So You Think You Can Be a Trump Juror?

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, MAGA Mike Johnson may lose the MAGA and his job.

Speaker 1 Over support for Ukraine, Carrie Lake tells her supporters to strap on a Glock as Arizona becomes the central battleground of the 2024 election.

Speaker 1 And later, I talked to Alex Garland, the writer and director of the hit movie Civil War, about why he chose to make a blockbuster about American democracy coming to a violent end.

Speaker 1 What do you think, Dan?

Speaker 1 I guess that's more of a rhetorical question.

Speaker 4 It seemed like a good year for it.

Speaker 1 You should see this movie, Dan. You will like this movie.
You should see it.

Speaker 4 I'm excited to see it. on an airplane when I see most of my movies.

Speaker 1 No, don't see it. No, no, you got to see it in the theater.
You got to do the full IMAX.

Speaker 1 I know. I know you're a parent of two, so you don't do that like me, but

Speaker 1 you should think about that. Okay.
All right.

Speaker 4 We'll see it. We'll see if you want to see if you can persuade my wife that one of our rare nights out will be to see a movie about the end of democracy.

Speaker 4 Is that a nice dinner, the two of us? Yeah, go for it.

Speaker 1 All right. Before we get to that, it's only been a week, but Trump's election interference trial is off to a bit of a rocky start, thanks to the defendant and his propaganda network.

Speaker 1 So as of this taping, we do have 12 jurors and one alternate, but they're still looking for five more alternates after losing two jurors on Thursday.

Speaker 1 You can imagine it hasn't been easy to find Manhattanites who don't have a strong opinion about Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 The judge has been asking potential jurors to raise their hands if they don't think they can be impartial. Dozens have been dismissed that way.

Speaker 1 If you make it past that round, you're asked all kinds of questions, many about your political views and social media posts, all of which journalists in the courtroom have been reporting.

Speaker 1 One of the jurors had posted in 2018, quote, Trump invites the Thai boys to the White House and the boys request to return to their cave.

Speaker 1 That was pretty funny.

Speaker 1 That's good. Another posted an AI-generated video of Trump saying, I'm dumb as fuck.
It could have been more creative.

Speaker 1 And one juror, who I really identify with, called himself the Repost King.

Speaker 1 We stand a repost king.

Speaker 1 Right before we started recording, there was another juror who had had a tweet where she said that Trump was racist, and she was forced to stand up in court and read her tweets. And

Speaker 1 her first comment when she had to read her tweets was, oh no, which is like all of us, right? How relatable is that?

Speaker 4 I mean, think about it this way: if we don't all do everything we can to defeat Donald Trump, there's a chance we'll all be doing that in court.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4 Standing up and reading our tweets. You know what?

Speaker 1 Those are going to be short trials, and they're not going to be looking for a lot of jurors.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 All right. Judge Gorka, mercy, please.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 The jury of Sidney Powell only has rendered a verdict.

Speaker 4 All right.

Speaker 1 Anyway.

Speaker 1 So all of this became a lot less funny when Fox News host Jesse Waters started a conspiracy about the fact that liberal activists are supposedly infiltrating the jury, which Donald Trump then amplified on Truth Social in what the district attorney is now arguing is a clear violation of his gag order.

Speaker 1 Let's listen.

Speaker 5 Number two, a nurse from the Upper East Side with a master's degree. She's not married, has no kids, and lives with her fiancé who works in finance.

Speaker 5 She gets her news from the New York Times, Google, and CNN.

Speaker 5 She said two things that really stuck out. One, quote, I don't really have an opinion of Trump.
And quote, no one is above the law.

Speaker 5 I'm not so sure about Jared number two.

Speaker 5 They are trying to rig this jury. They are catching undercover liberal activists lying to the judge.
They're saying, oh, have you ever said anything on social media about Donald Trump?

Speaker 5 No, I can't remember. Well, what about this post where you said he should be in prison?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, that one

Speaker 1 strike.

Speaker 5 And they keep throwing these undercovers at him.

Speaker 1 So the juror that Jesse Water mentioned at the beginning of that clip, the nurse, was dismissed after telling Judge Murshon she was concerned about being publicly identified.

Speaker 1 She said, just based on the information that was reported out, like friends were asking, is she the juror?

Speaker 1 So she was dismissed. The judge then barred reporters from describing potential jurors.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 some reporters were complaining about that. They thought it was a First Amendment violation.

Speaker 1 I don't know if the need to know demographic information about jurors sort of outweighs the potential threats to their safety, but we'll see.

Speaker 1 And then the judge is going to decide next week whether to hold Trump in contempt for violating the gag order. There are now 10 truths

Speaker 1 in question here that the judge will be deciding whether that violates the gag order. But the damage is already being done.

Speaker 1 Trump and MAGA World are clearly trying to not only poison the jury pool, but public confidence in the trial.

Speaker 1 How worried are you about that?

Speaker 4 I'd say pretty worried.

Speaker 4 Do I think that Donald Trump, aided by a billion-dollar funded right-wing propaganda machine, can erode confidence in u.s institutions and processes and norms yeah i'd say i'm pretty concerned about that now

Speaker 4 does that mean they can render a conviction null and void uh in the politically in the eyes of the public that i'm not so sure about right yeah

Speaker 4 like right now

Speaker 4 who's paying attention to this who's really seeing it who are they really mostly just firing up people who already think donald trump's being railroaded and blah blah blah blah and believe these conspiracies probably in the end of the day he's gonna he's either gonna be convicted or he's not and that's what's gonna matter a lot more than what trump's saying.

Speaker 4 But what he is making this process, which was already sort of messy, as the criminal just system often is, seem messier.

Speaker 4 And that he's pushing on an open door with a very cynical public, a majority of whom we've seen in polls, including a ton of independents and even some Democrats, who think that the primary purpose of these trials, all of Trump's trials, is about stopping him from returning to the White House or his politically motive or something like that.

Speaker 4 So he has public opinion on his side.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And, you know, we're not going to hear about the jury a ton

Speaker 1 once it's seated and the trial starts but

Speaker 1 trump has already succeeded in like you said uh making it seem like the uh prosecutions are political and the judge is political and the the DA is political and all this.

Speaker 1 And the one thing he doesn't have going for him is, oh, if you get it convicted by a jury of your peers, most Americans, you know, tell pollsters, well,

Speaker 1 that's what the Constitution says. And we accept that kind of verdict.
And so the only thing left is to impugn the motives of the jurors.

Speaker 1 And you can imagine like a bunch of MAGA weirdos like digging through people's social media posts if they can find the right person.

Speaker 1 And then if just one juror has lied about their, you know, previous social media posts or, you know, donations to political candidates, and then they dig it up and

Speaker 1 publicize that. You can see people saying, oh, well, that was that was kind of bad.
You know, so it is totally pushing against an open door.

Speaker 4 All of that is true. Even if every juror, if no juror is ever outed in this process,

Speaker 4 no MAGA sleuth ever finds anything like that.

Speaker 4 Donald Trump was already on the 10-yard line from the fact that the jury's in Manhattan. He's already, it's a blue city.

Speaker 4 He got a front, you know, Lovett very impressively ran through all of the math of this on Tuesday about the number of votes that Donald Trump got. I mean, it's, you were already there, right?

Speaker 4 Once the trial was in Manhattan by a elected Democratic prosecutor,

Speaker 4 you were there. But every little bit is going to matter.

Speaker 4 And people are, in an election like this, are looking for permission to do one thing or the other, to vote, stick with Trump or get off the Trump train.

Speaker 4 And all of these things can matter on the margins.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Trump will be posting a map of Manhattan and the

Speaker 1 vote totals before the end of this trial, I'm sure, or after it's over. Trump also said he thought he had the right to reject as many jurors as he wants.

Speaker 1 He basically posted, he's like, I thought that I get to do as many challenges as I want. I thought that I, basically, he just thought he could get, pick the jury.

