QAA Podcast - I Hate the ‘90s feat. John Ganz (E282)

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Do you look back on the early 90s with a sense of fondness? In this episode, we hope to ruin that for you just a little bit. What if we told you that this time period was crucial in the development of American right wing populism and therefore crucial for the eventual election of Donald Trump and the rise of QAnon? Bet you’re a little less nostalgic for those slap bracelets now. We speak with John Ganz, author of the new book When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. He explains how KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, Economist Murray Rothbard, Paleoconservative Pat Buchanan, Texas Tycoon Ross Perot, and other colorful figures laid the groundwork for the results of the 2016 election and all its consequences. When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374605445/whentheclockbroke John Ganz on Twitter https://x.com/lionel_trolling Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to podcast mini-series like Manclan, Trickle Down, Perverts and The Spectral Voyager: www.patreon.com/QAA Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was formerly known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

POMPEO-WI-WKIN-U-O-O-O-W-O-O-O-W-W-W. if you're hearing this well done you found a way to connect to the internet welcome to the qaa podcast episode 282 i hate the 90s featuring john gans as always we're your host jake rockatanski julian field and Travis view remember the early 90s assuming you are a millennial or older the cold war had ended and with it the possibility of the end of the accompanying national paranoia. The console wars pitted the Sega Genesis with its lower price point and larger library of games against the Super Nintendo, which boasted high-quality exclusive releases like The Legends of Zelda A Link to the Past and Star Fox.

Companies like America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy gave owners of home computers a way to access the information superhighway. The USA Olympic basketball team, the Dream Team, mercilessly crushed every national squad they face in Barcelona. America was so fearless that young people proudly wore t-shirts printed with the stylized words, no fear. Oh, I remember this is such a wonderful time. I had a big dream team t-shirt with all the like cartoon, kind of like big head caricatures of all the, of all the, the players. Oh man, you're taking me back. Did you have the Looney Tunes dressed like criss-cross? No, no, but I had the Chris Cross. I had the Chris Cross cassette tape and like definitely thought about

could I get away with wearing my clothes backwards? Yeah. Jake nearly died from a slap-on bracelet injury. Yeah, he tripped over his parachute pants. It was very tragic. And the charismatic politicians from Arkansas, named William Jefferson Clinton, led the centrist faction of the Democrats to the White House at the young age of 46. The emerging liberal consensus would surely last 1,000 years.

It was seemingly a world away from modern American political and cultural problems with its mainstream conspiracism, democracy-threatening demagoguery, and politicians running for office far beyond typical retirement age. But something strange was emerging in the midst of the third-way economic policies and colorful 16-bit graphics, the forces of American right-wing populism were building a coalition, developing their philosophy, and refining their tactics. KKK Grand Wizard David Duke deployed a more palatable version of his white supremacist rhetoric for his political campaigns.

Economist Murray Rothbard broke from the genteel. conservatism of William F. Buckley and instead promised to repeal the 20th century. Ross Perrault proved that a billionaire business tycoon could run for president as an anti-establishment outsider. These fringe figures fell short of their greatest ambitions, but their vision of what is possible for their movement was realized with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The emergence of this movement and the characters that comprised it is a subject of the book When the Clock Broke, Con Men Conspiracist, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. Its author and our guest today is John Gans.

He has written for The Washington Post, The Baffler, Art Forum, and the New Statesman. He's also the author of the newsletter on Popular Front. John, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, really fascinating. It tackles, you know, I think, my favorite kinds of questions, which is like, you know, how the hell does we end up in this situation just generally? And there's lots of ways you can tackle that question.

But, man, this is really, I think, crucial and really thoroughly under-explored piece of that puzzle. Thanks so much. So, I mean, so let's just get started with what you found. Because early in your book, you discussed the political career of David Duke. Now, David Duke, KKK Grand Wizard, that political career was mostly unsuccessful. He was in the Louisiana House of Representatives from 89 to 92, but his many other political campaigns failed. So why is this your launching point?

Well, it's for a few reasons, which are related, actually. So David Duke, yeah, he ran for Louisiana House of Representatives as a Republican. And what happened was that he completely panicked both the local and national Republican Party who were unable to stop him. So he ran as a populist outsider against the establishment successfully. The president at the time, Ronald Reagan, recorded a radio hits against him. The RNC sent people down there. And they couldn't stop him. And they were paying an enormous amount of attention to an extremely, you know, a local election, which on the surface of it is something they should have ignored.

But they realized there was a political problem for them. And his defiance of the Republican establishment made him a very attractive figure to a lot of people on the far right. And his campaign and his campaigns in the way that they panic the establishment also made a lot of people within the Republican Party and conservative movement who wanted to move things rightwards very excited. They saw him as a hopeful sign that this former neo-Nazi, former, in quotes, he remains and remained a neo-Nazi, you just toned down that part of the rhetoric. And former KKK figure who won a majority of the white vote in his running for governor in 1991, 55% of the white vote in Louisiana. He showed what they believe was the viability, the beginning of the viability of their kind of politics and that their moment had come. So he was a launching point for their movement and for their politics. and he was sort of a warning light

for the political establishment who really struggled to get rid of him. Warning. Warning. Most of your citizens are still agreeable to Nazism. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that's really remarkable. To me, I mean, of course, we know, you know, there's a long history of white supremacy in this country in the south. There was Jim Crow. There was many politicians who have sort of run. on the legacy of that and, you know, run on white grievances. But David Duke was not just a Southern

racist. He was a neo-Nazi, which, you know, to most Americans raised with the Nazis are the bad guys in the movie, usually is a bridge too far, but, um, no pun intended. But the fact that he was not immediately rejected by a vast majority of voters for that reason, I thought was really remarkable and showed a big change in the country's politics. Yeah, especially during this time when, I mean, they were introducing 16-bit graphics. I mean, there were so, there was like way better things to do than hate minorities. And yet still, still this guy over 50% of the vote. Well, I don't, I don't want to insult. I'm sure you have many gamers as your, uh, as your listeners, but we've learned that those constituencies of hating minorities and playing video games are pretty

have some overlap. Let's say they're compatible. Well, wait, wait. This was before online gaming, all right? Sure, sure, sure. There was, yeah, there was no lobby to jump in and shout slurs. Say the N-word, yeah. I'm pretty sure they still shouted the N-word on couch co-op playing Sonic.

