Pod Save America - "50 Shades of MAGA."

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

The January 6th committee highlights how Trump’s attempted coup led to threats of violence against anyone who refused to go along. Strict Scrutiny’s Melissa Murray joins to talk about the Supreme Court’s terrible gun decision, and Zayd Dohrn, the host of Crooked Media’s new series Mother Country Radicals, joins to talk about political radicalization in the ’70s and today.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, the January 6th committee highlights how Trump's attempted coup led to threats of violence against anyone who refused to go along. Strict Scrutiny's Melissa Murray joins to talk about the Supreme Court's terrible gun decision. And Zay Dorn, the host of Crooked Media's new series Mother Country Radicals, joins to talk about political radicalization in the 70s and today. But first, just a few housekeeping notes. You'll hear Dan's interview with Melissa in a bit, but all the Strict Scrutiny hosts are also doing an emergency pod today to provide in-depth analysis of the Supreme Court's gun decision.

So you can check that out in the Strict Scrutiny feed right after you finish listening to us. And if you haven't heard, this year's Crooked Media Pride Fund will support three incredible organizations, the Transgender Education Network of Texas, Trans Lifeline, and Equality Florida. All three organizations provide community building,

gender affirming, and life-saving resources to the queer and transgender community all year long. So we are very excited to be helping out. To learn more and pitch in, please visit crooked.com slash pride fund. All right, let's get to the news. On last week's episode of Insurrection, the January 6th committee revealed how Donald Trump pressured Mike Pence to go along with his coup. On Tuesday's episode, the committee revealed how Trump and his accomplices pressured state election officials from Arizona to Georgia to go along with his coup. Today's episode we are recording this Thursday morning will be about how Trump pressured the Department of Justice to go along with his coup.

And the recurring theme that's come up in these last two hearings, at least, is that anyone who stood up to Trump, anyone who refused to go along with his illegal plan, wasn't just harassed. They were threatened. Their families were threatened. Their lives were put in danger. That was true of Pence. It was true of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican Trump voter who testified that people broke into his son's widow's home to harass her. It was true of Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, another Republican Trump supporter, who testified that his wife and gravely ill daughter had to worry about what will happen on Saturdays because that's the day that people show up outside their home to threaten them and call Bowers a pedophile.

And it was especially true of Georgia election workers Shea Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, whose lives were threatened to the point where Moss's grandmother was ambushed and Freeman had to leave her home. Here's a clip of their testimony. A lot of threats, wishing death upon me, telling me that, you know, I'll be in jail with my mother and saying things like be glad it's 2020 and not 1920. It's affecting my life in a major way, in every way, all because of lies. I've lost my name and I've lost my reputation. I've lost my sense of security.

All because a group of people starting with number 45 and his ally, Rudy Giuliani, decided to scapegoat me and my daughter, Shay, to push their own lies about how the presidential election was stolen. Dan, your reaction to Tuesday's testimony? It's just such an important reminder that what politicians say matters. that what politicians say matters, right? It's not just trolling or owning the libs or trying to go viral or excusing your own loss. It matters. And people died because of it. People's lives were threatened

and the Capitol was ransacked. And I think that's one thing these hearings have done masterfully and importantly, which is remind us of what happened because of the big lie. Because I think because it's such a this traumatic, unique experience, we've sort of like numbed ourselves to it over the last year and a half. And whether it was the footage from that first hearing or hearing about how close the mob came to Mike Pence or hearing from these election workers and the Republicans who stood in the way of Trump's insurrection, what that meant for them is a reminder of just how dangerous a game the Republican Party is playing. Because almost to

a person, they continue to push the lies that led to this violence and these threats, continue to enable the behavior and the people who led to this violence and these threats. And it is happening right before us. I think it's very important for all of us to recognize just how dangerous it is. Listening to Shea's testimony in particular was probably, I'd say, the angriest and most upset I've been since January 6th. And I couldn't shake it. And I was trying to figure out why. And I think a big part of it was hearing how frightening the threats were. A big part of it was hearing how racist the threats were.

But I think what made me most upset was that these two women were just doing everything that we want good citizens to do in this country like they uh they weren't just voters they were poll workers they weren't there to swing the election to democrats or republicans they just they just wanted to make the election work um they just they just wanted to make sure that every vote was counted and maybe that's because their parents and grandparents grew up at a time when they weren't allowed to vote. And they realized that people fought and died for that right. And so they wanted to do the work to protect it.

And now these monsters have tried to scare them and scare others away from performing one of the most basic obligations of citizens in a democracy. And look, like, I get that politics feels awful right now. You know, like people are angry and they're upset and they're just done with it. But this is exactly what Trump and those MAGA assholes want. They want us to be angry. They want us to be cynical. They want us to give up. They want us to turn against each other.

And that's how they win. That's how they win. And I don't think we should make it easy for them because fuck them. so you know if you if you want to keep these mag assholes out of power and stop them from fucking with our elections go to votesaveamerica.com slash midterms and you can sign up to do more than just vote you can volunteer you can organize you can donate we have plenty of stuff for you to do. Also, our friend was the lawyer for Shea and Ruby, and he was alerting me to two GoFundMe links that I tweeted out this morning, which are links and GoFundMe accounts to help them put their lives back together. So if you want to help Shea and Ruby, if you were moved by their testimony, I tweeted it out this morning. we'll tweet it out again at the end of the episode. They've already raised over $400,000, which is amazing. But also, nothing can replace what they've lost, that sense of security and, as Ruby was it was fucked up. I want I want to come back to this this recurring theme of threats and harassment toward anyone who stood up to Trump. But I also want to get your reaction, Dan, to the committee's focus on the the MAGA plot to send fake Trump electors to Congress and and their decision to play the audio of Trump's call with Raffensperger, where he asked him to find 11,700 votes.

