Tim Miller: Our WWE Politics

Welcome to the Friday Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
I am back with Tim Miller. So first of all, happy Friday and welcome to New Orleans, Tim.
Hey, Charlie. It's good to be with you.
It's good to be here. It was a long drive.
I saw a lot of America. It was enjoyable, but I'm ready.
I'm ready to be in my new home. We ought to mention that we're actually taking this show on the road.

People wonder. It was a long drive.
I saw a lot of America. It was enjoyable, but I'm ready.
I'm ready to be in my new home.

We ought to mention that we're actually taking this show on the road.

People wondering, what is Charlie and Tim actually like?

What happens when we're in person?

We generally don't do this in person.

We did one podcast in Austin, Texas.

That's true.

You were batting your eyes at me.

It's like in person.

It's like, you know, the sparks.

You can feel it.

It's a different level of intensity when you're staring me in the eyes.

Yeah, it was not the batting of the eye thing.

I don't know what it was. But in any case, we're going to have an audience.
This is Charlie and Tim live in New York City, Thursday, May 18, 2023. I sense that you're a little bit nervous about this.
Sort of the one-on-one with the crowd. I love doing the live stuff.
It's so fun. Our other live events have been so great.
So something about you and me, though, we have an extra level of energy that who knows what's going to happen up there. Yeah.
So I don't know about nervous anxiety, some excited anxiety, but people should make a whole weekend out of it. New York is beautiful for two months a year, and May 18th should be it, right? Make a whole weekend out of it.
May is gorgeous. This is a two-part bulwark goes on the road.
You and I go on, and we go mano a mano. Lord knows where that's going to go.
Then we exit, and JVL and Sarah take over with Molly Jong Fast, whose podcast I did this week. So you have basically a double deuce, two scoops of the bulwark.
If you come to New York for all of this, you can get the ticket. And we'll hang out afterwards, have a beer.
At least I will. You might be tired.
I don't know. I'll hang out and have a beer.
I don't want to make promises for you. I was thinking of the format of the show.
People are going to go, well, you're not going to talk about Trump and DeSantis and all this other stuff, right? Because we've heard this on the podcast every single week.

So what I was thinking of doing was probing a question that I've heard from a lot of listeners, which is, and you know where I'm going on this, Tim.

Does Tim Miller not really know any musicals before 1990?

I mean, so, okay, Oklahoma.

I know the basic song.

Oklahoma, where the wind, something, something.

I saw it on Sesame Street.

This is good.

South Pacific.

I literally never.

You messaged me that on the sub stack, and that was the first time I'd ever heard of those.

I mean, I've heard the term South Pacific, like flying to the South Pacific, but I wasn't aware that it was a show. Okay, The King and I.
Is that about King Lear or? My Fair Lady. I mean, obviously, I've heard the phrase My Fair Lady, but I don't know any of the songs.
I think that what we need to do is I need to play some show tunes and ask people in the crowd. This will be a New York crowd, and they will all know it.
And I just want, like, okay, we're going to find one of these that Tim will recognize.

Do I get to do like jam band songs back at you?

Like I saw Winespread Panic at Madison Square Garden one time.

Can we do, can I like, I saw the strokes there.

Can we do a little, can we do one of those?

A little back and forth?

We could just do, was there a show like Name That Tune?

Maybe instead of doing the podcast,

we should just do Name That Tune live.

I don't know if people would pay $50 for that. I would not do name that tune live i don't know if people pay 50 for that i would not do well no i don't know anything about generally anything that has the word panic in it with large crowds i try to avoid okay but i do have something for you this morning okay and this is relevant okay this is not just off the wall all right let's play this and by the way i'm confident that you will be able to recognize this okay go ahead Hey, shut up! You put that howling down there and go to bed.

You are so... let's play this and by the way i'm confident that you will be able to recognize this okay you put that howling down there and go to bed you shut up you're gonna get the law on you and then call her back because she ain't gonna come you're gonna have a baby listen I hope they haul you in and turn a file into the devil's house.
You stinker.

Hey, Stella! Hey, Stella! This is a black and white movie, or is this in color? I'm just trying to get my bearings. Oh, no.
I think, is it on the waterfront? Is it on the waterfront? I don't even know why that's in my brain. This is my way of welcoming you to your new home in New Orleans.
It is one of the greatest movies set in New Orleans ever made. A Streetcar Named Desire.
Marlon Brando. Ooh, A Streetcar Named Desire.
I've heard about that. Now that you are officially a resident of New Orleans.
I need to watch that one? You have to watch that one. Okay.
Or at least do not let anyone else in New Orleans know that you are not familiar. Okay.
Well, this makes me feel bad because my husband, we were doing on the road trip, I was doing New Orleans music education for him. You know, we were doing The Meters and Dr.
John and just, you know, we did a little hip hop, the No Limit guy. It's like we wanted him to make Boosie badass.

You know, I wanted to make sure he knew all the New Orleans tunes,

but here I am now.

He needs to educate me the other way on the movies, I guess.

Because A Streetcar Named Desire,

I've seen that skit that you just played there,

parodied in other places, but, you know, the original.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah.

It's become a meme.