Yeah. Sure. Yeah, I mean, I have to confess. I mean, I had some read some David Duke about David Duke before reading your book, but I had a fairly naive idea about the influence. an impact of his presence and his campaigning. I guess I assumed because I knew that like, you know, I guess like ivory tower conservatives and also, you know, the establishment Republicans rejected him. I assumed his influence was fairly quarantined. But as you go into

the book, that's not really the case. He wound up being shockingly influential in this paleo-conservative movement. Yeah, I think that they always shared similar ideas, not perhaps quite as explicit in their embrace of Nazism, although I do believe that they were either fascist fellow travelers or crypto-fascists and sometimes pretty openly fascist, but he definitely, I don't think his ideas so much, which are just Nazi ideas and not particularly original, were influential, but they definitely saw him as a hopeful sign that their politics had arrived. And they emulated some of those appeals in his campaign. I mean, Pat Buchanan based his political run. The appearance of David Duke on the scene and his success in Louisiana was definitely a huge factor in his decision

to primary Bush. So, yeah. And then he wasn't really quarantined because Pat Buchanan emulated him an enormous amount. And then Pat Buchanan was a speaker at the RNC in 1992. And this is, and this keeps on happening, this is after the Republicans in their attack and attempt to stop Pat Buchanan, try to link him to David Duke. Fairly. Call him an anti-Semite. Fairly. So they do all these, what he calls smears, but are actually pretty fair characterizations of what Pat Buchanan's politics are. And then they invite him to speak at the convention. They realize, okay, we have to keep this convention together. He represents the right of the party, so we're going to give him some speaking time. I don't think that does them any favors politically, because he kind of runs,

he says the country's falling apart, which is not what the incumbent usually wants here at the convention. But yeah, it's pretty remarkable that the Republican Party, you know, invited to speak in prime time a candidate who they had just spent the last few months calling a Nazi. So what does that say about them? I don't know. Apparently, they recognized that he was part of their coalition. And it wasn't like they didn't know what was in his speech. They, you know, they sent the speech to the Bush campaign and they said, that sounds great, Pat. So that to me was really something. And there's a very, there's a very small skip and a jump from David Duke to the Republican National Convention in 1992. I wonder if some of the logic there is like, well, if we get this guy up here, people will see his ideas are somewhat good, but a little extreme. And I will appear to be, you know,

know, the kind of reasonable choice, almost like some mutant version of the Pied Piper thing that Hillary Clinton thought she was running against Donald Trump. Yeah, I think what happened was, first of all, there's another context that has to be at it, is that, you know, this was a time where there was a lot of anti-establishment sentiment free-floating in the political system or outside of the political system in the electorate. So Ross Perrault was also running for president at this time on a third party. You know, he didn't say this rhetoric exactly, but it's essentially drain the swamp sort of message. And a lot of people who were interested in Duke and Buchanan were also interested in Perrault, although he did not play the racial stuff as front and center as they did.

So definitely the populist campaign of Perrault made the Bush people believe it was really important to bring Buchanan back on board. And also Buchanan was a mouthpiece for Connoisse. conservatives. So they really were like, well, we can't have the right wing of our party bolt, you know, otherwise we don't have a fighting chance. We got to keep the people who were all in for Reagan with us. So he was a part of their coalition. But by admitting that the far right was part of their coalition, perhaps it was a little more revealing than they intended. And I don't think that they ever successfully put that genie back in the bottle. You speak a little bit about neoconservatism as having its roots in Disaffected liberals? Yeah. Speak a little to this in terms of the moment that we're examining? Sure. So this is after the period of the neocon kind of apostasy to the right.

So many neocons were former socialists or former liberals who were disaffected with great society liberalism, with the McGovern campaign, with the counterculture, and with black power. And we're concerned about things like urban crime and the Cold War. and the Democrats seem to have become too liberal for them and two left wing. And they, you know, over a course of a decade, basically defected to the right. But they brought with them, according to the people who had always been on the right, some liberal ideas and tendencies, which the people who viewed themselves as part of the old right were not very happy with. Now, along with the liberal views and tendencies, there's another factor. A lot of these guys are Jewish.

and were the children and grandchildren of immigrants. And they kind of had a very, a kind of American patriotism that, you know, would be recognizable to us. You know, Abraham Lincoln was great. You know, the creedal nationalism of the Statue of Liberty is good. FDR was a great president. The World War II was a great American endeavor. And a lot of these people on the right, these old right people who could trace their politics back to the pre-war America first form of conservatism weren't that thrilled that these people came over and were now

claiming to speak on behalf of conservatism. And they had much more mainstream cash than a lot of these people on the right. And kind of from the point of view of these right wingers called the old right and came to call themselves paleo-conservatives in contradistinction to the neoconservatives, they viewed them as liberal interlopers. And there was very often an anti-Semitic tone to that, which was that, you know, these Jews are taking over our country and our movement, and we got to push them out and do our own thing. That's not entirely the whole story, because there were prominent paleo-conservatives who were Jewish. They just didn't seem to mind or had rationalizations when things got a little anti-Semitic. So, yeah, that was the

neocons. And the part of the story here is that there's a war going on within the Republican Party and the conservative movement between the neocons and the paleocons over what conservatism really means. One point that you made that I thought was really interesting was, you know, this idea that, you know, the paleocons, according to them, you know, the Vietnam War and World War II, like, all of that was like kind of a wash. And like, if they could, they would actually prefer to go back to like the 19th century, like, you know, even further back in terms of sort of, you know, values and how government

is run. And it's so funny because nowadays, you know, you. you know, conservatives look to that time as this like golden era. Oh, the guys, the real patriots who fought in the wars and like this beautiful time afterwards. It's just like, it's really interesting to see how it shifted over time, even though it's kind of still the same. It's kind of still the same. There's still this longing to sort of, you know, retreat back to an earlier time. But as time goes forward, the time that you want to retreat back to keeps moving up a little bit. Yes, definitely. I think, you know, some of these guys, even though they really want, you're in

for a pre-war America and sometimes a pre-Civil War America. You know, the 1950s held a lot of, as a very conservative and conformist time in a country, held a lot of appeal for them. And it's really funny to me now, being a millennial, that there's all these, like, return memes that are based on the 90s and playing Sega Genesis and stuff like that. I just find that to be hysterical because that's the most prosaic shit in the world to me, you know, like, it was nice, but it's not, it wasn't like a golden age. It was fine.

Like there's, I've just seen like these concerns, this is what they took from you and it's like eating shark, those shark snack treats and playing Sega and the basement. Oh, oh, I love those shark bites. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The mystery white shark, racist coded, uh, food snacks. Exactly. Maybe that's the key to the whole thing. So, yeah, I find that shifting of the poles of nostalgia to be really funny too. But these guys definitely thought, I think, like, neocons are very nostalgic for the war.

