The Bulwark Podcast - Tim Miller: Our WWE Politics

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

Marco Rubio thinks he's in office just to send tweets, No Labels couldn't have picked a worse time for a third-party candidate, and DeSantis' war on woke knows no end. Plus, Fox's 24-hours of fear and paranoia feeds gun violence, and Charlie Sykes issues a mea culpa to Tim Miller. Your weekend pod. show notes For tickets to The Bulwark Live in NYC go to TheBulwark.com/Events. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Welcome to the Friday Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. I am back with Tim Miller. So, first of all, happy Friday and welcome to New Orleans, Tim.

Hey, Charlie. It's good to be with you. It's good to be here. It was a long drive. I saw a lot of America. It was enjoyable, but I'm ready. I'm ready to be in my new home. We ought to mention that we're actually taking this show on the road. People wondering, what is Charlie and Tim actually like? What happens when we're in person? We generally don't do this in person. We did one podcast in Austin, Texas. That's true. You were batting your eyes at me. It's like in person, it's like, you know, the sparks, you can feel it. It's a different level of intensity when you're staring me in the eyes.

Yeah, it was not the batting of the eye thing. I don't know what it was. But in any case, we're going to have an audience. This is Charlie and Tim live in New York City, Thursday, May 18th, 2023. I sense that you're a little bit nervous about this. So the one-on-one with a crowd. I love doing the live stuff. It's so fun. Our other live events have been so great. So, you know, something about you and me though, you know, just we have an extra level of energy that who knows what's going to happen up there. Yeah. So I don't know about nervous anxiety, some excited anxiety, but people should make a whole weekend out of it. New York is like beautiful for two months a year

and May 18th should be it, right? Like make a whole weekend out of it. May is gorgeous. So this is a two-part bulwark goes on the road. You and I go on and we go mano a mano. Lord knows where that's going to go. And then we exit and jvl and sarah take over with molly jong fast who's whose podcast i did this week so you have basically two

a double deuce two scoops of the bulwark if you come to new york for all this you can get the ticket and we'll hang out afterwards have a beer at least i will you might be tired i don't know i'll hang out and have a beer i don't want to make promises for you. lot of listeners which is and you know where i'm going on this tim does tim miller not really know any musicals before 1990 i mean so okay oklahoma i know the basic song oklahoma where the wind something something i saw it on sesame street this is good south pacific i literally never you messaged me that on the sub stack and that was the first time I'd ever heard of those. I mean, I've heard the term South Pacific, like flying to the South Pacific,

but I wasn't aware that it was a show. Okay, The King and I? Is that about King Lear? My Fair Lady? I mean, obviously, I've heard the phrase My Fair Lady, but I don't know any of the songs. I think that what we need to do is, I need to play some show tunes and ask people in the crowd,

this will be a New York crowd crowd and they will all know it. And I just want like, okay, we're going to find one of these that Tim will recognize. Do I get to do like jam band songs back at you? Like I saw Widespread Panic at Madison Square Garden one time. Can we do, can I like, I saw the Strokes there, CD Sound System. Can we do a little, can we do one of those? A little back and forth. We could just do, was there a show like Name That Tune? Maybe instead of doing back and forth we could just do was there a show like name that tune maybe instead of doing the podcast we should just do name that tune

live i don't know if people pay 50 for that i would not do well no i don't know anything about generally anything that has the word panic in it with large crowds i try to avoid okay but i do have something for you this morning okay and this is relevant okay this is not just off the wall all right let's play this and by the way I'm confident that you will be able to recognize this. Okay. I'll beat on a woman and then call her back because she ain't going to come. You're going to have a baby. Listen, you're not... I hope they haul you in and turn a file into a... I'm not going to give down here. You stink. Hey, Stella!

Hey, Stella! Is this a black and white movie or is this in color? I'm just trying to get my bearings. I think, is it on the waterfront? Is it on the waterfront? I don't even know why that's in my brain. This is my way of welcoming you to your new home in New Orleans. It is one of the greatest movies set in New Orleans ever made.

A streetcar named Desire. Marlon Brando. Ooh, a streetcar named Desire. I've heard about that. Now that you are officially a resident of New Orleans, you have to watch that one. Or at least do not let anyone else in New Orleans know that you are not familiar. Okay. Well, this makes me feel bad because my husband, we were doing on the road trip,

I was doing New Orleans music education for him. We were doing The Meters and Dr. John and just, you know, we did a little hip-hop, the No Limit guy. It's like we wanted to make Boosie badass. You know, I wanted to make sure he knew all the New Orleans tunes, but here I am now. He needs to educate me the other way on the movies, I guess.

A Streetcar Named Desire, I've seen that skit that you just played there parodied in other places, but, you know, the original. Yeah, I know. Yeah. It's become,

I mean, Hey, speaking of memes, we have to do this because we're talking on Friday morning. So by Friday afternoon, this meme will already be beaten to death with hammers. Okay. But can we talk about the various rapid unscheduled disassemblies that have taken place this week?

Obviously SpaceX blowing up after about four minutes. In my newsletter this morning, I was tempted to make a snarky remark about the rapid, unscheduled disassembly of Ron DeSantis' campaign, but I thought that's unfair to the SpaceX rocket, which at least made it off the launch pad.

