The Three Questions with Andy Richter - Rachel Maddow Returns

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

Rachel Maddow is back! The host of “The Rachel Maddow Show” joins Andy Richter to discuss the new season of her hit podcast, “Ultra,” the history of the American fight against fascism, her love for Jason Isbell's music, why she is vocal about her experience with depression, and more!Hey there! Do you want to talk to Andy live on SiriusXM’s Conan O’Brien Radio? Leave a voicemail at 855-266-2604 or fill out our Google Form.

Hi everybody, welcome back to The Three Questions. I'm your host Andy Richter, and this week I am talking once again to the wonderful Rachel Maddow. I love Rachel so much. We had such a great time when she was on this podcast before, and I am so happy to have her back. You, of course, know her as the host of the fantastic Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC. You can listen to the second season of her hit podcast, Ultra, right now wherever you get your podcasts. But before my chat with Rachel, I just want to mention that the Andy Richter Callen Show is now airing Wednesday on SiriusXM's Conan O'Brien Radio. Episodes will be available on demand in the SiriusXM app, or you can find them a week later in this same

three questions podcast feed. If you want to be a part of this new radio show, you can call 855-266-2604 or fill out the Google form in the description for this podcast episode, and we just might get back to you and we will have you on the show. I want you to be a part of it. And now, enjoy my conversation, which I should preface this. This was before the presidential debate, which is why we did not talk about the presidential debate or else we sure would have.

Here is my conversation with the wonderful and talented Rachel Maddow. Well, hello, Rachel Maddow. How are you? Hello, Andy Rector. I'm really happy to see you this morning. I'm happy to see you too. I'm so glad that you're back. You know, I normally, you and Jason Isbell

are my two, two timers. Cause this podcast for years, I've been saying like, well, it's kind of, you know, it's, it's about, it's sort of like a little mini autobiography. And can you really tell that twice? But then time went on and I realized who gives a shit? Who cares? You know, if I'm gonna talk to somebody twice, I'm gonna talk to them twice, so. I love Jason Isbell so much. He's one of those people who, like, if somebody else, if I'm with somebody else or I'm in a public place

and a Jason Isbell song comes on, I can't not sing, because I know all the words to every song he's ever published, including with all of his bands. And so it's like, I have to go away because I need to sing along with this chorus, this part about what happens in the bar and the old friend. Hold this personal story, please. Put it on pause. I have to go sing quietly to myself and my terrible singing voice.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love that guy. What I mean, what I find so striking about him is just that he's just, there's so much like he's like, he's so, he's a talented guitarist, a talented songwriter. And then like really, really brilliantly smart, just in terms of like his views on the world. And that's not just because I agree with him on a lot of stuff.

It's like he's a legitimately smart guy and really funny. And like it's just, it's too much. And especially like... He can act. Yeah, there's the other one. There's the other one, yeah. It's like, and you know, there's a lot of musicians

that aren't exactly bright. So, you know, you get used to that. And it's like, you understand, you have this magical math in your head that makes everyone happy. Like you don't need to be smart. And then that fucker's smart and handsome and good at acting and funny. And it's like, take it easy, buddy.

And now he's got good teeth. And he has fancy teeth. And he also, I feel like he was the first person in talking about recovery, talking about getting sober in a way that was not at all preachy, not at all overtly welcoming, but also totally demystifying about the process in a way that people learned his songs about not drinking and people saw the

transformation of him and heard him do interviews about it and he never once preached about it and he wasn't doing like the recovery rap or anything but I swear to God he reached hundreds of thousands of people with his totally realistic accessible message on that at a time that I think a lot of people really needed it. He wasn't throwing his shoulder out, patting himself on the back either. It wasn't heroic.

It was like, look, this is, I got myself into this, I'm getting myself out and it's not pretty. It's not fun, it's not pretty, but it's good. If you guys out there in the world are listening to us right now and don't know what we're talking about, listen to the Jason Isbell song, If It Takes a Lifetime. It will stick in your head and it'll become your favorite new pop song. It will also give you the world's most subtle and

adult understanding about the process of recovery and living sober. It's fantastic. Yeah. It's fantastic. Have you had many struggles with, you know, different sort of mental issues, or are you luckily untouched? I have depression, and I have had depression my whole adult life,

which I've talked about in a few different venues. And I definitely have people in my life and in my family who've had struggles with addiction. And so it's all very real and very present, I feel like it's a top line thing in my life and in my family who've had struggles with addiction. And so it's all very real and very present. I feel like it's a top line thing in my life and has been for a long time. And I found it for me deciding to talk about having depression was because it was helpful to me

when I heard other people admit to it. People who you wouldn't know, people who have successful lives and who you see working in the world in a way that is functional, learning that you can do that and you can live a whole life while also acknowledging that you're coping with and treating your depression was useful to me.

