Factually! with Adam Conover - This Election is Historically F***ed Up with Rick Perlstein

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

The 2024 election cycle has been positively ludicrous. Between Biden's disastrous debate performance, the attempted assassination of Trump, every single thing about JD Vance, and Biden dropping out of the race, it seems like history is happening too fast to even keep track of. This week, Adam sits down with Rick Perlstein, political historian and author of Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980, to unpack one of the most charged moments in American political history. Find Rick's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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hidden in its history, and I know you are because you're a smart person who listens to this show, well, you should check out these audiobooks, available everywhere audiobooks are sold. Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. So we have just gone through the most insane month in American politics that I can possibly imagine. First, President Biden had a disastrous debate performance

that made basically the entire country realize that no matter how much his aides might try to hide him or gaslight us, that he was definitely too fucking old to be president. And this started an unprecedented chain of events in which nearly Biden's entire party started clamoring for him to drop out of the election four months before election day. Then in the middle of all that turmoil, an assassin with a rifle took a shot at Trump during a campaign rally and missed killing him by mere millimeters. Just a few days later,

at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Trump appeared with a bandaged ear, spoke about his brush with death, chose a far right-wing Yale law grad and venture capitalist to be his vice presidential candidate, supposedly because of the guy's anti-elitist populist credentials. And then, weirdest of all, Hulk Hogan gave a speech. But not to be outdone, just a few days later on a frickin Sunday, Biden posted that he was leaving the race on Instagram. That's right, dude did a notes app announcement that he was dropping out of the presidential election, and he endorsed Kamala Harris, who has now essentially become the presumptive Democratic nominee. And then, Charlie XCX said that Kamala is brat. There has not been such an unprecedented turn of events in American politics since John

Philip Sousa dubbed Rutherford B. Hayes the King of the Sousaphone. Okay? Shit is nuts. And when you add in the fact that one of the candidates in the race is a former president who tried to overturn an election using force, well you just have to admit that this is one of the craziest fucking election years in American history. You know, at moments like this we all look for something solid to grab onto. And for a lot of people, that's history.

A lot of us want to look at our past to ask, has anything like this happened before that can help us understand the present? A lot of people are comparing this year, for instance, to 1968, the last time that we had a presidential election that was this chaotic or had this much political violence. But is looking at history limiting and can it actually blind us to what is happening in the present? Well, to answer that question, we have an incredible guest. But before we get into it, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show and all of the incredible

conversations we bring you that help you understand the world and what is happening to us, you can support the show on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free and you can join our online community. We would love to have you. And of course, if you like standup comedy and you wanna come see me in a city near you,

head to adamconover.net for my tickets and tour dates. Coming up soon, I'm heading to Baltimore, Maryland, Austin, Texas, San Francisco, California, the Chicago area, Toronto, Ontario, so many other incredible cities had AdamConover.net for those tickets. And now let's get to this week's guest to understand this incredibly charged moment in U S history. Our guest today is one of the best political reporters and historians working.

His name is Rick Perlstein. He's the author most famously of Nixonland, as well as many other incredible books about 20th century American political history. And he writes about this election at the American Prospect. Please welcome our good friend, Rick Perlstein. Rick, thank you so much for being back on the show. Adam, it's great to be here.

I've been looking forward to it. I mean, you are my very favorite political historian. You're also a political reporter. Given the events of the last month, you were the first person I wanted to have on to talk about what the fuck is happening in American politics right now. So how does it strike you as both a political writer

and a historian in recent events? I would say how it strikes me is that we are so used to responding to events based on kind of our familiar groups, our familiar thought patterns. It's like riding a bicycle, right? We all know what happens when, you know, a president drops out, when you're choosing a running mate, you know, when, you know, swing states are this and all these kind of routines we run in our head, it's like riding a bicycle. This is like, you're riding a bicycle and the chain slips off the gear. And you're pedaling and pedaling and you're not going anywhere. And

it makes for a kind of a paradoxical situation for historian because historians are always supposed to be saying, look to the past for lessons, look to the past for lessons, look to the past for lessons, past for lessons. And for about like, you know, four or five years now, I've been saying, well, often looking back at history can actually be an alibi for not looking at what's happening in the present because what's happening is so unfamiliar. We really seem to be in one of those moments that arrives every century or so, in which all the categories are thrown up in the air. And yet we only know how to talk, you know, using the old categories,

you know, all this yakking and yakking and yakking about bowling, right? No one knows what polls signify, You know, no one knows how to pull people when, you know, everyone has cell phones. No one knows, you know, what polls predict what. And yet, and yet we act like we do. So, you know, I'm kind of yelling my head up, head up a lot of the time saying, you know, when reporters call me and say, what is the historical parallel to this? I'm saying, why are you calling people who are actually involved in the events you're trying to cover instead of me?

You know, hang up, hang up, talk to someone who's, you know, in the streets for Black Lives Matter, you know, talk to someone who, you know, is angry about Israel and Gaza and doesn't want to vote for the Democrats, you know, like, like, you know, did you ever see that classic movie, Lawrence of Arabia, right? And Peter O'Toole, you know, he's he's this great British colonialist, he supposedly has this, you know, finger on the mind of the Middle East and all these, all these Middle East leaders and potentates and tribal leaders are saying, but sir, it is written. And he finally gets so angry at people.

And he says, he yells at his lungs, nothing is written. Nothing is written. Yeah. I mean, the question of what's going to happen in the election comes down to there's millions of people around the country and they need to decide to leave their houses, go to a polling place or fill out a ballot. They got it home and mail it in and they're going to make a decision on the day. And you're right, it's very unclear how polling,

which is randomly calling people on their cell phones, is going to be connected to that decision that real people will make. And Adam, I always like to point out that, you know, what people vote for on November 5th is, you know, pretty far down the list of variables about what's going to happen on November 6th, right? I mean, it doesn't matter how many votes Donald Trump gets in kind of our horse race if the MAGA guys in the red hats blow up the track the next day, right? So, I mean, we're dealing with the variable of political violence and there's no responsible reporting about what's going to happen in the election that doesn't bring that on board as an issue. Right. I mean, you know, you need to look at the fact that, you know, hundreds of election

workers across the country are quitting in terror because, you know, they've been intimidated so much by, you know, Frank fascists. So, you know, yes, that's part of it. Right. But there are other parts of it that, you know, aren't even part of, you know, the world that's part of it, right? But there are other parts of it that, you know, aren't even part of, you know, the world of a Peter Baker or a Maggie Haberman, right? Yeah. Well, let's talk about how historically unique this election really is,

because the last normal election I can remember was 2012. Obama versus Romney. That was like straight out of, I don't know, an episode of the West Wing or something. It was just a normal ass fucking election. There was the 47%, that was like the most interesting thing that happened the whole time. Then after that though, 2016,

we have a former reality star running and having a shock win. And we had the death of Scalia a few months beforehand, which like was, I remember thinking, this is the craziest thing that's ever happened in an election. You know, a tipping point Supreme Court justice dies a couple months before the election.

