The Bulwark Podcast - Will Saletan: Policing the Police

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Training and diversity are not enough — cops who break the law must be prosecuted. Plus, the normalization of political violence around Jan 6 and the attack on Paul Pelosi, and Steve Bannon goes deeper on election denialism. Will Saletan joins Charlie Sykes for Charlie and Will Monday Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Welcome to the Bulletwork Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. Well, we have a lot of catching up to do. The RNC has re-elected Ronna Romney McDaniel, whatever that means. I have to say it that way because I can't do the verbal version of the crossed out word. We're going to get to Kevin McCarthy was on the Sunday

shows. Donald Trump had a very low energy campaign rollout. We have a renewed debate about police reform, about policing and race. And Paul Pelosi is waiting for his apology. I think I might start with that. But so did you spend the day watching football like all other Americans, males, Will Salatin? I can only say that I did half. I watched the AFC game. The NFC game was kind of a blowout, so I missed that. Oh, it was. Okay. So people just spare me all the direct messages about, you know, American males. I know that women watch football as well. Okay, just find something else to be outraged about. I promise you, by the time this podcast is over,

you will have like a list of other things to be pissed off at as opposed to that initial comment. Well, I had planned the whole day around watching NFC Championship football, as I always do. And I have to say, the first game, the NFC Championship, because it was over in like the first, what, 60 seconds, it felt like. And it was one of the most underwhelming games I've ever watched. It must be really painful to be a San Francisco 49er fan, to have watched that game, you know, and down goes another quarterback. And here comes a quarterback

you've never heard of, who's worked, you know, has been on the roster of 14 teams, and there's a reason why he doesn't stay. And then he gets injured and you bring back a quarterback who clearly could not throw the ball. So you have a team, one of the best teams in the NFC. They've worked all year long. And in the end, they couldn't do anything. And it was like, there should be a mercy rule at some point. It's like, just stop, please. Charlie, people say that politics is messed up, but what about sports? How is it that you go into the championship game before the Super Bowl without an extra quarterback on your roster? Is that prohibited somehow to have somebody who could actually throw the ball in case the first guy gets knocked out? Do you remember when they had the all-star baseball game here in Milwaukee and they had to end it because they ran out of pitchers?

They had that famous picture of Bud Selig, who was then commissioner, up in the stands, sort of like shrugging with his hands, like, I don't know, what are we going to do? They didn't bring enough pitchers. We ran through all the pitchers. Nobody thought it was going to go this long. So, hey, all you fans

that showed up for the all-star game, it's a fake game anyway. By the way, I do love the fact the Pro Bowl is now tag football. Let me just raise my hands, though, on behalf of all Americans who are happy for anything that shortens a baseball game. All Americans, male and female. Okay, so there's a lot to talk about, including the Trump rollout. Although, interesting, I just retweeted something about, let me just see if I can find this. I have not actually read this.

It's been in the back of my mind, this approach that Republicans are taking to Donald Trump, which is to hope and pray that he goes away, but not actually doing anything about it. McKay Coppins apparently has a piece in The Atlantic today about the central story of 2024. You know, the fact that, you know, you have all of the smart people in the Republican Party, you know, quietly predicting Trump's going to lose or he's going to drop out or he's going to disappear, but not doing anything to actually make it happen. And so this is from McKay Coppin's piece. There's an old quote that has been attributed to Lee Atwater. When your enemy

is in the process of drowning, throw him a brick, Sullivan told me. None of Donald Trump's opponents ever have the balls to throw him the damn brick. They just hope someone else will. Hope is not a winning strategy. Right, right. That just nails it, doesn't it? It does. Nobody's really going to stand up to this guy. But you know, on the other hand, Charlie, on the affirmative side, what does Trump really have to work with? He thinks he has loyalty. He doesn't have loyalty.

He has cowardice, right? The whole problem all along. It works for him. Exactly. So these guys, they're not going to stand up to him. But if the political wind turns against him, if he raises his hand and says, I'm running for president, goes out, does a couple of events, not a lot of people show up, there's not a lot of excitement. And everybody in the Republican Party starts to get the vibe that he's not as scary or powerful as he used to be, then he's just not going to get the support that he

thinks he's going to get that's going to somehow lock down the primary for him. Or it's going to be on the glide pattern, and the default setting is they're going to renominate him. I did say that on Morning Joe this morning. And look, I mean, I understand that he doesn't have the same juice that he had before. He doesn't have the charisma. He's got a lot of fat Elvis vibe about him. You know, you're clearly seeing a lot of Republicans who are trying to distance themselves from him in South Carolina and in New Hampshire. But the reality is he's the only guy in the race. You know, I've commented on the fact that he didn't clear the field, but he is the only guy in the race. We don't know what Ron DeSantis is going to do.

