Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy.
And I'm producer Jesse Ken, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through tears. We have such an excellent episode for you today.
MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirshner joins us to talk about Jack Smith's decision to drop his case against Donald Trump and what this spells for lawlessness in the new Trump presidency. Then we'll talk to Dartmouth professor and author of The Undertow. Seeds for a exclusive award, Jeff Charlotte. We'll dig into the rise of Christian nationalism and its profound impact on American culture and politics.
But first, let's have some fun. So, just before we were about to record, we got news that Jack Smith, the special counsel, has filed a motion in the D.C. courts to drop all the felony charges against Donald Trump. This is in the case, because, you know, we still have to point out which cases these are.
This has to do with Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election, everything that happened on January 6th, etc., etc. So those charges are going away, which is, I guess you could say, mission accomplished for Donald Trump, since that's a large part of why he ran for president in the first place this time around. So Danielle and I were talking, and we were like, you know, there were a bunch of topics we were thrown around, and then this happened, and two of the other topics were the fact that we now, I think we're hearing that the Matt Gaetz report will not be released by the House Ethics Committee. And on top of that, Donald Trump is basically throwing out, you know, however many decades of norms and not signing an ethics agreement to set fundraising limits and transparency on his transition.
And the thing we kind of hit on was all of this is of a piece, and that piece is no one is here to save us. None of the institutions that we have counted on for a very long time to at least put guardrails on the attempts to subvert democracy, to subvert the rule of law, etc., etc., none of those are coming to save us. And a lot of people said 2020 was supposed to prove that the guardrails were in place. But the fact of the matter is no one is coming to save us, and that doesn't mean we can throw up our hands and we can say, fuck it, it's over.
It means that when no one is coming to save you, but you need to be saved, you have to save yourself. And you have to get together and band together with others to save yourselves and to save ourselves. So I think that's sort of going to be the theme of this topic is there are no heroes. We have to be the heroes.
Yeah, I don't know how we as a society will go about teaching children right from wrong moving forward. We all watched what Donald Trump did on January 6, 2021. We all followed this insurrection. Jack Smith now saying, well, we're dropping all charges.
Now just means that you can do whatever you want, which is what we've been saying. If you are wealthy, if you are powerful, if you are white, if you are a man, you can get away with extreme acts of violence. And that is okay. Donald Trump, like you said, ran for office to avoid going to jail, to avoid prosecution.
And all of the things that we said would happen if Donald Trump became president again are unfolding day by day, minute by minute. How do you tell people now, oh, follow the law, you know, follow the rules? Why? To what extent?
Who does it help? How many people were arrested after, well after the insurrection happened, that Donald Trump is going to get ready to pardon on day one? So again, what we have said as a country, what has been decided on November 6, isn't just that America wants Donald Trump, it's that they want everything that Donald Trump stands for. And on top of that list is lawlessness, that you can do and say whatever you want.
There are no rules anymore. So if that is the case, right, and we were hoping and praying and believing that, you know, oh, sanity was coming in in 2021 when Joe Biden was elected. Oh, look at the poetic justice of him appointing Merrick Garland as attorney general after Merrick Garland was shunned when Barack Obama tried to put him on the Supreme Court. Oh, look, he's going to take action because the full Mueller report was laid out for him on day one.
He didn't even have to start with the insurrection. And we are here in this moment. We have arrived at a time where our institutions have absolutely failed us because of people like Merrick Garland, because of people like Joe Biden, who frankly had a failure of imagination. And this belief that somehow that him being elected president in 2020 was the only thing that was needed in order to restore faith in our institutions.
No, it needed to have a robust and vigorous prosecution of a criminal on day one. And they waited until, what, two years in to appoint Jack Smith? And then Donald Trump did what he's been doing his whole goddamn life. He ran out the clock.
So I'm like, you know, we're here. And I think that you're right, Andy, that the reckoning moment isn't just about those that listened and heard over the last nine years everything that Donald Trump has said, everything that he's promised, every vindictive, every nasty, every horrific thing that he said. And said, oh, that's my guy. And pointed to him and circled in and put on their MAGA hats and shirts and apparel and Bibles and all of it.
And said, this is my guy. But it's also like the institutions did not hold. They did not. They just didn't explode in the way that we thought that they were.
But this is not what operating in a functioning democracy looks like. It's particularly when you can look at now Brazil, France and Italy and see what they're doing with their extremists in comparison to America. It's wild to see what happened in Brazil over the last few days where former President Bolsonaro has been charged along with a bunch of other people with plotting a coup to overturn the 2022 election. And you see that like so many people's response to that was, wait, you can do that?
Also, you can arrest people on the same day they try. Yeah. And yeah, we can't do that here. But other countries can do that.
Countries that we are supposedly, quote unquote, better than. But we don't have some kind of functioning system that will look at people who plotted a coup and who try to overturn an election. And at the end of the day, not only does nothing happen to them, but the guy in charge of them becomes the president again. It is absolutely insane that we have a system that allows this.
But what we have learned, again, is that we do. That our system, as currently set up, unfortunately, has allowed this to happen. And, you know, you can blame this on the system itself. You can blame it on the people that are in charge of those aspects of the system.
You can blame it on the Supreme Court. Whatever it is, again, all the things that were supposed to stop us from becoming a tin pot dictatorship, they're all failing us. I think it's important to make this clear that the response to this can't be, oh, well, or, well, we tried, or, well, that's that. It can't be anything along those lines.
