Pod Save America - "MAGA v. The Military." (with Sam Sanders!)

Episode Date: June 28, 2021

NPR's Sam Sanders joins the pod as Donald Trump holds his first rally since leaving the White House, former AG William Barr reveals what really went down between him, Trump, and Mitch McConnell, Republicans’ obsession with critical race theory finds them a new enemy in the military, and Tucker Carlson gets outed as a secret source for reporters.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. We're not used to this order. Jon Favreau is taking some much-needed R&R on Joe Manchin's houseboat. Joining us, we have a special guest. He is a correspondent for NPR and host of It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders. Sam Sanders, good to have you on the pod. It's so good to be here. I'm realizing now that I have really big shoes to fill, so I hope I don't screw it up.

Well, here's something I don't get to do in my gay voice very often happy pride what a pride it's been what a pride it's been on today's show thanks for being here Sam on today's show as Trump holds his first rally since leaving office to lie about the election

and Democrats look for a way to investigate January 6th after Republicans blocked a bipartisan commission. We have three big stories that look at how Trump's rejection of the results led to the attack on the Capitol, how the Department of Justice responded, and what was taking place inside the White House as protests turned violent. Also today, conservatives attack the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military generally for suggesting it's good when students read books. We'll briefly talk about the latest on infrastructure and how President Biden saying something obvious and true about the negotiations caused a mini freak out over the weekend. And Tucker Carlson gets outed as a secret source for the reporters he claims to

despise. That pause was nice. Really nice pause. Before we get to the show, we did record our first Love to Relieve It live in over a year to raise money for the Trans Justice Funding Project. We raised over $50,000, and it's one of my favorite episodes of all time with an incredible lineup of guests. So check it out. You can listen to it as a podcast. You can watch it on YouTube, or you can donate at crooked.com slash pride fund. Okay.

So since Friday, we've had these three big stories. I'd say that two are pretty serious, and one is pure gossip, which is at times single source to some of the biggest liars on earth. But the details are fun, and we've earned it. So let's start with a story that takes place in the run-up to the insurrection. Jonathan Karl, a reporter for ABC, interviewed former Attorney General Bill Barr, who's obviously most famous for lying about the Mueller report, protecting Trump at all costs.

It's December. You have Trump running around claiming the election is stolen. But at the same time, Republicans are desperate to hold on to two Senate seats in Georgia. And Karl documents surprising conversations between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Majority Leader at the time, and Attorney General Bill Barr. Tommy, can you talk a little bit about what McConnell and Barr were scheming over? And were you surprised by how direct the talks between them turned out to be? Yes, I was quite surprised.

I mean, look, there's sort of two big takeaways from this story for me. One, you know, Barr repeated in stronger terms, more colorful terms, what we already knew, which is that he didn't see any evidence of election fraud. He said, quote, it was all bullshit. And then two, you have this anecdote where McConnell, Mitch McConnell, calls Bill Barr, the sitting attorney general at the time, and asks him to talk to Trump, to intervene with him, to shut down these lies about electoral fraud, because McConnell was worried that Trump's ranting and raving about the election would

impact the Georgia Senate runoffs. Now, that actually, that shocked me, that someone, the Senate Majority Leader would call the sitting Attorney General to ask him to intervene politically in Senate races. But like you sort of alluded to, John, I mean, McConnell confirmed this with Jonathan Karl and Bill Barr said a lot of it on the record. So they don't seem too worried about it. A lot of the same people who are quite concerned about Bill Clinton talking to Loretta Lynch back in the day on the tarmac about an investigation are seemingly cool with this. That surprised me. Yeah. You know, it's, it's like even, you know, Jonathan Karl is very forthright at the top. Like

this is a bunch of interviews with, with Bill Barr. It is Bill Barr is seeking to tell a story about himself. But what, what Karl says is that Barr is, it seems to be frustrated that he's been widely seen as a Trump lackey who politicized the Justice Department. So let me tell you a story about how I yet again politicized the Justice Department. Sam, what was your reaction to this kind of rehabilitation effort by Bill Barr? I mean, I've stopped being surprised by it. I think there's a litany of people that have been around Trump's orbit that are trying to guarantee for themselves some semblance of a legacy or their next job. So the fact that these kind of interviews from someone like him exist don't surprise me. What surprises me and what perhaps is the most dismaying is that

at the same time, Barr is saying to Trump, you can't win this election. It's over. There is no fraud. He also indulged Trump and said, I'll allow the DOJ to keep investigating this stuff. And that felt like, you know, a parent when their five year old is like, there's a monster under my bed. There's like two options. You can say there is no monster. Go to bed. Or you can look under the bed for half an hour and waste everyone's time. And the fact that Barr chose to do that in a way that's much more serious than like what's beneath some child's bed, that's the danger. So I'm not surprised that someone like Barr would do an interview like this. I'm surprised that he was so casually talking out of both sides

of his mouth. On the one hand, he could say to Trump, you're going to lose. On the other hand, but we'll investigate why not. The why notness of it is very, is very dismaying, if not surprising. Do you think he looked under the bed and found like a half eaten McRib? Like what was under there? What are we talking about? This is the thing. It's like Trump has been trying to get everyone to look under his bed for like more than 40 years at this point. And the fact, sorry to keep this metaphor going, but it's like, no, no, it's good. This has been the central problem of Trump acolytes, you know, people who thought that they could do two things at once with him. On the one hand, defend institutions, fight for the truth. But on the other hand, indulge Trump. When you indulge Trump,