So that is also true of me and I wanna sort of pass that on. Yeah, I mean, I have, because I'm the same, I have struggled with depression. And I mean, you I'm the same, I have struggled with depression. And I mean, you know, and yeah, I guess it is struggled. I mean, first of all, I am like, the fact that it's still in this day and age, like people still feel like it's some admission of some weakness or some shame that you go and say,

hey, I'm sad more than I should be, or I'm anxious more than I should be, some weakness or some shame that you go and say, hey, I'm sad more than I should be, or I'm anxious more than I should be, or I have these intrusive dark thoughts that I would like to not have, you know, that that's somehow an admission of a flaw or a shortcoming. It's just, it blows my mind. And I think it's also with depression in particular,

it's also something a little bit intrinsic to the feeling of being depressed, which is that you feel disconnected. You feel very atomized and you feel like nothing is worth pursuing. There's that sense of hopelessness and purposelessness and disconnection from everything. And that is a recipe for not getting help.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also for not recognizing your own experience in others, your own connections to other human beings. That's that dis, at least for me, that disconnect is the big thing. And so anything that you can do to say, hey, I know you're feeling disconnected and you're feeling like this is only you

and you're alone in the world. You're experiencing something that's part of the human condition. Lots of us have it and there's lots of constructive things that you can do to survive it and to get better and to live alongside it. And so that to me recognizing like, oh, this isn't something that my brain created, especially just for me. My own little punishment I created for me. Like the Newlywood game, chosen just for you,

especially for you. That would have also been for any of the other contestants had they gotten to this part of the game. We all wanted to feel bad about ourselves. Everybody can sup from this particular cup of brain chemistry. It's in a big punch bowl. It's the same for every... Yeah, and the isolation is one thing. And one thing that struck me,

because I also feel like, my mother, I hope she doesn't... No, she's going to listen to this because she idolizes you. But- Oh, hi mom. Hi Glenda. But she, they're almost at times to me, from my perspective, it seemed like we shared a family depression.

Like it was, you know, it was like a meal we sat down to together. And I don't know whether that was connected to, but as I kind of tried to, you know, fight against it, I almost felt sometimes like my depression was like hell in 2001, like it was, it was fighting me to keep itself alive. Like it was trying to convince me of different things that after, you know, when I would look at them, I would think like, that's the depression trying to keep me from killing it. Like, incredible. My depression is a genius. How does-

Well, depression tells you don't try this constructive thing that might make you feel better. That won't do anything. What makes you think you're worthy of that? Yeah. Yeah. Right? That's what it's, it's the, it's a, it's an you think you're worthy of that? Yeah, yeah. Right? That's what it's, it's a, it's an, it's an evil little force. Yeah, yeah.

But we're bigger than it. We are, we are. And once you learn, once you learn its tricks, you can anticipate them. And then I feel like forewarned is forearmed a little bit. Yes. And thank you, Trent-a-licks. Thank you.

Shout out to Trent-a-licks. That's, that's my That's my current medication. That's the sponsor of this second podcast. Exactly. I got to say, a nod to Will Butern too. Thanks buddy. So let's talk about this new podcast. Once again, you're carving out the seamy underbelly of fascism,

which I love, I love, because you really are like, it's like you're a very sort of subtle crusader at this point. And I'm wondering how much that's kind of, like, are you just following your fascination or do you really feel like you're also kind of, there's an Elliot Ness to it, where you're gonna kind of, there's an Elliot-ness to it where you're gonna,

you're gonna bust those people. Well, you know, it's a good question. I, so this is season two of Ultra, and I think that Ultra is kind of a two-part story and was from the beginning. Yeah. Because the whole reason that I wanted to tell that story the first time for season one,

which also became that book prequel that I talked to you about, it was about this cast of characters in the United States ahead of World War II, the Great Sedition Trial where they all go on trial in 1944, and then they all get away. And I had found that story in the first place because I was looking for something else. And I was looking for the origins of American Holocaust denial for lots of reasons related to what's going on in the current, in current news. I was looking for that.

Giving your commencement speech. As you do. Hey kids, get a load of this. I was looking for that story. Where, where did that come from and when did that start? And when did we start doing that? I stumbled upon the Sedition Trial story, decided to tell that, but now the original question

that I was looking for is actually what happens to those Sedition Trial defendants, all those people who got away, all the members of Congress who were in cahoots with this Nazi agent in the lead up to World War II who didn't get punished for it. What happened to all of them? What, basically, after season one, what happens next?

What happens once the war is over? And the spoiler alert is that it's bad. Yeah, yeah. It's bad news, but I do think that it's important, both for that piece of history, but also for where we are now, to think about what happens once you know that you've got really bad actors who are definitely trying to get rid of American democracy

and you try to hold them to account and they not only get away with trying it the first time, they come back to try again. Yeah. That just happens to have modern resonance in terms of what we're dealing with right now in a different time and a different cast of characters. But that fight, like the sort of framing of that fight

was very real in the very end of the war and the beginning of the 1950s. And so that's what season two is about. It's kind of the, it's the other half of prequel. You say there's like parallels to today. You know, like today strikes me too, is like today didn't just happen. You know, like a lot of the people that are,

you know, like the tree of today has its roots in Nixon. Like all those water, like there's a lot of Watergate people that just kind of stuck around. They just receded a little bit, Watergate people that just kind of stuck around. They just receded a little bit, but then they came back later with George W. Bush and, or, you know, with Reagan and, you know, and I just, and then they kind of just, they stay and there just doesn't, it seems to kind of be like the same sort of pattern. And I mean, is there a through line with these seditionists to these same guys?

