The Bulwark Podcast - Will Saletan: Dining with a Nazi

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Trump had to know of Nick Fuentes before they sat down to dinner — he regards openly racist and antisemitic trolls as a fundamental part of his base. And now Kevin McCarthy needs allies of Fuentes to be speaker. Will Saletan's back with Charlie Sykes for Charlie and Will Monday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Syke. It is Monday, and no, I do not want to talk about the Green Bay Packers. I'm so reluctant to talk about the NFL in any way that I'm almost willing to talk about the World Cup, but almost. So joining me again this Monday, our colleague, Will Salatan. So happy Monday, Will. Happy Monday, Charlie. And the World Cup is an excellent thing to talk about because in the World Cup, unlike in Green Bay,

Draw 0-0. The Americans actually still have a chance. Yes, they still have a chance. It's just, I just can't invest, was it 90 minutes or so, to a game that has literally no scoring. I mean,, to a game that has literally no scoring? Who plays a game that has literally no scoring? Oh, the rest of the world, Charlie?

It, look. Right. It's a subtle game sitting around and watching a bunch of guys tap a ball back and forth. But, you know, trust me, it's exciting after a while. Subtle is not the word that I wanted to use. Okay, so since it's Monday, if you heard this one, Will, and any Semite and a neo-Nazi walk into a bar. I wish this was a joke, but it's not.

It's not a bar. It's Mar-a-Lago. It is the dinner table of the former and perhaps future president of the United States. I'm wrestling with, okay, this is same old, same old, because we've seen this before. And and also like this is a little bit next level when you think about it. What I wrote in my newsletter, the chatty love fest with the Holocaust denying neo-Nazi and for people who go, well,

OK, so, yeah, you know, I mean, they're all they're all bigots. They're all. Could we just spend just a moment, Will, letting people know who Nick Fuentes is? I want to put this guy in some context that even the most extreme MAGA types thinks that he's nuts. I mean, Mike Lindell is sitting around saying that guy's crazy. There's a lot of things we could say about Nick Fuentes. I mean, a lot of people obviously haven't seen this guy. He's a fringe character.

He goes to rallies. He gives speeches. He's a fringe character. He goes to rallies. He gives speeches. He has podcasts and stuff. And if you don't pay attention to these right-wing crazy circles, you might not know who he is. Let me tell you as a Jewish person how I've seen a lot of Nick Fuentes. If Kanye West were president of the United States, that would be really, really bad. But I don't believe he would try to kill the Jews. If Nick Fuentes were president of the United States, I would take up arms. That's where we are with this guy. He

would try to kill me and my family. He would try to kick us out of the country, put us in camps, whatever. That's who this guy is. So it's on a spectrum with other bigots and anti-Semites, but he's just that much further out there. Well, yeah, and he is never going to become president of the United States. But I do think that it's important. I mean, there is this pattern by which and for people who are wondering, you know, why we're spending time talking about this. I mean, there's so many different aspects. We'll get to it.

You know, the the whole vetting process to get to see the former president, the kinds of people that are allowed in the room and what's going on here? You know, Trump says he had no idea who Fuentes was. By the way, he does, because if you're not in MAGA world, he's not a household name. I get that. On the other hand, if you are within that world, he is not an obscure figure. And we're going to get to him and Marjorie Taylor Greene, et cetera. But it's also this replay of Trump's, you know, longstanding and very mutually beneficial alliance with the bigots and the conspiracy theorists ranging from David Duke, you know, the Klansman, to the very fine people of Charlottesville,

to QAnon, and to the Proud Boys. What he does is, for people who haven't, you know, seen this pattern enough, you know, he denies knowing who they are, even as he's sort of giving them winking acknowledgement, giving them encouragement. And he's tacitly acknowledging that he thinks of them, this this openly racist, anti-Semitic troll base as as a fundamental part of his base. This hate is spreading. It's being normalized and it's being mainstreamed. And for most Republicans, this is now baked in the cake. And so this has consequences.

It doesn't have to be just if he ever got into power. It's happening right now. So let's spend a moment listening to the guy that had dinner with the former president of the United States and who the president said, I really like this guy. He gets me. Apparently, this was a mutual admiration society back between the two of them. So who is Nick Fuentes? And you were talking about, you know, as a Jew, how you responded to him. This is not an exaggeration. This is not a hair on fire moment. This is Nick Fuentes talking about how violence against Jews

goes from zero to 60 in a very short period of time, and something that he looks forward to, it sounds like. Let's play the first one. When it comes to the Jews, here's the silver lining. It tends to go from zero to 60. Like, they're not wrong about that. But there's a reason for that. And the reason is them, okay? When it comes to the Jews, every society where shit has gone down with these people, it always goes from zero to 60 and never starts with burning all the town muds in Paris. Okay. It never starts that way, but frequently it seems to end that way. And it gets there very rapidly. Doesn't start there, but it frequently ends there. But I would say that the Jews had better start being nice to people like us.