there's no end to the indulging. He's going to keep it going to the point of literal insurrection. And this is like this article on the story feels new, but that both sides is on both sides of the mouth ism. That's been a constant since this man was running for office, you know, the first time back in 15 and 16. Yeah. I mean, you remember the quote by a Republican leader right after the election saying, oh, we'll indulge him for a couple of weeks. What's the worst that could happen? Tommy, so putting aside how political an effort this is, I could have sort of it's like, OK, we have the majority leader and the attorney general basically worrying over Senate seats

in Georgia. You have the president attacking American democracy all over the country. And the only reason the two most powerful Republicans on earth are willing to intervene at all is because they're trying to win the Senate. They're not worried about the democracy. They're not worrying about what it does to the constitutional order. They're worrying about these two Senate seats in Georgia. What does that tell you about what would happen if a Republican nominee were to challenge the results in 2024? Yeah, look, I think it's absolutely like a blinking red warning sign. I mean, I think Sam's sort of point he just made that there's no end to the indulging once you start, I think,

is sort of the core theme to all the things that happened over the weekend. I mean, I watched the entire Trump rally because I was quite bored. And like the last 30 minutes are about the election lie, right? Like there's no getting endorsed by Trump and getting up on stage and supporting him because you love the tax cuts and because you love that we got out of the war in Afghanistan or whatever and saying, yeah, but I don't love this other stuff. I don't love this big lie that he keeps perpetuating. It is the core of who he is right now. And like to be a part of Trumpism, you have to go along with that. Right.

So he just pulls everyone along with him to the darkest depths, no matter how much they would want to avoid that part of the conversation. Like it's disconcerting for the next iteration of whatever he does politically. Yeah. And you see it. So the next story, there's this ProPublica story that looks at what happened in the run up to the protests and rallies that took place on January 5th and January 6th. And you kind of seen that same dynamic playing out

of people around Trump trying to indulge Trump's fantasy around the election, while Trump officials are trying to manage the fact that this has drawn in some of the worst elements in American society. This is the reporting from ProPublica. On one side stood Women for America First, which wanted to, and I want to, this is stated so with such a kind of genteel manner. They wanted to hold a kind of extended oral argument with multiple speakers making their case for how the election had been stolen. Oh, is that what that is? Rejecting the election. And then on the other side was Stop the Steal, a new, more radical group that had recruited avowed racists with Proud Boys and Oath Keepers

and Alex Jones and his followers. But it turns out that there was a ton of communication between the Trump White House and the various factions that were putting this on. And while they were trying to manage the optics of who was going to speak and who wasn't going to speak, Trump was promoting all of it. He was promoting stop the steal. He was promoting this less radical but still anti-democratic group that was sort of running counter to them. Tommy, one thing that comes out in the story is that the officials around Trump were desperately trying to get Alex Jones and other speakers like that to have a different time slot. Do you think that that counts as disavowing a person who has harassed school shooting victims and has promoted the most racist propaganda that

you have disavowed them by saying that they should speak the night before at a different time slot? Yeah, or have worse seats at the rally. First of all, shout out ProPublica. ProPublica is having a moment. They got this story. They broke the big tax story. They got every rich person's tax return. So credit to them. It's like Britney. ProPublica is having a moment.

They are the it girl of journalism right now. They are the it girl of journalism. I support ProPublica. I think they're great. That's so funny. Yeah, the story was really interesting. It's unclear if the organizers spoke to Mark Meadows, then the chief of staff. It's clear that Trump aides were working behind the scenes to keep these most controversial

march leaders off the stage. He's the worst actors with this guy, Ali Alexander, Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, who's just an out and out white supremacist. But you also learned a lot about this woman, Caroline Wren, who's an establishment Republican fundraiser. She has close ties to Don Jr. and Kim Guilfoyle. So whatever the White House was doing to try to keep these people off the stage, she was personally pushing to get Ali Alexander and Alex Jones on the stage to get them better seats. She was working with Katrina Pearson. So there is some suggestion that they were trying to manage who spoke at this rally so as not to embarrass Trump. But the outcome eventually was that Trump offered language and rhetoric to this group

that did more to incite the crowd than I think anyone else could. So I don't know that they really get their distance here. Sam, what do you make of this story? I think if you look at it in the most craven interpretation, for Donald Trump, that rally before the insurrection was not about actually changing the outcome of the election. And like how much of getting the Alex Jones is there and the other folks there to gin up these crowds and get all of this time on the airwaves was to promote Trump and what might come next, you know? And I think that like there's two ways to look at what Trump was doing in that moment, either totally trying to undermine democracy and become a dictator or just being a craven businessman. And I kind of think it's I want to say like it works if you look at what Donald Trump is as a media business. He is a media business and he needs to keep attention. And once he realized he wasn't going to have the White House, it was like, how can I go out in a way that keeps the attention on me?

And so when you look at the folks that were organizing that rally and organizing those events, they had a financial interest in seeing what Trump would do next and helping him do something next like Parler or his own media business or his own new platform. So it was as much about that as him being mad that he lost. And I think that, like, if it's about that and about eyeballs and viewers of course you're going to have alex jones there because he gets eyeballs and he gets ratings so it's not surprising and i think that like we have to as journalists look at these things for what they are as well i think that like there's so much coverage of trump continuing to try to have rallies where there's a little more seriousness ascribed to what he's doing than what it really is. This guy needs eyeballs to make money. He needs eyeballs to make money, right?

And we should not cover these rallies without keeping that in mind. And I think that just because he gets the old band together and sings the same songs doesn't mean it's going to be a number one hit again. You know, like I would happily go to a Jagged Edge reunion concert. It doesn't mean that Where the Party At is going to be number one on the Billboard charts the next week. what Trump is and what he represents post-White House in perspective and understand that whether he is a politician or in office or not, he is a media entity. He is a media enterprise, and he is going to try to get as much attention as he can until he's out of here. Bring all the Jagged Edge comparisons to me, please. Last night, I watched a Netflix show about pop culture and pop music, and I watched an episode just on Boyz II Men

that I highly recommend for everyone because they do not get enough credit for how good they were at singing and how they merged Philly and Motown together. Love it. I apologize. Don't apologize for that. No, I'm New Jack Swing forever. Just processing that information.