years in a certain way as a high point in American civilization and patriotism. And the paleos didn't care for Roosevelt at all at all, of course. And also didn't think that, you know, America joining World War II against the Nazis was the right move for such a great thing. Papi Kinn in later years wrote, you know, a book about how, you know, mistaken Churchill was to go to war against Hitler. I mean, this just gives you kind of some, some hints of who they think we should decided with in this conflict. So yeah, they were really not content with the way the country. And you see this in conservative stay. They kind of hate America because they're not happy with the way the country actually looks. They have an image of the past, but the way it's become, they're very

dissatisfied with. Really quick. Another thing, just along those lines, because he sort of touched on it, I thought it was really interesting, this idea of, you know, that conservatives were, like, disappointed when the Soviet Union collapsed because there was no longer this, like, central enemy to unite them. And I think that that's a common thread even today is that, you know, what, what are we without like some kind of, you know, common enemy that we're all fighting? And I think it does even extend to, you know, neoliberals as well, like, you know, with the introduction of Donald Trump, that, that he is this ultimate enemy that as long as you oppose him, I mean, that's, that's all we care about. And that's, you know, that kind of stands in place of policy,

actual policy is just this opposition to Donald Trump, this figure. I do think there's something to that. I mean, definitely what it is the reverse. of what Donald Trump stands for in the eyes of his supporters, which is a big fuck you and a possible revenge against a political establishment they blame for the dispossession for the decline of the country. And Donald Trump embodies to many people, you know, the worst parts of the American experience, which I think it's a fair to say he does. But then they're not particularly attentive, perhaps, to the social conditions or the political conditions

that made a figure like Donald Trump attractive to people. in the first place and just superficially think that defeating Trump will mean, you know, the fever will break and the country can kind of return back to the way it was before. Again, unfortunately, I don't think that's really the truth. The book tries to make the case that these things are all symptomatic of underlying issues, both social and economic and a real, some grievances, which I think are legitimate and some grievances which I think are less so. But yes, I, I see what you're saying. And this is also part and parcel of like what I talk about, kind of like the enmity being less outward focused and sort of the beginning of a cold civil war in the

United States, where, you know, partisan divisions and cultural divisions are extremely stark. And people have very negative existential fear of their, of their ideological counterparts in the country. So, you know, returning to the, back to the influence of David Duke. So he lost, he lost, He lost the gubernatorial election. And in response, the economist Murray Rothbard, he wrote an essay called Right Wing Populism, A Strategy for the Paleo Movement. You also reference another essay of Rothbard, which was originally delivered as a speech to the second annual meeting of the John Randolph Club, which is called a strategy for the

right. So how would you describe Rothbard in the significance of these essays? Well, this essay was actually how I got started on this whole project, because this was shortly after Trump was elected or took office, and a lot of people were kind of trying on figure this stuff out. And I noticed that every single, this is when the alt-right was in the news a lot, remember? And this is before Charlottesville and shortly thereafter. And Rothbard kept on coming up in the interviews with these alt, these alt-right guys who had become, you know, explicit Nazis. You know, they would call themselves neo-Nazis or they would call themselves

fascist. But they all referenced that part of their intellectual journey at that point was this libertarian economist who was Jewish from the Bronx named Murray Rothbard. So I started to look into him and I found this essay, right-wing populism, which was written in the wake of David Duke's defeat and kind of relished the difficulty and the fits that he put the political establishment to. And I just thought, and both in tone and content and the politics it described, it was eerily prescient about what Trump represented. And then he transferred this and he said, the tribune of this new movement and the speech that he gave to the John Randall Club, which is very similar to the essay that he wrote, but it's his praise of Pat Buchanan, who is running for president

for the Republican nomination. And he says, you know, this goes back to a very old idea of his in defense of demigogy. We're going to short circuit the media elites. We're going to talk directly to the masses, be confrontational, menacing, frightening. And his model for this is Joe McCarthy. And he says, the genteel, conservative consensus that McCarthy may have been right on the substance, but that his tactics and methods were bad is exactly wrong. McCarthy, the substance of what McCarthy said didn't matter, the lying or truth of it. The good thing about it was the demigogy, was the way it menaced establishment elites, and went on TV and directly, you know, reached a public. And he said,

McCarthy couldn't quite do it because he wasn't that good for the medium of that era. which was TV. But this is the sort of thing we'd like to see. This is the way we should practice politics. So Rothbart says exactly the opposite of what conservatives who wanted to move into the establishment had done. We're going to make a politics, a respectability politics. So liberals aren't so scared of us. And we convince them that we're reasonable and intelligent people you can have a conversation with. He says absolutely not. I'm sick of this bullshit where they're telling us, you know, we're paranoid, we're lunatics. I'm not going to, let's stop calling ourselves conservatives. We're radical rightists. We're doing a counter-revolution here. We're going to

throw over the table and stop being wimps and so on and so forth. And, you know, this was, this is now basically, you know, Rothbard at that time, but still a fringe figure. This is basically what everybody on the right says now, every intellectual journalist kind of person on the right says now is like, we're no longer really doing conservatism. We're doing something more radical. We want to do something more radical than conservatism. So I thought it was just extremely prescient and eerie. And I started pulling that thread. And when I got into Rothbard and the people around him, I said, oh, there's a, there's a whole lot of stuff here. There's a whole movement here. So that was how I got into Murray Rothbard. I remember being at the Maricopa County voting office during the stop the steel phase after the 2020 election. And there was a weed smoking guy who described himself as a libertarian who was wearing a Murray Rothbard t-shirt. So yeah, there's, there's, there's, something to that. And that was the guy, he was the first to be like, hey, guys, they're moving ballots in the back and just getting the whole crowd. It's, it is incredible to see these

kind of, you know, somewhat marginal figures being like heroes of pretty young, uh, Trump guys. Oh, for sure, for sure. I think Rothbard, my sense of it is, is now that there's enough just pure, far right stuff that people aren't getting red pill, so to speak so much on Rothbard anymore, but in the last January, but I think they still are, Javier Malay and Argentina is a big Rothbar guy, you know, I think one of his dogs is named Murray, you know, the dogs he talks to. Yeah, yeah. So, like, I guess his cabinet, his advisors. So, you know, it is still a huge, I think it's still a big part of like the kind of far right subcult, internet subculture is the influence of Murray Rothbard. But it was, it was, I got to tell you, like, if you go back and read all these

post Charlottesville interviews with all these guys to a man to a man they all say Murray Rothbard it's really shocking yeah you know I read one of these one of these essays and you talk he talks about how he objected to being called conservative because it implies that we're going to conserve the world that liberals built basically yeah and he said that it would be fair to call people in his movement conservatives in 1910 so yeah I was I was I was though it was like because you know there was a question of like you know the slogan you'll make America great again there's always this question of like wait a minute when was it yeah when you want to turn the clock back to when exactly when was America great enough to preserve in your eyes

and apparently the answer for Rothbard was 1910 yeah it's like what are you punching in on the delorean screen like how how far are we going back by the way yeah for Rothbard it was definitely before the regulatory state and the new deal definitely before the new deal but but also before the progressive movement, basically when there was as close to laissez-faire capital. He was a big golden, golden, I mean, gilded age fan, right? So when the world was just kind of capitalist robber barons using private police forces to shoot strikers, that's kind of the thing that he liked. Other members of his cohort, you know, had even weirder things to say.