Which is still a question mark, I guess. Speaking of marks, do you have your blue check mark i've lost my blue check mark it's still haphazard have you noticed this this is bill crystal still has does he see one of the people elon's paying the eight bucks out of his own pocket for i say that would be unlikely unlikely it's such a like these losers you know i mean who cares all right let's just start here who literally who cares it's embarrassing for bill to still have his check mark at this point it only matters and like there's some

legitimate you know if you are the emergency services of new orleans like it'd be nice to know what the real one is for example like there's some where it's serious but who cares about us like pundits whether we have it yeah yeah you're right i mean there are some real world consequences and you you have a lot of these emergency agencies who are going hey by, by the way, you know, we're kind of screwed. You're putting us out of business in various ways. Elon doesn't give a shit. But the funniest part is, are you ready for this? I bet you notice this. Now, people who don't have blue checks, I'm sorry to you, the unwashed masses, the second tier citizens that Elon is, you know, righteously fighting for. You might not know this,

but we, the verified, had a special feed where we could just see things from people who also had blue checks that lived in our rarefied airs, kind of like an elite club. He's taken away the blue check, Mark, but we still have all that because he doesn't have any developers left. But who are these people? Who are the people on the verified list? It's like, okay. But I still have all the benefits. And now it's just weird people in there. It's like Turkey Neck replying to me. I'm like, okay. But I still have all the benefits. And now it's just weird people in there. It's like turkey neck replying to me. I'm like, who's turkey neck? There are many turkey necks out there. Okay. So while we were all distracted by the whole blue check mark thing, Elon Musk's

Twitter deleted the labels that alerted users. They were reading news from actual state-run propaganda outlets of authoritarian governments. So for example, you know, Russia Today, TASS, the Chinese communist news agencies. So last week it was like, I'm going to slap this label on NPR and, you know, PBS, like, yeah, because we really need to be warned about them. But now he's decided because he's Elon Musk and it's Friday, whatever, he's going to take off all the labels, including Sputnik and everything. And it's like, so there's actually a tweet out there, which I believe I retweeted where the editor in chief of RT, which is a Russian propaganda outlet. Thanks Elon Musk for freeing her outlet from the state media

label and making her appear more in searches. This is great. Thank you. Twitter de-labeled me and all of our channels as public-funded media. Now you can find me in the search, Brotherly Elon Musk from the heart, says this Putin shill propagandist. So congratulations. Yeah, good news.

Well, the good news is, yeah, they don't need to do bots anymore. You know, that was the whole theory of the bot program, right? Was that they would create, you know, social media accounts that would appear to be legitimate, that would be tweeting Russian propaganda. But now they don't even have to do that. They're just the Russian propaganda accounts can just treat Russian propaganda. We have been doing some stacking on this. Have you been pushing people over to our sub-stack notes? I'm trying to move over. I'm not as aggressive as I should because it's very good.

It's excellent stuff. I'm a Twitter addict. I'll be there until we die. It'll be me, the Russian bots, the crypto guys, Tom Nichols. That'll be the last five people on the site and you. Because we're addicted. I admit it. I wish I was not, but I am. Things are getting ugly over there. We're stacking we're on our sub stack notes i'm gramming bulwark stuff

now we've got a bulwark reddit you know we've got to diversify because like it's even more than a freak show than it was and it's like the guy just doesn't understand and we can all sound like the blue check stuff is kind of a little bit fart sniffing like the guy just doesn't understand what the purpose was of all of these things right like there was a reason why you verified people right it's so that people can get imitated there was a reason why that you tried to fight the fake bots so that people got you know real information even if it was wrong like information from legitimate sources right from people giving their real right? He's going to turn the thing into like the Craigslist scam pages, you know, where you can't even buy tickets on Craigslist anymore because everybody on there is a scammer because there's no controls.

Like Elon, you know, because he's in his little SpaceX bubble, just doesn't understand that. And he thought the whole thing was about like his pissing match with Taylor Lorenz. And he's like about to lose $50 billion over it. It wasn't really a great business deal. It's a terrible business model, especially when the heart of the business model is that you have millions of people, some of them actually talented, who are providing you with free content all the time. And what do you do? You find a way to piss them off and drive them away.

There are people out there who are giving you stuff for free all the time. You pay nothing for them. This is a brilliant model that he's decided to dump on from a great height. That's what can I say? I have a problem here today with you, Tim. Uh-oh. There's just so much stuff. I know. Where do we start? We talk about Ron DeSantis and the shitty week that he's had, a terrible week that he's had. We have a new Wall Street Journal poll showing that, once again, he's dropped double digits behind Donald Trump. new Republican Party, 55% of Republicans say that fighting woke ideology in our schools and

businesses is more important than protecting entitlements from cuts. The funny part about that is, do you know what was behind that poll, Dana? This is the Wall Street Journal's own poll. Like, that's such a weird thing to ask people. Like, what do you care more about, the wokes or entitlement cuts? It's like these guys are trying to nudge Trump and to stop talking so much about maintaining entitlements because there's still a handful of doctrinaire free market conservatives out there that want there to be entitlement cuts. So it's like, we're going to do this poll comparing the woke

versus the entitlement cuts. It comes back that still a quarter of the Republican Party, they do care about protecting entitlements, they found out, even though that's not what they wanted. And half of the party is now obsessed with the woke. Did you see the clip of Ron DeSantis, where he says woke seven times in like 10 seconds? We're going to stop the woke in the streets.

We're going to stop the woke in the air. We're going to stop the woke in the schools. It's just like, what are you talking about? Well, he's got his mantra. And the problem is, the 86th time you've heard that speech, you're going to go, okay, Ron, can we just move on? Can we just move on from your fight with Disney? Which is one of the most mind-boggling, stupid things that I can ever think of. But like in what political world, in what room full of political geniuses does someone say,

hey, you know what? We can slingshot our way to the presidency by going after the happiest place on earth. I want to get to the Disney thing one second, but the 55%, this is just a fundamental problem that Republicans have gotten themselves into being very online.

Like there was this period of time that was, I think, right. And I'm going to write something about that. So you go back to the 2020 primary early where the Democrats, like their staffers were so online, they're like obsessed with these random progressive hobby horses that like 22 year old progressives really care about, but nobody else does. And it hurt a lot of Democratic campaigns. And like that was a common criticism of Democrats.