It has to be to fight. And however you want to take that to mean, whether it's organizing, whether it's, you know, running for office yourself, whether it's, I don't even know, because it sounds very overwhelming, you know, because it's like, well, this entire system is out of order. And how do you fix an entire system? And there are people that have fixed entire systems before.
There are people who have banded together to fix entire systems and to make things better. And I do think we're going to find ourselves in the next four years, it's going to be very easy to put your head in the sand or to say this is too big. I can't do anything about this. And I'm including me in this.
I'm not lecturing anyone here. I'm talking about myself along with, you know, I think everyone who kind of feels this way. We have to be on guard against that. And we have to do whatever we think is in our power to do to try to fix this.
Because, again, the time for relying on other people to do it for us is long gone. The time to rely on the Constitution for doing it for us just seems to be gone. And so that leaves us. That leaves, I know this has become a right-wing phrase these days, which sucks, but it really does leave we the people in the sense of it leaves American citizens to sit here and say, no, no, we don't want a dictator.
And we don't want a lawless government. We have to say that. And we have to say it loud. And we have to fight for it because there are those among us, as we've learned in this election, as we learned in the 2016 election, as we learned in the 2020 election, which, you know, was by no means a landslide for Joe Biden.
There are a lot of Americans who do want a lawless government, who do want a constitution that they claim to support right up until they don't. And we have to be, you know, I really don't want to sound like hashtag resistance here because that is not me. But we do have to make it clear that we're not just going to roll over for that. You know, and I think that, frankly, it's really hard for people right now, as you recognize, how could this, like, how could I think that, you know, we're just still a couple of weeks removed from the election, still reeling from the fact that, like, this could happen here.
That, like, all the evidence, all the information, all you had to do was just listen to Donald Trump or just read any of the transcripts or listen to the people that he has surrounded himself with. And yet we're here. Honestly, I don't know how, like, how does America go and have the audacity to point out any other country and think that they are better, think that we are better than any other country when everyone else who had been presented with extremists has been able to figure their way forward, has been able to say, oh, they're not thinking to themselves in Brazil. Maybe we don't prosecute Bolsonaro because, you know, what would that mean about our government?
Oh, maybe. Weird thing. It'd mean it fucking works. That's what they decided.
They decided that their government wasn't fragile, that it was actually going to be able to move forward because when people do wrongdoing, whether they are presidents or not, that you prosecute them. And so what we've stated with our decision to reelect a man that attempted a coup, to reelect an adjudicated rapist, to reelect a racist, right, is that, like, this is who we are collectively. And that is okay for people who were, again, looking at a Department of Justice and saying, oh, they're going to get the job done or looking at Joe Biden and saying, oh, he's going to get the job done and recognizing now that no one got the job done except for Donald Trump. Mission accomplished for him, for his team, for team Broligarch and Oligarch and whatever the rest, team sexual assault, right?
Like, they won. And so I think that in this moment of deep kind of grief and despair, Americans need to wake up and recognize that, right, like you said at the top, nobody is coming to save us. There is not an institution that has not fallen and bended a knee to Donald Trump from the Supreme Court to the Department of Justice. And now we are seeing who is going to be running all of our other systems moving forward, running them completely into the ground.
He said, last week, oh, we don't need to worry about these people's qualifications because they're not being hired to do the job. They're being hired to destroy the agency they're put in charge of. So you don't need to have a resume that says you know how to do the job because they're coming in as sledgehammers. So a part of me is in a space right now where I'm like, you know what?
It isn't so much that America deserves Donald Trump, but America clearly needs Donald Trump as president of the United States. America, a large swath of people actually need to lose everything in order to understand, like, what value there was in freedom and bodily autonomy. And it's unfortunate that the host of us who already knew are going to be part of that collective pain. But I honestly now, given everything that we've seen and what we know over the last couple of weeks, I don't see any other way to get to the other side, obviously, than having to move through what is going to be maybe known at some point in history as like the Dark Ages 2.0.
Yeah, and look, I think that's a really interesting discussion. Jonathan Lass at the Bulwark wrote an interesting piece a couple weeks ago, right after the election, in which he basically said, and he said he himself is not sure how he feels about this, but he put forth the argument that Democrats should not save Donald Trump from himself this time around. They should not curb his wildest ambitions or whatever. They should let him run this country into the ground.
It was similar to what you were just saying. He's like, that's the only way that people are going to realize, the people that voted for him are going to realize that they made a really big mistake. Like I said, he himself said he wasn't sure if he believed this position. He was just putting it forth as a possibility.
And I understand the upside to that, to not curb his worst impulses, because then when you do that, it allows people to say, see, he wasn't that bad. But of course, as you pointed out, the flip side of that is so many people get hurt in the meantime or die. It's not an exaggeration to say people are going to die because of Donald Trump's policies. And people are going to be hurt.
People are going to be hurt physically. Talk to some trans people about the rhetoric that we've already seen happening in the past couple weeks about everything that's going on and the pain that they are feeling. It's really hard to say, well, we're going to have to go through four years of that. And yes, it sucks, but it's so I don't know.
It's a rough conversation. But I do understand, at least intellectually, I understand the argument of this is what you voted for. You see, this is what you're getting. But of course, the problem is a lot of people didn't vote for that.
And like you said, like we shouldn't bear the brunt of this. And it's going to be a lot of the people who didn't vote for Donald Trump who will bear the brunt of it. That is one thing we know for sure. I think it's an interesting thought experiment, but I don't know.