Better. Because what comes out of this is going to be a lot uglier and a lot worse for them than anything that's being said on this show or has been said on this show. Great. This guy gets no points for subtlety. He's joked about the Jews who were killed in concentration camps, comparing them to cookies being burnt. I mean, you know, words like vile just kind of feel a little empty when you're describing this guy. Yeah. I mean, I'm recalling as you speak's listening to that clip, Dave Chappelle talking about, there are two words that should never be used together. They are the and Jews. Although I would remind you that I believe Donald Trump either tweeted or said the phrase, the blacks, you know,

so people who talk this way, the Jews, the blacks, the Mexicans, whatever it is, they're people who think in categorical terms about you. They don't think about you as an individual. They're interested in, you know, a group, is that group an enemy? Is that group a threat? And then they sort of define you as the enemy. And from that point on, you're in danger, as Fuentes is saying. And it's really interesting what he said there about, you know, he said it goes from zero to 60. He's talking about antisemitism. But he then says the reason is them. The reason is the Jews themselves who caused this. And that is kind of a core idea of antisemitism. When you say the reason why there is racism is the blacks. The reason why there is

antisemitism is the Jews. That's how you start on the road to the madness and the murder. People also need to understand that, you know, Nick Fuentes runs this organization called the America First, whatever it's called, that's had Marjorie Taylor Greene come and speak and Paul Gosar. He's a big fan boy of America First, but he's got very specific ideas about democracy as well. So it is not just that he is an overt white supremacist who attended the Charlottesville rally and spouts racist rhetoric. It's not just that he's in Holocaust denying neo-Nazi. He is very clearly and again, overtly, unsubtly, highly anti-democratic. You know, we throw around words like authoritarian. Well, like, what do you mean authoritarian? Well,

how about a guy that explicitly calls for a dictatorship because we cannot trust, you know, the evil voters of this evil country? So imagine this guy, I'm going to play this in the next clip, sitting down with the president and they're talking about how they're going to make America great again. Well, what does Nick Fuentes really think about America, his fellow Americans, and the kind of government that we should have? Let's play that clip. You got to recognize the fact that this is a godless country. I hate it. It's immoral. It's wrong. It's heinous. It's evil. But this is an evil country. And this country will surprise you with how evil it is. And that's why you got to get this out of your head that there is some silent majority cavalry that's going to come out of the woods and save us at the last

minute. It's not. When we meet the left on the battlefield and they outnumber us like five to one, that's it. But the point is, when you look at these things like abortion, it's popular. People like abortion, hate it, but it's true. And you can thank the Jewish media for that. Abortion's popular. Sodomy's popular. You know, being gay is popular. Being a feminist is popular. Sex out of wedlock is popular. Contraceptives are, it's all popular. That's all, that's not to say it's good. That's not to say I like that. Popular means the people support it, which they do. And, and it sucks and it is what it is, but that's why we need dictatorship. That's unironically why we need to get rid of all that.

We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe or force them to play by our rules and reshape the society. So, Will, a little bit of tension there between the freedom, don't tread on me line of MAGA, of we love America much more than you do. We are going to be fighting against the America-hating left. And that little bit of America is so vile, we need to have a dictatorship that forces people to think like we do. A little contradiction there. Well, Fuentes is actually a useful window into this way of thinking about the world.

He is an anti-pluralist, right? You know, you and I are pluralists. America is what it is. It's a great country because you can, people can believe differently as long as we don't, you know, go around hurting each other. We respect the rule of law and the constitution.

He doesn't believe any of that, right? Fuentes is a, what I would call a Christian tribalist. So he doesn't understand Christianity as moral. He understands it as my team. And anybody who isn't a Christian is evil. And so there's no space for those people. We need a dictatorship of our people who believe like us. So Fuentes' model actually for how to run a government,

how to run a country is kind of like Iran, I would say. It just happens that his version is Christian. So we're gonna suppress, purge the people who don't believe like us. It's also, by the way, Charlie, why he loves Vladimir Putin, right? Putin's a dictator who nominally claims to be Christian, anti-gay, whatever, and we're going to suppress the people. So it all becomes about the dictatorship and it becomes about undermining pluralism. And of course, as Fuentes put it in that clip, we're going to force you to believe what we believe. That is straight out of the Iranian government. So speaking of Vladimir

Putin, just in case people are thinking that we are taking him out of context, this is from his America First conference earlier this year. This is from February of this year. This was the event that Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke at, by the way, who's about to become one of the most influential members of the majority party in the House of Representatives. So this is from the America First conference earlier this year, after I believe Russia had just invaded Ukraine. And Nick Fuentes leads the crowd in chanting Putin, Putin, Putin. Here it is. Can we give a round of applause for Russia? Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And of course, he compares Putin to Hitler and not in a critical way necessarily. And now they're going on about Russia and Vladimir Putin is Hitler.

And they say it's not a good thing. And they say it's not a good thing. And this is the same speech where he then introduces one of the rising stars of the Republican Party, Marjorie Taylor Greene. For those of you who think he is merely a fringe character, We know what role she's going to play in the next Congress. Here's Nick Fuentes introducing and embracing MTG. We are honored. We are humbled and excited to welcome to the stage right now for our first speech. And we love to get to know her much better.

I think this is going to be the beginning of something great. The representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene. So, Will, the big question is, how did he end up at Mar-a-Lago? And really, it's not a mystery when you consider all of the people that Donald Trump has been letting into the room. Right. I mean, whether it was in his presidency after his defeat or since, he seems to be a magnet for these crackpots and these kooks, but so much for the vetting process for the most secure facility in the world, right? We can stash top secret nuclear documents because obviously this is a super, super mega, mega secure facility.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So first of all, if we take Trump's denial at face value that he knew anything about Fuentes, then it's a security problem. It's a vetting problem. These are the people who come in and they come in because they're the people who love Trump and because they love Trump, Trump loves them and they're bigots. That's why they love Trump.