Hey, speaking of memes, we have to do this

because we're talking on Friday morning. So by Friday afternoon, this meme will already be beaten to death with hammers, okay? But can we talk about the various rapid unscheduled disassemblies that have taken place this week? Obviously, SpaceX blowing up after about four minutes.
In my newsletter this morning, I was tempted to make a snarky remark about the rapid unscheduled disassembly of ronda sandis's campaign but i thought that's unfair to the spacex rocket which at least made it off the launch pad which is still a question mark i guess speaking marks do you have your blue check mark i've lost my blue check mark it's so haphazard have you noticed this this is bill crystal still has does he does he see one of the people elon's paying the eight bucks out of his own pocket for i say that would be unlikely unlikely it's such a like these losers you know i mean who cares all right let's just start here who literally who cares it's embarrassing for bill to still have his check mark at this point it only matters and like there's some legitimate you know if, if you are the emergency services of New Orleans, like it'd be nice to know what the real one is, for example. Like there's some where it's serious, but who cares about us? Like pundits, whether we have it.
Yeah, you're right. I mean, there are some real world consequences and you have a lot of these emergency agencies who are going, hey, by the way, you know, we're kind of screwed and putting us out of business in various ways.
Elon doesn't give a shit. But the funniest part is, are you ready for this? I bet you notice this.
Now, people who don't have blue checks, I'm sorry to you, the unwashed masses, the second tier citizens that Elon is righteously fighting for. You might not know this, but we, the verified, had a special feed where we could just see things from people who also had blue checks that lived in our rarefied airs, kind of like an elite club.
He's taken away the blue checkmark, but we still have all that because he doesn't have any developers left. And so we...
But who are these people? Who are the people on the verified list? It's like, okay. But I still have all the benefits.
And now it's just weird people in there. It's like Turkey Neck replying to me.
I'm like,, who's turkey neck? There are many turkey necks out there. Okay, so while we were all distracted by the whole blue check mark thing, Elon Musk's Twitter deleted the labels that alerted users.
They were reading news from actual state-run propaganda outlets of authoritarian governments. So, for example, you know, Russia Today, TASS, the Chinese communist news agencies.
So last week it was like, I'm going to slap this label on NPR and, you know, PBS, like, yeah, because we really need to be warned about them. But now he's decided because he's Elon Musk and it's Friday, whatever, he's going to take off all the labels, including Sputnik and everything.
And it's like, so there's actually a tweet out there, which I believe I retweeted where the editor in chief of RT, which is a Russian propaganda outlet. Thanks Elon Musk for freeing her outlet from the state media label and making her appear more in searches.
This is great. Okay.
Thank you. Twitter delabeled me and all of our channels as public-funded media.
Now you can find me in the search. Brotherly Elon Musk, from the heart, says this Putin shill propaganda.
So congratulations. Yeah, good news.
Well, the good news is, yeah, they don't need to do bots anymore. You know, that was the whole theory of the bot program the bot program, was that they would create social media accounts that would appear to be legitimate, that would be tweeting Russian propaganda, but now they don't even have to do that.
Just the Russian propaganda accounts could just treat Russian propaganda. We have been doing some stacking on this.
Have you been pushing people over to our sub-stack notes? I'm trying to move over. Not as aggressive as I should, because it's very good.
It's excellent stuff. Yeah, I'm trying to move people over.
I mean, I'm a Twitter very good it's excellent stuff yeah i'm trying to move people over i mean i'm a twitter addict i'll be there till we die it'll be me the russian bots the crypto guys tom nichols i'm like that'll be the last five people on the site and you and um because we're addicted i admit it i wish i was not but i am but you know i mean things are getting ugly over there so we're stacking we're on our sub stack notes i'm grammingwark stuff now. We've got a Bulwark Reddit.
You know, we've got to diversify because it's even more than a freak show than it was. And it's like the guy just doesn't understand.
And we can all sound like the blue check stuff is kind of a little bit fart sniffing. Like the guy just doesn't understand what the purpose was of all of these things, right? Like there was a reason why you verified people, right? It's so that people couldn't get imitated.
There was a reason why that you tried to fight the fake bots so that people got, you know, real information, even if it was wrong, like information from legitimate sources, right? From people giving their real opinions, right? He's going to turn the thing into like the Craigslist scam pages, you know, where you can't even buy tickets on Craigslist anymore because everybody on there is a scammer because there's no there's no controls i like elon you know because he's in his little spacex bubble just doesn't understand that and he thought the whole thing was about like his pissing match with taylor lorenz and he's like about to lose 50 billion dollars over it wasn't really a great business deal it's a terrible business model especially when the heart of the business model is that you have millions of people, some of them actually talented, who are providing you with free content all the time. And what do you do? You find a way to piss them off and drive them away.
There are people out there who are giving you stuff for free all the time. You pay nothing for them.
This is a brilliant model that he's decided to dump on from a great height. That's what I say.
I have a problem here today with you, Tim. There's just so much stuff.
Where do we start? We talk about Rhonda Santas and the shitty week that he's had, a terrible week that he's had. We have a new Wall Street Journal poll showing that, once again, he's dropped double digits behind Donald Trump.
By the way, the Wall Street Journal poll has an interesting data point about the new Republican Party. 55% of Republicans say that fighting woke ideology in our schools and businesses is more important than protecting entitlements from cuts.
The funny part about that is, do you know what was behind that poll, Dana? This is the Wall Street Journal's own poll. That's such a weird thing to ask people.
What do you care more about, the wokes or entitlement cuts? It's like these guys are trying to nudge Trump and to stop talking so much about maintaining entitlements because there's still a handful of doctrinaire free market conservatives out there that want there to be entitlement cuts. So it's like we're going to do this poll comparing the woke versus the entitlement cuts.
It comes back that's still a quarter of the Republican Party. They do care about protecting entitlements, they found out, even though that's not what they wanted.
And half of the party is now obsessed with the woke. Did you see the clip of Ron DeSantis? Like where he says woke seven times in like 10 seconds.
We're going to stop the woke in the streets. We're going to stop the woke in the air.
We're going to stop the woke in the schools. It's just like, what are you talking about? Well, he's got his mantra.
And the problem is, you know, the 86th time you've heard that speech, you're going to go, okay, Ron, can we just move on? Can we just move on from your fight with Disney, which is one of the most mind boggling, stupid things that I can ever think of. Like in what political world, in what room full of political geniuses does someone say, hey, you know what, we can slingshot our way to the presidency by going after the happiest place on earth i want to get to the dizzy thing one second but i just want the 55 this is just a fundamental problem that republicans have gotten themselves into being very online like there was this period of time that was i think right and i'm going to write something about that so you go back to the 2020 primary early where the Democrats, like their staffers were so online.
They're like obsessed with these random progressive hobby horses that like 22-year-old progressives really care about, but nobody else does. And it hurt a lot of Democratic campaigns.
And like that was a common criticism of Democrats. I think there's been a readjustment on that, not maybe as far as maybe it could be, but a certain level of readjustment.
The Republicans now have the inverse of this. Fifty-nine percent of the base is obsessed with the woke in the schools.
And every swing voter has no idea what you're talking about. Just don't ask them to define it.
Right. Yeah, well, they can't define it.
But what about swing voters? There are certain people in my life that I think about who are like former Republican types who are not super daily Bulw super, you know, daily bulwark readers or listeners, like all of our good fans, like, you know, have other interests in life and are casual, you know, Romney Biden voters, right. They don't even know what you're talking about.
I literally can't define it. Don't understand it.
And your whole stump speech is about it. Like speaking in tongues.
Yeah. This whole stump speech.
And it's like, it's like you'd go to a, to hear Ron DeSantis and halfway through, he starts speaking in Chinese, like John Huntsman did on the debate stage that one time when I was working for him with my head in my hands, right? It's like, what are you – we don't even know what you're talking about. And yet, he feels like he has to do this.
Well, now, I think probably because he believes it. But also because half of the party in this Wall Street Journal poll, like that's what they care the most about.
So you're completely beholden. So this week, in my morning shots yesterday, I ran through a bunch of the headlines, how bad they are, people backing away from him, the way his trip to Washington sort of blew up in his face, more of his congressmen from Florida are endorsing against him.
And you can feel the conventional wisdom turning against him, including the recognition of something that we have talked about endlessly for months here at The Bulwark, which is the fact that Ron DeSantis does not simply play an asshole on television. He is one.
He's got a personality problem. He's not likable.
He's not warm and fuzzy. But also now this dawning recognition that, you know, the guy doesn't have very good political instincts and he's kind of locked into this commitment that, and I wrote yesterday that, you know, he has to fit in with the lizard people.
You know, I am a lizard person. I, you know, will fight the same people.
I hate the same people. I'm going to diss the same people.
I'm going to punch the people in the face that you actually hate, But he just doesn't have the skill to pull it off. I mean, it's like an ill-fitting suit, right? So he just thinks that he has to tell gays to shut the fuck up, bully college kids who wear a mask.
He has to sign a six-week abortion ban. He's bitch-slapping liberals all over the place and showing that he doesn't care about gun control or, you know, he's going to go after drag queens.
And by God, he's going to go after Disney World. And I think a lot of the rest of the country, including Republicans, is going, what are you doing, man? I mean, who are you? It's not happening for him, is it? So here's my question to you.
Is he going to blow up on the launch pad? I feel almost embarrassed to ask the question because it's clear he's running. But is there a chance now that Ron DeSantis is going to look around and go, this is just not happening for me? What do you think? I don't think so because there was a report yesterday that one of its big donors, Robert Bigelow, I think, is also really obsessed with space aliens, whatever it's worth.
Maybe there's a connection there between Lizardman, Ron, and the space alien obsession. But he's like, I'm going to put $20 million into a super PAC, and I might even put in more.
There's a certain type of big Republican donor who sees him, maybe rightly, as weakened as he is. Maybe this is still the correct analysis, that he's like they're only out of Trump trump yeah what is their plan b to plan b yeah

