Bill Kristol and Jane Fonda: The New 'Fierce Urgency of Now'

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Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

A few housekeeping items, a few things to be excited about.

We have a new member of the Bulwark coming here in a couple weeks, but the news is out.

It's Catherine Rampell.

She was an economics columnist for the Washington Post and a co-host of The Weekend on MSNBC.

She's a new mother, so she's been out on maternity leave.

But when she's back, she's coming back with us with a new newsletter focused on economics.

She's been on the show several times, but she'll be appearing on here more to talk about all things that are happening with the economy, which I think is going to be a big, big story in 2026 and beyond.

You might remember her from daring Scott Jennings to do the Elon Musk Hitler salute on CNN a couple months ago.

She has Spitfire.

She's great.

We love Catherine.

So excited to have her on board.

And if you're not, you know, subscribe to our newsletters.

This is your time.

Go to thebulwark.com and get signed up on the newsletters as well.

I mentioned this before periodically, but we have this Bulwark takes feed now for folks who need even more than the daily podcast.

Sometimes it's just rapid response stuff to the news.

Sometimes it's other interviews that just kind of don't fit into our podcast timeline.

Today's guest, Bill Kristol, does on every Sunday a live interview that goes onto that feed.

This Sunday he was with Ryan Goodman of Just Security, some very serious legal talk about Trump's foreign and domestic military actions.

I did a little bit more, you know, frou-frou stuff, okay?

But I was on with KFC Barstool.

It's one of the original stoolie barstool bros, and we talked about how the Dems can do better in that, with that demo.

And I can tell you.

I think that there's a lot of misconceptions out there about how far away the Dems are.

I think that they could do much better with some of these guys.

Anyway, check that out if you're interested in that.

And lastly, today's show is a doubleheader.

I don't know, Bill Crystal, if you ever would have thought this.

It's back-to-back, Bill Crystal and Jane Fonda.

Jane Fonda in segment two.

She's

reanimating her father's Committee for the First Amendment.

And I was excited to have her on to talk about it.

Giddy, really, to have her on to talk about it.

And so there you go.

Bill Crystal, what do you think?

Editor-at-large, it's Monday.

It's you, but it's also you and Jane Fonda today.

Would you have seen that coming 20 years ago?

Not entirely.

Of course, we're fellow boomers, I guess.

That's true.

She's a little older, but we're contemporaries.

And I remember watching her father in some excellent movies.

And he was a big, yeah, he was a big free speech defender, I think, during the McCarthy years, right?

Yeah.

Kind of courageously, I think.

And Catherine Rampel is a great addition to us.

I think it's a little bit, I wouldn't just include her as housekeeping.

I'm just going to say that.

I have a higher.

I'm going to curry favor.

Assuming she's watching, I'm going to curry favor with her right now, making clear that I dissent from that relegation.

But that's okay.

That's okay, Tim.

This is why we need Catherine Rampel.

This is why we need more women.

So I don't do these microaggressions.

I wasn't even thinking about the gender thing, honestly.

I was saying about Jane Fonda.

We talked about this a little bit.

I knew nothing about Jane Fonda, it turns out.

And it's one of these things where, like, in life, some people just become like memes or characters.

And in the right, I just got this vision of her passed down to me that was like totally wrong, actually, it turned out about Jane Fonda.

I don't know.

She was, as you said, it was more your era.

So you maybe lived through it all.

The photo she allowed to be taken, I guess, I think I got this right in 72 maybe, in Hanoi with a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, which presumably was being used to shoot down American pilots.

That was very bad.

Not good.

Now, she then reinvented herself with all the diet stuff and all and the exercise, whatever that was.

Exercise, I guess, wasn't it?

And I think she sort of apologized for what she did in the 70s and visited McCain and so forth.

So I'm okay.

I'm okay with her.

And it ended up being kind of right, though, about the war, broadly.

Maybe not about the actual.

You shouldn't stand by the actual North Vietnamese or should you?

just gonna say, you know, I don't want to sound too old school neocon here, but that's a little too far.

We needed you to represent that point of view on the crystal and Fonda.

And I'll just say, Fonda, she was throwing, the only thing she was disappointed about is that neither of us are really Republicans anymore because she was excited to have Republicans in the tent for the new effort.

So, anyway, stick around for that.

All right, the real news.

The military is invading Chicago and Portland, I guess, against the

or over the objections rather, of the local political officials.

Thought that this was yeah a republic that we were living in apparently apparently not or maybe still uh thanks to some judicial rulings um in chicago we have jb pritzker i guess we'll start there this was uh jb last night uh we must now start calling this what it is trump's invasion it started with federal agents it will soon include deploying federalized members of the illinois national guard against our wishes and it will now involve sending in another state's military troops texas i call on governor abbott to immediately withdraw any support for this decision and refuse to coordinate with with the administration.

So there it is.

There was a period of time where we thought maybe they're backing off this a little bit.

They're going to go into red states where they had, you know, where the National Guard was welcomed, where there weren't these constitutional issues.

You talked about this stuff with

Goodman yesterday.

I'm wondering what your top thoughts are.

You know, I thought Andrew Egger put it well in the morning newsletter.

We really have the rule of law and the rule of Trump, and the two, which have been in tension with one another, and the rule of Trump has been creeping up against the rule of law, you you might say.

They're now in just full-fledged conflict, I think, sort of head-on, you know, collision.

I mean, this is the moment where we'll see the moment, it'll take a while, but we're now at a different point, I guess the way I put it than we were maybe a month ago when, as I said, these things were all happening.

Authoritarianism was moving.

But now we really have the real moment of crisis, I would really say.

Yeah.

The rule of law side has had a momentary victory so far, at least in Oregon, over the rule of Trump.

And I think it's just worth really focusing on what we've seen here.

It's Karen Immergut.

She is a Trump-appointed judge in Oregon, 2019, appointed by the Trump administration.

That's important.

She's twice now blocked the administration's attempt to send troops over the objections of local officials.

Local officials filed emergency injunction.

Immerget in one of her rulings.

In this case, and unlike in Newsom, so she's contrasting with California, plaintiffs provided substantial evidence that the protests at the Portland ice facility were not significantly violent or disruptive in the days or even weeks leading up to the president's directive on September 27th.

Furthermore, this country has a long-standing and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs.

She kind of frames that up even really from a right, you know, from a more conservative judicial perspective.

The whole ruling is worth reading, and she's very strong on this.

I mean, we'll see what happens if the rubber meets the road.

The MAGA folks are all saying, you know, the judge isn't in charge of the military.

We are.

And I mean, that could end up being in Oregon, really, where this comes to a head.

