What a Weekday: Ba Da Ba Ba Ba I'm Losin' It!

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Speaker 1 Learn more at kia.com/slash fortage dash hybrid. Kia movement that inspires.

Speaker 2 I need there needs to be you need to have like a warning system with friends to be like, hey, am I being, am I turning myself into a clown? Can someone tell me?

Speaker 3 I think the answer is just having real friends.

Speaker 4 So who would say that to you?

Speaker 2 Yeah. I just say that as someone who's like, I'm not even,

Speaker 2 I could absolutely see myself going down that path. Like I could become one of those clown people.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we know. I know you know.
Do you want to do you want us to tell you if we start deciding?

Speaker 2 Okay. I always want to be told.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, you're still good.

Speaker 5 You need a stronger fear of noodles.

Speaker 2 I will do whatever

Speaker 2 works.

Speaker 2 And even some things that don't work.

Speaker 3 To flee from your own mortality.

Speaker 3 To avoid aging.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 She was saying, like, when you're dating someone, your check should be, is this a person who could help me through the death of my mother?

Speaker 4 I think that's totally reasonable.

Speaker 2 Well, you just don't think that way on a first date. Yeah.
Or a third date. But, like, you should.

Speaker 9 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 We're back with Kendra, Hallie, and Sarah. This week, we also have an interview with historian Eric Larson about his book, The Demon of Unrest, about the lead up to the Civil War.

Speaker 2 For some reason, I felt it was timely.

Speaker 2 I love this book. I found it to be a fascinating period of time to think about, which is the time basically between Lincoln being elected and inaugurated and the march towards the Civil War, and

Speaker 2 what it is like to think about the perspective of the people that were making that Civil War a reality, even though they did not believe and could not predict how bloody and terrible it would turn out to be.

Speaker 2 And Kendra and I were here. We were into it.

Speaker 5 I loved it.

Speaker 11 I started reading the book this weekend, and it's funny because you say period of time. What you did not explain is that it literally goes day by day

Speaker 11 across multiple locations, which I'm fine with, but you said during the interview that like you stopped reading Grant's memoirs because you hated the troop movements.

Speaker 11 And he does, which I, again, I love this stuff. Eric Larson does describe like full-on troop movements from Moultrie to Sumter,

Speaker 11 back to the mainland.

Speaker 2 But it's really,

Speaker 2 it's much more like a narrative.

Speaker 2 The Grant memoir, it is a mechanical description of various aspects of the war planning.

Speaker 2 A topic for another day. We've got too much to talk about.
Let's get into it. What a weekday.

Speaker 2 On Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned with former Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Speaker 12 I certainly have many Republicans who will say to me, I can't be public. They do worry about a whole range of things, including violence, but they'll do the right thing.

Speaker 12 And I would just remind people: if you're at all concerned,

Speaker 12 you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody. And there will be millions of Republicans who do that on November 5th, vote by President Harris.

Speaker 2 Imagine doing something and not telling everyone about it immediately.

Speaker 9 Couldn't be me.

Speaker 2 Republicans can be moral, but only under the cover of night, like waiting till the cashier turns their back to put money in the tip jar. Makes no sense.

Speaker 2 The whole point is to do it when they can see it. That's what it's about.
It's about the credit.

Speaker 2 You put the money in and you make a long, sustained icon.

Speaker 9 Big smile.

Speaker 16 That's for you.

Speaker 5 You must be a delight to deal with.

Speaker 2 I am a delight to deal with.

Speaker 2 I'm a delight, added Cheney.

Speaker 17 Like if you wouldn't, if you wouldn't hire somebody to babysit your kids, like you shouldn't make that guy the president of the United States.

Speaker 9 I mean, that's like

Speaker 9 pretty good.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that rules out most presidents we've had.

Speaker 2 You think Rutherford B. Hayes knew how to change a diaper? Going forward, though, good rule.
And also, by the way, even babysitting is an unnecessarily high bar for Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 Would you trust Donald Trump not to give your child a peanut butter cookie when you went to the bathroom, even though he has a peanut allergy, was the only piece of information you conveyed to him?

Speaker 2 Would you trust him not to think she's just being crazy and kids love peanut butter?

Speaker 2 Now you're using the EpiPen.

Speaker 2 You never use the EpiPen.

Speaker 2 But Donald Trump gave your kid a peanut butter cookie.

Speaker 5 I guess it was likelier that he would just eat the peanut butter cookie.

Speaker 6 Right. He's not giving it away.

Speaker 5 But then he like wipes his hands on the kid.

Speaker 4 Like you use your kid as a napkin and then

Speaker 2 it's high as a clock.

Speaker 2 Also in Michigan, Maria Shriver had this question for Harris.

Speaker 14 You know, everybody I talk to says, you know, I have to turn off the news. I can't read anything.
I'm meditating. I'm doing yoga.
I'm doing, I'm so anxious. I just don't even know.

Speaker 14 I'm eating gummies, all kinds of things, you know.

Speaker 15 What are you doing? What are you doing?

Speaker 4 Not eating gummies.

Speaker 9 Cop.

Speaker 18 I was going to say that sounded like she's eating gummies.

Speaker 11 Yeah, yeah, I thought that's what she said.

Speaker 2 And then Maria Shriver was arrested backstage.

Speaker 2 Can I just...

Speaker 2 It was all fine. That was the most,

Speaker 2 I'm talking to rich friends in New York and LA question I've ever heard. Oh, you're meditating and doing yoga? That's some, that was, that was rich person shit.

Speaker 11 Yeah, the rest of us are going to work.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, some people are doing yoga.

Speaker 2 But, like, are we in Michigan here?

Speaker 9 We're in Royal, we're in Royal Oak, Michigan.

Speaker 2 Are we meditating and doing yoga? Are the undecided we need doing? Are they meditating and doing yoga?

Speaker 18 Michigan, Wayne in the comments. We're going to work.

Speaker 9 We're not in Michigan.

Speaker 5 No, we're going to work. We're coming home.
We're smoking a joint and then we're watching Real Housewives. I think that is what we're doing.

Speaker 9 That's what you're specifically doing.

Speaker 3 But I do think, like, this, this straddles the line. I think it's like how to be relatable and also like how to be aspirational to women.

Speaker 3 Where I think there is something where it's like, okay, well, there, Maria Shriver is also having to medicate herself through this.

Speaker 3 i understand that part yeah like i think there is that element to it yeah wearing a sneaker very relatable

Speaker 2 it's a cool outfit i love it oh no i like it yeah i like that the they like it's a good i like this look i like this group i like the

Speaker 2 exactly six people sitting

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, in a low-energy interview with Dan Bongino on Friday, Trump offered this fresh take on serial rapist Harvey Weinstein.

Speaker 19 I was so amazed that Harvey Weinstein got schlanged. He got hit as hard as you can get hit because he was sort of the king of the walk, right?

Speaker 19 And yet he got hit.

Speaker 2 Fuck, said Kamala Harris, lowering her head in her hands. That was my closing message.

Speaker 2 Interesting moment there of a man in decline. He didn't plan to say schlong.

Speaker 9 No, you could see it.

Speaker 3 You could see it has.

Speaker 18 He searches for the perfect word, and that perfect word is schlonged.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I think it's more that he couldn't.

Speaker 2 I think that, like, we are watching Donald donald trump decline he said schlonged i think he couldn't find a better word yeah no he his brain said i got it don't you worry sir schlonged

Speaker 9 uh

Speaker 2 we got to beat this guy we're in for four schlong years

Speaker 2 interesting interestingly the last time you heard the word schlonged was in 2015 when donald trump said hillary clinton got schlonged by obama in the 2008 primary He then posted this tweet for the ages.

Speaker 2 When I said that Hillary Clinton got schlonged by Obama, it meant got beaten badly. The media knows this, often used word in politics.

Speaker 2 I wanted to talk about this because this is a reminder that when Trump first ran in 2015,

Speaker 2 he felt like he had to explain himself a tiny bit. Like he felt like when he said this, he needed to say, no, no, no, I just meant beaten badly.

Speaker 2 Don't worry, I wasn't saying something more vulgar than that.