Can Ron DeSantis take a punch from Donald Trump? Now, Trump continues to, you know, kind of throw rocks at DeSantis and Nikki Haley saying they are disloyal and saying, you know, DeSantis' record on COVID was really terrible and he's going to go after him as kind of a rhino. Is DeSantis up for that? At some point, what is he going to say about Donald Trump? Are they just going to hope that somehow he goes away or the meteor hits him or the Big Mac from God hits him or whatever? Are they going to be able to say this man should not be president for these reasons? I'm trying to imagine what words come out of Ron DeSantis' mouth that would, you know, constitute a punch at Donald Trump. I just don't know. I mean, at this point, you have to assume that the odds are in favor to be the Republican nominee is that guy, despite everything.

Okay. So I agree with all the folks who say that DeSantis, as he presents himself on a stage, is kind of mousy, right? He's just, he's not an intimidating figure. I think that he doesn't come across, you know, anyway. I think he comes across as a bully who would punch somebody smaller than him. He can punch down. In a prepared speech, maybe. But, you know, on a debate stage or in some impromptu comment, I don't think he's got that. But Charlie, I think the answer to your question is, I don't think Ron DeSantis is going to respond much to Trump at all. And he may just wager that he doesn't have to, that he's already doing well enough in polls. There's already enough of a

market for a Trump-like character who isn't exactly Trump that DeSantis can sort of let it brush off his back. And I'm not convinced that Trump's going to beat him. So our colleague Bill Kristol had a very interesting tweet that got a lot of attention over the weekend. He tweeted out a picture of Trump campaigning in South Carolina where he's at some place where they were serving greasy hamburgers or something like that. And what Bill wrote was, the coverage I've seen of the Trump campaign trip is all 2024 horse race. January 6th, not mentioned. Understandable, but suggests the price we've paid for no indictments, no trial, no real reckoning for January 6th. Trump treated as normal candidate, not a president who tried to subvert an election.

And, you know, I read that and I thought, you know, yeah, the media has learned nothing. It's going to do it again, that he is being treated as a normal candidate because we don't have templates for how do you write about somebody who has been as corrupt and seditious as Donald Trump. And they're going to treat him like a regular candidate. It's a good thing for Bill to have flagged early on in this campaign. It's true, but he's not a normal candidate. And that's not just something that we have to sit and bite our nails about. He's going to keep saying crazy stuff that reminds a lot of people that he is a political liability. I mean, he could win the election. That's very frightening. But he's going to keep talking. This truth thing he put out this morning about Putin is just another reminder to people,

I don't think he can stop himself. You're referring to the fact that he's gone back to Helsinki and said, you know, I was right to say that I trusted Putin more than our intelligence agencies. He felt the need to double down on one of his worst moments. But here's the thing, Will. Republicans saw him in Helsinki. They knew that. And they still rallied around him for a second term as president. Right? The Republican Party didn't flee from him then. Why do you know, Charlie, that I am a Pollyanna, so I'm going to give you my Pollyanna take on this. Donald Trump was then the president of the United States. As we see with the case of Joe Biden, it's a very difficult thing for a political party to turn against its incumbent president. But he's, first of all, out of power. Secondly, lost an election that they felt like they should have won. That point, you open the field, a lot of people are just going to be willing to look at an alternative in a way that they weren't before. So they were going to excuse Trump before. But if somebody comes along, and I think DeSantis has satisfied this need,

who is a sufficiently Trump-like, sufficiently owning of liberal tiers, and who isn't Trump with his constant liabilities and his next gaffe, whatever it's going to be, I just think there are enough Republicans who are going to move over to that guy. Well, you can't beat nobody with nobody. And that's part of the problem. Although I see that he was in South Carolina at one of his deeply underwhelming events. And Lindsay is back. Lindsay is back again. I mean, you're our Lindsay whisperer here. And, you know, there was some speculation that Lindsay was distancing here. And, you know, there was some speculation that Lindsay was distancing himself and then he was like quasi back in the fold. But then he was keeping arm's length. But when Donald Trump showed up in South Carolina, there was Lindsay

standing right next to him again. So is he back on Team Trump? Is he all in? Is he going to be the 2024 fluffer again? Well, so the official Lindsay story, of course, is that he's kind of the Trump whisperer. So he's the bridge between the party and Trump. So he's got to stay in Trump's good graces. And that means he's got to flatter Trump. He's got to constantly signal that he still supports Trump. But Charlie, you know, there was a noticeable lack of sort of down ballot support for Trump in South Carolina. Yeah. noticing that. Yeah, and not a lot of enthusiasm. And so I'm not sure that anybody at the top levels of the Republican Party is really going to bat for Trump other than showing their faces

and sending the signal that they're going to be with him. But I wanted to say one thing about Trump's speeches here. Trump is getting bad reviews for basically being kind of conventional in these early speeches, you know, sticking to the teleprompter and not low energy and boring. Yeah, that has been the Lindsey Graham advice. The advice has been just don't be crazy. Just don't say stupid stuff that's going to, like, scare people about you. It's the kind of stuff that might drive them over to DeSantis.