So, you know, obviously right-wingers and conservatives always have a golden age in the past. But Samuel Francis, who was his buddy and a big influence on contemporary kind of para-Trump intellectuals, pro-Trump intellectuals, he said something even more peculiar, which was that, you know, he was like, yeah, yeah, conservatives always talk about the good old days, the Confederacy, the old republic before FDR, but that's not it. we still as Americans have not created a true national myth. And what was going to happen next, if the kind of right-wing populist movement that I envisioned would happen, was that American nationalism would become true for the first time, right? So it would be a rejection of liberalism. But it wouldn't be a return exactly to a previous dispensation. It would be something both highly reactionary and racist. in his view, and race was a huge part of what he thought these politics had to be, but also

modern in something new. And this is when you start to have to use the F word, right? So this is no longer merely conservatism, which is nostalgia. I mean, it participates in some of that nostalgia for, it envisions a wholly new form of American nationalism based on a racial, you know, idea of what Americans are. And that, to me, when I read that, I was like, Like, yes, this guy is really a fascist. This is not conservatism. It's not merely, you know, the hard right of the Republican Party. This is envisioning a quite different kind of politics. Now, in that essay, I mean, Rothbard seemed to deviate from like typical libertarian talking points about the wonders of American industry to instead decry big business as part of the

corrupt cabal that included the media and the government. Yeah. So he wrote this. The reality of the current system is that it constitutes an unholy alliance of, quote, corporate liberal, big business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic underclass who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America. Therefore, the proper strategy of libertarians and paleos is a strategy of, quote, right-wing populism, that is, to expose and denounce this unholy alliance and to call for getting this preppy underclass liberal media alliance off the backs of the rest of us, the middle

and working class. Yeah. Sounds familiar. Very angry. Yeah, exactly. But nowadays, I think it's very common for conservatives to kind of like selectively attack big business. I'm thinking of like Ron DeSantis going after Disney.

Right. Congressional Republicans attacking social media companies for alleged censorship. But like, why? I mean, it seems odd for an intellectual founder of anarcho-capitalism to go after what he called big business. Yeah, that is a really interesting and important and complicated question. So they don't like the big business insofar, this is how they would put it, big business insofar as it's, you know, buddy, buddy with the state. And part of this kind of, as he calls it, this unholy alliance. And also it's part of the establishment of liberalism, right? Which is corporations cooperate

with the government bureaucracies in terms of, you know, let's say non-discrimination, right? So what people now would call, well, capitalism. They sort of are doing the bidding of the civil rights bureaucracies. So there's that part of it. Then there's a sense speaking to an alienation a lot of people have where, you know, corporate America, although they may be quite pro-capitalist, corporate America is very alienating to them. And the world of capitalism they prefer and actually work in and stand for

is a world of small and medium-scale family businesses. And those types of firms, because of their scale and, needs are particularly resistant to regulation, to labor unions, and don't exist in this comfy relationship with the government and have a much more hostile relationship with the government. So there's a kind of small business owner, a medium business owner, resentment of the corporate state duopoly that's embodied in that. And this is old. I mean, this goes back to new deal, business rejection of the new deal, right? So, A lot of corporations kind of got with the program, and there were good things about it for them, you know, labor laws that could kind of figure out how to cooperate with.

And, you know, the people who organized to resist the New Deal were often these, you know, they could be quite rich firms, but they were often family held, regional businesses. And they're the ones who really formed the backbone of what would become the material support for the conservative movement. And also formed the kinds of organizations that resisted the new deal and resisted the power of organized labor. So that's a big part of it as well. I was watching this pizza review on YouTube the other day. Was it Dave Portnoy? Yeah. And he went to this place and the guy was like, you know, he's like, yeah, it's, it's, it's a New Haven style.

He's like, it's New Haven style. But like, I can't cook it over Cole because fucking Gavin Newsom with the Cole. Like, it was like this whole, this whole like, the whole like, political thing, like within the pizza review, that the pizza couldn't be authentically New Haven because fucking Gavin Newsom, you know, like doesn't allow coal for whatever. I

don't even know what the rule is, but there was some kind of debate and complaint and I was just like, it just reminded, I thought of it, you know, thinking about this about these small businesses kind of rebelling against the, the wokeness of the government and then, oh, it's so easy for these big corporations to play along, they lose nothing,

you know, but me here, you know, I can't make my pizzas fucking charting. is you want it. Jake is about to find out about smoke shows. Yeah. I mean, I watch those Dave pornois videos, too. They're great.

They're very relaxed. Yeah, the pizza reviews, he knows I to review pizza. But the, yeah, you know, who was the big plaintiff in the suit about,

about vaccination requirements, was a national organization of small businesses, right? And if you look at the two types of big constituencies for the Republicans and Democrats, you know, Democrats get a lot of lawyers. So they, They want to be a little cynical.

Any reason to be able to sue an employer they're down with. And the kinds of organizations that are supporting Republicans are like, anything that can get us sued more, we're going to fight. You know, anything that gives legal rights to our consumers or to more often our employees is something we really want to resist. And it's not always, it is very often not the biggest firms who have the resources to just be like, yeah, all right, we budget so many. We have armies of lawyers at our disposal. We'll create a fucking department that deals with this kind of complaint. And, yeah, we'll just find a way to deal with it. It's, you know, firms that are like, no, I don't, like, I need to be able to sexually

harass my employees. And I can't be sued for it because I don't have enough liability insurance or attorneys. So, and, you know, those businesses are an important part of the Republican coalition. I mean, you know, people talk about Trump as like, you know, the dictator of, of, of, of dealership owners, you know, so, and that being a center of his, of his support. And I think there's a lot of truth to it. And you see that being ideologically articulated already back here in the 90s. I want to return to talking about Pat Buchanan a bit because he, I mean, he is, he is super fascinating. He seems like he is a real key figure in helping transfer these, these fringe, you know,

white supremacist ideas even, into a more mainstream package, more successfully than David Duke did. Because, I mean, Buchanan, not a fringe figure. He worked in the White House for three presidents. He was a regular guest on MSNBC and CNN. And as I learned in your book, he was openly inspired by David Duke. So, I mean, so what can you tell me about, I guess, Pat Buchanan's relationship to Duke? But Pat Buchanan is, yeah, he was the clearinghouse, the sanitizer, and the popularizer of these very far-right views that usually only appeared in strange newsletters or, you know, on minor public access stations from time to time. But he was really tapped into them and he said, you know, the biggest vacuum in American politics, which he sought

to occupy, is to the right of Ronald Reagan. He worked in the Reagan White House. He worked in the Nixon White House. And, you know, I don't know if it's well known, but Nixon wasn't particularly liked by conservatives because he was viewed to be too much of a, you know, a centrist and a pragmatist. But Pat Buchanan saw something else in Nixon. He saw the Nixon more that we know now, which is the Nixon we heard on the tapes, which is Nixon the paranoid, Nixon the anti-Semite, Nixon the hater of liberals, because he had this relationship with him and he knew all that. And he thought that what happened in Watergate essentially was a coup by the liberals against this kind of tribune of middle American populism. And Nixon's mistake was to not

use that opportunity to kind of launch a countercoup. So any political figure that comes along that is willing to dispense with some of the niceties that dictated American policies that dictated American politics, which Buchanan felt held back this authentic American right-wing populism, he was very interested in. He watched Duke's campaign very closely. He timed his own run after the end of Duke's gubernatorial run and saw that as a sign of his own success. He saw that what messages worked at the same time he would lie and disavow, you know, any interest or knowledge about what David Duke is up to. But then in, you know, other newspaper articles he would say openly, yeah, you know, we're emulating his campaign.

