in the Republican primary of 2000, gaining even less traction in the early contest than before, as the rest of the movement coalesced around much more marketable figures. Not willing to go without a fight, the recently disgraced Roger Stone helped convince him to lead the Republican Party and commandeer the flailing post-Rospero Reform Party, getting his name on the ballot as an alternative to Bush and

Gore for the populist right. With Poppy out of the picture, Buchanan couldn't make a credible argument that he was the last social conservative left in national politics. All he was left with was his epic right-wing economic populism, so he leaned into it about as hard as he possibly could. He quickly found out that there was no constituency for this brand of politics. At one telling moment during the campaign, he even managed to headline a Teamsters rally with Rep David Benoit, the sitting Democratic House minority whip and adamant NAFTA opponent, and Representative

Bernie Sanders, an obscure left-wing independent from Vermont. Buchanan railed against the free trade policies of both the Democrats and Republicans, promising to block the admission of China into the World Trade Organization and even declaring that he would appoint Jimmy Hoffa Jr., the new Teamsters president, as his trade representative. You could not have been more on the nose than this speech. With both major party candidates following the same line on trade, there was absolutely nothing holding back economically populist hard hats from coming home to him, America's proto-Trump.

They just didn't want to. At the Teamsters rally, where Buchanan spoke, the New York Times has several union members in the audience how they felt about the speech he gave. They didn't bite. One trucker from Brooklyn said that while he personally supported some of Buchanan's trade policies, that didn't mean he was for him personally. Another from Cincinnati said that he simply didn't think Buchanan was presidential. The sole member of the audience the Times could find that actually supported the reform

candidate said that it was because he outright agreed with his positions on social issues, which he also admitted put him in the definite minority among his union brethren. Looking back, it's somewhat remarkable that the Times managed to find a single Buchanan supporter in the crowd. By the time election day came around, Buchanan only achieved a laughable 0.4% of the vote. Not 4%, 0.4%. He only received over 1% of the vote in six states. Part of this was no doubt due to the messy primary that featured in some capacity,

Jesse Ventura, Ron Paul, Warren Beatty, Sybil Shepherd, and Donald Trump. The latter of which had this to say about Buchanan. Tomorrow, Pat Buchanan is announcing that he will be a candidate for the presidency on the Reform Party. I just think it's ridiculous. I mean, he wrote a book. In fact, some have even suggested that Stone tried to make the primary a trainwreck to help Bush Jr.'s election chances. But keep in mind, this wasn't exactly an era of two-party dominance. Ross Perot had managed historically strong showings in the past two consecutive elections, running in Buchanan's exact party in one of them.

In 2000, that same year, Ralph Nader won millions of votes and broke the 5% barrier in several states. There was a real appetite for alternatives, and Buchanan did as much as he possibly could to make himself one. People just didn't want him. If we can take anything away from Buchanan, it's the things he did not do. He was not especially charismatic. He could not be funny, and he was unable to captivate a roomful of people unless they were already totally on board. Trump may have echoed a lot of Buchanan's

platform, but only because it was a useful way to attack GOP primary rivals and Hillary Clinton. Simply put, the only element of Buchanan that actually scared the GOP establishment was adopted by Trump and deployed far more effectively than either Buchanan or the James Bakers of the world could have ever imagined. It's one thing to rail against elites and vaguely rage at failed policy. It's a whole other thing to do it when voters see you as a fun outsider rather than a humorless scold who isn't even sure why he's there. Buchanan's greatest legacy, in the end, would not be something he did. It would be something he caused. If he had not

galvanized upper Manhattan's dumbest minds into creating modern neoconservatism as we know it, we would have never seen the backlash to it in the form of Donald Trump. Returning to our triad, last but not least, is James Dobson. A master of political media who created most of the forms and functions of the modern right wing. Dobson wasn't just more successful, better financially-renumerated, and more respected than Buchanan or Weyrich. He was also somehow more unnerving. Don't take my word on it, take his.

Dobson's professional career began as a USC psychologist under the aegis of certifiably insane eugenicist Paul Popenoe. This was a case of iron sharpening iron. Some men would see the challenge of working under a man who sat on the board of every major eugenics organization imaginable and frequently demanded the mass sterilization of the mentally ill and resigned themselves to a distant second. They could never hope to be more unnerving, more bizarre, or repulsive than their boss was.