Like, do they overlap in terms of influence? Yeah, they do. And that's the thing that I feel like I've learned over this process, that it isn't just that, you know, history recurs or there are things that happened before that have eerie similarities to things that are happening now. It's that history accumulates. And so you end up building these piles of things

that you stand on top of. And how did we get here? Well, part of the way we got here is McCarthy. And part of the way we got here is the Nixon era. And part of the way we got here is McCarthy and part of the way we got here is the Nixon era and part of the way we got here is all the way back to the seditionists getting away with it and the America First movement really getting away with it in the lead up to the 1940s. There was this, there's a big sort of soft line, an important soft line,

like a real permeable barrier between violent extremism, like foreign influence, America's enemies abroad, people who wanna get rid of American democracy here, and mainstream electoral politics. And we're experiencing that acutely right now, but that has been true going back for 80 years. And every time you get the radical anti-democratic forces on the ultra-right, scooching their way into electoral politics,

it has a corrosive effect on electoral politics. And it makes our mainstream politicians worse and worse and worse over time because it's not policed. They're never sort of purged. They're not, um... Their lessons are, they sort of survive it. They survive recurring scandal, never get held accountable, and it just comes back more and more aggressively every time. Why do they, why are they not held accountable? Are they too close to the seats of power?

Do the, like, do the sort of, like, true hands on the levers of power agree too much with them? Well, that's one of the big lessons that I think is most relevant to where we are today. And like one of the things that is the kind of news you can use part of this history, which is when you have people who have real political power and they are either linked to violent extremists who want to get rid of democracy, or they themselves are violent extremists who want to get rid of democracy, what happens when the criminal justice system tries to prosecute that as a crime, because sedition is a crime, treason

is a crime, any form of violence is a crime, whenever the criminal justice system gets involved, one of the things that we have learned from history and that we ought to be ready for now, we ought to have been more sort of braced for it in the Trump era is that the people with political power bring improper pressure to bear on the legal system. They pressure the Justice Department, they pressure the prosecutors, they pressure the judges, they pressure the jurors, they pressure the whole legal system in a way that is really bad and corrosive

to the legal system. And it happens every time people with political power and their allies commit crimes. So we should have been more braced, more ready to protect Fonny Willis in Georgia. And to protect Alvin Bragg in New York and to protect Jack Smith and his cases in the federal courts. We should have been more ready when Trump was president for Bill Barr to come in and

say, oh, Michael Cohen's pled guilty to doing something for Donald Trump. Well, you're not going to investigate Donald Trump for that. We should have been ready for Barr to go in and actually he totally dismantled the U S attorney's office in DC, which is why, you know, all of Trump's cronies that were prosecuted in DC had their cases unwound. We should have been more ready for the justice department and the legal system to get messed with inappropriately by people with political power.

And we didn't brace for that. And so we didn't defend against it. And so that is a lot of what is going on right now that is wrong. Is there bracing against it that could be done when, you know, when, you know, as regime change happens, the clean house of these various sort of agencies, and is there any protecting the district attorney or state attorney's office against a bill bar?

Yeah. I mean, I think that in the same way that public pressure matters in the negative sense, I think public pressure matters in the negative sense. I think public pressure matters in the positive sense. And so I think there should have been more of an outcry in Congress and in the state legislatures and from the public basically hands off the legal system, like hands off these prosecutions, like get, you know, leave these jurors alone. When they doxed the jurors in some of these cases, like that should have been a national scandal.

And the people who did the doxing should have paid for it. And the people who incurred, like the people who've been attacking the family members of the judge in the New York DA case, and that's members of Congress. That's the speaker of the house doing that. That ought to be, there ought to be huge political blowback for them in doing that. Like the scandal there is not that, you know, the judge has a family and they have jobs.

And the scandal there is that there are people who are public, have public facing jobs as elected officials who are attacking the family members of a judge in an American criminal case. That is, there ought to be huge outcry against that, and we should have known that it was coming and embraced for it and responded to it more strongly. And I think there's still time to course correct on that, but had we understood this history better

that I've been working on, I think we would have been better sort of forewarned and therefore forearmed for it. Yeah. I've always felt like many on the right and it becomes more and more and more. And a key to Donald Trump is just they have a superpower of shamelessness. Like they just, there's just things where you, you know, that have you no decency? Like that would be just, that wouldn't even be make the news, you know, like that. In Congress, somebody's saying, have you no decency, sir?

Well, the answer, I guess, is self-evident, you know? But, you know, on that point, though, after Joseph Welch said that to Joe McCarthy, have you no decency, sir, we think of that now as like the, oh, and then McCarthy collapsed because of his shame. But I mean, after that happened, literally millions of people signed petitions, don't you dare censure Joe McCarthy. They filled Madison Square Garden. Wow. They brought, there was this huge movement

on the right to destroy McCarthy's enemies and to get him elected president. And I mean, he like toured the country doing these massive Trump-style rallies about how, you know, I wear your censure and I wear your criticism as a badge of honor and I'm an outlaw and I wear your criticism as a badge of honor and I'm an outlaw and they can't stop me.