Speaker 2 No longer is he bound by whatever

Speaker 2 sense of restriction he felt in this moment. That's gone.

Speaker 2 We're thinking about.

Speaker 3 This and the 14 other tweets from this specific day are captured at UC Santa Barbara's American Presidency Project. Because it's like, oh, right.

Speaker 3 They just are capturing documentation from every account, like a presidential election. And that's it.

Speaker 11 That's what we got.

Speaker 2 It's funny. We're talking about Ulysses S.
Grant's memoirs in which he writes like movingly about

Speaker 2 standing up to a Confederate and saying

Speaker 2 the importance of standing up for the American flag and that that will sit side by side with

Speaker 2 by schlanged,

Speaker 2 I of course meant.

Speaker 2 On Saturday, Trump was speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania when he rambled for 12 minutes. 12 minutes about the late Arnold Palmer eventually getting lost in a reverie about Palmer's genitalia.

Speaker 21 But Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women.
But this guy,

Speaker 21 this guy,

Speaker 21 this is a guy that was all man.

Speaker 21 This man was strong and tough.

Speaker 21 And I refuse to say it, but when

Speaker 21 he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, oh my God,

Speaker 21 that's unbelievable.

Speaker 21 I had to say it.

Speaker 2 Thank you, Mr. Trump.
The question was about abortion.

Speaker 2 What's annoying about all of this is now when I ask for an almond Palmer, some jokes are going to bring me iced tea and lemonade.

Speaker 11 One of my qualifications for dating, not someone who helped me through a the passing of a relative,

Speaker 11 but was specifically I wanted to be with a man who would never bring up golf or anything related to golf in a conversation. And I really think

Speaker 11 this is why.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 11 Golf is bad.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, the problem is golf, you know, a case of golf, you can come down with it later in life. You know, it's something that

Speaker 2 you can become golf with age.

Speaker 2 You may not be golf in your 20s, but you can become golf with golf in your 30s or 40s.

Speaker 11 I think it's actually hard to come down with golf with age because, no, it hurts the back. When you get back into it,

Speaker 5 it hurts.

Speaker 11 Have you taken a golf swing lately?

Speaker 3 Let me guess. No.

Speaker 3 It was polite of you to even ask that question.

Speaker 9 No, I haven't.

Speaker 9 No. Have you been to a top golf?

Speaker 2 I haven't been to a top golf. I don't hate golf.

Speaker 2 You know, Travis and I would golf. That's right.
During the pandemic, too, we would go golf. How about that? I mean, like three times.

Speaker 11 I just lost like three points of

Speaker 8 three hits for you.

Speaker 9 Oh, really?

Speaker 9 Are there hits left?

Speaker 2 How many?

Speaker 9 Yeah, negative hits.

Speaker 2 Are we at the bottom of the.

Speaker 2 Arnold Palmer had a huge hog, huh? Well, that's all I needed to hear, said an undecided voter in Pennsylvania. And the hits from Trump kept coming.

Speaker 2 On Sunday, Trump visited a McDonald's in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, which had been closed for the photo op, as he pretended to work at the fry station and pushed his basis claim that Kamala Harris didn't actually work at McDonald's in college.

Speaker 2 The best part is when Trump took a good long stare at the fry oil and said, This is what will inevitably kill me.

Speaker 2 Trump spent about five minutes making fries, Sans hairnut, and then he said this.

Speaker 7 Never touches the human hand.

Speaker 15 There we go, nice and full.

Speaker 2 Never touches the human hand, nice and full.

Speaker 2 Said a McDonald's employee, I've never heard it described that way, but sure.

Speaker 2 Did Trump think they just plunge their hands into the scalding fry bin and scoop them out with burning fingers? Is this guy a fucking gorilla with the command suit?

Speaker 2 I hate how much this made me want McDonald's, by the way. That's the ultimate testament to McDonald's fries.
They could be subjected to this and come out unscathed.

Speaker 2 I went to McDonald's because of this, of this story yesterday.

Speaker 2 And even though I am currently on a miracle weight loss drug, I still managed to get down a McDouble, a hot and spicy McChicken, and a 10-piece nugget meal.

Speaker 5 I had my normal order on Sunday when I was coming back from Target because this was all.

Speaker 9 You guys.

Speaker 16 Looking at this right now, it's 10 a.m.

Speaker 18 I want fries so bad.

Speaker 9 Come on.

Speaker 9 Control yourself.

Speaker 5 The only thing I ever ordered in McDonald's.

Speaker 2 It's going to be something crazy.

Speaker 9 No, it's not.

Speaker 4 Don't reward them.

Speaker 11 No, I got a large fry and a large sprite.

Speaker 9 That's the

Speaker 9 sound. That sounds perfect.

Speaker 2 Well, that's great. You just don't get it.
You don't get a sandwich?

Speaker 11 I haven't eaten McDonald's meat.

Speaker 9 I'm fish fillet all the way to high school.

Speaker 2 I know you're fish fillet.

Speaker 9 I know you're fish fillet.

Speaker 2 I remember when I would, because there was a time

Speaker 2 when I would go to McDonald's more frequently, and I just, I knew that if I got you a fish filet, you'd be pleased.

Speaker 3 Keep think of me next time we go.

Speaker 2 Anyway, no prison can hold my appetite once the idea of McDonald's is introduced.

Speaker 2 Trump spent 15 minutes at the drive-thru window handing pre-screened drivers bags of food that they hadn't ordered and dodging reporters' questions. Obviously, the drivers had to be pre-screened.

Speaker 2 Anyone who has worked at the drive-through can tell you about the full spectrum of humanity's flaws and mental illnesses that come before you at that window.

Speaker 2 A person's car is a portal into their secret lives, and your job is to reach out toward that portal time and time again.

Speaker 2 And then from the other side, imagine you're on your way to work. You pull into a drive-thru for a Shane Egg McMuffin that you plan to keep between you and God.

Speaker 2 You come around the corner to pick it up, and fucking Donald Trump pops out of the window. It's a waking nightmare.
You might disassociate.

Speaker 2 You might not trust that you aren't dreaming until you've fully alienated yourself from every person who loves you.

Speaker 2 Seeing Donald Trump in a McDonald's drive-through window could ruin your fucking life.

Speaker 2 Could you imagine? Could you imagine?

Speaker 2 Like, I was thinking about what it it would be like to have

Speaker 2 that physical form, that shape pop out of the drive-thru window to hand you a bag of food. I think I would scream at the top of my lungs.
Like, not even like in a self-aware way.

Speaker 2 I think I would just, like, like when

Speaker 2 that, when that studio head finds

Speaker 2 the horse in his bed. Like, that kind of, oh,

Speaker 9 like, that kind of car into a tree just to see if you were real.

Speaker 16 Would you do? You would crash your car into a tree just to see if you were real.

Speaker 2 Right, exactly. Like, this can't be happening.

Speaker 5 You can't eat that food.

Speaker 11 Like that's the other thing. Yeah, you don't know that you have to go to the next McDonald's because you know he wants to touch it with his human hand.
Yeah. Also he keeps bringing it up.

Speaker 11 And like I don't, I don't know what they do at McDonald's normally, but he's not wearing gloves.

Speaker 3 Well, he doesn't have a hair net. Yeah.
See how that shit's just falling in there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he doesn't have a hat on.

Speaker 11 I'm not eating it.

Speaker 3 I'd probably eat it, but I feel bad.

Speaker 5 I'd eat it.

Speaker 2 We hundred

Speaker 2 eighteen.

Speaker 9 We know.

Speaker 2 I can't get McDonald's again, right? No.

Speaker 5 No, there's definitely another McDonald's around the corner that you can get.

Speaker 9 You don't know what you're trying to do.

Speaker 2 No, we're not doing it. I don't want it.

Speaker 11 I had it yesterday. We have a first one here.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's not a good one. You have to drive to, I know where you have to go.

Speaker 9 You have to drive to.

Speaker 2 It's at La Brea in Santa Monica.

Speaker 2 It's best to come in.

Speaker 9 So that gets through a narnie wardrobe. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, you don't want to go through the...

Speaker 2 You have to make the, it's a tough left from La Brea, so it's best to either come around or to take Lexington to make the left to get into the McDonald's or go down Santa Monica, make the right and then the right.

