The Bulwark Podcast - Will Saletan: How Many Coups Do You Have to Attempt?

Episode Date: April 24, 2023

Trump's negative poll numbers are not high enough, Alito couldn't get other justices to go off the cliff with him, and DeSantis can't stop bossing companies around. Plus, hyper-identity politics in the literary world, and the escalation beyond the Second Amendment. Will Saletan is back with Charlie Sykes for Charlie and Will Monday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Good morning and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I am Charlie Sykes. It is Monday, which means I am joined by my colleague, Will Salatan. You have a great weekend, Will? I did, Charlie. I did. It's lovely out here. It's the Washington spring, our three weeks of spring. Okay. So I am three time zones away from you right now. I'm in an undisclosed location in a desert community where it was 95 degrees yesterday. 95. Don't give me the stuff about tri-heat. That's just freaky hot. Charlie, you're from Wisconsin. You think that 50 is hot. And what is your point? One of the bartenders at the event I was at was complaining. It hasn't been warm here. I mean, it was in the fifties. It's been in the fifties for days. And I said, you know, I'm from Wisconsin 50 that spring that is spring. Of course here in Phoenix, uh, that's not the undisclosed location, but they only have two seasons hot and hotter. So I think we're getting into the hotter. Okay. We have so much to talk

about today. I want to talk about something I wrote about in my Morning Shots newsletter about a best-selling author, Richard North Patterson, who's been a contributor to the bulwark. It is an amazing story and a really disturbing story. If people haven't seen it, I would encourage them to read it. He wrote us an email over the weekend and had an essay in the Wall Street Journal. I want to get to that in a moment. This is going to be a big week. Joe Biden is going to announce probably tomorrow that he is running. There are a lot of poll numbers out suggesting that Americans are not exactly jazzed about this prospect. I don't know whether that's going to mean anything. Since you and I spoke, Will, the Supreme Court

late on Friday made a ruling on the abortion pill. They sort of backed away from the edge. We have Ron DeSantis speaking to the Heritage Foundation. So again, there's a lot going on. Kevin McCarthy bringing a debt ceiling vote to the House of Representatives. So this sort of deadly, is it a kabuki dance or is it a game of fiscal chicken? Which overused metaphor should we use today? It's kabuki chicken. Oh, that's good. Okay. See, I knew I should ask you. Let's start with abortion.

Let's start with what the Supreme Court did. They came right up to the edge. And apparently, it looks like they voted seven to two to basically say, yeah, we're not going to ban the abortion pill nationwide. And interestingly enough, Justice Alito was very, very unhappy about that, was really had a bundle about that. So let's talk about what you're reading from the court's latest decision, which I mean, arguably is the most important decision on abortion since Dobbs. What happened? Right. Okay. So the Supreme Court has delayed this. They've not allowed the lower court rulings to go into effect, which means you will still have access to this pill while the case goes through the court. But

the case is going through the courts. The merits have not been decided. And so this could come up, Charlie, honestly, it could come up next year in the middle of the election that the Supreme Court is deciding the merits of whether we're going to roll back the FDA approval of Mifepristone, which means that we would be eliminating, if that were approved, we would be eliminating access to the most common method of abortion in this country. It's also the primary method of early abortion, right? So what we're seeing is the pro-life movement increasingly moving from regulating and restricting the later stages of pregnancy to the earliest stages, and not just banning it state by state, but trying to eliminate access nationwide. And it's not going to end with

this ruling. It's only going to escalate as this case proceeds through the courts. I think that is true. Was it your formulation last week that we were going to find out whether the court was conservative or was radical? Yes. Okay. So I think we saw a little bit of the conservatives going, you know, we are not going to follow Sam Alito over the cliff on this one. Yeah. So, you know, what does it mean to be conservative? That's a lot of what we're debating these days as Trump has kind of upset that whole idea. And in the courts, so the idea of judicial restraint is the judges shouldn't be making decisions, that we should let legislators representing the people make these decisions.