right i mean youngkin or kemp it's like could one of those people emerge you know maybe i don't know

the other people on the fields definitely or not and so i think that he'll have the money i'd like

to see glenn youngkin's dms yeah yeah really please yeah so um you know i think that a lot

of the money folks will stick with him.

He surrounds himself with a very tight inner circle, as all these stories report.

And I think that the people around him still very much want him to run.

And the people he's hearing from very much want him to run.

It's consultants who want money from him.

And it's donors who want to give money.

So there's a lot of incentives pushing him in.

The other thing, and this really cuts both ways for him, is that what Ron Deonda santa still has better than any of the guys in 2016 or gals he has this elevator pitch against trump that like in theory could work and that there's some data that still shows that it could work right like yeah exactly and he's still winning in michigan there's still some of these early states murphy wrote about iowa this week in the bullwark in theory it could work and in practice we're seeing a lot of reasons why it's not as you wrote in the newsletter but in theory could work and it's this pitch of hey i have the same enemies as you and i know how to beat them right trump doesn't now can he actually make that argument against trump successfully not a lot of evidence of that right now yeah but it feels like he'll want to get in and try and so i you know my assessment is think a big lesson that everyone should learn from 2016 and 2012, a lot of your political campaigns get baked in before you're even a candidate. This happened to Jeb.
We did that. I have regrets.
We did that stupid Megyn Kelly interview where he got all pretzeled up over Iraq before he was even a candidate. We weren't going to win anyway.
But you see this in many campaigns where you don't have the infrastructure don't have the infrastructure around there to support you i just don't think that ron de santis realized i think he's in this little his little tallahassee bubble i don't think he realized that the thing that was appealing was that elevator pitch and that all these little details that he adds on to it just make a different group of people think he's weird or wrong right it's like he felt like he had to do this florida legislature section where it's like oh we're gonna expand don't say gay which is despicable we're gonna do the six

week abortion ban which is like much less popular than the 15 week whatever they had before you know

we're gonna go after disney and each one of those things like he thinks it's helping him with a

certain part of the base but it's actually hurting him with another group right whether it's swing

voters certain cases trump people in other cases he's just lost his north star he could get it back I don't think he's