That's what attracts them. But Charlie, can I just point out that I don't think we should accept Trump's denial about knowing something about Fuentes. First of all, I mean, prior to Fuentes showing up, we can debate what Trump knew about Fuentes, what he should have known. But I just wanted to quote to you from the Axios report on this meeting at Mar-a-Lago, which is their source said that during the meeting, during this dinner, Fuentes told Trump that he'd been banned from Getter, this right-wing social platform, because Jason Miller, somebody who worked for Trump, was not a fan of his. Quote, Trump asked whether it was because

Fuentes was on the, quote, fringe of his supporter base, the source said. Fuentes acknowledged that he was, saying he's, quote, one of those people who got banned from everything, unquote. So that is a conversation attributed to Trump and Fuentes by a source who apparently was inside this, indicating that during the meeting, Trump knows at this point that Fuentes is a fringe character. Fuentes has told him so. Trump then issues statements denying that he knows anything about Fuentes. I think we have to accept at this point that Trump knew during the conversation that Fuentes was a bad guy. I mean, Trump himself obviously is a bad guy, but Fuentes is in a different league. And then Trump issues these statements denying it. So I don't think we should accept Trump's denials. I agree with you. Look,

I mean, let me just take one step backwards. The whole Fuentes thing does tend to obscure, you know, something else that's really, really bizarre, which is that he was intentionally going to have dinner with Kanye West. Yes. Who he clearly knew, who has clearly been on some, you know, mental breakdown slash anti-Semitic rant. Why the former president would want to meet with him, leave that aside. But the one thing that's inarguable in terms of what he knew and when he knew it, I want to read Hugo Lowell from The Guardian, that Trump has repeatedly refused to disavow the outspoken anti-Semite and white supremacist Nick Fuentes after they spoke at

dinner, rejecting the advice from advisers. The former U.S. president was urged publicly and privately to denounce Fuentes in the aftermath of the dinner, but Trump eschewed making outright disavowals of Fuentes, the people said, and none of the statements from the campaign or on his truth social account included any criticism of Fuentes. Hmm. So there's several things like, how did he get in in the first place? What was the conversation like when he realized perhaps, well, when he obviously realized who this guy was. And then afterwards, and again, this is part of this two-step where he knows, wink, wink, wink, that these are part of his base. These are the loyalists. He's not going to burn them even when, you know, the guy's a freaking neo-Nazi. Yeah. And can I just come back to what your point about

Kanye, which I think is really important. Remember, Trump's defense against having met with Fuentes is, I didn't know this guy. I just meant to have dinner with Kanye, right? Kanye, just for people who have not followed all of it over the past month. So everybody knows that Kanye said, when I wake up, I'm going death con three on the Jewish people, on Jewish people, right? It's subsequent to that. In the weeks since then, Kanye has been out with more of these statements. Here's just a couple of them. This is from October 16th. Jared Kushner is an example of how the Jewish people have their hand on every single business that controls the world. October 19th, I've been wronged so many times by Jewish businessmen. They're taking money out of my children's mouths and putting it into their children's mouths. October 24th, like if Rahm Emanuel is sitting next to Obama or Jared sitting next to Trump, there's a Jewish person right there controlling the country. Okay, these are quotes from Kanye West over the past month. After all of that, after all of that, Trump is literally says,

why would I not meet with Kanye? He loves me. So leaving Fuentes aside, Trump's defense is that he deliberately met with an overt anti-Semite. So what should we make? And by the way, this seems tedious to even to ask, what do we make of the overwhelming silence from Republicans? Now, there are there are exceptions. There are notable exceptions, which we will acknowledge. But most of them are basically sitting out. I think, you know, Axios says GOP lawmakers hushed on Trump's dinner spokespeople for nearly two dozen House and Senate Republicans, including party leaders, co-chairs of caucuses and task forces focused on Judaism or anti-Semitism and

sponsors of legislation to combat anti-Semitic hate crimes did not respond to requests for comment. So this is sort of the muscle memory of cowardice that they've just built in for the last six, seven years now. It is. And Charlie, think back a few years to when you made your decision, right? There were people when Donald Trump emerged who recognized that Donald Trump was a bad man, a really bad human being. Part of his badness was he was an overt bigot. He literally said a Mexican-American judge couldn't judge him because of the guy's heritage.

He literally said all Muslims should be banned from entering the United States. It was all out there. You made a decision. Other people made a decision. He's bad. He's a bigot. We are going to reject him. Everyone who didn't make that decision, who tried to hide, ignore, pretend it wasn't there, cover it up, which is basically the entire leadership of the Republican Party, ends up deeper and deeper into this muck of Trump and his filth and the people

he associates with. If you make the decision early, you don't end up having to defend this kind of grotesque propaganda and bigotry at the end. You're right. I mean, we know that's why it's baked into the cake at this point, because, you know, all of the pro-Trump and the anti-anti-Trump folks in the Republican Party who've rationalized voting for him in 2016 or again in 2020, or haven't closed the door to supporting him again in 2024, like Bill Barr, weirdly enough, have all basically decided, okay, we know he does this. We know this is the consequence of this, and we're going to go along with it. We will accept this. We will enable this.