What do you think the legal and political significance of laying out all that testimony and evidence was on Tuesday? Well, let's start with the Raffensperger call, where we now know from previous testimony that Trump had been told repeatedly, shown data and otherwise, that the votes that he was asking Raffensperger to find did not exist. He clearly had the knowledge based on what we know that he was asking Raffensperger to commit fraud on his behalf in order to hand him the presidency. And that is under investigation right now by the Fulton County District Attorney. There's an impaneled grand jury. This is an area of real potential legal jeopardy for Trump and his aides. And we have it on tape. And this is a tape as damning as anything that came out in the Watergate hearings. It is, you know, whether they're, you know, lawyers will have to, in grand juries,

have to make a decision about whether you can prove a crime. But from a point of, from a pure point of guilt, moral, political, historical, this is the smoking, the most smoking gun we've, we've had in probably had it for a while, probably in American history, right? It is like we, he is on tape committing a crime,

no subtlety, no plausible deniability. He is doing it. Well, we, I mean, when we were in Oakland, you know,

we were debating with Melissa about like, you know, Trump's intent and you have to prove what was on his mind and he did he really believe that there was voter fraud and did he really believe he was just availing himself of all his options and did he know it was illegal but when you hear him say to Raffensperger hey man just find me the votes yeah that's not someone who's like hey I think there was fraud we're gonna need to do something we're gonna take it to court no no no it's just find me the votes man just find me the fucking votes yeah I I think there was fraud. We're going to need to do something. We're going to need to take it to court. No, no, no, no. It's just find me the votes, man.

Just find me the fucking votes. I also think it was interesting that there's the Raffensperger call. And obviously, as you mentioned, there's that Fulton County investigation going on. But the Justice Department just delivered a bunch of grand jury subpoenas on Wednesday to state officials who were connected to the fake elector plot in other states as well, right? Absolutely. And so that's the other part of this. And I think that is incredibly critical. As these hearings have gone on, there's been this growing focus on Trump's knowledge and participation in

a plan to send fake electors to Congress to create a fig leaf in order to overturn the election. And that is a, I mean, the word fake here is very critical. This is a conspiracy to commit fraud. Once again, a ponderous former judge somewhere in America is going to have to make a decision about whether you can actually convict a person of the crime commandments we have, but let's be clear what he was trying to do here. And so this is an air, it is Trump knew about it. His aides knew about it and they participated in it. And that's a big deal. And what's funny about this is, is this is not a, there's no real mystery to what happened here. Like, so as you mentioned, this department of justice said for grand jury subpoenas, one of the guys who received the subpoena is a Trump campaign aide who is caught on video working – passing along the fake – the slate of quote-unquote fake electors.

And he's doing that wearing a Trump campaign sweatshirt with his name on it. And how did the committee get this video? Was there a secret source? Did they subpoena it? No. The Arizona Republican Party tweeted it out. So this was happening in full view for everyone to see. And the question is, will there be legal consequences? There absolutely should be political consequences for what happened here. Someone else will decide the legal, but they tried to defraud

the country to put in place a person who lost the election. That is an absolutely – that is an open-and-shut case. That is very clear. Everyone has testified to it. Everyone has admitted to it. And can Democrats therefore make the case that that is a reason – one of the many reasons why this political party that is on board with said scheme, which has protected the people guilty of it from any sort of legal political accountability, should ever be in power again. And that's the real question here. And I think the political consequences are key too, because I don't want us to get so hung up

on the legal implications that, look, at some point, some jury is going to hear this evidence and make a decision. But there's a much bigger jury that gets to make a decision in 2022 in 2024 and that's everyone who's fucking registered to vote so i don't want to lose sight of that because like we can't necessarily control what an actual jury does or what prosecutors does we can hope we can follow along and stuff like that but we can't control it we can control what all of us do about this who we tell about it who we try to persuade about or who we try to get out to vote um and speaking of that let's go to the the committee also showed text where uh wisconsin senator ron johnson staff tried to hand mike pence a package of fake trump electors to which pence's staffer responded in

the text do not give that to him once again great text in the text in the text, do not give that to him. Once again, in the text. In the text, do not. Constantly text about our crimes. Excuse me, excuse me. I have fake electors for the coup. Where can I deliver the fake electors for the coup? Can I give them to the vice president? No, do not give the vice president the fake electors for the coup.

The vice president is anti-coup. Yes, please direct these messages to the group thread titled coup. I mean, do you think this will have legal implications for Johnson or back to the political conversation? Would you focus on this issue if you were the Democratic Senate candidate running against him in November? He is up and he's maybe the most vulnerable Republican senator up right now. Like for the system to feel like it works, the people who implement an attempted violent overthrow of our government should face legal consequences. We also – Hear, hear.

That's right. Look, look. It's a crazy theory. I don't – it's not kind of out there. Hard to agree. that Donald Trump, Ron Johnson, rich, white, politically connected men in America tend to face legal consequences at a much lower rate than the rest of America. And so it's very possible they're not going to face legal consequences here. But that doesn't mean, per your earlier point, that Ron Johnson, who is up for reelection this fall in a state that Joe Biden won,

Ron Johnson, who's one of the least popular senators in America, should not face political consequences as we did. Now, I don't think the crux of the campaign against Ron Johnson should be about one of his aides trying to give papers to an aide to Mike Pence. But his continued advocacy for the big lie, his willingness to stand by a violent overthrow of our country as an example. It's one data point in a larger argument about his MAGA extremism that is out of touch with the country and is out of touch with Wisconsin. So I think this is another way in which to make the larger argument against Ron Johnson,

which he often makes for us every time he opens his mouth. Yeah, I mean, you know, he's one of my nominees for America's Dumbest Senator. I realize there's some stiff competition in that race. If we don't do well in this election, we're going to have to really reorder that because there are some real contenders on the ballot this fall. But I do think you can make a case that, you know, Ron Johnson ran as this businessman who was going to go clean up Washington. And now he can't focus on problems that people care about because he's too busy trying to keep Donald Trump in power and kissing Trump's ass and being as extremist as possible. He's become way out of step with Wisconsin voters. That's the case that he broke his own term limits pledge so he could stay in the Senate to help Donald Trump steal the next

election. Right. That's how that's what cares about. Donald Trump doesn't care about Wisconsin. So let me ask you, what do you make of Brad Raffensperger and Rusty Bowers? Raffensperger clearly isn't a Trump fan anymore, but he did support the voter suppression legislation that Georgia Republicans passed after 2020. Bowers not only supports that kind of legislation, he said after the hearing, he still might vote for Donald Trump in 2024. What the fuck rusty bowers who looks like uh ed harris needs to play you in the uh in the movie version i did i missed the

first hour of the hearing i sat down i'm like what is ed harris doing but everyone was like oh wow rusty bowers what what and i'm look i i give a lot of i give a lot of leeway to like Republicans who hold positions that I abhor but have decided on the issue of Donald Trump and the future of democracy to be on the right side of history. And I kind of thought that Rusty Bowers was headed there and then he was like, nah, I still might vote for him. And I'm like, what are you doing, man? What are you doing? What do you think about that? I think that like the color gray, there are 50 shades of MAGA. Like, they're just degrees here, right?