How nuts is that? Then the next election, Donald Trump is now the president and we have COVID across the country. And we have the, you know, the George Floyd protests and our moment of racial reckoning, our two momentary moment of racial reckoning in the United States. So I was like, that's a fucking crazier election than the last one. The breakdown of the institutions of journalism at the ends of kind of social

media and corporate greed. Right. I mean, that's a fog. Right. But let's not also forget that it wasn't like, you know, we went from normal elections 2012 to weird elections, 2016. You know, a lot of this was a long time coming, right? I mean, let's not forget that George Romney, in order to kind of ingratiate himself to kind of Republican Party that had been rationing more and more towards authoritarianism for decades at that point, lied so often that the gray lady of the New York Times editorial

page accused him of lying using the L word. There was a blogger for MSNBC, he still works for them, named Steve Bannon, who used to have an ongoing series counting up Mitt Romney's lies. He was up to the 50s by the time the election came along. Don't forget, Mitt Romney, now he's seen as kind of the time the election came along. And don't forget Mitt Romney. You know, now he's seen as kind of the anti-Trump savior. He did, you know, look the camera in the eye and said, no one has to look. No one ever had to ask about my birth certificate.

Right. So, you know, the, the Republican party in many ways was evolving towards Trump. Right. But yes, weird, weird, weird stuff happened, especially in 2020. Now, I think it's interesting because you said in that answer, I think by mistake, you said George Romney at first instead of Mitt Romney, George Romney being Romney's father. Well, you're a historian. You dwell in the realm of the past.

I'll tell one George Romney, Mitt Romney nerdy historian thing. So George, George Romney was a big superstar in the 1960s and he was very much kind of a centrist and he's most famous for saying that He was the frontrunner. He was supposed to be the shoe in the pundits all were like he's gonna run away with the 1968 nomination because the pundits are always wrong and they always kind of based their ideas on you know Kind of cliches from the last war basically and one of the things Mitt Romney did was he was very opposed to the Vietnam War. He saw what was going on.

And he would point out, we can't win a colonial war 10,000 miles away. We can't win a land war in Asia. That this is a civil war that we're getting involved in. And then he said something that was considered the colossal gap. He told the truth. You know, Michael Kinsley said that a gap in Washington

is when a politician tells the truth. But what he said Kinsley said that a gap in Washington is when a politician tells the truth. But what he said was when I went to Vietnam, the generals there gave me a brainwashing, right, which basically meant they lied to him. But it was taken like he said, like he said, the generals, you know, really did a Manchurian candidate thing and literally brainwashed it. And after that, his goose was cooked. But anyway, he was famous for this is how, you know, how crazy the Republican Party used to be. He became a big superstar by inventing. He was a automotive executive for a now defunct company called American Motors. He invented the first fuel efficient American car. And when when his son Mitt Romney first ran for president in 2020 in 2008,

he announced his campaign at the Henry Ford Museum next to an electric car and said, I'm going to be the guy who does did does what my father did in the 1960s and take, you know, environmental problems seriously and introduce electric cars. Of course, by 2012, he was a global warming denier, just like the rest of them. So that's our kind of devolution of the Republican party decade by decade. Well, the connections between now and 1968,

which you mentioned, let's get into that, because it's often, it really is this year that keeps coming up again and again right now. So I wanna lay out the case that I've heard for how they're similar before I, and then I want to get your take. But this year we've had an assassination attempt against a former president, presidential candidate.

We've had the rise of political violence generally. And then we had, you know, chaos in the Democratic Party nomination and the specter of maybe a contested convention is something that was discussed many months at the DNC in Chicago. 1968, we had LBJ, a popular president, step down or decide not to run again. We had the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King the same year, right? And we had

chaos of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And so it seems like this sort of spooky synchronicity. You have written extensively, I love your book, Nixonland, which is a lot of it takes place in 1968, sort of the pivotal year of that book. What do you think about the comparisons between the two years? Is it a similar moment or is that a wrong trail to go down in our analysis?

If you hop on your bicycle and do what you're familiar with, you know, that sounds pretty good, right? When do you think that Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for reelection? Oh. This is a trick question, by the way, Adam. I'm gonna, I'm telegraphing my shot here. I'm doing a little Babe Ruth.

In the cycle, I think it was earlier than Biden because there was a primary. Can I stop you? He decided, him and his wife decided that he was not going to run for reelection in 1968 in 1964. And at the time it was widely presumed that because, you know, the, the, the nation was in the midst of extraordinary turmoil. There had been, and that he had been humiliated

in the New Hampshire primary and was very unpopular because of racial uprisings and Vietnam, that he must have done it because he couldn't stand the pressure, which was a reasonable surmise for the time. But history changes when you get new information, right? They call it revisionist history. In 2014, the diaries of Lady Bird Johnson, which were only kind of released in limited fashion, you know, back, I think it was in the 1970s, were released in

their full form. And a wonderful historian named Julia Swig wrote a new biography of Lady Bird Johnson. It's called Lady Bird Johnson, hiding in plain sight, in which she demonstrates that they had decided together that he was not going to run in 1964 and portrays them kind of discussing all through the next four years how they're going to, when and how they're going to announce this, right? Which completely goes against the whole historical parallel that shows, oh, well, Biden left under pressure, LBJ left under pressure, so this is 1968. Then there's the convention turmoil. And that turmoil was so specific to the circumstances of 1968, whether it was. You know, the presence of millions of young Americans who thought

the world was going to end because because of the Vietnam War, you got to remember like 100 people, 100 American troops were dying a day in Vietnam and some days in 1968 that any college student, if they dropped out to be drafted the next day, right, and be one of those one. It was just, you know, mind blowingly stressful. Mine. And so you had a lot of very extreme radicalism. People talking about overthrowing the entire civilization, which is not something you really hear too much these days. And yeah, like the kind of

almost puckish trolling threats, like, you know, we're gonna pour LSD in the Chicago water supply, which were taken seriously by the quite reactionary, traditionalist Irish Catholic mayor of Chicago, Mayor Daley, whose police force was full of these people who were so angry that they weren't able to crack any skulls during the riots in Chicago a few months earlier in April of 1968, after Martin Luther King was assassinated, that they were just loaded for bear. They were just waiting for the excuse to beat up on some hippies. By the way, did you did I in your viewers see my what my Ronald Reagan shirt says? Hold it up a little bit more.