And then he would accuse Duke of emulating him. These are all the normal sorts of things politicians do. There is no reasonable way of looking at the record and saying that Buchanan was not very attentive to what David Duke was up to and trying to emulate and ride the same wave. He was much more of a political professional. And, yeah, had this mainstream kind of cachet, had this access to media. He got away with an enormous amount for a very long time. You know, like, although he complained about the censoriousness of political correctness and how the liberals dominated everything, you know, he lived very comfortably among the media elites who, you know, as you said, he was a commentator on MSNBC for many years. And he was able to kind of,

I'm going to speak quite frankly now. I think Pat Buchanan is a fascist, if not a Nazi. And he was able to askance himself in the American political establishment and fly somehow under the radar, even though his views were pretty transparent for many, many years and to work very hard to drive those views forward. And when Trump comes along, Buchanan instantly recognize them as the same sort of thing. They both recognize each other as the same sort of thing. Buchanan has often said Trump is the last chance for my ideas. So yeah, Buchanan's career to my mind is a really shameful failure of American institutions to recognize in their midst something really sinister and to tolerate it. And it's really kind of shocking if you go through

what Buchanan was writing in the newspapers every week because he was a syndicated columnist. And then seeing what access to the highest parts of American politics and media he had he was able to to jump around and it's kind of remarkable i don't know if that was your experience looking at the book but that was definitely my experience researching it yeah i mean i was pretty i was pretty sure i know that in the book you you have a great word for david duke's ability to sort of be in this you know this white supremacist nazi underworld and then a book bring out into a more respectable sort of audiences and he called them amphibious which was yeah and i feel like pat began is you It has that even greater amphibious ability, this weird way he can sort of shape shift

and sort of, you know, openly, you know, be inspired by David Duke and draw, you know, draw lessons from him and how to drive his message forward. And at the same time, be like buddy, buddy with Rachel Maddow. That's, uh, it's a, that's, you're right. Yeah, sharing jokes with that, with her. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was just, I was really, really shocked at like just, yeah, like, how much he was able to be accepted in sort of like a poor mainstream media and political environment considering the real horrifying depths of his anti-Semitic and Nazi views.

I mean, they're not that well disguised. I mean, I think if you have a little bit of knowledge, I mean, maybe to the completely untrained eye, you're like, well, I don't really know what he means by that. But I think to anybody who knows a little bit about the subculture that he's calling on, you're like, oh, that is, that is, if not a, you know, it's not even. even a dog whistle. It's a, it's a scream, you know. So, yeah, that was really something else to me. And, you know, he still has people who defend him. I mean, on the right, but, you know, all of his colleagues from TV were all like, you know, this guy was very polite. He had a lot of Jewish colleagues that he never made me feel bad about being Jewish. He never said anything weird, you know. So I think there's also, there's a lesson there about the complicity of the media and the complicity of elites in welcoming into their midst people, that they really should, frankly, cancel. I mean, you know, like, it's become a bad word and, and it can definitely be abused, but there's, in my view, Pat Baganon should have been a guy at a gun show,

ranting at a gun show. He should not have been on MSNBC, you know. So another colorful character you discuss in your book is Ross Perrault. He was the, you know, the first populist billionaire with a conspiracist street to run for president. Yeah. Yeah, I joke about, you know, the parallels between. him and Trump. But I mean, there was a lot more than I realized. So he was a Ross Pro, he was a Texan who built his fortune with a company called Electronic Data Systems or EDS, which did a lot

government contracting. Yeah. And I really enjoyed this paragraph in your book, which describes his paranoia during a rocky period of his life. A latent paranoid streak in Perrault grew more accentuated. He hired private investigators to check out employees, competitors, daughters, boyfriends. He moved EDS headquarters to a walled compound patrolled by armed guards. Employees were physically searched and given polygraphs. Perot became convinced that the North Vietnamese had contracted the Black Panthers to assassinate him. He later claimed that would-be assassins had scaled his walls but had been chased off by his guard dogs. He traveled with bodyguards and bought a specially designed bulletproof car with special emplacements

for firing submachine guns. When Texas Governor Bill Clements appointed Perot to a special commission on narcotics, Perot demanded permission to build a helipad on his property to avoid ambushes by the cartels. His neighbors successfully resisted that one. This is just like, yeah, average American who makes six figures these days. Yeah. Just slowly building an armed compound. Oh, no, yeah, he was just like, I mean, this is another figure. It's like a lunatic, you know, billionaire who clearly should have no place in, you know, really respectful politics, but managed to find a surprising amount of support. Yeah, and the same thing is, you know, he kind of flew, the Republican Party was his way he kind

got into politics because he was a big Republican donor, not a particularly reliable one, but he kept on kind of shaking the possibility of massive donations and then would often renege when he felt like the Republicans weren't doing his favors. But he definitely became part of the Republican donation machine under Nixon. And, you know, Nixon, he was sort of fit in with the imaginary notions of the Nixon administration because this was a guy who was a self-made man from the Southwest, not a part of these snobby liberal. He was a sunbelt, you know, billionaire. This was the kind of businessman that they liked, conservative in his values. Yeah, you know, and he becomes progressively a little bit more paranoid and nutty as his life goes on.

You know what I think about Ross Pro and the best way to think about him in a certain way is he's like a Wes Anderson character, like where he has, he lives in this world of his own creation, which is kind of a child's world. He is obsessed with Norman Rockwell paintings and he has several of them in his office. He's obsessed with the Boy Scouts, you know, his time in the Boy Scouts. He keeps his Boy Scout manual and like a, I think like a Tomahawk and a harmonica from that age. It's funny. I mean, West Anderson is actually from Texas, so I wonder if there's something to the connection there. But he has this almost childlike conception of the world and mythology he builds up around himself. And on the one hand, it's quite funny. And there's something folksy and apparently something kind of harmless about kookery about Perot. He's not quite, I mean, at least in the way he spoke, he's not quite as sinister and aggressive as, say, Trump.