And most of the justices on the Supreme Court appear, it's hard to tell from this kind of a ruling what they're thinking. But this Supreme Court ruling, suspending the lower court rulings, is consistent, at least, with the idea of judicial restraint. Here's a lower court judge, a federal district court judge in Amarillo, right? The pro lifers went in, they judge shop, they set up in Amarillo to get this guy to issue this ruling. So one judge could eliminate access to this pill nationwide. And for the Supreme Court to say, not, you know, we're not going to let that go into effect yet, at least as consistent

with judicial restraint. But Charlie, you put your finger on one guy, Sam Alito, who in the Dobbs case last year said, you know, we want judges to get out of this business. And yet a lower court judge does this in Amarillo and Alito essentially wants to allow the rulings below. He says, you know, the FDA doesn't can't really show that it's been harmed by the suspension of access to the pill. So I'm starting to get the feeling that Sam Alito is not a judicial conservative, that that's all fake. Or particularly consistent in his judicial philosophy. I think you see where he's coming down on all of this. And of course, the Republicans still debating among themselves where they're going to go on all of this. Did you notice over the last week, you had an interesting back and forth between, of all people, Donald Trump and one of the leading pro-life groups, the Susan B. Anthony Fund. What do you make of that? Well, that's kind of wild. I mean, Trump has an instinct for at least what's politically saleable because Trump doesn't care about any of the moral issues. He's not like Mike Pence,

actually believing that these are the killing of persons and we have to stop it. Trump's just looking for political advantage. So he takes the sensible position politically, which is, you know, I'm running for national office, so I'm just going to kick this issue to the states, which was a time-honored position among fake pro-lifers for a long time. The Susan B. Anthony list, which claims to represent a million people, but it is a very prominent pro-life group. And it issued a statement saying, this is not acceptable on Trump's part. We will not accept it. It's not acceptable to push this back to the states. They've drawn the line. It has to be a national ban.

Right. And they're trying to send the signal to Trump. I'm sorry, we're not with you if you're not for a national ban. An interesting little power dynamic there. It is. And Charlie, this statement from the Susan B. Anthony, this is an amazing statement. I'm just going to read you one line from it. They said, saying that the issue should only be decided at the state is an endorsement of abortion up until the moment of birth. That's an

amazing statement. I mean, that is an escalation of what counts as pro-life in this country. I think most people in this country who consider themselves pro-life are somewhat moderate on this issue. They think abortion should be more restricted than it is. They think it is a form of killing, but they wouldn't say that, you know, overturning Roe and returning the issue to the states and the people is an endorsement of abortion, much less an endorsement up until the last moment. That's crazy. So it'll be interesting to see whether or not Trump aligns himself with the pro-life movement, because, I mean, he's got a lot of chits to play on all of this. And, you know, I had Tim Alberto on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. He said there's the real gap right now between the pro-life movement and Donald Trump. My guess is that

they'll resolve it if, in fact, he moves on to get the nomination. Also, in a power struggle in the Republican Party between the Susan B. Anthony Fund and Donald Trump, I have to say that Susan B. Anthony is about to find out the limits of their clout within this new magnified Republican Party. The problem is, what do you do if you strongly believe that abortion should be outlawed everywhere, but candidates who say that keep losing, right? And so we had this lesson in the 2022 midterms, the extreme candidates are tending to lose. And at some point, a political party, in order to be viable, has to back off and say, you know, we'd like to ban all the abortions, but in fact, America won't stand for it. And if the party doesn't back off, what happens is you

have another political cycle, another election cycle in 2024, when these candidates lose even bigger. I suspect, Charlie, that's what's going to happen. So Nancy Mace from South Carolina is having a moment where she's getting a lot of attention, although she's also going through some weird things. I can't quite figure out what her deal is. You know, one day she's on one of the talk shows and sounding like reasonably rational. And then the next day she's filming a selfie of herself

talking about some weird conspiracy. You know what I'm talking about here? And it's like, wait, wait, wait. Is this the Nancy Mace who sounded like she has a clue She's filming a selfie of herself talking about some weird conspiracy. You know what I'm talking about here? And it's like, wait, wait, wait. Is this the Nancy Mace who sounded like she has a clue and is stepping up? And then she feels the idea. I need to shore up my batshit crazy cred here with this. Well, she was on one of the shows over the weekend talking about this and about the politics, exactly what you are talking about and the problem this poses for Republicans. So this is Congresswoman Nancy

Mason, one of her more, I don't know, mainstream moments. And we have to show compassion, especially to victims who've been raped. The Florida bill mandated that women who were raped, to get that exception, had to report it to the police, had to get evidence at a hospital. And I will tell you, based on my own experiences, it took me a week before I was actually able to tell somebody what happened to me. And by that time, there is no evidence. There's nothing you can collect at that point. And, you know, that puts heavy, heavy restrictions on these victims. And there are millions of women everywhere who've gone through this. I'm not the only one. Yeah, I mean, obviously

she's speaking as a sexual assault victim and that's pretty powerful stuff. You get the idea that, you know, down in Florida and other states, they're trying to finesse this issue, but they can't quite get it right. They're willing to have exceptions in the case of rape or incest, et cetera.