There we go. It says I smell hippies. So that was the mood in 1968, right? But the idea that like, you know, the convention in 19 in 2024 in Chicago could conceivably, you know, kind of get out of control. It's not just a bunch of kind of, you know, Irish cops with nightsticks were running this show. It's what they call a national security.

Like a NATO convention or a WTO convention or, or a national party convention is run, the security is is run by the federal government. And there'll be police forces from all over the country. When I was in Milwaukee for the Republican Convention Act, kind of 37 different police forces from like, you know, the McCallan County, Texas Texas Sheriff's Department to game warden, you know, and, and so it's, you know, the, the, the security for these things is so locked down. And, you know, we can talk more about this. The police aren't such a hair trigger. Quite frankly, there was a terrible killing of an unhoused person in Milwaukee by these cops from Columbus, who, you know, if they had been from Milwaukee, they would have known that this guy represented no threat at all. But basically, yeah, the idea that

you could have people sitting down in the streets, which happened in 1968, you know, right in front of the convention hall, and undisciplined cops are going to go in in front of the TV cameras and to start beating heads, you know, and throwing people into into police wagons and throwing tear gas into them. Yeah, It's just inconceivable. And yet the kind of level of political discussion is just like, well, 1968 was in Chicago. 2024 was in Chicago. Now there, you know, this is, this is a really good example of my principle that sometimes when you look at history, it can keep you from avoiding variables that are actually relevant to the president. So what is the, what is the role of the governor of Texas in all of this?

I'm going to ask you like another trick question. Wait, can I let me let me just let me just say one thing, Rick, before we before we get to that, because I don't know, you're not entirely putting my mind at ease about what could happen at the convention. If you have all these different police forces from out of town, I very well remember 2020. I very well remember 2020 when, you know, you had police, you know, rioting and tear gassing protesters

and clonking them on the head and, you know, pulling people into unmarked vans and shit, like that was real. And you have activists, it's not Vietnam, you're right. People, Americans are not being sent to Israel to go, you know, kill Palestinians in Gaza. But you do have a very angry group of Americans who, you know, see what's happening there

as a genocide that the US is supporting. And they are going to be protesting. You're thinking like a historian. You're actually looking at the evidence in front of you, right? So, yes, it's completely possible that something terrible could happen. But it will be a different kind of terrible, right? I mean, one of the variables you want to look at, too,

and, you know, again, look at what's happening in front of us is the governor of Texas for like well over a year now has been sending, filling up buses and even airplanes with migrants from South America. And one of the greatest human rights abuses we've ever seen in America, and it's still, it's disappeared from the front pages, they'll take these desperate people, they'll load them up in a bus, and they'll have them driven to like, you know, a liberal city,

like New York or Chicago, and literally just dump them off in the middle of the night with no warning. And basically, he's trolling liberals. He's saying, you people think, you know, immigrants are good for America. You think we should treat migrants, you mainly great, go for it. And what this actually, I think was modeled after was something that happened in the early 1960s. When, you know, brave civil rights activists, black and white, had these integrated bus rides to the south called the freedom rides. And you know, we're beaten within an inch of their life for the sin of, you know, race mixing, right? So racists in the south did something called the reverse freedom rides. They said, great, you want integration? They would,

they would take, you know, they would go down to what they called in Skid Row where all the unhoused people live. They would go, you know, kind of take people who are getting out of jail, vagrants, people on welfare, and they would bust them to places like the Kennedy compound in Massachusetts. And then they would say, Wow, you like Negroes, you take care of them. Right. And in fact, they weren't taken care of. Right. And that's exactly what's happened, you know, places like Chicago, we've busted our butts, you know, actually, you know, but it's created an enormous amount of tension in the city. So we now know that Governor Abbott has a plan to dump, you know, migrants on Chicago

during the convention. Right. So his dream, you remember when when Rick said, when, you know, the governor of Florida, DeSantis, right, we'd kind of hold up these maps of San Francisco and each X on the map was where a homeless person that supposedly pooped in the street. That's what they want to be on camera in Chicago, right? That's what they want. So it's a different Chicago 68 scenario. It's a potentially terrible scenario,

but every time you're kind kinda talking about Chicago in 1968, you're kinda crowding out attention to something that I don't see being covered anywhere, right? And you know, shows of rank cruelty, hypocrisy, nastiness, and sheer anti-democratic, you know, propaganda-driven monstrosity that is the Republican Party. So in video games, there's this thing called min-maxing. I'll spare you the technical definition,

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That's 20% off your order with the promo code factually. Support our show and tell them Adam sent you. Don't just blend in with the crowd. Stand out with Chubbies. But I do think, think though that looking at history can be helpful to remind us of how brutal and angry and disgusting American society can be. I mean, your book, Nixonland, which is shamefully the only book of your quadrilogy, tetralogy, whatever you call it, I have read.

the only book of your quadrilogy, tetralogy, whatever you call it I have read. But I'm like really intend to read the others because your book really blew the lid off of the baby boomer nostalgia trap that I had been given my entire life of, oh, the hippies and the civil rights movement won. And we made America a happier place. And everybody held hands.

That was the last time we had you on. We talked about that. And you and your book is about no Americans applauded the murder of the students at Kent State and you know, et cetera, that there was this brutality underneath the surface in mainstream American society that Nixon capitalized. And that's why it's so anguishing that people act like what was the Saturday Night Live sketch when election night in 2016 and the black folks are watching it with the white folks and the white folks are like, I don't even recognize this country anymore. And the black folks are like, rolling their eyes, you know. So yeah, I mean, it should definitely serve as an antidote to sentimentality. You know, the kind of Obama, there is no red America, there is no blue America.