Really shooting for the episode title today, huh? Oh, I didn't think we could do that. But this is what happens when I do a lot of my pod prep like 12 hours in advance. And then I get wedded to a really bad joke and I can't let it go. You know what? I laugh. That's good. You know what? I laugh. That's good. That's really all I was hoping for.

Even if it's a pity laugh, I'll take it. I mean, I'm an easy laugh. I will. It's true. I mean, to be there only two of us talking to each other.

Now, if you didn't laugh, it'd be super fucking awkward. Okay. You were right. Like we, Brad Raffensperger, Bowers,

a bunch of people, but there are a handful of Republicans who deserve credit for the courage they showed at this moment of decision in 2020. Like, absolutely. And I'm very glad that if it's a choice between Brad Raffensperger as Secretary of State of Georgia or Jody Heiss, the big lie believer that Donald Trump endorsed, Brad Raffensperger is better. But you know what's better than Brad Raffensperger? A Democrat that doesn't support voter suppression laws.

You know what's better than Rusty Bowers? A Democrat Speaker of the House in Arizona. And so just it's worth – these are good reminders that it is possible for Republicans to show courage. We should applaud them when they do. But our democracy cannot depend on a small handful of courageous Republicans, right? Is that ultimately that's, you know, even the brave Republicans support voter suppression. Even the Republicans who wouldn't let Donald Trump steal the last election may help him

win the next one. And which is why ultimately the only way to deal with this sort of behavior is to beat the Republicans, even the ones who were courageous in 2020. That is just, that is the only option we have. Yeah. We have a great Democrat who'd be a better secretary of state than Brad Raffensperger, being when she'd been right on Pod Save America. She just got, she got the nomination for secretary of state there. Go, go vote for B. But look, I, I actually don't like whenever I see these debates about, is this Republican who's turned on Trump a hero or not? Like, I don't find that the debate's very useful

to start, like, ranking what their specific level of political courage is to figure out which shade of MAGA. There we go. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. There you go. Well, look, I think the defining issue of our time is whether you support people who want to overturn our elections or whether you're willing to fight those people. I detest voter suppression policies.

I also think that throwing out votes is a different and even bigger threat than making it harder to vote. It is an existential threat to every other issue that we care about. We have people throwing out votes and installing people in power. None of the other issues we care about we can make progress on. It's all done at that point. So if you're willing to fight the people who don't even want to bother counting the votes, you can be on our team. We'll fight you

on everything else later. Yeah. I mean, we focus a lot. I mean, look, this is a tendency in the media gets that does this too. You focus on individuals, you focus on individuals because that's where the drama and the character and the story is. And is this person a hero? Does this person have courage? They not. There's a much bigger issue at stake here, right? Which is the pro-democracy coalition that elected Joe Biden in 2020 has to remain together in 2022 and 2024. And that coalition is very big and very diverse

politically, ideologically, in every which way. And there's a lot I disagree with with other people in that coalition about, particularly people the further you drift to the right in that coalition. But again, we have to all hang together or else there is no democracy. So who gets a merit badge in the Republican Party? I don't really care much about. Yeah. I mean, it's been such a dumb binary debate throughout the Trump years, where it's whenever there's a Republican who shows courage and does something that, you know, opposing Trump or whatever, they're standing up to the insurrection,

that if you praise them, you are therefore endorsing everything they've ever stood for, right? As opposed to just being a temporary ally in the fight for democracy. And you can praise Brett Raffensperger for his courage and also support his Democratic opponent in the fall, right? You can say some of these never-Trump Republicans are helpful in making the case to other never-Trump Republican voters without saying we're going to point them to our cabinet and they're going to be the new leaders of the Democratic Party. That's just a fake, stupid debate. We can have a little nuance to this. Reporters love this because they live to call people who participate in politics hypocrites.

And so you get a bunch of reporters who are like new liberal hero, Liz Cheney. It's like, no one fucking called her a hero. She's doing some good work on the Trump stuff. She's, she's standing up when she should have stood up. She's showing some political cards. Great. She's no one's fucking hero. Like, you know know you've been offline a lot if you will and there are a lot of people on twitter who are calling her a hero we're not but a lot trust me i've been out well i've been i've been out in the country the last few weeks and a lot of democrats are calling her a hero okay well no one that no please tell me no elected democrats right but you can she can also be heroic and brave in this instance i think she has shown tremendous courage and has put her

career on the line once again we don't support this exactly why i hate this debate yes exactly why i hate this anyway one of the major takeaways from these hearings is that trump's coup um didn't succeed because a relatively small group of political leaders and election officials held the line and they held the line against tremendous pressure from Trump and violent threats from some of his supporters. These were people, these were Democrats, Republicans, nonpartisan poll workers like Shea Moss, even Trump supporters like Bowers. And I think you can argue that at least for Trump and his MAGA goons, that 2022 is about making sure that that group of bipartisan and nonpartisan political leaders and election officials is replaced with MAGA loyalists. Do you think enough people understand that's the strategy

and those are the stakes? Do you think the hearing is helping more people understand that? I do think the hearing is helping with that, but I do not think it, clearly enough, people do not know that those are the stakes. They do not fully understand just how dangerous, well thought out and well funded the Republican plan to take over the election apparatus in this country is. I'm not here to promote, well, maybe I'm here, but I will promote your conversation with Jennifer Senior. Oh, I thought you were going to be battling the big lies. No, no, no, no, no. I was not. I was going to promote offline. Oh, thank you.

You had a very good interview with Jennifer Senior from The Atlantic who wrote a fascinating profile of Steve Bannon, who is, as she said, obsessed with Pod Save America, as he should be, but gets into just how he is using his platform to organize a precinct by precinct takeover of the election apparatus in this country so that at every level, the Republicans can make sure that there are no Brad Raffensperger's or Rusty Bowers or nonpartisan election workers to stand in the way of the next insurrection. And that is happening. And it's very clear that most Democrats do not know that. Most people in the country do not know that. You can see that in the discrepancy in funding for Republican secretary of state candidates and Democratic secretary of state candidates.