But then they have this, you know, they get themselves tied around the axle. Well, what does a case of rape actually mean? What hoops are we going to make the women go through? Again, this is one of those things where they've had 50 years to prepare for this, but clearly they don't have a really workable, humane, compassionate strategy here. No, they don't. And rape is in particular a very difficult issue for pro-lifers.

Because look, if you believe that this is a person, a fetus is a person, it doesn't matter how it was conceived, right? It's not the fetus's fault that there was a rape. So all fetuses should be protected, including those who were born of rape. Well, the problem is that just runs up against the intuitions of lots and lots of people, including Charlie, so many moral conservatives who don't like abortion. But they also, Charlie, kind of distinguish between whether you went out and chose to have sex and whether somebody just walked up and raped you. And in that case, they sort of feel like, yeah, you know what, you should have some choice in the matter. And so what Nancy Mace is articulating is first of all, that intuition. And secondly,

Charlie, the personal experience of a rape survivor. That's very, very difficult for the hardcore pro-life people to go up against a Congresswoman who is herself a rape survivor. That's very, very difficult for the hardcore pro-life people to go up against a Congresswoman who is herself a rape survivor talking about how, in that situation, a woman deserves choice. And as we were just talking about, the polls are on her side. So let's talk about the polls briefly. I don't want to spend a huge amount of time talking about this, but there is a new poll showing 70% of Americans think that Biden should not run again. This comes out just days before he's set to announce his re-election bid. Americans just But there is a new poll showing 70% of Americans think that Biden should not run again. This comes out, you know, just days before he's set to announce his reelection bid.

Americans just think that he's too old and they're kind of exhausted. This is the NBC News poll. So 70% of Americans don't want Biden to run for a second term compared to just 26% who do. And among those who do not want the 80-year-old president to pursue a second term, 69% cite age as a reason why, with 48% calling it a major reason. So, deep breath here. The obvious, unfortunately stupid question is, is this going to be a problem for Joe Biden. It's one thing to say, I don't want him to run. I really don't want him to run. But if, as it increasingly looks like it's going to be a rerun of Biden-Trump, does that matter? Just give me your sense of Biden going into this race with pretty bad poll numbers and that pretty horrific number of people just wanting him to shut it down. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, he's not in a great position if you're referring to the historically incumbents,

right? So he's got the people who don't want him to run again. He's got all those Democrats who don't want him to run again. He's got low approval rating. Well, it's like a 4154 kind of situation. Not great. But Charlie, this guy was not hugely beloved in 2020. He was okay. He was the acceptable candidate. Remember he did terribly okay. He was the acceptable candidate. Remember, he did terribly in the beginning of the primaries. So there wasn't great love for Joe Biden. He was the guy everyone could agree on. And then, Charlie, in the 2020 election, we had the greatest turnout for a winner in history. Right.

81 million people showed up to vote for Joe Biden. Why? Was it because they love Joe Biden? No, no, it wasn't. It was because the guy on the other side was Donald Trump. So if the guy on the other side in 2024 is Donald Trump again, you won't have any trouble turning out people for Joe Biden. You wouldn't have trouble turning out people for any Democrat.

Somebody on Twitter over the weekend was saying, you know, if it's Trump versus Biden, I'm going to predict it's going to be the lowest vote turnout in 30 years. And I jumped up and I said, I'm willing to take that bet because I don't think so. I think you could have a massive vote turnout. Yeah. Speaking about the other guy, you know, I think it's a Bidenism that, you know, you don't have to beat the almighty. You have to beat the alternative. And right now, as bad as Biden's poll numbers are, Trump's poll numbers are even worse. Biden has a 38% positive rating. Donald Trump is down to just 34%. I have a positive view. So I do remember back in 2016, looking at Donald Trump's numbers and Hillary Clinton's numbers and thinking, there's no way

that either one of these is electable, except they're running against one another. And unfortunately, we have that. I think that the motivation for people to turn out if we're faced with a Donald Trump 2.0, with everything that Donald Trump is promising, if that's not enough motivation, I don't know what would be. I think it will be a record turnout. And it is interesting that Trump continues to escalate what he's promising slash threatening he would do in 2.0. I mean, this is not one of those cases where there's any room for, well, maybe he'll grow into office, or maybe he's joking. He's laying down one marker after another, isn't he?