so anyway

the short answer is

I don't think he's going to

blow up on the

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I don't think he's going to I don't think he's going to, so anyway, the short answer is I don't think he's going to blow up on the punching pad because he still has that North Star. But man, I mean, it has been about as bad as it could be given the place that he was and, you know, the competition here.
Let's be real. This is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast.
Thanks so much for listening to this show where every day we try to help you make sense of the political world we live in and remind you that you are not the crazy one. If you enjoy this podcast, I'm sure you're going to find my free Morning Shots newsletter, a great companion for understanding what is happening to us.
And every morning as I prepare for this show, I share with my readers what's trending and what to pay attention to, including my latest writing and essays on the events of the day. To sign up for my free Morning Shots newsletter, go to thebullwark.com slash Morning Shots.
That's thebullwark.com slash Morning Shots. And I look forward to seeing you in your inbox soon.
You sent me this morning a new South Carolina poll of Republicans, and you're seeing a little bit of bad news for Donald Trump. Explain.
Yeah, well, again, and this is another reason why you get DeSantis in the race. Now, it's just one poll, so we get a caveat this, but it's interesting..
It's a South Carolina, which Trump absolutely needs to win. It's a credible firm that is doing this poll.
And here's the question. Now, Trump's winning in this poll, but the more interesting thing underneath was, how would you rate your support for Donald Trump these days? I love those kind of poll questions.
Very open-ended. This is not like they're trying to do it.
Taking the temperature. Yeah, taking the temperature support firm is strong as ever so that's good news right he's got this big base 11 i never liked him in the first place 21 i used to like him but now i wish he would just go away 20 i still like him but yes less than i used to really i just looked at that i'm like man you got 32 that like wish you'd go away now 20 of those people liked him and maybe if you like somebody at one time you can always try to win them back right and and i'm sure they'll talk themselves into it if ends up just being trump or buy but like that is a massive negative number that exceeded where he was in 2016 and i just i look at that and my big takeaway is sometimes we just get down in our

navels and i know we've talked about this a lot on this podcast but it just bears mentioning because nobody else fucking mentions it that 20 i still like him but less than i used to had tucker laura hannity had all them had the courage of their own real views in the text that we've seen from dominion had the republican electeds all stood up and been stronger after january 6th you could get that 32 number up this was doable like there's this fait accompli attitude out there among the pundit class among republicans it's like oh this is a cult and yeah there's a lot of people in a cult 47 that's not nothing but you could have it. Half the party was and is gettable.
And it's just they're getting the wrong signals. And it's like when you see a number like 32, you're like, man, they were a little bit closer to being out of the woods, I think, than people realize had there been an actual concerted effort to get out of the woods.
Well, I mean, and this is the key. Crack don't don't smoke itself.
And, you know, you may have luscious fruit hanging in the tree, but it's not going to pick itself, right? I mean, someone's going to have to go and do it. And so far, everybody's going, maybe it'll fall on its own.
Maybe it'll go. Maybe we don't need to actually touch the tree.
Maybe we should, hey, or maybe let's let Chris Christie go and he'll shake the tree and then it'll fall off the tree. Or maybe there will be a meteor that will hit the tree and knock the fruit down because it's there.
But we've seen this before and no one wants to touch the stuff. Or maybe I could kind of casually mention to voters that if they reached into the tree, they could get the fruit.
But I'm not going to say the name of the fruit. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, DeSantis out there being like, well, my hardest attack on Trump is going to be that he is, I have some sense that there's been some chaos from other leaders out there.
And it's like, who are you talking about? Like you, I think that's right. Like maybe that wouldn't have worked, but I guess anytime I look at that poll and I just think, but nobody tried, nobody tried nobody tried and here we are we're seeing this all again with the scientist where he's like i'm not going to try my strategy is going to be i'm going to go hard on all these issues and hope that people come over to me and like that's the ted cruz strategy and we're just walking down that that same path again that's very interesting okay so one more point on desantis it is It is interesting all of these members of his congressional delegation are now coming forward and saying, yeah, he never talks to me.
He never writes to me. He pays no attention to me.
And then you had that very weird Marco Rubio video. Just really quick before the Rubio video, the one example of the guy that didn't talk to him, Stuby, I might be saying his name wrong.
He got injured. He got seriously injured.
And DeSantis didn't call him. He didn't call him.
He didn't send him a text. He didn't send him an email.
He didn't have Casey write a nice note with a cookie bouquet. It's like a Republican member of Congress from your own state got into a serious injury.
You're thinking about running for president. Even if you're not, you're the governor.
And that just shows a lack of humanity and egotism that is really alarming. If you're on the bull camp for DeSantis, that he can recover from this.
This is a weird fucking person that does not have basic human interaction skills. Well, he just doesn't like people.
Yeah, that you go. I mean, yeah, I mean, that's part of the problem.
I mean, you can change your position on a lot of different issues, but if you basically at bottom don't like people, don't like interacting with people, don't give a shit about people, that's just a little harder to finesse, right? I mean, you can hire people who can pretend to care about all of those things, but, you know, and again, I apologize in advance for saying this, but it does appear that Trump gets this. He's constantly writing notes.
He's calling people. He does that kind of schmoozing thing.
And it doesn't change the fact that he's a sociopath, like authoritarian nightmare, but he's one with a Sharpie. I'm sitting here with a note that he that he wrote me in 2016.
You know, he writes to people it's and forget, I'm not going to even go into it. Okay.
So Marco does this weird video and I have to say that I'm, this is an indication of how weird I am. I'm watching him do this video from his, his office or his study or whatever.
And I keep waiting for him to stop and reach for a bottle of

water and chug that down. I thought you were going to come out of his ears, which somehow continue to grow.
Okay, well, whatever. So he's complaining about how we just can't get any gas down here in Southern Florida.
Why aren't they doing anything about it? And it's like, Okay, first of all, you're a United States Senator Marco.

Who is they?