So the discrepancy in funding between what Republican and right-wing super PACs are putting into party-wide efforts to recruit an army of poll workers and the very smart grassroots efforts by groups like Run for Something and others, but pale in comparison to the funding sources that the right has. There is an asymmetry in this. And if we do not catch up quickly, we're going to find ourselves in a very different situation after the 2024 election. Yes. One place I do think the committee might be making progress is views about Trump. There was a new UNH poll out yesterday of New Hampshire voters who say they're likely to vote in the 2024 Republican primary.

So last October, the same poll showed Trump in the lead with 43 percent, DeSantis with 18 percent and everyone else in single digits. This week's poll shows Ron DeSantis in the lead with 39 percent, Trump with 37 percent. And Mike Pence, Mike Pence more than doubling his past showing from 4% to 9%. He's coming. Watch out for Mike Pence. Dan, how much do you attribute that movement to these hearings? Well, look, John, no poll has ever been wrong. We should treat this one individual singular poll.

This one poll of this sample of just a few hundred New Hampshire voters. I actually don't know what the sample size was. Every poll should be treated as if the top lines were inscribed on a stone tablet sent down from the Mount. We should take it as the gospel. I have no idea if this poll is right. It is, you know, if you look at the overall trend of some of these Republican primary pollings, primary pollings, two things are clear. A large plurality of Republicans want someone other than Donald Trump to run in 2024. And that Ron DeSantis has been growing in sort of every subsequent poll to the point where he is, you know, maybe perhaps in New Hampshire, we'll know when the more polling is done, has overtaken Trump. A lot of people were pretty excited about this, but I think we should not pat ourselves on the back that Republican voters have seen it,

you know, have come to terms with what's happened in this country and decided to replace a dumb insurrectionist with a less dumb insurrectionist. Like that's like, I don't think that's a great thing, right? It's we're just swapping one authoritarian for the other. I think there are two, let's just for the sake of argument, say this poll is accurate and that Trump is suffering in the eyes of Republican voters. The hearings are obviously why that's happening. And I think there are two sort of reasons that undergird that. The first is it's bad for Trump when Trump was in the news. It reminds people of all of his flaws.

He has benefited greatly from being essentially silent for the last year and a half. Like that is very good, particularly with Republican voters, right? He's like a Rorschach test. His staff had wanted to take his Twitter feed away from him for years. The Twitter feed has been taken away

and they were correct. It was a good thing for him. Yes. And then the other reason is to the extent Donald Trump is back in the news, he is talking about two things, the past and himself. And Ron DeSantis, he's in the news, is talking about the future. It's a dark, dystopian, bigoted, authoritarian future, but it is the future, and he's not really talking about himself. And so Trump is backward-looking and self-obsessed.

And so you can see why that could make some Republican voters either like him less or think he is a less viable candidate to take on Joe Biden in 2024. And so it is possible that just the mere focus on Trump from this committee is bad for Trump, both with the public writ large and Republican voters, perhaps more specifically. Well, then I think one big question to think about before we move on is what all this means for the rest of the MAGA Republicans and the MAGA movement. You point out, you know, just if somehow Trump loses, but we get Ron DeSantis, that's not exactly a happy ending here. So and I think all this brings us back to the recurring theme of threats and violence that we've that we've heard in these hearings. You know, in addition to what we heard on Tuesday,

we also learned that MAGA supporters threatened the lives of Republican committee member Adam Kinzinger, his wife and their five month old baby. We also saw a new campaign ad where former Missouri governor and current Senate candidate Eric Greitens holds a shotgun and encourages people to go rhino hunting, Republican in name only. That's rhino. Florida Senator Rick Scott gave a speech over the weekend where he said that the American left has become, quote, the enemy within. And, you know, MAGA Republicans, Trump supporters, Dan Crenshaw and John Cornyn, were booed, confronted, and called traitors at the Texas Republican Convention, where the state party adopted a platform that declares Joe Biden's victory illegitimate, says that homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice,

says the Voting Rights Act of 1965 should be repealed, and that Texas should hold a vote in 2023 on seceding from the union. I guess the question is, what do we do about a political movement that has resorted to threats of violence and harassment, particularly one that has largely taken over one of our two major political parties. I mean, this seems to be where we are right now. A large faction of the Republican Party has been taken over by a movement that is growing ever more extremist by the day. This has been a trend that's been happening for a long time. This is the root of a lot of the Tea Party response to the election of the first Black president. It was at the core of Donald Trump's birtherism, Donald Trump's candidacy, the big lie,

et cetera, and it's all happening. And I think over the course of much of that decade and a half of time, there was this thought and hope that Republicans would solve this problem among themselves, that there would be some courageous Republican who would stand up to these forces and, you know, move the party in a different direction. There was, you know, sort of this hope that maybe the voters would do it for him in 2016. If Trump had lost that election, maybe they would do it in 2020 if Trump had lost overwhelmingly, and that the party could look inward. And there are obviously elected Republicans who would prefer that their party not act like this, but none of them have the courage to say anything about it. So they continue to coddle it and even benefit from it because they need the enthusiasm and

juiced out turnout that comes from inviting this dangerous fringe into their rapidly shrinking base. And you can see why they do it because they keep getting away with it, right? Think about it. Like the Republican president incited a violent riot on the Capitol. And what has happened to him since then? Nothing. What about his party that helped spread that lie and continues to spread that lie? They're favored to win the House and the Senate right now. So why would they do anything different? They think it is in their political interest to welcome this extremist, violent fringe into their party to elevate it and to coddle it. And the only thing we can do here, and it's not an easy answer, it's not comforting, is we, the pro-democracy majority

in this country, has to beat them. We have to beat them again and again and again until they recognize that they're not going to do the right thing on their own. They're going to do what's in their political interest. And we have to show them that they will pay a political price for acting like this, for pushing these conspiracy theories, for sanctioning this violence. And until we do that, we're going to continue to be in this exact hinge point for democracy. And so it's not easy, it's not pleasant, it's not comforting, but we have to make them pay a political price for it. And they're going to keep doing this until they do. And I think the fundamental challenge here,

particularly in this election, is, you know, you say we, we as in people who are very engaged in politics, people who listen to this podcast, people who watch MSNBC, people who go volunteer, organize, donate. Most people in this country are not engaged in politics. Most people don't pay close attention to politics. And I think the question is, how do you get people to care about this, this threat to democracy that's out there

more than they care about inflation? Because in their lives, they're seeing the cost of gas and groceries go up and they may think that these threats of violence are something that happens somewhere else, that it's being overblown, that it's exaggerated, that politics has been

screwed up for years anyway and washington's a mess and what i really care about is the fact that i can't afford something and i think our you know we we can all be mad about that and roll our eyes about that but it's the truth of what people are feeling and i think it's it's incumbent on us to um to persuade them otherwise to persuade people that this is actually a big fucking deal. In fact, the biggest fucking deal. And I think I very much agree with you, but I do want to sort of hone in on one point, which is I don't think it's do you care about inflation or do you care about democracy?