Yeah, he is. I mean, the Trump 2024 campaign is more explicitly authoritarian than the Trump 2020 or 2016 campaign. I mean, he's basically saying, I am your justice. I am your retribution. Elect me. I'm going to go in and purge the civil service. I'm going to go in and annihilate all your enemies. It's a classic strongman. And Charlie, that polling that you're talking about,

the NBC poll, the most dismaying number to me is not, I mean, so he's got a 34% who positive feeling about it. The negative feeling, Charlie, is only 53% of Americans. Now that's better than 43, right? I couldn't bring myself to read that because I didn't want to have this conversation. It was like, are you kidding me? After all of this, only 53% of you have a negative view, honestly. I mean, how many coups do you have to attempt to

get that negative number higher than 53? I don't know. Yeah. The Washington Post had a piece about how explicitly authoritarian he's being. Former president is proposing deploying the military domestically, purging the federal workforce, building futuristic cities from scratch, mandatory stop and frisk, deploying the military to fight street crime, break up street gangs and deport immigrants, purging the federal workforce and criminally charging leakers. Luck is basically saying you can't claim I didn't tell you, you know, you can't claim that. 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 morningshots. That's thebullwork.com slash morningshots. And I look forward to seeing you in your inbox soon. Let's talk about Ron DeSantis over the weekend.

Another rocky weekend. I think people, by the way, are making too much of that comment he made in Japan where they asked him about the plunging poll numbers. And he says, well, you know, I'm not a candidate yet, right? I mean, I just thought that was a throwaway line. But he spoke at the Heritage Foundation, which, by the way, is becoming less and less conservative and more and more MAGA. Let's play a soundbite from Ron DeSantis, where he's talking about local control. You and I are old enough to remember when conservatives and Republicans actually believed in local control,

and DeSantis is basically explaining like, no, let's play that soundbite. We've also enacted legislation that bars local governments from defunding the police. I mean, you can have three yahoos on any city council do something stupid, but we're not going to let their citizens suffer as a result of that. We'll keep the cops on the street and put the money back in. Okay. So, I mean, that's obviously a winner for the heritage crowd, but it is kind of sort of nakedly, we're not going to trust local communities to make these decisions. Right. I think DeSantis is an interesting figure in history because he's the guy who's coming in after Trump. So Trump was this kind of, you know, crazy, self-absorbed, dangerous guy who

just sort of, I'm going to reinvent the Republican Party. All that's Reagan stuff about, you know, free enterprise and local control. I'm going to like trash that. But DeSantis is coming along after him. And DeSantis is a more rational figure, but he's institutionalizing a lot of the changes that Trump did. So the Reagan, Charlie Sykes version of conservatism is being discarded, and they're coming in with this populism stuff. And the Heritage Foundation is the perfect place to encapsulate this because it's supposed to represent conservatism and the obliteration of what went before. And this local control issue is kind of fascinating because one of the things conservatives used to talk about is the government closest to the people is the government that governs best. This is historically what conservatism was. And here's Ron DeSantis talking about how he's going to override, what's his phrase? Three yahoos on any city council. Imagine Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden or anyone dismissing local government as three yahoos on any city council and saying, I'm going to override that. Fox News would be up in arms about that for weeks. But here's the governor of Florida, nominal conservative

saying he's going to do that and crickets. The Heritage Foundation crowd is fine with that. Speaking of yahoos taking over local governments, you'd read that story in the Washington Post over the weekend about that county in Michigan where you had these batshit crazy MAGA folks who've taken over Ottawa County government. You have to read the whole thing, but it really reads like the plot of a dystopian series on Netflix. Okay, let's go back to Rhonda Sanders. So local control, so last century. He continues to campaign on his war against American corporations that disagree with him or whose politics don't align with his. Let's play the soundbite where he talks about the woke corporations and why we have to go after them. We can win elections. We can say the right things.