It's an excellent opinion.

People really should read it.

It's not super long, but it's very 30 pages or something, but it's very tightly argued.

You know, it's funny.

I thought I heard her name when this case appeared last week.

And I thought, why do I know that name a little bit?

I don't know every district judge in the country by any means, especially out in Oregon.

And it turned out I vaguely remembered her name because she was, as a young lawyer, went to work for Ken Starr when he was special counsel in 1998.

And she was the person who deposed Monica Lewinsky.

Oh, really?

Yeah, Starr didn't want to do it himself.

I mean, for kind of obvious reasons.

It was more seemly to have.

And so, and so Karen McCarthy, then she was George W.

Bush U.S.

Attorney for four or five years, I think.

So, yeah, I mean, not a bleeding heart liberal and a tough.

I remember a couple of lawyers I know when she got the case thinking, oh, could have gotten a better draw out there, you know.

Excellent opinion, really worth, worth reading.

You know, this thing of the MAGA reaction, which Steve Miller embodies, I suppose, or leads, that, you know, the Trump's in charge of the military.

He's commander-in-chief.

They're throwing that term around a lot.

Think about what that says for a minute.

They're not saying that he's commander-in-chief when we're fighting a war abroad and therefore the judiciary has to be extremely restrained and second-guessing things, which is a reasonable position sometimes.

They're saying he is commander-in-chief of the military here in the United States.

But the military is not...

He's not commander-in-chief of law enforcement in the United States.

And the use of the military in the United States is very limited, both by law and tradition, and implicitly, at least, by the Constitution.

And so it's so revealing of how far MAGA World has gone to just embracing, I don't know what to call it exactly, Caesarism is one term that they use in political science, you know, sort of that's just dictatorship, maybe.

You know, he just gets to use the military in the United States, wherever he wants, whatever he wants, without regard to what the facts are, without regard to all the legal niceties, what the governors who are elected officials in their state think.

And that's, we're also supposed to say, okay, you know, he's commander-in-chief.

I guess he just gets to deploy forces against, and incidentally, against American citizens.

This is not just to help ICE arrest, and that would be not, that's problematic too, incidentally, to arrest undocumented immigrants.

These people who are protesting, so far as we know, are, I assume, overwhelmingly, American citizens whom the military is going to be doing what against?

Fighting.

It calls to mind the Mark Milley speech that he gave about

how the American military is different and they don't pledge an oath to a dictator, to a wannabe dictator, and talks about the traditions and just like how counter what this administration is saying to kind of those

traditions.

More on Miller.

He got into a little tiff with our colleague Sam Stein on social media over the weekend.

Steve Miller wrote this about Immigrant.

Legal insurrection.

It's interesting.

that they appointed an insurrectionist to be a Christopher Court judge, but was their decision.

They'd like insurrectionists, I guess.

Legal insurrection, Steve Miller says.

The president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, not an Oregon judge.

This is an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers.

And the deployment of troops is an absolute necessity to defend our personnel, our laws, our government, public order, and the Republic itself.

Sam quoted him saying, Top official in the Trump White House calls a decision from Trump appointed judge an organized terrorist attack on the federal government.

Stephen said to Sam, You are repugnant.

I mean, not wrong, but but not correct in this

situation in particular.

That was hard.

Again, I don't, we'll see how this all shakes out, but like the just the escalating rhetoric and the threats here, like this, this notion that like a judge that they appointed saying that they've not created a rationale for taking over the Oregon military, you know, Oregon National Guard is

an act of insurrection that requires

and potentially if they're complicit in organized terrorist attack that requires the administration to crack down on it.

And And the kind of other text around all this, and you talked about this a little bit with Ryan Goodman, was this national security presidential memorandum that people were talking about, NSPM 7, which is about domestic terror and how the U.S.

now censors this memorandum saying that the federal government will put together a strategy for investigating and disrupting any organizations that foment political violence, that speak out against it.

I mean, it's a pretty alarming trajectory.

I mean, the memorandum is alarming for everyone that can go after.

But, you know, I hadn't really focused until you read just now Miller's post.

Legal insurrection.

I mean, the normal thing any other White House would say, or even this White House, or even Trump in the first term at least, would have said is mistaken decision by a judge, a very regrettable.

We expect to prevail on appeal to the Supreme Court.

Well, Biden or Bush would have said very regrettable.

Trump would have said, loser, you know, loser, judge, idiot.

But legal insurrection really lays the groundwork for, obviously, ignoring judicial rulings that are insurrectionist, for I don't know what, removing judges who are insurrectionist?

I mean, are they also subject to this national security memorandum and can be arrested?

I mean, it shows how far we've gone.

And no one, of course, God forbid any Republican member of Congress or anything should, senator, should, you know, say something about, maybe someone on one of the judiciary committees say something about how this is inappropriate for the number two person, really the number one person in the White House, on the White House staff to say.

So it shows how far we have gone down this path to very bad path.

Very bad path.

The path potentially that we're heading towards, you, I noticed a post from you over the weekend about Stephen Miller's various,

because he was just off the chain, and I've just read part of the various things that he was talking about, but tweets that are like inciting, you know, the situation, exacerbating the situation in a bunch of these scenarios in Chicago, where there were protests

against ICE.

Miller continues to be out there

looking for pretexts to send these troops in.

And obviously, that's kind of the crux of this fight in Oregon:

it's like their rhetoric is not matching the reality, right?

Like they're trying to argue that there was this emergency, there's this violence going on.

And it seems like that judge Emmergit is basically saying, well, yeah, like if there was violence, I would have let you do this, but there hasn't been.

And so they want violence.

They're looking for violence.

You write, Steven Miller is so desperate for a Reichstag fire moment.

That keeps getting thrown around.

I thought it might be useful for some listeners to like, what do you actually mean by that?

Because there was a period of time where I had the impression that Reichstag fire was representing like a false flag, like the Nazis basically started the fire, then bladed it out the communists as a way to grab power.

But it seems like as history has gone on, I think that was a misconception.

And that the Reichstag fire moment really just means that something happens that then leads the want to be authoritarian to assert power.

Yeah, I mean, shortly after Hitler takes power, I guess, or becomes chancellor, I think it's the end of February 1933,

the Reichstag, the German parliament, is set on fire.

I think at the time, the guy who was arrested seemed to be an anarchist of some kind, and kind of a disturbed person, acting alone, so far as one could, as historians now think.

The left assumed it was a false flag thing at the time.

It may not have been a false flag thing, but it was taken advantage of in a huge way by Hitler and the Nazis to basically,

I think it's when they passed the Empowering Act, whatever that's called.