Right. And the price of that is Trump sounds relatively boring when he tries to sound normal. And he can't help himself. As you point out, I mean, he's putting out these truth social, what do you call them? They're not, I want to say tweet. I mean, these truth socials, these truths, which of course, yeah. I think they're truths. God, that hurts to have to say that, you know, about, you know, Vladimir Putin was right. And I don't know what else he's, you know, comparing himself to Al Capone this morning

that he, you know, he's, he's got as many, whatever. It's just, it is, it is so bizarre. I have a piece out of this weekend that I've highlighted in my newsletter this morning. And it's something that you had highlighted after his announcement when you ran in November, which is that he's doubling down on brutality. And I understand that Adam Serwer wrote, you know, the cruelty is the point. I think it's moved past that. And it was what I'm suggesting. So what happens when cruelty is not enough? And Trump is really leaning hard into the whole idea of brutality. He's long supported torture. He's endorsed extraditional murders. You know, he's talked about and speculated about shooting migrants and protesters. He's pardoned war criminals. You know, but as you pointed out, one of the centerpieces of his announcement speech is his often stated enthusiasm for taking the Chinese approach to drug dealers, which is to arrest them, summarily try them in a few hours and then kill them the same day, shoot them, and then send the bullets to their families. He's got a thing about bloody bullets. He's got a thing about real brutality, which I guess I'm trying to distinguish from just cruelty, because I'm talking about real violence. I'm talking about the maiming, wounding, flesh tearing. He wanted to put spikes and alligators around his border wall. He is fascinated by the concept of shooting protesters and demonstrates the actual violence. I would like

to tell you that that will repel Republican primary voters, but the reality is there's an ideological component to the celebration of violence. And it really does, I think, you know, trigger, you know, a dopamine hit for many in the right wing base. And it's very, very dangerous. And I'm not sure that Ron DeSantis is the guy to push back against that. Ron DeSantis has gone out of his way to establish his own cruelty cred, you know, sending the migrants up to Martha's Vineyard. So the question is, can you allow Trump to outflank him on the brutality front? And I don't know. No, I don't think anyone's going to outflank Trump on the brutality. It very much reminds me of his crazy, you know, inaugural speech, which was about American carnage. And of course, the carnage is from Trump himself or the advocacy of carnage, carnage in response to carnage. And to me, it's very ironic in a sad way, because this is a movement that calls itself America first. But if you really wanted to

destroy America, you wouldn't do it by sort of making America weak in the face of aggression, you would do it by eliminating the moral difference between America and its enemies. And that's kind of what Trump does. Trump advocates, not just advocates authoritarianism, not just advocates violence, but explicitly refers to people like President Xi of China as his models for this. So he's saying America should, yeah, America should just be like the totalitarian authoritarian regimes that we used to pride ourselves in opposing. You know, what a weird flex for being America first and talking about American exceptionalism when the core of his message is, why can't we be more like the Chinese dictator thug? Why can't we treat criminals the way the Filipino strongman did?

I mean, the fact that he is obsessed with the superiority of non-American, anti-American, anti-democratic regimes like Duterte in the Philippines, Putin in Russia, Xi in China. That would be something that if you wanted to push back against him, you'd say, you know, I'm sorry, Mr. Trump, I don't think that we should become more like China, the Philippines, or Russia. I think America should get back to American values. This would be a very, very powerful message, I think, among Republican voters. Unfortunately, I can't imagine any of them saying that, so it's going to be left up to the Democrats, but it is awfully weird. Okay, I wasn't planning on leading off with this. I was planning to work up to this. We're going to

get to the Memphis police story, which is just gut-wrenching, and the debate that's long overdue, I think, about police reform. But the video reality check we got this weekend about the vicious attack on Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, the body cam footage was released showing this guy, David DePay, demented thug, breaking into the house, striking him, making it very clear that it played out exactly as the police had said that it played out. There were a number of interesting developments, including the fact that David DePay, who is still in jail, has pleaded not guilty, somehow calls into a local television station and confesses and brags about it. And normally,

you wouldn't want to give more oxygen to a guy like this. But I think it's really important to listen to this guy, especially in light of where I'm going on all this. All of the dozens of Republican elected officials, right wing media types who had either sided with this guy or had spread vicious misinformation about this attack. And again, in my newsletter this morning, I repeatedly asked the question, where does Paul Pelosi go to get his apology? How many of these people will apologize for lying about or joking about this attack or spreading conspiracy theories, because this is the guy that actually struck and could have killed this 82-year-old man, you know, struck him with a hammer. This is David DePay calling in from jail to a local television station. Listen to this. I would also like to apologize.