So we've had guys this shameless before, and that's worth remembering too. There's a great book by the guy who actually led the committee in the Senate that censured McCarthy in 1954. He was a Republican senator from Utah. His name was Arthur Watkins. And he, after he led that committee that censured McCarthy, and we think of that as like, oh, again,

McCarthy like he was the wicked witch. They poured water on him, poof. Watkins had his career destroyed. Wow. He was run out of Republican politics. He was run out of the Senate. McCarthy's rabid, totally fervent supporters hounded him out of the party and out of public life and threatened him and made his life miserable

all in McCarthy's name. And McCarthy was just such a monster. So we've been there. Does that kind of thought, we've been there, does that give you solace? You know, like, does it help you at times to be, cause I know there's different things that, you know, there are different things where I feel like, well, that's, you know, cause it seems so dire at times.

And you're like, no, no, we've kind of done similar before. And, and we, you know, they're still delivering bread to the grocery stores and everything. You know, we're still, you know, my, my retirement account is okay, you know, so, you know, does that give you solace that this is kind of, we've been here before in some way? It is both comforting and discomforting. Yeah, yeah. People talk about, oh, the partisanship in Congress is so bad.

Yeah, nobody's beating one of each other to death with a cane. That's not happening now. Or shooting at each other, having duels. In the Congress, right, exactly. So that is, it gives you perspective, I think, but also more practically, I feel like when you learn about, like the McCarthy example, like you learn about people like the McCarthy example,

you learn about people who were basically as bad or perceived as posing as big a threat to who we are as a country and what our system of government is, and then you very practically look at, okay, who stood up against them and what worked. It gives you a new place to look for ideas about how to respond and how to defend the country because, um, you know, there, there was the biggest anti-war movement we have ever had in this country was the America

first committee and a lot of people who were part of that just genuinely didn't want us to join world war two, but also a lot of people involved in that were super pro Nazi and they didn't get their way. So how did we stand up against them? How were they exposed? How did pressure against them work? How did they end up losing? How did McCarthy, when McCarthy wasn't actually shamed out of the Senate,

how did McCarthy ultimately fall from his perch? People really thought that he was going to be president in 1956. How did that not happen? How were him and his millions of followers diverted from that course, which would have been so bad? That's very rich territory for me in terms of thinking about what we can do now. And that's why I'm trying to learn these stories

and tell them. I mean, you obviously weren't alive during what your report, mostly what, you know, this series is about. And, and you, but you are living through this one. So what do you, do you think this one is more, Don? You know, and by this one, I mean, this kind of rise of fascism, if you will, or, you know, this kind of like, well, you know, I mean, I don't know how, if you want to deny that this is a recurrence of a particular pattern, I don't know what to tell you.

But this go around with this kind of nonsense, this kind of silliness, do you think this is worse? What do you think separates this from, what separates Trump from McCarthy? I think there's some things that are worse and some things that are better, right? So like, even if you go back before McCarthy, you go back to World War II, while we had a pro-fascist, very active pro-fascist movement here, the fascist who was influencing those movements here in the United States, Hitler, was steamrolling his way through Europe, literally conquering all of Europe and on his

way toward conquering the world. In this case, I mean, I don't think you can make an exact allegory with what Russia is doing in Ukraine, but that is a, it's a sort of similar, but smaller and maybe allegorical thing that isn't the same type of world, at least yet, isn't the same type of world toppling least, yeah, isn't the same type of world toppling threat that is supporting it.

So there's that. Um, with McCarthy, um, certainly, he was a more talented demagogue than Trump is. Um, and he... Talented in what sense? Because, you know, if you're just gonna measure things by volume, Trump is president. McCarthy never got to be president. So in what way, was he just a more nimble intellectually?

He was charming and not dumb and could... That's the most striking indictment you've ever said about, about a president. I'm only saying nice things about Joe McCarthy. He was. Charming and not dumb. He was, he was, he was, he knew what he was, he knew what he was doing and he was strategic and he thought long-term and all of those things. That said, he never did become president.

He didn't ascend that far. He wasn't good at building a movement. So in that way, Trump has been good at building a movement. McCarthy threatened the powers of the Republican Party, but there was a guy named Eisenhower who was standing in his way, who was the president at that time, rather than having a president of an opposing party. So, there's sort of good things and bad things there in terms of that comparison. But, um...

And it was helpful that he was like, big war hero, you know, like that. He wasn't just, you know, I don't know, he wasn't just like Dick Durbin, you know? He was like a huge war hero, you know? I will say that he did kind of lie about his war record. I mean, he served in World War II. There's nothing dishonorable about his service.

But at one point he used to, he would say in the campaign trail that he had like 10 pounds of shrapnel in his leg. Ooh. And that's why he had to wear. I didn't know any of that. Yeah, it's great. He had to, he used to wear like Ron DeSantis style, he used to wear shoes with big lifts

in them. And when he got to look taller and when he got called on that, he said like, basically shame on you for asking me that. I'm wounded. I've got this leg injury from my time serving in the war. He did have a leg injury from serving in the war, but it was from him being drunk and falling off a ladder on a boat. So he did, there was no shrapnel involved, but all right,

but again, that shows you like, it's kind of a smart lie. Right, right, right. But it's like, it's like, okay, I need lifts in my shoe because of my injury. And it's like, wait, you need equal lifts in both shoes? That doesn't, I can see if maybe like, you know, like one lift in one shoe to even things out, but you're okay.