Speaker 1 He just thought he could pick his jury. Just keep rejecting jurors until he gets

Speaker 1 12 people in MAGA hats.

Speaker 4 Just the entire Waters family.

Speaker 1 So I feel like I was studying a poll or a focus group trying to detect the jurors' political leanings by reading about their demographic information and media diets.

Speaker 1 I'm fine with not knowing now that the judges said that, but I was interested when we did know. Do you think that the lawyers and jury specialists are also polar coaster listeners?

Speaker 4 I mean, how could they not be? Who would not listen to our hit subscriber exclusive podcast that you can all subscribe to at crooked.com slash friends? How about that?

Speaker 4 We just live for the organic plugs around here.

Speaker 4 I got a couple more coming too, so beware. But the, I mean, it's a fascinating process.
It is exactly what every campaign does, right?

Speaker 4 This is the secret sauce of campaigns in the age of data is you take where someone lives,

Speaker 4 everything you know about them in terms of are they a man or a woman? Do you know

Speaker 4 what their demographics are? Do you know their age? And then you take in other data sources that campaigns get access to, which could include

Speaker 4 off of social media, who do they follow? Right. Who, what, you know, in the old days, this is less relevant now, but like what magazines did you subscribe to, right?

Speaker 4 You could actually get that, you could buy that information and see if someone's a New Yorker subscriber or subscribe to the NRA magazine.

Speaker 4 And you and the campaigns create a profile of every single voter and potential voter and then rate them a scale of one to 10 as to how likely they are to vote for your candidate.

Speaker 4 And that's exactly what the jury consultants are doing here. It is, this is probably the most political trial in history and it's using the exact same modeling

Speaker 4 processes and strategies that are at the core of modern political campaigns. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And the one thing that they're not working with is you can't actually ask people like, are you a registered Democrat or Republican or who they voted for?

Speaker 1 so they're there but you can tell a lot just by demographic information but they can know that right don't they have their name they have their name uh they have their name but they're not allowed to ask them in court right but you they run the same reason they look up all their Facebook posts you just look them up on the voter side right if they are registered I mean I would encourage people to read the coverage about these potential jurors because I think it would surprise the typical political junkie to learn that there are plenty of people that we have heard from this week who even in Manhattan don't have strong opinions of Donald Trump and people who have media diets that you might not expect.

Speaker 1 Like there was a potential juror who said he gets his news from the New York Times, Fox, the Daily Mail, and MSNBC.

Speaker 1 You think that's fake? Yeah, that's fake. I don't.
That's fake. Come on.

Speaker 1 No one does that. Well, here's what I told Lovett when he did his fancy math about Manhattan.
The biggest chunk of people in Manhattan are people who didn't vote.

Speaker 1 I mean, there's still like 600,000. He was doing the number of votes for Biden, the number of votes for Trump, which was very tiny.
But then there's just a... I think it was 85,000.

Speaker 1 Is that 85,000 out of, you know, 8 million people in Manhattan? But the biggest chunk of people is people who did not vote.

Speaker 1 And as we know, like low propensity voters or people who skipped one election or multiple elections, they tend to have like weird political views. They tend to have more diverse media diets.

Speaker 1 They are moderate on some issues. They're liberal on some issues.
They're conservative on some issues, or they just don't pay attention attention much. And that's like a lot of voters in the country.

Speaker 4 Yeah, there is a, I mean, that is true. The, I guess my one point of disagreement would be is that what really correlates with partisanship is news consumption.

Speaker 4 Just merely consuming news, like consuming political news, watching cable news or reading the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or Fox News or the Daily Mail, which was a ridiculous suggestion there, but is someone who is much more likely to vote, to engage in politics than someone who's not.

Speaker 4 But the vast majority of people in Manhattan and elsewhere are people who just don't consume political news, right? Their answer to that would be TikTok or Instagram or ESPN or the local news, right?

Speaker 4 And not a national news source.

Speaker 1 I did talk to a

Speaker 1 20-something young woman for Last Season of the Wilderness who, when I asked Media Diet, she said

Speaker 1 TikTok, Daily Mail,

Speaker 1 and she was extremely upset about the Dobbs decision and classified herself as very liberal. That Daily Mail, it just pops up.
It just pops up, you know?

Speaker 4 The Daily Mail is celebrity-focused. Right.
Like, we view it as a conservative political organ, but there's just a lot of like

Speaker 4 Kardashian coverage, real housewise coverage, just celebrity stuff in there, which a lot of people do get.

Speaker 1 No, I thought it was just interesting for as we're all out there

Speaker 1 in the next several months, like talking to voters, knocking on doors, making phone calls, you're going to encounter a lot of people who you'd be like, wait, you haven't made a decision yet.

Speaker 1 You don't know who you're for. Like, how is that the case? And a lot of people are just that don't pay attention.
They don't pay attention.

Speaker 1 All right, meanwhile, Joe Biden has been mostly silent on the trial, and his staff is telling reporters that they think there will be more than enough coverage without them doing anything to stoke the fire.

Speaker 1 That said, Biden did make an oblique joke about the trial during his campaign swing in Pennsylvania. Here he is.

Speaker 7 Under my predecessor, who's busy right now,

Speaker 7 Pennsylvania lost 275,000 jobs.

Speaker 8 I mean, let's look at the facts.

Speaker 1 So he then got a direct question about the trial afterwards. Let's listen.

Speaker 9 His lack of ethic has nothing to do with me. I have nothing to do.
I have not once talked to anyone in my administration about Trump's legal problems.

Speaker 9 A lot of them occurred well before I became president. And so I have nothing to do with that.

Speaker 1 So what do you think about how Biden and his team are navigating this? And anything you think they or other Democrats should be saying?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think the president is right not to talk about it.

Speaker 4 It's just, I don't know what it would just fuel the sort of conspiracy theories and the Trump messaging about this that we talked about before.

Speaker 4 Now, he needs to tell a story about Trump that is consistent with the facts of this trial. I think he's been doing that.

Speaker 4 You guys on Tuesday talked a lot about how you would talk about it in the message around. I thought that was all very good advice, right?

Speaker 4 About Donald Trump thinking the rules don't apply to him, fighting for himself, not fighting for you.

Speaker 4 Like this,

Speaker 4 this is background noise to the message that Biden is giving out on the snump. And so they have to, they have to be consistent.
I think they will be.

Speaker 4 Politico reported this morning that the Biden folks are telling, and the DNC is like telling Democrats not to talk about this at all.

Speaker 4 And I obviously agree that this should not be our main message, right?

Speaker 4 We shouldn't be out there every day talking about the hush money trial or, you know, Donald Trump falsifying business records to hide an extra marital affair from the voters or how are we going to like not when Arizona is banning abortion without exceptions and Donald Trump wants to give a $2 trillion tax cut.

Speaker 4 But I do think it's a mistake to seed the ground entirely because there's this asymmetry here where the right is talking about all the time.

Speaker 4 They're shaping everything that comes out of it, raising these questions, spreading these conspiracy theories, and Democrats are saying nothing. Right.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I don't know that, and I don't think you could have political conversations right now, like with the people in your lives, where this trial does not come up.

Speaker 4 This is what is in the news. This is the thing that's breaking through.
Donald Trump falling asleep in the trial went completely viral on social media.

Speaker 4 It's just, it is part of any political conversation, much much more so than the expiration of the Trump tax cuts at the end of 2025, right? And so we have to know, we have to talk about it.

Speaker 4 And if Biden's not going to talk about it, someone else has to, right? And like I said, Biden shouldn't talk about it.

Speaker 4 Just before this podcast, I was working on a post for MessageBox where I was going to lay out talking points and message guidance for all of us, voter, you know, as we're talking about the voters in our lives about how to best talk about the trial.

Speaker 4 And I just, and that's going to come out in a couple of days. If you want them, you should subscribe subscribe at substack.messagebox.com.
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 That's organic plug number two.