I want to apologize to everyone. I messed up. What I did was really bad. I'm so sorry. I didn't get more of them. It's my own fault. No one else is to blame. I should have come better prepared.

I spent all my time exposing government corruption online, only to have them silence my people's speech as quickly as they could. They circumvented the Constitution of the private industry. In the grooming class, how important is the

restriction of your civil rights to the private industry? It's called fascism. I have a lot more to say. I had a website of over 300 pages. That's 300 pages of stuff they don't want you to hear.

I don't want to hear it. Okay, so he says, I messed up. I'm so sorry. I didn't get more of them. I should have come better prepared. Okay. So let's leave this guy aside because as the New York Times pointed out, let's go back to November. Within hours of the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi, activists and media outlets on the right began circulating groundless claims, nearly all of them sinister, many homophobic, casting doubt on what happened. Remember, Charlie Kerr called for his audience to post bail for the Pelosi attacker. You know, some amazing patriot out there in the Bay Area really wants to be a midterm hero. Somebody should go bail this guy out. You had Donald Trump Jr. posting pictures implying that they

had been involved in gay sex. Remember, Carrie Lake was joking about it. No jokes about Pelosi attack. These are hostages and have a lot of protection. Tucker Carlson was asking questions about all of this. Can I just read you a list of some of the people? Can I just do this? Because I mean, the New York Times had a very handy graphic. Here are 21 of the elected officials, candidates, and other prominent figures who spread misinformation or cast doubt on the attack. Senator Ted Cruz amplified doubts that the facts were being disclosed. Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested Mr. Pelosi knew his attacker. State Senator Wendy Rogers of Arizona suggested the

attack might have been staged. Representative Claudia Tenney amplified a conspiracy theory about an extramarital gay affair. Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson, Dinesh D'Souza all raised doubts about the attack. What a surprise. Ryan Fournier claimed details about the attacker were fabricated. Sebastian Gorka also had questions about what was really happening here. Peter Hegseth, Fox News host, also went along with this. Elon Musk amplified a conspiracy theory about male prostitution. Megyn Kelly also raised questions. Devin Nunes repeated a false report the attacker was in his underwear, which he clearly was not.

Roger Stone suggested the attack was staged. Royce White, House candidate in Minnesota, claimed the attack involved an extramarital gay affair. And then, of course, Donald J. Trump, the former president of the United States, who suggested the attack was staged. Have any of them apologized? Elon Musk claims he has. Sounds like bullshit to me. I have seen a couple of people say, I got it wrong. And that's great, but not enough of them. You're right. I got it wrong. Okay. My bad. Okay. Charlie, to me, the whole episode speaks to the derangement of the American right these days. And the derangement, to my mind, you tell me what you think it is, consists of deciding that libs are

the enemy. Libs are the bad guys. Anything that hurts the libs is good. We're not going to believe anything that the libs say happened to them, even, you know, there's video evidence. So now we have a confession. I don't know how much difference that'll make. But what happens is if you make that decision, you find yourself standing with anybody who is against the libs. So in the case of Donald Trump, it's like, you know, the libs were in the FBI were against me. So therefore I say Putin is better than those folks. Right. And in this case, in the case of this violence against Paul Pelosi, it's you find yourself literally defending a hammer attack, excusing the guy. I mean, think about, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene and other folks defending the January 6th perpetrators, right?

Going into the jails and praying with them and claiming their civil liberties have been violated. So here's another violent attack. These dots connect, though, don't they? They do. They do. And so in the responses to the Paul Pelosi episode, I just think we're seeing the derangement of the right. And how many of them will come back to reality when they, you know, see the video or hear the confession. I just don't know. Now you do, you do know. I mean, that's the part of the problem because I wrote back in November, I thought that this whole thing felt like a turning point, not just as a culmination of

the rising tide of threats, but really a new sort of normalization of political violence and acceptance of it. But also you see this, the loop of misinformation and how it works. You could actually track, and the New York Times has this wonderful graphic on this. I mean, how you can track how bogus false information gets into the bloodstream and then it is amplified and then it is spread. And even after it is refuted, nothing really changed. These folks just will go on. You know, you think Ted Cruz is going to be calling up Nancy Pelosi and saying, I am really sorry. I am sorry for your husband.