Because I think we're going to lose that battle. And it's just not how people's brains work. They don't make political decisions in silos. Like, I'm going to care about my wallet, or I'm going to care about my culture. I'm going to care about my country. I'm going to care about my kitchen table issues. It's much more nuanced than that. Here's the question. Who do you think is going to solve the challenges facing this country, whether it's high gas prices, high grocery prices, income inequality? Is it going to be a party that is obsessed with book bans, bullying trans kids, refighting the last election, believes in conspiracy theories? It's because of them or it's going to be people who will fight for you, right? Like,

we have to make this about who is going to fight for you and who is fighting for themselves. Right. Like we have to make this about who is going to fight for you and who is fighting for themselves. And if you do that, we have a chance. And it is hard. Like I'm not saying that there is a magic solution. There's some secret message. There is a lot of political headwinds. But the we we have to tell a story about who the Republicans are. And part of that story should lead people down the accurate, true path that this party does not give a shit how high your gas prices are, right? They do not care. They care about themselves and their power. And that's an easier, that's an open door to push on right there. Yeah. Because like, you know, just to give you guys again a preview of this season of The Wilderness, which will be out in September, I'm going to do a bunch of focus groups. I've already focus groups in virginia and and uh in pittsburgh and when you talk about issues that matter you know unfortunately there were voters in the in the pittsburgh group these are all uh most of them are democrats most of them are planning on voting uh not very engaged and most of them were like yeah they too much attention

being paid on january 6th that was in the past and what we really care about is inflation when you start talking about both parties um you know what they say about democrats is like democrats can't get their shit together which you know is a topic of conversation on this podcast all the time um but when you ask them about republicans they start saying extreme crazy care only about themselves uh don't care about us. And I do think getting it into that choice frame and away from the like, what issue do you really care about is probably the best chance that we have. When we come back, Dan will talk to strict scrutiny's Melissa Murray about the Supreme Court's gun decision. This morning, the Supreme Court released a major opinion on a Second

Amendment case. The conservative majority sided with gun manufacturers here to help us understand what the court did and what it all means is strict scrutiny's Melissa Murray. Melissa, welcome back to Positive America. Thanks for having me. How are you? Less good than I was about three hours ago, I think. But my days go downhill on Supreme Court decision days. So I imagine yours probably do as well. Yeah, it's only going to get worse from here. Yeah, it seems that way. This is the appetizer of terribleness. Okay.

The amused boosh of terribleness. Yes, there we go. All right. Just very simply for all of us non-lawyers doing this interview and listening to it, can you just explain to us what the Supreme Court did and what it means? So the case was brought by two gun owners in New York State who sought a concealed carry permit. And New York is one of the handful of states that is a quote unquote may issue state, which is to say that you can get a concealed carry permit. But in order to do so, you have to demonstrate a special need. And the problem that the court found here with that permitting

scheme from New York is that it gives a lot of discretion to state and local officials to decide what needs are special enough to warrant getting the permit that would allow you to carry a concealed weapon in a public space. And so in this decision, which was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, incidentally, the decision was handed down on his birthday. So happy birthday to him, I guess. And he's been jonesing for a big Second Amendment case for a long time. So this is actually quite a birthday present. They invalidated the New York licensing scheme. They said very clearly that the Second Amendment permits a right to keep and bear arms in public settings. It had previously held in a case from 2008 called Heller versus the District of Columbia, that the Second

Amendment protected a right to keep and bear arms related to the home. Now this allows you to go beyond the home to public spaces. But they didn't say it was sort of an unfettered free-for-all in the public sphere. So they noted that there might still be opportunities for states to limit the carrying of weapons and concealed weapons in public spaces in quote-unquote sensitive areas. But they didn't really say what these sensitive areas might be, although they did note that areas that had previously been identified as sensitive included places like polling places, maybe schools and federal buildings and quote unquote courthouses. So it's great that where they work will be continued to be regarded as a sensitive place. But, you know, I think what this decision actually does is set up and tee up

a range of litigation to try and determine what this right to keep and bear arms in public actually means and what authority states and local governments have to actually restrict the carrying of weapons in public settings. Like what are in fact those sensitive areas where the state can appropriately regulate? And so we don't know, I guess the New York governor said she was considering calling back in the legislature to rewrite the law to try to meet this new test. Is there any sense of what that could possibly be? Are we just going to be in a case of states pushing up against it until we find what is a permissible level of state power to protect its citizens in this situation? So it's worth me maybe laying out what this new test is. So previously, the idea had been in this Heller case that the Second Amendment permitted this right to keep and bear arms. But then there was some sort of means and ends testing. So yes, you had a right to bear arms, but it wasn't an unfettered right, meaning that the state could appropriately regulate it so long as their imposition. And we kind of jettison the idea that there is any kind of presumptive opportunity for the state to think

about whether it can meaningfully infringe upon that right. Like the starting place is the Second Amendment protects this right. And the only kinds of state regulations that are consistent with the Second Amendment are those regulations that would be consistent with the historical understanding of what the framers would have understood as reasonable regulation. So if you want to have a reasonable regulation, states get back to 1789 and figure out whether what you're doing in 2022 is consistent with what the states and other regulators would have done at the time the Second Amendment was drafted. So it's a kind of backwards looking opinion, no pun intended. It actually physically requires us to look backwards to think about what restrictions would have been okay in 1789 and when the Second Amendment

was drafted. And so that's the task that the New York legislature has to deal with. And to be clear, it sets a really high bar, I think, for legislatures going forward, because what would have been reasonable to a legislature at the time the Constitution was drafted is obviously very different from what the legislatures of today face in terms of the threats of gun violence, the kinds of threats us that we have to look backwards to what the framers would have understood as a reasonable restriction on the Second Amendment, we don't have to think about the Second Amendment as only enshrining a right to bear the kinds of arms that were available in 1789. So the historicizing is incredibly selective. So, you know, your AR-15 is fine, but in order to regulate it, you have to go back to 1789. How close are we to the Supreme Court allowing states to require us to house