Speaker 2 I would say, hypothetically, if I've got my.

Speaker 3 Sure, Grant's diary of your movement.

Speaker 2 Anyway, even though the drivers were pre-screened, things got dicey when one asked for an extra barbecue sauce and an abortion.

Speaker 2 Because you only get one sauce with the four-piece.

Speaker 9 People don't know that.

Speaker 2 Of course, the fun of the event couldn't help but make way for the snarling chaos and evil just beneath the apron, as Trump once again refused to say he'd accept the election results.

Speaker 17 Either way, will you accept the results of the election?

Speaker 19 Yeah, sure, if it's a fair election.

Speaker 2 Somehow, as usual, awfulness is even more offensive when spoken through a drive-through window.

Speaker 2 The drive-through window is a place of receiving what you ask for, of what you see is what you get, of the best America has to offer, a place of fairness, a place of truth.

Speaker 2 The reporter then took the opportunity to ask the hamburgler if we could trust him around all these juicy piping on Big Macs.

Speaker 2 Another question Trump refused to answer, a question about raising the minimum wage.

Speaker 19 Well, I think this. I think these people work hard.

Speaker 20 They're great.

Speaker 19 And I just saw something across this. It's beautiful.
It's a beautiful thing to see. These are great franchises and produce a lot of jobs.

Speaker 19 And great people working here, too.

Speaker 2 I'm dodging it.

Speaker 2 These are great franchises. He's there at the behest of the owner.

Speaker 2 Trump as president will break unions, oppose the minimum wage, eliminate the protections against out-of-pocket costs or Obamacare, and pass a national sales tax to pay for tax cuts for billionaires while exploiting working people in every way possible and turning the federal government into a favor factory for his rich friends.

Speaker 2 friends. But he did put on an apron.

Speaker 2 And he's wearing it. Will it work?

Speaker 2 It's a good picture for him.

Speaker 11 It's the one time the tie works and matches and it's because you can't see how low it's then hanging.

Speaker 2 Damn it. It just works.
It's a great picture for him.

Speaker 2 And, you know, the Trump people, their bet is that the picture

Speaker 2 will work because they think everyone's stupid.

Speaker 2 That's what they're counting on. It's like a sick and twisted joke.

Speaker 3 And you guys all ran out and went to McDonald's after you saw this?

Speaker 9 Nobody would like to do that.

Speaker 11 The pictures were everywhere, and I was sitting at home, and I knew I had to go to Target, and I knew that there was a McDonald's. It's the valley.
I don't have to go too far.

Speaker 11 There was just one everywhere.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 2 I didn't want to go to McDonald's because I saw Trump in a McDonald's apron.

Speaker 2 I wanted to go to McDonald's because I heard the word McDonald's, McDonald's, McDonald's, McDonald's, and fries, like fries specifically.

Speaker 9 We've got to get Tim Walls in there.

Speaker 3 We've got to get Common World.

Speaker 16 Talk about seeing him scoop the fries, just seeing that many fries.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a lot lot of fries. You see all the fries.
You think, my God,

Speaker 2 you think abundanzo.

Speaker 18 Just the abundance.

Speaker 11 If Tim Walls wants to go to like a five guys, I will go to five guys.

Speaker 9 Five guys.

Speaker 2 Five guys.

Speaker 9 I love five guys. That's the better burger.

Speaker 16 Give a nice grilled cheese. Oh.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, just on the bun.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 They do have a good grilled cheese. I don't like the fries that much there.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 11 Oh, I like how much they give you because you don't have to get a large. You can get a small.

Speaker 9 Yeah, they can get a little bit of a small.

Speaker 2 They throw fries in the bag.

Speaker 2 That's the bargain you make when you go to the Five Guys.

Speaker 8 But

Speaker 2 I'd rather have fewer fries of a fry I prefer. McDonald's.

Speaker 16 That's just un-American.

Speaker 9 I'm sorry.

Speaker 6 Shake Shack.

Speaker 2 I know what I'm saying is blasphemous.

Speaker 2 You don't like Shake Shack?

Speaker 11 Well, I've moved, so I was eating a lot of Shake Shack, and then I rediscovered Five Guys, and I genuinely think Five Guys makes a better

Speaker 9 product all around. Agree.
Really?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Not my position.
I respect Five Guys. I don't, it's just not my preference.

Speaker 2 You know why I think the problem is, and I think it's important that we really get into this 14 days before the election, is that for me, five guys sits in between McDonald's and Shake Shack. Really?

Speaker 2 Yes. And that, in that, I think of five guys as a little bit more of a

Speaker 2 it's more effort. And if I'm going to do the more effort version, I'd rather go up to Shake Shack.
And if I want to do less effort, I'd rather go down to McDonald's.

Speaker 11 I would put Shake Shack in the middle of McDonald's and five guys, because I feel like five guys is the more effort food.

Speaker 2 No, but

Speaker 2 five guys is, it's Shake Shack is what the Shake Shack's problem is the price.

Speaker 2 It's a price. Shake Shack is priced up.
And so you end up like Shake Shack is just, it's a little bit more premium.

Speaker 2 And I just, if I'm not going premium, I'm going to McDonald's or Taco Bell, to be honest. Or being honest, Taco Bell's good.

Speaker 9 You know how I feel about Taco Bell.

Speaker 3 I looked up and all five guys are voting for Jill Stein. So someone keep got a lot of people.

Speaker 2 Four out of five, five guys.

Speaker 2 Trump reflects it on his McDonald's stop on Monday.

Speaker 20 You know, you never know about life and you never know what's good, what's bad. You do something that's going to be great, it's okay.

Speaker 20 And you do something that's supposed to be okay. This was supposed to be a routine stop and it turned into a monster, but it was a beautiful monster.

Speaker 2 There was a lot of love.

Speaker 2 Hey, do you ever wonder what it sounds like when a declining maniac tries to wax poetic, but his vocabulary has dropped to about 300 words? That's what it sounds like.

Speaker 6 14 days.

Speaker 2 14 days, baby. I'm losing it.
Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-da. I'm losing it.

Speaker 6 Yeah, we could tell.

Speaker 2 I am losing it. McDonald said the company does not endorse candidates for elected office, and that remains true in this race for the next president.
We are not red or blue. We are golden.
Really?

Speaker 2 Then explain to us how Mayor McCheese has run unopposed 12 times in a row on a platform of sending Grimace back to where he came from, which is hell.

Speaker 18 Where was Grimace on January 6th?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Where was Mary McCheese on January 6th?

Speaker 2 He was there. Mary McCheese was at the Capitol.

Speaker 9 Is it a real character? Mary McChees? Yeah, of course he is.

Speaker 11 Oh, I genuinely didn't.

Speaker 2 What's the sheriff called? Sheriff Berger?

Speaker 6 No.

Speaker 9 Sheriff Berger?

Speaker 9 Mary Burger. There's a cop called.
God damn.

Speaker 2 Constable Chicken.

Speaker 9 There's a bird, right?

Speaker 5 There's a bird that's like a pilot or something.

Speaker 9 Really? Sheriff. Yeah,

Speaker 6 it's a female bird character.

Speaker 2 I've only heard of it. Is it Officer Big Mac?

Speaker 9 Okay.

Speaker 4 And is there an Earl Bird? Did I make that up?

Speaker 11 I think it's Bird Big. I can only think of Grimace and the burglar.

Speaker 3 There is a pantheon that they do.

Speaker 9 They kind of got rid of it. He's the burglar.

Speaker 6 He's the ham burglar.

Speaker 9 Okay. You never shorter to the burglar.

Speaker 2 Birdie, the early bird.

Speaker 3 Oh, okay, for breakfast, probably.

Speaker 2 Anyway, is Donald Trump a ridiculous clown? Is he a terrifying threat? He is, of course, both at once a balance that Barack Obama attempted to strike during a rally in Nevada over the weekend.

Speaker 2 Obama highlighted the mistake of dismissing Trump as unserious.

Speaker 2 When Donald Trump repeatedly lies or cheats or shows utter disregard for our Constitution or just insults people, people make excuses for it. They say, well,

Speaker 2 he's not serious.