No, I think you're right, though. My one caveat on what Sam just said is that I think that one aspect of Trump as a politician is the shock that he experiences by how far his own bullshit has taken him. And so, you know, we're going to talk about this Michael Wolff reporting about just how about Giuliani and Trump spinning each other up, actually coming to believe that Mike Pence really might step in and give him the presidency. Mike Pence really might step in and give him the presidency. And I do think two things can be happening at once because he's not a he's he doesn't need these facts to align, doesn't need his story to make sense. That's sort of that's that's the essence of what Trump has done as a politician. He says whatever he has to say, even if it's contradictory to what he had said moments ago, there's no theory about a feeling. There's no theory. It's just feel it's about it's about it's about a feeling. And so I think. It's just feeling. It's about a feeling.

And so I think that you're right that this was about generating the most attention, generating the most press possible, getting people riled up. But if it did result in those objections working, if it did result in Republicans being so intimidated as to overturn the election on his behalf with Mike Pence at the helm, that would have been a great outcome for him too. And it puts in context too, I think one thing that also I think was, I'm glad we're having this conversation about these look backs is because it helps make sense of what was happening while these things were unfolding. Like I remember when Bill Barr comes out there and says that he sees no evidence of widespread fraud.

And I'm like, that doesn't seem like the Bill Barr I know. And now we know McConnell was trying to win the Senate with Bill Barr's help. And then it was a little bit strange when Trump was like, we're going to start here and we're going to walk to the Capitol. And then there's a bit of confusion at the time about, wait, there's an event at the Ellipse and there's some smaller events supposedly taking place at the Capitol, but it's one big event. What's going on here? Oh, it just seems clear to me now. Like, oh, I see. They really were trying to have it both ways and keep this whole big operation together

with the Proud Boys, but also some of the kind of base of the Republican Party that they've been relying on the whole time. Well, and like the most revealing part of that reporting from Michael Wolff that y'all sent to me, it just like stopped me in my tracks. It's like, you know, he's at that rally before the insurrection begins. And he's like, we're going to walk over there. We're going to walk over there. And then he walks off stage and his staff is like, what did you mean?

And he was like, I didn't mean that. He didn't mean it. You know, he understands that there's a disconnect and a difference between what he says and what he really means. And he's never had to grapple with that. And it's like his most ardent supporters, I don't think have ever internalized that. Like, he's never going to put himself at risk for them. He's never going to risk it all for them. He's going to preserve himself at all costs. But you feel free to walk to the Capitol

and risk your life. You feel free to do it. That like to the very end, that was his dynamic. your life. You feel free to do it. That like to the very end, that was his dynamic. So Tommy, let's talk about this. So there's an excerpt of Michael Wolff's book that looks at the day the insurrection was unfolding. We already talked about how Rudy Giuliani, who Wolff reports, was drinking heavily. I didn't know that. That was really surprising to me. I had no idea, but now it makes sense. It does make sense. That was really surprising to me. I had no idea, but now it makes sense. It does make sense.

Have you seen drunk people before? I've seen myself. Yeah, I've seen drunk people before. Yeah, I guess I would say it's the first time I've seen it actually written down. But yeah, I mean, I do think it was pretty obvious that Rudy was drinking too much when he asked Jeanne Priero for three fingers of scotch on air. Shouldn't have done that. So, Tommy, in this story, well, we can get to some of the more substantive points. But what was Ivanka Trump doing as the protests turned violent in the White House? This was one of my favorite little anecdotes.

Apparently, she was, as the Capitol is being overrun, like we're hours into it, she's walking around the West Wing. She's talking to people about how her kids got into some Florida private school. And then she tweeted some message to American patriots.

She was urging them to be, to calm down, to stop the violence. And then she ultimately deleted this tweet, but she called them American patriots. But I just love thinking about Ivanka walking around as the Capitol is getting sacked, talking about how her kids just got into some like $50,000 a year preschool

because that's where her head is at all times. So Sam, one point that Wolf makes here that I do think is worth highlighting, and he's a sleazy person and a lot of this has to be taken with a grain of salt. Big old grain of salt. And the amount of single source. There's a moment in the story where Jason Miller, who is a despicable human being, just a creep beyond all creeps, is like, and then I shot out of bed and I realized we had to have an

orderly transition. It's like, all right, you're so full of shit. Yeah. Wow. But, but there is one point that he makes that I do want to highlight. He says this as this, as the effort to stop the certification is unfolding, he says, there is nobody on the white house side whipping votes. There was nobody on the white house side who was particularly up to date on who might be with them or against them other than from public reports. The extent that, as the media darkly warned, there was an extraordinary plot to hold onto power, an incipient coup even, there really were only two plotters with no one to back them up. So Sam, on the one hand, that's true. This was an incompetent operation. As you said,

it is a media operation. But also at the same time, even with all that incompetence, most Republicans now believe that the election was stolen and Trump should be the president. How do you think about that balance between the malevolence of what they were trying to achieve and the incompetence with which they tried to achieve it? I think we should be used to it by now. I think it like this was just what it was from the start. Yeah, I think it like this was just what it was from the start. And I think the problem really for me in the aftermath of Election Day was the speed at which mainstream newsrooms, including my own, were eager to put on the air and in the paper and on TV the voices in the Trump White House that said, oh, it's not over yet. You know, we, I speak for

big J journalism, we could have said, we're not interviewing you. You know, this is psych and this is bogus. No. And so it took my industry a good month to start calling the big lie, the big lie, after we had given those folks the microphone to tell the big lie for a month. So the behavior of the Trump administration is not surprising, as I've said several times in this conversation. What is surprising is the extent to which we all just sit there and watch it happen and don't say anything. And the we right now is my industry. There is a version of reality in which a day or two after election night, CNN and the New York Times and NPR and The Post and The Journal put all their heads together and say, we're going on our airwaves and our papers saying it's done. We didn't do that. You know, we all were at that four seasons total landscaping press conference.