But Dobson was a champion. He took this as a challenge and delivered. His first published works focused on family life, child rearing, and dating, and they are some of the most stunning churning selections we've compiled for this project. Dobson led the charge of defending spanking as a form of punishment, and in one nauseating selection Dobson advises, after the spanking, the child will often want to crumple at the breast of his parent. In another, he tells parents to become the boss of their disobedient child by hitting

them with a switch until they stay in bed. Not happy to rest on his hideous laurels, he ups the ante by encouraging daddy-daughter dating for girls so they can practice heterosexual-romantic relationships. Naturally, a member of one of his organizations went on to create and host the first purity ball. For fathers, he suggests that taking their son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that dad has a penis just like his only bigger. In one particularly puzzling entry, Dobson recounts seeing a

televised police standoff where a deranged captor took three teenage boys as hostages before killing one of the boys and then turning the gun on himself. Dobson responded to this horrific scene by rallying against car chases and TV shows, by rallying against car chases in TV shows, karate chops in his words, the Palestinian Liberation Army, and Truman fucking Capote for writing In Cold Blood. To say that Dobson was obsessed with media would be a severe understatement. He was a master of it. With the connections of Nixon's special counsel turned world's least convincing evangelical, Chuck Colson, and the funding of, once again, the DeVos family, he founded a vast empire that

encompassed lobbying groups, think tanks, and media consumed by millions. Part of Dobson's brilliance was that despite being an early televangelist, even though he was never a pastor, having vast influence within the Republican Party and his empire crafting messaging on countless pieces of legislation, he self-presented as an apolitical, avuncular older man who was just interested in doing the best he could for families. Despite his absolutely repulsive earlier writings, the combination of his public image, his secular credentials as a child psychologist, and his carefully selected deviations from moral majority orthodoxy made him a force

to be reckoned with. Focused on the family, his primary organization provided resources for right-leaning parents and school boards to challenge reading material that they found objectionable, making Dobson a far more deft opponent to public schools than Matt Walsh and Moms from Liberty Failures that we see today. If you had an abstinence-only sex-ad program in the Bush years, there's a good chance that Focus on the Family provided the materials. And if you're listening to this series, there's a good chance that it worked so well that you're still following it.

Focus also provided a training ground for many young upstarts in the world of Count Ick. One of Dobson's best friends landed her worst son an internship there, a man by the name of Eric Prince. He co-founded the Alliance Defending Freedom, a dominionist legal group that helped get Dobbs kicked to the Supreme Court and fights for transgender sterilization laws in Europe. If that wasn't enough, he's also probably more responsible for the homeschooling movement taking off in America than any other single individual. As early as 1980, he used his nationally broadcasted

radio show to champion the values of homeschooling. Former ADF President Michael Farris, the man now considered the father and leader of the American homeschooling movement, has called Dobson's interviews with Raymond Moore his inspiration. The HR6 battle that we did together in 1994, that's still legendary in Washington, D.C., as the number one example of grassroots outcry to stop something that had passed. It was a democratically controlled White House, a democratically controlled white house a democratically controlled house and senate the bad measure that would have been homeschooling

the relevant house committee on a straight party line vote and eight days later because of the outcry coming from your show from homeschoolers from lots of other people but uh... your show really led the way uh... we defeated that in fact a counter amendment, 422 to 1. It still stands as the greatest reversal in eight days in the history of Congress.

Well, there were more than a million phone calls that poured into the Capitol after our program and you made the case for what we believe. And they do still talk about that because it melted the switchboard. It not only melted the Capitol Hill switchboard, Washington, D.C. as a whole was having problems getting calls through. Well, there is still a lot of support for homeschooling out there, but what the Werners, Jim and Linda, told me yesterday is that there still is an effort to limit the homeschool families and to interpret the law in a way that will be disadvantageous

to them. So we have to continue to be vigilant here in the United States. And the Romica family is a good example of it. In fact, it's outrageous. Dobson certainly wasn't above making repulsive remarks, obviously. His horrifying statements on AIDS earned him the rebuke of then-surgeon general C. Everett Koop, and even the anti-abortion crusader Francis Schaeffer considered him a power-hungry lunatic. His former radio co-host wrote an entire book about Dobson's psychotic behavior,

which included driving an hour to avoid minority neighborhoods in California and sending $17,000 through his organization to a divorced woman for undisclosed reasons. Strangest of all, Dobson's first crossover success was a controversial interview with Ted Bundy hours before his execution, where the serial killer sobbed for the camera and pretended that finding hustler magazines in a dark alley made him murder dozens of women. Dobson, in this same video lecture, would draw a flowchart on a blackboard in front of a room full of scared teenagers that led from softcore, to to perversion and then death. For those who had not fried their brains by spending hours looking for backmasked messages in Guns N' Roses CDs,

they could see that Bundy was trying to be the center of attention one last time, and even his audience was uncomfortable with the large amount of money that Dobson made on the interview tapes. He was later pressured into donating a large chunk of it. Still, Dobson, unlike his fellow bellowing lunatic Pat Robertson, who Dobson thought was an idiot, had at least some instinct to know what would freak people out and what wouldn't. With an audience of 5 million listeners, and an enormous profile in the world of Republican politics, he was

able to stop several anti-gay discrimination bills from being passed in states that could be accurately described as purple at the time, and the introduction of the Defense of Marriage Act to Congress was in no small part due to focus on the family and its sister organizations efforts. But despite his carefully constructed friendly persona, Dobson wasn't afraid of finding a party. Only he did so far more effectively than Weyrich and Buchanan. After a dust-up with Ralph Reed over Reed's support for Bob Dole and his desire to expand