Speaker 2 He's not, everything a president says is serious.

Speaker 2 Mass deportations of immigrants, punishing his enemies, Arnold Palmer's big honk, being shocked you don't touch scalding hot french fries with your bare hands because he never never thought about, let alone saw how his favorite food was delivered to him on a silver tray.

Speaker 2 He means every word. Obama also called out the inherent danger in Trump's recent looniness, describing his long word-souled speeches in the town hall where he swayed to music for 39 minutes.

Speaker 2 You would be worried if your grandpa started acting like this.

Speaker 2 You would.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 right?

Speaker 2 You'd like call up your brother, your cousin, or something, be like, have you seen grandpa lately?

Speaker 2 What are we going to do?

Speaker 2 But this is coming from somebody who wants unchecked power.

Speaker 2 Wants the most powerful office on earth

Speaker 19 with the nuclear codes and all that.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 the point is

Speaker 2 we do not need to see what an older, lunier, Donald Trump looks like with no guardrails. Especially around the bathtub.

Speaker 2 As voting began across the country, pundits and podcasters alike rushed to predict the significance of the early vote. Spoiler, we don't know.
Nobody knows.

Speaker 2 There will be no clear answer on who's winning this election until the election is over, and even then, probably not for a few days, every moment spent trying to decipher ambiguous scraps of data is a moment you could be spending pestering an exhausted mother of three in Lansing, Michigan via phone.

Speaker 2 And a bit of good news, Elon Musk's attempt to bump Trump's ground game in Arizona and Nevada might turn out to be a bust. Why? Because his canvassers were faking it.

Speaker 2 Or as Musk calls it, coming every time.

Speaker 2 I like that one.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 According to league data obtained by The Guardian, up to a quarter of doorknocks registered by Musk's America PAC in both states were reportedly fake, with canvassers allegedly lying about the number of houses they visited.

Speaker 2 Also, many of the canvassers appear to have been porn bots.

Speaker 8 Troubling.

Speaker 2 The PAC's internal system flagged 24% of Arizona doorknocks and 25% of Nevada doorknocks as unusual survey logs.

Speaker 2 In one example, a canvasser logged home visits while sitting at Guayo's on the Trail restaurant in Globe, Arizona, a half a mile away from the doors he was allegedly knocking.

Speaker 2 Bad look for democracy, but excellent look for Guayo's incredible happy hour deals. Bottomless chips and salsa for $5.99, I lie about canvassing voters in Arizona, too.

Speaker 2 Of course, canvassing for Trump is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Elon Musk's attempt to influence the 2024 presidential election.

Speaker 2 Last week, Musk announced that he would give away $1 million each day to registered voters in swing states states from now until the election.

Speaker 2 He's like a more sinister Willy Wonka, which is saying something because most of the kids who visited Willy Wonka's factory died horribly.

Speaker 2 To enter, voters have to sign Elon's petition pledging to support the First and Second Amendments. Some experts say Musk's offer may be illegal and constitutes election interference.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we can't have one billionaire illegally buying elections. It's not fair to the other billionaires and corporations trying to buy it legally.

Speaker 2 If I are in one of these swing states, I'd sure as shit sign that pledge. Many of of you listening are perhaps eligible.

Speaker 2 Consider taking that pledge might put you in a position to take a million dollars from the world's richest loser and get the funniest fucking story of your life.

Speaker 2 That'd be awesome. Wouldn't you sign it if you lived in Pennsylvania? I would.

Speaker 4 That's a good question.

Speaker 9 I don't know. I don't.

Speaker 11 I wouldn't want my name on that for posterity's sake.

Speaker 3 I would immediately donate it to like Plant Pennsylvania. Yeah, I feel like you have to immediately give it a shot.

Speaker 2 Donate it. And by the way, if you win a million dollars from Meal and Mucks, you could donate some of it and still feel pretty good about it.
How about this?

Speaker 2 Buy yourself a car as a down payment for a house and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a good cause. That's a great fucking day.

Speaker 16 It's easier than going on Survivor and losing immediately.

Speaker 9 Oh,

Speaker 9 wow.

Speaker 9 Just a.

Speaker 2 Didn't expect to

Speaker 2 just

Speaker 9 samuraize sword to race

Speaker 9 indeed.

Speaker 2 Just sitting here having a nice time. Next thing I know.

Speaker 9 Ow. That's my job.
Bless you forget.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Lest you forget.

Speaker 3 Got him.

Speaker 2 While Elon Musk might not like being in politics, he sure likes spending his money on it.

Speaker 2 According to The Guardian, Musk donated $75 million to his America PAC to support Trump in the last three months. He remains the PAC's only donor.

Speaker 2 Fortunately for our side, Kamala Harris has set a record for fundraising this fall, raising over $1 billion in the three months leading up to September 30th, while Trump has raised less than he did in 2020.

Speaker 2 Between targeting battleground states and focusing on canvassers, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are essentially running the evil version of the Democratic campaign if Kamala is Spider-Man Elon and Donald are like green goblin crazy rich villains while we're all out here just missing our uncle you know

Speaker 11 i think one of the other things that i took from demon of unrest that i didn't know anything about by the way look it's happening now kendra's talking about it i like it i know i know i want to hear what you have to say eric larson is a he's a good writer he makes history really accessible to the masses it's very important

Speaker 11 but there was one of the guy one of the main protagonists in the story, it's either Ruffin or Hammond. I think it's Ruffin.
He was also a scientist who, because he was a, remember, he studied soil.

Speaker 11 That was his big thing. He studied soil in order to like make crop yields larger.
But then, and he was also a very rich plantation owner.

Speaker 11 And then his side gig was being a rabid secessionist who went from state to state. That's rough.

Speaker 2 That's roughen. Yeah.

Speaker 11 And I'm just like, oh, he's, this is the same thing. A person who could just be doing science.

Speaker 6 Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 There's a moment.

Speaker 2 So in the book, there's this guy,

Speaker 2 Ruffin, Edmund Ruffin. Edmund Ruffin? Edmund Ruffin.
He's just a vile, egotistical

Speaker 2 narcissist who craves attention and praise for pushing success,

Speaker 2 craves attention and praise for pushing the Civil War to the point where he goes to the battlefield and like rides on a cannon and like they all the there's just clearly soldiers who have to like manage this old man who's famous who's come to kind of be part of the battle and he's 67 so he's like very old by 1861 standards but at one point he is sleeping nearby a cannon and a bunch of soldiers set the cannon off basically deafening him and it's very clear like they fucking hated this guy and and it's just funny to like it's like it yeah it's, there's a reason I thought it would be worth talking to Eric Larson because.

Speaker 9 I get it now. Oof.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, and again, we're not, we're not saying these things are the same. We're not saying these things are exactly the same or equivalent, but history, history,

Speaker 2 as Joe Biden would say, quoting Seamus Haney, it does rhyme.

Speaker 3 Right. I would say if it's almost like if we didn't learn from it, it will repeat itself.

Speaker 4 We're really dedicated to not learning from it.

Speaker 2 And even sometimes we learn from it and it repeats itself.

Speaker 2 You know? It's sort of like if you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it. But you're also doomed doomed to repeat it if you learn about it.

Speaker 16 There's only so much stuff that can happen.

Speaker 16 Eventually, it's got to start repeating.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like when we were trying to decide on what color should be the crooked color, and we were talking about what brands use which colors, and the person that was designing it got pretty annoyed with how circuitous the conversation had become and said, well, yeah, it's tough to choose, but there are only six colors.

Speaker 2 So instead of spending the next two weeks refreshing Twitter and panicking yourself and your group text, how about you volunteer? Knock on doors. Make calls.

Speaker 2 Get together with your fellow anxious Americans to make an actual difference. Do not sit home and just freak out.
Save that for election night.

Speaker 2 That's why Senator Brian Schnott said during our Pod Save America interview, if we do everything we're supposed to do, we will win. And if we do anything we're not supposed to do, we will not.

Speaker 2 Are we going to win? No one knows. I feel terrified.
Correct feeling. You don't get to feel okay these next two weeks.
And if you do, you're just lying to yourself.

Speaker 2 Because if Donald Trump wins, none of us are anxious enough. And if he loses, it will be because we were awake to the danger.
There are two weeks left.