militias in our homes? Right? Because that seems to have been very high on the minds of the people who wrote that amendment back then. And I'm joking there, obviously, but... So that's actually the third amendment, the quartering of soldiers, but. So that's actually the third amendment, the quartering of soldiers, but all related to this idea that they were very concerned about the tyranny of government. I think with this court, this is a really maximalist six to three court. I think anything's possible. So, you know, get your guest room ready for the militia, like it could happen. But, you know, what's actually really interesting is the lineup here and the time with which the court took to actually issue this decision. So the oral argument occurred in November of 2021. And it was very obvious in November that there were five votes to strike

down the New York scheme. And really the only question was, what were they going to do about quote unquote sensitive places like the New York subway? Justice Kagan brought up the subway repeatedly in her colloquies with the lawyers. So that really was the only question. And for weeks, we've been waiting for this decision. It's the only decision left from that November sitting. And I speculated on Pod Save America at one point that, you know, perhaps the reason we had not gotten this opinion was because, you know, we had these horrific shootings in Buffalo

and Uvalde and in other communities around the country. And maybe the court was just sort of like, you know what, let's slow our roll. We can't actually be ghoulish and expand the Second Amendment while people are literally still mourning the deaths of 19 children. You know, now we're almost a month. I think today is just a day shy of the month anniversary of that horrific shooting in Uvalde. We have the Senate poised to take up some gun regulations. And, you know, this opinion does not endanger any of those regulations in any way. Maybe the court thought that, you know, this was an appropriate moment to release it. And so maybe they were just sitting on it until the heat died down a little. But there are actually some interesting concurrences here. And one of the interesting concurrences comes from Justice Kavanaugh, who was also joined in that concurrence by the Chief Justice. And they really hammer in on this theme that there's still room for states

and localities to restrict the public carrying of firearms in quote unquote sensitive areas. And so again, rank speculation that the ladies of strict scrutiny have been engaged in. We were wondering if maybe the reason they waited on this opinion was because the chief and Justice Kavanaugh were trying to get this separate concurrence together, which may have the effect of perhaps limiting a little bit the maximalist energy of this majority opinion. Because do they in there either imply or state directly that the laws in a lot of states would meet this test. Is that correct? So, well, so exciting here. Everything's in the footnotes, Dan. You got to read the footnotes. So they note that New York is one of a handful of states. Interestingly,

they're all blue states, California, New Jersey. They also happen to be six states that comprise about 25% of the population of the United States. So they're just like, we're just striking down these six states, but those laws actually impact about a quarter of the population of the country. So it's incredibly significant. They suggest that the other 43 jurisdictions, which are quote unquote, shall issue jurisdictions, which is to say that there are requirements to get a concealed carry permit, but on the whole, the state, if you meet them, will issue the permit to you. There's a footnote where they suggest that maybe even having those threshold requirements might eventually be called into question. So shall issue states, the majority of states that have

these sort of threshold requirements for concealed carry permits are fine for now. But, you know, I wonder if this footnote suggests that they're ready and inviting perhaps litigation that would suggest that even those threshold requirements intrudes too much on the Second Amendment rights of gun owners. And then you brought up the 2008 Heller decision. And could you just – there is this sense in all of the Republican rhetoric around this, the conservative response to this decision, that the right to bear arms has been as understood by the Supreme Court as a constitutional right since the beginning of the republic. But that is not actually the case. It's a more complicated, more recent story. Can you just explain sort of what the Heller decision meant and why it's so significant and why it's important to recognize that the court's current understanding of the right to bear arms is much more recent than I think people think? So the text of the Second Amendment says, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. So there's this sort of prefatory clause and then this operative clause about the right to bear arms.

The prefatory clause is this piece about the militia. For most of our constitutional history, the court has interpreted the Second Amendment as permitting a right to bear arms in conjunction with militia service because of that prefatory clause. In 2008, in the Heller decision, in a five to four decision, the court essentially concluded that, you know, the prefatory clause that mentions militia service was kind of like, they just threw that in there as surplusage, like no big thing, no big deal, nothing to see here. And that any earlier decision, including a decision from the 1930s, that actually limited the right to bear arms because it was linking it to militia service was actually wrong. And so that happened in 2008. For much of our

constitutional history, we have observed this right to bear arms. We've just linked it to the requirement of militia service. So it's not just like every individual gets a right to keep and bear arms. It's in conjunction with this militia service right. In 2008, the court essentially makes a stunning and unprecedented departure from that interpretation of the Second Amendment, determines that the Second Amendment in its plain meaning has nothing to do with malicious service. That was just like stuff they added in. And in fact, it stands for the principle that individuals have a right to keep and bear

arms in the context of home for traditional purposes like home defense. And now today they have expanded it a little further, not only home defense, but also the possibility of self-defense in public spaces. Right. So the Supreme Court believes you have a constitutional right to carry a weapon in public for the purposes of self-defense. Last question for you. I will ask this question, then I will step back and let you do your work. But could you help us understand the seeming contradiction between a Supreme Court, which says now that states have very limited authority to regulate whether you can carry a weapon in public, but seems to say that states have great power to regulate personal health care decisions like abortion. So Dan, you and I are on the same page. I literally

just raised this inconsistency on an emergency episode of strict scrutiny. And the only thing I can say really is, you know, we might be, this court might be more amenable to reproductive rights if we could all give birth to an AR-15. That seems about right. I mean, states, I think when this decision in the Dobbs case, the abortion case finally drops, I think states will have broad authority to regulate abortion as they see fit. But as you say, in this case, states' authority to limit where guns can permissibly be carried, you know, that's verboten. And it's worth noting, this is, I think, one of the last opinions that Justice Breyer will write for the court. And Justice Breyer wrote a very impassioned dissent to the majority opinion in

Heller in 2008. And he essentially reprised some of that in his dissent today. But one of the things he really emphasized, I think he did this because it is so long been a sort of stalking horse of the conservative legal movement. He really emphasized this question of federalism and localism. And he talked about the fact that, you know, in New York, when state officials were making these decisions about what special needs warranted a concealed carry permit, they were doing it sort of contextually, like the rural counties like made decisions based on the local needs, recognizing that those local counties were very different from places like Manhattan County, for example, where the special needs that might prompt someone to request and receive a concealed carry permit could be very different. That kind of localism,

that kind of federalism concern has been such a concern of the conservative legal movement. Sandra Day O'Connor talked about this. Justice Anthony Kennedy talked about this. And I think Justice Breyer resurrected it in this opinion, because I think he is pointing out the inconsistencies. This is a conservative legal movement staffed by six Supreme Court justices that are not always consistent about where their priorities and their principles are. Melissa Murray, thank you so much for joining us. Everyone check out the emergency episode on the strict scrutiny feed about this decision episode on the Strict Scrutiny feed about this decision and subscribe to Strict Scrutiny.