But it certainly was not a love note to Rhonda Sanders. I mean, if the last thing that Rhonda Sanders needs this week, which was a terrible, horrible, very bad, absolutely craptacular week is a United States Senator from his state basically saying, yeah, it's like, why are things so effed up here in your home state? What's going on there? I think that this was a hilarious video.
If you haven't watched it, you just got to pull up Marco's video thing because at first it's like he talks for like a minute and he's been like, they aren't doing anything. He says the word they five times.
It's like, who's they? Are you talking about the DeSantis administration? Are you talking about the Biden? Like you're the senator. So he's like, we haven't had gas for four days, lines are long.
And like, they are out there saying that it's, it's the people's fault for wanting gas. And no, the people, it makes sense for the people to get gas.
I'm like, who, who is the straw man you're arguing against? I don't even know who you're talking about. So it's a very weird video, but it's telling about our politics.
The Semaphore article comes out this morning. And as soon as I saw it, I just was like, it just works on so many levels desantis um they they asked marco i guess in the hall in the senate you know if you think about endorsing between desantis and trump and marco's like no i'm not going to do that for a while and it's like well you know have you talked to desantis about it and marco says i haven't talked to desantis in months it's like what you haven't talked to the governor of your own it's like it's like first how fucking weird is ron de santos like you're not even checking in with him he's a governor you're the senator like of the of the same state you would think that you would be for him for president like that's very strange and then it's like yesterday you see there's this problem in south florida that no one is dealing with about how there's this gas shortage and your response is i'm going to send this weird this weird Twitter video, not like, hey, maybe I should call Ron and see if he's going to do something about this.
I mean, it's just like, it shows the performative assinuity and like the whole WWE-ness of our politics right now. That just doesn't even occur to Marco and Iran anymore.

Yeah, there are people

who handle things like this.

There are phone numbers

that you can call

if you are a United States senator

to deal with all of this.

Getting retweets is the priority here.

That is the point

of being a senator, right?

Getting the most retweets, I think.

Because we're all so online.

Hey, I have to mention

you're not my party this week.

I haven't had enough bandwidth to be able to deal with all of this, you know, new third party buzz, the no labels folks, by the way, that they're emailing me, they're sending me all this stuff. You know, these are the folks that are trying to get on the ballot, you know, to have a sort of an independent and, and I don't know what they've contacted you, but it's like, they, you know, I was like, Charlie, if you want to sit down and talk about our plans it's like yeah no i just understand that almost everything you're saying is completely delusional when it is not completely counterproductive so you did a whole piece on not my party you're not a fan of the third party buzz i mean in theory there are third party things i like you know the mcmullin didn't work out, but I thought it was worth a try.
You know, I think that there have been certain places, certain states, certain times where third parties work. The problem is, is that Donald Trump is the leading candidate in 2024.
And like, we need to deal with that. And I think that if you're not in politics, the new labels people, we'll get to them in a second, like are just, you know, egomaniacs and, you know,

want to raise money from gullible donors and, you know,

potentially have notorious motives.

But I think might just be stupid.

This doesn't distinguish them from many others.

That's true.

But they have that common disease that is easy to identify for those of us

who've been around.

But there are regular people out there and I get questions from them when I

do events.