Anyway, that's where they began to really destroy the democracy over which Hitler was still kind of presiding and begin the path, the road towards totalitarianism.

So the analogy, I suppose, would be there could be incidents in places that are not false flag.

They're just unfortunate incidents, or maybe even some six left-wingers do something somewhere.

And they use that as the excuse to consolidate power and purge opponents.

And they really went all out against the left

in Germany and et cetera.

You can get overstated to like what their plan is with regards to purge, but they definitely want to use the power of the law to go after left-wing fundraisers, you know, don't, big donors, left-wing groups, any protest organizations, in addition to using it as a rationale to have the military in the streets of these cities.

Right.

And I would say just empirically, if I could say, you know, there's just no question that ICE is provoking.

violence at this point.

Great point.

ICE is not solving a problem of violence.

It's not, it theoretically could be the case.

You and I might not like the deployment of ICE even in these circumstances.

We certainly might not like the

National Guard being federalized, but it could theoretically be the case, and it was the case

in L.A.

in 92 when Bush used the National Guard, that there were terrible riots going on because of, in that case, the Rodney King decision.

And the federal, there was a good reason to set in the Guard or whatever.

ICE's deployment here is just clear from the way they're conducting themselves in Chicago, the instance with the helicopter raid on that apartment building.

Was that early last week?

They're provoking the violence.

Their presence is provoking the violence.

And beyond their presence, their actual actions are pretty purposefully at this point provoking violence.

So it's in a funny way in this respect, beyond the Reichstag fire, you might say.

So, yeah, but they warrant the violence.

And I mean, I got to say, most 98% of the protesters seem to me to behaving with pretty impressive restraint, actually.

There have been very little violence from the people who are.

protesting ICE is pretty ICE has committed a lot more violent acts than the people protesting.

Yes.

In Portland, that's why they picked Portland because there were really violent protests in Portland.

And some of that was back then.

There was also the kind of proud boys are in the picture.

So they're kind of right-wing militia groups and left, and they were fighting amongst themselves.

So I, you know, but like that was the case in 2020 in a way that it's not, hasn't been now.

And yeah, I mean, some of the videos, the ice, and there's some funny ones of the ice, like the fat ice guys like chasing around the guy on the bike in Chicago and stuff.

Like there's some funny videos, but there are like some very alarming videos about like, and obviously the guy that I guess I should should mention this, actually, I've been meaning to mention this.

Um, there's the video, I'm going from memory, so I apologize if this is wrong.

I believe it was in New York where the ICE agent pushes down the woman that is really upset that her husband has been taken away, undocumented, I guess, allegedly, supposedly an undocumented migrant, and his wife is pushed to the ground.

And then they fired the guy.

And I think I mentioned that on either this or the next level podcast.

A couple days later, they unfired him.

Like, they brought him back.

And so, to your point about the the provocation, like they're

they're good with it.

They want it.

And the ads that they're running and the glorification that Christina was putting out the videos.

Yeah, as a single, I'll just ask.

She does look kind of weird in the workout video, I will say.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Maybe that's provoking, just kind of the way that just sort of an uncanny valley non-human kind of presence.

Yeah, has a single ICE agent been disciplined, so far as we know, and

in the months this has been going on and with all the videos we have of really

inappropriate, to say behavior,

say at least behavior by them.

I doubt it.

And they're encouraging it.

And the videos encourage it and glorify the use of violence by ICE.

Again, there's none of the normal.

We hope we don't have to use force.

You know, they don't even pretend that anymore.

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you wrote for me she already mentioned andrew's post on the rule of law versus the rule of trump which was very good uh you also wrote about how this impacts the shutdown politics and i've been having these conversations with everybody that comes on it's like it's sort of a tough cog on the one hand it's going decently well for the democrats actually the politics of this you look at the numbers like that voters are either neutral or kind of, you know, it's basically even, like, as far as who's getting blamed for this, a little bit more towards Trump.

It has, I think, elevated the salience of the rising health care premiums, which are going to be coming, you know, this fall, have already started to come for some people.

So that's good.

And yet, it's kind of like, well, is that really what the fight's over, right?

Like some on the left are saying, like, is this, is the reason really that you're not funding this government because of Obamacare subsidies?

Or is it because of Trump's lawlessness?

And does the fight need to be elevated to that point?

You write it like this.

Don't Democrats need to say in light of new circumstances that they will not vote to fund an administration that's trying to impose martial law at home and to start unauthorized and unjustified wars abroad?

Don't Democrats need to demand that provisions curbing the administration's authoritarian moves, or at least provisions guaranteeing Congress votes on those authoritarian moves, need to be attached to legislation funding the government.

Expand on that.

You said it.

I mean, I say at the beginning that they've done a pretty good job on the healthcare fight.

And the obvious, the natural thing to do, and maybe ultimately, maybe maybe I'm being a little provocative, I don't know, is to just keep fighting the healthcare fight.

They're doing fine with it.

But I just feel personally it's a little weird.

And things have changed a lot since that healthcare strategy was devised a month ago when it was pretty reasonable, or even when it began to be implemented really, you know,

two weeks ago as the shutdown became imminent.

And now we are in a genuine constitutional crisis and a genuine showdown between the rule of law and the rule of Trump.

And somehow that has to be captured, I think, in what the Democrats say.

Now, maybe you can let Pritzker and Newsom and others and the governor of Oregon make this case, and Jeffreys and Schumer can keep talking about health care and very robotically on message.

But it just feels weird to me at this point.

And I do,

can they actually prevail?

Can they prevail on health care?

Incidentally, I'm a little doubtful.

Can they prevail on getting things onto these legislation?

Who knows?

They haven't tried.

I mean, we don't know.

Are Republican senators going to be a little nervous not even allowing a vote on the use of congressional authorization for the use of force?

There are Republican senators, Ryan Goodman makes this point, who have a pretty long record of being pretty strongly in favor of Congress having a say on these sorts of things.

Now, are they capable of totally collapsing in the wake of Trump's opposition?

Yes, of course.

So, I don't know.

I just feel like at least for now, I thought I would put this out there.

It's a little beyond probably what the traffic will bear for now politically, but I don't know.

Another few days like what we've seen, congressional leadership can't be totally detached, so to speak, from what the governors are saying, from what's happening actually in the streets of Portland or Chicago.

Sometimes it's hard to, like, you can imagine and game out in your head how these sorts of political kind of moments will

settle like, you know, into the into the kind of public consciousness and like what, you know, what people take away from them.

I was pretty worried that the Democrats were going to find themselves like with internal dissension and not enough backbone to fight and that it would end up kind of you know feeling rather limp.

It doesn't feel that way, I guess, now.