I don't know if you can do that. I don't know if you can say, hey, let him do basically whatever he wants for the next four years. Because, man, it's going to be bad enough, even with people fighting back, but to just not fight back and to not try to put a stop to at least whatever you can. I don't know.
I just don't know, man. Yeah, I mean, look, I think that your point about Democrats, I mean, I don't even know how Democrats would save Donald Trump from himself with absolutely no, like, you know, with no House, no Senate. Like, I don't know what Democrats are really doing to thwart his plans. And again, like we said this, there would be no guardrails this time.
There are no breaks. There's no nothing except full speed ahead. I think that the only thing that Democrats can do is stop pretending to be the adults in the room and stop playing by rules that clearly, as we stated from the top, no longer exists. This is a lawless country.
There are no rules anymore. That's what Donald Trump has shown us. That's what MAGA has been celebrating. The lawlessness is what runs supreme.
So I need for Democrats to stop pretending that they are somehow the adults instead of recognizing that they need to flip the table and figure out how the fuck to play a new game. Because this whole, like, Schumer-Pelosi backroom doors and handshakes and scotch and this and my friend across the aisle bullshit is, like, 20th century crap. And, like, they need to let that stuff go. And, frankly, I would love to never hear the names of some of these, like, beacons of democracy that have been in Congress for 3,000 years.
I would let them all to, like, move aside because they don't know how to play this new game at all. And they show it every single day that they are not prepared to meet this moment. Yeah, I think there's so much truth to that. And you brought up earlier and, again, just now with President Biden.
And I think if you want to point to probably the biggest failure of the last four years of his administration, it is exactly what you just said. And the way you said it, it's that 20th century mindset of reaching across the aisle and, you know, we can disagree without being disagreeable and all that stuff. And we have learned that, unfortunately, no, no, no, we can't. It's one thing to reach across the aisles to someone when you're arguing about, like, a few percentage points in a tax rate.
It's another thing to reach across the aisle when people basically want you gone from the country. They want you not to exist. Like, if someone says to you, I want to kill you, and you say, well, I don't want you to kill me. And they say, well, let me hurt you.
And you say no. And then it's like, well, why won't you compromise? But that's where we are now. It's like the compromising shouldn't be you want to kill me, and so no, I don't want you to kill me, so I'm just going to let you hurt me.
Like, that's not a compromise. And that is where we seem to be in terms of politics in this country right now. I don't think either of us are sitting here calling for violence, you know, so I want to make that clear. But I think this whole notion of compromising with people who do wish violence upon you, who refer to you as the enemy within and domestic enemies because you disagree with them politically or because you don't think that minority groups are less than, there's no compromise to be reached with people like that.
And like you said, I think calling it a 20th century mindset is just the perfect way of putting it. And Joe Biden had a 20th century mindset. And look, he did some good things as president. And he didn't get any credit for them, but he did some good things.
But that was, I think, the overwhelming mistake that he made, which honestly is not even his fault. That's who he is. He's a 20th century guy. And so is Chuck Schumer and the other people you mentioned.
And I think you're absolutely right. The Democratic Party, if it's going to stay viable, desperately needs an entire shift in mindset. Folks, I am so happy to welcome back to the new abnormal Glenn Kirshner, MSNBC legal analyst, host of Justice Matters, and my go-to when I want to understand the rule of law. But today, it's how do we understand how to live inside of what is evidently with the announcement of Jack Smith rescinding his case on January 6th.
Donald Trump. How do we exist, Glenn, inside of what is now a lawless country? We don't have the rule of law here, and this is what you've been fighting for your entire career. Yeah, as a career rule of law guy, as somebody who has fought for justice for decades, 30 years as a federal prosecutor, fighting for the fair application of the rule of law, including being fair to all defendants, and then since retiring from the Department of Justice, fighting in this new battle together with you, Danielle, and so many others, fighting for accountability and for the rule of law to apply to the ruling class criminals like Donald Trump.
You know, I think today is the day that one could probably observe that the rule of law died. I'm actually going to make my way to a point of light amidst all of the darkness, so it's a very dim point of light because even though my gut screams the rule of law died today because Jack Smith moved to dismiss both of Donald Trump's federal prosecutions, the one for him trying to steal the 2020 presidential election and order an attack on the U.S. Capitol to try to unconstitutionally claim to power, and the second federal case down in Florida where he stole and unlawfully retained, classified documents, our national security secrets obstructed justice by refusing to give them back and violated our nation's espionage laws. Those two cases are about to be dismissed by the judge because Jack Smith has said, because there's a legal opinion from the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel that, gosh, we just don't think it's a good idea to prosecute a sitting criminal president.
I, Jack Smith, have to abide by that DOJ policy, and I have to move to dismiss these cases. That, to me, feels like the death of accountability and the death of the rule of law, but there are two words, and here's where I'm going to try to find that dim point of light, Daniel. There are two words in the motion to dismiss that provide that little bit of light, and those two words are without prejudice. What does that mean?
He's asked the judges to dismiss these cases without prejudice, meaning they can be re-brought, revived, re-indicted in the future once Donald Trump leaves office. Now, will that happen? If so, when will that happen? If a new administration comes in after Donald Trump does his nefarious best to destroy the government and all of our institutions, which is clear, it's what he's trying to do given his unqualified and even dangerous cabinet picks.