Right. So some of this, I hate to use the word blood, some of this, whatever it is, is on our hands too. These are clear, obvious lies, but there were real world consequences no matter what Bill Barr says, right? Like Trump savaged Bill Barr the minute he made all these statements

with ABC this morning. The Michigan Republican-led state Senate concluded that there was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. This Arizona audit that's happening as we speak and not done till August, I believe, is clearly a joke. It's not credible. It's being conducted by unqualified people. But all of this churn, all this big electoral lie content is leading to voter suppression laws in dozens of states that the net effect is going to be probably to make it harder for mostly black,

mostly Latino people to vote in the next election. So like there is real damage being done by these lies, even if Bill Barr is belatedly repeating that it was all nonsense. Yeah, it's you know, there's the flip side to the coin of the kind of failure to tell the truth as it was unfolding. It's like, OK, there was a failure to be direct enough about what was taking place in this country out of some reverence for dispassionate, non-biased coverage. No, or a desire to hold on to this mythical conservative news consumer. I digress. Right. But no, no, but that's important. That's part of this. Right. That's how they kept it. They have to think about that, that mythical consumer. And then after the fact, the coup fails, the insurrection attempt fails. And then you have the kind of cynical, hard edged media reporter like Michael Wolff, like many others who say, see, like there's all these these sensationalistic resistance types who are taking this way too seriously, acting like it was some coup in the making. But look, look how dumb it all turned out to be.

Look how incompetent it all turned out to be. Tommy, do you think we overstated the case for the fact that Trump was a threat to democracy? You think we're overstating the case now? No, no. case now? No, no. I think it's absolutely clear that he is willing to believe his own lies and he's willing to push people until they go along with them. And that if he had had the opportunity to stay in power, and it sounds like for a while he and Rudy Giuliani were the only ones who actually thought there was a chance Mike Pence might actually take steps to overturn the election, that he would have been happy to remain. So I think we came very close to him sticking around in the most traditionally authoritarian

manner possible. And it was a big deal. You know, it's like Lord of the Flies. The book starts, you're like, these are little boys. They're going to have some fun on this island. And then before you know it shit turns yeah and it's like that's just human nature you know if you push any human hard enough long enough something happens shit turns and it gets real and so it's it's psych i'm just playing until it's not yeah and i mean this is not new to trump this is just human nature and like trump is this rare breed of politician who just doesn't have a stop button. He doesn't have a freaking stop button at all.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the and, you know, you can see these connections, right? Like Trump knows the election wasn't stolen. He basically talked about it. He gives interviews about the different demographics he lost at this point. And yet he still says that there is this big lie and everybody plays along.

And then a bunch of people believe it. And they show up at the Capitol where you have a clearly blatant effort to invent a boogeyman in critical race theory. But a bunch of people start showing up at school board meetings screaming because they believe it, because they really believe it. They have internalized it. And so the creators of this propaganda may not be great organizers. They may not be successful at it. They may not be competent, but it's still reaching millions of people every single day and ripping at the fabric of our society. Well, and this is the thing that is always the elephant in all of these rooms. The connective tissue here is Fox News. They carry the water. They carry the messaging, even mentioning critical race theory, like the trajectory of where that story came from.

This conservative filmmaker, Christopher Ruffo, appeared on Fox News in early September of 2020. He said the words critical race theory. The White House was watching. They saw it. They liked it. Within a few days, they had Ruffo at the White House to help them craft Donald Trump's executive order banning CRT and the federal government. That happened by the end of September. There's a direct through line to all of these stories and all of these conspiracies, and it is Fox News. Yeah. So before we go, obviously, this is still playing out

because Trump held a rally this weekend, his first since leaving office. And what did he talk about? He talked about the big lie. Sam, let me start with you. What were your what were your thoughts in as this latest rally unfolded? I would say to reporters covering it, just because everyone in those pins is full of great Vox because they'll say crazy stuff for your article doesn't mean it's an actual trend. doesn't mean it's an actual trend. I think we confuse sometimes the ease at which we can get a story to the importance of the story itself. It's really easy to do a story at a Trump rally.

We know how to do it at this point. And there's a lot of folks that will give you great tape and great bites. It doesn't mean that it's the most important story in the country. And I don't think a Trump rally right now is nearly as important as journalists think it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. I also just, I do think like sort of having watched the whole thing, I do think it's instructive where you can see what they want to talk about, right? So ostensibly 2022 is the focus. He leads with crime.

He leads with murder, you know, defund the police, borders are overrun, cartels and drugs, right? Critical race theory. Those are their top core issues. But when you get to the end, after Trump complained about the teleprompters being messed up by the wind, you get it to the parts that he really wants to talk about, which is just 30 more minutes regurgitating all the election lies. So I thought that was interesting and instructive, but you're right. It's not surprising. It's not new. It's just sort of like the core of the GOP message

filtered through the broken brain of the president who would like to have won the election that he lost. All right, well, let's leave it there. When we come back, Republicans no longer love the troops. Last Wednesday in a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the 2022 defense budget, Republicans pressed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to investigate the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and its use of critical race theory, following reports that a guest lecturer at the academy used phrases such as white rage. Matt Gaetz took the opportunity to question the military academy's curriculum.