Speaker 2 If you are listening to this, you can get to a swing state to knock on doors. You can make calls.
You can donate. And at Vote Save America, we are launching a new program.

Speaker 2 It is called Last Call because the messengers that will make the biggest difference are the ones people know and trust. So we need everyone listening.

Speaker 2 We need you to think of three people you know who live in a battleground state like Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, or Georgia, and make sure they vote.

Speaker 2 Scroll through your contacts, find those names, text or call them. Then do that a few more times before election day.
We are not kidding. The reminders work.

Speaker 2 And if you don't know anyone in those three states, you definitely know three people who could use a nudge to vote no matter where they live.

Speaker 2 If you don't know what to say in those texts, DMs, and calls, go to votesaveamerica.com/slash vote to see your voting checklist and click last call to get your script to convince three people you know to vote.

Speaker 2 That's votesaveamerica.com/slash vote. And if you do it, email us to tell us how it went with a voice memo and Crooked might play it on an upcoming pod.

Speaker 2 Everybody knows three people in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina. Text them.
They could be an old friend. They could be a college friend.

Speaker 2 They could be someone you slept with. They could be someone you didn't sleep with.

Speaker 2 They could be the love of your life.

Speaker 2 And the time he didn't work. But you think about them every day.
You think about them every single day.

Speaker 18 This is your in.

Speaker 2 This is it.

Speaker 6 Two birds, one stone.

Speaker 2 Speaking of having to do a whole song on dance, Cynthia Revo took the internet to task for a fan-made wicked poster, which obscured her character's eyes.

Speaker 2 A reference to the musical's original poster, as well as an infamous wicked meme that asked, is your pussy green?

Speaker 2 So here we have the movie poster as it was released.

Speaker 2 It's inspired by the original cartoon version for the Broadway show, but they have Ariana a little more visible and they have Cynthia Revo a little more visible. You can see your eyes.

Speaker 2 So then some fan made this alternate poster that obscures the eyes, makes the lips red, like in the original poster, covers up a bit more of Ariana's face, like the whisper, and also gives Cynthia Arrivo more of a smirk.

Speaker 2 Someone also made reference to the fact that on the original Broadway poster, somebody had scrawled graffiti that said, Is your pussy green? Which made the rounds many times over the years.

Speaker 2 Cynthia Revo saw all this and said,

Speaker 2 This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen. Equal to that awful AI of us fighting, equal to people posing the question, is your pussy green? None of this is funny.
None of it is cute.

Speaker 2 It degrades me. It degrades us, wrote Arivo, the original poster is an illustration.

Speaker 2 I am a real-life human being who chose to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer, because without words, we communicate with our eyes.

Speaker 2 Look, she's a theater kid. She's earnest.
You don't get vocals like that being ironic or detached. That's for incels and podcast hosts who are incels.

Speaker 2 It sucks that you have to take yourself this seriously and be insufferable to be that good at musical theater, but that's the bargain every Broadway star makes with the ghost of Oudahagen.

Speaker 2 It's just sort of like, oh, it's not that, it's just a fan art. It's not a big deal.

Speaker 5 It's the original poster.

Speaker 16 That's, I didn't,

Speaker 16 you should be excited.

Speaker 5 That's the original poster.

Speaker 2 Ha, ha, that's cool.

Speaker 7 That's the, ha.

Speaker 3 It is sort of, it is interesting.

Speaker 3 I feel like musical theater people in, in, I think there is an earnestness that does speak to, that comes out in their talent but then it does require them to be so humorless about their craft I think I

Speaker 2 allow it I think they're allowed to be just mad about everything if it helps if it helps their talent oh I just I am glad I am glad like I am glad Cynthia Arrivo is just telling us how she feels and she's not doing anything polished she's out there she's out there being herself great

Speaker 3 It's nice. I feel like everything is so ironic and detached.
And like, if you're younger, it's like, oh, everything's cringe.

Speaker 3 I like someone being like, I'm just going to tell them how this, you know, how upset I am about this thing that doesn't really matter.

Speaker 11 I mean, until they're endorsing or not quite endorsing Kamala, then we have to have a whole 15-minute conversation about it.

Speaker 2 That's fair. Well, that's because the stakes.
There's no stakes here. That's why this is fun.
The stakes here are zero.

Speaker 16 I think it's right that she's outspoken about being upset. I do think it's a very funny thing to be upset about that your fans are engaging with the thing you made and that somehow it hit on you.

Speaker 2 I love it. I love it.
I'm excited for the Wikipedia.

Speaker 4 I couldn't believe you said that. Yeah, I was really shocked.

Speaker 11 This PR campaign has been like rough.

Speaker 4 It's too much.

Speaker 2 So I only found out yesterday

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 it's a two-part movie that they divided in half. But actually, to me, that's not a bug.
That's a feature because the first movie must go till Defiant Gravity.

Speaker 2 And that second act is

Speaker 2 the first.

Speaker 4 Who's going to see it? Yeah, I bet.

Speaker 2 I don't know, but that's not my problem. I get to leave on Defiant Gravity.

Speaker 2 And when I saw it the first time,

Speaker 2 when I saw Wicked,

Speaker 2 I saw it when it came to DC.

Speaker 2 Actually, I saw it, I mentioned this to Senator Jackie Rosen, in fact, because I was interviewing her. And when I saw it with my mother at the Kennedy Center,

Speaker 2 Harry Reid was in the box next to us. And after Defying Gravity and the curtain comes down, I was crying and like applauding and on my feet.
And then I looked to my right and Harry Reid fully asleep,

Speaker 2 which was awesome. But I didn't know really anything about Wicked.
when I saw it. And I don't really remember anything after that defying gravity, I don't think anyone does, really.

Speaker 11 Yeah, it's not, it's no Into the Woods second act.

Speaker 11 Well,

Speaker 2 that's true. And finally, during Dua Lipa's rendition of Do You Believe in Life After Love during the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Cher joined her on stage and said, I'm Cher.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 9 Yeah, unbelievable.

Speaker 2 I like, I thought Dua Liba was doing fine. It's like a great live performance, just not, you know, just a Dua Liba doing a live show.

Speaker 2 And you don't realize until you hear Cher singing what Cher singing is like, and you hear that booming tone, that rich voice. And you're like, and that is a, that woman, how old is is she?

Speaker 2 She's in her 70s. Yeah.
Incredible.

Speaker 8 A very.

Speaker 16 Oh, no. It's just going to Italy and be like, oh, I've had Olive Garden.

Speaker 18 I guess I kind of know what this is.

Speaker 16 And then having actual past.

Speaker 18 Like, oh, no.

Speaker 4 Do a Lima is Olive Garden Cher?

Speaker 2 This is like if you were recording a weekly political podcast, and then bam, Cher walks in and starts podcasting.

Speaker 16 I bet she's great at it.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Oh, God, if she had a podcast.

Speaker 2 How much better would this episode be if Cher walked in right now?

Speaker 18 So much better.

Speaker 2 Okay, before we go, I have not been able to stop talking about this book. And now Kendra's reading it, and she understands why.

Speaker 2 So I sat down with Eric Larson to talk about Fort Sumter, January 6th, and what we can all learn from a time in which a group of Americans turned against the country as a result of right-wing and racist propaganda and also the Civil War.

Speaker 2 You know? So when we come back, my conversation with Eric Larson.

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Speaker 2 Earlier this year, I read a book I haven't stopped thinking about and to my producer's exhaustion talking about. Joining me now is the author of the book, The Demon of Unrest.
It's Eric Larson.

Speaker 2 Eric, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
Thank you. Let's start with this.

Speaker 2 What is the demon of unrest?

Speaker 15 Well, so

Speaker 15 the reason I call it the demon of unrest, I'm taking that actually from

Speaker 15 a letter written by one of the minor protagonists in the book, and he's commenting on the demon of unrest being unleashed in America in this

Speaker 15 antebellum period leading up to the Civil War.