All right, whatever. He's likable enough, I guess, you know. Yeah. Okay, Rhondy. Well, I mean, do you feel more hopeful after doing all of this research and doing this deep dive on these topics? I do. Yeah. I mean, you listen to people talk about the stakes of the election and what's going on

with the Trump movement and the takeover of the Republican Party the stakes of the election and what's going on with the Trump movement and the takeover of the Republican Party and all of the stuff they're doing now about celebrating being criminals, right? And like, and the thing you hear over and over again is unprecedented, unprecedented, a threat like we had never had before. And in some ways that is true, but in some ways it's not.

In some ways we have had incredibly dire threats that are kind of along these lines from would-be authoritarians who are trying to dismantle the American system of government. We've had this before and we've handled it. And the reason we don't remember that is because the good guys won. Yeah.

For the most part. And so we don't think about the severity of the threat that really was present in those times. And we don't celebrate the heroism of what the good guys had to do in order to get there. So season two of Ultra starts with this very much forgotten senator named Lester Hunt. Mm-hmm. Nobody remembers it all. He was a dentist from Wyoming.

He was kind of adorable. Yeah. But he is... It's a pretty fascinating story and then it... Yeah. And it, you know, spoiler alert, it ends sad. Sorry, folks. Yeah.

But he was a hero. Yeah. And he did... It cost him his life, but he did, he stood, he recognized the danger, stood up against it and paid the price for it. But the country ought to remember his heroism when we are thinking now, not just about the tragedy about what happened to him, but of the bravery that led to it. I want us to have more sort of American true fables of what it means to defend our democracy, stop would-be authoritarians, defend the American system of government

against people who wanna get rid of it. Turns out there's a whole bunch of fascinating, really dramatic personal stories about that. And I wanna tell as many of them as possible as quickly as I can. Right, right. Cause we need it now. Do you hope to inspire, you know, like inspire people

to be the, you know, the opposition to these movements, these sort of rightward movements? I guess, I mean, I'm- Or is that too highfalutin for you? I think that's too highfalutin. Yeah, yeah. I don't ever try to really inspire anything except a deeper understanding of what we're doing. And so I just, I think the more clarity,

more knowledge, more clarity, more understanding we have of the stakes and the context and what we're all capable of in terms of standing up for our values that people will make their own good decisions. Yeah. I like to get psychological. And I, I throughout my life have, have tried to, you know, the golden rule, you know, try to, try to see things from another side. Yeah. And it gets harder and harder. Like I can, you know, I could, it was, I mean, I never could agree with it because, you know, your, your water seeks its own level and, and, you know, and in sort of

various different kinds of issues, I would feel like, well, yeah, it kind of seems like the government should help poor people. You know, like, there's just my inclination towards what one would call liberal or left kind of feelings. And I try to understand it because some things that are so just plain on their face to me, other people have such a different idea of. I heard, and it was probably on MSNBC because I listen in the car.

I can't watch at home. My four-year-old is very conservative. She only watches Newsmax. I'm like, well, the comprehension level is right, but I mean, honey. So I was listening in the car and they were talking to a Trump supporter and there was the question about whether or not he was fundraising for all his own personal gain and to pay off his own personal legal stuff. And there was a supporter who said like, well, if he did, that would make him a really selfish person. And I just don't think he has that in him.

And it's just gobsmacking. Like, and I wonder like, I mean, what do you think drives people to sort of get behind these movements? And these are supposedly, I mean, they're not, they're not all Nazis, you know, like not, you know, not everybody that's going to vote for Donald Trump is a white nationalist.

I mean, you know, you could make the case that they're, they're comfy with it, but you know, but- He's probably locked up that demographic, but it's a very small demographic. Exactly. But you know, I mean, there are people that think of themselves as all kinds of good things and all kinds of open-minded things

who are still like, yeah, yeah, I do like, I like this. And the conviction, that doesn't bother me. And I mean, what do you think is the component of somebody that can, who seems, like I say, to be an otherwise reasonable person to be okay with this? I think that, I mean... And I know this is not news, this is me asking your opinion, but you're well informed, so...

And I will just say, I mean, caveat on this is that I think if you talk to a thousand different Trump supporters, you'd get a thousand different explanations. You know, you can't generalize broadly, but I think if you look at... I think if you look at it kind of big picture, there's two things that I have learned about by looking at other times in our country when people have felt this way, have sort of made these kinds of choices, and looking at other

countries that have transitioned from democracies into not democracies. And there's two things about that that I feel like I've learned that I didn't understand before. And one is that you don't have to, as you say, you don't have to be a Nazi, certainly. You don't have to think of yourself even as an authoritarian to have legitimate frustrations and upset with how badly the government runs

or with what democracy is like. Democracy is about us all making a collective decision together about what we can, at least a majority of us, or maybe a super majority of us can decide we maybe might incrementally possibly do if we can get it through the process. It's a frustrating sort of ignoble thing when it's working at its best, just in terms of the way things go. And so it can be both unexciting and

also frustrating. And it can make you feel like we need something better. We need something more efficient. We need something more responsive. Members of Congress, people tend to like their member of Congress in polling, but not like Congress in general. Right. Right. They don't like the system. And so somebody who says, this system sucks. We have problems that aren't getting any better.