Again, I'm going to talk about what the arguments are, I'm still a little, I still don't don't really know what the exit strategy is, but like, it does feel like they're dug in for a fight in a way that is, that is useful for the moment.

And I do think, to your point, I mean, depending on what happens in Portland and Chicago, and as these guys escalate, you know, that could change, you know, their posture and positioning even more.

I do think that's a good thing to raise.

Do you have any other shutdown thoughts?

Well, just my only other point I make this at the end, just as a suggestion in a way, at the end of the little piece, is that so so we have the shutdown on the one hand.

That's sort of what's happening in Washington.

We have the actual constitutional crisis happening out in the country, but with the Trump administration as well.

And then we have this no-kings protest planned for a little under two weeks from now, which I think will be very big.

I mean, it could be bigger than the previous one.

I think millions of people.

And if you think about the resistance to Trump, there's sort of a legal side, there's a let's call a political side and a popular side.

And I do think these could all be kind of brought together in a way that they haven't quite been yet over the eight months or so of this administration, you know, over the next two weeks in a way that would kind of reinforce each other.

So I think it's a bit of an opportunity just politically to build more momentum on the side of the resistance.

Sam Stein, our colleague who edits the morning shots usually, was joking in Slack that he didn't expect.

If you had told the young Sam Stein, he said, you know, 15 years ago, that he'd be editing Bill Crystal, saying that there needs to be, you know, popular and legal and congressional resistance to the use of the military at home and abroad, untethered use of the military.

He wouldn't have quite believed it, but I had to explain to him that, of course, it's all very different.

No, I didn't really explain anything, but

it was a sending fair point.

Well, it speaks to the seriousness of the moment, I think, that alignment has been found.

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The other thing that happened over the weekend from Trump on this front, it's just like, it's the kind of thing that in any other administration or era or moment, like Trump's speech to the Navy would just have been an all-consuming kind of conversation point.

And, you know, here we are half an hour into the show.

We're getting to it.

But

he gave a speech at the 250th anniversary of the Navy in Virginia.

It was the Hills Naval Academy and a big win over Air Force the day prior in football.

Hag South was at that doing selfies with the players afterwards.

Trump called this speech a rally and like it very specifically in the context of a political rally.

Like he was referencing the

front row Joes or whatever.

He's got like people that go to his political rallies and like the total number that he's done.

And

during this speech in front of the sailors, he says, We have to take care of this little gnat that's on our shoulder called the Democrats.

He goes after Barack Hussein, Obama.

He talks about how his alcoholic doctor had said that Trump was the best physical specimen between Obama and Bush.

I mean, it is just a totally, wildly inappropriate and incomprehensible speech from a president in front of the sailors in Virginia.

Do we have a sense of how the sailors reacted?

Were they weren't as stone-faced as the generals, I suppose?

Yeah, they were not stone-faced as the generals.

I'll give them mixed credit.

There was definitely some hooting and hooting and hollering around like Trump being a great physical specimen and some of that sort of stuff.

And Trump did kind of give them an opportunity to boo Barack Hussein Obama, and they did not take that.

Similarly, I think the little gnat was kind of quiet after he started talking to the little gnat.

So I didn't know to go to the category, so I don't know exactly what appropriate behavior it was there.

There was certainly some hooting and hollering though in the crowd, but maybe it wasn't, was maybe not the most alarming that it could have been.

How about that?

That's good.

I mean, I sort of expected the general officers to be, you know, very disciplined, but you don't know what's going on down in the ranks and among young, very young sailors.

Where was this?

This was in Roanoke or Norfolk down there, right?

Yeah, I forget.

Yeah, it was somewhere in Virginia Beach, yeah.

So I'm hopeful that there's a broader sense throughout the military.

It's really important that there be, obviously, that this stuff is inappropriate.

They have to put up with it.

He's the commander-in-chief,

as they always remind these young troops.

So, you know, they've got to be respectful.

But yeah, they don't have to internalize the notion that

he's the person they work for, as opposed to the chain of command, which he's at the top of.

The oath they take is to the Constitution, not to him.

It is just, it probably goes without saying, but just like the whole context of all this, you know, like the idea of simultaneously, I'm sending troops into these cities to go after so-called left-wing agitators while giving a speech in front of, you know, rank and file and talking about the Democrats as if they're the problem that needs to be taken care of, followed by the speech of the generals, where he's talking about the enemy within being scary and the enemy without.

And I mean, all of that together, you know, paints quite an alarming picture.

No, totally.

And I was wondering, I don't know if this was scheduled a long time ago, if there was some 250th anniversary somehow thing of the Navy that he was, you know, going to go to.

But if again, if this is happening in a foreign country, speaks to the general officer corps on a Tuesday, and then was that just this past week?

I've totally lost track of things.

Yeah.

And then six, five days later, speaks to sort of enlisted or the rank and file, let's just call it, of one of the major, one of the services.

You get a sense that, gee, you know what?

He thinks the military is pretty important, pretty important to his agenda, to his authoritarian agenda, to his staying in control, maybe ultimately.

And he's pretty, you know, systematically too strong.

But in his way, he seems to be giving a lot of speeches to the military.

Why is that, you know, and paying a lot of, and Hex, as we know, is paying a lot of attention to promotions within the military and so forth.

So, again, this is, he called it a rally, which, you know, is interesting.

But in a way, if he were just giving rally speeches, one would be less alarmed, right?

Here's maybe one other.

Whether to be alarmed about this or to laugh at it, I don't know.

I think think I'm going to be alarmed by it.

Are you familiar with Scott Adams?

Just a name, yeah.

Okay.

Well, he wrote the Dilbert cartoon.

Yeah, right.

You know, this is the kind of thing where

you don't really want to care about what these people think.

But Scott Adams was in 2015 a prominent early Trump advocate, like when it was kind of comical to be for Trump, really.

And he was there at the beginning.

And so he gained a huge following among Trump supporters, right?

As somebody who's like, hey, here's a Hollywood guy that'll put his name out there.

And he's gotten increasingly unhinged.

And yet he maintains an important following.

I like to monitor this stuff because, you know, a lot of times you're seeing from Stephen Miller and stuff, oh, it's the left that is calling us fascists and we need to crack down on that because that is an incitement to violence.

Well, here's one of Donald Trump's biggest supporters over the weekend, Scott Adams of the Dilbert cartoon.

By far the best form of a government, if you could get it.

now the problem is there's no way to guarantee that that's what you're getting, but if you could get it, the best form of government would be an authoritarian, strong man who had your best interests in heart,

which turns out to be Trump.

Is he an authoritarian?

Yes.