Matt Gaetz took the opportunity to question the Military Academy's curriculum. Obviously, he's famous for funding a lot of tuition at various schools. He takes an interest in it. I'm very sorry. I know that it's true. I'm sorry. Don't be sorry for that. All of this led to an impassioned response from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley.

Let's listen. On the issue of critical race theory, et cetera, I'll obviously have to get much smarter on whatever the theory is. But I do think it's important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read. And the United States Military Academy is a university. And it is important that we train and we understand. And I want to understand white rage. And I'm understand. And I want to understand white rage. And I'm white. And I want to understand it. So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America?

What caused that? So Tucker Carlson reacted with his trademark subtlety. He's not just a pig. He's stupid. So Republicans lashed out against not just Milley, but the military in general. Gates said our nation's military should be focused on defending America, not defending wokeism. J.D. Vance, who is going to be running for Senate on these issues, he has basically said, I am going to run for Senate from Ohio on the culture wars said, I personally would like American generals to read less about white rage, whatever that is, and more about not losing wars.

John and Dan had a great conversation with Jelani Cobb a week or so ago about the propaganda campaign around critical race theory. But Sam, what was your reaction to Mark Milley's speech there? I mean, honestly, when I saw it, I was like, go off, sis. Surprising. Wow. Okay. But I also think that when you think about the military, particularly the star generals and top tier talent at the higher echelons of the military. They all see themselves as philosopher warrior kings, and they want to be highly educated and highly literate. And this is a tradition in the military that goes way far back. The second thing to keep in mind is that the American military on several issues has been a few steps ahead of the rest of American society on social issues. So the military racially integrated before the rest of the country did, decades ago. Before Donald Trump's trans ban

in the military, the military had thoroughly integrated trans employees into every layer of its workforce. And in fact, the US military was the single largest employer of trans people in the country, if not the world. So if you know the history of the military, particularly the recent history of the military, the U.S. military, it's not out of line for someone like Mark Milley to say, we want to actually talk about race and study race. One, it is in line with this through line of intellectualism at the top ranks of the military. And two, the military's single goal is to get as many folks in as possible. And they need to have a space that feels welcoming to black and brown people who disproportionately serve in the military. Right. from that, to go to J.D. Vance's comments, he went on in this tweet storm to apparently say that the generals need to keep in mind that it's like poor white conservatives who disproportionately fight America's wars. That's not true. It's not true at all. It's never been true at all.

Black and brown people and poor people disproportionately fight America's wars. And if you look at the highest rate of military service, that honor per capita goes to American Samoa, not a country full of white people. So there's a lot of mythology that you're seeing holes being poked into some of the right-wing mythology about what the military actually is. It's not what you think it is. Well, it's also they give away the game a bit when a general says, I want to understand what led to an insurrection. I want to understand racism in this society. And then a bunch of people raise their hands and say, how dare you talk about me this way? Yeah.

How dare you attack people that see the world that way? It's the white rage that Milley speaks about. Yeah. Right, right. So, Tommy, Michael Bender is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He has a report around Milley calling C plus Santa Monica

fascist Stephen Miller that he said he told him to shut the fuck up because he was comparing Black Lives Matter protests in cities across the country to war zones. It does seem that that that part

of the the emotion in Milley's voice is rooted in genuine outrage about what took place in the insurrection and some of what he saw from inside the Trump administration. What did you make of his speech? Yeah, I mean, I think Milley seems genuinely frustrated by what he had to deal with in the Trump days and also how he was portrayed because, you know, he was talked about in terms of the clearing of Lafayette Park and the Trump photo op. So I had a similar reaction to Sam. It was like, good for General Milley.

I mean, as you noted, the military desegregated in 1948. That obviously didn't end the sort of systemic racism within the military. If you look at the top brass, is overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white. But I also imagine Milley is aware that they have a real right-wing extremism problem in some parts of the military, right? Like the Oath Keepers, that was founded by an army veteran. There were some ex-military members who were part of that mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6th. There's National Guard members have been removed from their posts for making extremist statements. So the Pentagon, they know this. They're aware of it, they're offering training to help sort of root out and identify

some of this right-wing extremism. But to me, I mean, this is a story once again, where like, there is a lie that I think Sam sort of explained how it came to be extremely well. And all of a sudden it's on television. And then you wake up one day and 22 states have proposed laws to ban the teaching of historical racism, right? So like these lies have real world impact. And again, it shouldn't surprise us because culture war fights over curriculums or school textbooks are a constant in these new conservative politics. I was reading about how in 1974, some fundamentalist Christians were so angry about textbooks that they considered ungodly that they blew up a West Virginia school board building with dynamite. The Great West Virginia Textbook War.

It was amazing. They were shooting up school buses. They had to close down the coal mines in that county in West Virginia because it got so crazy. Yes. And you know who helped them out? The Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation sent a lawyer down to defend a bunch of domestic terrorists. So it should be no surprise to anyone that today the Heritage

Foundation is releasing these hysterical reports about the dangers of critical race theory. So, you know, like Republicans look for these culture war issues. They want to exacerbate the feeling that like society is changing, that mostly white voters are losing their privileged place in society. That's what this is. And you can see with Tucker Carlson that his respect for reverence for the military comes after his reverence for white supremacy and his love of the culture wars. And that's what I made of just the whole... J.D. Vance is an annoying troll who thinks that he's just going to tweet his enough shit to get resistance liberals to quote tweet him in outrage and win a primary

in Ohio. And he's a he's a clown who's propped up by like Peter Thiel's, you know, venture capital money as he as Vance denounces the tech industry. But yeah, I mean, like I was not at all surprised by this. I think this is going to be their go toto. You know, just to kind of piggyback on this idea that these culture wars have been with us for a very long time, they have. So on my show, I had a historian on who studies the history of education. We talked last Friday about critical race theory, and he outlined how this stuff goes back decades. Even in the 30s and 40s, you had the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Legion fighting textbooks by some Columbia professor named Harold Rugg. And all they wanted these books to do was to have kids ask, what do you think about history and what should change?