If a new administration comes in with an attorney general and prosecutors who give a rat's ass about the rule of law, rat's ass I think is a legal term so I can say it, and they try to re-bring these criminal prosecutions against Donald Trump as they should, they're going to have to fight a battle with the judges, with the federal court, and that battle will be, did they bring them in time? Because there's this thing called the statute of limitations that says you have to prosecute somebody within five years of the crime, and we know if Donald Trump serves four more years, those prosecutions will time out, and the law, the statute of limitations, will prohibit them from being brought because the time has expired, unless the judges rule that because the Department of Justice policy dictated to Jack Smith that he can't prosecute these cases while Donald Trump is in office, that should also cause the statute of limitations to stop running, such that it doesn't matter if five years have expired. That is the legal fight that Jack Smith just beat up in these motions to dismiss, and I'll read you the next to last sentence in his motion to dismiss. He says, immunity from prosecution for a sitting president, that is the Office of Legal Counsel opinion, not the Supreme Court ruling, but the opinion saying we don't think it's a good idea to prosecute a sitting president.
That kind of immunity from prosecution for a sitting president would not preclude such prosecution once the president's firm is over, and he is otherwise removed from office by resignation or impeachment. So that is what Jack Smith is hanging his justice hat on right now in hopes that maybe these cases can be revived in the future, but Danielle, that is cold comfort to me that Donald Trump has gotten away with all of these crimes against the American people, and instead of going to jail, he waltzes right back into the overlock. I mean, you know, I appreciate you searching for the dim light in this time of real darkness. For me, it still will just remain dark because what I am really having a hard time with, Glenn, is what an absolute failure Merrick Garland is, and because of him, what I believe Joe Biden's legacy is going to be moving forward.
A man that gave over 40 years of his life and career to America will be known and remembered as the president that allowed democracy to die. Talk to me about Merrick Garland and how his inability to meet this moment, how Joe Biden and what I am naming as a failure of imagination to recognize how bad and how much of a threat Donald Trump and MAGA is to this country that believe that they could just turn the page, and that's how we find ourselves here. Yeah, Danielle, I got nothing because Merrick Garland and his Department of Justice, for whatever reason, declined to hold Donald Trump accountable for his crimes in a timely manner, and they could have, and they could have, and they didn't. I will never understand why.
I don't think I could ever be given an adequate explanation for why. I mean, you know, and it's not just the insurrection, and it's not just his theft and lawful retention of classified documents. For God's sakes, he committed crimes while in office last time, like 10 counts of obstruction of justice, but there was a policy that we couldn't prosecute him for those crimes that Bob Mueller meticulously detailed in volume two of the Trump Russia report couldn't go after Donald Trump until the minute he left office, and then the minute he left office, we sat there and we didn't do shit. We did nothing, and now here we are again.
This is governmental insanity and sloth and abdication of the responsibility to protect our fucking democracy. They haven't done it. They've given it all away, and they've given it away to a guy who committed all of these crimes to try to steal the presidency last time he lost it. We're now handing it to him.
That's the first time I think I've used that word on air, and I don't mean democracy. That's not the word. No, I know. I have interviewed you for years.
We have years of date. Like, this is how I know that we have arrived at, like, the bottom, the darkness, the end, because you have always, and I want people to really understand, like, you have always had faith and held on to know the rule of law will hold. The Department of Justice, which you know from the inside out, will be able to meet this moment, to hear the anger and the disappointment from somebody that has held this agency, this department, in such high regard for your entire career. Like, I want people to understand, like, people listen to my anger all day, every day.
You are somebody that has always believed that justice will prevail, that justice matters, like the title of your show says. And so, what does it mean now, though, Glenn, that here we are? What do you think that this means for the American people moving forward? How do we even call ourselves a lawful country?
How do we even manage to step forward in a way that makes sense when laws don't matter? They're not applied across the board. Yeah, they're applied to you and me and everybody else who is not, you know, rich, influential, connected, powerful, a member of the oligarch bro club. You know, it will still apply to everybody else.
Everybody will still be going to jail, just like they always have. But Trump, you know, gets to surround himself with billionaires and oligarchs and sex offenders and folks who are entirely incompetent to serve in government, could never even pass a security clearance or a background check. First of all, justice does matter. It will always matter.
The fact that it has failed doesn't mean it doesn't matter. In fact, I've had people screaming at me in all caps across all platforms because they're saying, you know, you said justice matters, but it doesn't. It obviously doesn't. And I would say to them, you know, your anger at the injustice that we're living through proves the point that it does matter.
That's why you're so angry at the injustice that we see all around us. So the next battle we get to fight, Danielle, is do we get to keep our republic? Do we get to keep our democracy or not? And I hate to say some of the people who will have the most direct opportunity to save our democracy are the Senate Republicans.
Why do I say that? Because they can still act as a check against Donald Trump's lawlessness and unconstitutionality. And here, this is another very dim point of light. They take money betting on the bravery of Senate Republicans.
But, you know, they have twice told Donald Trump no, right? Donald Trump wanted Rick Scott as Senate majority leader. Now, these senators went behind closed doors, so nobody knows who cast a vote for whom. And of the three candidates, Rick Scott came in dead last.
Well, even if anonymously, that was the Senate Republicans telling Donald Trump, yeah, no, we know that's who you want. We're going to put John Thune in. The second was a little bit more publicly because Donald Trump said, OK, I want Matt Gates as my attorney general. The Senate Republicans said, no, he ain't getting through.