Let's cut through all of this stupid process stuff, which is really what democracy is. It's a protection, system of protections of a process. Right. Let's cut through all this process stuff and just get something done. That doesn't necessarily have to come from a dark place. Yeah. That can just cut, that can come from a very noble place in terms of wanting things to be better in your country or in your community. Um, the, the, the problem with it is that if you say,

let's not have process, let's just trust a person who I believe embodies what's good for the country. And if we just give that person all the power, they'll wipe away all the impediments and do it themselves, is that they never, the people who get that sort of power never use it for the benefit of anybody else. They just, you know, maybe they make the trains run on time, but then things don't go well, and more broadly speaking. So I think that instinct to like, of toward efficiency and towards like a strong man to just do it,

doesn't have to come from a dark place. But then the other thing, the second thing is dark because the way those candidates for strong men get you to agree that now is the time for revolution, now is the time to get rid of the old system, now is the time to get rid of all the processes and protections and rights that we had and instead do something radical and new is by convincing you that things are

terrible and we are in terrible danger. And they tell these exciting transgressive lies about people who you want to not like. And it's sort of bottomless what you will believe if you are set up to think that they're the enemy and they're the people to blame for what is wrong. And so you see that with bizarre conspiracies about, you know, Democrats and the left and gay people and immigrants and trans people and all the rest of it. In Ultra Season Two, there's another instance like that where there's these like prurient, lurid, terrible, almost pornographically violent fantasies about Jewish people and it's big anti-Semitic conspiracy

theory. You always have to blame somebody. And the thing that I have finally figured out that I should have gotten from the beginning is that those lies are transgressive and gross and detailed and like horror movie style for a reason. It's because they're emotionally cathartic to people. People get excited by them. They're very rewarding to them to really dive in

and believe them and it can drive real political fervor. And so on Earth One, everybody's like, I don't think Pizzagate is real. I don't think Hillary Clinton eats baby's faces. Yeah. But on the other side. They're not terrifying children to make a drug to get high off of.

Yeah. Like, I don't see this. Like, I don't think that there were suitcases full of ballots. Yeah. And like, I don't think that's happening. But on Earth, too, the people who have decided to believe those things find it so rewarding

and so emotionally cathartic and so psychologically all-encompassing that they not only dive right in, they suspend all disbelief, decide that's going to be the driving function of their life and it drives them into a radical, increasingly radicalizing sort of fervor toward this one person they've decided to believe. And that is a psychological phenomenon. And those two things can go together. You can come from a very constructive good faith place and then get very dark about what is the cause

of the emergency that requires our radical action. And somebody like a fascist demagogue gives you both sides of that equation and then you're there. I think you're so right. Like horror films. We watch horror films because there's a catharsis. Because we get to practice being scared rather than being really scared. Yeah. And usually, you know, horror films, it's like being murdered or, you know, or like even, you know, vampire, like every fucking movie monster has some

sex aspect to it, you know, like it's all just like, like vampires, like there's a man that will come in here who will mesmerize you and then suck out all your blood and you will be, you know, like in his thrall for the rest of your life and you'll never die, you know, like,, there's so much, you can see this root fear that's being exercised, you know, and, you know, and exercised, they're both like meanings of the word. What do you think is at the root of these fears of these

people? Like, what are they so afraid of? Like, no, they're not going to be murdered, you know, or I mean, I guess they could think that, like, all those people from the cities, which is a good code word, or good code, they're going to come and get me. But like, what are they so afraid of? Well, Trump is telling them to be afraid, right? I mean, if you look at the... I find it hard to watch his speeches for the one thing. They're like Fidel Castro length at this point.

Yes, yes. He just goes up and he talks for hours and hours. But the C-SPAN, helpfully, I've made a habit of reading the C-SPAN, like the closed captioning transcripts, the auto-generated transcripts of his speeches when I can't stand to sit there and watch them for a long time. They're pornographically violent. He talks about immigrants and he talks about, uh, crime and he talks about now Democrats and the, and the legal system.

Um, and like the treatment of the January 6th defendant warriors. He talks about these people in ways that have like really granular level details of violence and gore. Um, he tells like rape stories, he tells murder stories, he tells dismemberment stories, he tells all of the stuff that is really, you know, breaking you down in terms of what you usually experience in normal life about, you know, things that we have natural inhibitions against.

And I think that is really getting at people's id, making them feel afraid. And after he sort of breaks you down with all of this horror that is out your doorstep and they're coming for your children and they're coming for, you know, all of this stuff. And then he says, and you want to know who they are? It's the left.

You want to know who they are? It's the Democrats. You want to know who they are? It's Joe Biden. And we need to, it's not defeat them in the election, we need to destroy them. We need to get rid of them once and for all, we need to eradicate them.