Right. So this goes way back. And what's crazy about the origins of critical race theory, the guy that kind of made it a thing, Christopher Ruffo, this investigative journalist filmmaker who went on Fox News last September and then made it a thing with the Trump White House. He has said in interviews, this is the same kind of stuff that we talk about when we decry multiculturalism or diversity. But the phrase critical race theory, it's nebulous enough to be scary. And I like that. Critical race theory as a term is not new. This is an academic term that was coined in like the 70s and it's like a legal term to allude to policies and laws that might not directly address race but can still be racist in their outcomes given this nation's history. This is a graduate level theory for literally like law students. It's been around for a long time. It is just a nice new label for the same old fights. And it's nice for these folks

because it's ambiguous enough to place all of your fears in it. And when you look at these interviews and these conversations where you ask folks about what's going to be taught or what's not going to be taught, they don't know what it is. They don't know what's in the books. It is just, it's just a symbol to launch their fears into. And I think that it all really boils down to race and who our public schools are for. There are all kinds of issues that put school boards on edge about what can be in a textbook, right? Evolution, sex shit, gay shit. But the one that's always the worst, the one that always gets folks the most up in arms is race. And I think that it's because it gets to the core of what people think public education should be. There

are some people that still believe that public schools and all schools exist primarily for white children and should indulge white fantasy to keep those white kids and their parents happy. white fantasy to keep those white kids and their parents happy. But the rest of the country is quickly saying right now, we cannot continue to educate a diversifying country without actually speaking to the truth of what this country is, particularly for black and brown children who are going to read that Pollyanna history and say, that don't make no sense. How, Sway? to read that Pollyanna history and say, that don't make no sense. How, Sway? And so for me, it's not about the buzzword itself. It is not about one academic or one professor. It is about whether or not all of us in this country want to actually integrate our schools and not just integrate them by the makeup of the kids in them, but integrate the kind of ideas that we think our children can stomach. And it's got to be more

than just white fantasy for white kids and their parents. It has to be. Clint Smith's book has a really powerful chapter on this about the lost cause effort, which is an effort to rewrite the Civil War history, to defend the Confederacy, to make it as if it was about states' rights or something more noble than just the defense of slavery. He talks about how individuals who are pushing this lost cause ideology care about the monuments that people are tearing down, but they actually view children as the most powerful monuments because they can go on and spread that revisionist history lie, this lost cause narrative to their friends, to their peers, and we'll defend it

because it's something that gets ingrained in you. And no one likes to be told that what they think or believe or that their worldview is wrong. So you get attached to it almost. Yeah. But in the absence of the truth about our history, you have these white parents who want to hold on to that white fantasy

of what history was. And this idea that white people have always been the protagonist, that's really what it's at its core, right? This idea that white people were actually always on the good side all the time and they were the heroes. But when you do that, it says to every other child in that school, you don't just matter less, but the way you got to be here and the way that you and your community is, it doesn't make sense. And we're not going to explain it to you. And so like it is, it is, it is, it's not even like the fact that this conversation has been, we've been able to make this conversation about white kids and white parents. For me, they're a little bit less important than like the black and brown kids who are just going to grow up confused, totally confused. These white

kids are going to be fine. These white kids have access to Google and TikTok and they're seeing this stuff anyway. These conversations happen anyway. I'm worried about the black and brown kids who are still told that the civil War was about states' rights or who are never told the actual history of Native people in this country. Their confusion is more important to me than these white parents' discomfort. Sam, one more question on this. There's also this aspect in which this is a kind of role reversal where we've spent a lot of time having Republicans use the military as a cudgel against Democrats. And this seems like it's the reverse of that. What's your reaction to how that's been

playing out? I think it speaks to a larger issue of the way that the entire country conceptualizes the military period. We see it as distinguished white men who are strong leaders like Millie who talk that way and wear all the badges. When in actuality, a large swath of the military is black and brown, working class people, many of them women, many of them queer. I grew up in San Antonio, Texas. And when I was a kid, San Antonio had about five military bases just in the city. And the first both high schools I went to were a few miles down the road from Randolph Air Force Base. And by virtue of my public school being next to an Air Force Base, it was the most integrated school that I'd ever gone to in my life. integrated school that I'd ever gone to in my life. It was about a third white, about a third black, about a third Hispanic. It was a totally integrated society. That was because of its proximity to the military. And so when I see these fights over Millie and what Millie means for the military, I think we have to expand the conversation and say the military was never just those white guys at

the top. The military is an incredibly working class and in many cases, diverse institution. And when you hear from those voices, all of them holistically up and down the chain, Mark Milley's comments don't seem that out of place, right? We're looking like we have allowed ourselves to believe another white fantasy about what the military is. And it's never just that. It's never been just those white guys fighting our wars. I also think that like, you know, the Laura Ingrams of the world, the Tucker Carlson's, they know the power of that Milley speech, right? Like they're communicators, they're partisans, they're propagandists. And you can look back in pretty recent history at