So we might as well withdraw. That's the second time they said no. Here's what I'm hoping, Danielle, because the rule of law, unfortunately, is in hibernation. Now I'm going to say it's dead.
It's in hibernation for the next four years, as evidenced by today's motions to dismiss. I am hoping that the Senate Republicans don't have the appetite for dictatorship that Donald Trump has. Donald Trump loves him, the monocrats and strongmen and, you know, dictators like Kim Jong-un and Putin. He loves it.
He wants to be a member of that club so desperately. But I think what he wants even more is to enrich himself. And I actually think if Donald Trump was told you could make more money drifting off American democracy than you could make by converting America into a dictatorship, Donald Trump would say, I'm all in for democracy if it means that's the way I can best enrich myself. But I don't think the Republican senators who were cowards, I mean, they were, you know, they were incredible cowards because they wouldn't break from Donald Trump because they didn't want to alienate his base.
They wanted to get elected or reelected. Well, now they're all comfortably elected for the next two or four or six years. Now, you know, at least they've stood up a couple of times to Trump. And I'm hoping they don't have an appetite for dictatorship.
I mean, for God's sakes, folks, you got all of the levers of power. You got the White House, the House, and the Senate. Just go ahead and pass a shit ton of conservative legislation. Just go ahead and victimize everybody who's not wealthy the way we know you love to do.
Take advantage of it. But in the first two years of the first Trump term, when he had the House and the Senate, they accomplished nothing, nothing. They didn't build the wall in Mexico, didn't pay for it. They couldn't even repeal and replace Obamacare.
No infrastructure. The only thing they did was give tax breaks to billionaires. They're going to do it again. I hope that the dysfunction and the infighting and the lack of appetite for dictatorship that Donald Trump has, the lack of that appetite among the rank and file Republicans, I'm hoping, will act as something of a bulwark.
Yes, there are instances in which the Senate Republicans, a handful of them, have made the decision that, you know, I guess a man that is alleged to have underage sex and pay for it is a bridge too far. I like to remind people that Matt Gaetz wasn't on a path to confirmation, not because he has a history of sexual assault or violence or anything that they care about. It's that he's not liked at all. Do you foresee, though, Donald Trump throwing these senators a bone in a way that says, look, I got your back.
I'll protect you. Oh, your constituents will be fine. Your state will be okay. But just go along with this.
Like, because again, autocrats rise to power, not because they roll through the streets with tanks, but because they're duly elected, because they're duly elected and the power is readily given to them. And so, you know, there are millions of Americans that found value. They were not all duped by Donald Trump. They found an alliance with Donald Trump.
They found a messenger in Donald Trump. They found a future that they want in Donald Trump. So is there something that remains, you think, appealing to these senators to persist with the rule of law when Donald Trump could offer them, you know, I don't know, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that they could say, yeah, okay, I'm good. You know, I don't know, but you're right.
Most autocrats and dictators get elected first. And as you say, they don't roll through the streets with tanks, but you know, Donald Trump will roll through a cowardly Congress. And that is how he will consolidate power. Here's my hope.
I don't have any hope that the patriotism that may be somewhere lying dormant in some of these Republican senators will surface, make a showing and help save the day from the aspiring dictator that Donald Trump is. But here's what I do believe with these senators. They love and covet their own power and position and prestige that I'm confident of. They want the power.
They think they're the biggest, baddest boys on the block. And if they continue to give it all over to Donald Trump as dictator, eventually he will turn on them and he will take their power. He will ignore their power. He will emasculate them.
And I don't think they want that because they want their power. Maybe they're like, look, we're not going to roll over for you because if we do, then we won't have any power left to exert. We won't get to flex anymore. You know, maybe that will motivate them.
I don't know. But am I filled with optimism? No, hell no. Hell no.
Well, we will leave it there today, my friend, as we continue to reel through the emotion of what a Trump win, what this new power regime is going to bring in for all of us. But I can't thank you enough for the work that you've done over these several years, the voice that you have given to justice, you know, the education that you've provided to people. And we will see what comes next. But I appreciate you.
You are a justice and decency and fairness and equity and equality warrior. You are. And that's why I so love your voice and value that we've been doing this for years together only to find ourselves in this place. But I can't speak for you, but I probably can speak for you.
We're not going to lie down. We're not going to lie down. We're going to keep at it. We're going to keep punching until we can't punch no more.
100%. Thank you, my friend. Jeff Charlotte teaches writing at Dartmouth College, has won multiple awards for his own writing, and is the author of seven books. His most recent, The Undertow, Seen from a Slow Civil War, was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award in the nonfiction category.
He is one of my absolute favorite guests, and he joins me now. Jeff, thanks so much for being here. Hi, Andy. Good to be with you.
So there's so many things I want to talk to you about, but I want to start with some stuff that has just sort of come to the fore in the last little bit. Leonard Leo, who was the head of the Federalist Society, ProPublica, unearthed something that he had said a while ago, and he was talking about culture in America, and he said, I want to crush liberal dominance. This was months ago, but NPR did an interview with him more recently, and they sort of talked about what he said there, and they asked him, and he said, I want to make sure there's a level playing field for the American people to make choices about the lives that they want to have in their country. And he sort of went on from there.