Speaker 4 But just a couple of quick points, a tease, if you will. One,

Speaker 4 we should always start all these conversations by making the point that the law should apply to equally to everyone,

Speaker 4 including the rich and powerful, and including even former presidents.

Speaker 1 By the way, it was so funny that in Jesse Waters' tirade there, he was like, and then she says, nobody is above the law. I don't know about that one.

Speaker 4 That's the key.

Speaker 1 That's the key. You can tell right there.

Speaker 4 You don't think there's one guy above the law. I'm not trusting that voter.

Speaker 4 The second one, and you hinted this before, is that it's not just that a jury of Donald Trump's peers are going to decide his fate here.

Speaker 4 The actual indictment itself was already brought by a jury of his peers, right?

Speaker 4 These were career prosecutors who laid out the facts as they found them to a jury of Donald Trump's peers who then made the decision that this should go to trial. And so it's going to trial.

Speaker 4 And then I think another point here is that we have to take a step back and talk about all of these trials as a way, as an example of the chaos that Donald Trump brings to the White House.

Speaker 4 And they will be distracting from him. Because this is not over, right? If

Speaker 4 let's say there's a hung jury here, it's acquitted or he gets convicted and

Speaker 4 he's not in prison, but he still goes to the White House anyway. There's still the Fulton County trial.
There are all these defamation trials. He is just in this legal morass.

Speaker 4 Like, look at what he's doing right now. If he's dealing with this in the White House, how is he going to be able to help you? How is he going to lower costs?

Speaker 4 How is he going to make healthcare more affordable? We have to just, we have to push this forward a little bit to explain how having someone who is

Speaker 4 always in

Speaker 4 legal chaos and trouble prevents them from actually helping your family. So there's a lot more to say about it.
It's coming, but those are, I think, some.

Speaker 4 points where I think we should all just be talking about this in a way that explains to voters why they should care because I think that's a big question they're going to have.

Speaker 1 I mean, not a surprise after

Speaker 1 you all heard me say on Tuesday's pod, but like I think the

Speaker 1 president and the campaign have been pitch perfect on this so far this week. Like, I love the joke that Biden told.

Speaker 1 I'm actually surprised that he told a little joke, but I think it's totally fair, right?

Speaker 1 He's not joking about Donald Trump in jail, but the fact that he's a little busy, like subtle stuff like that, I think is really good.

Speaker 1 The campaign put out a memo after the first day that said, wake up, Donald, after stormy abortion ban coverage, Trump poll memo attempts to hush panic

Speaker 1 which is like i mean because i do think they're going to have to get their message in this story but this is the story that everyone's covering uh even more than the press is going to be the political press at least is going to be covering the abortion story which is still much more important for the country and most voters.

Speaker 1 To get that message into these stories, you're going to have to make the connection a little bit.

Speaker 1 There was a new memo out today from the campaign that said, folks, it's bad for Donald Trump out there.

Speaker 1 And then in in parentheses, it says, or in there, wherever he is this week, calls him a con man, accuses him of selling people out to enrich himself, saying that whatever he's doing won't help his personal life, saying that he's in this to fix his personal problems.

Speaker 1 So they're doing exactly what you're suggesting too, which is like...

Speaker 1 putting this trial in the context of the larger message about Trump, which is that he only cares about himself. He's only in this to like stay out of jail and to make sure that he's not broke.

Speaker 1 And he really doesn't care about anything else.

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Speaker 1 Lots of action in Congress right now, Dan.

Speaker 4 That's something we say a lot around here.

Speaker 1 In the Senate, Democrats just killed the impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas based on the fact that policy disagreements don't constitute impeachable offenses. No shit.

Speaker 1 Republicans are like, oh, terrible precedent, terrible precedent. Not even doing the trial in the Senate.

Speaker 1 It's like, well, you send over a ridiculous fucking impeachment that's based on Mayorkas just carrying out Joe Biden's policy and nothing else, then yeah, we're not going to have a trial.

Speaker 4 Idiots. Oh, now they care about due president.

Speaker 1 I know it's ridiculous.

Speaker 1 And over in the House, Mike Johnson seems like he's about to do the right thing and lose his job because because of it.

Speaker 1 He's decided to hold a vote on four separate bills that will provide support for Ukraine, Israel and the Palestinians, Taiwan, and surprise, ban TikTok.

Speaker 1 So whatever passes from those four bills will get packaged together and then sent to the Senate for an up or down vote, which is how they would, that's why he's kind of snuck the TikTok ban in there because the Senate has not moved on that.

Speaker 1 Biden said he's supportive. Most Democrats and Republicans in Congress seem at least somewhat supportive, though we'll see over these next couple days.

Speaker 1 But the Marjorie Taylor Greens of the world are furious with Johnson over the Ukraine funding specifically.

Speaker 1 More hardliners are threatening to oust Johnson as speaker. There was a debate whether Representative Van Orden called Johnson tubby.

Speaker 4 Is he tubby?

Speaker 1 I don't even think he was tubby, but the Freedom Caucus was saying that

Speaker 1 Van Orden called him tubby and said that he was going to join the motion to vacate and then Van Orden said no I'm actually defending Johnson and I would never call him tubby

Speaker 1 ridiculous what's going on in the house Dan

Speaker 1 Johnson to his credit does not seem phased here he is Wednesday night why are you willing to risk losing your job over this Ukraine funding listen My philosophy is you do the right thing and you let the chips fall where they may.

Speaker 13 If I operated out of fear over a motion to vacate, I would never be able to do my job.

Speaker 13 Look, history judges us for what we do. This is a critical time right now, a critical time on the world stage.
I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important. I really do.

Speaker 13 I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we've gotten that

Speaker 13 I believe Xi and Vladimir Putin and Iran really are an axis of evil. I think they're in coordination on this.
I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed.

Speaker 13 I think he might go to the Balkans next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies.

Speaker 1 And here's what Mike Johnson's loyal friend Donald Trump said when asked about if he if he still stands by him.

Speaker 10 Professor Marshall, is our tech speaker Johnson?

Speaker 4 But we'll see what happens with that. I think he's

Speaker 1 we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens.
Just standing by his guy.

Speaker 1 That statement from Johnson, which was the

Speaker 1 like the most passionate he's been about supporting Ukraine or really, I mean, he hasn't said much of anything about it.

Speaker 1 He has been like mildly for it, but also critical of Ukraine assistance in the past. But that was like a full-throated defense of NATO and

Speaker 1 helping Ukraine. It was, to me, it was like someone who has had their brain pickled by Fox News, like shut the TV off for 10 seconds and like read a real article.

Speaker 4 Really? That's what you think?

Speaker 1 That's what I thought.

Speaker 1 I mean, I am willing to believe that Mike Johnson has completely odious views on a whole bunch of issues, but was actually convinced by the intelligence that this is an important vote, and he's like willing to lose his job over it.

Speaker 4 The way I took this was my interpretation of all those remarks was,

Speaker 4 you know what? This job, I didn't ask for this job. I never really thought about it before they gave it to me and it kind of sucks.
So whatever happens, happens.

Speaker 1 I mean, but

Speaker 1 what do you have have to gain by losing your job and doing Ukraine?

Speaker 4 Well, it looks like he's going to lose either way.

Speaker 1 No, no. I think if he said no to Ukraine, if he said absolutely not, I'm not moving these bills, fuck off.

Speaker 1 He would like the Washington establishment and mainly Democrats and a few random Republicans who are left would be like write not beds about him. But what the fuck does he care?

Speaker 4 I mean, yes, I will. Just in the spirit of good faith that you brought to this conversation, I will agree with you that I think he...