Speaker 15 Political discontent and discord. And I found that particularly striking because

Speaker 15 there really is sort of an interesting resonance when you think of a demon

Speaker 15 running amok in the landscape, stirring up trouble. And so

Speaker 15 that's why I borrowed that for the title.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 when I picked up the book, I just assumed that you had seen the events of January 6th unfold and all the tension and

Speaker 2 plotting that went into it, and then started looking into Fort Sumter as a parallel. But actually, you had begun working on that book during the pandemic long before January 6th, is that right?

Speaker 15 Right. Right.
Well before,

Speaker 15 essentially a year before January 6th, just sort of exploring the nature of,

Speaker 9 well,

Speaker 15 trying to answer for myself. I mean, how did the American Civil War start?

Speaker 15 It's a question that occurred to me back when my book tour for a previous book, The Splendid and the Vial, about Churchill, got cut in half by the pandemic, and I found myself with a lot of extra time on my hands.

Speaker 15 And back in that period, as now, unfortunately, there was a lot of political discord. People were, you know, fringe people were muttering about a contemporary Civil War, contemporary secession.

Speaker 15 I just found myself thinking, well, how did the Civil War start? So I started looking into it.

Speaker 15 What happened with January 6th, as I watched that unfold, was that it persuaded me in a very visceral way that this story that I'd been working on for a year was not just a story from the distant past.

Speaker 15 It had a real contemporary resonance.

Speaker 15 Now, unfortunately, mentioning January 6th, who knew? Who knew that this would be a real flashpoint in America today, but apparently it is.

Speaker 15 I got a lovely, a lovely note from a cordial reader who tore out my author's note and said, and said, January 6th, horseshit.

Speaker 9 Yeah, well,

Speaker 2 in reading the book, you know, you write about someone named Edmund Ruffin, who was a fire reader, a very pro-slavery, very anti-union

Speaker 2 Confederate. And can you talk about the role?

Speaker 2 Maybe this isn't the right term, I'm not drawing an exact parallel, but between the role of a form of right-wing propaganda about the North and about Lincoln, and the role that kind of writing played in exacerbating tensions and leading to the events of the book?

Speaker 15 Well, here's the thing. Back in the antebellum period,

Speaker 15 much as there is today, we talk about echo chambers and people talking to themselves and ramping themselves up into believing things that

Speaker 15 aren't true. This was the case back in

Speaker 15 1860, 61, particularly with regard to how the South viewed the advent of Abraham Lincoln, who, of course, was elected November 6, 1860,

Speaker 15 was not inaugurated until March of 1861.

Speaker 15 When he was elected, he made it very clear, and prior to his election, he made it very clear that he had no intention of abolishing slavery in states where it already existed, existed, nor was he going to oppose

Speaker 15 the Fugitive Slave Act, which abolitionists in the North found really atrocious.

Speaker 15 So basically his stance was very moderate in terms of slavery. The South would not believe it.

Speaker 15 They saw him as the Antichrist, that they came to believe that his one goal was to abolish slavery, which of course to Southern planters in particular, was an existentialist threat.

Speaker 15 So when you talk about propaganda, the South was convincing itself. The The South was convincing itself that Abraham Lincoln

Speaker 15 had one goal in mind, and that is to abolish slavery. In the North,

Speaker 15 where abolitionism was on the rise,

Speaker 15 they saw the South and its protection of the institution of slavery as equally atrocious on Aaron. So you had this rift that grew ever wider in the course of those

Speaker 15 months between November 6th

Speaker 15 and March 4th of 1861, Inauguration Day.

Speaker 2 I was reading

Speaker 2 Grant's memoirs.

Speaker 2 Actually, I was reading them before I read your book, and I got to the part where he was describing in exquisite detail various troop movements, and I got bored.

Speaker 15 Okay, well, see,

Speaker 15 I love it that you said that you were reading about troop movements and you got bored.

Speaker 15 I've actually had a lot of people come to me and say, you know, I really didn't really want to read your book because I thought it would be boring.

Speaker 15 I wanted to wait for the good stuff, which, of course, is the troop movements and the battles.

Speaker 2 So, thank you.

Speaker 2 Yes, look, it's it's very interesting, but it's a lot of logistics. Grant goes into a lot of logistics in that book, but there's one part where he's talking about being in Missouri and

Speaker 2 the Union forces have just taken Camp Jackson, which was

Speaker 2 a rebel military installation. And he's on the train and there's a

Speaker 2 pro-Confederate guy in the train, and he's ranting and raving about the North. And he says, things have come to a pretty pass pass when a free people can't choose their own flag.

Speaker 2 Where I come from, a man dares to say a word in favor of the Union. We hang him from the limb of the first tree we come to.
He thinks he's in a safe space. Grant goes up to him and basically says,

Speaker 2 I had not seen a single rebel hung yet, nor heard of one. There were plenty of them who ought to be, however.
And what Grant says is,

Speaker 2 that man was so crestfalling that I believe if I had ordered him to leave the car, he would have gone quietly out saying to himself, more Yankee oppression.

Speaker 2 And I do not believe, I cannot believe how modern that felt, how contemporary that felt. And I'm wondering if in your research for this book,

Speaker 2 you're in all this

Speaker 2 these documents, these diaries, this source material, and then January 6th happens. And was there some part of you that said, you know what? Maybe this isn't as shocking

Speaker 2 as I felt. Maybe this is exactly what flows from what I've been looking into.

Speaker 15 Well,

Speaker 15 when January 6th unfolded, I mean, I was watching it right here in my office

Speaker 15 on CNN.

Speaker 15 I watched for hours as this thing happened and with just a growing sense of

Speaker 15 fury, anxiety,

Speaker 15 shock at what was going on, but also with a sense that,

Speaker 15 you know, I'd just been through all this reading these historical documents. You know, some of these things that I had been reading could have been written today.

Speaker 15 You know, for example, case in in point is that in 1861, the two moments of gravest national concern before the actual start of the Civil War were: would the Electoral Count be certified?

Speaker 15 Doesn't that sound familiar?

Speaker 15 And would the inauguration come off with Lincoln surviving? Now, the Electoral Count

Speaker 15 back in 1860, they took it a lot more seriously, the potential for disruption of this. There was a gentleman named Winfield Scott, General Winfield Scott, commanding general of the U.S.
Army,

Speaker 15 who was a lot of things. I mean,

Speaker 15 he was ill, he was six foot four, 350 pounds, ailing in every conceivable way. But one thing he was, was utterly loyal to the Union.
And he vowed that nobody was going to interfere with

Speaker 15 this electoral count. And if they did,

Speaker 15 if anybody did, he was going to strap him to the muzzle of a cannon and fire that cannon and, as he put it, manure the hills of Arlington, Virginia with his body.

Speaker 15 And he flooded Washington with cavalry, with cannon, with soldiers, and indeed the electoral count came off fine, although there was an attempt to disrupt it with people trying to get into the Capitol.

Speaker 15 But with that kind of force, it was obvious that

Speaker 15 there was not going to be any disruption of the count.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 you rely on a lot of original documents, diaries, source material.

Speaker 2 But of course, some of the best stories people don't write down. You can't know what they are.
You can't always

Speaker 2 report them because they weren't recorded. But how do you think about that, right? Because if you're trying to base as much as you can on what people were willing to put to paper,

Speaker 2 those are accounts that are inherently going to be in some way sanitized.

Speaker 15 Well,

Speaker 15 I don't know. I mean, look, you use the phrase based on, which suggests that,

Speaker 15 you know, there's partly based on these things, partly not.

Speaker 15 I'm scrupulous with this book to

Speaker 15 adhere entirely to the documents that existed at the time. The documents,

Speaker 15 both government, private, and the diaries and so forth, pretty comprehensive and give a really, really very rich view of how people were thinking and what was happening. Is anything being sanitized?

Speaker 15 I don't know. If Edmund Ruffin, in his 4,000-page diary, he's one of the villains in the book.

Speaker 15 Edmund Ruffin in his 4,000-page diary is not telling us the truth about some aspect of what he's writing about, well, maybe, maybe that's true. But boy, he sure gives you a lot to go with.

Speaker 15 You don't have to worry about the rest.

Speaker 2 It's funny that you call him a villain because you're very,

Speaker 2 you really try to let their words, let people hang themselves with their own words. But as I'm reading the book, I thought, Eric Larson fucking hates this guy.
Is that right?