I think there's been a readjustment on that. Not maybe far as maybe it could be but a certain level of readjustment republicans now the inverse of this 59 of the base is obsessed with the woke in the schools and like every swing voter has no idea what you're talking about to define it right yeah well they can't define it but what about swing voters i just there's certain people in my life that i think about who are like former republican types who are not you know super you know daily bulwark readers or listeners like like all of our good fans like you know have other interests in life and are casual you know romney biden voters right they don't even know what you're talking about like literally can't define don't understand it and your whole stuff like speaking in tongues yeah this whole stump speech is about- Like speaking in tongues.

Yeah, this whole stump speech. And it's like you'd go to hear Ron DeSantis and halfway through, he starts speaking in Chinese like John Huntsman did on the debate stage that one time when I was working for him with my head in my hands, right? It's like, what are you,

we don't even know what you're talking about. And yet he feels like he has to do this. Well, now I think probably because he believes it, but also because half of the party in this Wall Street Journal poll, like that's what they care the most about. So you're completely beholden. Yeah.

So this week in my morning shots yesterday, I ran through a bunch of the headlines, you know, how bad they are, you know, people backing away from him, the way, you know, his trip to Washington sort of blew up in his face. More of his congressmen from Florida are endorsing against him.

And you can feel the conventional wisdom turning against him, including the recognition of something that we have talked about endlessly for months here at the Bulwark, which is the fact that Ron DeSantis does not simply play an asshole on television. He is one. He's got a personality problem. He's not likable. He's not warm and fuzzy. But also now this dawning recognition that, you know, the guy doesn't have very good political instincts and he's kind of locked into this commitment that, and I wrote yesterday that, you know, he has to fit in with the lizard people. You know, I am a lizard person. I, you know, will fight the same people. I hate the same people. I'm going to diss the same people. You know, I am a lizard person. I, you know, we'll fight the same people. I hate

the same people. I'm going to diss the same people. I'm going to punch the people in the face that you actually hate. But he just doesn't have the skill to pull it off. I mean, it's like an ill-fitting suit, right? So he just thinks that he has to, you know, tell gays to, you know, shut the fuck up, you know, bully college kids who wear a mask. He has, you know, sign the, you know, a six-week abortion ban. He's, you know, signed the, you know, a six-week abortion ban. He's, you know, bitch-slapping liberals all over the place and, you know, showing that he doesn't care about gun control or, you know, he's going to go after drag queens

and by God, he's going to go after Disney World. And I think a lot of the rest of the country, including Republicans, is going, what are you doing, man? I mean, who are you? It's not happening for him, is it? So here's my question to you. Is he going to blow up on the launch pad? I feel almost embarrassed to ask the question because it's clear he's running. But is there a chance now that Ron DeSantis is going to look around and go,

this is just not happening for me? What do you think? I don't think so. Because there was a report yesterday that one of its big donors, Robert Bigelow, I think, is also really obsessed with space aliens, whatever it's worth. Maybe there's a connection there between Lizard Man Ron and the space alien obsession. But he's like, I'm going to put $20 million into a super PAC and I might even put in more. There's a certain type of big Republican donor who sees him maybe rightly, as weakened as he is maybe this is still the correct analysis that he's like they're only out out of trump yeah what is their plan b to plan b yeah right i mean youngkin or kemp it's like could one of those people emerge you know maybe i don't know the

other people on the fields definitely or not and so i think that he'll have the money i'd like to see glenn youngkin's dms yeah now yeah now yeah really please yeah so um you know i think a lot of the money folks will stick with them he surrounds himself with a very tight inner circle as all these stories report and i think that the people around him still very much want him to run and the people he's hearing from very much wanted to run it's consultants who want money from him and the donors who want to give money so there's a lot of incentives pushing him in the other thing and this really cuts both ways for him is that what ron desantis still has better than any of the guys in 2016 or gals he has this elevator pitch against trump that like in theory could work and that there's some data that still shows

that it could work right like yeah exactly and he's still winning in michigan there's still some of these early states murphy wrote about iowa this week in the bulwark in theory it could work and in practice we're seeing a lot of reasons why it's not as you wrote in the newsletter but in theory it could work and it's this pitch of hey i have the same enemies as you and i know how to beat them right trump doesn't now can he actually make that argument against trump successfully? Not a lot of evidence of that right now. But it feels like he'll want to get in and try. And so, you know, my assessment is, I think a big lesson that everyone should learn from 2016 and 2012, a lot of your political campaigns get baked in before you're even a candidate. You know, this happened to Jeb. We

did that. I have regrets. We did that stupid Megyn Kelly interview where he got all pretzeled up over Iraq before he was even a candidate. We weren't going to win anyway. But you see this in many campaigns where you don't have the infrastructure around there to support you. I just don't think that Ron DeSantis realized. I think he's in this little Tallahassee bubble. I don't think he realized that the thing that was appealing was that elevator pitch and that all these little details that he adds on to it just make a different group of people think he's weird or wrong right it's like he felt like he had to do this florida

legislature section where it's like oh we're gonna expand don't say gay which is despicable we're gonna do the six-week abortion ban which is like much less popular than the 15-week whatever they had before you know we're gonna go after disney and each one of those things like he thinks it's helping him with a certain part of the base, but it's actually hurting him with another group, right? Whether it's swing voters, certain cases, Trump people in other cases, he's just lost his North Star. He could get it back. I don't think he's good. So anyway, the short answer is I don't think he's going to blow up on the launching pad because he still has that North Star. But man, I mean, it has been about as bad as it could be given the place that he was and, you know, the competition here.