There's all of the United States of America. I mean, one story that kind of comes to mind is in 1966, which is, you know, a year no one talks about because 1968 is the cool year, right? There was a congressional election. One of the big issues was whether it would be legal not to sell your home to a black person, right? It was called open housing. And a bill to outlaw, you know, prejudice, prejudice, sales of houses and rentals of apartments was put up. It was the first civil

rights bill of the sixties to fail. It was kind of the harbinger that the great society was over. And somehow I got in touch with a, uh, a guy who, um, won a seat. From Iowa, uh, in Congress, uh, in 1964, right? It was a great year for liberals. It was just, you know, the, this is the high heroic sixties, the civil rights act of ass, very Goldwater, this very reactionary guy who opposed civil rights, was the Republican nominee and lost. But then two years later, there was this huge backlash against civil rights.

And what this congressman told me was, first of all, he, well, he, what he told me was he went to a meeting of farmers in Iowa to try and persuade them to, you know, reelect him to Congress. And they said they heard a rumor that a black motorcycle gang was coming up from Chicago to, you know, kind of like, you know, kind of like Marlon Brando and the Wild Ones, you know, kind of like to, you know, you know, maraud through the farm towns of Iowa. And he said, that's when I knew I wasn't going to get to serve my second term in Congress. You know, so that's kind of the Trumpist instinct, which has, you know, been with us

since the know nothings in the 1850s or even before. Right. That's always been, you put it very well, Adam, this kind of undercurrent, you know, we really, you know, American politics, our American prospect is really kind of a struggle between our better angle angels and our, you know, uglier angels. And unfortunately, we set to mentalize that. Right. And we act like, you know, the Trump energies come from nowhere. You know, I see Fox News, you know, all the time as a historian, but it's always in the 1960s and 70s, no letters to the editor. Right. And what you know, one of the things that Roger Ailes did was, you know, the guy who started Fox News with the specific goal of saying, you know, the Republicans need their own TV channel. We can never allow a Watergate to happen ever again. Right. Which was kind of seen by a lot of people on the right, but not in the mainstream as kind of a way that the Democrats

usurped the presidential victory of Richard Nixon in 1972. a lot of what he did was he basically took what was under the surface and put it on the screen, you know, to basically create this some, what I call the bedwetting nation. You know, this kind of information bubble in which tens and tens of millions of people are indoctrinated using the most sophisticated, you know, to bring back our friend George Romney mind control techniques, really to operationalize the darkest corners of their brain to believe, you know, I mean, you probably have, you know, old old relatives like, you know, my grandma, my late grandma started watching Bill O'Reilly. And the next thing you know,

she was terrified to do is she was so glad she was too old to go outside because she thought suddenly that, you know, if she would get her head chopped off, right? Yeah. Every day is a Willie Horton ad now. Exactly. We have, you know, Willie Horton ads 24 seven. I mean, did you hear this new, um, caravan that they're trying to whip up? Oh, there's a new caravan. I don't even want to, there's, I don't even want to get into it. Like, let's talk about the, you know, what role that sort of right wing, you know,

bloodthirstiness has in our politics. You wrote recently about Project 2025, which is a big boogeyman for the left right now. It's in the news every day. And you have an interesting historical perspective on it, on that right wing project. Share that with us. People thought I was minimizing it,

and I feel a little guilty about that, right? Because we finally found this thing, well, before JD Vance came along, that could terrify all Democrats, right? We could all unite behind the terrifyingness of Project 2025. And I pointed out a couple things. First of all, behind the terrifyingness of project 2025. And, you know, I pointed out a couple things. First of all, you know, the most terrifying thing about project 2025 bar none, and

there's no way you can kind of minimize this really, is that they're trying to turn the federal government into a political extension of loyalism to President Trump, right? So, you know, we have something called a nonpartisan civil service. Most of the people who work for the government, they don't get fired when there's a new president, you can only fire them for if they don't do their job. And there are only 4000 people who get confirmed by Congress that are actually picked by the president and the White House, they want to make that 50,000

people who can be fired because, I don't know, they say global warming is real, or they say mercury and water supply isn't bad, or the most important job for the Justice Department, and this is literally in the Project 2025 section on the Justice Department, is pro-choice people harassing pro-life activists, right? This is like this terrible problem. So anyone who says that could be fired the next day,

right? The problem is, I mean, not really a problem. The fact of the matter is this is what the American right has been trying for, I've dated back basically 100 years, right? Getting rid of the nonpartisan civil service. You know, Richard Nixon, my guy, after he won reelection, he did what I call Project 1973. He had a guy read a whole manual about how you can fire people and get around these rules that say you can only fire people when they're not doing their job.

How to fire people who just don't support Richard Nixon. Because just like Donald Trump and his gang think that there's a deep state hidden within the federal government that's out to get Donald Trump, Richard Nixon would rant all the time on the White House tapes about how the civil service was full of these Kennedy loyalists who were just out to get him. Oh, and by the way, a lot of them Kennedy loyalists who were just out to get him. Oh, and by the way, a lot of them were Jews kind of were. Yeah.

He was obsessed with that too. The same guy who wrote the manual about how to fire civil servants was the guy whose job it was to count how many Jews there were in the Labor Department. So anyway, Jesus Christ, they try and they try and they try and they've kind of serially failed. I mean, the reason they failed in 1973 was because, you know, Richard Nixon was kind of caught with his hand in the, in the cookie jar. Watergate happened. Right. Well, but Reagan, the guy on your shirt,

successfully did it to a large degree. I mean, he slashed the budget of HUD and all these other departments and, you know, created, he really, you know, And so like another thing is this project 2025 it's an, it's every four years they come out with one of these things. Yeah. you know, really did slash and burn. And so like another thing is this project 2025. It's it's every four years they come out with one of these things. Yeah. You know, they they have something called Mandate for Change. So the first one was in 1980. It came out after Reagan won. And, you know, it was, you know, I'm not going to like say

the Reagan administration wasn't terrible for a lot of, you know, vulnerable communities. They cut. Yes, like you say, the budget of the for public housing in America by 75%. But all the stuff they wanted to do, just the conservative movement just wasn't kind of mature enough. It didn't have the political capacity. And most of the people who are around Reagan, because they knew that he was seen as too extreme at a time when a lot of those kind of 60s reform energies were still in the air, that he wouldn't get reelected. So the people who surrounded him were this ancient species, these dinosaurs called moderate Republicans, right? So he didn't accomplish nearly as much when it came

to deconstructing the administrative state as the truck people want. But they've been working on this assiduously for 25 years ever since, right? But they've been working on this, you know, assiduously for 25 years ever since. Right. And they've been building up the base for this using their media. Right. And they've been building up their capacity for this by building up the think tanks. And if you, you know, they really, really know how the government works. Right. It's like if you talk about, you know, the average kind of liberal activists, you know, their federal departments, they write about in there that most of us have even heard of, but they know exactly what they do, exactly how to destroy them.

