The Bulwark Podcast - Tim Miller: Be Happy, Make Babies

Episode Date: March 10, 2023

People not having kids because of climate change anxiety are not thinking about a future with Josh Hawley having 100 babies. Plus, sad CPAC, the least charismatic politician among us, and Fox stars in private sound like The Bulwark Podcast. Tim Miller's back with Charlie Sykes for the weekend pod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy Friday and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I am Charlie Sykes, joined by my colleague Tim Miller on what I think, Tim, is an against-the-odds podcast today. Okay. Please tell me. Okay, so we had this massive snowstorm here in Wisconsin, which, by the way, is not breaking news. It's March. It's Wisconsin. This is one of those massively heavy snowstorms. I mean, yes, heavy snowstorm, but also very heavy snow.

So it's sitting on the trees and breaking off branches, causing trees to fall down. So when my alarm went off this morning, we had no power in the house, no power in the entire neighborhood, no Wi-Fi, no nothing, absolutely nothing. And I think the last time something like this happened, we were out for like 12 hours. So I'm thinking, I don't know, going to be able to do the podcast. So the miracle of, you know, Wisconsin energy, I guess, that we are back up. Although, I will tell you, you know what my day is going to consist of? Walking around picking up broken fallen branches and an epic snow blow that will probably take me an hour and a half. If you never hear from me again, it's that.

Charlie, I went to see a Ron DeSantis speech a couple weeks ago, and he's been discussing about how a lot of people, you know, in your generation, let's say, are moving to Florida, you know, and how they've got a lot of folks that are coming down there now. And, you know, maybe you don't love Florida, but I was in Tucson the other weekend. Tucson seems very nice. They have a not insane governor.

Tucson is like Wisconsin South, though. Yeah, I bumped into two Charlie Sykes fans while I was in Tucson. Two. And one was from Madison, and one was from some other city I'd never heard of, Maquoketa or something. The snowbirds is a real thing. Something for you to consider. Well, that's true.

I actually don't mind snowblowing. I mean, this is kind of a dirty secret. You get a sense of accomplishment. I mean, just take my word for it. I mean, you're a California guy, but take my word for it. There is something about it. Although, when it gets to be 10 inches, and it's really, really heavy, you're dealing with heart attack weather here, and it's going to take forever to do my driving.

Can I revise and extend my remark really quick? Sure. One of the two Charlie Sykes fans actually was a Charlie Sykes hater who's come around on you. Well, there are people who go both ways. I was one longtime fan and then one former hater turned fan. That's pretty good, but both in Tucson, on the street, just walking down the street.

You're just walking down the street and they go, yo, Tim Miller. Tim Miller, yeah. We're from Wisconsin. Old Charlie Sykes fans. Happened two separate times in Tucson. That's a lot of knowledge there. I have a ton of stuff I want to talk to you about. It feels like this has been a really busy week

and maybe we're all tuckered out on Fox News and I want to talk to you about this what I think is the cognitive dissonance in a new poll from Florida about Ron DeSantis and his agenda, but I wanted to start with this. I have to say, I loved

You're Not My Party this week, where you take on the doom and gloomers, including one Taylor Lorenz, who is a young woman on the staff of the Washington Post and absolutely miserable. Could I just play like the first minute and a half of this? Then I want to talk about the people who have just decided that everything has gone to hell, that we live in a hellscape. Let me just play you for yourself, Tim Miller. It's too late to reverse climate change. Having my regular meltdown and realizing I'm never going to escape capitalism.

Income inequality is worse now than it was during the French Revolution. And I don't know how to make a guillotine. Okay, Doomer. Here's another idea. Make babies and be happy. Oh, behave. This is not my party. Brought to you by The Bulwark.

This week, I wanted to take a little break from the news cycle to discuss a disturbing idea I've seen from progressives on social media. It's called Doomerism. Doomerism. Wikipedia defines Doomers as people who are extremely pessimistic or fatalistic about global problems like overpopulation and climate change. The end of times. Internet culture commentator Taylor Lorenz encapsulated this ideology by tweeting the

other day, the teens are unhappy because we are living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic with record inequality, zero social safety net, job security as climate change cooks the world. That is bleak. She concludes that you have to be delusional to look at life in our country right now and have any hope or optimism. Depressing. Well, color me delusional then from our miracle vaccines to our decently sturdy social safety net to our record low unemployment almost all our critiques about society are wrong you are wrong and if you think 2023 america is a hellscape may i suggest you go out get some ice cream touch grass maybe see a show you need to chill a little just a little so this is the bright and sunny side of tim mill Miller that we should all show and look around and go, guys, it is not the end of the world.

But the kid stuff really bugs me is why I did it. That we shouldn't have kids. It has consequences, right? Yeah. And that's the second part of the episode. That's the part that gets me. People listen to this podcast. We all have concerns.

I have concerns. I think it's okay to be alarmed about various threats to democracy. It's okay to be alarmed about the climate. But when we start to do two things with kids, one is just saddle them with grown-up neuroses and anxiety to the point that we're saying it's okay for teenagers to be depressed at an unprecedented scale, really, if you look at the numbers, because of the climate. I think that that's the grown-ups doing a bad job, right? Because there have always been problems.