We can even do the right things. If the left can just impose its agenda through corporations or other private means, and we don't do anything about it, then we are going to be losing. What they are trying to do is they're trying to do an end run around our constitutional system. They know these policies like a war on fossil fuels and domestic energy, war on the Second Amendment and other types of individual rights. They know that that would not work at the ballot box. So they can just do an end run around that process, engage in this to try to change policy or change culture

without ever being held accountable. They're going to take that opportunity to do it. But that is going to change our country for the worse. And so I just think as conservatives, you know, it's not conservative to just simply defer to every corporation in America. That's being a corporatist. Okay, so like five minutes ago, corporations were people. Five minutes ago, the private sector was different than the public sector. And now you have Rhonda Sanders talking to the Heritage Foundation, basically saying, you know, hey, this whole idea of private individuals and private can pursue its own values, then that's bad. You think through the philosophical underpinnings of what you just heard. Trust me for the progressive listeners to this podcast. This is really mind-blowing to hear a conservative Republican talking about, yeah, we can't let the private sector go its own way.

We can't let them do things in the culture that we disagree with. So it's not just enough to have government power. We need to use government power to control what they do culturally. My favorite phrase in that whole rant of, it's not a rant, he's reading from a script. This is a whole prepared, you know, abandonment of what used to be conservatism. Yeah, I know. End run. He keeps talking about how corporations are trying to end run the system. What he's saying there is that the private universe, the universe of people acting outside government is trying to end run government and people. We can't have this, right? We can't have people acting, what's his phrase? Acting through private means, because that's against us. That's changing our culture. So we, the nominally the conservatives in the audience of the Heritage Foundation and the conservative electorate, are going to use the

state to stop these private corporations from acting. And what are the private corporations doing that's so awful? Well, just a couple of weeks ago, DeSantis was giving a press conference and talking about what he objected to in Disney's behavior. And it was that they were advocating for gender ideology. Advocating. Well, guess what? Advocating. If you're a private citizen or a corporation, you can advocate. That's called freedom. And that's something that conservatives used to recognize, but now that's end running the system and we have to stop them. All right. So the other big storyline of the last week was the latest hair trigger American carnage.

What was unbelievable about it is that we've gone through the cycle where America has been numbed by the mass shootings. And the last week we saw another version of the American carnage. Teenager goes up to it or brings the wrong doorbell, gets shot. Cheerleaders get into the wrong car. Cheerleaders get shot. You have a young woman and her friends pull into a driveway in New York.

A guy comes out, shoots, kills her. You have a six-year-old playing with a basketball. Basketball rolls into the neighbor's yard. Guy comes out, starts shooting at the six-year-old girl and the father. What is happening to American culture? I mean, for all of the well-regulated militia people, the people who said, what we need is more good guys with guns,

you know, an armed society is a polite society. Well, hell no. Mike Pence was out there yesterday, you know, being asked about this. And let's just play Mike Pence's reaction to the latest episodes of Americans just going off and shooting one another. Tragedy should not require us to forfeit our liberty. And the right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States. I don't know the facts of those cases. I'm confident that local law enforcement will move forward and apply the law in a proper way. But I can't help but suspect that this recent spate of tragedies is evidence of the fear that so many Americans are feeling about the crime wave besetting this country. So the nugget of truth there is, yes, Will, you have a lot of people who are fearful, who are paranoid, who think that somebody who comes to their door and rings their doorbell

is probably part of, you know, the great replacement hordes coming for them. That's true, right? But the fact that he throws this out, I mean, the fact that Mike Pants can't come up with something better than, of course, you know, go back to the Second Amendment being enshrined. We're not going to take people's liberties away. So young woman drives into somebody's driveway, loses her way. Guy comes out, shoots and kills her. And Mike Pence is asked about this. And it's like, well, he was Second Amendment right. And, you know, he was probably afraid because he's watching Fox News and, you know, seeing all this, you know, crime. The mayor of Kansas City actually had a good response. Quinton Lucas is the mayor of Kansas City, and he was asked about this. Let's play him.