And that's just textbook, right? That sounds the same in German. And that tactic is, you have to create the fear to create the sense of emotional openness to the radical suggestion. You have to create a sense of emergency because you're asking people to give up the right to vote forever. You're asking people to give up their system of government forever. It's not like you invoke the Insurrection Act on day one of your presidency to use the military against the American people and

then you then you un-invoke it, right? Once you've done that, you don't give back that power. They're not planning on a 2028 election if Trump is elected in 2024. Wow. Yeah. It is again, psychology. It's so like the, just the kind of ape that we are

can be so frustrating because there are these cycles. And like, yeah, Trump is textbook. That fucker never read a textbook. It's just the instinct of a particular kind of bully and a particular kind of power hungry, selfish, megalomaniac. And, and it just makes me, it, it bums me out so much that, that as you've said, there are movements where people,

they say, the process is too complicated. Let's just pick one right thinking person, one sort of hero, one, and it's always a man. Let's find ourselves a big, strong daddy to run the family. And that daddy's always right wing. Like where's the benevolent left wing dictator that it's gonna like, I'm gonna put tanks in the streets

so that kids can have free lunch. You know what I mean? I just, it's so, and I know the reason, it's because somebody with that kind of mindset is like, well, you can't put tanks in the street, you know? Like it takes a kind of a real inherent moral failing to be like, there better be tanks in the street for me to get what I want, you know? Yeah, I mean, once you get to, I mean, there definitely are terrible, violent communist dictators of yours.

But once you get to that point, they're all in, I mean, dictator is dictator is dictator. Yes, yes. They're all, they all look the same. Once you are never going to leave power, and you are therefore not answerable to the people who you rule, so there's no reason, you don't need to do anything

to make them like you, right? Because you can, you do what you want, you don't have to answer to them anymore. When you got rid of elections, you got rid of that feedback mechanism, right because you you can you you do what you want You don't have to answer to them anymore when you got rid of elections you got rid of that feedback mechanism Yeah, right And if you and once you're using force against your own people you start off by saying it's the it's the bad people There's the people we all agree are bad people you start off using force against them and then the widen the aperture a little bit And now you say you're using force against the deep state and then you say you're using force against your political enemies, and eventually

you're using force against everybody. Yeah, yeah. And it's that, left-wing dictators and right-wing dictators is a meaningless distinction in the end once they get to using, once they get to tyranny. Yeah, it's a human feature. It's like opposable thumbs. There's also corruption.

You know, like you get enough power and you get like, you know, if everybody eats off of one tree, if you get all the fruit off that tree, it's going to break your mind. You're going to, you know, it takes a lot of work. Believe me, I'm sure it's the same in your business. Egos, power, it takes a lot of just strength of character to realize when you're surrounded by people who say, oh, you're right, you're right, you're right. No, no, I'm not always right.

I am very much capable of being wrong and I need pushback to keep on the right track. It takes a lot of extra work once you get to a level where everybody's doing whatever you say. Yes. And I'm always wary of sort of extrapolating from human individual psychology to governance and like how country should run. I love it.

It's a lot of fun. That's the idea of democracy too, right? Which is that one entity, one political faction, certainly one political person, shouldn't always get to say what we are doing. We should all be able to participate. The best argument should win. People should be in power for a while and then lose power, either by design or because they've been outcompeted for it. And then once you are out of... It's healthy. Once you're out of power, losing does not mean dying.

You should be able to then come back and compete again after revising your message and making a better argument. It's an idea of like constant iteration and constant... like knowing that there's going to be failures, making a plan for it, coming back, trying to be constructive, making sure everybody gets a say, protecting everybody's speech rights, protecting everybody's political rights so that everybody can compete, so that nobody's being left outside the system and thereby starts attacking it. I mean, democracy is genius.

I mean, I think it is divinely inspired. And I say that without apology for it. but it is, it takes a freaking adult. Like it just, you have to be mature enough to not be like, everybody else needs to shut up. You once and for all are out of this. I'm the one who's in charge. The only thing that should take you off the board in a democracy is if you tried to dismantle democracy.

But as long as you're shy of that, everybody should be able to compete. And that is, I think, really hard for us just as selfish, egotistical humans to live with long-term. And that's why there aren't very many 250-year-old democracies in the world. And we need to fight to save this one. Are there things in your mind that, like mistakes that the opposition to these kind of forces

have made as of late? What could have been done differently since you do know everything? What could have been done differently to keep it so that Mike Johnson isn't saying shitty stuff about the judge in the Trump trial? Where along the way could they have reinjected the shame that sort of kept things, kept things civil? I mean, I think that once it became clear that Trump, while he was president, was manipulating the Justice Department, right? When it became clear with that, I mean, the Michael Cohen case is like, it sort of feels like a cartoon version of the legal problems of Trump. But if you go back to that, that was actually

once the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jeffrey Berman, wrote his book saying, hey, you want to know what happened in the Michael Cohen case? Trump had his folks come in and shut down that investigation and dismantle, take apart that federal investigation so that individual one was never going to get charged and that investigation was stopped. And then they tried to get us to bring charges against John Kerry. And they did take out the, they took out the US attorney in DC and, and, and, and did a 180 on all the cases affecting Trump's friends and used that US Attorney's office to bring bogus prosecutions.

They actually did bring a bogus prosecution against a Democratic lawyer who barred, sort of ordered them to prosecute. I mean, that is a sidebar. Most people listening to us right now don't know what scandal that is that I'm talking about. Like, oh, there were so many Trump administration scandals. That should have probably been the takeaway scandal of Trump as president, because that is...

We are getting rid of the rule of law. To the extent that the rule of law exists, I'm going to force the normal people out, bring in my own goons and turn this thing around so that I am running this place like a strong man. And he only got the hang of it once he got Bill Barr in there as attorney general. And then that now has blossomed to becoming what he's planning on doing with the second term. That's the whole point of the second term in terms of destroying the opposition, making it illegal to oppose him, and bringing all these things down to Baron's enemies.