Let's be real. This is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark Podcast. Thanks so much for listening to this show where every day we try to help you make sense of the political world we live in and remind you that you are not the crazy one. If you enjoy this podcast, I'm sure you're going to find my free Morning Shots newsletter, a great companion for understanding what is happening to us. And every morning as I prepare for this show, I share with my readers what's trending and what to pay attention to, including my latest writing and essays on the events of the day. To sign up for my free Morning Shots newsletter, go to thebullwork.com slash morning shots. That's thebullwork.com slash morning shots.

And I look forward to seeing you in your inbox soon. You sent me this morning a new South Carolina poll of Republicans, and you're seeing a little bit of bad news for Donald Trump. Explain. Yeah, well, again, and this is another reason why you get the sandus in the race now it's just one poll so we get a caveat this but it's interesting it's a south carolina which is trump absolutely needs to win it's a credible firm that is doing this poll and here's the question now trump's winning in this poll but the more interesting thing underneath

was how would you rate your support for donald these days? I love those kind of poll questions. Very open-ended. This is not like they're trying to do it. Taking the temperature. Yeah, taking the temperature. 47% my support for him is strong as ever. So that's good news, right? He's got this big base.

11% I never liked him in the first place. 21% I used to like him, but now I wish he would just go away. 20% I still like him, but yes, less than I used to. Really? I just looked at that and I'm like, man, you got 32% that wish you'd go away. Now, 20% of those people liked him. And maybe if you liked somebody at one time, you can always try to win them back. And I'm sure they'll talk themselves into it if it ends up just being Trump or Biden. But that is a massive negative number that exceeded where he was in 2016 and i just i look

at that and my big takeaway is sometimes we just get down in our navels and i know we've talked about this a lot on this podcast but it just bears mentioning because nobody else fucking mentions it that 20 i still like him but less than i used to had tucker laura hity, had all them had the courage of their own real views in the text that we've seen from Dominion? Had the Republican electeds all stood up and been stronger after January 6th? You could get that 32 number up. This was doable. Like there's this fait accompli attitude out there among the pundit class, among Republicans. It's like, oh, this is a cult.

And yeah, there's a lot of people in the cult 47 that's not nothing but you could have got it like half the party was and is gettable and it's just they're getting the wrong signals you know and it's like and i when you see a number like 32 you're like man they were a little bit closer to being out of the woods i think than realize, had there been an actual concerted effort to get out of the woods. Well, I mean, and this is the key, you know, crack don't smoke itself. And, you know, you may have luscious fruit hanging in the tree, but it's not going to pick itself, right? I mean, someone's going to have to go and do it. And so far, everybody's going, maybe it'll fall on its own.

Maybe it'll go. Maybe we don't need to actually touch the tree. Maybe we should. Hey, or maybe let's Maybe we don't need to actually touch the tree. Maybe we should, hey, or maybe let's let Chris Christie go and he'll shake the tree and then it'll fall off the tree. Or maybe there will be a meteor that will hit the tree and knock the

fruit down because it's there, but we've seen this before and no one wants to touch the stuff. Or maybe I could kind of casually mention to voters that if they reached into the tree, they could get the fruit, but I'm not going to say the name of the fruit. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, DeSantis out there being like, well, my hardest attack on Trump is

going to be that he is, I have some sense that there's been some chaos from other leaders out there. And it's like, who are you talking about? Like you, I think that's right right. Maybe that wouldn't have worked. But I guess anytime I look at that poll, I just think, but nobody tried. Nobody tried. And here we are, we're seeing this all again with DeSantis, where he's like, I'm not going to try. My strategy is going to be, I'm going to go hard on all these issues and hope that people come over to me. And that's the Ted Cruz strategy. And we're just walking down that same path again.

That's very interesting. Okay, so one more point on DeSantis. It is interesting. All of these members of his congressional delegation are now coming forward and saying, yeah, he never talks to me. He never writes to me. He pays no attention to me.

And then you had that very weird Marco Rubio video. Just really quick before the Rubio video, the one example of the guy that didn't talk to him, Stuby, I might be saying his name wrong. He got injured. He got like seriously injured. And DeSantis didn't call him. He didn't call.

He didn't send him a text. He didn't send him an email. He didn't have Casey, you know, write a nice note with a cookie bouquet. It's like a Republican member of Congress from your own state got into a serious injury you're thinking about running for president even if you're not you're the governor and that just shows a like lack of humanity and egotism like that is really alarming

if you're on the bull camp for desantis that he can recover from this it's like this is a weird fucking person that does not have basic human interaction skills well he just doesn't like people yeah there you go i mean yeah i mean that's part of the problem i mean you can change your position on a lot of different issues but if you basically at bottom don't like people don't like interacting with people don't give a shit about people it's's a little harder to finesse, right? I mean, you can hire people who can pretend to care about all of those things. But, you know, and again, I apologize in advance for saying this, but it does appear that Trump gets this. He's constantly writing notes. He's calling people.

He does that kind of schmoozing thing and doesn't change the fact that he's a sociopathic authoritarian nightmare, but he's one with a Sharpie who I'm sitting here with, with a note that he wrote me back in 2016, you know, he writes to people it's and forget it. I'm not going to even go into it. Okay. So Marco, uh, does this weird video and I have to say that I'm, this is indication of how weird I am. I'm, I'm watching him do this video from his his office or his study or whatever. And I keep waiting for him to stop and reach for a bottle of water and chug that down. I just it's I thought you're going to come out of his ears, which somehow continue to grow. No, OK, well, whatever.