Speaker 15 Well,

Speaker 15 well phrased, first of all. No, you know, you know,

Speaker 15 I'm a journalist. I'm a trained journalist.
There are two of me. You know, there's one that sits up here.
This is the good guy who says, wow,

Speaker 15 this is sad. This is hard.
This is awful, and so forth. This one sits up here and sees this stuff, sees Edmund Ruff and reads his diary and is like, wow, this is really good stuff.
This is great.

Speaker 15 Do I hate Ruffin?

Speaker 15 No,

Speaker 15 not really. I mean, but as you say, I just let him hang himself.
I mean, he was a hateful, hateful, hateful man.

Speaker 15 And so I just play out what was in his diary and let him tell us exactly how he was feeling, his hatred, his absolute hatred for Yankees, anything northern,

Speaker 15 and just his...

Speaker 15 even his initial hatred of being a Virginian, that's where he hailed from, because Virginia was not avidly seeking secession in the way that South Carolina was.

Speaker 15 Even there, he was like continually complaining about Virginia, Virginia, Virginia.

Speaker 15 His diary, if you can stand it, is really well worth reading.

Speaker 15 It's an amazing, amazing document. Like I said, 4,000 pages, very candid pages.
When you read that diary, you come away thinking, yeah, Ruffin has bared his soul to me, and

Speaker 15 he's not dissembling about anything. Similarly, may I say, to another villain in the book.

Speaker 2 Which man? Which one?

Speaker 15 James Henry Hammond from South Carolina, planter and senator, who also left a very detailed diary, sufficiently detailed that

Speaker 15 he reveals that he had a sexual dalliance with four of his nieces at one time.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Pretty candid.

Speaker 2 That's what I actually, that was going to be literally my next question because that's another villain in this book. And, you know, this is somebody abusing several children.

Speaker 2 And, you know, you tell the story from multiple perspectives. You get Edmund Ruffren's perspective.
You get James Hammond's perspective. you get

Speaker 2 Robert Anderson's perspective. He's the Kentucky-born commander at Fort Sumter.

Speaker 2 And what I thought as I was reading the book is

Speaker 2 you're telling the stories through these various perspectives, and every person in their own mind is a hero of their journey. And yet, there is evil here.

Speaker 2 These are people participating in,

Speaker 2 contributing to

Speaker 2 being genuinely evil.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I wonder how you grapple with that in trying to tell this story, because the documents you have about James Hammond are by James Hammond, but he's committing atrocities inside of his house and telling himself a story about what that looks like.

Speaker 2 And so, how do you strike the line between letting, as you say, that you know, being meticulous and scrupulous and using the words that these people put to paper, while also recognizing that, you know, in history's lens, like these, these were monsters.

Speaker 15 Right, right.

Speaker 15 Well, you know,

Speaker 15 in the case of Hammond, it's pretty clear that

Speaker 15 dalliance with four nieces is inexcusable by any standard in any time.

Speaker 15 If we take that off the plate and we talk about other things that he did and other things that he felt, you really have to view them through the lens of the times.

Speaker 15 Something that I always have to remind myself is that it is a mistake of the first order to bring modern judgments into play

Speaker 15 when reading

Speaker 15 past documents, past diaries, and so on. Again, I make the exception of the sexual diance with four nieces.

Speaker 15 I don't care what era you're in. That's pretty vile.

Speaker 15 But

Speaker 15 screenwriters always refer to point of view, and this is something I really try to adhere to is I'm trying to look at this period.

Speaker 15 I was trying to look at this period

Speaker 15 through the eyes of people who existed in that time, what their goals were, what their standards were. I mean, for example,

Speaker 15 another thing that today we would classify as evil, but back in that era, was fairly, pretty much the norm among southern planters.

Speaker 15 Senator Hammond has a manual for his overseers to help manage his population of enslaved blacks. And the last portion of that manual is is a very detailed,

Speaker 15 essentially how-to guide for how to whip his enslaved laborers. Now today, we are outraged by this.
This is absolutely incredible that this happened.

Speaker 15 Back in the day, this was the norm, so much a norm that he felt he could actually codify it in his manual.

Speaker 2 A norm in one part of the country, and yet obviously you have abolitionists, white and black, fighting against the practice.

Speaker 15 Exactly, a norm in the South.

Speaker 2 But at the same time, and

Speaker 2 I struggle with this a little because it's funny. It's like a fun time.

Speaker 2 I'm supposed to be this sort of, I don't know,

Speaker 2 lefty progressive, but I find myself less a moral relativist. Like you see in this work the way in which their participation in slavery destroyed their souls,

Speaker 2 made them coarse,

Speaker 2 egotistical, narcissistic,

Speaker 2 mean-spirited, closed-off, and ultimately unhappy. I don't want to speak.
Edmund Ruffin's story does not end happily, right?

Speaker 2 These are people that were corrupted by something, even though they tried to convince people that.

Speaker 15 Spoiler alert.

Speaker 5 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Spoiler alert. Edmund Ruffin.

Speaker 2 And honestly, I'm sorry. I was like, a little bit like, good.
I was satisfied.

Speaker 2 I was like, you may not want to say that you hated that guy. I fucking hated that guy.

Speaker 15 It was sort of a perverse, slow-clap moment.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 2 The zealotry of someone like Edmund Ruffin, the convincing themselves of the righteousness of their cause, the almost

Speaker 2 the kind of projection, the way in which they defended their kind of way of life,

Speaker 2 on some level in reading it, you couldn't help but think, I don't know that these people really believe this. I think on some level, there is a way in which they are

Speaker 2 trying to convince themselves while aware of these horrors. Is there any truth to that?

Speaker 22 You know,

Speaker 15 one of the things that I found particularly fascinating

Speaker 15 is the advent of the so-called pro-slavery movement, which is a big part, I feel, of what provided fuel for the start of the Civil War.

Speaker 15 You know, going back to as early as 1800,

Speaker 15 even southern planters felt that slavery was,

Speaker 15 they would refer to it as a necessary evil. But over time, as slavery began to be perceived

Speaker 15 as an active evil by the North, by the international community,

Speaker 15 in the South

Speaker 15 there grew this pro-slavery movement because they couldn't abide this perception of themselves as evil because they kept slaves.

Speaker 15 So they came up with this rationale, this idea that, and came to really believe it.

Speaker 15 The pro-slavery movement was very, very effective in having the South. It was not meant to persuade the North.
It was meant to persuade Southerners that really what they were doing,

Speaker 15 what they were maintaining in terms of the institutional slavery, was the best of all worlds for everybody concerned, including the enslaved blacks.

Speaker 15 That's the really interesting element of their argument.

Speaker 15 They felt that they were doing these people essentially a favor by giving them basically, you know, three squares a day, insulating them from the labor market vicissitudes up in the north, protecting them through economic ups and downs.

Speaker 15 They really came to believe that. And they weren't kidding around.
It was not like they were looking in the mirror in the morning saying, okay, I think this is horrible, but

Speaker 15 I'm going to propound this view of this sort of pro-slavery ethos. Now, there were people who were very clear-eyed about slavery.

Speaker 15 One of them is somebody I love in the book, a a diarist named Mary Boykin-Chestnut, the premier female diarist of the Civil War era.

Speaker 15 And she was very conflicted about slavery, and she was not shy about stating that conflict.

Speaker 15 And so that, and I found that very compelling. She's sort of the person who stood there in the merch between North and South.

Speaker 2 So one point you make throughout the book is this is a group of people motivated by their ideological sentiments, by their belief in this evil institution, by their loyalty to the Union, but few could have comprehended that what they were marching towards was the most deadly war in American history, and yet that is what they were marching towards.

Speaker 15 Right, right.

Speaker 15 Let's stop there for a second.

Speaker 15 Because that, to me, is one of the also very, very fascinating elements of the saga and something that actually I think has a lot of relevance today.

Speaker 15 You know,

Speaker 15 what amazes me is that with this tension, there was the prevailing belief,

Speaker 15 certainly in the South, was that

Speaker 15 there would be no civil war. And if there was,

Speaker 15 there would be so little bloodshed.