Right. Can we pause on Chris Christie for a minute? Oh, I want to come back to Chris Christie, but go ahead. Yeah. Okay. Chris Christie to me is the, is the paradigm of this, right? The people who made the wrong decision at the beginning about Trump are people who thought, well, I can deal with what he has said so far, right? Not, not understanding or accepting or facing the fact that when you embrace a bad person, it only gets worse. He's just going to keep doing more of this. So let's start with what Chris Christie says is saying now about, about Trump and, and about Fuentes. He said what Christie statement is, this is just an example, another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald

Trump, blah, blah, blah. He goes on about this. Chris Christie is more than anyone else. The person responsible for Donald Trump winning the nomination for president in 2016, becoming president, everything that has happened afterward. Back in February of 2016, this is after Trump has made his bigoted statements, after he said all Muslims should be banned from the United States. Chris Christie comes out, torpedoes Marco Rubio, who had the best shot of taking out Trump, and endorses Donald Donald Trump and just decides, I'm going to go with this guy. It is because of Chris Christie that we ended up, for Chris Christie to accuse Donald Trump of a lack of judgment after what Chris Christie himself did is just the height of hypocrisy. Well, interestingly enough, I'm looking at a tweet that Trump put out back in

February of 2016, where he's trying to say that he really did disavow David Duke. So this was after the whole David Duke controversy exploded. And guess who is standing behind Donald Trump in this picture at this press conference holding the shine box? It is Chris Christie. He has been through this. So Chris Christie, who kept his mouth shut and went along with the bromance between David Duke and Donald Trump now is saying, well, this is just this is completely unacceptable. Look, I'm glad that they're saying it's unacceptable. I don't want to, you know, you know, rain on everybody's brain. But there were some people who went out of their way yesterday, very, very small number to denounce this. And I'm kind of a little bit surprised. Asa Hutchinson, who is the outgoing governor of Arkansas, a long time. It was a congressman, right? He was a congressman. Then he was the governor of Arkansas.

Yeah. Very forceful, I thought, in his response. Let's play it. And I'm going to get your reaction on the other side. I mean, you can have accidental meetings. Things like that happen. This was not an accidental meeting. It was a set up dinner with Kanye. And so this happened. But you certainly have every occasion that the question of white supremacy or neo-Nazism or denying the Holocaust comes up. You've got to be absolutely clear in your communication that this is not acceptable dogma, it's not acceptable conversation, it's not acceptable history, and you have to disavow it.

It is as simple as that. And I'm very proud of the Republican-Jewish coalition, the former ambassador, U.S. ambassador in the Trump administration to Israel has condemned this. And so what Donald Trump did and his failure to condemn it is really the minority of the party. It's the extreme side of it. And that's what you've got to distance yourself from. And he failed to do that.

You watched a lot more of the Sunday morning shows than I did. But that seemed like the clearest denunciation of Trump by a Republican. Right. In fact, the only one who I saw who made a very clear moral denunciation. I mean, what Hutchinson says there, remember when Republicans used to talk about culture, you know, and we have to, we have to protect the culture. We have to send clear cultural messages. That's what's going on here. Somehow Republicans have failed to understand that racism, that anti-Semitism, that bigotry, these are cultural problems. It isn't just like abortion.

It isn't just about sexual deviance or whatever other issue you want to drag into it. Racism, bigotry, prejudice, these are cultural issues. And Hutchinson's exactly right. You have to say what's acceptable. You have to be clear. If you are silent, then the society becomes more deviant. And we're not talking up here about people who wear strange clothing. We're talking about people who threaten others because of their inherent characteristics or because of their religious beliefs. Okay. What I find really difficult is this is easy. This is not hard to be a Republican. You would think, and to say, okay, we denounce Holocaust denying neo-Nazis. Okay. We do not want to associate with that

person. This is the lowest of the lowest hanging fruit. So it's a measure of how far this party has become that this is considered too difficult, because if it's Donald Trump and we criticize Donald Trump's overt flirtation with neo-Nazis, then we might get a mean tweet or a mean social media post. And we're so frightened by that. By the way, can I get off topic for a second? A little digression. Go ahead. So this morning I'm watching TV reports about the incredible courage of these Chinese protesters juxtaposed to what's going on in Iran, juxtaposed to what's going on the line. And then contrast that with the absolute cowardice of the Republican establishment that is actually afraid of a truth social tweet from Mar-a-Lago. I mean, it's just like we live in a world where split screen, we have this amazing courage, willingness to stand up for principle, to fight for your country.

And then you have Republicans in Congress who are all like, you know, looking for the back of the closet, looking for the tall weeds. Yeah. All the time. Yeah. So it's cowardice. But but, you know, in addition to that, Charlie, it's also political practicality. I mean, one of the pictures that I saw when I was reading about Fuentes this weekend is there's a picture of him. I think it's at an America First conference, one of his things. Anyway, he's standing there.

He's got Paul Gosar next to him. He's got Steve King next to him, the former congressman. As you point out, Marjorie Taylor Greene was at one of these Fuentes things. These Republican Congress people and former Congress people who are literally present with Nick Fuentes and his anti-Semitic filth and his bigoted filth. These people are now a core element of the Republican Party. If Kevin McCarthy doesn't have the vote of Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Paul Gosar, he's screwed. He's operating with a majority that is absolutely dependent on people who are this close to Nick Fuentes. Now, among the people who are obviously pretty upset about this, Ben Shapiro from The Daily Wire, who's going through some interesting things here because, you know, he had gone all in on MAGA.