Is he a strong man?

I'd say yes.

Yes, he is.

Is he benevolent in the sense that although although he's tough,

everything he does clearly is for the benefit of the public?

At least he's benevolent.

1.3 million followers there for Scott Adams.

I guess there's points for just saying it.

But I do think it's important to just like call attention to this, which is like, they're saying it.

Trump has 2028 hats.

One of his biggest supporters of 2015 is like, we want him to be a benevolent, authoritarian, strong man.

He is a benevolent, authoritarian, strongman.

There's no pushback, really.

I mean, there are people that will push back if it's the left that says it, you know, and say that they're doing hyperbole.

But when it's from inside the house, that's just kind of

a little alarmed that they're putting that into the public discourse.

Wait, till Trump reposts it.

That'll be the real moment.

But no, I hadn't known about that.

I mean, I knew who Adams was, that he was Trumpy and all that, but that is striking.

No, the cards are all, you know, like in blackjack or poker, the deal is cards are face up at this point, right?

Yeah.

There's no, there's no mystery about what their hand is and how they're going to play it.

It's a concerning thing.

I tried to bring Ken Burns to the dark place last week and I couldn't do it because he's

seen it all.

It couldn't be any worse than it was in Charleston during the

revolution or whatever.

And that's great.

That's great.

We definitely have been in darker places than in this moment.

But one of the things he said that struck me that's just, I've really been sitting with all weekend is like, Some of the principles of

the revolution, of the founding,

like like the people advancing them didn't even fully believe them i mean obviously based on their behavior of slaves and stuff but that there was this kind of momentum or inertia of like if you put it if you put a powerful idea out into the world people pick it up and it manifests itself right and he was talking about that in the positive way about the ideas of the founding and i just i'm increasingly worried about that today, right?

The inverse of that.

These things are being put into the ether in a way that they were not.

I totally agree.

I think it's really an important point.

I've been very struck along a parallel path or the same path, really, which is authoritarianism has a certain

natural support out there.

There are things it appeals to in the human soul, and especially in some people's souls, and especially maybe in this current moment for various reasons.

And once it gets to momentum, people do sign on.

We know this from history, right?

It's not like everyone was on board with Mussolini or Hitler or anyone else.

Hugo Chavez, the moment he showed up, or even when he first got elected, maybe, and it's the normalization isn't even a strong enough term because, of course, he's been now been elected president twice.

So it's way beyond just normalization of it as kind of just a movement in America.

I couldn't agree more.

It's really bad ideas can have momentum, unfortunately.

I don't know if as much as good ideas, but almost as much as good ideas.

Yeah, okay.

And the founders knew this.

It's just to take a second on the founders, which Ken Bruns knows a lot about, obviously, you have done about.

They were very worried.

They didn't think, oh, once we set this thing up, there's never a chance of demagogues taking over or popular passions getting out of hand.

They spent a huge amount of time and effort worrying about constructing institutions to check that, to guardrails against that.

And then they say also, you know what?

We still depend on the public ultimately

and elites.

They don't quite say it this way, but I would say that's what they think, to stop this as well.

We need humans, not just guardrails, to stop these tendencies, which are always going to be there, or possibilities, which are always going to be there.

All right.

Well, assuming we avoid the authoritarian strongman coming to fruition, we do have some rank politics ahead of us.

And I just want to touch on two things really quick before I lose you that's coming up here in the Virginia governor's race.

We talked about it last month.

You're in Virginia.

Abigail Stanberger seems to be running a strong race against a quite absurd, ridiculous Republican challenger and Winsome Sears.

Some news over the weekend, though, kind of down ballot, where the Attorney General, the Democratic Attorney General candidate, Jay Jones, had like sent a bunch of just really fucking disgusting texts about how his opponents, like, kids, were little Nazis, and how he wanted to piss on the graves of his opponents.

And, like, the Republican speaker, if he had two bullets and it was the Republican speaker, and like Hitler and Pol Pot or something, the Republican Speaker would get both.

I mean, just like it was private texts.

Maybe with somebody that he's flirting with, I've heard.

So, I don't know.

It's kind of a Corey Lewandowski type behavior there.

So, it was private text, not a public, even still, horrendous.

And

I think that the Democrats, in a number of ways, we've seen this like from the top of the ballot all the way to the bottom.

Like there's a little bit of a lack of seriousness sometimes in like dealing with the threat that we are dealing with.

Like it was not a secret that this guy was a ridiculous candidate, that he was running a primary.

And I guess you'd tell me it was

a close race, but I feel like there could have been, you know, maybe a more formidable opposition against somebody that was going to embarrass the Democrats to this degree.

Yeah, I mean, I voted for his opponent in the primary, I'd like to say, who lost 51.49.

So, you know, it was a perfectly, the opponent was a totally reasonable, moderate Democrat, more like Spanberger.

I mean, Jones, not only just when the stuff broke, he didn't really apologize right away, right?

Didn't it take him for a while to be dragged into a more serious apology?

So he behaved very badly.

Look, honestly, if early voting hadn't begun, I'd be very much in favor of everyone pressuring him to get off the ballot and let the Democrats nominate, presumably the person who got 49% of the vote.

I feel like it's it's close to disqualifying.

But I guess with early voting having begun, it's just very, very hard to figure out how you would, you know, people have to go back and vote again and how do you keep track?

It gets pretty crazy, right?

So I don't know if that can work.

So here we are.

I don't know how much it'll hurt.

I don't think it'll hurt Spanberger too much.

So in Virginia, we vote independently for the governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general.

So people might split their ballot down at the AG level and vote.

So the good bottles have happened in Virginia quite recently.

Yes, and I'd say the AG, who's the incumbent, is the most reasonable version of Junckinism that you're going to get.

I I mean, it's not, you know, he's gone along with a lot of stuff I wouldn't go along with and gone along with Junkin going along with a lot of stuff that one shouldn't go along with.

But he's not, I think, you know, it wouldn't be fair to say he's like a full bore Trumpy type.

So I do think a certain number of swing voters might switch over to him in the general.

I don't, I think they can separate this Spanberger from this.

With Spanberger, for some reason, they're all reluctant to, they criticize him pretty harshly.

But then the Republicans intelligently, from their point of view politically, kept saying, well, but do you favor him dropping out?

And then none of them is quite willing to say that.

So right, the timing.

Yeah.

No, it was good, Appo.

To me, the lesson, because like who the Virginia Attorney General is, is not really that important to me as living in Louisiana.

But to me, the lesson is just, again, going back to like,

there has been a reticence, and I tie this to the Biden.

and an element parts of Kamla, there's a reticence among kind of the democratic cultural elites of like, we've got to circle the wagons.