And, you know, so, I mean, basically what I said was, you know, you know, they've been trying this for a long time. So don't act like, you know, project 20. It's kind of frustrating, right. It's most satisfying and frustrating. It's frustrating that people don't know that this is a project. It's satisfying that people are finally getting the point.

Yeah, I mean, when you hear someone like Kamala Harris or any other democratic, you know, lifer talk about it, it's kind of like, okay, well, good. I'm glad you're worried about the right-wing project to dismantle the federal government. Why weren't you talking about that in 2012 when you ran for Senate? Exactly, where were you and why did you allow...

When we were following Barack Obama when he was saying, oh, well, this is just an anomaly. The Tea Party is just an anomaly. The fever will break. No, I mean, the fever had long ago kind of consumed the host. Yeah. Or the Clinton years when Clinton abetted it, right. And it happened, right. And did so many things that basically degraded the only tool that Democrats had to keep people from being seduced by the cultural conservatism of the right,

which was basically use the federal government to help people. So, you know, the other thing about Project 2025, it's really important to point out is it's not all just this is what we're going to do. This is what we're going to do. This is what we're going to do, which, by the way, is a good thing. They're showing us what they're going to do, you know, which is really awesome if you're kind of fighting someone that you know, their strategies in advance. But some things, some chapters of Project 2025 show

how badly in disarray the conservative movement is. There are literally chapters in project 2025 that are written by two separate people arguing two opposite points. Like there's a chapter that says there's something called the export import bank, which is basically a corporate welfare thing. And a lot of the, you know, a lot of the Trump people think it's terrible because it's globalism and whatever, you know, because they want corporations to stop being woke and they don't want them to get all this support.

So there's a chapter that literally says, um, this is why the export import bank is terrible. And then there's another half of the same chapter that says, this is why the export import bank is great. So you know, it, yeah, it's not merely this juggernaut, right? It's a very complicated document. And if we can use it as a tool to terrify people about the Republican party, right,

because the Republican party is terrifying. But it also should be seen as a tool for people who really wanna think strategically about how to do what Richard Nixon did, which was divide the opposition. Do you know what the Philadelphia project was, Adam? That might be kind of a couple sentences at Nixon land. So I'm not going to wrap your knuckles for not doing your homework on that one. So Lyndon Johnson, you know, came up with the idea of affirmative action,

basically his administration, and he gave a famous speech and said, he said, you can't just remove someone's chains and have them start the race and say the race is fair. Sometimes you have to kind of adjust things to make it fair. That was affirmative action. Right. Right. Which is thank you, Richard Nixon, for that wonderful argument. Lyndon Johnson said that.

And Richard Nixon said, hey, we got this thing. Oh, Lyndon Johnson said, excuse me. And this thing is already in place. And basically there's something called the Philadelphia project, which is like the federal government will give favor to construction companies that are owned by African Americans when it comes to federal construction projects. Right. And Richard Nixon said, one of his aides said, Oh, we should get rid of this. This is terrible. This is woke nonsense. They called it Crow Jim then, by the way,

they didn't call it woke. They had different words, but they had this. Where they called it, they called wokeness or reverse racism, they called it Crow Jim. Because it was the opposite of Jim Crow. It was racism against white people. That's kind of funny.

It's like, that's a little creative. That's gonna be my next essay. It's gonna be about Crow Jim and in. That's gonna be my next, my next, my next, my next essay is going to be about Crow Jim and then project 25. At least they coined a word as opposed to just ripping off woke, which was, you know, coined by black Americans. Anyway, go on.

So yes, woke was like, you know, what hip black people were saying, just like, yeah. So Crow Jim, they're like, oh, well, if we, if we actually increase this program, we can make the two most important parts of the Democratic coalition, which is basically union members, right? Yes.

And who, you know, basically have what? Who at the time were racist. A lot of them were white racists, right? Especially what they call the building trades union. You know, the people who pass down their jobs from father to son, right. Yes. But wanted, you know, things like the strong, strong federal government, lots of building projects, and African Americans want affirmative action. If we can

get them at each other's throats. Well, you know, we can win in a landslide in 1972, because these people won't be able to get along together. A lot of what's in Project 2025 is basically a roadmap to those kinds of opportunities. Getting the Republican Party fighting tooth and nail against each other. Yes. What is so fascinating about this political cycle is What is so fascinating about this political cycle is during the RNC, it seemed as though the Republican Party was completely unified, right?

Trump had just had an assassination attempt. Hulk Hogan, you know, ripped his shirt and everybody fucking lost their minds. And meanwhile, the Democrats are don't rip your raking shirt. It's too nice. Meanwhile, the Democrats are at each other's throats, right? Like screaming at each other on social media everywhere else of shouldn't we dump Biden and using the most horrible arguments against each other of, you know, accusations of bias and things like that.

Yes. Democrats and disarray. Then Biden drops out. Kamala Harris becomes the nominee. And we've had at this point about 10 days a week, 10 days of just, you know, democratic joy. Democrats in a ray. Oh, my God. In a ray. Oh, I was just on a zoom last night called White Dudes for Kamala.

And, you know, we had we had all of these. You know, I kicked them off Twitter for pro gym. He did. He said we can we had all of these. You want to kick them off Twitter for pro gym? He did. He said we can't have racism on Twitter. Incredible, incredible. Right. Extremely funny. Yeah. You have all of this outpouring of support, right. And people honestly forgetting about the divisions on the left.