Can you put him on the phone? I really want to do it. No, they're just going to move on to the next sort of thing because we've created this vast deranged engine of political hatred, the condoning of political hatred, the condoning of political violence, and the willingness to spread and to believe bullshit conspiracy ideas, even after they are refuted. I don't know if people are continuing to spread them, but I would not recommend people listening to Tucker Carlson or some of the other shows on Fox News, because what you are not going to get will be, you know,

heartfelt on-air apologies. That is just not going to happen, because what you are not going to get will be, you know, heartfelt on-air apologies. That is just not going to happen, because the next time something like this happens, the same thing will happen again. I promise you. It's a perpetual motion machine now. Yeah. And so let's talk a little bit about the complicity of these nominally mainstream propagandists like Tucker Carlson, the rhetoric that they put out. So, for example, I could not hear all of that message that David DePay put on the answering machine or whatever, but some of the words I did hear, I heard patriots, right? We're the patriots. I heard him say, here's my website with all this stuff they don't want you to hear, right? So, that's the pitch to the left doesn't want you to hear. It sounds like he's got a

manifesto, basically like one of those, you know, mass murderers who issues a manifesto. The Unabomber. Yeah, exactly. That kind of thing. But he's picked up this lingo, Charlie. And it's the same lingo that the advocates of, you know, 1776 and the insurrection and all that stuff put out. Even if you are not advocating violence, when you spread these conspiracy theories, there are nuts like David DePape who are out there with a hammer or a knife or a gun or a bomb, and they will act on this in a way that you might not suspect. And you really need to think about it, because after the hammer attack, after January 6th, you have a warning that the rhetoric you're using leads to violence. Okay, so deep breath here. Let's pivot to Kevin McCarthy going on the talk shows. This was sort of his first Sunday morning doing the rounds. I don't know how many he was on, but he was on CBS.

I thought this was the most interesting exchange, Will. He's on with Margaret Brennan, who is trying to ask him about George Santos. Oh, by the way, the breaking story this morning is that he's backing down. He's going to let Ilhan Omar be on the Foreign Affairs Committee. You saw that. I would like to say that because he rethought his position on all of that. Obviously, he just looked around and realized he didn't have the votes to kick her off. There were a number of other centrist, quote unquote, centrist Republicans who said, yeah, we're not going to get into this tit for tat here. So he was forced to back off from that. But he was on with Margaret Brennan, the newly elected Speaker of the House of

Representatives. She's trying to get him to talk about George Santos, and he's not having it. Doesn't it further wear down credibility when you put someone who's under state, local, federal and international investigation as a representative of your party? I'm talking about George Santos, representative from New York. We should have that discussion. So let's have that discussion. You want to bring up Santos and let's talk about the institution itself, because I agree wholeheartedly that Congress is broken. And I think your I think your listeners or viewers should understand what proxy voting was because it never took place in Congress. But I'm asking about George Santos. I know you asked me a question. Let me ask you could put it to a vote. You asked me a question.

I'd appreciate if you let me answer. So let's go through this because it's not one simple answer. Congress is broken based upon what has transpired in the last Congress. The American public wasn't able transpired in the last Congress. The American public wasn't able to come in to see us. People voted by proxy, meaning you didn't have to show up for work. Bills didn't have to go through committee. So what I'm trying to do is open the people's house back for the people so their voice is there, so people are held accountable. So now, as I just had in the last week, for the first time in seven years, every member got through. If you got a third of your caucus to vote to oust him, you could do so.

You don't think you could get your Republicans to do that? I wasn't finished answering the question. So if every single new person brought into Congress was elected by their constituents, what their constituents have done is lend their voice to the American public. So those members can all serve on committee. Now, what I'm trying to do is change some of these committees as well. Like the Intel committee is different than any other committee. So you're just not going to answer the question? Well, no, you don't get to

question whether I answer it. You ask the question. I'm trying to get you through that. I don't think you've said the name George Santos like once. But you know what? You're talking about proxy voting. No, no, no. But you know, you started the question with Congress was broken and I agreed with you. But I was answering the question of how Congress is broken and how we're changing it. So if I can finish the question that you asked me, how Congress is broken. I equated every single member. They just got elected by their by their constituents. They have a right to serve. Well, yeah. Well, so everybody knows that Donald Trump is a liar, but he's a mean liar.

And so Kevin McCarthy is basically wagering that if he is nice, if he smiles while he's lying, or if he smiles while he refuses to answer the question, somehow it will go unnoticed that he's stonewalling, right? But he obviously was. He's not good at this. He's really, really not good at this, by which I mean, he's really bad. The reason, of course, why he won't answer the question about George Santos is the same reason why he backed down about getting rid of Ilhan Omar, which is that he's got only five vote margin to work with, right? So he can't afford to lose this brazen liar, Santos, right? He needs some, every vote he can get through Congress while Santos has not yet been removed from his job will help McCarthy. So he, in this interview, he like not only refuses to

answer about Santos, he's like defending all kinds of crazy stuff about, Margaret Brennan asks Kevin McCarthy about the election deniers that McCarthy has put in committee jobs. And McCarthy basically says, you know, it's not really denial. They're just questioning the election. Or Marjorie Taylor Greene with her insane COVID conspiracy theories and, you know, jail Fauci and that kind of thing. He says like, you know, I think I put her on the COVID committee because we want to hear all points of view. So McCarthy has to defend this insanity because too many of the people in his Republican conference believe the insanity and he cannot afford to alienate them. You know, I don't know how long he's going to last as a speaker, but two years from now,