Now, when you look a little bit more into it, you can see, well, there are some very negative parts about what he represented, including, you know, he talked about using the army against drug dealers and stuff like this. Again, kind of like a childish way of looking at the world. But he represented to a lot of people, a hyper-competent person who was able to take care of big problems, a businessman, no nonsense, would take care of the Washington bureaucracy. And another thing that made him popular. among people who had anti-government views or anti-Washington views was his association with the P-O-W-M-I-A movement. You've seen the black flag everywhere. Oh, yeah. What people may not know is that's kind of a peculiar movement in the sense that, and Perrault was a big donor to this and a big donor, especially to its more extreme wings. You know, there really were no, there was no possibility that they were live prisoners after the end of the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia. movement was or section of this movement was absolutely convinced that that was true. And they managed to convince the majority of the American public that was true. And this sort of fanciful idea

that the government was hiding something. And once we retrieve these guys and we would even start the war again to do it, you know, sending commandos and some people even tried to these missions, people Rossboro funded and was associated with, we can kind of exercise the ghosts of Vietnam, how we'd been humiliated and dishonored in Vietnam and restore national, a feeling of national health and wholeness. So he was an absolute true belief, you know, it's difficult with some of these figures to dissociate where the cynical parts come in, where they're kind of manipulating people with these very emotional ideas and where they all believe, where they believe them. I think for the most part, I mean, there is a very cynical and self-serving side of

Perrault, which I think comes out in the book. But he, Also, I really do believe, think he believed many of these things. So he was a true believer of the POW MIA movement, an encourager of its worst and craziest side. And this endeared him and ingratiated him to a lot of veterans, to a lot of people whose experience of the Vietnam War was very bitter, both towards the government who they felt betrayed, possibility of actually winning in Vietnam and stabbed these men in the back and left them to rot. And had a simultaneous resentment against the government. the anti-war movement against the counterculture for also stabbing the men in his back. So it was, it's again, it's the same sort of thing where it's a right-wing and conservative idea, but it's an anti-establishment one. It's a populist one. It's one that feels like the powers that be are in conspiracy against ordinary Americans. I have a guy who lives right down the street who flies the POW flag, and he always has a

perfectly kept lawn, and he has a sign that says this property is protected by a U.S. Marine, and he has a minion that says, I have my eye on you. That's very funny. This is like the mind of a Perot voter probably. Like a despicable me minion, not just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, a minion. And he has his eye on you. Cute and threatening. Dispicable me, Kitch, or whatever it is, like, has really gotten into the right wing in a strange way.

I don't know why. They think it's cute or something. Yeah, it's so random. Yeah. But, yeah, the way that, you know, Ross Barrow endeared himself to a certain subsection of Americans with this essentially conspiracy theory. In 1993, a Senate committee on the issue found that, quote, there was no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in southeast. Asia. Right. But despite that, he's able to, you know, he's able to, like I said, build up his political cachet through not just the conspiracy theory, but like the lunatic wing of this

conspiracy theory. It reminded me of like how Trump kind of burst on the political scene with birtherism. Like here's this, you know, this weird outsider billionaire and then he's calling into like Fox and Friends or whatever to promote something to claim that, you know, the government's lying at you at the highest levels. And he also did like activism. He claimed he was sending investigators to Hawaii to get to the, bottom of things. And there was, I mean, it reminds me as like, well, apparently if you are, if you're just a billionaire, apparently the way to really build up a little bit of political cachet for a political run is through promoting conspiracy theories. Yeah, I think that that's

absolutely right. I think that in a way the birtherism conspiracy theory, I think really, you know, I'm not the first person to say this, but I think, you know, a particular emphasis needs to be made is that that's really the whole root of Trump's politics, which is certain people are not really American citizens, right? You know, and certain people who maybe don't look the way that we think American citizens should look are definitely probably not American citizens. And that's the core of Trump from the beginning. It's, you know, some Americans aren't really Americans. That's the, that's the core of his politics. Sometimes that's racial, sometimes that's ideological, sometimes that's gender, you know, whatever you name it. It kind of mutates around.

But yeah, there's absolutely a parallel that these, it's not even, is it correct to even call them fringe because they have kind of mass constituencies even though they're ignored, but they're a good way to tap into parts of the population that are real constituencies, but don't feel like they have a representative yet. And those are really the kinds of people you want to get going if you're going to say run for president. So Trump employed something I like to call the any weird constituency strategy. So he goes out there and, you know, someone says to John McCain, for example, oh, I think Obama's a Muslim. He says, no, no. Like, he's like, he's a, don't, don't say that sort of thing.

Trump goes, sure, why not? We're going to look into it. And he, everyone who comes up to him, no matter how nuts, he says, he doesn't care. He doesn't believe it or not believe it. He just goes, okay, sounds interesting. Sounds good. You know, I'm looking into it. We're going to, a lot of people are saying it.

You know, and he makes these constituencies, which are not used to be taken seriously and feel very angry and rejected by the mainstream of American society. And he says, oh, this guy's, even if it's not sincere, this guy's listening to us. This guy is on our side. And he becomes a kind of catch-all candidate for a lot of people who just feel bad vibes about mainstream America and have concerns that are not answered to. So you have anti-vaxxers who become very enthusiastic about Trump because Trump just has these anti-establishmentarian vibes. I don't think, I mean, we know Trump actually helped in the development of a vaccine. I'm sure Trump takes every medication that he can get his

hands on. It has no compunctions about it. He's a very mainstream and conventional guy in a lot of ways. But he knows that those sorts of constituencies are important to him. Either, you know, he's been counseled this or he just, I think he just has the instincts of it. These people come to him and he's like, okay, look, these are my people. And I need to make them feel like I take them seriously. So I think that's the way conspiracy works in the Trump campaign. It is a source of discovering previously ignored constituencies. It's a source of keeping people. involved, emotionally invested, creating this narrative of heroics and fear around the candidate. But yeah, you see that for sure in Ross Perrault is doing the same sorts of things, playing around

with the same sorts of energies. So in this period of like the 90s, what exactly, where is Donald Trump doing? I mean, is he like taking mental notes about the forces of this right wing populism or is he like sort of unwittingly surfing this force into the White House? That's a really good question and one that I really don't perhaps have the best answer to. I think that, look, when I went on the Ezra Klein podcast, his researchers found something that I'm actually quite embarrassed to say I didn't know about. But it was really fascinating was Trump goes on Larry King and says, David Duke and Pat Buchanan represent a lot of anger in this country and he's sort of taking notes. And on the other hand, and you're like, oh, so this guy always kind of had his eye on this kind of stuff.

hand, it was in the news. Trump repeats things he hears a lot. He could have just been saying what he heard read in the newspaper or heard on the radio. You know, it was a pretty conventional view. So I wouldn't say, oh, he was a political genius necessarily who, you know, saw that that was the, you know, his end. Okay. With that being said, he was really has been floating around this world of third parties and odd politics for a while, you know, like he was, he tried to use the reform party as a vehicle. So he's, he's a familiar with the Perot movement. You know, he attacked when he was his opponent. He attacked Pat Buchanan.