Speaker 1 Just trying to deal with with your knee-jerk partisanship as always you know that's right just try what jury are you trying to get on

Speaker 1 i read the wall street journal editorial page

Speaker 4 um i i he was fine with ukraine before he became speaker and then changed his position to keep being speaker oh you know i guess one way less generous way of thinking about this is he realizes he's going to lose his job at some point he's probably not willing to hand ukraine to russia for initial three months of speaker so maybe there's that plenty of his colleagues but good for you know what good good for him good for him right good for him no i mean i'm saying this to like as a good for mike johnson but it's also infuriating because it's like oh you believe the intelligence guess what like all you would have had to do is uh you didn't even have to get intelligence briefings you could have just like read the news

Speaker 1 there wasn't like whatever fucking twitter rabbit hole you've been down and uh and fox news and all that bullshit.

Speaker 4 And it's just a needed delay. We could have done this six months ago.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 If there's a motion to vacate,

Speaker 1 he would basically be ousted because they have such a small margin in the House. All it would take is like, you know, a couple of Republicans at this point.

Speaker 1 So it could be Marjorie Taylor Greene. I don't know what the count is.
One more, two more. It's not that much.
So Democrats would have to step in and save him.

Speaker 1 Do you think they should? I think they will. It seems like it.

Speaker 4 Some Democrats have already publicly said that if he brings

Speaker 4 these foreign aid bills to a vote, they would save him over that. Is it annoying that we have to save him? Absolutely.
Right.

Speaker 4 Like, the Republican Party is just like so fucked up and incompetent and at each other's throats that it's being essentially led around by Barjrew Taylor Greene that we actually have to do that.

Speaker 4 And the idea that Democrats are going to vote to keep someone with views as odious as Mike Johnson as Speaker, just so the government can function sucks. Like that really does sucks.

Speaker 4 But it's ultimately, it's probably the responsible thing to do here because there's not some, you know, Aaron Sorkin-esque bipartisan power sharing agreement in the wings. It's Mike Johnson.

Speaker 4 And if he loses, you know, there's, you've seen reporting about this, is that a lot of problems think there's, that's it. There's no one else who can get the votes.

Speaker 4 And just so the government will be unable to function in a time of wars abroad, that'd be crazy.

Speaker 1 We also have one more funding fight. I think the deadline is end of September.

Speaker 1 Remember, they do not fund this government through the election. So, like, do we really want?

Speaker 1 I mean, could Joe Biden blame a shutdown on Speaker Marjorie Taylor Greene when he's on the campaign trail in October?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and maybe it works, but like, do we want to introduce that variable into the calculation?

Speaker 1 And do we want just people to suffer for the government shutting down because some person even kookier than Mike Johnson is the Speaker of the House?

Speaker 1 And you weigh that against the political benefit we would get from the circus that would come from Mike Johnson being deposed and then another 50 votes till they find the next MAGA speaker.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't know that we got the Democrats got much political benefit out of the McCarthy

Speaker 1 ouster. So, like, I don't know.
I don't think it makes a huge difference.

Speaker 4 No one is paying.

Speaker 4 No one's paying attention. No one's paying attention.
We can't get people to pay attention to this fucking presidential campaign.

Speaker 4 I know.

Speaker 4 To follow the ins and outs of Congress, like people are not, people dropped off of this podcast when you brought up Congress.

Speaker 1 Even

Speaker 1 I said there's a lot of action in Congress right now. You don't think that was a.

Speaker 4 Oh, congressional action. People are like,

Speaker 4 let me go to noise cancellation mode so I can't be distracted.

Speaker 4 Just, I don't think that people would notice it enough that it would, it's worth the price to pay.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Like, I think that's the benefit.

Speaker 4 It should be great, but no one has dialed it enough to know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I feel the same way. All right, we're going to move off this topic.

Speaker 4 Come back, people. Come back.

Speaker 1 So, the highest-profile MAGA kook trying to claw her way into Congress next year is Carrie Lake, who's running against Ruben Gallego for the Arizona Senate seat, being vacated by Kirsten Cinema.

Speaker 1 Replacing cinema with an actual Democrat wouldn't just help the party maintain control of the Senate.

Speaker 1 Gallego could be the vote needed to pass national abortion protections, voting rights, and other things that cinema never loved as much as she loved the filibuster.

Speaker 1 In 2022, Lake only lost to now Governor Katie Hobbs by 0.7%.

Speaker 1 She's currently trailing Gallego by anywhere from five to eight points. But there's only been a couple polls in the last couple of months, so I wouldn't take that to the bank.

Speaker 1 Two potential reasons she's trailing.

Speaker 1 One, her previous support for the state's 1864 total abortion ban, which the state Supreme Court has allowed to go into effect, and Republicans in the legislature have so far refused to repeal.

Speaker 1 And two, comments like this from just the other day.

Speaker 16 And we need to strap on our.

Speaker 16 let's see, what do we want to strap on? We're going to strap on our

Speaker 1 seatbelt.

Speaker 1 We're going to put on our helmet or your Kerry Lake ball cap.

Speaker 16 We are going to put on the armor of God.

Speaker 16 And maybe strap on a Glock on the side of us just in case.

Speaker 1 What do we want to strap on, Dan?

Speaker 1 It's like she just

Speaker 1 left it hanging there. She's like, what do we want to strap on? And you're like, oh, no.
Oh, no. And then it's like,

Speaker 1 and then the answer is God and a Glock.

Speaker 4 And I would say, just as someone who's a real admirer of organic plugs, what have pitched the Gary Lake ball cap?

Speaker 1 Organic plugs.

Speaker 1 It just keeps getting better.

Speaker 1 So not the most salacious thing she could have told in the strap but certainly the most dangerous.

Speaker 1 So there you have it. One candidate wants more Arizonans to have guns.
The other one wants them to have health care. Seems like it should be a pretty clear choice, no?

Speaker 4 You would hope.

Speaker 1 That's not even the first time she has said something like this. Like

Speaker 1 she has told her supporters to like arm themselves. And in the, not just like, I love the Second Amendment and you should have the right to bear arms.

Speaker 1 Like arm yourself because this is going to be a tough election. Arm yourself.
Like in the context of the election, after we just saw January 6th a couple of years ago, it's fucking wild, man.

Speaker 4 This seems so, such like such a pedantic thing to say, but the polls do show that advocating for political violence is bad. Yeah.

Speaker 1 No, I think that's a

Speaker 1 good question. It's good to state.
It's good to state because a lot of people are like, oh, it's not going to matter. Who's like, yeah, it's not going to matter to her supporters.

Speaker 1 That's why they're her supporters. But,

Speaker 1 you know, Arizona is a pretty close state. And there's probably a lot of people who are not Cary Lake supporters, and there's some people who are undecided, and there you go.

Speaker 1 And there's just the fact that, like, you know, you have candidates talking like that, and you have Trump doing his thing.

Speaker 1 It's going to be a very contentious election, and it's just, it's playing with fire. It's playing with fire.

Speaker 1 Lake has been trying really hard to pretend she never supported the 1864 abortion ban.

Speaker 1 She's basically talking like she's suddenly pro-choice and apparently has been calling Republicans in the legislature to try to convince them to repeal the ban.

Speaker 1 So far, no takers in the House. I think she's got a few in the state Senate who might be trying now.
I feel like this is going to be even harder for Lake to pull off than it will be for Trump

Speaker 1 since she is like, there's audio of her saying that she supports the 1864 ban. But I don't know.
What do you think?

Speaker 4 Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 4 It's going to be, we've talked many times about how Trump gets a little bit of a pass on abortion compared to other Republicans because he is a sleaze ball who cheats on his wife and is from Manhattan, all, all the above.

Speaker 4 But Carrie Lake is on video.

Speaker 4 There are audio recordings of her supporting this law. And there's going to be, and this is a low-end estimate, $120 million of ads with that footage to show voters.

Speaker 4 Like, I don't, she is not going to be able to escape this. She might be able to get voters to focus on another issue.
than abortion.