comments made by Admiral Mike Mullen, the previous chairman of the Joint Chiefs, about the need to get rid of don't ask, don't tell, and the impact that those comments had on moving the debate forward and removing this horrendous rule or law or whatever it was, getting rid of the stigma. And I think it was interesting and notable to me that Lloyd Austin, who is the Secretary of Defense, African-American, didn't necessarily seem like he felt like he had the same space to go on this soapbox the way Milley did. But frankly, we needed to hear it from Milley, right? He is the sort of, I think, the kind of messenger who normally would convince a Fox News audience. And so they saw him as a threat and they went after him as hard as they

could in the most personal terms and they did it immediately. It's the Elvis effect. You can have all these black singers sing their songs and they sound great. And it's not a hit until Elvis covers it. And it's just like, it happens in every space and every way all the time. And again, to take it back to my industry, we capital J journalists, the media have to fight that tendency to focus on the kind of voices that we think are from central casting. There's a lot of voices. There's always been a lot of voices. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. When we come back, we will briefly talk about a mini freak out over the infrastructure negotiations and cover a intra Fox News fight that broke out over a surprising column. On Thursday, Joe Biden and the bipartisan group of lawmakers crafting an infrastructure deal announced that they had reached a $1.2 trillion deal focused on roads, bridges, tunnels, railways, waterways, and broadband to be paid for with increases in IRS enforcement projected to bring in a bunch of money in unpaid taxes. Biden's joy was short-lived.

An hour later, during a news conference, the president told a reporter that he would not sign a bipartisan bill without the second reconciliation bill, a partisan Democratic only bill that might spend trillions more. He said, if this is the only thing that comes to me, I'm not signing it. I'm not just signing the bipartisan bill and forgetting about the rest. Republicans responded with outrage. Senator Bill Cassidy said he felt blindsided. Senator Rob Portman was pissed and disappointed. Senator Susan Collins bemoaned the Republicans never had an inkling that there wouldn't be a linkage, which I found very, um, Seussian. This isn't despite this, despite the fact that that everybody knew that this was what

was going on. Yeah. These were linked publicly over and over again. Schumer said it on the floor. These two efforts are tied together. Let me make that clear. Speaker Pelosi agrees that we cannot do one without the other. Biden later walked back the comments saying that they were a mistake and affirming

that he is standing by the bipartisan deal, saying, I fully stand behind it without reservation or hesitation. The New York Times had a play by play with this headline, how Biden's impromptu comments upended a political win. And this lead, it was all going according to President Biden's tightrope plan to pass the most ambitious economic agenda in generations, right until the moment that Mr. Biden, a politician with a history of rogue comments, veered off script. Tommy, this was pretty confusing because it seems like everyone knows what is going on and Biden just said what was going on. But why is it so important that Biden not acknowledge the reality of the two bills being

linked together? I mean, I think what Biden was reflecting in his walk back is that the idea that he would veto the bipartisan bill if he didn't get the Democratic only bigger bill could actually upset the negotiations. And so that's fine. And if they felt like they needed to do this dance to get things back on these two tracks, that's fine. I do, you know, sort of, I don't want to be a media critic here, but I think, you know, sort of echoing some of the things Sam said earlier, like, this is a lot of play acting and, his agenda is stopping Biden, right? He's just the most cynical person you could imagine. So of course, he's going to do everything he can to prevent this bill from passing, screw up bipartisan negotiations, prevent Democrats from doing a

follow-on bill with a lot of additional liberal spending, and maybe even a tax increase for the wealthiest people in the world. So he's going to throw whatever he can, you know, like throw whatever he can in the gears to try to muck this thing up. And it's a little bit frustrating that we are playing along, acting like these are real concerns, like anyone was surprised by this linkage when, as you said, everyone has talked about how Democrats are cool with the bipartisan bill because they know that they will get another run at it with their other priorities. It doesn't mean Manchin and Sinema are going to go along, but of course, everyone knew they were going to try. So, yeah, I mean, I read all these stories. I found them a little bit exhausting, but here we are.

I do think that there's this knee jerk instinct to cover bipartisan negotiations from the point of view as Democrats, as the protagonist trying to recruit the Republicans as the antagonists, which ends up being about like, what are we doing to keep the Republicans on board? What are the Democrats doing to keep the Republicans in line? But actually, this doesn't seem to be about the Republicans. I mean, I understand why for pure kind of messaging, the Republicans want to not have them be linked directly because it's a little bit like, wait a second. So we're going to do what we both agree to together. And then when we go to the bathroom, you're going to do all the stuff we hate. Like I get, I get there's a little bit of a kind of strangeness to that. But really this

seems less about those 10 Republicans who are going along with this because they know Democrats can pass a reconciliation bill without them with all this stuff. So it's just about them getting credit for some piece of this. It's about keeping the 50 Democrats stuff. So it's just about them getting credit for some piece of this. It's about keeping the 50 Democrats together. And it seems like you keep the 50 Democrats together. You need to show a couple of those Democrats that you're willing to do this bipartisan deal. Like, Sam, is that is that right? Is that how you're seeing this? I don't know. I I read all the stuff about it and was trying to get right into this whole story before taping. And the only big thought that I came away with was, oh, Joe Biden made a gaffe? So surprising. He's never done that before. I mean, this just seems like a whole lot of crying over the normal order of things. Totally. of things. When bills this big work their way through both chambers, this is kind of how it's

done. This is the order of things. And this is the way that Joe Biden does politics. He just talks and he never shuts up unless you make him shut up. And I think ultimately at the end of the day, something passes because one thing I know for sure, in spite of all the hemming and hawing over the cost of infrastructure and the cost of this and that, something all politicians in Congress love to do is go home to their districts and talk about all the money they got for their district, they got for their county, they got for their state, and the latest bill that just passed. about the cost of these bills. They all like to go home and brag about getting money for their home. They do. And I just really think that at a certain point,