It's climate change. The issues that Taylor lists, some of those are just not true. But others of them that are legitimate are not that different, or in some cases, better than problems in past generations. And this leads to choices. The next part of the episode that I get to is i saw several people not just her ezra klein wrote about this to ray tweeted about this several others have seen prominent progressive commentators about how either they or people in their lives are not having kids

because they're worried about this this is lun lunacy. This is bad. This is algorithm-induced psychosis. If you don't want to have kids because that's a choice that you're making, that's fine. If you don't want to have kids because you think that your one child is going to make or break difference on the sea level rising, that's crazy. Ezra Klein and his friends should be having lots of kids

because hopefully it's one of those kids that gets us over the edge on nuclear fusion so we can actually fix these problems. Or hopefully one of those kids that solve the problems of the future. If all the smart people are just sniffing their own farts and riddled with anxiety to such a degree that they can't have children, and Josh Hawley's out there having 100 kids, the math out there isn't really working. That's kind of the subtext there. These are not just anecdotes. I mean, you cite that recent poll of 16 to 25-year-olds show that, you know, 39% of them are uncertain whether to have kids.

Because of climate and those issues. The question he gets most from readers is, should I have kids given the climate crisis? So, you say, you know, look, there are well-intentioned worry warts, but I love your phrase, algorithm-induced mass psychosis. There's real evidence that the kids are not necessarily all right right now, that they are depressed. Now, is that because of this or is it just kind of a pandemic hangover? Is it just, I mean, how do you sort all of this out? Have we really convinced kids that there is no future? It is all doom or gloom?

I don't think it's helping. I saw on the phone side of the argument here as being a big problem, just the peer comparison that is required based on social media. And there's been a lot of research on this, just general, you know, phone addiction, general awareness of too much. Like we weren't wired as humans to know every single one of our classmates' internal thoughts and, you know, ideas and private life, right? Like, it's just, it's too much. It's overload. You know, I saw something yesterday that was 51% of young women

who identify as liberal also have been diagnosed for having some kind of mental health issue. What do we, you know, pull out from that that is unique about young women right now? And it's phones, it's Instagram, right? To me, that's it. And Taylor was rebutting this when she sent the tweet. Like, her tweet was like, oh, you know, all these white guys like Tim. She wasn't specifically picking on me because I hadn't said anything yet, but it was other people in my cohort, you know, are saying that it's phones when really it's all these other actual real issues that have people depressed. And it's kind of like, I don't think that that's true.

And if the answer is the social safety net, then why aren't we seeing more depression among people on Medicaid in Kentucky, right? Like, why weren't we seeing more depression among folks in the 70s during stagflation? There have been plenty of eras where the economy is worse than it is now. This is like a reality check. You know, thank God that people in during the 1930s and the 1940s and the 1950s did not have the same mentality. Because, you know, you may forget, you know, back in that day, you were concerned about nuclear annihilation. I mean, there's always been something out there, right? But there does seem to be this, the doom and gloom. So, your take on this. So, rather than doom and gloom, your advice is go forth and try to make shit better.

Enjoy all the bounty and the beauty in the world. And when you find the right he, she, or they, go ahead and make a baby with them. Making a baby is great. I wish I could make more. I can't. I've been trying, but it's not working. But if you can, if it's working for you, you should make babies. Babies are great.

They are great. And they're also an investment in the future, aren't they? Yeah, we need them. JVL wrote a pretty good book about this, What to Expect When You're Not Expecting. The demographic pyramid issues are real. And we could solve some of this with immigration, but we're not doing immigration anymore either. And so, we have real problems. It isn't good for society, just on balance. We can look at Japan, we can look at other societies like this, we can look at China setting down this path. It isn't good for a society when the balance of the demographic

pyramid is off to such a degree that there are a lot of old people and not very young people. Like that is not good for the society's future economic growth. If you're worried about economic issues, Taylor, it's not good for the dynamism of the society. There are a lot of downstream negative effects from that. And so, you know, I mean, like there's a reason we should be trying to have 2.2 kids per couple. So, I'm failing on this front. So, I guess I'm a little bit throwing a rock from my glass house. But, again, I have no judgment of people that decide that parenting is not for them or whatever. Like, my concern is that we are creating this fake narrative that our society is on this inexorable path to destruction.

And so, people shouldn't have kids because it's, like, good for the world to not have kids. Like that is not true. Like our society needs kids. We need young people to replenish the population and to actually go and do work. So we have, you know, when we're old, so we have people creating, you know, economic value and having kids is good for your mental health. Like having kids is a blessing and lovely. It's the best thing that's happened to me. And so this notion that people who want to have kids or who might want to have kids shouldn't because like they're worried about climate change

in 40 years is lunacy, right? I mean, it's lunacy and I care about climate. Yeah, I mean, shots fired. You went after what you call the bunch of neurotic fatalists who want to make us so riddled with anxiety that we don't go out and do anything. So what kind of blowback have you gotten? Have you gotten any yet?