But he knows what Pat Buchanan's about for many years, you know. And, you know, he becomes associated with the Tea Party movement. So I think that Trump does have a, you know, he's not taking clippings out and he's not reading, you know, magazines, but he has an instinct for this stuff. And he's been around those things and he's been aware of it. So it's something he has observed and he understands the political power of, really. intuitively, I think. I think that Trump is a talented but limited politician. He's very good at figuring out the types of concerns that these people have and getting them very excited and wanting

to go out to vote for them. At the same time, he's not good at saying, okay, I've got a core and a base behind me. Now it's time to change my message to make it palatable to, you know, a more broader stream of Americans. He's always been pretty unpopular. So this ability to speak the language of the fringe for him is a mixed blessing. It gets them all really going, but it makes it really hard for him to fully cross over into the mainstream. You know, Trump, that may change, uh, consider, but, you know, he could get a majority, but he never has, and he's always been quite unpopular. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I, I think that Trump, and if you asked him, you get some kind of uncoherent word salad out of it, like, have you been aware of this? And he would

say probably both yes and no. He said, I don't know. I've never paid attention to to it. And then he go, but, you know, I've been looking at this for a long time. You know, so I don't think he would get a very clear answer out of him. But my suspicion is that he has some awareness of it. He knows it's important for him. Look, I mean, he knows that the constituency of the extreme right is something he can't really totally reject. Like, sometimes he has to step back from it. But he never can say, you know, he had dinner with Nick Fuentes. He says to the proud boy, stand back and standby. He gets that crowd worked up on January 6th. He knows those people are his people, right? He can't say

they're idiots, fuck them. I don't want to have anything to do with him. He can't do that. They know are his people. So I don't know if that's a good answer, but that's the best answer I can give you. I mean, I do feel like one of the major talents that Trump has is the ability to kind of read a room and then know this very

quickly when the message is resonating with people and then double down that message. You get a bigger response. Absolutely. So I was wondering, it's like, as we saw this a lot in like his political rallies. This is probably why he likes his political rally so much. It gives him instant feedback on what he's saying. But I was like, I wonder how long he's been employing the skill to kind of like notice what kind of message is sort of like getting

a rise out of people that may feel otherwise neglected by the establishment. Yeah, I think that's exactly. I mean, he's very, you know, you can see him do it. He like does this thing where he tests out a piece of material and then they don't like it and then he tries something and you can see him kind of light up. The dynamic between, I think this is under comment that about, about it is that Yeah, the dynamic between who's leading who, Trump or the crowd, you know, they have this, they have this symbiotic relationship, which is really fascinating to watch. And they like that he's leading them, but they also like that they can give him feedback. And that makes them feel like he's their leader, you know, in the sense that he is a part of them.

They have this experience talking to him and him talking to them, which is, probably a really transcendent feeling if you're convinced that this guy is, you know, here to save the world in the United States. Again, the interaction with a figure like that and having that experience with a leader like that, you got to bring up fascism because that is very much what the crowd experiences with the fascist leader, which is a kind of oneness or a sense that this guy we're in a corporate body with this guy and he's a he's leading our movement but he also represents us more wholly than anybody has before so there's this organic relationship between trump and his crowds which i think is a little under commented on i mean other politicians

they they trot out they have a material given to them but they're not doing this kind of it's almost like a comedian or a dj right who's getting stuff from the crowd and then altering his material as he goes on the fly And, you know, that's, you know, comes from his background in entertainment and show business. But, yeah, it's a different way of practicing politics than, say, going up there. And, you know, you can always tell when he's reading a teleprompter, he gets kind of bored. And he's just like, da, da, da, da, da, da. And he really has a lot more fun when he can just kind of riff with the crowd and say shit.

And they go, yeah, and he's like, yeah, we love boats, don't we folk? You know, like, some of it seems really, it's not all, we hate black people, we hate minorities. It's often like kind of banal and silly things. You know, he's reading the menu from talking about boats and sharks and reading the menu from the cheesecake factory because it's folksy, you know, it's what these, it's what his crowds also are like, they feel like he relates to them. Now, in actual point of fact, I'm sure he thinks they're absolutely disgusting idiots, but he can make them feel like he really cares and likes them and enjoys their company

and enjoys this, this communion that he's having with them. And I think that's also why Trump, even though he's not a religious man, he's quite profane, why people who are religious and have that experience in church see in him a religious kind of figure because he's preaching and channeling the spirit in the same way, even though that spirit is him talking like a gangster and not talking about the Lord or whatever. But he does similar things as a preacher, you know. Yeah, I mean, they've also been conditioned to accept figures like Joel Austin, you know, these kind of megachurch grifters. who do have ostentatious wealth and are kind of walking contradictions. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And I don't think those contradictions bother them. I think that they view themselves. I mean, this is my snobiest liberal elite view of Trump voters. Forgive me. Is that a not insignificant number of them believe that they will magically get rich

through proximity to him because he represents wealth, right? And he represents richness, success and being in his presence supporting him means that that will somehow shower down on them as well. And that's the same kind of thing with this prosperity gospel business and all these, you know, grifter preacher, mega church preachers. It's like, well, you know, maybe if I listen to them, I'll get rich too. And, you know, Trump basically does nothing to dissuade people. He's like, yeah, we're never going to stop winning. So I think a non-insignificant a number of people just think that Trump equals success.

and that by being close to him, by supporting him, by worshipping him in a way, which is really sad and strange, they will receive a measure of that back. I want to get your take on Q&ON as it relates to the history of the kind of right-wing populism. Because to me, like, Q&ON is like, it feels like the end point of right-wing populism as most hallucinatory. Because it doesn't just say that the political and cultural elites are corrupt and self-serving, which is, you know, pretty defensible stance. says instead that they're all satanic pedophiles. It doesn't just argue that, you know, that

a charismatic, a charismatic politician should get around the lying media. It says that the lying media will all be executed at Gitmo for their lives. I mean, it has the same kind of like resentments and promises of, of right-wing populism, but it's just taken to this incredible fantasy level. Yeah, that is really fascinating. It's really interesting. I've been thinking about that too. Like the pedophilia stuff is so intensely hateful and violent and disgusting and fearful. And it's a little different from the P-O-W-M-I-A stuff, which is comparatively kind of benign. Why does it go to that? The fantasies reach those fever pitches. I don't know. I think that perhaps as the sense of alienation intensifies the feelings of the absolute, the absolute malign nature

of those felt to be in charge also intensifies. So the less you know what's going on, the more the world feels out of control, the more you want to believe or you have the need to believe that it's run by absolute monsters like that. That being said, you know, I think there's also some sort of weird displacement

that's going on because child sexual abuse is something that happens a lot. It usually happens in the context of people, not these elites. I mean, they might be local elites like people who are trusted, priest, so on and so forth. You know, our parents or relatives, this abuse happens a lot, but this being displaced, this issue is like being displaced on these kind of fantasy figures

instead of being like, well, this is a communal problem. They're like, no, these evil people outside do those sorts of things. It's not that like, dude, child abuse is something that's very real and quotidian and banal, unfortunately. It's not very far away. It's not in the White House. It's in people's homes. So I don't know. It's really tough one. I, I, I, It's quite fascinating, and I do think Q&N on is an acceleration of some of the things I've talked about. You don't see much pedophilia discourse, at least in the literature I encounter. There is a little bit of it, and it's in this way. You know, Woody Allen comes up as a figure in the culture wars, right, at this time.

And right-wingers say about Woody Allen, look, this is what liberals are like. You know, they have this weird menagerie of multicultural children. They're doing kind of incest things. God knows what they're up to. And they try to use this as an attack on the Democrats. And a lot of some, you know, more people on the, on the right fringe of the Republican Party and Conservatives really want Bush to go after Woody Allen. And Bush's campaign is like, you sound crazy.