Speaker 4 I'm very skeptical she can actually accomplish that, but she, this is, she, this is a huge problem for her, which is why she's desperately trying to get them to to repeal the law, because that's the one thing she could do that could lower the salience of the issue.

Speaker 1 I also think the other danger for her in this race, because she has been trying to moderate herself here and there, though certainly not, she certainly didn't succeed with that Glock comment.

Speaker 1 But I think the danger now is that there's going to be a large segment of voters who see her as too extreme.

Speaker 1 But she's also sounding like she's dishonest, full of shit, like a typical politician by, you know, just saying things that are obviously flip-flops in service of trying to win an election.

Speaker 1 And I think once you're in that territory, then you're both extreme and full of shit. And it doesn't really help you out too much.

Speaker 4 Yeah, seeming like her, the reason why she did so much better than Blake Masters last time was in part Mark Kelly, no, known quantity,

Speaker 4 so much more so than Katie Hobbs, who Carolick's running against, but is that she seemed, she seemed, she has been to date the most authentic seeming replica of Trumpism,

Speaker 4 right? Not just the extremism, but the on-the-stump performance, the outsider appeal. And

Speaker 4 if she's trying, if she becomes like a normal politician,

Speaker 4 that is going to undermine that bit of her strength that allowed her to run ahead of some other Republicans.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So Trump's pollster put out a memo saying their poll shows only 11% of Arizonans followed the news about the abortion ban. It was mostly Democrats.

Speaker 1 It's far from the top issue for voters and that voters prefer Trump's position over Biden's.

Speaker 1 Speaking of bullshit, you think there's any truth to any of that? Or is it just all, what do you think?

Speaker 4 I think that poll is ridiculous. I think the reporters who reported on it kind of dropped the ball there because the you have to when

Speaker 4 the good thing is there was some transparency from the Trump people. They actually put out the poll questions they asked.

Speaker 4 And the way they framed Biden's position was absurd and not a position at all.

Speaker 1 It says, Biden supports unrestricted access to universal abortion, including abortion up through the ninth month of pregnancy, and he supports taxpayer funds to pay for abortions for any reason.

Speaker 1 And then the Trump was like, Trump believes the decision on abortion laws should be left up to the state so that voters in each state can decide.

Speaker 1 However, he's opposed to late-term abortion and would end federal taxpayer funding of abortions. So Trump wins that 5140, and then he wins 4541 among persuadable voters.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 4 Just think about it this way, right?

Speaker 4 This is actually a sign of huge weakness for the Trump people, which is they've given the worst possible, most dishonest version of Biden's plan, and they're winning by four points.

Speaker 1 That was my first thought, honestly.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.
It's what I, what I think is probably true and worth noting is that probably a lot of people have no idea that this law passed and that we're going to have to just, this is.

Speaker 4 This whole election comes down to narrowing the news chasm between what is happening

Speaker 4 and the voters.

Speaker 4 And so, I mean, this is like people know a lot more about this than Trump's trial, other things, because it's a huge deal in the the state and being talked about in the state and covered in the state.

Speaker 4 But people are probably not following it. A lot of people are not following it closely because they're not following news closely.

Speaker 1 And again, this is not just a problem we can yell about and yell at the media for. Like, this is a problem for all of us to help solve, too.

Speaker 1 This is a, you always say this, like, we're our own messengers now.

Speaker 1 And when you, this is part of narrowing that chasm that you talked about is going to be the work that we do between now and November. All of us, everyone wants to volunteer.

Speaker 1 So, you know, here's

Speaker 1 here's an organic plug. VotesafeAmerica.com.
How's that?

Speaker 1 Nice. Not as organic as whatever.
Coco Star message box.

Speaker 4 Strap-ons. Carrie Lake's ball caps.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 4 if the ad salespeople aren't out there trying to get a sponsor with the strap-on segment, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Strap-ons in Civil War. Is that the good title?

Speaker 4 Marjorie, Carrie Lake Straps-On for Civil War.

Speaker 1 Speaking of Civil War, when we come back,

Speaker 1 I will talk to to the writer and director of Civil War, Alex Garland. Two quick things before we go to break.

Speaker 1 If you want to fight back against book bans, the Crooked Store is doing a flash sale on all Free the Books merch.

Speaker 1 Free the Books tees, sweatshirts, and magnets are 30% off, but the sale won't last long. So make like a conservative who found out about a kid's book with a gay character in it and act quickly.

Speaker 1 Head to crooked.com slash store to shop before the sale ends.

Speaker 1 Also, the entire second season of World Corrupt, co-hosted by Tommy and and Men and Blazers Roger Bennett, is officially out on the Pod Save the World feed.

Speaker 1 If you're a fan of the series, you'll be excited to hear that Roger is logging onto Crooked's Friend of the Pod Discord for a round of Ask Me Anything on Thursday, April 25th at noon Pacific.

Speaker 1 Ask him about anything, including the making of this latest season of World Corrupt, Saudi Arabia's big investments into soccer, F1 racing. And honestly, any embarrassing question about Tommy.

Speaker 1 That's what I'm just recommending. If you're not a member, you can head to crooked.com slash friendsnow to sign up.
Check out World Corrupt. It's a fantastic series.

Speaker 1 If you haven't listened to the first season, check out both. If you have, the second season is fantastic.
So take a listen.

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Speaker 10 What's poppin' listeners? I'm Lacey Mosley, host of the podcast Scam Goddess, the show that's an ode to fraud and all those who practice it.

Speaker 10 Each week I talk with very special guests about the scammiest scammers of all time. Want to know about the fake heirs? We got them.
What about a career con man? We've got them too.

Speaker 10 Guys that will wine and dine you and then steal all your coins. Oh, you know they are represented because representation matters.

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Speaker 1 If you're someone like me who worries about our democracy falling apart, boy, do I have the film for you.

Speaker 1 Civil War is a vivid depiction of what it might look like for America to dissolve into armed warring factions and what it would look like for journalists to try to cover that story for the rest of the world.

Speaker 1 It's number one at the box office, the biggest hit yet from our friends at A24. And we are lucky to have with us today the man who wrote and directed the film, Alex Garland.

Speaker 1 Alex, welcome to Pod Save America.

Speaker 6 Thank you very much. Pleased to be here.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 So for the last eight years, I have lost countless hours of sleep worrying about the scenario this movie is about. So I wasn't really sure that I wanted to see it, but I did, and I loved it.

Speaker 1 I've been telling everyone to see it.

Speaker 1 You started writing this movie in the summer of 2020, which was the beginning of a period when I really felt for the first time like everything here could just fall apart.

Speaker 1 Why did you want to make a movie about that?

Speaker 6 I would bet it's for exactly the same reasons that you were spending all those sleepless nights. I was also having the same sleepless nights for the same reasons.

Speaker 6 And it was a huge topic of conversation in public discourse, but also private, like

Speaker 6 friends, family, again and again and again, month after month, year after year.

Speaker 6 the newest jolt of shock as the escalation of strangeness continued.

Speaker 6 My country was in one sort of paroxysm or another.

Speaker 6 So was yours. So were several other countries, many other countries.
And

Speaker 6 I wrote it for exactly the same reason you might have written it.

Speaker 1 How did you feel? Because you started writing the script in June. How did you feel about the script when you saw January 6th go down?

Speaker 6 So the script pre-existed. Something else pre-existed as well, which is

Speaker 6 there was a lot of talk. There had been talk

Speaker 6 from smart people for a long time, time, which said,

Speaker 6 if you

Speaker 6 use language in a certain kind of way, if you use violent language, it will lead to actual violence, that that will be the product of it eventually. And

Speaker 6 that was one of those warnings that turned out to be completely true for exactly the reasons the warning was stated.

Speaker 6 and actually in the way the warning was stated as well, pretty much, I think.

Speaker 6 And so

Speaker 6 what I felt was a mixture of huge shock and no surprise and

Speaker 6 the weird dissonance between those two things.