And I understand that's like, why couldn't we have a third party? Likeiden is old like like trump is insane like shouldn't we have a better option than these two guys and like that does make sense on one level so i wanted to do a longer video for not my party like explaining why actually it's the inverse of that and that in our system a third party is strongest when the two parties seem similar right and you know Perot didn't win any states, but the closest he got is the year that Clinton runs as a Southern Democrat, that DLC Democrat and H.W. Bush is running as a fairly moderate Republican.
And it's like, oh, we don't feel represented, the more populist Trump-y type voters back then, and the random folks that Perot added onto the side. So that made sense because the stakes were low.
If you were like, if it's gone to my head, I would have voted for H.W., but whatever if it's Clinton. You can go for Perot, let's give it a shot.
If the stakes are existential, if you are a Democrat or a never-Trumper who looks at Trump and says our democracy could end if it's Trump, well, logically not gonna want to throw your vote away for a third party person if you were a deranged trumper who thinks that the election was stolen from donald trump and joe biden has dementia and is running a pedophile ring well you're not going to want to throw away your vote on a third party person like when when that risk is on the other side so our negative partisanship has made it such that this is even though it might seem like a time where a third party would be strong it's actually the worst time to try to run a third party and obviously if trump's on the other side like anything that that creates additional risk of an of a disaster trump second term is a bad idea so i want to kind of lay that out for folks the no labels thing i think is particularly pericious on this front. I'm not quite as panicked as some other people about this because I find the no labels people to be utterly incompetent.
And I'm just, I'm not really certain talk about blowing up on the launching pad. I think that they might be blowing up on the launching pad a lot more realistically than DeSantis.
But I'm glad other people are monitoring that and, you know, keeping the heat on. But it'd be a different thing than the noels people said, hey, we're coming to you and we've got a plan.
We found the guy that can take votes from Donald Trump or the woman. Then okay, great, come to me with that.
But I don't think that person exists. At least not now.
No, I don't see it. And it does seem to be kind of an ego-driven type thing where they've created their own little grift bubble.
Okay, so as I've said many times in the past, I hate talking about mass shootings. I hate getting into the doom loop.
But this week, I have to say, this week feels extraordinary. Look, I understand, before we get into this, I mean, I understand that there are hair trigger shootings that take place in places like Chicago every single week.
I get it. I understand that there were 35 people of all races who were shot in Chicago last weekend.
This goes on all the time. And yet this week felt different.
I mean, the whole ringing the wrong doorbell, getting shot, making a wrong turn, getting shot and killed, getting in the wrong car and getting shot. Your basketball rolls into your neighbor's yard and somebody shoots at a six-year-old girl.
I mean, it feels like we're in this new chapter or maybe we're just noticing what's happening with our hair trigger American carnage. And it also feels like it's more than just about guns.
It is about guns. But it's interesting.
I was listening to a lot of the commentary on this, and unfortunately, everybody, and Tim, you've been doing this a long time, everybody falls back on to their priors, and they keep going back to their same arguments. And I'm going like, okay, it is about the guns.
It is about racism, but it's also about other things that may be even worse than that. The fact that we have created this culture of paranoia, of fear, of distrust with guns that results in this kind of, I'm seeing somebody that I don't know.
They're in my driveway. I'm going to kill them.
And this apparently has been happening more. I mean, part of it is, I have a family that lives in Southern Maryland, and I might get lost someday.
I might turn into the wrong driveway. Am I going to get killed? Are they going to get killed? Can you imagine being in politics or doing something else where you go door to door? And if you have the wrong color or you're wearing the wrong clothes or you have the wrong hair, and we have all of these laws on the books that seem like a great idea to stand your ground or the castle doctrine that basically says that if you shoot and kill somebody in your house, the presumption is you've acted in self-defense.
So the actual killing is objective. Whether or not you'll be held accountable for it is completely subjective now.
So this week of American carnage, I guess it does turn out, by the way, that an armed society is not a polite society, that more guns does not equal less crime and that more good guys with guns is the way to go because damn, I'm done. Yeah.
I mean, I've got two big thoughts on this. The first on just the societal part, because I wrote about this after the Tennessee shooting.
I had a great conversation with Gloria Johnson on the next level about this, that one of the Tennessee three, but we didn't kind of get into this as much as I wanted to. Thank you.
When we get as deep on this part as I wanted to, it's just like figuring out a way to turn the temperature down. Because she represents, Gloria, like a decently conservative district, actually.
You know, the two Justins are in the deep blue parts of Nashville and Memphis, respectively. And we're just talking to her about the community.
And there is a lot of tenseness and anxiety in these communities right now you know about the other political side and i was happy to hear that like she didn't hasn't felt unsafe at this point but you see this with other people where they're like you know things are so hot that i'm worried that you know somebody's going to pop off and some of these shootings that you've discussed are just random, but the other politicized efforts like what we saw in Texas with the Greg Abbott situation, the guy that drives into the Black Lives Matter protest. And Abbott's making that much worse, of course.
Yeah, exactly. So who is out there that's lowering the temperature? And I hate everybody's like, oh, don't both sides us.
But I do, like as I was doing my sub stack, I was doing an Ask Me Anything, like driving through Texas, and I had some of our more liberal or progressive readers that were like, oh, be safe, I'm worried about you in Texas. And like, that makes me sad, right? Like people would feel that way.
Like there are really, there's really wonderful people all over the country and that we are so focused now on the threats and the danger among us. You have Trump out there saying that the real enemies are within, not without.
Obviously, he is exacerbating that way more than any Democratic politician. But I worry about this across the board, just like everyone trying to figure out how to turn the temperature down.
Now, that's not going to gun problem though like that is just not and the gun thing like this is we've gone around and around on this i'll just say briefly like i always considered myself like a technocratic pragmatic conservative right even when i was a conservative i was like you know like we need to be practical here and i just don't know how you can look at the stats about american gun deaths and say that

like this system is working and not like the answer is more guns like it's just not like our gun deaths levels are on par only with like third world countries where there are wars like we're on par with yemen you know it's crazy and that you can have a kid like ralph jarl go into a guy's driveway, go to the door and get shot. That's an unfathomable event in Sweden.

You know, kid like ralph jarl go into a guy's driveway go to their door and get shot that's an unfathomable event in sweden you know it's an unfathomable event and that should be an unfathomable event anywhere and it's not here just because of the proliferation of guns and now we're in this place and looking at tennessee and the aftermath where you can't even discuss forget reforms about getting less guns out there you can't even discuss ways to license to curb it you can't do anything i mean there was the was it louisville was in the kentucky shooting there's so many mass shootings i can't remember anymore the kentucky the louisville mayor's like the gun that was used in the shooting is going to be back on the street because by law in kentucky we have to auction it off it's like what like that is madness this is the madness that we're having this proliferation of senseless random killings, and no one is exempt. Now, between the mass shootings and, you know, ringing the wrong doorbell, it can be your kid, it can be you, it can happen to anyone.
We are having this massive crisis, tens of thousands of people getting killed. As you point out, you know, a level of violence that makes us look like Yemen.
And yet there is this complete total disconnect where one legislature after another is thinking, yeah, let's disseminate more guns. Let's make it easier to carry guns openly.
Let's make it easier for people to shoot people and have defenses for all of this. And so you have the 16-year-old Ralph Yarrell who's shot by this 84-year-old white guy who apparently was mainlining Fox News and various paranoia things.
What a surprise, least surprising story of the week. But then you have the New York story.
It's a 20-year-old white girl who's shot and killed by a 65-year-old because she and her friends pulled into the wrong driveway. In Texas, you have these cheerleaders who are in their cheerleader outfit who are shot because they made a mistake and tried to get in the wrong car.
By the way, which I've done a million times with Ubers these days. Like in the Uber world, an Uber car pulls up, you're like, oh, that's my Uber, and you open the door.
Okay, so that does not necessarily appear to be racially oriented. In Charlotte, North Carolina, this is i think one of the worst little girl has her basketball roll into the neighbor's yard group of kids go to fetch it this guy comes out robert lewis singletary and starts shooting at the six-year-old girl and her father i mean what the hell did you see the one in florida with the two dads driving and they get into a road rage incident and they shoot at each other.
And they both have their daughters in the car. And both of their daughters get hit.
It's like... Standing their ground.
Standing their ground. As horrible as these ones where they're shooting strangers are, is there ever a story that more clearly debunks the notion that you are safer by carrying a weapon than the idea that these two redneck dads shot at each other while their daughters were in the car it's unimaginable you know but this is what happens like you have guns everywhere and you get your temper hot sometimes it's going to happen things are going to escalate well especially when you put the guns in hands of people who have no background checks no training whatsoever and then are encouraged to uh regard everybody else as a danger.
So this was the guy, the grandson of the man that shot Ralph Yarrow says, you know, I feel like a lot of people of that generation, the older generation are caught up in this 24 hour news cycle of fear and paranoia perpetuated by some other news stations. And he was fully into that sitting and watching Fox news all day, every day, blaring in his living room.
And I think that stuff really kind of reinforces this negative view of minority groups. It doesn't necessarily lead people to be racist, but it reinforces and galvanizes racist people and their beliefs.
Okay, it's not all about race, but in this particular case, you get this guy who's sitting and he's watching, you know, this American carnage, one story after another, you know, this nightmare world. They're coming to get you.