we ought to play this tape next to what he sounds like. I think he'll be an alto by then. I mean, it's just going to be him. Okay. You can complain about that. You can be offended about that if you understood that reference. I mean, and the thing about him is that he just thinks he can just keep talking. I mean, the filibustering there and the, you know, let me finish the question. Well, you don't get to make me answer the question, whatever it is. This style is, well, this is why I rarely have politicians on this podcast, because at a certain point, they just sort of go off on their talking points. But it is an interesting art form. And I was, you know, thinking about how they, when they get together behind closed doors, and they talk about how to handle a hostile interview or an interview that is trying to elicit information or ask them about substantive things. And I think basically it's like, talk about guacamole and talk about it as

long as possible. So you can do this. So why would you put, you know, any Semitic conspiracy theorist who has peddled disinformation about COVID on the COVID committee. Well, Margaret, I think the most important thing to understand, and I agree with you completely, is that guacamole is a health food. Now, some people think it's a vegetable. Other people think it's a fruit. But I will tell you that I think that guacamole serves many, many, many uses. And excuse me, no, I am answering. You can't make me answer this question. I'm answering him. So the thing about guacamole is do you like spread it on chips?

Or are you one of the people that thinks that we should have guacamole toast? Now, I think that real Americans think that guacamole toast is elitist. And one of the things that I am doing is I am trying to return guacamole to the people. And the people should, you know, I don't know how that's, it's really distinct from, you know, and now 20 minutes about my thoughts about guacamole and American democracy.

So Charlie, I think you should be selling this as a memo to McCarthy because guacamole is actually much, much more important to Americans than what McCarthy wanted to change the subject to, which is proxy voting. Who in America is thinking and talking about proxy voting outside of the House of Representatives? Nobody cares. We need to talk about what the American people are sitting around their kitchen table talking about, by which I mean proxy voting. They are thinking about the San Francisco progressive Marxist woke types who think that guacamole is for toast. I'm sorry now because it's hard to make a transition from the absurd to the really grave. Did you watch the videotape of the murder of a young man in Memphis by a group of at least five police officers?

Yep, yep, I did. I'm sorry. I don't know where to start with this story. It's a horrific video, okay? It's basically a video of a gang attack by a bunch of guys who have the word police on the back of their jackets, but who are otherwise, it looks like a carjacking. I know a lot of people don't want to look at this video. And I understand that. Just let me tell you, it starts off like a carjacking. They drag this guy out of his car. They beat him. They mace him, but he runs away. The entire time he's narrating, he's saying, I didn't do anything. He's telling them he's not doing anything to them. They don't care. So it's a gang attack by a gang that is inside the police. So, and we're going to find out more about this unit in Memphis. That's called the Scorpion unit. But Charlie, as awful as this video is, I am so glad that the video exists because you look at this video and I can't speak

for anyone else, but I think to myself, how many times has this happened into how many young men and how many cities and no one knows about it because there was no video and the cops lied. Okay. And again, I don't want to insult all cops. This is a minority of police, but this must have happened hundreds and hundreds of times. And we just don't know about it all cops. This is a minority of police, but this must have happened hundreds and hundreds of times. And we just don't know about it because the video wasn't there. So I'm glad they had the body cams. I'm glad there was surveillance camera footage too. And as a result of that, I think we will be able to bring these guys to justice. Yes, but clearly the body cams and a variety of other policy changes that have been made have not stopped

this kind of brutality, to come back to that word again. There are complications in this story. There are people who are trying to say that this is about, you know, white supremacy and institutionalized racism. But all of these officers are Black. The police chief is Black. How does race play into this? I mean, there's no question about it that this kind of violence seems to happen to young black men more than anybody else. It would be naive to say that this is not about race. On the other hand, this is a complicated story. How do we break that down?

How do we break down the fact that it's five black men who beat the crap, who killed another young black man? So weirdly, Charlie, I think the fact that the officers are not white in this case, again, I don't want to make it sound like it. The fact that the officers in this case are not white can actually make it possible for a lot of white people to avoid the first reflex. And I'm sorry to say this, I don't, not all white people have this reaction, but research does show that one of the things that

happens is people, I start to identify by color. Who are the white people in the story? If I'm white, I identify with them. And that because the cops here are not white, it's possible for a lot of white people to step back, look at the situation and say, you know, who is out of line here and what should be done about it? So this is a case of obvious police violence. Race comes in, in my opinion, based not on the race of the perpetrators, but the race of the victim. And think about it, if you're a white person or anybody, think about it this way. Who do sexual predators target? They target runaways. Why do they target runaways? Because they think they can get away with it. It's somebody that you can abuse and no one will care. All right. So that's not a racial

analysis. That's just analysis of target selection based on who you can get away with. A lot of the violence against young black men happens the same way. The cops who did this, ask yourself, would they do this in a nice, wealthier, white neighborhood? If they stopped you or me, it wouldn't have ended this way. Yeah, exactly. And they don't do it for that reason. They target the people they think they can get away with. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white as a cop.