I think that actually it is this culture of fear and paranoia that's drummed up by some, including politicians like the former vice president, who mentioned it almost in a way as if it's an excuse for this type of action. This was in the safest neighborhood of Kansas City, or one of our safest neighborhoods. And was a man who in his statement to the police said I was scared of this in essence large black person outside of his door. He thought the child was six feet tall he's only 5'8 he thought he was a threat he was on the other side of two locked doors. This is the sort of thing that happens when you have this culture of paranoia and fear that's

being drummed up by politicians and some of the media. And, of course, this fetishization, I've said before, of guns. So, Will. Yeah. Yeah. So what's going on here is we have a mix of two things. One is guns and one is fear. And they're both major problems.

Bad combination. Yeah. Yeah. So we have, what, 400 million guns in this country. That's more than people. We have like about half the household have guns. And Charlie, a lot of the people who have guns, if you look at the stats, about 30% of Americans have recently bought a gun as a precaution against gun violence. In other words, there's a gun arms race. I don't necessarily want a gun for myself, but other people have guns and they're scary and dangerous. So I need a gun to protect myself. So now you have all these people who have guns and then you

add to that, this element of fear and Quentin Lucas is exactly right here. Mike Pence and many other conservative politicians and Fox news and the whole right-wing media sphere is stirring up fear of crime. And Charlie crime is up up recently, but it is concentrated not in the areas, in these white areas where these people are, and it's not nearly as high as it used to be. So there is some escalation of it, but the fear element way exaggerates the risk to people. And it used to be that you could just go out and scare people, and that was a good way of raising money politically, of electing your candidates. But now we have this additional element that if you are out there telling people that there is some massive crime wave that is threatening their neighborhood, which is not true, some of those people are going to shoot other people, fearing that those other people are criminals.

Especially when you have these laws. And you know that I'm exhausted talking about this. But, you know, even back in the pre-Trump days, I got in this nasty fight with the NRA when they were pushing for what they called constitutional carry, which was concealed carry without any permits, without any before times, even Republicans in Wisconsin recognize that. Yeah, you can have concealed carry, but let's not just have, you know, anyone be able to do this because, you know, they're going to shoot their nuts off or they're going to shoot their neighbor. You're pushing more and more people to carry guns without any indication they know how to use those guns or should be armed. Push them out into the community, having convinced them that they are going out into this absolute hellscape of people who are threatening them and criminals and there's violence everywhere. And so, you know, go into, you know, the neighborhood Walmart and what, you know, 60% of the people are packing, maybe 40% of them actually know how to use the gun.

Maybe 20% of them know the circumstances of which you're supposed to use the gun. Maybe 10% of them would actually be trusted to pull that gun and fire it in a crowded store. Bad things are going to happen. And Mike Pence, I can pick on Mike Pence, but this also reflects the culture right now in the Republican Party. You can't even say, this is outrageous, this is terrible. We need to talk about responsible gun ownership. We need to rethink this idea of arming people without any permits, any training, any background checks whatsoever. But he can't do it. He's just got to go through the knee jerk, Second Amendment sort of thing. And yeah, well, you know, I mean, there is this terrible crime thing because, you know, I'm going to campaign on American

carnage. So what do we have? We have more guns in the hands of people who have no fucking idea what to do with those guns in an environment where basically the information space has been taken over by competing meth dealers who are competing with one another of who can stoke the most anger, paranoia, et cetera, about what's going on. And what a surprise that bad things are going to happen. And look, this isn't just about the Second Amendment. I mean, the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, is just the first level of this problem. What we've had is an escalation from the Second Amendment to everybody buy a gun because you need to be scared of other people having guns.

So we have this massive increase in the percentage of people, the number of people who have guns. Then we're going to try to prevent background checks, which are a way of preventing crazy people from bad people from getting guns. We're going to encourage open carry. So as you're pointing out, we're going to have more and more situations in which people are armed. There's one thing to have a gun at home, but now you're carrying a gun. Now we're promoting stand your ground laws. So we're telling people, you know what, if you see some guy outside your door, your window, you can shoot at him and we'll probably protect you legally. We're there opposing red flag laws, which, you know, someone's telling you I have a mental health problem. No, you know, you can still have your gun. So all of these things

are escalations from the second amendment that encourage more people to have weapons and to use weapons. And then Charlie, you lay on top of it, all of this rhetoric about how there's a massive crime wave that's endangering you. And all of that combined is going to lead to more incidents like this. And Charlie, Mike Pence has no excuse in these cases. Like these people pull into a driveway, it's the wrong driveway. They're on their way out. They're leaving the driveway and the guy is shooting him. There is no rationale for that based on an imminent threat. That's just somebody with a gun and a hair trigger. That is not the Second Amendment. I want to talk about this Richard North Patterson story. This is not a new story,