So he's he's complaining about how we just can't get any gas down here in southern Florida. Why aren't they doing anything about it? And it's like, okay, first of all, you're a United States Senator, Marco. Who is they? But it certainly was not a love note to Ron DeSantis. I mean, the last thing that Ron DeSantis needs this week, which was a terrible, horrible, very bad, absolutely craptacular week, is a United States Senator from his state basically saying, yeah, it's like, why are things so effed up here in your home state? What's going on there? I think that this was a hilarious video. If you

haven't watched it, you just got to pull up Marco's video thing, because at first it's like, he talks for like a minute and he's been like, they aren't doing anything. He says the word they five times. It's like, who's they? Are you talking about the desantis administration you're talking about the biden like you're the senator what who you know so he's we haven't had gas for four days lines are long and like they are out there saying that it's it's the people's fault for wanting gas and no the people it makes sense for the people to get gas i'm like who who is the straw man you're arguing against i don't even know who you're talking about so it's a very weird video but it's telling about our politics the semaphore article comes out this morning and as soon as i saw it i just

was like it just works on so many levels desantis um they they asked marco i guess in the hall in the senate you know if you think about endorsing between desantis and trump and marco's like no i'm not going to do that for a while and it's like well you know have you talked to desantis about it and marco says i haven't talked to desantis in months it's like what you haven't talked to the governor of your it's like it's like first how fucking weird is ron desantis like you're not even checking in with him he's a governor you're the senator like of the of the same state you would think that you would be for him for president like that's very strange and then it's like yesterday you see there's this problem in south florida that no one is dealing with about how there's this gas shortage and your response is i'm going to send

this weird twitter video not like hey maybe i should call ron and our son's gonna do something about this i mean it's just like it shows the performative assonanity and the whole WWE-ness of our politics right now. That just doesn't even occur to Marco and Iran anymore. Yeah, there are people who handle things like this. There are phone numbers that you can call if you are a United States senator to deal with all of this. Getting retweets is the priority here. That is the point of being a senator, right? Getting the most retweets, I think.

Because we're all so online. Hey, I have to mention you're uh not my party this week i haven't had enough bandwidth to be able to deal with all of this uh you know new third party buzz the no labels folks by the way that they're emailing me they're sending me all this stuff uh you know these are the folks that are trying to get on the ballot you know to, to have a sort of an independent and, and I don't know what they've contacted you, but it's like, they, you know, I was like, Charlie, if you want to sit down and talk about our plans, it's like, yeah, no, I just understand that almost everything you're saying is completely delusional when it is not completely counterproductive. So you did a whole piece on not my party. You're not a fan of the third party buzz. I mean, in theory, there are third party things I like, you know, the McMullen thing

didn't work out, but I thought it was worth a try. You know, I think that there've been certain places, certain States, certain times where third parties work. The problem is, is that Donald Trump is the leading candidate in 2024. And like, we need to deal with that. And I think that if you're not in politics the no labels people we'll get to them in a second like are just you know egomaniacs and you know want to raise money from gullible donors and uh you know potentially have notorious motives but i think might just be stupid this doesn't distinguish them from many others that's true but they have that they have that common disease that is easy to identify for those of us who've been around

but there are regular people out there. And I get questions from them when I do events. And I understand. That's like, why couldn't we have a third party? Biden is old. Trump is insane. Shouldn't we have a better option than these two guys? And that does make sense on one level.

So I wanted to do a longer video for Not My Party explaining why, why actually it's the inverse of that and that in our system a third party is strongest when the two parties seem similar right and you know perot didn't win any states but the closest he got is the year that you clinton runs as a southern democrat that you know dlc democrat and hw bush is running as a you know fairly moderate republican right and it's like oh we don't feel represented the more populist kind of Trump-y type voters back then, and then random folks that Perot added onto the side. So that made sense, because the stakes were low. It's like, if you were like, eh, put a gun to my head,

I would have voted for H.W., but whatever, if it's Clinton. You can go for a Perot, let's give it a shot. If the stakes are existential, if you are a Democrat or a never-Trumper who looks at Trump and says, our democracy could end if it's Trump, well, you're logically not going to want to throw your vote away for a third-party person.

If you were a deranged Trumper who thinks that the election was stolen from Donald Trump and that Joe Biden has dementia and is running a pedophile ring, well, you're not going to want to throw away your vote on a third party person when that risk is on the other side. So our negative partisanship has made it such that this is, even though it might seem like a time where a third party would be strong, it's actually the worst time to try to run a third party. And obviously,

if Trump's on the other side, anything that creates additional risk of a disaster of Trump's second term is a bad idea. So I wanted to kind of lay that out for folks. The no labels thing, I think, is particularly pernicious on this front. I'm not quite as panicked as some other people about this because I find the no labels people to be utterly incompetent. And I'm just, I'm not really certain. Talk about blowing up on the launching pad. I think that they might be blowing up on the launching pad a lot more realistically than

DeSantis. But I'm glad other people are monitoring that and keeping the heat on. But it'd be a different thing if the No Labels people said, hey, we're coming to you and we've got a plan. We found the guy that can take votes from Donald Trump or the woman. Then okay, great, come to me with that. But I don't think that person exists. At least not now. No, I don't see it. And it does seem to be kind of an ego-driven type thing where they've created their own little grift bubble. Okay, so as I've said many times in the past, I hate talking about mass shootings. I hate getting into the doom loop. But this week, I have to say, this week feels extraordinary.

Look, I understand. Before we get into this, I mean, I understand that there are hair trigger shootings that take place in places like Chicago every single week. I get it. I understand that there were 35 people of all races who were shot in Chicago last weekend. This goes on all the time. And yet this week felt different. I mean, the whole ringing the wrong doorbell, getting shot, making a wrong turn, getting shot and killed, getting in the wrong car and getting shot. Your basketball rolls into your neighbor's yard and somebody shoots at a six-year-old girl. I mean, it feels like we're in this new chapter, or maybe we're just noticing what's happening with our, you know, hair trigger American carnage. And it also feels like it's more than just about guns.