It's who you can get away with. Again, this is a gang attack. They've chosen a target. So that, I think, would be a helpful way for folks to think about it. It's not racial animus, right? It's not racial, even particularly implicit racial bias. It is target selection based on who you think you can get away with attacking. institutionalized about the culture that leads to all of this, whether it is the culture of violence, a culture of bullying, culture of brutality. Over the weekend, I was on a number of these panels where you're talking about, well, what do we do? What can Congress do about all of this? And frankly, we can't wait on Congress to pass any legislation because that's not going to happen

anytime soon. But I think that there are a number of things you can do. I think that at this point, you have to realize you have a deep underlying problem that needs to be addressed by changing the hiring practices, the training practices, and the accountability for police officers. We need to get rid of qualified immunity. I don't know whether, you know, how that's going to come about, at least at the local level. But also, one of the smartest things that I read over the weekend was Noah Smith's newsletter where he talked about, you know, obviously, if you look at the United States compared to a number of other industrialized countries, we do not professionalize our police in the same way. They do not receive as

much training as other members of professions. And I think clearly that has to be one of the components. Obviously, we're moving toward more accountability with the cameras, et cetera, and we're seeing this in Memphis. But I think clearly something needs to be done to change the internal culture of these departments. And obviously, simply diversifying the hires is not sufficient. I saw one statistic that at least in one state, less than 50 percent of the police officers even have college degrees. Now, I'm an advocate for having more professions open to people who don't necessarily get degrees. professionalism, the professional qualifications and training of police officers, and then figure out a way to much more aggressively weed out the bad apples. I'm for that, but I want to sort of put in a plug for the accountability side and the punishment and the enforcement side, not the

training side. Let me just put it to folks this way. I am a fan of truly conservative approaches to crime, truly conservative. And that is you enforce the law. You really enforce the law and you're pro-police, right? Support the police. But part of supporting policing is supporting policing of the police themselves. You have to come down on them. And this is why I don't think training is enough. I don't think diversity in the force is enough. Those are all great. And this is why I don't think training is enough. I don't think diversity in the force is enough. Those are all great. And those are things that liberals talk about. But a truly conservative approach to crime, in this case, crime committed by police is we will throw the book at you. We

will nail you. So let me come back to the body camera. I understand, Charlie, the body cameras did not prevent this. They literally did the crime with the body cameras running on them. But what the body camera allows you to do is to prosecute these guys, to put them in jail for the rest of their lives. And that is the way in which the body camera works. It's the prosecution that will stop this. Let's just go back for a second to the point about getting away with it, right? Why does this kind of crime happen and why does it happen in black neighborhoods? It happens because the cops think they can get away with it. When cops start going to jail routinely, because we have body camera footage, we have surveillance camera footage, we have evidence to nail these guys,

then cops around the country get the message, you can't get away with it. You can't get away with it in the white neighborhood. You can't get away with it in the black neighborhood either. And that's when it will stop. I hope you're right. You know, one other thing that I think that we need to really address, and I wrote about this back in 2020, is the role of police unions. And, you know, there's kind of a weird dynamic there because the, you know, Republicans generally have been very, very hostile to public employee unions with the exception of police unions. Here in Wisconsin during Act 10, you know, Scott Walker actually carved out the police unions. You know, everybody else was stripped of their collective bargaining rights effectively, except the police union. But you look around the country when we've had cases like this, the unions have played a, I would say, a mixed role, but in many places, not a constructive role in holding the bad guys accountable. They have pushed for policies that have covered up and protected some of the brutal cops, come up with making it back to your point about they think they can get away

with all of this, you know, they are, you know, part of a culture in which the violence is winked at or it is encouraged from one another. There is no peer pressure against it. And they all feel that they are protected against accountability, or they have, at least up until recently, felt they were protected by their own unions. Right. Yeah. The unions are a major problem. I think one of the first conversations you and I had on a podcast, we were joking that we should trade the liberals to abandon the teachers unions and the conservatives abandon the police unions. The teachers will protect the bad teachers a lot of the time. I'm sorry. I don't want to insult all teachers. Some cops will protect the bad cops. Charlie, think back to the George Floyd case, right? The original police report there was just BS, right? The police, they lied. But because there was phone

camera footage, right? They got nailed. And the same thing is true here. Imagine the Tyree Nichols case with no video, with no body cams, with no surveillance cams. You would just get another lie from a bunch of officers protecting each other because the bad cops do protect each other. You made this point earlier, but think back over the last 40, 50, 60, 70 years. How many times have things like this happened that we never saw that were in fact covered up? And therefore, you know, generation after generation of cops knew that they could get away with things like this because they had gotten away with things like this. That's how certain patterns and practices become institutionalized. And it is chilling to think what was going on back in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and the 90s when there weren't any of these cameras.