something passes, something big, these kinds of conversations will keep happening. You know, see the forest. You know, this is one tree in a forest. It's one tree. Keep that in mind. Yeah. Also, you know, Sam, that point is so true

that you had Republicans bragging about money going to their districts from a COVID relief bill that they voted against. So yes, maximum cynicism here. I mean, I also think the more interesting to me, a lot of it was I saw AOC came out over the weekend on the Sunday shows. And she's like, look, my message to Biden is House progressives wanting to succeed. We want to pass this bigger infrastructure bill. So that gave me some hope. You saw Manchin talking about how he's willing to sort of meet in the middle, maybe not a $6 trillion bill, but maybe not a $1 trillion bill. He's talking about raising taxes on some of the richest people in the country to potentially pay for it. So all of that made me

hopeful. That's like the political piece of my my brain the sort of human being who lives in the world in 2021 part of my brain is sitting around looking at news reports of like seattle being 115 degrees and like 110 in canada and thinking like holy shit i hope we do the climate change money asap because things are real bad and that should be our priority yeah no i i I and but it does seem like there is a larger lesson here in that, you know, one thing that's been so frustrating about Manchin and Sinema, and we're not going to talk about them again today, is that, OK, they're not for getting rid of the filibuster. We get it. We've read both of your op eds. But the they could have kept the filibuster in place while threatening to get rid of it, which would have put them in a position to negotiate better bipartisan deals. And one of the lessons for why this bipartisan deal is even on the table is because those Republicans know there's a partisan deal that will happen with or without them, that like the threat of legislating without

the Republicans have put the Republicans in a position of wanting to negotiate. And there's a lesson there if Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema care to learn it. But unfortunately, they are not interested in lessons. Before we go, last week in The Times, Ben Smith reported what many reporters have apparently known, that Tucker Carlson spends his time when he's not denouncing the liberal media by trading gossip with them. He's the go-to guy for sometimes unflattering stories about Donald Trump and for coverage of the internal politics of Fox News. This led to a ton of internecine, horrible, horrible fighting amongst some of the worst human beings on planet Earth. And so because this is pointless navel gazing and therefore we are

going to indulge in it briefly. Here's how this works. I'm going to read a quote and you're going to have to tell us who said it. All right. Call it out if you know it. Tommy and Sam, call it out if you know. This is eerily similar to a game called Who Said That? That Sam plays on It's Been a Minute. here we go now the big news is that some people at fox apparently don't like me and said bad things about me gutlessly behind my back according to ben smith and members of the media mob ben if that's true that's called a normal day in the world that i live in who said it tucker carlson sam who's no tell me uh black belt in karate, Sean Hannity.

That is correct. Next quote. I don't give an Adam Schiff about what anybody says about me. Tucker Carlson. No. Oh, man. Laura Ingram? It was Sean Hannity.

Final quote. I'm not going to change just because some of you don't like me. Tucker Carlson. Just one. Nope. Nope. Sean again?

Sean Hannity? It was Sean Hannity. He went on a very, very long diatribe about Tucker Carlson and it's a delight and every piece of it is enjoyable.

WandaVision voice, it was Sean Hannity all along. Wow. It was Sean Hannity all along. I mean, all you can do is have fun with this story because these people are just so full of shit that it's fun to lay it all bare the way Ben Smith did. It does make me think back about years and years of what felt like soft coverage of Tucker Carlson, of reticence to refer to his content as sort of white supremacist, even when it clearly was, right? When he's talking about like of what felt like soft coverage of Tucker Carlson, of reticence to refer to his content

as sort of white supremacist, even when it clearly was, right? When he's talking about like South African white farmers being killed, like literally like pulled off the VDARE, like sort of white supremacist websites. And now you have to wonder, is that because the people who cover him

and are supposed to write these things up are more concerned about losing him as a source? I saw a St stead Wesley from the New York times sort of tweet something to this effect that was just sort of like, this is a reminder of some of the circles you are expected to run in to get all the big scoops and why it's real shitty sometimes in Washington. I thought that was instructive. I mean, they're all such messy Queens. I mean's like come on come on when you see this like sniping back and forth from people who work together yeah you're just like grow up like at least like help try to protect the company bottom line like I got a lot of colleagues I can't stand you're not gonna hear about it on my show you know it's not gonna be on my show yeah open up slack it's yes exactly and another

thing about ari shapiro that guy that guy grows pears inside of a jar what's he trying to prove who goes got time to plan that's real by the way he does grow pears inside of a jar and it's always bothered me he lives in a perfect farmer's market to his face. Yeah. I crashed at Ari Shapiro's house years ago for like a week. And every day I'd come in there and he would have made me a meal like from the garden. And after he worked a full damn day, like now that guy, let him run Fox News, NPR, all of them. Put him in charge. And he can sing? Yeah.

He's in a band that plays at like Carnegie Hall. I mean, it's- And he's tall. And he's pretty tall. People should be looking into this. Yeah, he's in good shape. Nobody's talking about this. Why aren't they taking it to Ari?

We're not doing a good job leaking about Ari Shapiro. They're not supposed to be compliments. Well, I heard. It is also, I think, like Tucker Carlson is putting on a show. He's playing a character. And all the people he's texting know that it's a character. All the people in Tucker's life that apologize around him, all the people that work for him, everybody thinks it's just a-

He's the Colbert rapport. He's the Colbert rapport. But it's not a game. Yeah. But it's not a game because people take it really seriously and it's really dangerous. So with that, that's our show. Sam Sanders. Thank you so much for being here

it was so much fun it's great to be here Dan will be back on Thursday with Anat Shanker-Osorio and very excited about that conversation have a great week everybody

Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production the executive producer is Michael Martinez our senior producer is Flavia Casas. Our associate producers are Jazzy Marine and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer.

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