It is about guns. But you know, it's interesting, I was listening to a lot of the commentary on this. And unfortunately, everybody, and you know, Tim, you've been doing this a long time, everybody falls back on to their, you know, their priors and they keep going back to their same arguments. And I'm going like, okay, of distrust with guns that results in this kind of, I'm seeing somebody that I don't know. They're in my driveway. I'm going to kill them. And this apparently has been happening more. I mean, part of it is I have a family that lives in Southern Maryland, and I might get lost someday. I might turn into the wrong driveway. Am I going to get killed? Are they going to get killed? Can you imagine being in politics or doing something else where you go door to door? And if you have the wrong color or you're wearing the wrong clothes or you have the wrong hair,

and we have all of these laws on the books that seem like a great idea, you know, stand your ground or the castle doctrine that basically says that if you shoot and kill somebody in your house, the presumption is you've acted in self-defense. So the actual killing is objective. Whether or not you'll be held accountable for it is completely subjective now. So this week of American carnage, I guess it does turn out, by the way, that an armed society is not a polite society, that more guns does not equal less crime, and that more good guys with guns is the way to go because, damn, I'm done. on this the first on just the societal part because i wrote about this after the tennessee shooting i had a great conversation with gloria johnson on the next level about this that one of the tennessee three but we didn't kind of get into this as much as i wanted to thank you the way we get as deep on this part as i wanted to it's just like figuring out a way to turn the

temperature down because she represents gloria like a decently conservative district actually on you know the two justins are in the deep blue parts of Nashville and Memphis, respectively. And I was just talking to her about the community, and there is a lot of tenseness and anxiety in these communities right now about the other political side. And I was happy to hear that she hasn't felt unsafe at this point. But you see this with other people where they're like, things are so hot that I'm worried that, you know, somebody's going to pop off. I mean, some of these shootings that you've discussed are just random, but, you know, the other kind of politicized, oh, you know, you know, efforts like what we saw in Texas,

Greg Abbott situation, you know, the guy that drives into the Black Lives Matter protest. And Abbott's making that much worse, of course. Yeah, exactly. So who is out there that's lowering the temperature? And this is, I hate everybody's like, oh, don't both sides us. But I do worry, like, as I was doing my sub stack, I was doing an Ask Me Anything, like driving through Texas,

and I had some of our more liberal or progressive readers that were like, oh, be safe, I'm worried about you in Texas. And that makes me sad, right? That people would feel that way. There a really wonderful people all over the country and that we are so focused now on the threats and the danger among us. You know, you have Trump out there saying that like the real enemies are within, you know, not without. Obviously he's exacerbating that way more than any democratic politician, but i worry that this across the board just like everyone trying to figure out how to turn the temperature down now

that's not going to solve the gun problem though like that is just not and the gun thing like this is we've gone round and round on this i'll just say briefly like i always consider myself like a technocratic pragmatic conservative right even when i was a conservative i was like you know we need to be practical here and i just don't know how you can look at the stats about american gun deaths and say that like this system is working and not like the answer is more guns like it's just not like our gun deaths levels are on par only with like third world countries where there are wars like we're on par with yemen you know it's crazy and that you can have a kid like Ralph Yarl go into a guy's driveway go to their door and get shot that's an unfathomable event

in Sweden you know it's an unfathomable event and that should be an unfathomable event anywhere and it's not here just because of the proliferation of guns and now we're in this place and looking at Tennessee in the aftermath where you can't even discuss, forget reforms about getting less guns out there. You can't even discuss ways to license, to curb it. You can't do anything. I mean, there was the, was it Louisville? It was in the Kentucky shooting.

There's so many mass shootings. I can't remember anymore. The Kentucky, the Louisville mayor's like the gun that was used in the shooting is going to be back on the street because by law in Kentucky, we have to auction it off. It's like, what? That is madness.

This is the madness that we're having this proliferation of senseless random killings. And no one is exempt. Now, between the mass shootings and ringing the wrong doorbell, it can be your kid. It can be you. It can happen to anyone. We are having this massive crisis, tens of thousands of people getting killed. As you point out, we know a level of violence that makes us look like Yemen. And yet there is this complete total disconnect where one legislature after another is thinking, yeah, let's disseminate

more guns. Let's make it easier to carry guns openly. Let's make it easier for people to shoot people and have defenses for all of this. And so you have the 16 year old Ralph Yarrow, who's shot by this 84 year old white guy who apparently was mainlining Fox News and various paranoia things. What a surprise, least surprising story of the week. But then you have the New York story. It's 20 year old, you know, white girl who's shot and killed by a 65-year-old because she and her friends pulled into the wrong driveway. In Texas, you have these cheerleaders who are in their cheerleader outfit who are shot because they made a mistake and tried to get in the wrong car. By the way, which I've done a million times with Ubers these days. Who hasn't? In the Uber world, an Uber car pulls up, you're like, oh, that's my Uber, and you open the door.

Okay, so that does not necessarily appear to be racially oriented. In Charlotte, North Carolina, this is, I think, one of the worst. Little girl has her basketball roll into the neighbor's yard. Group of kids go to fetch it. This guy comes out, Robert Louis Singletary, and starts shooting at the six-year-old girl and her father. I mean, what the hell? Did you see the one in Florida with the two dads driving and they get into a road rage incident and they shoot at each other and they both have their daughters in the car and both of their daughters get hit? It's like... Standing their ground. Standing their ground.

As horrible as these ones where they're shooting strangers are, is there ever a story that more clearly debunks the notion that you are safer by carrying a weapon than the idea that these two redneck dads shot at each other while their daughters were in the car? It's unimaginable. But this is what happens. You have guns everywhere, and you get your temper hot.