The threat is so great that we got to stick with our side.

You know what I mean?

We don't want these internal fights breaking out.

And that is the wrong lesson, right?

Like, I mean, and we've seen how that has backfired several times.

It's just like, no, if there is a Democrat that is going to harm the party or that is going to harm the country or that is not, that is whatever, using bad judgment.

They should be called out for it.

Like, there should be a concerted effort to move to stronger options.

And this is kind of a micro version, I think, based on what I've heard in Virginia.

It wasn't like a great secret.

I don't know if people knew that his texts were this disgusting, but it wasn't a great secret that this was not maybe the strongest candidate they should have.

All right, in Georgia.

Lauren Egan went there, our colleague, to cover Jeff Duncan, former Republican lieutenant governor, who acted extremely admirably in the face of Trump in 2020 when he tried to overturn the votes in Georgia.

Then endorsed Kamala Harris, gave quite a good speech, I thought, at her convention about kind of the moral imperative for why he decided to do that.

Good guy.

I've got to know him a little bit.

And he is now running

as a Democrat in the Georgia Democratic primary.

Mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lawrence Bottoms is the other,

is I guess the leader in the polls right now and be the most prominent candidate.

There are a couple other people in the race.

I was wondering what you made of the Egan's story and of that, of Jeff Duncan's attempt here.

I'm very encouraged that he's doing it.

I mean, I think I may have talked to him about it.

Actually, I was, we were on a bus together at the going to the Republicans or ex-Republicans for Kamala Harris event in Pennsylvania, where we also like stood on the stage, kind of, but 20 of us kind of didn't seem to help much in Pennsylvania.

But anyway, and Jeff gave an excellent speech there too.

And I think we were talking about like what party are we in now these days and so forth.

And I repeated, I believe this was your original point way, way, way back when, and you were early on this, that you know what?

If you're, if you're with the Democrats, you might as well just join the Democrats.

And then you can maybe influence the Democrats.

And someone like him, who's been elected statewide, can run as a Democrat.

So he's doing it.

I'm not taking any credit for this.

I'm just saying.

And I don't know if he's going to win or not.

I mean, running against the former governor of by far the largest city in the state, who's a Democrat, is obviously, you know, it's a bit uphill.

He should be encouraged to do it.

He should be praised for doing it.

And if he loses, he should still be praised for doing it.

And I hope it doesn't deter other people from doing it.

You know what?

You lose once.

Maybe you win two or four years from now.

Maybe someone else like you wins.

Maybe you have a standing now in the party to be a player, you know, be a figure at an active in state level or the national level.

So I'm very heartened by his decision to run.

And right now, the polls are far behind, but it's natural that we would start off that way.

I don't know.

What do you make of it?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think that the model makes more sense in Kansas than in Georgia, or in like a red or congressional district.

And so I don't, like you, if he loses his primary, I don't, you know, I think that I don't think that should discourage the model.

I think that maybe there are other districts where that, where it would maybe make more sense.

I think it could work for him in Georgia.

I think obviously the black vote is like particularly significant in Georgia, and that's going to be a challenge for him.

Like, is he going to be able to appeal to black voters?

Maybe, maybe he will.

I don't know.

But I think that maybe the model is different in a

different

state that's different demographically and politically.

But it's also like Democrats want to win.

A lot of Democrats want to win.

And there are certainly obviously ideologically motivated Democrats, but there are also Democrats who really, you know, if you're in Georgia and you look at Brian Kemp's last years, Brian Kemp's been like about the most reasonable Republican out there, but he still passed a six-week abortion law.

If you're a Democrat and you're like, I would like somebody that will not, that will at least, you know, put in place a more reasonable restriction, you know, when it comes to abortion.

There are various other things.

Democrats are sick of getting beaten.

And I look at somebody like Keisha Lance Bottoms, and she said, and we'll see what kind of campaign she runs, but Lauren Egan like asked her campaign about, you know, Duncan making the argument about electability.

And they sent her a poll.

from 2021, so it's a while ago, that showed that she had a 57% approval rating in Atlanta when she was mayor.

And I was like, well, that's not that good, actually.

I mean, if you're going to win as a Democrat in Georgia, you need to win big, big numbers in Atlanta.

And I think that she has baggage from COVID and from the crime spike that happened.

I'm not blaming that for her crime spike happened everywhere in 2020 and 21, but you can see the ads, you know?

And so I don't know.

I think that he has a legitimate electability case to make to Democrats.

And Tim, won't the Republican nominee haven followed closely enough?

It won't be someone as reasonable as Kemp, right?

No, it's probably going to be Burt Jones.

So on the Republican side, they got Raffensberger, who also acted honorably as Secretary of State.

But it's kind of a funny, it's sort of a model of like

dispatchism versus Bulwark, or like national review, maybe national reviewism versus bulwarkism.

It's like,

Raffensberger is going to run as a Republican.

I think his campaign is hopeless, but good on him for doing it.

And he'll almost certainly get beaten by Burt Jones, you know, unless, who knows, maybe he texted somebody crazy.

I don't know if I hurt the Republican primary in Georgia.

Maybe you remember.

Didn't they have some candidates just two years ago or something?

Who was that?

The guy who was.

Yeah, maybe it doesn't.

Yeah, Herschel.

No, probably doesn't hurt you.

So he is lieutenant governor who is fully on board for the Stop the Steal.

It's just a straight insurrectionist, far-right lunatic.

And so, yeah, to your point about the importance of electability, if you're a Georgia Democrat who's unhappy with Kemp and you have the specter of this guy coming in,

might be enough to get you to kind of...

broaden the tent a little bit.

I don't know.

We'll keep monitoring it, but I'm happy that Jeff is giving it a shot.

Anything else?

Any final thoughts before we get to Jane Fonda?

The people are ready for Jane Fonda, I'm guessing.

I think the people want Jane Fonda, you know.

I'm willing to acknowledge that.

And I think we're on good terms these days.

I think we follow each other on Twitter or something or did.

Maybe we're doing her in Blue Sky now.

And I think we're good.

I think that she'd be excited to hang.

I don't know.

You're in L.A.

soon, I heard.

So now you guys can get together.

Everybody, that's Bill Crystal.

He's here every Monday.

We got a little bonus segment for you with Jane Fonda up next.

So stick around for that.

All right, everybody.

We are sold out of tickets to all of our shows on the fall tour except for October 8th in Washington, D.C.

And I was on a call yesterday planning out what we've got in store for you.

It's going to be fun.

Obviously, JVL will be there, so there'll be elements of darkness.