Speaker 15 One guy vowed that he would drink,

Speaker 15 first of all, there would be so little bloodshed that it would only fill, as quote-unquote, a lady's thimble.

Speaker 15 And another guy vowed that he would eat all the corpses of this civil war because he believed that there would be none.

Speaker 15 So here is this

Speaker 15 very interesting situation where people have persuaded themselves that

Speaker 15 this conflict is not going to lead to a civil war, the civil war that ultimately killed the current count, it believed to be 750,000 people. What underscored for me vis-a-vis today,

Speaker 15 first of all, you know, my takeaway, my takeaway was that, A, you know,

Speaker 15 when people say crazy things, take them seriously. When people today start talking about civil war, talking about violence and so forth, take them seriously because, you know,

Speaker 15 they probably mean it. The other thing that

Speaker 15 my takeaway from my research was that, you know,

Speaker 15 the inconceivable is always conceivable to someone. Case in point is Edmund Ruffin.
He was one of the few.

Speaker 15 in his diary, well actually, sorry, in his really, really bad novel called Anticipations of the Future, he was one of the few who actually saw forward far enough and darkly enough to recognize what a conflict like this would actually do.

Speaker 15 He envisioned the complete incineration of New York City by Southern forces as part of

Speaker 15 this conflict. And that came, not New York was never destroyed in the Civil War, but that volume, that degree of violence comes a lot closer to what ultimately happened than

Speaker 15 this self-delusion that any civil war would only provide enough blood to fill a lady's thimble.

Speaker 2 Aaron Ross Powell, as you look at this election, there's a lot of people listening to this that feel like they're seeing the kinds of

Speaker 2 there are Edmund Ruffin's versions of Edmund Ruffin. I'm not making a direct comparison, but there are versions of Edmund Ruffin all around us, people who are

Speaker 2 saying the most extreme things,

Speaker 2 thirsty for blood, wanting the fight, vilifying their enemies.

Speaker 2 What lessons did you take from that

Speaker 2 of looking at how we kind of went into the Civil War that we could apply now and how we fight back against that kind of tension? How we, I don't know,

Speaker 2 how you deal with a demon of unrest?

Speaker 15 So my answer is, I mean, what you do is you try to have a safe and

Speaker 15 unthreatened election, and that's the best that you can do.

Speaker 15 I mean, we're living in troubled times, and it's no secret to anybody.

Speaker 15 How this gets resolved,

Speaker 15 I'm not the person to ask. I wrote a book about the start of the American Civil War in 1861,

Speaker 15 with

Speaker 15 certainly no anticipation that the events of January 6th would occur.

Speaker 15 So it's anybody's guess what's going to happen and how to deal with it.

Speaker 2 Well, you know, well, what help is that? We need you to write something about the future.

Speaker 15 Well,

Speaker 15 I wish I could. I wish I could.

Speaker 15 One of the things that

Speaker 15 is always tempting when you look at history of historical patterns is that

Speaker 15 you maybe delude yourself into thinking that you can see, oh, this is not going to have a good end because we're moving

Speaker 15 in a direction that

Speaker 15 historically has not resulted in a very positive outcome. I think,

Speaker 15 my speculation is that I think there's tremendous potential for violence in America.

Speaker 15 I know that the national intelligence, domestic intelligence entities, Homeland Security and the FBI, I know that they are deeply concerned about this happening.

Speaker 15 And I come back to what I said before, is that when people start talking crazy, When people start talking crazy, take them seriously. And I, you know,

Speaker 15 maybe I'm alluding here to certain things that a certain individual has said about locking up Democrats and

Speaker 15 so forth. But

Speaker 15 take them seriously.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much for your time. Last question before we let you go.
What's the silliest or most surprising or funniest thing you've ever seen in a piece of

Speaker 2 primary documentation that you've been looking into?

Speaker 15 Oh, I mean, in any book.

Speaker 2 Yeah, any book.

Speaker 15 Well, I'd have to think, so often I come across things that actually

Speaker 15 just make me laugh. And if I can, if they work in the actual primary narrative, they go in the primary narrative.

Speaker 15 If they don't work in the primary narrative, readers of my books, I think, now know enough to know that they should go to the footnotes because that's where I stick the stories that are particularly funny or particularly

Speaker 15 offbeat. I mean, one case in the case of Demon of Unrest was this guy, this guy's walking,

Speaker 15 a congressman, I believe, was walking in

Speaker 15 the vicinity of the Capitol in Washington on a dark night. This is before the Civil War.
And he's molested by two guys,

Speaker 15 one who tries to stab him, stabs him through

Speaker 15 a folded edition of the Congressional Globe, which is the past version of what we call Congressional Quarterly. So

Speaker 15 he isn't hurt by this display. He survives that.

Speaker 15 He pulls out a gun, shoots one of his attackers,

Speaker 15 punches another one

Speaker 15 and knocks him out, and he fights off this group of assailants in a very, very dramatic and very funny way, as if you expect him next to have a cannon come out of his coat

Speaker 15 and blow these guys away. The New York Times wrote a piece about that back in the day that was actually very funny.
Now,

Speaker 15 we're not talking knee slapper here. I'm sure I could come off on something if I had more time, but that'll do it for now.
That's in the footnotes.

Speaker 2 I love that story because these guys think they're going to get away with

Speaker 2 screwing with this pro-Lincoln guy, and he just fucks them up.

Speaker 15 That's a good way to put it. That's a good way to put it.
Totally, totally surprising.

Speaker 2 Eric Larson, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciated Demon of Unrest.
I really felt like it was

Speaker 2 a helpful bit of history that resonates with what we're going through right now. And as you said, to take these kinds of people seriously,

Speaker 2 even if they are not serious people.

Speaker 2 So Eric, thank you for your time.

Speaker 15 Sure, sure.

Speaker 15 Thank you.

Speaker 2 All right. Thank you so much to Eric Larson.
That's our show. Thank you to Sarah.
Thank you to Hallie. Thank you to Kendra.

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See you, sluts, on Saturday.

Speaker 2 Straight shoot tie

Speaker 2 Love it, or leave it, it's not it, or leave it.

Speaker 2 Let's get on my side,

Speaker 2 love it, or leave it, it's not it, believe it.

Speaker 2 Straight shoot tie,

Speaker 2 love it, or leave it, it's not it, believe it.

Speaker 2 Love it or Leave It is a crooked media production. It is written and produced by me, John Lovett, and Lee Eisenberg.

Speaker 2 Kendra James is our executive producer, Chris Lord is our producer, and Kennedy Hill is our associate producer.

Speaker 2 Hallie Kiefer is our head writer, Sarah Lazarus and Jocelyn Kaufman, Peter Miller, Alan Pierre, Will Miles, and Mohanad El-Sheiki are our writers. Evan Sutton is our editor.

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Speaker 7 It's love it. We'll leave it.

Speaker 9 Perfect.

Speaker 2 And I didn't order lunch. Ah, we're going to McDonald's.

Speaker 8 No, no, no, no, McDonald's.

Speaker 2 Come on, people.

Speaker 2 In a statement released after Trump's visit, I'm going to order a salad and it takes a while.

Speaker 11 I just don't understand how you can eat the McDonald's. Like, you have to go with him to get the McDonald's.
You can't eat McDonald's after it's been transferred.

Speaker 9 That's fine with that. I'll go.

Speaker 8 I'm fine, we'll all go.

Speaker 2 We'll all go, but also, yes, you can.

Speaker 2 We're four and a half minutes from the McDonald's.

Speaker 11 That's too long.

Speaker 11 You got to eat it as soon as it comes out. As soon as Trump can't

Speaker 18 visit,

Speaker 9 what's poppin' listeners?

Speaker 22 I'm Lacey Mosley, host of the podcast Scam Goddess, the show that's an ode to fraud and all those who practice it. Each week, I talk with very special guests about the scammiest scammers of all time.

Speaker 22 Want to know about the fake heirs? We got them. What about a career con man? We've got them too.
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Speaker 22 Oh, you know they are represented because representation matters. I'm joined by guests like Nicole Beyer, Ira Madison III, Conan O'Brien, and more.

Speaker 22 Join the congregation and listen to Scam Goddess wherever you get your podcasts.