We're not going to do that. And like, we're not going to do that. So there is the beginning of that. It's funny now because, you know, I mean, not probably. I don't think most people in like middle America give that much of a shit about Woody Allen. But like a lot of right winger urbanites and centrist urbanites are like, Woody Allen did nothing wrong. You know, like it's strange to see that his.

case has shifted from from life left to right over the years. But yeah, you begin to see some hints that like, oh, the left is about sexual impropriety. The liberals are about sexual impropriety. But these vast conspiracy theories of abuse, no, not so much. And at least not that I was able to see. Yeah, you know, I always felt like at least part of the reason why QAnon was able to take a foothold in some parts of the conspiracies, right, is because Trump failed to move on his promises, you know? It's like he promised to lock her up and drain the swamp. And that just didn't look like it was happened. And if like in order to resolve that cognitive dissonance, I mean, you have, you have a couple options. You can either, you know, accept the fact that maybe, you know,

Trump's a bullshitter. And maybe it didn't mean what he was saying. Or you can, you can believe the fact that it is happening, but it's happening in secret. And it's actually more horrible than you could possibly imagine. It's going to, it's going to be such a dramatic reveal once like all your political enemies are swept away and taken to, you know, some CIA black site. Well, and like in a similar vein, like you were talking when we were talking about Nixon, you know, how I think it was Buchanan who saw that as like, you know, a coup and that Nixon should have, you know, run this counter coup. Right. Which brings up the point is like, that's what the base wants now for Trump, you know, especially given this trial. They want him, you know, if he gets elected, to imprison

all of his enemies. And, and now it's not just Pat Buchanan whispering it into his ear. It's, it's the entire base as well as other, you know, right-wing politicians. So, yeah, it's like, how worried are we, you know, for that? Because it seems like at this point, that's about the only thing that would, you know, satisfy his base to a certain degree. Yeah, I think, like, yeah, there are a lot of people who just wanted him to kill liberals, essentially. But I do think, like, where this also gets into territory where you have to talk about fascism and Nazism is that these internal enemies are no longer realistic, but completely phantismatic, hold a completely phantasmatic role in, you know, this ideology, right? So it's not like, yeah, like these people are doing anything in particular that's evil or negative.

It's that they stand for something almost extremely abstract and something that these people have trouble. They're like, they just hate them. They just hate them. And they must be doing something evil, just the most evil possible thing. And they stand behind, they stand behind everything, right? It's not always anti-Semitic, but it often goes in that direction. But it is structurally anti-Semitic in the sense that it posits this really all-powerful force, right, that's fucking everything up and making your life miserable and taking away what's yours and it's coming after your children. And I think that there's a really fascinating theorist who tries to look at what anti-Semitism, how that worked in Nazi ideology.

And basically what he says is, well, it's almost like everything that's bad about the capitalist system. You can't reject capitalism. You like property. You like businessmen. You like owners. But capitalism is a very alienating and difficult system to live under. It's, you know, constantly faces you with this abstract form of domination where you don't have control over your life, where you're completely at the whims of the market and some impersonal abstract forces after you. And it kind of embodies that abstract force in something more imaginable.

So instead of being like, oh, the forces of capital are driving us in these different directions, it's this evil goblin creature holding the strings, you know? And I think it is a way people have a mistakenly conceiving or fetishizing what their actual experience of living in a capital society is, which is, yeah, it's, you know, what is this weird engine that's driving us and makes us need to work. makes our lives fail and makes our society so competitive and cutthroat, and we can drop through the cracks. And, you know, every day it feels like we're losing something that we loved and value to the ravages of time just because the market is moving. So I think it's a way for people to deal with that. And that's very hard to get your mind around, that there's some kind of, the way that we've set up the economy, the way that the whole world system is set up is highly violent and aggressive to both our physical and mental states at all times. So it's much

easier to convert that into some kind of fantasy figure that's like a person, right? Or imagine personality. That's one way of looking at it. And one that I find kind of persuasive. I don't know about you guys, but it definitely sometimes feels like you're kind of talking about capitalism, but in a very strange way. You know, like that's kind of what I see in a lot of these conspiracy theories. Yep, that's the show. Yeah. Right. So the book is When the Clock Broke Conman Conspiracists and how America cracked up in the early 1990s pick it up. There was a lot more in there. We simply were not possibly, not possibly get into in this conversation.

But I certainly will never think about the early 90s or the forces that gave rise to Trump in quite the same way. John Gantz, where can people find more of your work? Well, I've got my substack newsletter on Popular Front. Yeah, so if you found this interesting, please subscribe. I try to write twice a week, and the book will be out quite soon. And you can find me also. Sometimes I'll be in magazines and newspapers you might read. I still do that. So yeah. Thank you so much for having me. This was a real blast. And yeah, I really hope you guys, I mean, it seems like you guys enjoyed the book, which is just great to hear. And I think your listeners are going to get a real kick out of it. It used to be the Mario Brothers, and then it was the Mario World, because the globalists took over. Yeah, the globals took over it. And all of a sudden, there's a Wario, there's a Waluigi. There's a Wario.

Who's the, who are these guys? These guys don't seem like they're from here. I'm surrounded by all of these squid. There's a lot of floating squid, and I'm going into a pipe, and I'm coming out, and I'm coming out in a musical area. Okay, there's a lot of luck and a very musical area, but a lot of people are, Not going into the pipes, they're staying up top. In fact, they're going up even higher. They're climbing the beanstock and getting all the way up,

and there's a man with glasses, and he lives in a cloud, and he's going to give me all of the coins. Can you do a trumpet on Echo the Dolphin? Echo the Dolphin is very unfair game. One of the most difficult games for the Sega Genesis. I always saw in the trailers they had him fighting a giant octopus, and I always, of course, I want to Echo the Dolphin, get to the octopus, but you could never get to the octopus.

You could never barely jump over that one island. You had to wait, and the other dolphins would have to push you, and eventually you would turn the game off, and you would go back to Togem and Earl and find the secret level, where you could lay in the hot tub with the babes, which is all I like to do is To Jam, and sometimes Earl, but mostly Togem.

And we would lay in the hot tubs with the babes. My favorite Toadjam and Earl level is the one where you get to repeal the Glass Stiegel Act. Thank you for listening to another episode of the QA podcast. You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and sub for five bucks a month. Great deal. It ain't going up, even with Bidenflation. And you'll get a whole second episode every week,

plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes and all of our mini-series. And for everything else, we've got a website, QAAA podcast.com. Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless and keep you. We have auto-kewed content based on your preferences. Got to go.

Hey, guy, you're the first serious gamer I've seen all morning. Check this out. Brand new 16-eat-bit Super Nintendo and Super Mario World. Wow! What's this one? Oh, this is a Sonic the hedgehog from Sega Genesis. Hey, look at these radical colors, huh? Wow, Sonic's fast, too.

No, over here. I like Genesis, and it costs a lot less. Wait kid, that game there. Sonic and Genesis. I knew that. Sonic the Hedgehog, more action, more speed. Sega Genesis, it's a whole lot more for less.