When we come back, John will talk to Zayd Dorn, the host of Crooked Media's new Tribeca-winning podcast, Mother Country Radicals. Joining us now is the host of Crooked's newest limited series mother country radicals which just won the tribeca film festival's podcast award for best audio storytelling and non-fiction

zay dorn congratulations and welcome to the pod thanks john happy to be here so i first learned about your family uh when many americans did back in 2008. My boss, Barack Obama, was accused of being friendly with your father, Bill Ayers, who along with your mother, Bernadine Dorn, were leaders of the Weather Underground Organization, which was a left-wing militant group that aspired to overthrow the U.S. government in the 1970s. How did you process learning about all that as a kid? Like, what was it like to sort of first understand who your parents were and then square the public perception of your parents with the people who raised you? Yeah, it was a long process.

It took a long time. In some ways, the end of, it was a long process. It took a long time. In some ways, the end of that process was doing this series because when I was a kid, you know, my parents, I mean, they never hid anything from me. They always told me we were on the run from the FBI. My mom was on the 10 most wanted list. I knew we were fugitives. I knew we used fake names. So I never I was never lied to about it. But at the same time, it seemed pretty normal to me. Most of my friends, their parents were on the run or were in prison. And, you know, when you're born into something, you don't really stop to think how strange this is. So it took me a while until later when I was, you know, a teenager growing up and starting to see, like, not all parents are like this.

And, you know, starting to realize, like, how unusual that kind of childhood really was. starting to realize like how unusual that kind of childhood really was. So once your parents came out of hiding and got normal jobs, what was it like to be the child of Bernadine Dorn and Bill Ayers? Yeah, for a while it was pretty normal. I never thought about it much. You know, by the time my mom got out of jail and we had turned ourselves in by that point, we were no longer fugitives. I went to a normal high school.

My dad was a professor of education. fugitives. I went to a normal high school. My dad was a professor of education. He actually got the Chicago, Chicago Mayor Daley gave him the Chicago Citizen of the Year Award when I was in high school for his work with educational reform. So in a certain sense, they were just normal, you know, citizens. They were activists. It wasn't until 2008 when I really, you know, we got thrust back into the news when Hillary Clinton was talking about my dad, Sarah Palin was saying we were palling around with terrorists and all this. So that was when it started to kind of feel really surreal. Yeah, I was going to ask what the 2008 campaign was like from your end.

Because from our end, it was like, okay, now there's this story. And everyone on the campaign who was from Chicago or connected to Chicago, David Axelrod, who's who's in this series, you guys interview, you know, explain to the rest of us. No, they had this past and now they're sort of there. You know, they've done their time there. They're sort of reintegrated into society. People talk. And it was sort of hard to square that with the what you were hearing from like you said not only the republicans and sarah palin but hillary clinton yeah it is hard to

square and i think if you listen to the series there's something very surreal about the fact that these are people who were setting off bombs robbing banks you know teaming up with black liberation groups to you know break people out of prison. And then 20 years later, they were pretty normal, prominent Chicago citizens who were just doing their activist work and who knew everybody, Obama, Jesse Jackson, you know, a lot of folks in Chicago. The way to square that, I guess, is just to say, my mom did her time. She did time in jail. They turned themselves in. My dad got probation. And then they spent a long time kind of doing normal activist work and sort of building ordinary lives in the kind of progressive movement in Chicago. And, you know, they kind of had a second act. They were they

had another part of their lives that was very different. For us, it was a strange time, though. I mean, Fox News had had vans parked outside our house. They were chasing my dad down the street. He was on every TV channel in the country. And he actually came, I was living in New York at the time. He came out to my apartment to kind of lay low for a while and try to stay out of the spotlight. And we turn on the TV just to relax. And there's Stephen Colbert making a joke about him.

So it was hard to escape that kind of media circus once you're in it. So what made you decide to dig into this past and tell this story now? Yeah, well, there were really two reasons. There was a political reason and a personal reason. Politically, you know, I started it during the Trump administration, and I was really interested in this question of how people resist a government that seems to be going off the rails, you know, how they resist a law and order president, especially how young activists should kind of go forward in that way. And what was interesting is while I was doing the

research for this project, I was interviewing my parents, interviewing other members of the Weather Underground, the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army. And one thing I started to notice over and over again is so many of these people had been radicalized by the killing of black people by police back in the 60s and 70s. So the murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago and the murder of Clifford Glover, this 10-year-old kid in Queens. And as that was happening, as I was doing that research, that's when George Floyd was killed. And so the protests exploded on the streets and it started to feel like a really relevant and important story to tell now. So that was the political reason. The personal reason was that,

my parents were getting older. My mom was about to turn 80 years old. Kathy Boudin, who's another weather person who was the mom of my adopted brother, Chesa Boudin, she had cancer and was very ill. And so I started to feel like this might be my last chance to ask some of the questions of my family members that I'd always had in my mind and to get their voices on tape. You know, I mean, they really are historical figures in some way. My mom marched with Martin Luther King and worked with Fred Hampton and met Muhammad Ali and Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden. So I wanted to get those voices on tape, you know, while I still could. Yeah, back to the political reason, because, you know,