and it's not an isolated story. So I just want to make it clear for all the people who are about to write, you know, Charlie, this has been going on for some time. So we got an email from Patterson over the weekend, and he's been a contributor to the bulwark. And I would say that he would be one of our, you know, he's a liberal Democrat. This is not some fire-breathing right-winger here at all. So he writes, last January, my agents began submitting to publishers the manuscript of my first novel in nine years. On the surface, I had reason for confidence. Of my 22 prior novels, 16 had been New York Times bestsellers, and in general, reviewers had treated them kindly. And

my agent shared my assessment that this one called Trial was equal to my strongest work, whatever, you know. And like my most successful previous books, it's a law-based narrative culminating in a murder trial. So it's pretty interesting. But this is what he wrote to us. The novel was repeatedly rejected by major publishers because as a white author, I chose to write about some of our most vexing racial problems, voter suppression, unequal law enforcement, through the prism of three major characters, two of them black. Now, there is this vocal segment of the left that is insisting that this kind of fiction is a form of cultural appropriation. And for some reason, it's really vicious in the world of young adult fiction. But it's popped up before

where people are like, you can't write about Native Americans because you're not Native Americans. You can't write because you don't have the right identity. But Richard North Patterson is really well known and really successful. So that's why in my newsletter this morning, I said, that's why this felt like an escalation or at least an exclamation point on what's going on. So this is what Patterson wrote to us. This preemptive censorship reflects the new but militant insistence that authors of fiction should stay in their lane and therefore that the identity of the author overrides all of the other elements indispensable to good fiction. The ironic result is to repress the very voices the preemptive censors propose to amplify. In this case, the numerous black residents of

Southwest Georgia that I interviewed in the course of my research. So he wrote in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, the issue isn't really about me or my book. The core question applies to anyone who dares to write fiction, whether empathy and imagination should be allowed to cross the lines of racial identity. This goes to the heart of what kind of literature we want and what kind of society we aspire to be. No kidding. People are free to dislike any book on whatever basis they choose, but to repress books based on the identity of the author is illiberal, intolerant, ignorant of the ways of creativity, and inimical to the spirit of pluralist democracy. And he wrote to us, I didn't write this book because I was spoiling for a fight. And his agents warned him that I'd be running into some serious trouble. But he did

find an independent publisher, Adam Bellow and Post Hill Press, who was willing to buck this new creed of mandatory identity authorship. And they're supporting his resolve. He has a sub stack newsletter and they're putting out installments of the book twice a week over the next seven weeks, you know, so that reviewers can judge for themselves. But but you can tell that this comes as a shock. And he said this issue transcends fiction. And this is what he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. It is time for the literary community at large to reject a creative segregation that reflects the ills of a society too often driven by fear, anger, and

polarization. The way forward is by fostering understanding across the lines of identity, not by subordinating capaciousness of spirit to the defensive crouch of tribalism. Literature should expand our humanity, not shrink it. So I just find this amazing that this culture, does it mean that men can never write books about women or that women can't write books about men? I mean, think of all of the works of literature in which the author or authoress writes about somebody who is different than them. What's going on here, Will? So I am not surprised at this, Charlie. And the reason I'm not surprised is because of the greatest novel ever written, which is Animal Farm, right? Animal Farm, George Orwell's work

about a group of people represented by animals who start out as revolutionaries and become authoritarians and conservatives. And that is the nature of revolutionary movements. And so what has happened in the case of attention to race and gender and all these other categories is, at first, society was kind of blind to this. And so there were people who called themselves woke. They were awake to the role that race played in society and perspectives, the blindness of many white people to their situation and to their privilege and all that stuff. And that was all true and important. And that served an important function in history. And it's still serving that function. But what happens to the ideology of wokeness over time is that it hardens.