But we're also bringing in Sarah McBride for a conversation with Sarah Longwell that I'm super excited for.

Maybe we we might get Will Summer up to talk about some of the crazy shit that's happening on the MAGA right.

I've got some other plans in store for you.

So it's not too late.

Get your tickets now.

Washington, D.C., October 8th.

Go to thebulwark.com/slash events.

Thebulwork.com/slash events.

I hope to see you all there.

It's at the Lincoln Theater.

Awesome venue.

Appreciate them for hosting us.

And so I hope to see you all in Washington, October 8th.

Hey, everybody, we are back.

This is such a delight.

I'm so excited for this.

She's an Academy Award-winning actor and activist.

This week, she relaunched the Committee for the First Amendment, which I was honored to be asked to sign, to become a member of.

It is the great Jane Fonda.

Hey, Jane, how are you doing?

Hi, Tim.

I'm so grateful that you've signed.

It's wonderful.

I want to ask you something.

I'm hoping you're a Republican.

I'm not anymore.

I officially left in 2020 when he tried to steal the election and everybody went along with it.

So I'm sad to tell you that I have to disappoint you.

I'm no longer a Republican.

That's too bad.

I wanted to be able to say we had Republicans signing on.

We might be able to find one or two these days.

I've tried.

I tried to get to Tucker Carlson.

I tried to get to Ted Cruz.

Tried to get to my friend Arnold Schwarzenegger.

None of them answered me.

I'll work on that for you.

We can shake out a Republican.

Well, I'll work on that for you.

We can find somebody.

You know,

this is not a partisan issue.

One of the great

foundational things in this country, in our democracy, was that even if you didn't agree with each other, you knew that you each had the right to speak what you felt without danger.

And my God, if we lose that, I mean, our fathers and grandfathers fought wars to protect that right.

And so we have to stand up together, Republicans and moderates and Democrats and independents.

Yeah, I got you.

You got me on the moderate list.

I'm with you.

It is crazy in this moment that this is where we're at.

We're taping this on Friday.

It's going to air on Monday, but just we had news just today.

FBI fired a guy for having a gay pride flag on his desk.

Apple shut down an app that allowed people to tell people, to warn people if there were ICE agents in their neighborhood.

That's part of the First Amendment, too.

Obviously, I guess I assume it was the Jimmy Kimmel situation that prompted you to start this.

I mean, these threats seem to be very real.

Talk about why you want to do it now.

No,

it was before the Kimmel thing.

I received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award.

And in thinking about what I wanted to say, I remembered that there was this committee for the First Amendment in the 1950s, which came to be because of the House on American Activities Committee and what was being done to so many Hollywood people put in jail and so on, you know, because they were accused of being communist when they weren't.

And my dad was a member of that.

And so I talked about that.

And then, I don't know, about a month and a half ago, two months ago, me and my posse were saying, we need to start it again.

So we did.

Who's in your posse?

They're not names you'd recognize.

Okay, just your pals.

You have a posse because you also do.

a ton of like actual real life activism.

You know, a lot of times people of your stature will have a big fancy fundraiser in the Hollywood Hills and check the box, but you're doing real work,

volunteering, supporting organizations.

Since when I first became an activist in the 1970s, it was always,

I was on the ground.

If I was going to work with soldiers, I was on the military bases.

I was in, you know, I was there.

And

that's how you learn and grow.

As an activist, I love that part of it.

You know, you're closer to this than me.

I worry a little bit that people are scared to go out and speak out and protest,

maybe more so than in the past.

I wasn't around for the Vietnam protests that you were in, but I think people are afraid of the government retribution, afraid of the massed ICE agents, and that that is having a dampening effect on people speaking out.

Do you sense that?

Do you hear that from people?

Yeah, and quite justifiably.

There's protests, those are very important because it shows that huge numbers of people are opposed to what's happening.

But there are other things like strikes, boycotts, walkouts.

You know,

one and a half million people stopped their subscriptions to Disney after Kimmel was suspended.

That matters.

Now, they didn't get in trouble.

There were so many of them.

That kind of thing.

The flight attendants may go on strike and that might bring the shutdown to a close.

They did that before with Trump and it made him stop what he was trying to do.

When people do something en masse that's strategic and really harms the opponent, especially economically.

This is what has to happen now.

I mean, there's so much stuff to be upset about right now.

And you're talking about what prompted you to start the committee.

When you look out there, what really gets you mad?

What do you think is the locus of resistance at this point?

I mean, what is scary is that we have a president who has already taken more power than any president in the history of this country.

He's trying to control the Federal Reserve.

He's trying to get the central bank.

And it's happening faster than it ever has in any industrial democracy.

And

historically, it takes 18 to 22 months for an authoritarian to consolidate power.

Once that happens, it's very hard.

to defend democracy after that.

That's why there's an urgency.

We really

have to get together and unify now across the political spectrum.

But

I forgot this.

God damn, I'm old.

That can't be true.

And I forgot what I was going to say.

I was asking what

you're most angry about.

Yes, the demonizing of activists.

We are Americans.

Our fathers and our grandfathers fought wars for these rights.

When I got mad at America because of the Vietnam War, I was living in France.

I came back here to protest.

I care about this country.

So to accuse activists as being domestic terrorists, I'm sorry.

You know, the slap suits, that means trying to intimidate people from protesting in public.

They're doing that.

It's all to scare people.

The president called you the enemy within this week.

He said you're scarier than the foreign terrorists.

You know, that we don't know who the enemy within is because they don't wear a uniform and they're trying to undermine the country.

He also said that he was a big supporter of free speech.

So I'm pissed at his

henchmen who are making him do things that he obviously doesn't want to do.

Maybe.

That's a good way to look at it.

We'll see.

Maybe it's the henchmen, or maybe they're full of shit.

Maybe they were all full of shit on the free speech thing.

Maybe they just wanted to be able to say the P-word

instead of actually giving people a right to protest.

This is classic.

I mean, it's happened in Hungary.

It's happened in Turkey.

It's happened in Russia.

This is the playbook that we're confronting here.

And this has never happened to us before.

We flirted with this in the 20s and 30s, but it's never happened.

So

we have to curt our loins.

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I like that you say that there's still time to fight, that we still need to fight.

Sometimes I hear from people who are really beaten down and kind of feel like it's already been lost.

I understand that sentiment.

And I was watching last night the documentary about you, you know, trying to get up to speed.

And And there was this one scene that really struck me.

It was an interviewer.

I didn't recognize him.

It was before my time.

But interviewer on one of these shows.

And he was having on.

And he was saying, you were once a radical and were, you know, castigated as being outside on the extreme.

And now

your position is in the mainstream.