He hired Candace Owens, who's a big buddy of Kanye West. And remember, he justified his support for Trump's reelection by saying, you know, whatever bad things he's done, he's already done them. He can't get any worse than this. Right. So, so now it's like, whoa, okay. Maybe you shouldn't be having dinners with any Semites, um, you know, in neo-Nazis. And Popat has the tweet of the day.

Popat, who's, how did we describe him? Prominent commentator. He's quoting Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro. So I moved to Bigotsville and bought a house on Bigot Drive and joined the local Bigot Association and the Society for Advancement of Bigots and put out a lawn jockey. And now I have to ask, where did all these bigots come from? It's weird. Yes, exactly.

It is weird. So we played Asa Hutchinson. More typical was a congressman. Is it James Comer? Yep. I'll learn these names at some point. He's the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee. And he's asked about this and listen to how he answers this. Do you think it was a mistake for the former president to do that? Well, he certainly needs better judgment in who he dines with i know that he's issued a statement and said he didn't know uh who those people were but at any rate you know my focus is going to be on uh investigating the current administration as the next chairman of the house oversight

committee and trying to get a handle on the massive amounts of waste fraud and abuse in our federal government so basically he instantly pivots from, yeah, I'm not going to be interested in, you know, this sort of, I don't want to talk about this. I want to talk about the investigations that we're going to do. You know, Hunter Biden's laptop and, you know, wasted money in all of this, much more typical of where the Republican Party is going right now. Yeah. I mean, in that, that's a short clip from Comer, but in that he conveys a couple of things that are highly significant. One is he says it's a matter of judgment, which is a way of saying it's not a moral issue to him. It's just not a moral issue to these

Republicans, the bigotry, the prejudice, the racism, the antisemitism, not a moral issue. The other thing is he says, that's not my focus. Charlie, as you're pointing out, like if you say my focus is going to be elsewhere, you're telling the public the Republican Party is not going to care about this issue. If you want someone to care about protecting minorities from people like Nick Fuentes, from people like Kanye West, you're going to need to elect a different party. That is a very politically stupid and morally reprehensible position. So where are we at in the Kevin McCarthy speaker watch? Matt Gaetz keeps putting out statements that he doesn't have the votes. Why do people not understand?

We are not going to vote for him. He's not going to get 218 votes. So do you take that at face value? Are Republicans in denial about how bad their division is? I mean, you know, being speaker is a shitty job to begin with. I mean, it's kind of, you know, the herding cats job. In this particular case, it's herding rats. Is he going to get to 218? I don't know if he's going to get to 218. I mean, the McCarthy position and the position of Kevin McCarthy's supporters is nobody else can get to 218, right? It's like that joke, Charlie, about the two guys, the bear is going to chase them. And the second guy says, I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.

That's kind of where Kevin McCarthy is, right? He, no one else can get to 218. Therefore it will fall to him. And Charlie, it may work to get him the speakership, but if you become speaker of the house only because nobody else could get the House, only because nobody else could get the votes, not because you actually have 218 people who really support you, that puts you in a terrible position for as long as your speakership holds, right? It's going to make him a very weak speaker. And it's going to make the people we just talked about, the Gateses and the Gosars and the Greens, it's going to give them power over the speakership and therefore over the Congress. Yeah, it's going to be a shitty job if in fact he he gets it. So, you know, among the other things, you know, trying to catch up with the weekend, I realized when I

was putting my newsletter together, there's a certain length like, you know, it says, you know, post too long for newsletter for email. So I have to leave it out. And there's just so much, including what is going on with Elon Musk, who has now, you know, announced that because of an online poll that he did of the Paul Gosar's and Nick Windy's of the world, that he's going to restore all of the suspended Twitter accounts. What could possibly go wrong there? Apparently endorsing Ron DeSantis over Trump. We'll see how that all plays out and lashes out at all things. Alexander Vindman. Did you follow that? Alexander Vindman, you know, the, the, the Patriot whistleblower who raised his voice when the former president was trying to blackmail, uh, Ukraine and Elon

Musk is tweeting out, well, who's the puppet and who's the puppet master? Is it Alexander Vindman? What the fuck is this about? Well, I don't really know what Elon Musk meant by this, but I know what other people who have talked this way mean by it, right? When they talk about Vindman as a puppet, there's this whole view of Vindman and the Ukraine saga that goes back to the CIA. The idea is that Vindman was part of a deep state. It's part of the intelligence community, the CIA, they were all out to get Trump. So they exposed this phone call of his yada yada. If Elon Musk is in this mentality of the secret deep state, which consists of patriots, by the way, of people who work in US intelligence and have for decades, and people who in Vindman's case, literally laid

down their lives, risked their lives for the United States, then that speaks to a certain illness in Elon Musk that makes his control of Twitter as a social media platform even more dangerous. So the other big story of the day, and I'm not going to make any predictions on this because I'm not an expert in all of this, with these ongoing protests in China that appear to be at, I don't know whether we can compare them to what happened in Tiananmen Square, but looking at the Drudge Report here, the China COVID revolution, the biggest protest since Tiananmen, calls for Xi to resign. We want freedom, defiance. And apparently Twitter is flooded with Chinese-inspired garbage to suppress reporting