Dan and I just spent sort of like the first part of this episode talking about how the threat of political violence has become a recurring theme in these January 6th hearings, particularly right-wing violence. You and I talked about this in the early days of Mother Country Radicals, but how did the, you know, you started around the, or you're doing the research around the George Floyd protests. the research around the George Floyd protests. Then in January, there's a violent insurrection against the Capitol. And there's this rise of right-wing violence that we see to this day. How did that factor into your thinking about how to tell this story about left-wing political violence? Yeah, well, I think it's important both to think about the kind of the roots of radicalization, how that happens on both sides, but also to think about the differences. You know, I mean, I asked my dad during the series about the insurrection. We all watched it, of course. And, you know, I asked him, given that they, you know, that the Weathermen bombed the Capitol building, did he feel like there was some similarity there? And I mean,

the answer is interesting, and I'll let him speak for himself. But what I think is interesting about it is, you know, there is this question of like, is political violence ever justified? But then there's also a question of like the difference between, first of all, right-wing political violence, as we've seen, is so much more common. Actually, left-wing political violence

is very, very rare. But second of all, there's a big difference between a group of people who stormed the Capitol, not in a revolutionary or grassroots way, but literally to keep the sitting president in power illegally. I mean, that was a right-wing attempted coup, not a kind of insurrection from oppressed people. And mainly the thing I think is really different about it is,

you know, you can have people radicalized on both sides, but what radicalized my parents and members of the Black Liberation Army and Black Panther Party was, you know, systemic racism and police violence against black people. That's real. That's very different than being radicalized by the idea that, you know, Democrats are running some kind of pedophile ring in a pizza parlor. I mean, you can be radicalized by real things and you can be radicalized by lies. I mean, whether or not you think that the threat of political violence is ever justified or whether you think whatever the equivalence you may or may not believe between right-wing and left-wing political violence one of one of my takeaways from from the story you tell about the weather underground is that political

violence and even the threat of political violence doesn't seem very politically effective. Just listening to sort of you tell the story about all of these left-wing groups and social movements and sort of how they splinter and they disagree over this question of violence and tactics. What's your take on that? Where did you come out on that after doing this whole project? Yeah, I mean, it's a big question. And I think it's a lot of what the series ends up being about.

It's not just these young people who got radicalized and did these violent acts, but what it meant to them, to their children, to the movement as a whole. And those are complicated questions to untangle. I mean, for me and my brothers, it meant our parents going to prison. For some of my friends, it meant their parents being killed. And as you say, there's big debate about what those kind of radicalized movements did to the 1960s peace movement and, you know, and afterwards. I guess I think, you know, where I come down is I'm a writer, not an activist. I'm interested in what drives people, what motivates people. And, you know, what the series tries to do is say,

like, why did people go down this path? What does it look like to try everything else, you know, to try marching in the streets, to try voter registration drives, to try protesting, and nothing seems to work. The Vietnam War goes on, black leaders are still being killed, and why do people suddenly decide to go down this path of violence and, you know, how we can avoid it? I mean, I asked my parents and others in the show, you know, what do they regret? And you hear a lot of people wrestling with, you know, how they think of this stuff now and what they would have done differently.

So there are notes of caution in there and also notes of inspiration. I mean, there were some really brave and committed things that people did as well. What do you hope people take away from your family story? Well, I hope, first of all, I mean, I think it's an incredible story. I think people who have never heard it before, their minds are going to be blown. I mean, it's a story,

you can't believe it took place here in America in a way that, you know, it reads like a heist thriller or a true crime show or something. It's, you know, got brawling with the police and jail breaks and bombings and shootouts. And at the same time, it's got some real historical lessons and some real kind of, I hope people learn from it, even if they know the story already. I think for me, the takeaway is about, you know, what it looks like for young people

to decide to put themselves on the line and especially what it looks like to have the white and the black movement work together. You know, we talk a lot about allyship nowadays. And one of the big lessons for me in this series was talking to people, you know, members of the Weather Underground who were mostly white and then members of the Black Panther Party and the way they worked together and the way they tried to kind of build solidarity is, I think, an underexplored story. And I think people will get a lot out of the kind of complexity of that relationship and also some inspiration from that.

Yeah, I mean, look, I've been, I've been tweeting and saying this to everyone who'll listen, but it's, it's one of my favorite podcasts we've ever done at Crooked that I've ever had the privilege of just working on just a small part of. And I think the reason is twofold. One, because of what you said, where it's just, it's a, it's a fun listen. It's exciting. It's got all that, you know, it carries along like a real exciting story. And also because I think you wrestle with some of the political questions and challenges that are core to what we're debating right now, and particularly on the left left which is you have a lot of people who

are down and cynical and and down on voting and down on organizing and you know the other option that we've seen happen in the past is that it can lead to radicalization and violence and i and i do think that the story you tell is not, it doesn't sugarcoat it. You know, it doesn't, I don't think it glorifies it. I think it shows that that movement went through some pretty hard times personally, their families, you guys, and then also the political movement as a whole. And I don't think that there are a lot of easy answers. And I just think that, you know, obviously you were very close to this,

but I think you did a fantastic job sort of, you know, like you said, you're a writer, not an activist, just telling the story like it was and letting the people who were involved speak for themselves. So I do hope that everyone goes and listens because I think you can learn a lot.

Thanks, John. Well, thank you so much for joining Pod Save America. Everyone go check out the Tribeca award-winning learn a lot. Thanks, John. Well, thank you so much for joining Pod Save America. Everyone, go check out the Tribeca award-winning mother country radical, Zayd Dorn. Thanks for joining Pod Save America. Thanks, John. Appreciate you having me on. All right, that's our show for today. Thank you to Melissa Murray for joining. Thank you to Zayd Dorn for joining. Again, you to Melissa Murray for joining. Thank you to Zay Dorn for joining. Again, hope everyone goes to votesaveamerica.com slash midterms. I will tweet out those GoFundMe links as well for Ruby and Shay. And also, if you're organizing, if you're out there going to knock on doors and volunteering and you want to be caffeinated, we got some crooked coffee that has finally launched. And

here's the best part. You buy crooked coffee, a portion of the proceeds from every bag is donated to register her, which is an organization mobilizing women around the country to register to vote. So it's another way to help the cause. Head over to crooked.com slash coffee to learn more. And again, votesaveamerica.com while you're there and have a great weekend, everyone. We will coffee to learn more. And again, Podsaveamerica.com while you're there. And have a great weekend, everyone. We will talk to you next week. Bye, everyone.

Podsave America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Andy Gardner Bernstein. Our producer is Haley Muse, and Olivia Martinez is our associate producer. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineer the show. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Sandy Gerard, Hallie Kiefer, Ari Schwartz, Andy

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All right. Everybody chill out. Everybody cool out.