I mean, what's it like? I mean, basically your neurotic fatalists feel the need to share their neuroses with people rather aggressively. Yeah, I had the Snapchat crowd on the nose, actually. Who is the target audience for this, right? I've heard from a lot of, like, teenaged, you know, guys in college, mostly who are like, thank you. It's so weird that everyone around me is like, so wound so tight about all this. And it is true to their experience in their in classes and college, etc. So I've heard positive feedback from them. And some of the other social media outlets, I've heard critiques

from people who I'm usually with you, Tim, but society is terrible, and the climate thing is terrible, and our social safety net is terrible, and income inequality is terrible. And I kind of want to say to them, like, yeah, I get it. Like, this was not an episode that is everything is rainbows and unicorns. Everything is perfect. Like, our social safety net isn't impenetrable. Like, the point is that if you look at the broad scope of history, like, our current economic condition and our current social safety net is pretty good compared to where it has been. That doesn't mean it's good or it's great or it's perfect, but comparatively, hunger's down, illiteracy's down, child mortality's down, child poverty's down. We're in a much better situation than we've been in the past. And so it's pretty strange

that when you look at these charts you can look at these charts together it's like all of these indicators of things that should cause human misery are all going down while people saying that their personal misery is going up and to me like that is a social cultural issue and maybe you know there might be some value in kind of assessing what we're doing to young people to make them feel like their misery is up when all of the objective measures would indicate that it should be down. Yes, but unfortunately, so many of the doomers who are too depressed to have children or to get out of bed in the morning are never too depressed to tweet.

I'm not going to judge anybody for tweeting too much. All right. Now that's hitting a little too close to home, Charlie. Okay. So I want you to explain something to me as a political professional, because I am perhaps irrationally interested in this new poll out of the University of North Florida. Got some very good news for Rhonda Santus and some bad news for Ron DeSantis. And I'm going to put this in the box of cognitive dissonance. You know, the one I'm talking about. This is the one that shows him just destroying Donald Trump in a head-to-head Republican primary, 59 to 28, you know, in a more crowded field. DeSantis, this is Florida Republicans, not surprising, I suppose, but still impressive. DeSantis gets 52%, Trump gets only 27%, and then everybody else is like at 4%, 3%, 2%,

Mike Pence is at 2%. So, pretty good news for Ron DeSantis. They like him personally, okay? However, this is where we get to the mixed message. They also polled some of the hot- hot button culture war stuff that he is pushing. And the numbers are kind of staggering. Floridians may be moving red, but they're not all in on the right wing agenda. So, for example, when they ask, what about legislation that would ban critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion programs on university campuses?

Sixty one percent of Florida voters oppose that. They're against that. 77% of Floridians oppose this crazy idea to allow concealed carry without a permit or a license. 77% say they think this is a terrible idea, including 62% among Republicans. Okay, so one more here. When they ask, you know, Florida voters, how do you feel about the six-week abortion ban that may come to Ron DeSantis' desk and that he will sign, 75% oppose it, including more than 60% of Republicans. So can you, like, just parse this out for me, Tim? They like DeSantis, but I have real questions about how the DeSantis agenda is going to scale

up and it's going to play when you have these kinds of numbers in his own backyard. Well, Charlie, humans are complicated. Yes, right. It was a striking poll for sure. Really quick on the politics of it. It is legitimately good news for DeSantis. A lot of people forget this. A lot of people want to cite the 2016 race, Trump's victory as being, you know, mostly due to the circular fighting squad among the 16 of us that were running against him. But in Florida, Trump ran basically head to head against

Rubio. John Kasich stubbornly stayed in. Rubio and Cruz cut a deal where Cruz stopped, you know, when focused on some other states that were running that day. So it was basically head to head against help state Rubio. And Trump crushed him. I don't have the number in front of me. I think it was by 20. Umpteen. Yeah, it was brutal. That was the end for him. So for that to be inverted for DeSantis Trump, now obviously the campaign hasn't started yet, et cetera, et cetera, that's a legit sign that something is different from 2016 versus 2024 as far as beating the bad orange man.

So there's something to be said for that. Yes. Now the poll itself on the issues versus the DeSantis popularity, this extends beyond, so you listed guns, abortion, and the DEI. The DEI was the most encouraging number for me. CRT. CRT, yeah. CRT, DEI, like these sort of bands and colleges. Because I just wasn't sure. To me, it was kind of like Don't Say Gay, where I was like, on its face, I think it's illiberal and horrible. You know, it's easy to do a bumper sticker, you know, thing about how, you know, we don't want our schools teaching kids to be racist. You know, we don't want to sexualize our children. Like,

those are easy bumper stickers, and rebutting them is a little more complicated. So, I was disillusioned when the Don't Say Gay bill ended up pulling pretty well. I'm happy to see the inverse happening here on the DEICRT bans. So, you know, that's good news. But at least the question, okay, well, then why is DeSantis popular at all, right? And this extends, by the way, to weed legalization, which is popular in the state. 70% of Florida voters want to legalize recreational weed. Yeah. And Florida had a ballot initiative. I don't think it was this time. It was in 20 or 18, about $15 minimum wage that passed overwhelmingly. So, it's like, what do people want, right? You don't want the abortion ban, you don't want the crazy constitutional carry, you don't want the DEI bans and schools and CRT

bans. You do want legal weed and you do want $15 minimum wage, but you want Ron DeSantis over Joe Biden. Like, why? An element of this is Florida has a lot of, we talked about the snowbirds at the top of this podcast, like Florida has a lot of these kind of MAGA, socially liberal people that lived in Long Island and moved to Florida, right? Like, so there's this some element of this where it's not Alabama. Okay, it's like, it's a different type of Republican a little bit, that DeSantis is attractive. I think that the economic situation in Florida is real. I know that this always drives JVL crazy. It's like, why doesn't Joe Biden get credit for this? But I think that people besides inflation, feel pretty good about job availability, housing as compared to other states, etc. in Florida.