on what's going on there. So I am inspired by watching what the Chinese people are doing, but I just don't know what the mechanism is for them to make any changes. And I've lived through too many of the, you know, the irrational exuberance. Well, this is going to change history and this is going to pull down this authoritarian regime when it hasn't. So what is your sense about where we're at in China? And this is going to pull down this authoritarian regime when it hasn't. So what is your sense about where we're at in China? And if you want to throw in Iran as well, the other authoritarian state really under siege at the moment. All right. I agree with you. I'm skeptical that anybody can overthrow a regime that's as well

entrenched as China's is. But there are a couple of unusual factors here. One is that China is accustomed to growth. If the government clamps down on activities such that the economy is contracting, people are in serious economic straits. That is a threat that the Chinese regime is not necessarily prepared for. The other thing is the degree of constraint here of people having to stay in their homes. The zero COVID in China is like when right- wingers in America talk about Tony Fauci locking people up, that's bullshit. But that really, you know, that kind of stuff is happening in China. And so the extremity of the repression and the extremity

of the possible economic consequences are great enough that we may be in uncharted territory there. No, I mean, to underline that point, to compare what they did to what we did is just ridiculous because in China, zero COVID means if you test positive, they don't just tell you to stay home and sleep at all. They come and they pick you up and your family and they take you to a quarantine center and you have to stay there. I mean, think about that. Think about the implications of that. The reason I think the Chinese communists have been, quote unquote, successful so far is because they have delivered something on the in the area of nine percent annual growth. If that drops down to two or three percent, then that whole promise of that deal, that bargain that they've made breaks down. Right. And so there is a certain vulnerability. It really does come back to the economy. Iran is a little bit more complicated because they can't fall back on, you know,

promises of prosperity. But I don't know how that plays out. Well, there's a little bit more of a history of freedom in Iran, not for everybody, but there's the pre-Ayatollah's regime. There was some institutional memory of that, if not been the lifetimes of present Iranians. So that's another factor that makes Iran a little bit more unstable. Charlie, I'm a little bit fascinated by the methods that China is resorting to to try to control this. One is, I think people have pointed out that, so if you're in China, you're being told we have this crisis, we have to clamp down, nobody can go out, or very extreme anti-COVID measures. Meanwhile, if you're watching the World Cup, there's all

these people without masks, right? And so China's having to censor images of the people in the stands- That is so weird. Who are not wearing masks. And the other thing is China's pumping out, this is totally fascinating to me, how do you control information in the information age? Well, if you go out and search for the names of Chinese cities, Shanghai or whatever, what's popping up in internet searches and on Twitter is spam. The Chinese are pumping out porn spam. So they found this other thing and we're just going to flood you with escort services and sex ads and stuff like that. And so that has become a censorship method in the modern age.

I just think that's kind of fascinating. I don't know if it's a harbinger of the future. The other issue that I wanted to talk with you about, and I know that you've been following it a lot more closely than I have. There was a discussion on the Sunday morning shows yesterday about what's going on at the border. And every time you and I bring this up, we get a lot of blowback from people saying, you know, you're not being fair to the Biden administration. Things aren't really that bad. I have to tell you that as a casual observer, it looks bad what's happening at the border. And I'm not sure what the administration's plan to solve it is. In particular, Will, I was thinking about Jay Johnson,

who was Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security, who had some rather poignant things to say yesterday. This is Jay Johnson from yesterday morning. I have to be honest about the asylum laws and the processing. It takes six years right now to process an asylum claim once someone has entered this country. And one of the problems is that the bar to qualify initially and establish a case of credible fear is relatively low, something like 70 percent of migrants qualify who seek it. And the ultimate qualification for asylum, the percentage there is only about 20 percent, and it's six years in between. Migrants know this. And so we've got to develop a system where we can more expeditiously deal with these claims, but also take a look at the credible fear standard itself. I know my friends

on the left won't be too happy to hear that. No politician is going to take that vote. But it does exist, and it's phenomenal. Well, it can be done possibly through regulation, and I think it's something that ought to be looked at. So, Will, your take on that? Well, Charlie, several weeks ago, you and I were talking about this issue of the border, and we talked about the fact that our system's overwhelmed, too many migrants coming in, the numbers are astronomical, and how are we going to deal with it? And you asked me, what would you do about it? And I've been thinking about that ever since you asked this question and I did not have an answer. And I am so grateful to hear this from Jay Johnson because he exactly nails what the

problem is. We have, and as he says, liberals don't want to hear this, but we have a, we have a standard for letting people stay in this country for six years while they're waiting for their claims to be adjudicated. That is too low. We are letting too many people into this country claiming asylum, but they do not have a legit claim. As he says, only 20% end up being valid. So we need to, as he says, we're going to need to limit, we're going to need to tighten that standard. Liberals do not want to hear that, but clearly we do, we cannot logistically handle the number of people who are coming here who do not have a valid claim. And we're going to have to, we're going to have to do what a lot of conservatives have said, which is we're

going to have to make it more difficult for people to enter this country without a demonstrably valid claim for asylum. Well, also, I think you need to you need to restore a little bit of credibility to the system, you know, that you have a catch and release system where people come across and then are released on parole and can be, you know, disappear into the country for years, whatever the adjudication of their case might be. I mean, that doesn't pass a common sense test. Right. And I think that's one of the reasons people look at that and go, OK, that doesn't sound like we're serious about controlling the border. Right.