It hardens into this idea that you are only your race. So somebody like Richard North Patterson, look, you're just white. So we stop looking at the content of what you're bringing to us. And we just say only certain people can write about certain things based on their color or based on their gender. So the trick to being woke is to stay woke. And part of staying woke is noticing when the movement that you joined that was originally enlightening, was originally opening your eyes and the eyes of other people, hardens into a dogma and ceases to pay attention to the world and sees everything only through a lens of what color are you or what gender are you. No, you're exactly right. And that is profoundly illiberal. It's

also profoundly anti-humanist. Interesting reaction to this, Yale's Nicholas Christakis tweeted out over the weekend, a modest proposal. Fiction writers can write whatever they want and can inhabit minds of anyone they can imagine. If readers admire the work, then it has stood on its own. So, you know, Flaubert, not have written Madame Bovary, should Tolstoy not have written Anna Karenina. It becomes absurd when you begin to think about it, but it's also become just a cudgel for bullying people, I think. I found a link to an article that was written back in the before times, back in 2016, by somebody who was making a presentation about something he was doing and

just encountered this massive blowback because of identity politics. And it really was an attempt to stifle his voice and to cancel him. So bear with me here. You can have two things happening at once. You can have demagogues like Ron DeSantis and Christopher Ruffo try to exploit, you know, quote unquote, wokeness. But there is a real thing there, whatever you want to call it. If calling it wokeness doesn't work for you, then get rid of it. But this hyper identity politics, this, you know, stay in your lane kind of attitude, this is spreading. And there's a real problem here, particularly when we don't deal with one another as human beings.

We don't deal with one another's arguments or with the quality of our mind. We don't deal with the product of the writers. We don't engage with the poetry or the novels. We just engage with their racial identity. I mean, that doesn't sound like a step forward to me. That seems like a radical step back. Yeah, it is. And this is just reminding me of, you know, I went to college and I studied a lot of this critical theory stuff. This is the kind of thing Ron DeSantis make, you know, and Donald Trump called cultural Marxism and whatnot.

But the trick is, and you don't have to go to college for this, you just notice what's going on in society. And you say, there's something wrong with the way things are. And you start it with a critical mindset. And what's really important is to maintain the critical mindset and apply it to your own side. So you start out in the civil rights movement, you start noticing the function of race in more and more of our institutions and you try to clean it up. But you've got to be alert to these moments where your side tips over into, as you're calling it, Charlie, identity politics, where it gets lazy and it stops looking at the quality, the nature of what Richard North Patterson is writing and only looks at, look, is this author white or black or brown? And then we start vetoing people based on that. That is just lazy. But it is what happens to every movement.

And it's the conceit of many people who think of themselves as woke that the fundamental thing is to look at everything through the lens of race or gender. No, the important lens is that critical insight. And you have to notice when you've crossed over and become part of the problem, as in this case. I agree with you. Okay, so what are you going to be looking at this week? You know, Charlie, at some point I want to write about this, all this transgender stuff. And you and I have talked about this issue and we have complicated views. I think Leah Thomas should

not have been allowed to compete in the women's bracket, but that's a minor, minor case. What we have is this major attack by Republicans on not just the idea of genital mutilation for children, but I was really interested to see Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, talk this week about why he vetoed. Here's a Republican governor who vetoed an anti-trans bill, and he talks about how the bill was restricting the rights of parents. All of this abortion stuff we're talking about and transgender, there is a Republican attack on the rights of families to make medical decisions, not just minors, but parents. And I think we need more attention to how parents' rights can represent freedom and how progressives and Democrats should

be talking more about certain cases where that is being trampled by the right. I'm going to be very interested to see that. I did something a little contrarian this morning in my newsletter. I think it is safe to say that Andrew Sullivan is not a friend of the bulwark or an admirer of what we do. And yet he had a really interesting piece about Dylan Mulvaney, who is the influencer who got caught up in the various culture wars. It's a very provocative piece, and I will put a trigger warning on it for some folks, but this is a multi-front war. It's not just about the athletes who are upset, who I think raise some interesting issues, but also from women who are saying, okay, so where do women fit into all of this? And what images of women are being embraced

by all of this? And I have to say, there's some pretty troubling aspects of this, but I'm not going to get into it. If you're willing to dive into that particular world and keep in mind that Andrew Sullivan is, we're not going to be having beers anytime soon, I don't think, but it's an interesting and provocative read. Let me just put it that way. Well, you and I should talk about this because the whole idea that transgender is a war on women is, I think it's part of a right-wing movement to try to exploit. So you and I can have a good argument about that. Okay. You read Andrew Sullivan's piece and then let's have that conversation. Okay. Okay. We'll do that. Then we'll talk next week. Have a great week. Well, you too, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again.

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