I think that, again, I don't agree with this, but from a vibe standpoint, people felt good about DeSantis kind of being vindicated on the COVID thing. I don't find it that he's been vindicated. I think he dabbled way too far with the anti-vax stuff. But I think that there were certain things like the beaches, etc. that stick in your head, right? Like he was right about, right? Like we didn't need to have bans on beaches. Probably we should have had people, we should have been encouraging people to go to the beaches, really. So, I just think that the kind of economic COVID leadership, like there's this sense among your kind of soft Republican in the state that he did a good job and that what is happening in the blue states was overbearing. And that is, I guess, how I would answer it. We might need to see a

Sarah Longwell focus group down there to really dig deeper on this, this disconnect. But in a national campaign, like you're saying, like things get very different, right? You know, if you pass this constitutional carry, the six-week abortion ban, for example, that are two-thirds or three-quarters against you, and you have 100 million in paid ads come down on your head on it, you know, all of a sudden, the voter that is less entrenched in one side, that is a little bit more low information, you know, some of that stuff starts to come into focus a little differently. I will say that just one more thing. We had a test on this. Kemp and Abbott both passed very unpopular abortion bans and won overwhelmingly. So there clearly is a voter that is attracted

at some level to the MAGA Republican leadership that disagrees on the abortion and that it's not enough to get them to change their vote. There's also the question of candidate quality. And I know we're now going into tricky, you know, area, you know, and you made this point. I mean, you know, in Texas, Beto O'Rourke was probably not the man for the hour. Charlie Crist was, you know, clearly flawed candidate against Ron DeSantis. So I guess the question is, have Democrats succeeded in capitalizing on these vulnerabilities? It seems that their messaging hasn't lined up with these cracks. Yeah, if you dump Josh Shapiro into all those states, what happens?

I would love to do that. I wish we could just have eight Earths and test everything out. Does Josh Shapiro win in Florida or Georgia or Texas? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Probably not. Probably not. More competitive though.

Yeah. Crime is another issue. I mentioned the economy and COVID. I think crime is another thing. Like Shapiro was really good on all this, right? Like he, you know, this shouldn't be that hard, right? But for some reason it is for politicians across the board. But, you know, Shapiro tried to neutralize vulnerabilities. You know, he did a little bit of punching left on the crime issue, right,

to demonstrate that he was going to be tough on that while really going at, you know, Mastriano on being a lunatic on democracy, but also on abortion and some of these other social issues in the suburbs and running up his numbers there. So, you know, could that have been done in Georgia with a different candidate than Stacey Abrams? Could that have been done in Florida? You know, I think that that's an open question. But clearly, DeSantis had some vulnerabilities that Charlie Crist didn't do a very good job of prosecuting. You mentioned the crime issue. And as we know, there are a lot of progressives who are really, really angry that Joe Biden has pivoted on the crime issue.

I'm going to describe it as a pivot, signaling he was going to sign the legislation that would overturn the District of Columbia's new crime bill, which, of course, had a lot, a lot of stuff in it. But it included, and this would attract a lot of attention, lowering the penalty for carjacking. And he basically said, look, I'm going to go along with all this. He knew this was going to be a huge Republican talking point. I thought it was very interesting this week that the vote in the Senate overturned that was 81 to 14 or something like the vast majority of Democrats went along with all of this. So here you have, once again, the acknowledgement that Joe gets it, that if you want to, you know, go into 2024, you know, in a competitive way, you have to move to the center on a couple of these issues, including crime,

including immigration. Progressives are furious about it. But these were two significant liabilities the Democrats had going into next year. And Joe Biden is figuring, hey, you know, I'm going to give you progressives a lot of goodies in this budget. I mean, this is like a festival of progressivism. But in order for me to move left on these fiscal issues, I have to take some of these other issues off the table. And I am not going to be the soft on-crime candidate in 2024. What did you think about that? Yeah, I think he had a lot of cover. Like, Biden's comfortable space on crime has always been, he is a police guy, right? I mean, you know, how many police funerals has Biden spoken at over his 100 years in office?

You know, he is kind of comfortable with the Black kind of mayor, that sort of, you know, Eric Adams type, right? Like, that's a comfortable spot for him. Like, he's dealt with a lot of, you know, folks in like majority minority cities, you know, who put mayors who come from the machine, right? And this is the mayor of DC was against this, actually, the city council supported over our objection. And so, I just think that he was in a comfortable space for Biden to oppose this. And like you said, since there was so much stuff in there, some good stuff, by the way, you know, on criminal justice reform, but some stuff that just at least sounded really bad, which maybe, you know, shouldn't be how we judge everything. But for the Democrats on an issue that's very vulnerable, lowering the penalty for carjackings

is just a really bad talking point, right? And you just don't want to give folks. So, I think Biden was in his comfort zone on opposing this. And, you know, if you can take this model, and I wrote about this, right? This idea of, you know, we're going to be tougher on guns, but also be more supportive of police. That is a place that Biden's comfortable. And in Colorado, I'm writing an article for Monday about what happened to Colorado, how it got so blue. And, you know, Polis right now is pushing forward. The governor, Jared Polis. Yeah, the governor. He had this 21-year gun ban, like strengthening the red flag laws. I just think that there's a lot of space here, you know, for Democrats to maintain popularity,