Sometimes it's going to happen. Things are going to escalate. Well, especially when you put the guns in hands of people who have no background checks, no training whatsoever, and then are encouraged to regard everybody else as a danger. So this was the guy, the grandson of the man that shot Ralph Yarl, says, you know, I feel like a lot of people of that generation, the older generation, are caught up in this 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia perpetuated by some other news stations. And he was fully into that, sitting and watching Fox News all day, every day, blaring in his living room. And I think that stuff really kind of reinforces this negative view of minority groups. It doesn't necessarily lead people to be racist, but it reinforces and galvanizes racist people and their beliefs.

It's not all about race, but in this particular case, you get this guy who's sitting and he's watching this American carnage, one after another you know this nightmare world they're coming to get you they are dangerous and then there's a knock at the door and he goes to the door and there's a black man who is gigantic he's actually five foot eight 140 pounds you could have done a sociology experiment on this. He told the cops the guy was six feet. It's like, no, actually. Hulking black man, five foot eight, 140 pounds. 140 pounds. I mean, that's like just skin and bones.

And he's invading his castle. Actually, he doesn't even open the door. So the guy starts shooting through the glass. I mean, it's just holy crap. Okay, so here's an interesting little factoid. So I was listening to Lawrence O'Donnell last night. He had an historian on, a historian of the Old West, and he said, you know, it's a myth that in the Wild West that people walked around, you know, in the towns like or Tombstone, you would have to surrender your guns. You would have to go to the marshal's office or the sheriff's office and sign in the guns and you'd get a receipt. Because none of these towns actually wanted to have heavily armed people scaring off the business people. These little towns wanted to become actual cities. They were capitalists and they knew that people wouldn't be coming into the town to make their weekly or monthly deposits if they thought they were going to be robbed. So in fact, they had very strict gun rules. In fact, he showed a sign from like the 1880s, and you can see the

sign saying, you know, weapons strictly forbidden. You're not allowed to do it. So this whole notion of everybody walking around packing heat was really after the fact where a lot of these towns were figuring out how do we market ourselves to the tourists. We'll have the shootout in the OK Corral and we'll reenact it eight times a day. The reality was that even in the old— It's reminiscent of the Lost Cause stuff, you know, that all these Confederate statues weren't actually from that. It was from like the 9th Amendment. It's sort of retrofitting the history. But I thought it was really interesting that the people in the West, if you would have told them about our open carry constitutional carry laws now, they'd say, you're out of your mind.

Are you people crazy? The whole essence of civilization is that you do not want people walking around with guns, threatening other people, making them feel unsafe. So I really thought that was an interesting historical tidbit. And you can look it up. I'm going to defer to the experts on that one. You can look it up. Okay, you and I have not had a chance to weigh in like everyone else has on the whole question of the Fox settlement.

I am of two minds on all of this. I do understand that Dominion made the right business decision. Their lawyers had a job to do. They did it. They did it well. It's a big load of money. It will have an effect. And Smartmatic is coming up. Smartmatic is saying that we want even more money from Fox. There are other lawsuits out there. But I just don't think

this changes the trajectory of disinformation. I don't think that this was a victory for democracy. And I am disappointed that we are not going to have a six-week festival of Fox's deplorability. But I understand that there are other people who say, no, glass half full. This is good. This is the way it's supposed to work. Where do you come down? I'm more glass half full on it. I mean, it's nice that Lachlan Murdoch's great- great grandchild will have a couple milli less you know um after our the estate tax pony um a smaller pony yeah only four polo ponies not not five what yeah i was just joking but uh look the dominion guys

god bless i really think you know had fox just dealt with them the right way early, you know, they could have gotten out of this with a lot less money. And I think that the Dominion guy ended up being out for blood because they were being slandered, John Poulos. And I think they did the Lord's work, really, with this discovery. And just an unbelievable amount of information has come out about Fox. You know, they have to do what's right for their business. 780 million plus plus good for them for getting that so i'm glass half full on it i don't think there was going to be anything that happened at trial that changed the trajectory of fox the fox had a chance to change their own trajectory

after january 6th they chose not to do so they chose to go the other direction and double down to crowd out newsmax as rupert murdoch famously said in that email which we'll always have now it's not about red or blue, it's about green. And for them, they need to tack to the MAGA right to protect their right flank, and they were always going to do that. You know, sure, it would have been nice to see Tucker sweat on

the stand, but on the grand scheme of things, I think Dominion did the Lord's work, and I'm happy they got their payout. Well, I'm happy they got their payout. But I will admit to you, I wanted it to be more, and I wanted to see a trial, but that's just me. I wanted the fair enough. I understand that. I wanted the festival of schadenfreude, but I do think that this whole question of, okay, you know, would the trial have changed the audience? Would it have peeled people off from the audience? And that's certainly

possible if the trial would have been like the January 6th committee. But let's go back to the January 6th committee. I think they did an absolutely masterful job. I think that they documented it. They did everything they possibly could. And yet it's hard to find that they had that much of an effect on Republican opinion. So I'm not sure that this would, not because the Fox News audience does not hear about this or know about this, is that they don't really care about it. They don't care. The heart wants what it wants. They wanted what Fox gave them and continues to give them. And that's the heart of it, right?

Yeah. And here's how propaganda works, by the way. It's about the old George W. Bush line from that funeral about judging yourself by your best intentions and your enemies by your worst examples. This is how propaganda works. The people that watch Fox, that are daily Fox viewers, their brains have been consumed by every negative thing that a liberal has ever done, real or imagined, exaggerated to the 10th degree, right? And so, if you have been conditioned to believe that Joe Biden is really a socialist that might be complicit in a pedophile ring that is on the take from China, and that MSNBC and CNN and the New York Times and Washington Post all lie with impunity. Okay. Then if you learn that Fox also lied a couple of times, it's easy to say to yourself, well, at least they're on my side.