And I think Jay Johnson is actually he's right that the migrants understand this. Everyone has gotten the message that you can get into the United States. You come in, you claim asylum and you can be here for a long time. And the system for finding you later for your hearing is not great. But, you know, in addition, you've already been able to put down roots here. You've had you've been able to make money here. We have to send a signal out to the rest of the world. It's not going to be that easy.

You're going to have to prove that you have a legit claim. So, Will, obviously, we are still in an election season. I think everybody was hoping we'd be done by the end of November. We have the runoff election in Georgia. Latest poll that I saw has Warnock up by four points, which is still ridiculously close considering who Herschel Walker is. But that race has turned pretty nasty and pretty negative. So what are you seeing there? Well, Walker is trying to fight back. He doesn't have Brian Kemp on the ticket this time to help

him out. And so he's, he's going, and one of the grossest things that I saw, Charlie was, uh, Herschel Walker's new, I don't know if you've seen this, the, the, a new ad about trans, the transgender swimmer. And you and I have talked about the transgender swimmer and whether, yeah. So, but this, this is the, literally, I think the day after the shooting in Colorado at the gay nightclub, literally the next day, I believe Walker puts this ad on the air. It's him and a female swimmer who was in the pool with the transgender swimmer, you know, and she's complaining that it's unfair. And look, it is unfair. I agree to have people who were born male competing with people who were born female. It's just a biological advantage that they have. But as a percentage of like the world's

ills, it's so minuscule. And as a percentage of transgender issues, you just had five people killed by an anti-trans, anti-gay hate crime, right? And instead, you're talking about somebody who got tied for fifth place in a swimming competition because there was a transgender swimmer. The proportions are just completely out of whack. Obviously, that's not one of those ads that's designed to persuade anyone that's on the fence that if you're really upset about that, you already know who you're going to vote for. You know, I think this is, again, an indication of the way these issues just loom so large within MAGA world. I was actually talking with somebody

the other day about, you know, what are the main issues driving, you know, Republicans at the moment in, say, rural areas? And he said, it's these gender issues. But I don't know that that solves the problems that Republicans have, uh, in terms of the suburban vote or whether or not someone's going to vote on that issue as opposed to any other serious issue involving, you know, the public. And I guess that this is what's, you know, I'm sorry to go back to the James Comer thing and, you know, the incoming Republican Congress, the fact that they're really not even going through the motions of talking about serious legislation or things that would actually solve problems that Americans have or that would, you know, have any relationship to

the daily life of Americans. I mean, maybe we're living in a world that it's all entertainment, it's all social media, but it seems completely disconnected with the way most people live their lives. Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with all of what you just said. And can I suggest a more constructive direction for the House Republicans?

Because one of the other things that James Comer said in his interview this weekend was, he said, when we Republicans take over, he wants to take over the Oversight Committee and be chairman. He said, we believe there have been hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars wasted over the past three years spanning two administrations, not just Biden, but Trump, in the name of COVID. He said they want to look at fraudulent unemployment insurance funds, fraudulent PPP loans, money that was spent by local and state governments as COVID stimulus and what the waste that was involved.

Charlie, that would be great. That would be a highly constructive use. These are all legitimate. Totally. This is why God made Republicans to investigate this kind of fraud and waste. I hope they do it. I hope that's where they spend their time. Yeah, I think we can divide some of these oversight investigations into two buckets.

Number one, the ones that are completely legitimate, like the ones you just mentioned. I think it's completely legitimate to have hearings about the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And I think the administration has an obligation to cooperate. On the other hand, if we're going to spend the next 18 months wallowing in Hunter Biden's laptop, I mean, really, I mean, how many times do we have to point out that, you know, he's a private citizen? And look, I mean, if they have hard evidence tying Biden to it, maybe that's a different story. But so far, we haven't seen any of that. You know, we've gone through this entire discussion without talking about Jack Smith, without talking about another one of the unhinged meltdowns from Mar-a-Lago.

For people who think that the appointment of Jack Smith was somehow a break for Donald Trump because it will slow things down. That's certainly not the way it's playing down at Mar-a-Lago, is it? I mean, it's just throwing everything up against the wall. And I suppose the strategy is, you know, I will try to discredit this guy. I will try to intimidate this guy. But I don't know about you, Will. It's just there's something about the playbook. It just feels so old and tired and boring these days. Do you know what I'm saying? It just it's it doesn't have the same pizzazz that it used to have. Yeah, we've we've gotten used to Trump attacking anyone who investigates

him, right? But I have to say, going after a special counsel is one of the best insulated people in the world is Jack Smith. And so this is not somebody that, you know, the House Republicans will be able to get rid of. He's going to do his investigation. Donald Trump is a whole lot better off ceasing to lie and obstruct. If Trump wants to get the best of Jack Smith, Trump better start complying with the law. That would be a much better strategy. Yeah, I think it's a little bit late for that. I just think it is a little bit late for that. So we'll have a chance to talk about what's going to happen with the primaries. The answer is right now that nobody knows. But it is interesting how, and I keep coming back to this,