to support criminal justice reform, to support like pretty not gun grabbing stuff, but some pretty strict gun regulations. And also, you know, also not circle the drain of where some in the party want them to go on police abolition or whatever. I'm glad you brought up Colorado because, you know, there's a lot of attention on a lot of these states that have drifted off and become solidly red. You know, Florida and Ohio now solidly in the red category. Iowa, which used to be a swing state, now very, very red. But the flip side of that is, look what's happening in Pennsylvania. Look what's happening in Michigan. Look what's happening in Colorado or Arizona or a lot of these states where, in fact, the Democrats are scoring victories in areas that they had never performed that well in because you have

these swing voters, and they do exist, who are being alienated. And I kind of wonder, that's why I was, you know, asking about the DeSantis thing. I don't see that Ron DeSantis reverses these trends, at least in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan. I don't know about Arizona. I mean, Arizona has just gone completely crazy. Okay, so you and I have not spoken since you went to CPAC and had a wild and wonderful adventure, including, I have to say, I absolutely loved your face-to-face conversation with Carrie

Lake, who made fun of your clothes. How old are you? 41. You dress like a 13-year-old. My mother was like, I got to say, yeah, she was was like i think you got the better of her but i gotta admit she had a point i was like mom ouch yeah carrie went at me i was happy that i could make my time useful because i wanted to be with you going toe-to-toe with john bolton we both had our had kind of spirited conversations if you will can you put it that way i loved your john bolton conversation the podcast has been great all week, actually. But yeah, Carrie and I had a little discussion. And I wanted to go, I had hoped that we were going to have more time together, but she stormed off after she made fun of my age. But I had a couple of things I wanted to get out. And the very first thing, which was the only one I could get to, was mocking her a little bit, yelling at her and being like you're lying you're lying it's not true it's not fraud like it has some limited value in my opinion at this point like everybody knows it's false everyone knows she's lying you know so i have not listened to the medley podcast is the one i haven't gotten to yet so maybe i should have listened to that before talking to

carrie and got some tips on on cornering her but the strategy I decided to go with was kind of in a mocking way, gently being like, you know, is it possible that you just lost because you told McCain voters to go to hell? Like, is it maybe, have you maybe considered this alternate explanation that it wasn't the machines, you know, and that it wasn't some nefarious cabal of neocons and neoliberals in the deep state that worked together to stop you and that really you just lost the campaign because you had a really stupid strategy of turning off the voters of people that had won the state before, like John McCain and Jeff Flake and Doug Ducey. And so we kind of went back and forth on that. And you could see the wheels turn in her

brain a little bit, but she was not giving an inch on the point. Give me your overall take on CPAC, because, I mean, obviously it was a Trump festival. You talked about the sad vibe of the event. It felt like it was very diminished. A lot of people who had been there in the past were not there. You know, Heritage is not there. You know, the TPUSA Charlie Kirk people apparently were not there. Fox was not there. Was the NRA there? No, I didn't see them, actually. You know, the TPUSA Charlie Kirk people apparently were not there. Fox was not there. Was the NRA there? No, I didn't see them, actually. You've been to these things before, right? Yeah, I mean, I hadn't been since 16. So, like, I had not really been during the MAGA heyday. So, this was my first time since during the 16 primary. Yeah. So, what is your overall take? I mean, how much of it is, it did look sad. It really did look diminished. On the other hand, you know, Donald Trump got out of it what he wanted to get out of it.

So where are we at with CPAC, you know? Yeah, it was really sad. I hope if people haven't read my diary, I hope that they would enjoy that. I wrote a pretty enjoyable diary, I think, kind of mocking the proceedings. So it was sad. It was smaller. The question then is, okay, so what? Like, the reality is we i don't

think that we'll have a good answer about that till next year which is why i decided to just do a silly little withering diary about about the nature of cpac rather than try to you know make broad prognostications about it because because here's the thing we know that it has gotten smaller the energy wasn't quite as there though though the people that were still there were like the core of the crazy and wanted all Trump, and he wins the straw poll by 50 points almost. I was surprised, by the way, that he didn't get 90% of the vote. Yeah, yeah, right.

The question is, okay, why? And there are a couple of potential reasons for why. Maybe, as we saw in that poll in Florida, there's a significant amount of Republican voters who are just kind of ready to change the channel for the Trump show, you know? And they like him still, and they had fun. And it was a good decade. But you know, they want a new program. It's season nine, and they're bored. Maybe that's maybe that's what's happening. Maybe the Matt Schlapp controversy, you know, led people to be

like, I don't know that I want to pay $300 to go into the slush fund of this guy that is allegedly pummeling another conservative man's penis against their will. Fumbling junk, yeah. Junk fumbling. The other thing is there's a lot of options here. The America Fest that I went to in Phoenix that I wrote about in December was not sad, really.

It was kind of scary, actually. And there was a ton of energy there. Many more people, I mean, I'm ballparking it, but to my eye, many more people were there. And so now you have, CPAC used to be this thing when I went in 2016, where it's like this one gathering where you had the crazies there, but the establishment was also there because they felt like they had to work.