That's a great point. And anybody thinks that this just started happening. Isn't it amazing? We have these cameras and suddenly cops became really violent. That is not what happened. of Lindsey Graham, but he had a show, and I think it was this weekend, where he's hosting Kerry Lake and My Pillow Guy, and I kid you not. Okay, so think about this. This is the trifecta of MAGA here, right? Steve Bannon, My Pillow Guy, Kerry Lake. And I want to play the audio because, and at one point, if you listen to this, Steve Bannon is just adamantly telling Carrie Lake, you are the freaking governor of Arizona. Okay. She's been defeated.

Her opponent, Katie Hobbs has been sworn in. She lost the election. Steve Bannon is so now invested in election denialism that he is telling Carrie Lake, you are the governor of the state of Arizona. I mean, the crazy, you want to talk about the doom loop of crazy here. So let's play this bit. Veronica McDaniel has not pulled you aside and say, let's have a cup of coffee and spend five minutes together. Have you guys spent any time with each other one-on-one? No, we haven't, unfortunately. And you know what? I do want to reach out to her because here's what's going on. And I know that this might not be the popular view. Ronna won.

Full stop. You shouldn't have to reach out to Ronna McDaniel. You're the freaking governor of Arizona. You just won an incredibly tough race because you stood for policies that MAGA stands for. She should be blowing your phone up every day. Can I get five minutes? This is outrageous. But here's what I'm willing to do.

I'm willing to meet with her and say, let's move forward because this next election, if we do not get President Donald Trump back in the White House, I don't know how much longer we can last. I think our republic is in peril. I will do everything in my power. If that means I can't cross the country, whatever it means, I want to get President Trump in because I want my children to have a future. Hang on, hang on, hang on. If we don't get you in Arizona, if we don't get you in Arizona now, I'm not going to sure we have sovereignty. Okay, Will. I got nothing. I got nothing.

Charlie, I'm so excited because I found a pony. I owe you a pony today, and I found the pony. All right. Okay. So it's nuts, right? It's completely deranged. But part of what's so disturbing about it is that, you know, I think there were a lot of folks who thought that, okay, Donald Trump is an election denier. Donald Trump is crazy. But Donald Trump will die or pass from the scene, and we'll get back to a sane Republican party.

What this illustrates is that the insanity is running throughout the party and the election denial is. And that's very scary. It can lead to violence. But, but Charlie, and here's my pony, here's the pony in the stack of you know what. It is that by denying the election results, by, you know, insisting that she really won and that the reason why she didn't officially win is that by denying the election results, by, you know, insisting that she really won and that the reason why she didn't officially win is that the machines were rigged or whatever. What Bannon and his version of the Republican Party are doing is they are continuing to lose elections because they won't fix the problem. Right. The problem is that Carrie Lake lost this election by about 17000 votes votes and about 30 to 35,000 Republicans in Maricopa County alone just didn't vote for her. They voted down ballot for other Republicans. They didn't vote for her because she's nuts, right? She's crazy. She's out there. And that

is the underlying problem. And because the Arizona Republican Party isn't fixing that because they're in the grip of this madness. They just continue to lose elections. Charlie, they lost the governor's race, the Senate race, the attorney general's race, the secretary of state race. They lost all the way down the ballot. And they did that because they are crazy. And as long as the voters of Arizona and some other states are willing to administer defeat to this crazy party, then they'll keep them out of power. And eventually, the party will have to learn that in order to get back into power, they need to nominate sensible people and not these crackpots. Well, let me call your attention to the giant pile of you-know-what that was covering up that pony. This woman, this demented woman,

this deranged woman did get 49% of the vote. And as we started the podcast, Donald Trump is still the odds on favorite, I think, to be the Republican nominee. So, you know, I think your belief is this is so crazy, people will see it's crazy, and they will turn against it. In so many ways, the last six years have been a refutation of that because there's been so much crazy. And yet here we are. Here we are. I hope you are right, by the way. I desperately hope you're right. We're in the midst of an experiment into whether our democracy can survive. And the answer to the question whether you're right or I'm right will unfold over the next couple of years. And I

honestly, Charlie, cannot tell you which of us will turn out to be correct. But we'll be here. We'll be doing it. We'll be doing a play-by-play on all of that. Will Salatan, thank you for joining me again on Charlie and Will Monday. I appreciate it. Thanks, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.

We will be back tomorrow, and we will do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.