They are dangerous.

And then there's a knock at the door and he goes to the door and there's a black man who is gigantic.

He's actually five foot eight.

140 pounds.

You could have done sociology experiment on this.

He told the cops the guy was six feet.

It's like, no, actually.

Hulking black man, five foot eight, 140 pounds. pounds i mean that's like that's like just skin and bones and he's invading his castle actually he doesn't even open the door so the guy starts shooting through the glass i mean it's just holy okay so here's an interesting little factoid so i was listening to uh lawrence o'donnell last night he had an historian on a historian of the and he said, you know, it's a myth that in the Wild West that people walked around, you know, in the towns like Tombstone with, you know, all kinds of guns.
In fact, back then, if you came into, you know, a town like, you know, Deadwood or Tombstone, you would have to surrender your guns. You would have to go to the marshal's office or the sheriff's office and, in the guns and you'd get a receipt because none of these towns actually wanted to have heavily armed people scaring off the business people.
These little towns wanted to become actual cities. They were capitalists and they knew that people wouldn't be coming into the town to make their weekly or monthly deposits if they thought they were going to be robbed.
So in fact, they had very strict gun rules. In fact, he showed a sign from like the 1880s, and you can see the sign saying, you know, weapons strictly forbidden.
You're not allowed to do it. So, this whole notion of everybody walking around packing heat was really after the fact where a lot of these towns were figuring out how do we market ourselves to the tourists, you know, we'll have the shootout in the OK Corral and we'll

reenact it eight times a day. The reality

was that even in

the old... It's reminiscent of the lost cause

stuff, you know, that all these Confederate

statues weren't actually from that.

Exactly. It was from like the...

It's sort of retrofitting the history, but I thought

it was really interesting that the people

in the West, if you would have told them

about our open carry, constitutional carry laws now, they'd say, you're out of your mind. Are you people crazy? The whole essence of civilization is that you do not want people walking around with guns, threatening other people, making them feel unsafe.
So I really thought that was an interesting historical tidbit. And you can look it up.
I'm going to defer to the experts on that one. You can look it up.
Okay. You and I have not had a chance to weigh in like everyone else has on the whole question of the Fox settlement.
I am of two minds on all of this. I do understand that Dominion made the right business decision.
Their lawyers had a job to do. They did it.
They did it well. It's a big load of money.
It will have an effect and Smartmatic is coming up. Smartmatic is saying that we want even more money from Fox.
There are other lawsuits out there. But I just don't think this changes the trajectory of disinformation.
I don't think that this was a victory for democracy. And I am disappointed that we are not going to have a six-week festival of Fox's deplorability.

But I understand that there are other people who say,

no, glass half full, this is good, this is the way it's supposed to work.

Where do you come down?

I'm more glass half full on it.

I mean, it's nice that Lachlan Murdoch's great-grandchild

will have a couple milli less after the estate tax.

Smaller pony.

Smaller pony, yeah.

Only four polo ponies, smaller pony. Yeah.

Only four polo ponies,

not,

not five.

What?

I was just joking,

but,

uh,

the dominion guys,

God bless.

I really think, you know,

had Fox just dealt with them the right way early,

you know,

they could have gotten out of this with a lot less money.

And I think that the dominion guy ended up being out for blood because they were being slandered, John Poulos. And I think they did the Lord's work, really, with this discovery.
And just an unbelievable amount of information has come out about Fox. They have to do what's right for their business.
780 million plus, good for them for getting that. So I'm glass half full on it.
I don't think there was going to be anything that happened at trial

that changed the trajectory of Fox.

The Fox had a chance to change their own trajectory after January 6th.

They chose not to do so.

They chose to go the other direction and double down to crowd out Newsmax.

As Rupert Murdoch famously said in that email, which we'll always have now,

it's not about red or blue.

It's about green.

And for them, they needed to tack to the mega right to protect their right flank. And they were always going to do that.
You know, sure, it would have been nice to see Tucker Sweat on the stand, but on the grand scheme of things, I think Dominion did the Lord's work, and I'm happy they got their payout. Well, I'm happy they got their payout, I mean, but I will admit to you, I wanted it to be more, and I wanted to see a trial, but that's just me.
I wanted the Fair enough, fair enough. I understand that.
I wanted the festival of schadenfreude, but I do think that this whole question of, okay, you know, would the trial have changed the audience? Would it have peeled people off from the audience? And that's certainly possible if the trial would have been like the January 6th committee, but let's go back to the January 6th committee. I think they did an absolutely masterful job i think that they documented it they did everything they possibly could and yet it's hard to find that they had that much of an effect on republican opinion so i'm not sure that this would not because the fox news audience does not hear about this or know about this is that they don't really care about it.
They don't care. The heart wants what it wants.
They wanted what Fox gave them and continues to give them. And that's the heart of it, right? Yeah.
And here's how propaganda works, by the way. It's about the old George W.
Bush line from that funeral about, you know, judging yourself by your best intentions and your enemies by your worst examples. This is how propaganda works.
The people that watch Fox, that are daily Fox viewers, their brains have been consumed by every negative thing that a liberal has ever done, real or imagined, exaggerated to the 10th degree, right? And so, if you have been conditioned to believe that Joe Biden is really a socialist that might be complicit in a pedophile ring that is on the take from China and that MSNBC and CNN and the New York Times and Washington Post all lie with impunity, then if you learn that Fox also lied a couple times, it's easy to say to yourself, well, at least they're on my side. The other side is so horrible.
It's back to the third party conversation. It's this negative partisanship all the way down.
And so if these viewers have been conditioned, it's not like the old days in the 80s where they might have had Rush or whenever Rush started, late 80s, early 90s, but they still got Tom Brokaw at night.