The other side is so horrible, right? It's back to the third party conversation. It's negative partisanship all the way down, right? And so if these viewers have been conditioned, they don't, it's not like the old days in the 80s where they might have had a rush or whenever rush started, late 80s, early 90s, but they still got Tom Brokaw at night. These people don't have that. They're in a total bubble where the only information they receive is that the liberals are evil. And so once you've decided that the liberals are evil, it becomes very easy to justify it. So even if they do learn about the Tucker emails or whatever, they come around. I don't know how to fix that. I think that's an unsolvable problem.

And I just, I don't think the trial would have fixed it, but maybe it would have helped on the margins. But, but, you know, that's the, that's the main issue here. Okay. So we have to do something extremely unusual now. Okay. I have to acknowledge that you were right and I was wrong. Oh, I don't know what this is about, but I'm very thrilled to hear. It discusses with Kara Swisher on yesterday's podcast, the whole issue of the don't say gay bill. I thought that perhaps you and other critics had gotten out over your skis a little bit by saying, you know, that it was this draconian attempt to don't say gay when, in fact, it was simply saying that we don't teach this for first, second and third graders. It's just very young children. And you got a whole bunch of blowback.

Kara got a whole bunch of blowback. And I'm sitting there thinking, OK, maybe there was a little bit too much hype. But and this is my mea culpa. This week, you had the folks down in Florida say, hold my beer. We're going to take Don't Say Gay and we're going to make it apply through K-12, you know, through all of grade school, all the way through high school, including 18-year-old college seniors. And it's like, wait, how many times, Mr. Miller, were we assured by the smart people that no, no, no, no, no. This is simply about age appropriateness.

So you were right. I was wrong. Thank you. I will be a gracious winner in this one. And if you go back and read my very first article about Don't Say Gay, which was in February, I believe, of last year, the premise of that article was that when I first heard about this bill, I was like, come on. That was my first instinct, too.

It was just like yours. I was like, come on. They couldn't really be trying to push something through that is this backwards, this draconian, this on-the-nose. In 2022, when I wrote that, there's just no way. And the reason why I think I was out in front on this and Shapiro, Ben Shapiro, and all these other assholes that are coming for me in the National Review was because I called.

You know, from my Jeb days, I know a lot of Tallahassee folks. So I called around and I was like, what is true here? Is what the, you know, activist groups on the left saying true? Or is what, you know, the people that are, you know, shining DeSantis turds true? And to a person, they were all like, no, this is going to pass. It's as bad as they say. And they did end up modifying one element of it to be a straight shooter here from no discussion about gays. That's where the don't say gay moniker originally came from to no instruction, right? So, I mean, this is a very marginal improvement, right? To the say that now a kid doesn't have to worry if they talk about whatever gay stuff

that they're going to get in trouble. But still, a teacher now in 11th grade, I don't even know how you, can you not talk about Loving vs. Virginia? Even for your gay stuff, how do you not talk about sexual orientation in high school? Can you not talk about the don't ask, don't tell bill? How do social studies teachers do their work?

How do English teachers that want to read books, that have any kind of discussion of sexual orientation, teach those books? It was preposterous down to first grade. And the thing that always got me is I know, because I have a five-year-old, I know kindergartners. I just took Toulouse actually into a new school yesterday for the first time to visit it. And other kids look around and it's like, oh, hey, they're two dads. And when I leave, you better believe one of those little spunky little kids went to their teacher and said, hey, what's the deal with that? Is the teacher not just supposed to say, hey, some families have two dads. That would be illegal in Florida. That would be the textbook definition of instruction. And that is outrageous and wrong. And anyway, I hope people understand the seriousness

of it. It's also delusional. And Julian Sanchez makes a really, really good point on the recent bills that they are delusional. He said, look, the delusion here is even more ridiculous by the expansion that students in 2023 can somehow be shielded from the existence of these topics until the parents deign to breach them. They can't. Obviously, they can't. It's ludicrous. It's like, look around at the world. Do you honestly think that you are now going to shield high school students from ever hearing about these things? This is a great sub stack by Freddie DeBoer who says, yes, indeed, kids are going to learn about LGBTQ issues sooner or later. It is pointless to try to keep them from finding out about the existence of homosexuality, of gay love, of gay marriage, of trans people and gender nonconformity.

They're going to find out. They have smartphones, usually much younger than they should. They're curious. The world is always a click away. It is foolish to try to prevent them from learning about this stuff. And he says, look, I acknowledge that some of the reporting, you know, might have distorted and exaggerated what the bills call for. But now, you know, what Florida is saying is we're going, you know, all the way on all of this. And again, it's like, who are you trying to fool here? It's all of this confusion of actually dealing with a problem with this need to wave your hands and engage in this sort of you know non-virtue signaling of ron de santa saying the word woke you know 20 times in seven seconds or whatever it was but and yet what 55 of republican voters now say it's more important

to do shit like this than it is to protect entitlements from being caught i just what you know whatever what a world, Charlie. Here we go. So you are going to get off this podcast and you are going to go meet your family and move into your new house in New Orleans. I'm moving in, baby. It's happening. Thank you guys for being along the ride with me. Congratulations.

Have a great weekend. And maybe you should sit back, open a beer, you know, go on Netflix or whatever, and you can download, you can order, you can stream Streetcar Named Desire. I got NBA playoffs on the docket this weekend, but in July, I'll make it a priority. All right. Thank you, Mr. Miller. And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark Podcast. I am Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday, and I'll be actually podcasting from an undisclosed location in a different time zone, and we'll do this all over again.

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