Speaker 1 I know your filmmaking is more focused on starting conversations than giving answers. What was the conversation you were hoping to start with this film?

Speaker 6 I do say that. Yeah, I do.
And

Speaker 6 it is true. And in a way, in a sense, the conversation was with the centre-right to an extent.
And that's because I'm centre-left.

Speaker 6 And it ran along the lines of

Speaker 6 what are points of agreement. And

Speaker 6 I think

Speaker 6 that is because one of my realizations in

Speaker 6 summer of 2020 is that I would always have described myself for years and years and years as left-wing. If somebody said, what are you? I'd have said left-wing.

Speaker 6 And in some respects, in ideological terms, I could be really very left-wing

Speaker 6 on particular issues, I suppose. And around that time, I realized I'm not left-wing, I'm centrist.
That is to say, I'm left of center.

Speaker 6 And it was the word centrist and the way I felt attached to the concept of centrism,

Speaker 6 and suddenly having a kind of epiphany about it in a way, and realizing that I had framed politics as left-right, and I no longer in a way cared about left-right.

Speaker 6 I do care about left-right on some ideological issues of the function of running a country, like how taxes are spent or something like that.

Speaker 6 But I don't care about left-right when the issue is centrism versus extremism.

Speaker 6 And at that point, I'm a centrist and I have far, far more in common with someone on the center-right than I do on an extreme.

Speaker 1 Does that make sense? Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. What was going on that made you think,

Speaker 1 not that you're not left-wing, that you cared less about being left-wing than you did about being center-left?

Speaker 6 Because

Speaker 6 within a sort of reasonably functioning democracy, me, as it were, my side trading power with the other side for an amount of time is not catastrophic. It's the normal running of a Western democracy.

Speaker 6 It's what you would expect. In fact, it's sort of what you would want, inasmuch as that you don't really want

Speaker 6 any one party to be in power indefinitely, because then other sorts of problems start to arrive. That is

Speaker 6 typical of a very kind of century statement, actually, but that's where I am.

Speaker 6 Extremism poses something completely different, not the trading of power. It starts at a certain point to pose existential threats,

Speaker 6 not normal back and forth. And by the way, I do want to say, because we're having a political conversation, that

Speaker 6 I have issues with centrism. I'm not saying it's like a great sort of perfect solution,

Speaker 6 but when you put it alongside extremism,

Speaker 6 most of those problems melt away in comparison to what you're facing.

Speaker 1 I think that the challenge people have had in liberal democracies over the last decade now is

Speaker 1 if you have a,

Speaker 1 and right now we're seeing this in this country and in your country and all over the world, a sort of right-wing populism that has sort of morphed into extremism, that has seemed authoritarian much more in certain places than others.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 when one party and one or one political movement is becoming so extreme,

Speaker 1 the challenge is how do you how do you counter that without

Speaker 1 becoming extreme yourself, but also knowing that you need to warn people that they're becoming extreme.

Speaker 6 Or just stop the sentence earlier.

Speaker 6 Just stop it earlier, which is how do you counter that? That's it. Full stop or period, as you say in the States.

Speaker 6 One of the issues was I could see that

Speaker 6 my side was failing to contain right-wing extremism. So whatever it was we were doing

Speaker 6 was not effective. And I became increasingly concerned about what was effective.

Speaker 6 And in fact, in my country, something really odd is happening, which is that the left is about to win a huge victory over the right.

Speaker 6 And the right in my country has, I think, objectively been extremist.

Speaker 6 And they are not winning the victory in a funny way because they have done anything. Really, the right has just collapsed in the way extremist

Speaker 6 governments or parties can collapse, which is really under the weight of their own madness. And so the left just had to wait.

Speaker 6 And in fact, clearly at a certain point decided to stop being extremist themselves as a counter to the extreme right. And

Speaker 6 the current leader, whatever he might present to the world, has moved into a much more censorist ground and then in a way just shut up. He's just stopped speaking.
And

Speaker 6 he does make pronouncements, but they're very kind of banal, bland, sort of broadly reasonable pronouncements and just waits for the right to burn up, which they're doing incredibly effectively, like they are toast.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 that might be,

Speaker 6 it's just not a very satisfactory answer, which is wait until the other side destroys themselves. Sometimes something more active has to be done.

Speaker 6 The easiest thing for me to say is I've got no idea what the answer to your question was, except that I thought one of the ideas might be to stop demonizing the centre-right.

Speaker 6 And somehow I felt that the left, again, which I was part of, was repeatedly, effectively making the same statement as Hillary Clinton, was sort of making a basket of deplorable statement again and again and again and again and again.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 I couldn't see how a reasonable consensus would arrive out of that.

Speaker 6 People would just get more fed up and more extremist. And that

Speaker 6 could,

Speaker 6 it's a small could, but could be a road to hell.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's funny.

Speaker 1 I have said in the past that

Speaker 1 we treat sort of Trump voters as we're trying to judge them morally, which is a fine thing to do.

Speaker 1 But if we want to sustain a democracy in a country of over 300 million people, like we got to all live together because if we can't figure out a way to live with these people whose political views we abhor, then we're not going to have a country and it's going to fall apart into a civil war.

Speaker 1 And there's your movie.

Speaker 6 But I would say, on a sort of deep internal level, I don't think that's a fine thing to do because

Speaker 6 I know

Speaker 6 I have friends who are Trump voters. I have friends who are right-wing.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 they are not deplorable. They may be Trump voters voters for any number of reasons.

Speaker 6 Some of them are actually

Speaker 6 very similar to the reason I'm left-wing, which is the family I grew up in. I grew up in a left-wing family, and I took on those ideas, and I agree with them.

Speaker 6 In a way, I'm culturally left-wing. And some people are culturally right-wing and

Speaker 6 demonizing people for that reason doesn't seem fine. I strongly agree with what you said, that it is a mistake.

Speaker 6 I believe it is a mistake to make an ethical judgment on the basis of someone's voting preference.

Speaker 6 You can make an ethical judgment

Speaker 6 on the basis of whether they're racist or not. You can certainly make an ethical judgment there.
You certainly can't make an ethical judgment based on whether someone believes in the free market.

Speaker 6 I don't believe in the free market, but I don't think the argument for it is irrational or unethical. I just don't happen to agree with it.
And

Speaker 6 I have, I've been saying this sort of centrist stuff in interviews. And what

Speaker 6 people keep saying is that I am apolitical and the film is apolitical. And I think that that is

Speaker 6 that is only true if politics means left versus right. And if politics only means left versus right, then that polarization is a kind of inevitable product of that form of thinking.

Speaker 6 Politics should be a much, much broader term,

Speaker 1 in my opinion. No, I look,

Speaker 1 I should be probably one of those critics because I like started a media company to defeat Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 Like I should be one of those critics who are like, oh, it should have been more explicitly political. I left the movie feeling like very glad you decided against that.

Speaker 1 And also I thought there was more than enough context, like knowing Nick Offertman was a three-term fascist president who kills journalists.

Speaker 1 Like, so I thought, I thought the movie was maybe ideological, but not partisan and ideological only, not in the left-right sense, but in the sense of like authoritarianism versus like liberal democracy.

Speaker 6 Yeah, exactly. So, just to say, according to my way of thinking, it could be anti-Donald Trump without being anti-right wing.
And I think there's a complicated for me in myself.

Speaker 6 I am even unclear whether Donald Trump is right-wing.

Speaker 6 According to the terms I understand right-wing, really, I think he's, honestly, I think he's insane.

Speaker 6 I think he's kind of, he's, he's sort of, he, he gives indications of being unbalanced and he gives indications of being authoritarian.

Speaker 6 And I, and, and I would say that right wing thinking is not by necessity, either insane or authoritarian. So I, I'm, I'm not sure whether to bracket him there.

Speaker 6 I also think, by the way, if the left, this is one of the things that

Speaker 6 I'm going to just modulate the language that I'm sort of instinctively reaching for, but if

Speaker 6 the left wants to combat right-wing extremism, it needs to be in the business of winning elections.