that, that, uh, Donald Trump announces he's running and none of the things he was hoping would happen have happened. He has not been the recipient of this massive flood of endorsements and he did not clear the field. I mean, these guys are still there. Even Nikki Haley is still in the race, effectively. So, you know, there's a piece over the weekend in Politico. They talked about how it's just the excitement's not there anymore. There's not that enthusiasm. He's got all kinds of momentum going for himself. Now, again, you know, we've seen this before in the sense that the base is different than the elites in the media report. But I think it's an objective fact that that rollout did not accomplish what Donald Trump

thought it was going to accomplish. Yeah. Let me just throw in a theory about why that is. It is that the midterms are over and they, Republicans successfully talked Trump into delaying his announcement until after the midterms that helped them in the midterms, but it also took away his leverage because they wanted him to get his people until after the midterms. That helped them in the midterms, but it also took away his leverage because they wanted him to get his people out to the polls. Okay, he did that to whatever extent he was gonna do it, and that's over. So Trump is basically a hostage taker,

and he's lost his hostage. And so they're all looking at him like, what are you gonna do about it? Now you need us. We don't have to help you. And Charlie, you know that I have been following Lindsey Graham, who is one of my favorite weather vanes. And Lindsey Graham, who has been saying for two years, Donald Trump is the man, get out of his way, Ron DeSantis, has started to say lately,

you know, Trump's going to announce and he's going to have the feel to himself for a while, and we'll see how he does. And that is another sort of sign in the wind of that. Maybe Donald Trump no longer has the power to intimidate others out of the race and the power to keep everyone in line the way he used to. Yeah. And again, this may be premature, but also I'm getting the same kind of vibe out of what's going on in Arizona, where Kerry Lake is going back to the election denial playbook and Donald Trump is tweeting out or not tweeting out whatever they call it, the true social statements, you know, talking about problems with the voting machines.

But also, that just doesn't feel like it has the same energy. In fact, there's kind of an eye-rolling quality to it that other Republicans have just kind of moved on. And considering that this is the heart and soul of Trumpism, that's not a good omen for him. But again, we have a long way to go. And right now, Donald Trump still has the base behind him. He still has much of the conservative media, although not Fox News behind him. That's another big story. And his major asset, which would be a fractured field. Look, there's no way around it. The more candidates to run, the better it is for Trump. Or do you disagree with that? No, I agree with that. That's the one way he could, he could get the nomination, although not the general election. But I thoroughly agree with what you said about the loss of pizzazz.

You know, you and I have talked about sort of fatigue, eventually overcoming all things, including a lot of bad things. And I agree. People are just tired of this. They're tired of Trump and his whining about the 2020 election. Kerry Lake complains that there's an election lie and everybody's like, yeah, right, right. And Charlie, this is reminding me of back in the beginning of the Trump administration, there was a hearing, and I think I may have talked about this before, Eastern Europeans, Putin had been like in Eastern Europe, spreading all sorts of propaganda. And what happened is over time, the Eastern Europeans got used to the Russian propaganda. They were like, oh yeah, that's more Russian propaganda. Charlie, I think that's what's

happening here. People are like, yeah, more of Trump's lies, more of Trump's propaganda. Yeah. More election denial. And they're just brushing it off. They're not taking it seriously anymore. Well, okay. I probably should have seen this earlier, but, um, this is a post that Donald Trump put out. That is the timestamp says it was at 2.30 a.m. Think about that. Assuming that he didn't schedule it or anything, that he put this out at 2.30 a.m. Statement by Donald J. Trump. Massive numbers of broken voting machines in Republican districts on Election Day.

Mechanics sent in to fix them. And the word fix is in quotation marks and all caps. Made them worse. Kerry, Kerry Lake. Kerry had to be taken to a Democrat area, which was working perfectly to vote. Her opponent ran the election. This is yet another criminal voting operation. So obvious the word so obvious all in caps.

How about this? At two thirty a.m. Carrie Lake should be installed governor of Arizona. This is almost as bad as the 2020 presidential election, which the unselect committee refuses to touch, blah, blah, blah. So here you have Donald Trump sitting down there in Mar-a-Lago at 2.30 a.m. saying that Kerry Lake should be installed as governor of Arizona. I'm sorry, outside of the really fetid reaches of the fever swamp, is even Republicans taking that seriously anymore? Or is that like, man, this is just we are we are late stage fat Elvis here. I hope they're not taking it seriously. I don't hear them taking it seriously.

But man, is that a fascinating comment, that word installed. And folks, this is where you end up if you claim, as Trump does, as Kerry Lake does, that all the elections are corrupt. You can't believe any of the election results. What is the alternative to elections? It is installing the people that you claim won, even though you don't have the evidence for it. And that's pretty much what Nick Fuentes is talking about, a dictatorship, right? So the alternative to elections, to trusting elections, to fixing elections is not believing in elections, period, and ending up with the idea of we know who should have won and we're going to install that person.

Thank God Donald Trump failed to do that when he attempted his coup in early 2021. And I don't want to see Kerry Lake or anybody else doing it either. Another day to remind our listeners that you're not the crazy ones. They are. So, Will, thanks for coming back for Charlie and Will Monday. I appreciate it. Thank you, Charlie. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio production by Jonathan Seary. I'm Charlie Sykes. Thank you for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast, and we'll be back tomorrow to do this all over again.