the GOP to include more socially moderate voters, Dobson cast his vote for the Taxpayers Party in the 1996 election and told the Council for National Policy he was considering leaving the Republican Party altogether. It wasn't just Dull and what Dobson saw as inadequacies on issues like abortion. He felt the party itself had accomplished next to nothing despite their congressional victories. But with Dull's defeat and many of Dobson's allies fainting at working with the Democrats on issues like international aid, the party realized that their only route to the White House ran through an energized evangelical base. And after a screaming match between Dobson, his ally Gary Bauer, and House Whip Tom DeLay

that must have resembled a scene from Fargo, DeLay commissioned the Values Action Team, which helped turn Dobson and the religious rights' psychotic ideas, like nuking the National Endowment for the Arts into legislation that could actually pass, including future abortion restrictions. Helping Dobson in his efforts was the fact that there was a real electoral argument for a focus on evangelical whites. For as much hay has been made about the long history of the GOP's southern strategy, Dixieland had never really been a reliable base for the party by this point in the late 90s.

While national Republicans could sweep in elections against northern liberals, all Democrats had to do to contend in the region was to simply nominate a Southerner as they had done in 1976. In another era, this wouldn't have necessarily pretended doom for the GOP, as they could counteract this solid south strength with wins in the Midwest. This was how Nixon managed to get over 270, despite losing the bulk of the south to Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace in 1968, and it was how Gerald Ford nearly won in 1976 despite losing nearly every single former Confederate state to Jimmy Carter. But after 12 years of Reaganite economic and trade policies that devastated domestic manufacturing

and family farmers, and social policies that turned out the last remaining liberal Republicans, the rock-ribbed Republicanism of the Yankee North had faded. Even in his decisive loss to Bush in 1988, Michael Dukakis still managed to carry New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa, and came within two points of winning Pennsylvania and Illinois. Beneath the wreckage of that year's Republican landslide, the right found itself standing atop a house of cards. If Democrats could find some way to cut back into the South,

the GOP, now having lost its strength in historic Northern strongholds, would be electorally swamped. Four years later, Bill Clinton would do exactly this. Across two elections in a row, he managed to sweep both the North and much of the South, hanging up tremendous landslide victories and depressed and infuriated

Republicans. Bush and Dole tried to combat this by making an appeal both towards moderate Northerners and white Southerners at the same time. But this fell dramatically, ultimately winning over neither group. They, alongside the growing specter of talk radio, had simply polarized the country way too much for these kinds of broad wins to still be possible. In light of this, Dobson's argument that the GOP needed his constituency wasn't wishful

thinking. It was an inarguable electoral fact. But still, even by 2000, the party establishment wasn't entirely willing to go all the way in Dobson's direction. For their candidate of the future, they nominated another Bush, a born-again evangelical Bush, but still a Bush who campaigned as a compassionate conservative problem-solver. Dobson and his allies did not trust George W. Bush. They didn't like his dad, and they similarly expected W. to let them down.

They saw him at best as an unknown quantity and at worst another big tent Republican willing to compromise on their most sacred issues. During the campaign, they mostly held him at arm's length, with Gary Bauer attempting a primary challenge so pathetic it broke down his relationship with Dobson for years. Dobson even issued a warning to the Bush campaign when rumors circulated that he was considering a pro-choice Vice President. And when the results came in, his wing saw their theory of politics vindicated. All of W's moderate posturing had utterly failed to win him any northern swing states.

Oregon, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, they all stuck with Democrats, leaving W with nothing but a paltry four electoral votes from New Hampshire as the sum total of his efforts for a national appeal. The only place willing to take a chance on him was the South, where a series of dramatic flips across the ex-Confederacy allowed Bush to just barely steal the White House. This was the last nail in the coffin for the Republican establishment's hopes of a future without the religious right. While 2000 counted as a victory for them, the margin of victory was so narrow that it could only be

secured by a Roger Stone-induced riot and judicial coup. Facing an energized opposition and a hostile congress, the Republican Party realized that Dobson's grandstanding wasn't something they could ignore. They needed him and his empire. As the 2000s beckoned, Buchanan faded in and out of random punditry positions. Weyrich slipped on a patch of black ice and became paralyzed for the rest of his life, reportedly in agonizing pain even as he held weekly lunches in DC for Republican power players to link and build. He also made several visits to post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe to build ties with

religious conservatives, apparently deciding that he wanted to see even more ice after that accident. Ultimately, it was not the content of what these three men said, but rather the form that it took. Weyrich had no meter for what would freak normal people out. Buchanan couldn't find a natural base for his confused paleoconservatism, seeing as he was hoping that the white working class would somehow pick up a copy of Taki's magazine or Mankind Quarterly and hop on board.

There are echoes of these two men in the presence, and they're archetypes. Way rich as the behind-the-scenes architect to Allian for Primetime and Buchanan's impotent fascist albatross, Sig Hallean, the quiet part across the rooftops, remain Republican Party staples. But Dobson became even stronger and continued shaping the strongest iteration of the conservative media machine that the world had ever known. This is the sun My Lord, my Lord

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