You know, they felt like we had to butter up the crazies. I wrote a book about this. And, you know, so you had the whole panoply of the party all gathering. Well, now it's like, well, you've got Turning Point USA. They're like eight CPACs a year now. You know, they have one in different parts of the country. And Hungary. Yeah, and Hungary. Yeah, the whole party is a CPAC, right? And so, like, actually,

it's just the same level of crazy is just dispersed among more places, right? And so, it could be any of those things. I hope it's category one of people ready to change the channel from Trump. But I just I don't think that we can really be certain about that until we get deeper into the into the primary and see what it's like when Trump's out there, you know, trying to put his own crowds together. In your piece, you quoted Rick Wilson, who was sitting in for you on the podcast last weekend, comparing the event to a collapsing neutron star. It's smaller, it's hotter, it's more intensely crazy. Yeah, I thought that was good. Which I think is pretty, that was good. So my favorite line in your piece, I mean,

there's so many good ones, but the description of Rick Scott speaking to the event, it didn't sound like it went very well. Your description of Rick Scott, Rick Scott comes to the stage to dead silence. To say you could hear a pin drop would dramatically understate the case. On the big screen, he looks like an amphibious human-alien hybrid whose endoskeleton and exoskeleton are inverted. This man is an energy vampire. The lack of enthusiasm is so palpable, you could cut it with a butter

knife. I think he said destroy our country 12 times in the first three minutes. We're not getting big dick energy from Rick Scott, are we? No. I tickled myself, as you can tell. It's just, you know, I guess the number one goal of writing.

He's terrible. I mean, it's like the notion that this man is so delusional that he, did you see there's this Puck article about how he thinks that maybe if DeSantis flames out, he can come in late like Fred Thompson did, I guess. Yeah, like Fred Thompson, yes. As well as Fred Thompson. Mitch McConnell has just got to be

like thanking his lucky stars that the person challenging him inside his own conference that the person challenging him inside his own conference like has the least charisma that i've ever encountered in a politician in a public space who does he appeal to it's like the anyway there was no interest in him it was very little interest by the way in pompeo and haley they were day two so it wasn't part of my diary i'm not just gilding the lily here and the rick scott, it was dead in there. I mean, like, he sucked. I think before him was like Todd Starnes or some lunatic radio host, and people were cheering, and then Scott comes in. It's like,

so it wasn't quite like that for Haley and Pompeo the next day. But man, not a lot of excitement for them either. So people are probably wondering why we're taping this. We're recording this on Friday morning. We haven't talked yet about that big New York Times story yesterday afternoon. Prosecutors signal criminal charges for Trump are likely. This will be in the Stormy Daniels, Porn Star, Hush Money case. I guess the reason I'm not leading with it today, I don't know how you feel about it, is I think everybody takes a deep breath and will wait. We'll wait to see what happens. They'll either drop the shoe or they won't drop the shoe. And it's the first of many shoes that are potentially out there. This is, I think, the least dangerous, least significant case for Trump. But again, it might be the first crack in

the dam and the dam might be breaking. It turns out that nobody is above the law. And we'll see what the reaction is to New York. This is Manhattan's DA. We'll see what happens in Florida. We'll see what happens with the Department of Justice. But I don't feel any need to say the walls are closing in on Donald Trump again, because I kind of feel we've been there, Tim. What do you think? Yeah. Well, for people who are upset we didn't get to this on the 39-minute mark, can we just make them a pledge, which is if Trump gets perp walked, okay, if Trump gets actually indicted and gets perp walked, we will tape a special podcast immediately upon the video being revealed. And we will put it up for everybody to see. Even if it's not a Friday, we won't make you wait until Friday. We'll do it immediately and get it up as soon as possible

so everyone can just relish in it together with us. I'm with you. The story of Daniel's thing, in some ways, I get that my only thought of this is that I get that it's kind of the least serious, right? It's a campaign finance violation. But it's also, it's not the most cut and dry. He has a lot of cut and dry crimes. But it's about as cut and dry as you can get.

You're not allowed to do this. You're not allowed to do this. You're not allowed to pay off. I guess it's not because he did it through a cutout and it's like, whatever. It's complicated, but yeah. The notion that you're not allowed to use campaign funds to pay off the porn star that you had sex with is like pretty straightforward. The legal particulars, I guess, can get things more complicated.

But I mean, Cohen did serve time for this, right? I think it's always been one of the outrages that Michael Cohen goes to prison for doing what Donald Trump told him to do. There seems to be something wrong there. It's the same as January 6th, by the way. It's the same thing that pisses you off about January 6th. Absolutely. Oh, totally. So this is from the New York Times article that this is a complicated case. So they write, and they're the ones that broke the story story saying that it looks like he's going to be indicted. They're basing that on the fact that he's being invited in to testify. And generally, the way it goes is that with these New York grand juries, somebody who's about to be indicted is always given a chance to come in and tell their side of the story. But once that invitation is given, it's a pretty good indication they plan on charging.