But you posted something really interesting on Blue Sky, and you said, naturally, the word used by Leonard Leo that's echoing his crush, as in his plans for ideas other than his own. But you thought there was other stuff that he said in the NPR interview that really stood out to you. Yeah, well, there was two elements, and they're probably because they were sort of kind of steamy and creepy. He said, you know, we want to, in Hollywood, they're building this sort of network like the Federalist Society to promote right-wing, I want to say conservative, because those networks have been there for a long time, but right-wing fascist thinkers in Hollywood.
You know, he says his project in life is cultivating talent, and we may disagree about talent, but he's right. He's people who are good at doing the things he wants to do. But the term he puts is, I'm looking for people with a knack for art. And there's no serious writer, artist, filmmaker.
It's like, I don't know. I just kind of got a knack for it. And it seems kind of trivial and funny and glib, but it's also revealing of, and look, I mean, I went to the National Media Prayer Breakfast, oh my God, I think 20 years ago, which was a right-wing network in Hollywood. It speaks to the idea of the function of art, which is, you can have a knack for propaganda, which is to say, the story that works, that clicks, that moves people where you want them to move, right?
And then the other word that he used that I thought deserved a little bit of attention, just partly because it's creepy, was he wants these people, he wants to inject this into Hollywood, right? And you can kind of think of the mad scientist. You can also, I guess, think of, you know, RFK's vaccine conspiracy theories, but the idea of injection, which again is a term with a history in the religious right. You can find in the early 70s, religious right figures talking about injecting their ideas into the culture.
And again, it just seems gross, but think a little bit more deeply about it. They're not talking about like, oh, okay, so over here, you're making this kind of movie or this kind of book with this kind of political ideas. We're going to come and we're going to discuss and things are going to kind of grow. They're going to say, there's a body.
And instead of engaging with that body, we're going to inject something into it that we hope will be... and will then take over and they've got enough examples so those are the two terms that jumped out to me and put that in combination with leo who is what he does he is the talent yeah for sure and it's interesting because i saw again on blue sky people responding to you and they were like well the right can never take over culture and you were like i don't know how old those people were but you and i i think are both old enough to remember the 80s and you were pointing out that during the reagan years you had things like red dawn and rambo and stuff like that there are certainly elements of the right that are very good at getting into the culture yes yeah they always have and i mean look this idea of art as somehow intrinsically immune to right-wing views or fascism is a reassurance narrative and that's putting it politely it is time for the liberals and the left to stop fucking flattering themselves to think that they own these ideas and that artists are somehow good that art has something inherent in it that is redemptive these are by the way conservative ideas if you were saying about art is inherently anything well now you've just constricted it right but it's also to be in denial of not just the 80s i mean the 80s are really yeah we're of the age i remember red dawn which i watched many many times um uh we can and there's any amount of scholarship about the way that conservative ideas started moving into other movies movies aren't necessarily as remembered as much um but yes you can it doesn't just mean that you have you know some steve bannon making a filmmaker it means someone just making a movie that kind of hands toward this way that's an old old project by the way the congress for cultural freedom in the 1950s was paying for artists like jackson cia money this sounds conspiratorial it's not controversial the cia came up with this idea to fund artists like jackson pollock they wanted abstract artists to be a kind of soft power confrontation with socialist realism in the soviet union so the idea and of course look the wpa fdr's administration giving us walker evans and margaret perke white and all those great photographers i mean the idea of art as somehow being immune from any kind of political influence is a kind of weird flip mirror image of the art that leah wants which is as he says ostensibly not political by which he means he doesn't want left political art so we don't have time to go through this again we just went through it with the last campaign with harris trotting out celebrity after celebrity after celebrity look i like bruce springsteen but the idea that working class americans are going to say oh yeah that mega millionaire who lives on a horse farm in new jersey what he says harris is good then she must be good it's the imagination that we own art and we don't it's struggle and we can show up for the struggle like leo is or we can see the ground yeah and look i'm a huge bruce springsteen fan but the idea that a man of his aid and like you say his wealth and the fact that also his cultural moment has passed i'm still a huge fan of this is not a knock on him but his cultural moment has passed and as you point out i think you also mentioned this on blue sky like joe rogan has a lot more cultural relevance than bruce springsteen does right now ufc has a lot more cultural relevance than bruce springsteen does right now and these are the kinds of things that i think people and you're saying this that liberals and people on the left are overlooking yeah i mean like they say oh pop culture can't go right pop culture has gone right and i think you know who has good insights on these are the never trumpers who were you know they were republicans but they weren't the rush limbaugh right wingers and they didn't really like rush limbaugh but they were sort of looking at the sort of long before many leftists and liberals were paying attention to their saying look the republican party was already transforming 25 years ago as as the rush limbaugh's and right wing radio moved it further and further right you know the old overton window idea i guess which is kind of a flattened cliche but such that if you grow up with rush limbaugh as normal then you can absorb andrew tate an outright violent misogynist under investigation for kidnapping and sex slavery and all this kind of stuff you can say well i want you know a little more transgressive he's not that far that project joe rogan didn't come out of nowhere the ufc didn't come out of nowhere this project happens i look at for instance the other day right there's the big netflix fight jake paul and mike tyson which was a huge huge event i'm not going to say that there's anything intrinsically right wing in that event it is coming out of right wing culture and lots and lots of people who would not think of themselves as absorbing right wing culture you know my child's high school classmates very very liberal school they all watched it right that's how right wing culture works it's not the culture that comes and declare itself it's not gonna be like handmaid's tale it's transgressive this is leo what they're doing it's the idea of i was a kid watching red dawn and you know wolverines the battle cry of the good guys patrick swayze patrick swayze