Speaker 6 That's its job. That is the function of the left in a situation like this is hands down, flat out to win an election.

Speaker 6 And you do not win an election without usually persuading people of the other side to come and join you. And you don't do that by screaming at them and telling them they're unethical.

Speaker 6 And I have felt personally vindicated by some of the responses that I have seen, not vindicated in a good way, but vindicated in a bleak way, by seeing the left in a way do that.

Speaker 6 I find it depressing because I'm left-wing. And what I really want to do is remove what I see as dangerous extremists from occupying mainstream political parties.

Speaker 1 And surely social media amplifies that problem.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I sit in focus groups of voters a lot. And

Speaker 1 so when I see Trump voters or swing voters, like I don't think people who yell about this stuff on social media all the time realize how complex and weird voters can be and have all kinds of different feelings and positions on issues.

Speaker 1 And I totally agree on the persuasion thing.

Speaker 6 Just how human they can be, just how like normal human beings they can be.

Speaker 6 It's

Speaker 6 and social media.

Speaker 6 I mean, this would be where I'd start to betray my political colors, possibly with a different sort of language.

Speaker 6 It's just a rampantly capitalist, unregulated exercise with a tiny group of super, super rich, powerful people with

Speaker 6 a kind of politics that makes me twitch.

Speaker 6 And I kind of

Speaker 6 think in some ways,

Speaker 6 one of the questions I keep asking myself is why

Speaker 6 would Woodward and Bernstein not be as effective today as they were back in the 70s? Why is breaking a story about corruption not effective in the way it used to be?

Speaker 6 That's a complicated answer, but a big chunk of that answer is social media.

Speaker 1 Yes. No, I totally agree.

Speaker 1 Can you talk about how you calibrated the level of political detail and context to include in the movie?

Speaker 1 Was it like, was it pure storytelling decisions or were there some larger political landmines you were trying to avoid?

Speaker 6 No, there were political points I was trying to make. And I've broadly been making the points while we've been talking,

Speaker 6 which is a kind of reaching out on what do we agree on

Speaker 6 approach, I suppose.

Speaker 6 And also by not,

Speaker 6 when I talk about extremism,

Speaker 6 that would go into two different directions.

Speaker 6 I think the left are problematic, that is to say the far left, the extremist left, are problematic in a different kind of way to the extremist right, but they

Speaker 6 they're problematic if you want to win elections, I think. And if you want to defeat the right, then that becomes tricky, I suppose.

Speaker 6 I think also

Speaker 6 I made a set of assumptions, which is on a point of agreement.

Speaker 6 One of the things people keep saying about the film is why doesn't it explain, as it were,

Speaker 6 the sequence of events from the present day to the start of the civil war?

Speaker 6 Why is that left blank? And one of the reasons I didn't is because I don't think the reasons for this civil war would lie between this point now and the future.

Speaker 6 I think they all essentially lie in the past.

Speaker 6 They are things that precede this moment, not things that follow this moment. And

Speaker 6 in other words, they relate to history and

Speaker 6 the way in which history is dealt with or not dealt with. And

Speaker 6 I think that

Speaker 6 one of the politicals, sort of, I suppose it's an oblique political statement was leaving that question deliberately in the mind of the viewer

Speaker 6 to contemplate that

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 come to some kind of conscious or,

Speaker 6 by the way, unconscious conclusion.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I know you've answered a ton of questions about this,

Speaker 1 but I always assume that the big reason that you had Texas and California on the same side is so that the discussion about the movie wouldn't just be a continuation of our current political debate.

Speaker 1 And as someone who looks into the demographics of voters and everything, I could see a situation where Texas becomes a little bluer and it becomes more of a rural-urban divide, which you sort of hint at in the movie as well.

Speaker 6 And also these things change. Right.
But they change over time.

Speaker 6 They have changed in the past and they will change again in the future. This is

Speaker 6 the...

Speaker 6 Things are not concretized in that way. But also, I felt

Speaker 6 there was another point there, which is that the president is presented as the extension of extremism, which is fascism.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 I'm using fascism in quite a broad term, just authoritarian.

Speaker 6 It's not born from the right. I mean, there are fascist theocracies, I mean,

Speaker 6 or fascist communist leaders, as it were. And

Speaker 6 so what I felt was

Speaker 6 So if part of the thinking behind the movie is, what do we agree on here are texas and california agreeing they're saying actually

Speaker 6 our political positions are less important than this fascist president um which to me in a way would be rational in in fact i think it is rational yeah um

Speaker 6 and in the face of fascism the thing to do would be to agree that it's bad and and your

Speaker 6 as it were your family cultural ideological ideological background becomes immediately secondary to the problems that fascism presents which is why we have a uh a cheney on our side

Speaker 6 here in the us right now i and and would one want to not have a cheney on your side for for me on the left no i'm very glad to

Speaker 6 i i'm i'm delighted by it because it feels like a rational voice within a party that has entirely the capacity to be rational. Like rational thinking literally cannot just be the preserve of the left.

Speaker 6 If you think it's the preserve of the left, you are being prejudiced. And

Speaker 6 I do not want to be prejudiced. I can't be prejudiced because I genuinely, I have right wing friends and it's not an affectation.

Speaker 6 I am fascinated by their thoughts and opinions and also having a beer with them, they make me laugh, and I enjoy their company. And

Speaker 6 what of it? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, I thought the most frighteningly realistic part of the movie is how so many Americans are just intent on pretending the war isn't happening and think they'll somehow be able to avoid dealing with it.

Speaker 1 You have characters talking about how their families are sitting on farms pretending it's not happening. There's a scene where you go into a town where it looks like there's no war at all.

Speaker 1 Why did you want to make that part of the story?

Speaker 6 I bet for the reasons you think, which is number one, some people ignore everything when it's a few feet away from them.

Speaker 6 And that is a,

Speaker 6 you know, that's easy to find, right?

Speaker 6 There'll be people you work with or people in your family who are doing exactly that. I think there's another thing as well, which is that even within conflict,

Speaker 6 there can be

Speaker 6 surprising normalcy.

Speaker 6 And so in other words, you can find a market flourishing, or

Speaker 6 sometimes points of the heated point of conflict are not broadly slathered all over the land. They are in localized and intensely dangerous areas, but some places can be surprisingly unaffected.
And

Speaker 6 a lot of people, when normal life can go on, what they do is continue with normal life. They will continue with it up to the point that they can't.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 in some respects, that is an extension of the state we find

Speaker 6 now not in wartime.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 6 So there's a neat line to be drawn between the two.

Speaker 1 No, I mean, I found that terrifying because I think when people wonder, oh, could civil war happen here?

Speaker 1 You're like, well, I can't imagine the entire country and two armies like the last civil war we had and going at each other all the time because like look around.

Speaker 1 And yeah, well, you could look around, and everything could be quite normal. And then a couple cities away, something's happening.

Speaker 1 And in a way, that makes the continuation and the deepening of the war almost more likely because a lot of people are just ignoring what's happening.

Speaker 6 And a lot of civil wars are not fought over an issue,

Speaker 6 or if they are, the issue is just generalized disintegration and factionalization.

Speaker 1 Right, which is also scary.

Speaker 6 So,

Speaker 6 your civil war is not typical of all civil wars.

Speaker 6 There was an incredibly clear issue and an ethical issue to rally around, but that's really not always the case.

Speaker 6 Different factions might have an ethical issue to rally around,

Speaker 6 removing their own authoritarian leader,

Speaker 6 but other ones might not.

Speaker 1 And yeah, sure.

Speaker 1 I don't know if you read Ross Duthet's column about the movie in the New York Times, but his basic take is that he doesn't think we're at risk for a civil war because the unrest we saw between the summer of 2020 and January 6th hasn't continued, was a product of the extreme and unusual circumstances surrounding sort of a once-in-a-century pandemic, and that most Americans just don't support political violence.