But then again, we don't know this Alvin Bragg and what they're doing. But once that invitation is given, it's a pretty good indication they plan on charging. But then again, we don't know this Alvin Bragg and what they're doing. And then the New York Times reports, even if Mr. Trump is, they always call him Mr. Trump, even if Trump is indicted, convicting him or sending him to prison will be challenging. The case against the former president hinges on an untested and therefore risky legal theory involving a complex interplay of laws, all amounting to a low-level felony, but still a felony. If Mr. Trump were ultimately convicted, he would face a maximum sentence of four years, though prison time would not be mandatory. I think it's also significant and worth mentioning that this would be the first time in American history

that a former president was indicted on felony charges. Just saying. I mean, I'd be happy with an ankle bracelet. I'd like to see him in prison, but an ankle bracelet would feel pretty good for me. Convicted felon, just doing. I hear you. I don't have much more to add on this one. Okay, so let's do a little cleanup on Isle Fox. Another extraordinary week of document dumps showing the incredible hypocrisy and duplicity of Fox hosts. Tucker Carlson hates Donald Trump passionately.

I mean, where are we going on all of this? I want the Tim Miller treatment on Tucker Carlson, who, you know, continues to be exposed as just as awful as some of us long suspected, but damn, it's right there in print. He put it in writing. I was, I think, blessed with the opportunity to watch a little bit of Eric Bolling's program on Newsmax last night. He had on Carrie Lake. So I just, I can't quit Carrie. So I had to watch the clip of him with Carrie. And Eric is unhappy because he got pushed out of Fox. But man, he was withering going after Tucker on this. And I do think that Tucker underappreciates like the

potential vulnerability here. I know that, you know, look, nothing matters. Trump can shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, et cetera, et cetera. There'll be no actual punishments, but there are at least some true believers out there, right? Not everyone is a nihilist. Okay. And when they see this, that does at least make a certain category of person, a Newsmax viewing person, say, like, this guy is a phony. This guy is not telling us the truth. He's actually the same as Don Lemon. He hates Donald Trump. He hates us. Just like everybody else, he just is faking it better. And so, there was another line in there. I hate him passionately. He's just so visceral. That's the one that everybody pulls out. But I pulled out another line from the emails that really struck me. He was talking to his producer here. That's the last four years.

We're all pretending we've got a lot to show for it because admitting what a disaster it's been is too tough to digest. But come on, there isn't really an upside to Trump. I mean, to me, that was even a more astonishing quote, because that betrays the final lie, right? Like the final lie that they all tell themselves, and they all tell their viewers and each other, the MAGAs, the people who know Trump for who he is, that still feel like they need to go along with it. The final lie they tell is that, you know, the tweets might be bad, and he might be a

bigot, and he might be a little corrupt or whatever. But like, we got these great policies out of it. Like, we actually got something that we can feel good about, and we can just hang on to that. And here's Tucker saying, no, actually, that's not even true, right? Like, this has been a total disaster, and there's no upside to it at all. And so, I thought that was extremely revealing, accurate, by the way, that you do kind of wonder like how deep the rationalization set for some of these folks. Oh, it's pretty deep. Yeah. And that they're clear-eyed enough to about Trump's disaster to then continue to go out every night and do the show the way they do it. It's really just that part of it is just really sick. I'm going to

agree with you largely here. You know, you said not everybody's a nihilist, which is true, but also you have dueling nihilism here. You have dueling nihilists. Because I think there's a cockiness within Fox, and certainly within Tucker Carlson, that he will never be held accountable. I played yesterday that amazing soundbite from 2003, where he's talking about what a phony Bill O'Reilly was. Bill O'Reilly is like a man of the people, but the moment he's exposed for being, you know, not really the man of the people, it's all over. He's done. Because what Bill O'Reilly is like a man of the people. But the moment he's exposed for being, you know, not really the man of the people, it's all over. He's done. Because what Bill O'Reilly was doing on the air was schtick, which tells me a couple of things.

Number one, that Tucker Carlson knows schtick. He knows what he is doing. He knows it's phony. He knows it's schtick. But also, I think that he thinks that the rules have completely changed. That even though somebody being exposed in 2003 would be the end, in 2023, he thinks he's immune to that, right? That he thinks he's in this alternative reality bubble. But you make an interesting point here. when you have other folks like Steve Bannon and you have Eric Bolling and other people

who see the vulnerability and who are telling the Fox audience, this is what's going on. And we say, so if we lived in a world where Tucker Carlson's audience would never hear anything else, anything outside, then he's safe, right? And to a large extent, there are those people,

but there's leakage, isn't there? There's real leakage because you do have other people who are taking the shots. You have the OANs. I don't know what they're doing on OAN. I don't know what they're doing, you know, the other hosts on Newsmax. But Steve Bannon seemed to have devoted a lot of his speech at CPAC to ripping Fox. And then, of course, you know, the big, you know, joker here is, you know, the Orange Caligula down in Mar-a-Lago who continues to attack them and call them out. And now he hasn't gone after Tucker Carlson. So there is some real vulnerability there. There's vulnerability from within their own base. care what the bulwark says or NPR, any of that stuff. But those things, I think he's got to be looking over his shoulder, which is basically the whole story of why Fox freaked out, right? Because they're afraid their audience might leave them. I'm not a corporate legal expert. I'm not going to pretend to play one on this podcast. This is why I don't understand why they didn't just settle.

I just feel like the risks are so high of all this for them. The one caveat to what you said is that Bolling and Bannon are free to do this because they don't have any chance to get on Tucker's show, right? Tucker's bet, I think, is that I have the most highly rated show on cable. Sometimes it's a five that beats him, but one or two. And these guys all want to be on my show. They all want me to say nice things about me. So they're not going to go out and trash me, right?