man patrick swayze good working guy uh you know you want to watch the movie star power right and i think we get distracted by the grotesque of kid rock and ted nugent and it obscures for us the ways in which other forms of culture are moving right you know some person somebody responded to me i thought this was worth thinking about um although it could be considered knee-jerk leftism this is also the prospect of all these hollywood stars endorsing a democrat who is was running whatever whatever she is ran a center-right campaign and i'm not challenging that that's the shift too right that's the window i think this is gonna be happening we started by talking about npr's interview with leo and the interview itself is worth considering about not that i think npr needs to be just saying leo you're a liar they just need to ask questions and they didn't i think the term platforming can be abused i talked to right witness i'm not platforming them but what i heard npr with leo was so what are you gonna try and do well you're very good at doing so that might work there was no bringing let's say well here's what you actually have done here's how the money has flowed answer for this yeah you know i was gonna move to something else next but that brings me to something i wanted to get into later and i think that i'm gonna jump to that because it's a lot it's exactly i think what you're saying now you talked about one of the things you've been doing on your sub stack scenes from a slow civil war you've been writing about pete hegseth and you actually read his book the war on warriors behind the betrayal of the men who keep us free and first of all god bless you for waiting your way through that because i don't think i could do it but it's important and i'm glad that you did the point i want to get to now is something that you wrote about the failure of journalists to cover hegseth accurately and you wrote i don't think any of these journalists some of whom at least are otherwise strong reporters is secretly rooting for fascism it's important to distinguish between advocacy acquiescence and simple abdication under cover of cabinet selection as court intrigue and you went on to say you said many can't won't see fascist rhetoric as such because they believe or fear that doing so is unsophisticated they know that guys like hegseth are grifters that in the green room nobody's a nazi sure he's intense but it's mostly just theater and i apologize for reading such a long quote but i thought that was so important and i think it's along the lines of what you were just saying that there's this absolute failure to cover people like pete hegseth and leonard leo in the way that they need to be covered yeah it really is and it keeps going and it takes the form oftentimes of in fact we're being super tough right we're being super tough on matt gates because we're so focusing on the alleged sex crime so tough in fact that i'm sure some listeners will get angry at me for saying alleged but that's actually journalism right i'm not saying he didn't do it i'm not saying he did this is alleged right sure same with hegseth right here's where i want to be really careful because hegseth committed a violent crime but here's the difference hegseth says i didn't rape anybody i am against rape okay he's taking this bold stand of being against rape but what hegseth also says to get much less attention is i am for torturing and killing prisoners he says this right he went this is how he rose to fame is by calling for pardons most famously for three war criminals most famously for eddie gallagher who according to the testimony of his own man stabbed to death a teenage prisoner who was receiving medical care and just decided i'm gonna kill this guy shot a girl because he could right there you don't have to do the report you know reporting god forbid we actually go out and man writes a book about what he's gonna do if he's in charge of the pentagon god forbid we read it we've already got that right there on news clips on records instead we're talking about sex scandals rape is not a scandal it's a crime but it's being covered as a scandal will he get through or will that be too much not even dealing with the fact that the reality is the man was not convicted of a crime i'm not saying he's not innocent but we don't want to go down the road where we're saying that's court politics that's court intrigue it's a scandal because you don't have evidence right now you can go get that evidence and you should but you should also be getting evidence of what he's talking about using military force in the united states we can put this together we can go with mark esper the former secretary of defense who said yes i had to block trump from using military forces in the united states trump saying i'm going to use military forces in the united states and then this not really being well covered or in depth except writing a book saying the number one thing to do is to invade cities that i view new york san francisco seattle he says i view them as indigenous territory he means indigenous is a bad thing it's like he thinks he's in a western he means like indian country he says i view these cities as like samara he says in my previous books i've talked for a political project i'm no longer talking about politics this isn't a metaphor we are in a real war situation he said it's been a cold civil war so far but now we need to step up that's a fucking story and i hope the alleged sex crimes would seem very plausible to me bring him down but it terrifies me that no one in the media thinks it's legitimate to say it's appropriate to have an anti-democratic fascist person openly fascist except he's an old school fascist you know in charge military we talk about the tattoos the tattoos are revealing right the way i'm making the story but keep going i haven't even gotten into the crazy theology in that book which is i keep meaning to write about that for the subsect that's coming soon but suffice it to say whatever you think about the religious right in american politics i've been on that beat for many many many years and written historically nobody nobody with the religious views of hexad has ever gotten anywhere near power he is of a next order mike huckabee is ned flanders compared to this guy man it's so scary you and i were talking before we started recording about religious nationalism so i want to say to that real quickly and i'll start with again something you wrote on blue sky you wrote secular folk didn't pay attention to consolidation in america of traditionally antagonistic protestant and catholic rights and then international alliance with international orthodox right movements bipoc evangelicals hindu nationalists and even buddhist nationalists ultra nationalism being the common denominator and i think that's so important because you don't want to let them get away with saying we don't want a christian nation we are we're big fans of modi in india and your point is that more attention has to be paid and people like you have been saying this for a long time that all these right-wing religious nationalist groups are finding common ground and they may not exactly be 100 allies but they're working toward a common goal yeah and i should add that of course jewish nationalists too yes you know there was a group in the aughts i think it was called the international congress of families probably still exists catherine joyce wrote about it m guessin wrote about it and that's exactly what they were doing they were meeting in countries like poland very catholic country and they would bring together evangelicals there