Right. You've got you've got not going to have to be the biggest issue in Gaza. Knocking on wood. Yeah. But you've got Democrats's biggest issue is Gaza. Knocking on wood, yeah. But you've got Democrats whose biggest issue is Gaza saying, I'll hold on, I'll hold my nose for a second if they throw us a bone because we wanna defeat the Republicans. I really hope she throws him a bone

because this Joshua Pirro guy is up there. He's kind of like been going hard against the Gaza protesters. But anyway, for the nonce, it's Democrats in a ray. And did you read my last piece about the abortion protesters at the Republican convention? Yes, I did. But for our listeners, please summarize. This is wild. So we're talking about wedge issues. I feel like I'm giving wedge issue one on one to a party that really has a chance to kind of

really kind of knock these guys on their ass. Right. So they were so terrified at the Republican convention that if they raised abortion as an issue that Republicans, it's terrible politically for them. I mean, it's like it was great. As long as they just said, Oh, we're going to we promise to, you know, overturn Roe versus Wade. It was a meaningless promise, right? It was the dog chasing the car and now they've caught the car. And it turns out well, and did you notice Republicans like having sex too? And Republicans have daughters who have sex. And when you have sex and you get someone gets pregnant, there's like,

you know, a harmless and humane way to like not have a baby called an abortion. Well, suddenly, like, you know, suddenly, the Republicans are are like, Oh my God, we have this politically terrible issue. Why don't we just not talk about it? Right? So basically they, yeah, and you're saying that's because you're saying part of that is because Republicans are getting pregnant and wanting abortions and it's becoming divisive internally because of internally because 70% of people oppose abortions, uh, oppose Republicans on the issue. And, you know, because lo and behold,

how many abortions has Donald Trump paid for, quite frankly, right? I mean, it's kind of like, you know, so when I was, you know, hanging out in the street corners of Milwaukee, completely innocently, of course, my hometown, and I ran into these anti-abortion protesters who were in every other description were just down the line lefties. Now they talked about Christo

fascists, you know, they talked about the horrors of Gaza, they talked about the terrible over-policing in Milwaukee. But what they did was, they did something really fascinating. They would hold up signs with Donald Trump's face on it because literally when, when, when, when people who actually in the Republican party are so principal on the subject of abortion being murder, they tried to put it into the platform and were shouted down and were literally kind of railroaded out of the convention. Um, these guys, therefore held up signs with Donald Trump's face on it and

said, baby killer. Donald Trump is a baby killer. And Republicans get so mad. They would get so mad because these guys were throwing in their face the shame of having the day before yesterday, saying abortion was murder. Abortion was Holocaust. Abortion was the equivalent of Auschwitz saying, abortion, we don't need to worry about that. And literally, people were so mad at these these these protesters, they assaulted them, one of them, like, you know, through their their bullhorn down on the ground. So all you know, comes with these two is talk about abortion. And, you know, remind people, you know, that the Republican party doesn't care about them anymore.

Why not vote for the party that actually, you know, cares about things like jobs and healthcare, right? And we have a pretty exciting wedge issue. Were these protesters that you saw, were they leftists who are trying to instigate the right wingers or are you saying that these- They were just leftists who really, really think abortion is murder.

Wow, okay, so these are just some people who really, really think abortion is murder. Wow, okay. So these are just some people who do not fit into one of our normal political categories. They don't fit into our normal political categories. And you know, they're extremely principled. They, you know, we're living on a concrete floor in Milwaukee, you know? They ask their job, you know,

advocate for this issue that has like, you know, eight or nine adherents, you know? And there's, and there is a chunk of the Republican party that feels betrayed every time Donald Trump gets out there and says, uh, well, it's so great that now abortion is up to the state because they hear that as you're allowing California to murder babies. That's what they hear. When he says that it's like, if someone says literally this, this knucklehead pundit was like, you know,

interviewing a Democrat and the Democrat, I think it would might have been Buttigieg or one of them. He was saying, you know, Donald Trump, you know, ended Roe versus Wade. And the pundits like, well, you know, you can still get an abortion in, you know, Minnesota. And, you know, you know, unfortunately, the Democrat didn't have the wit to say, you know, well, before the Civil Rights Act, you know, I, the democrat didn't have the wit to say, you know, well, before the Civil Rights Act, you know, I mean, you could go to the bathroom next to a white person. If you're a black in Minnesota, what's your problem? Right? I mean, the problem is, it's no longer a federal right. Right. And what these guys were pointing out was that Donald Trump had literally said, we need to stop talking about abortion

because we need to win an election. And, you know, they did a really good job. And I write about this, obviously, in my book of, you know, my book on, the last book of my series, Reaganland, which is about, you know, the years between 1976 and the 80, when the Christian right was really kind of getting their spurs.

They did a really good job of convincing millions and millions and millions of people, literally, literally. This was the metaphor they would use that abortion is equivalent to Auschwitz. And you can't say, well, you know, we can have Auschwitz in Minnesota, but no, it's in Mississippi. Right. So this is like a party in deep, deep disarray. And it's very fun. It's very exciting.

It's a lot easier because you don't have to do bank shots anymore and pretend that you know, it's like, well, how I want to ask you about how much the Republican Party has transformed in terms of its larger political ideals. I mean, when you saw J.D. Vance give his speech, right, there was a and Sean O'Brien, the Teamsters leader on the podium and all of this, there was a lot of talk about, is this now a right-wing populist party,

a working class right-wing populist party? Clearly JD Vance is trying to pull it in that direction. That was Trump's initial inclination, but he was surrounded by all these sort of traditional Republicans. Is that a, yeah, in quotation marks, traditional, is that a genuine shift that you are seeing in the Republican party or is it a mirage

and, or is this really a realignment in what that party stands for? I would say it's more reducible to a Republican party that is enthralled to a certain class of capitalists on the West coast instead of a certain class of capitalists on the East coast, you know. Oh wow the West Coast instead of a certain class of capitalists on the East Coast. Oh, wow, Silicon Valley and so the Wall Street. Literally, and look, Elon walked this one back,

but he had a phone call with Trump and he tried to persuade him to choose JD Vance and 24 hours later, Trump chose JD Vance and almost immediately, apparently it was leaked to the Wall Street Journal that Elon Musk was going to donate $45 million a month to a, you know, Trump super PAC. You know, he claims that's not true. He's only going to give whatever $12 million or something like that. But, you know, in a lot of ways, you know, I would much, much rather have a party that's

enthralled to finance capital than a party that's enthralled to these kind of like wackadoodle, you know, Peter Thiel, kind of a master of the universe guys who are building like 100 foot bunkers underground in New Zealand for the apocalypse they're in is going to create. Right. I mean, think about it. Yeah. At least like financiers have to like, you know, be responsive to what the, you know, the market, you know, wants in any kind of given instance, which is, you know, terrible enough. But these guys are market makers, right? They're trying to create the very tools by which human beings interact in the first place. And if you look at, you know, so you have, you know, a guy like Peter Thiel, who's inter intellectual.