Because they need me. And so maybe that's true, right? Maybe he survives it because of that. But there are enough wild cards now out there in this fracturing MAGA universe that folks that don't feel like they need them know that they're not going to get invited on Fox anyway, that they really can go and start to chip away. And then once this DeSantis Trump primary gets hot, you know, then you've got to balance, okay, I can't make the Trump people too unhappy. I can't make the DeSantis people too unhappy. I think that Tucker and all of Fox is in a little bit of a tenuous position. Now,

is Fox going to collapse or, you know, are all of our dreams going to come true? No, right. But might, you know, they see some rating slippage, might some of these hosts end up getting cycled out, you know, in the creative destruction process of the 2024 primary? I think so. And I think that Tucker is more vulnerable than he's been. To your point about the settlement, I mean, I know why haven't they settled, because it's a really big check and Dominion doesn't want to settle. On the other hand, if you're really asking yourself, will they eventually settle? The key question is, will Rupert Murdoch want to go through a trial? Can you imagine what the trial would be like?

So instead of just reading these things, we would have Tucker Carlson on the stand day after day. I mean, this would be one hell of a trial. So just the trial itself would be, let's say, reason enough to settle, by the way, just so you know, I listen to a lot of cable stuff when I'm walking the dogs, listening to Sirius XM, just so you know. And so I'm walking in my driveway, and you were on the other day, you were on Nicole Wallace's show, and you were talking about these text messages and the emails. And my favorite line was when you said, so it turns out that these Fox hosts, you know, behind the scenes sound like the Bulwark podcast.

I heard you say that. I thought that was great. There you go. I'm always pimping. It's funny because it's true. It's hilarious. And you've got to bring people into the fold here, right? You can hear it here first on the Bulwark podcast, and then you can hear it

in the Fox host text message three years later. Apparently, the Fox News Green Room sounds pretty much like the Bulwark podcast, and then you can hear it in the Fox host text message three years later. Apparently, the Fox News Green Room sounds pretty much like the Bulwark podcast. Speaking of podcasts, you have a new thing coming. Tell me about it. We do. I hope people check it out. So, the Next Level used to be behind the paywall. We've taken the Next Level podcast out from behind the paywall.

And so, now it's going to be two times a week. On Wednesdays, it's me and JVL and Sarah just kind of bantering about the news. And then on Sundays, to give people a little bit of a break, you call it a palate cleanser at the top of your podcast. We're going to be bringing in people who are not political pundits outside of the punditry world. Actors, athletes, business people, military, who the hell knows? Comedians, ideas, welcome. And we're going to talk to them a little bit about the news, but also about their life, learn some life lessons, banter, have a little bit of laughs and give people a weekend break from this so now the next level will be two times a week i'm begging people to go over there

and subscribe those daily wire assholes i mean charlie your podcast is killing it it's at the top of the rankings and i just i love to be a part of it but those daily wire assholes they got like four in the top 25 okay so we need to start getting a couple other of our pockets the focus groups there longwells beg to differ go subscribe to the next level the guy we have coming on sunday particularly if you are in my age bracket you know you're gonna get pretty excited but if you're in my age bracket you're gonna be having celebrities i never heard of huh no no i think you'll have heard of it, but he just won't. He won't have been a teen idol for you.

You know what I mean, Charlie? Like, if, I don't know, who was a teen idol in your age? Like, maybe we could get David Cassidy or something for a future podcast? Annette Funicello? I don't even know what that is. But let's think about who the teen idols were for your time. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You do not know who Annette Funicello is?

No, I thought, is that a joke? I thought it was like... Shoot not know who Annette Funicello is. No. I thought, is that a joke? I thought it was like... Shoot me now! Annette Vermoncello? No. Vermoncelli? What? Is she alive?

I'm sorry. If she's alive and we can get to her... This is what I have to deal with, people. I do not want this podcast to be generationally discriminatory. We have some great guests coming that are not millennial teen idols. It just happens that we're starting with a millennial teen idol because he was promoting a movie that is out this week. Will you promise to actually just even Google Annette Funicello?

Just make me happy. I don't know how to spell it. You'll have to put it in Slack, how to spell Funicello, and then I can Google it yeah oh my well i guess the big question is whether you'll have mark hamill before we do here do you want mark hamill i want mark hamill yeah you're right you can have them all good all right this is the way it's done yeah i want anyone that's in the punditry world or anyone that loves that charlie sykes loves to take it but you know just a little zag a little break i think we taped this first one and it's gonna be fun people are gonna enjoy it and then you know

one hour 50 minutes of charlie sykes a day you know for our super fans isn't quite enough right i mean you got two commutes you know we need we need to get more content we need to knock that anti-transgender transphobe michael kn out of the rankings. I just dropped my microphone. We've got to knock that transphobe out of the rankings. That's how excited I am about fucking up Michael Knowles and the rest of the Daily Wire crew. So, you know, go subscribe. Okay.

There is something to look forward to. There is a reason to live. And if we don't do it, the babies that we are churning out will for us. Hey, so have a great weekend, Tim. Great talking with you. Go forth and have a baby. Make babies this weekend, all right? Life's going to be okay.

Every little thing is going to be all right. I've outsourced this. Now I'm making grandchildren, which is actually kind of cool and much easier. Much, much, much easier. I love that. Thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday, and we'll do this all over again.

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.