would be jews there would be russian orthodox there would be muslims probably some hindus then that's a little bit of a later development in terms of that alliance and they understood like we are fighting a big war and we're all on the same side another way of putting of it is gender nationalism they all had ideas about women's bodies and they all had ideas about queerness so all those things coming together and i think trump has now just put together the most hindu administration in american history and senior roles and liberals don't know about it and don't care and don't realize there's a whole lot of other people saying you know i just don't buy that he is this bigot because look at what he's doing and it's not enough to say they're fools we need to say look there is a new formation a new world political theological formation that is a global movement that's just taking and taking and taking power while we assure ourselves that the old norms hold they don't let's step up and engage with things as they are not as we wish they used to be yeah it's so fascinating i wish we had more time to get into this because i really do think it's so important and as i was saying to you before the recording there's a reason that i've been having a lot of guests on who have written books or just write in general about religious nationalism and right-wing religion i just don't think it can be underestimated how crucial understanding that is to understanding where we are now as a nation jeff thank you so much you're one of my favorite guests and just to reassure you nothing about today has changed that hopefully you'll continue to come on because i absolutely love talking to you thanks so much thank you appreciate it andy leaving how are you starting off this week with your fuck that guy well i think on our last show we talked about matt h dropping out of the running to be attorney general and we were saying you know that's great he should not be attorney general and then we were hoping that the person that was picked to replace him wouldn't be even worse and i don't know that we got that but we got someone who no surprise at all also sucks and that is pam bondy who was a one-time florida attorney general and she has been a favorite of donald trump for a while she is trump's pick to replace matt gates and she's not good she's had some legal trouble of her own in fact in that trump university case she has denied claims but the claims were made that she did not take legal action against trump university because donald trump gave her a $25,000 donation so this is the kind of person we're dealing with she said a really really dumb thing about palestinian protests on campus that we saw a lot of earlier this year she said frankly they need to be taken out of our country or the fbi needs to be interviewing them right away and of course she was trying to make the claim that the palestinian protesters were quote unquote pro hamas which we all know is i'm not saying it wasn't the case for some of the protesters it certainly was not the case for all of the protesters a decent number of whom were uh actually jewish so to be talking about throwing protesters out of the country doesn't really give me uh warm and fuzzy about her being the attorney general and she tried to undo obamacare when she was a florida's attorney general she opposes same-sex marriage etc etc she is generally an awful awful human being and if she's not as bad as matt gates that's only because he set the bar i guess really high or really low depending on how you want to look at it but she's awful enough in and of herself so uh so she gets my my fuck that guy for today yeah nothing says democracy like uh wanting to throw out people in the country that have the right to assemble yeah uh given to us by the constitution of these united states but what do i know i think that that is just going to be a long piece of toilet paper in this new regime yep so fuck that guy all right daniel close us out on this it's a holiday week i keep forgetting that i don't know how you would forget andy because it feels so fucking cheery i know so close us out on this holiday week who's your fuck that guy it's going to be donald trump surprise and you could say you know what merely the reason which one are you gonna pick and i'm going to pick this donald trump is expected to sign an executive order as soon as potentially january 20th to remove 15 000 trans service members from our military because nothing says that you care about the safety and well-being of our country and our military by removing 15 000 people for no other reason than you don't like them and what i continue to say about this bullshit jim crow 2.0 crusade that is being waged by nancy mace by mike johnson by donald trump against transgender people is that all you have to do is remove the name trans and put in black remove trans and put in muslim remove trans and put in jewish and you get the picture of what is being done this is what segregation looks like is what segregation has always looked like the tactics remain the same but the targets change over time and so this move is going to do nothing more than weaken our military it's going to do nothing more than have people want to leave the military because what donald trump and god forsake hegseth if he gets in because you know this is a party of sexual assault so what difference does it make if he was not charged or charged it wouldn't matter because this party will celebrate him regardless is that our military is going to be in a host of trouble which means that our country is going to be in a lot of trouble because i mean if you're one of our enemies right now and you're looking at what is unfolding in america seems like the pickings are very ripe right now for donald trump and for this party that cares little about our safety and as a matter of fact is more hell-bent on turning the military of these united states on its own people as opposed to our enemies abroad i say fuck that guy to donald trump to pete headstaff to the entirety of the maga movement that sees our military as a game uh to be played rather than a really important agency that should have serious people at the top so fuck those guys yes to everything you said and i will add on top of that the notion that a guy who did everything in his power to avoid military service is now going to kick out people who volunteered to serve in our military because he doesn't like something about them is so gross i'd like to say it's inconceivable except that i'm running out of times when i can actually use that word because all of this shit has become unfortunately easy to conceive all the stuff he does but it is wild to me that we have gotten to a point where a guy who did everything in his power and used his privilege and everything to avoid serving in the military thinks he is fit to kick out 15 000 people or however many it is who walked into a recruiter's office and signed up and it's just so awful and i just fuck that guy hope you enjoyed checking out this episode of the new abnormal we're back every tuesday friday and sunday if you enjoyed it please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going this podcast is a daily piece production with production by jesse cannon and shamus calder want more great listens check out our comedy podcast the last laugh and our star started the daily beast podcast at the daily beast.com slash podcast if you enjoyed this episode consider becoming a daily beast subscriber subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline head to the daily beast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today