There's a great piece today in the new republic that I highly recommend. You might want to look into looked into it for the pod. Do you know this guy, Jarvan Curtis, Jarvan Curtis? Jarvan is a literal Nazi who is quoted in the piece saying, you know, we should really fuel our biodiesel buses and cities with the the the the with the bodies, the burning bodies of homeless people, right? Jesus. And Peter Yarvin is buddies with Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is the guy who literally sponsored the career of JD Vance JD Vance has connections to this guy, Peter Yarvin.

Curtis Yarvin, you mean? Curtis Yarvin. These are genuinely frightening fascist people. And a lot of what they're talking about when they're saying, you know, we're going to, you know, be a party for the working class, they what they mean is we are going to be the party for the traditional, you know, kind of rural fantasy of the nuclear family in which I mean, I was listening to frickin JD Vance's, you know, memoir and people are like, where does this right wing guy come from? He never says a single negative word about kind of people solving their problems through the most vicious forms of violence. You know, it's a model of domination. And this has always been this kind of stereotype, you know,

that working class people have these kind of traditional values and they're like pummeling each other. And, you know, I mean, this is this is the JD, the work class that JD Vance identifies with. It's right there in his book, right? And if you look at project 2025 chapter on the labor department, there's all kinds of nice things about, making it easier for working women to kind of have flexible schedules, but it's all basically so white women can have more babies.

So there's a little bit of a line in there, lamenting that the average white lifespan has decreased, right? I mean, there's just like really weird kind of dog whistles going on that suggests that this comes straight out of kind of the most reactionary wing, the Catholic party. It is not the kind of working class that's all about. And then the chapter ends by saying, basically, we need unions that are basically run by the companies that they represent,

right? They call company unions. So it's really scary stuff. And anyone who falls for it is a sucker. Well, and it's very interesting. It's been very interesting to see the Democrats finally point out that sort of weird strain of philosophy. I think JD Vance's ascension helped make that happen.

They're making them look like what's the guy from Dr. Strangelove who's like the purity of our bodily fluids, you know, just like, oh, these guys have been reading too many weird books they bought off the self-published section of Amazon about how the white race is dying out. And they have a strange obsession with white birth rates that like comes out in the childless cat lady's comment. And you get the sense that there's going to be a new drop from JD Vance like that every single day until the election.

They're going to find some weird episode of Steve Bannon's War Room he went on where he started spouting something about birth rates. And the guy is your historian friend tells you his name is General Jack D Ripper, right? He's the guy, the purity of essence guy. But yes, and that was just a joke now, but that's the Republican Party's the republican party and you know i mean really the the club weird is a really it's a great trope because in a lot of ways it represents the exhaustion and the end of the road for you know obama's model of politics god love him which is that everything weird about the republican party was quote unquote a fever that was going to break. But you know, when you basically, you know,

corral millions and millions of people into a coalition, and tell them that the meaning of politics is that unless this one thing happens, and the thing changes, you know, every year might be, you know, trans people using the wrong bathrooms, or gay people marrying or women being able to vote or working class people being able to vote. If that happens, civilization is gonna end and that we're not gonna have a country and basically you're gonna disintegrate

into a little ball. But the thing that you're calling for, ultimately all those things, which is this kind of impossible state of innocence, make America great again, go back to when you were a happy child and, you know, we're skipping, frolicking down the path with a fishing pole on your shoulder, you know?

So you simultaneously are demanding something that's impossible, a return to some made up past innocence, and that's imperative. That if it doesn't happen, you're gonna die. And if you get a bunch of people together, that's, you're only creating a situation where your politics are gonna keep on ratcheting and ratcheting and ratcheting in a more authoritarian direction because you're promised something that can never be achieved. It's even worse when

when the right is in power because all these things that Donald Trump, let me just finish with this, all these things that Donald Trump have promises are not going to happen. And you're not going to blame Donald Trump because he's your hero. You've completely identified your fate with his. You're going to blame conspiracies. You're going to blame, you're going to blame quizlings in your own party. You're going to blame internal enemies

that have to be destroyed. And a really good example of this from the acceptance speech, which of course, you know, no one talked about in the media because they literally wrote their articles about the acceptance speech based on the press release. You know, they literally repeated the press release instead of what he actually improvised and said his whole business about building a quote unquote iron dome for America, right? This

idea that he's going to, um, which makes no sense. Iron dome is Israel's missile shield. So these very primitive rockets, you know, it basically covers like, you know, a couple hundred square miles. He basically implied that this is going to be, well, he said the Star Trek policy, I think it's going to be like Reagan's dream for Star Wars, which is this kind of like shield over America. Right. Yeah. Which is literally it's just as impossible and fantastical and lying and propagandaistic now as it was when Ronald

Reagan dreamed up the mid 1980s. But what it is, is it's the exact same thing as building a wall. He's going to create this imaginary shield that's going to protect you from everything scary, everything that's outside your tribe, outside your family, outside the familiar. And it's basically the most fascist thing he ever said. Yeah. Right. This idea that he's going to create an iron dome. The fact that it was completely bad, fantastically made up has no basis in reality that no one challenges from him for it. And the idea that it is a promise of pure infantile protection, like going back into the womb.