Speaker 1 Like we're at each other's throat online and we're always fighting and we're polarized, but we just we don't have it in it to really be that violent. What do you think of that?

Speaker 6 I think that could very, very easily and likely and also hopefully be true, but

Speaker 6 but

Speaker 6 but the concept of a civil war can also be a form of metaphor for another kind of entrenched conflict that leads to something. And the thing it leads to is people suffering.

Speaker 6 The product,

Speaker 6 extremism and

Speaker 6 populist politics and division does not

Speaker 6 only become bad and problematic at the moment people start shooting each other. It can be problematic way, way before that point.

Speaker 6 And so, in other words, it's not like everything's fine until civil war breaks out. Division of that sort

Speaker 6 on its own

Speaker 6 right now can cause problems, significant problems.

Speaker 6 Not only that, it can stop other problems from being fixed. So not only does it bring new problems into play, it also seizes everybody up where social improvement is concerned.
So yeah, sure,

Speaker 6 that guy could be right.

Speaker 6 And I hope he is perfectly legitimate, reasonable point to make, but

Speaker 6 civil war isn't the only game in town. And this is a movie being illustrative.
of a problem at its extension, but the problem it's being illustrative of is

Speaker 6 broader than that.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, Jr.: So, this is a movie about journalists, and you've said it's about the importance of objective journalism.

Speaker 1 I talked to a journalist walking out of the screening who said she was surprised because she felt that it was actually critical of journalists and that the characters seemed to care more about getting the story and the shot than they did about anything else, even their fellow citizens

Speaker 1 and their country falling apart all around them and people dying.

Speaker 1 What do you say to that?

Speaker 6 Well, I'd say that's a subjective response, and that's typical of responses to stories when you offer them up.

Speaker 6 That is to say, my subjective response is that it's admiring of journalists and hers is that it's critical. And in some ways, that could be the end of that exchange, except I could say

Speaker 6 why I think it is not critical. And I think, to me, it's actually something quite simple, which is that...

Speaker 6 Number one, a journalist's motivation can get separated from the product of what they do. So a journalist may well be motivated for careerist reasons or just competitiveness.
So their career, so

Speaker 6 careerist, they get a promotion, competitiveness, they get a scoop that doesn't lead to a promotion, but it gives them a dopamine hit, right? That's just sort of life and work and stuff like that.

Speaker 6 But the product of that journalism has a societal function.

Speaker 6 So as an individual,

Speaker 6 like

Speaker 6 that they may or may not

Speaker 6 demonstrate great sort of,

Speaker 6 I don't know, moral certainty and ethical behavior and stuff like that.

Speaker 6 It would vary person to person, but that would not negate the product.

Speaker 6 And then there's, so in other words, show them as conflicted, show them as morally compromised. It doesn't matter.
That's fine.

Speaker 6 They're allowed to be those things, just like I am, just like you are, just like everybody is.

Speaker 6 But they are doing something else, which is that

Speaker 6 in the acquisition of the product for whatever reason it is.

Speaker 6 And I think at times, by the way, Lee, the sort of lead journalist, lead photojournalist, does present an ethical argument about what journalists. So I would also,

Speaker 6 listen, it's not as clear as she'd like, maybe, but that's sort of my stock in trade. So, okay.

Speaker 6 I think that they're doing something simple alongside all of that, which is showing enormous physical courage, huge, huge physical courage. And I do admire that.

Speaker 6 So that is the other part of the component. That's the other thing that I'm presenting.

Speaker 6 I've known many journalists very well who do exactly that thing and I admire them for it.

Speaker 6 So if I present that to the world or to that journalist and she says, well, I don't find that admirable, I'd say, okay, well, that's a difference between us.

Speaker 6 So I am startled and admiring of that and you're not.

Speaker 6 And by the way, if I put it like that, of course, I'm being a bit tricksy because she probably would say, yes, no, I do. Of course, I admire that.

Speaker 6 I realize that.

Speaker 6 I'm making a point. But

Speaker 6 I guess, all right. So there's my answer.
I don't care if they're conflicted as individuals.

Speaker 6 That kind of thing doesn't really bother me.

Speaker 6 They do great work. If they do it in an ideological way, which is to be non-partisan or put another way, impartial.
I think that's good for news reporters to be impartial.

Speaker 6 Lack of impartiality, I would attach the social media thing we were talking about before. I think it's problematic with reporters.

Speaker 6 And the other thing is they can be incredibly brave. So what's not to admire in that, I would say.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Although I hadn't read that piece, but that you mentioned, that's partly because I decided to detune from the debate, as it were.

Speaker 6 I had read

Speaker 6 another thing

Speaker 6 talking about the journalists being cold in some of their behaviors, shooting dying people, photographing dying people, or tortured people, or whatever.

Speaker 6 Number one is that is something that all photographers do

Speaker 6 and need to do it. And the other

Speaker 6 element of that is that I think in the example that's being used, she's actually using the camera to get out of a difficult situation.

Speaker 6 She is using the camera to be distracting in the moment from the direction this

Speaker 6 sequence of events could go. She's trying to, so I think it's not,

Speaker 6 in my mind, in narrative terms, it's not as it was presented.

Speaker 1 But anyway, that's probably true. I mean, to your earlier point about social media, the movie made me think that the larger incentive structure for journalism today, which is

Speaker 1 very driven by, you know, that the whole industry is having a tough time. And so you need clicks and you need audience.

Speaker 1 And you're also competing with a bunch of amateurs on social media, just spewing all kinds of crazy information.

Speaker 1 And so I do wonder if like the state of journalism right now and sort of the incentive structure is making the problem of authoritarianism worse and not better.

Speaker 6 I think that,

Speaker 6 there's that phrase that arrived when that book, Perfect Storm, came out, which was a very good phrase because

Speaker 6 it's so useful in so many

Speaker 6 sort of events.

Speaker 6 If you have politicians for corrupt reasons trying to undermine journalism and you have social media and you have journalistic institutions in a state of panic about the things that you just stated, that's a perfect storm.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I think that is,

Speaker 1 I think that's why we're worried about the exact scenario that you made a movie about. Alex Garland, thank you so much for joining Pod Save America.
Everyone go check out Civil War.

Speaker 1 It is an intense but important experience, I would say.

Speaker 1 Thanks again for your time.

Speaker 6 Can I say one more thing? Sure.

Speaker 1 You sure can.

Speaker 6 What I wanted to say is this is I've had to do an awful lot of interviews for this film and I almost never get a chance to say what I think for various reasons.

Speaker 6 It might be the length of the interview or it might be I'm being overly cautious because not everything I say is a perfect representation of what I think

Speaker 6 because for all the human reasons, I am grateful, I'm genuinely grateful that I got this opportunity with you to speak more freely because

Speaker 6 it's just on a personal level. It's relief.
So thanks.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you.

Speaker 1 It was a great conversation. And I, as someone who has been in in politics, been a writer,

Speaker 1 I very much understood and appreciated sort of all the intricacies that go into creating a story about politics that does not feed into the current political debate in a way that's counterproductive.

Speaker 1 So I think you did a masterful job of that.

Speaker 6 Thanks, man. Thanks.
Appreciate it. All right.
Take care. Bye, Bunch.

Speaker 6 Take care.

Speaker 1 All right. Thanks to Alex Garland for joining us today.
Everyone, have a great weekend. Dan and I and Tommy and Aaron Ryan will be at the LA Festival of Books doing a live Pod Save America on Sunday.

Speaker 1 And you will hear that episode on Monday. And then we'll have the usual Wednesday episode for you.
So have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon.

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Speaker 1 Plus, if you're as opinionated as we are, consider dropping us a review. Pod Save America is a crooked media production.
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Speaker 1 Our associate producers are Saul Rubin and Farah Safari. Kira Woakim is our senior producer.
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