We should have put a finer point on how dangerous that was, and I think that would have prepared us for the attacks on the legal system that the whole Republican party is now participating in as a way of trying to bring Trump back. That was a mistake. Yeah, it's a shame because it's just, it's not sexy enough.

Like it's everything, you know what I mean? One of Trump's real successes has been injecting professional wrestling, no coincidence that he used to be involved in professional wrestling, into politics. It's, you know, like when he, his speeches now are what in the wrestling trade is called cutting a promo. It's all wrestling talk.

It's all, it's all hyperbolic. It's all bullshit. It's like you say it's all scary and stuff. And it's, but it's, but it's also too, like pushing all the big juiciest, grossest, oiliest buttons, you know? And so something like, well, he shut down a bunch of investigations. It just doesn't cut it, you know? It's like they need to... Yeah, because he's up there swear.

Like if you're biting the head off a live bat at your show, like nobody's going to pay attention to your lyrics. Right. Yeah, it's the Aussie principle. Yeah. Well, do you get, just last question, do you, when you have your time off, are you just like, do you forbid your partner from speaking of politics?

I mean, do you need time off the clock, definitely at the end of the day? So the smartest decision I ever made in my life was getting together with my partner, who does not care about politics. So Susan doesn't care. She's like, oh, you got more Nazi books delivered today, honey.

But I put them aside, because we're watching the Great British Bake Off. We're old lesbians and we have a responsibility to watch the finals because that showstopper is not going to cut it. And it's pride after all. We need to get some cats around us. Yeah. So our, so having, um, a, a diverse, a, a diverse life that has work and not work in it at the same time is, uh, I can't recommend it highly enough. Get your, get yourself a partner who does not care about the same things that you care about. Um, I've always- It keeps you humble. Yeah. I've always said, like, at least in show business, like you're, you need your family to be almost completely unimpressed

with whatever it is you do. It's just because I can't even imagine if I went home and everyone was like, tell me about show business. What happened in show business today? I'd just, ugh, I'd leave. I'd go sit in the car in the driveway. It's very, I feel like this is underappreciated advice. And I'm sure it's for show business,

but I think it's for anybody in any form of life where there is a risk of people saying yes to you because that will corrode your soul. Make sure you go home to people who are unimpressed by you and for whom you must take out the garbage. That's right. That's right. Well, let me say these things. home to people who are unimpressed by you and for whom you must take out the garbage. That's right. That's right. Well, let me say these things. New episodes of the second season of Ultra, they're being released on Mondays right now. And I've listened to two of them and it's really,

and it has taken every fiber of my being to not ask you for spoilers while we're rolling. fiber of my being to not ask you for spoilers while we're rolling. Like what, and I don't want to look it up, you know? It's like when you watch a historical movie and you're not, I'm like, I have to wait till it's over to look up what really happened in Troy, you know? But who is Sparta? So you can get Ultra wherever you listen to your podcast and plus part of an all new Apple podcast subscription offering. MSNBC premium listeners can listen to episodes early each week and ad free and then be a

real jerk about it to all your friends. And then the Rachel Maddow show in case anybody didn't know, airs on Mondays at 9 p.m. How is your life now when you're on Mondays only? When this podcast is over, my life will be better. But I'm working like 20 hours a day, seven days a week. But once we get to the end of Ultra, then I will, I swear I will go fishing. At least that's what I call Susan.

All right, I would love to go fishing with you sometime. That would be fun. We're gonna do that. We talked about ice fishing last time. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Oh, that would be awesome. So sometime, February 2025, I'm gonna put a note in my calendar

to call you and find out where you are. And we'll try to go in February. Where do you go in that? Do you go in the East Coast ice fishing? Or do you go- Yeah, Western Massachusetts. And Western Massachusetts. Okay, nice. Yeah. Oh, that would be so great.

Just getting drunk in a little house on a frozen lake. Pulling up dinner. You get drunk and I'll drag you around on a sled and play you Jason Isbell songs. Sounds nice. That's exactly what I want my retirement to be. All right, well Rachel, madam. This is so much fun.

Thank you so much. I love talking to you. And good luck with the luck with the new and keep up the good work. Truly, truly wonderful, wonderful work. And you're such a voice of clarity and wisdom and goodness. And I'm going to talk to you a third time, I bet something. You do another podcast or something and we'll talk again. All right. Well, tell your mom I said hi. Hi, Glenda. Nice to meet you. All right. Thank you, everyone. We'll be back next week with more of The Three Questions.

The Three Questions with Andy Richter is a Team Coco production. It is produced by Sean Dougherty and engineered by Rich Garcia. Additional engineering support by Eduardo Perez and Joanna Samuel. Executive produced by Nick Leow, Adam Sachs and Jeff Ross. Talent booking by Paula Davis, Gina Battista, with assistance from Maddie Ogden. Research by Alyssa Grahl. Don't forget to rate and review and subscribe to The Three Questions with Andy Richter wherever you get your podcasts. And do you have a favorite question you always like to ask people? Let us know in the review section. Can't you tell my love's a-growin'?

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