And that is the politics he's promising. And the movement that fails, a right-winger will turn into a fascist because they will feel betrayed. And as soon as they feel betrayed, they will just, in a very animalistic, dark, instinctual manner that brings you to the lowest level of your consciousness, they will see threats and they will seek threats to

destroy. When you talk about that, it sounds very ridiculous, but it also sounds, uh, it sounds politically genius in some ways. Sometimes I listen to Trump. I'm like the man is a political genius of a sort, right? And it seems you know, it was ridiculous, Adam. What? There was this guy in the 1930s in Germany who said Jews controlled all the banks and they were also Bolsheviks and they're all out to get you and destroy you. The bankers and the Bolsheviks working together. It was genius and it was nonsense and it was very, very dangerous. And this is the kind of thinking that is now just kind of injected

into the mainstream American life. And the fact that liberals finally have kind of stopped doing this kind of Obama, I think shot saying, well, maybe they have a point. You know, maybe we should read out, reach out to them. These are the normal Americans. Maybe we're the weird ones. And finally, can just say very clearly and very directly. And God bless Kamala Harris and God bless Tim wealth for doing it

Directly that these people are weirdos without any sort of negotiation with themselves You know this kind of you know mind twisted, you know BS, you know That makes you just sound like a BS or that is calling a spade a spade They're being very direct and you know what it works And a lot of this have been a lot of us been begging the Democratic Party to adopt being very direct and you know what? It works. And a lot of us have been begging the Democratic party to adopt this very direct, you know, frontal attack on the weirdness of the Republican party for decades. And the fact that it is happening is great frickin' news. Democrats in our ray.

I want to end by asking you about this, about the assassination attempt against Donald Trump. Because when I think about political genius, and look, I'm not saying that he is a genius, but he has a moment of it. He is a kind of genius, definitely. When he had that instinct after the assassination attempt to rise, to push through the Secret Service agents and pump his fist and yell,

fight, fight, fight with the blood in his face, I was like, oh my God. Yeah, that was pretty genius. What a cover up, I'll be watching, I'll be seeing that image for the oh, my God, what I think cover of cover. I'll be watching. I'll be seeing that image for the rest of my life. Right. And I'm curious how it struck you as a historian. And I'm especially wondering what if it what if he had been assassinated? You know, a lot of people made that lazy joke.

Oh, I wish that. But you know, I wish they got whatever. It's a morbid thing to say. But also, what a fucking world that would be to live in. What a historical. Yeah, that that is a alternate history. That is terrifying to me. There might have been a civil war, but it would have been Republican against Republican. Right. I mean, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like the the the, you know, whatever the the Steve Miller people against the, you know, like,

you know, who knows who knows what it would have been. But I think it would have caused absolute against the, you know, like, you know, who knows, who knows what it would have been. But I think it would have caused absolute chaos within, you know, the Republican Party. It would have been very ugly. The point about the genius. I think I'm going to write about this because I have a lot of, you know, sometimes I just have stuff in my brain that kind of like this, you know, I just, you know, jack into it and it comes out. I think Ronald Reagan, in a lot of ways, kind of visualized his own assassination even even since the 40s, when he was involved in like a labor strike in Hollywood.

And if I pretty I think pretty compelling evidence of this. And we all know that people who run for president are not normal people. They're megalovaniacs. And I think most of them probably in their heart of hearts have a moment late at night when they're actually kind of rehearsing these scenarios, you know, and I think that this was kind of in a way his rehearsed scenario and my evidence for this is, if you look at the actual video of the close up of the podium, and I'm not sure how widely this circulated, he

sounds like a blithering idiot. If you heard this, he's like saying, Where's my shoes? Give me my shoes, give me my shoes. He sounds like an old man, right? And then, you know, they finally, whatever, give him his shoes, and then they say the shooter is down, and they're about to hustle in our station, then he says, wait a minute, right?

There's a little bit of catch. He kind of slows down the frame, and he realized that this is my movement. And that's when he says, thrust his fist in the air and says, fight, fight. So this is this, you know, my argument that, you know, this was something that was, you know, he had a great presence of mind to being to be able to do it. I mean, you know, kind of a weird kind of perverse respect for him for that. But a weird kind of perverse respect for him for that. But if he hadn't come up with that, the last image we have, we would have of him is the blithering idiot saying, where's my shoes? Like, you know, kind of grandpa on the couch, you know, kind of watching, you know, you know, HGTV or say yes to the dress.

You know, do you think, though, that since he did create that moment, I mean, it's so funny that that moment happened and people said, that's it. The election is over. This is history before our eyes. You know, he will be and there was three days of just like, oh, we're all so happy he's alive and, you know, what a heroic man. And now it's gone. Yeah, I think. Yeah. Now it's now it's it's over. Like the moment has passed. Do you think it's going to return or we got on our bicycle and we, you know, kind of did our familiar thing, which is to say, you know, martyrs move votes.

And then suddenly three days later, we're peddling and suddenly the chain is not latching onto the the gears and we're onto a different thing. So, you know, I mean, that's always the way I've been ending these interviews out on these days is just kind of as uncomfortable as it is to kind of dwell in uncertainty to dwell in the present to kind of move in territory that is not familiar to us. We have to do it. And, you know, we also have to defeat the worst possible, most dangerous forces

that have ever come about in American life and have fun doing it. So, uh, in Shala. Incredible. Well, thank you so much. I love to talk to a historian who reminds me to live in the present. Uh, if, if someone wants to read one of your books, one of your many books, which one do you recommend that they start with

to get a little bit of insight into the moment that we're in now? Is Nixonland the place to start? My favorite. I mean, Nixonland is the most popular and it's the most dramatic, but I think the most kind of morally interesting and the one that kind of really gets deepest

into the guts of what's wrong with America, which is this kind of longing for innocence and this kind of attempt to kind of create sentimental narratives that kind of move us away from the dark realities. I think it's the one called Invisible Bridge, which covers the Watergate area. And it starts with an account of what happened when the Vietnam War ended. And the prisoners of war who had been in Vietnam, Nixon tried to kind of turn them into these sort of kind of proof that America had won the Vietnam War. So, you know, but you know, get it in hard cover and I get, you know, I can pay my rent.

You heard it here first. If you want to pick up a copy of one of Rick's books, head to our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. And where can people read your contemporary political reporting? Right. So if you go to prospect.org, a splash page will come on. You can sign on for my sign up for my my Wednesday column, which is going to go on to the rest of the year.

Thank you so much for being here, Rick. It was a thrill to have you. We'll have to have you back after the election to get your retrospective. I'll be retired. Good for you. Thanks'll have to have you back after the election to get your retrospective. I'll be retired. Good for you. Thanks so much, man. Well, thank you once again to Rick Perlstein for coming on the show. If you want to pick up a copy of his book, head to factually pod dot com slash books.

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