These people don't have that.

They're in a total bubble where the only information they receive

is that the liberals are evil.

And so once you've decided that the liberals are evil,

it becomes very easy to justify it.

So even if they do learn about the Tucker emails or whatever,

they come around.

I don't know how to fix that.

I think that's an unsolvable problem,

and I don't think the trial would have fixed it. But maybe it would have helped on the margins, but that's the main issue here.
Okay, so we have to do something extremely unusual now. Okay.
I have to acknowledge that you were right and I was wrong. Oh, I don't know what this is about, but I'm very thrilled to hear.
Discuss this with Kara Swisher on yesterday's podcast. The whole issue of the don't say gay bill, I thought that perhaps you and other critics had gotten out over your skis a little bit by saying, you know, that it was this draconian attempt to don't say gay, when in fact it was simply saying that we don't teach this for first, second, and third graders.
It's just very young children. And you got a whole bunch of blowback.
Kara got a whole bunch of blowback. And I'm sitting there thinking, okay, maybe there was a little bit too much hype.
But, and this is my mea culpa, this week you had the folks down in Florida say, hold my beer. We're going to take Don't Say Gay, and we're going to make it apply through K-12, through all of grade school, all the way through high school, including 18-year-old college seniors.
And it's like, wait, how many times, Mr. Miller, were we assured by the smart people that no, no, no, no, no.
This is simply about age appropriateness. So you were right.
I was wrong. Thank you.
I will be a gracious winner in this one. And if you go back and read my very first article about Don't Say Gay, which was in February, I believe, of last year, the premise of that article was that when I first heard about this bill, I was like, come on.
That was my first instinct too. It was just like yours.
I yours i was like come on like they couldn't really be trying to push something through that is this backwards this draconian this on the nose in 2022 when i wrote that there's just no way and the reason why i think i was out in front on this and shapiro ben shapiro and all these other assholes ended up coming from me in the national review was because i called you know from my je days, I know a lot of Tallahassee folks. So I called around and I was like, what is true here? Is what the, you know, activist groups on the left saying true? Or is what, you know, the people that are, you know, shining DeSantis turds true? And to a person, they were all like, no, this is going to pass.
It's as bad as they say. And they did end up modifying one element of it to be a straight shooter here from no discussion about gays.
That's where the don't say gay moniker originally came from to no instruction. Right.
So, I mean, this is a very marginable improvement, right, to say that now a kid doesn't have to worry if they talk about whatever gay stuff that they're going to get in trouble. But still, a teacher now in 11th grade, I don't even know how you,

can you not talk about Loving versus Virginia?

Even for your gay stuff,

how do you not talk about sexual orientation in high school?

Can you not talk about the don't ask, don't tell bill?

How do social studies teachers do their work?

How do English teachers that want to read books,

that have any kind of discussion of sexual orientation,

teach those books? It was preposterous down to first grade. And the thing that always got me is I know, because I have a five-year-old, I know kindergartners.
I just took Toulouse actually into a new school yesterday for the first time to visit it. And other kids look around and it's like, oh, hey, they're two dads.
And when I leave, you better believe one of those little spunky little kids went to their teacher and said, hey, what's the deal with that? Is the teacher not just supposed to say, hey, some families have two dads? That would be illegal in Florida. That would be the textbook definition of instruction.
And that is outrageous and wrong. And anyway, I hope you understand the seriousness of it.
It's also delusional. And Julian Sanchez makes a really, really good point on the recent bills that they are delusional.
He said, look, the delusion here is even more ridiculous by the expansion that students in 2023 can somehow be shielded from the existence of these topics until the parents deign to breach them. They can't, obviously they can't.
It's ludicrous. It's like, look around at the world.
Do you honestly think that you are now going to shield high school students from ever hearing about these things? This is a great sub stack by Freddie DeBoer who says, yes, indeed, kids are going to learn about LGBTQ issues sooner or later.

It is pointless to try to keep them from finding out about the existence of homosexuality, of gay love, of gay marriage, of trans people, and gender nonconformity.

They're going to find out.

They have smartphones, usually much younger than they should. They're curious.
The world is always a click away. It is foolish to try to prevent them from learning about this stuff.
And he says, look, I acknowledge that some of the reporting, you know, might have distorted and exaggerated what the bills call for. But now, you know, what Florida is saying is we're going, you know, all the way on all of this.
And again, it's like, who are you trying to fool here? It's all of this confusion of actually dealing with a problem with this need to wave your hands and engage in this sort of, you know, non-virtue signaling of Rhonda Sanders saying the word woke, you know, 20 times in 7 seconds or whatever it was. And yet, what, 55% of Republican voters now say it's more important to do shit like this than it is to protect entitlements from being caught.
What? You know? Whatever. What a world, Charlie.
Here we go. So you are going to get off this podcast and you are going to go meet your family and move into your new house in new orleans i'm moving in baby it's happening thank you guys for being along the ride with me congratulations have a great weekend and maybe you should try sit back open a beer you know go on netflix or whatever and you can you can download you can you can, you can stream Streetcar Named Desire.

I got NBA playoffs on the docket this weekend, but I will in July, I'll make it a priority.

All right.

Thank you, Mr. Miller.

And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark podcast.

I am Charlie Sykes.

We will be back on Monday, and I'll be actually podcasting from an undisclosed location in

a different time zone, and we'll do this all over again.

Hey Stella!

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.