He basically is saying to you that basically everyone came around to where you were on the Vietnam War.

And I do wonder if that gives you any hope, right?

Like that you had kind of seen that trajectory before,

being opposed to something and then seeing everybody come around to your point of view.

Do you think that that might give us a light and a path forward this time?

Listen, you're looking at a very hopeful person.

And that's because I'm active.

Yeah.

You know, if you if you are sitting around bemoaning what's happening, you're going to, you know, if you're going to, if you want to be hopeful, do hopeful things.

Yeah.

I mean, there's even joy involved in this.

I can't wait for the committee on the First Amendment, Amendment, maybe you'll be part of it, to come up with really creative stuff.

And I don't want to give away some of the ideas we have.

Totally fun, funny, non-obviously non-violent.

We have no place for violence in this.

Can't win with violence.

The tick success is non-violence, but we can have fun.

And I mean, we're creators, right?

We're storytellers.

So we can show, we can model for the rest of the country what CNN, creative, nonviolent, non-cooperation.

Well, you might be scaring some Republicans away by calling it CNN.

You know what?

You asked me if I was a Republican to start, and kind of who cares about that in some ways.

You know who you should be inviting to this, who we should be inviting as in my outside role here?

All of these tech guys and podcaster guys who were so adamant that their First Amendment rights were being infringed by the woke mob.

You know, our friends, the Joe Rogans and

Theo Vaughn's and Mark Zuckerberg said he supported Trump because Trump was a free speech president.

You should invite those folks.

Mark said he was for free speech.

He should be with you on this issue, I would think.

You know how to reach him?

We can figure that out.

I'm sure we can track that down between our role.

I don't have Mark's cell phone number, but I have some of those other guys.

Okay.

Because I think that matters, right?

Like those guys, you would think those guys would be with you, would be with us on this.

And we'll see.

We'll see if they put up or shut up, right?

Yeah.

Well, on the free speech thing, I asked you at the beginning, I said, was it the Kimmel thing that sparked it?

And you you said, no.

What was the threat that really, was there a particular threat or action that they did that had you riled up?

No, it's just that I read history and I, you know, I'm with people who pay attention and I read books and I could see what was happening, you know, in June, in July.

I could see

this is not.

the first go-around with Trump.

This is different.

I'm hopeful, but I'm also scared shitless.

How did you feel when you won again?

Just speaking for myself, it made me very sad.

Like, I was scared the first time.

I was actually sad the second time because it felt like that our fellow Americans had let us down.

I don't know.

What was your emotional reaction?

I felt sad, but I felt, okay, let's get to work.

Good.

We need that.

Yeah.

Here's one other thing I wanted to ask you about on get to work.

And

I came from the, I used to be a Republican, as we talked about at the top.

You know, can I I tell you this first before I ask you this question?

I just want to admit this, all right?

I didn't know shit about you.

I didn't know anything.

Like, I just knew the propaganda that I'd heard from my little Republican friends, Hanoi Jane or whatever.

And I hadn't really consumed your art.

And it was COVID.

And my husband was like, you would love Jane Fonda, actually.

We should binge Grace and Frankie.

And we started binging Grace and Frankie, which you need something to do in COVID.

All right.

And I was just like, you are so delightful.

My entire worldview changed.

And I started thinking about it.

And I was like, I didn't actually know anything about her.

Like, I knew nothing.

I knew like two sentences of slander.

And I do think that there's something to that, right?

And so like, there's a lot of people out there that are

being delivered propaganda that makes them think they think that their fellow Americans are enemies.

Maybe that there's a little lesson in my own failings and like how that can be punctured if you actually, you know,

talk to somebody and listen to them.

I don't know.

What do you hear that often?

Like, do you hear from people that felt like they didn't know the true Jane Fonda because of the way that you were smeared?

Yes, I do quite often.

And I'm happy to say a lot of them are veterans.

Oh, really?

That really makes me happy.

It makes me happy.

No, if people, if people knew where my heart was, they wouldn't.

They wouldn't think I was Hanoi Jane.

But what I mean when I say that is,

and a lot of it has to do with my dad who came from Omaha,

my heart is with working people.

I almost moved to Detroit to become an organizer in the United Autoworkers Union.

I wanted to do that until the head of the organizing said, Fonda, we've got plenty of organizers.

We don't have movie stars.

Go back and take your career seriously.

Smart guy.

But

I don't hang out with billionaires.

I mean, I married one.

He just wasn't like the other billionaires.

And I don't have anything against billionaires, but you know what I'm saying?

The both kind of people,

I don't hang out with them very much.

I am interested in the people on the ground who are hurting right now.

That's where my heart is.

I love that.

So what I was asking about the war protests, I do feel like, and you hear this from people on the left, who feel like that that anti-war energy has been lost on the left a little bit or got co-opted in in some ways by Trump.

Like Trump ran as an anti-war candidate.

And we see now how crazy that is.

I mean, right before we started taping, we just bombed another boat in the Caribbean.

Crazy.

It's crazy.

We're like bombing random boats in the Caribbean.

And he ran as the anti-war candidate.

Don't you feel like Democrats and folks in the left could kind of recapture some of the anti-war spirit and arguments that maybe, I don't know, has dissipated a little bit since the end of the Iraq War?

Or maybe you disagree with that.

I don't know.

know.

I think one of the big problems we have now is that there's two Americas and we're getting totally different information.

Yeah.

Totally different.

I know people who only get their, you know, from Fox and

Breitbart and that.

And so how can they know?

How can they know what the truth is?

And how can people organize?

It wasn't that.

polarized back in the in the 70s.

But

the most effective thing that we we did, and I say I was then married to Tom Hayden, and

Nixon had convinced people that the war was over because ground troops were coming back, even though he was, you know, the war in the north with the bombing was increasing.

And with the anti-war movement was looked at as violent and disruptive and everything.

So we got suits and ties and cut our hair and launched our campaign in Dayton, Ohio at the Ohio State Fair.

And I had just come back from Hanoi.

They hadn't yet built their story about attacking me.

So, you know, there wasn't all the hostility or anything.

I did a slideshow about women in Vietnam during the war at the Ohio State Fair.

And we traveled.

We did 80 cities in three months.

And

we talked to the people in the middle of the country.

And

Little by little,

they came to realize

we're paying for the war with our dollars and it's not ending.

It's increasing.

He's lying to us.

And,

oh, God, it was fantastic.

It was a whole new tactic.

And it was really successful.

And we did it two years in a row and we got the funds cut.

Congress cut the funds to the regime that we were supporting in South Vietnam that wasn't supported by the Vietnamese people.

And that was a big lesson.

Go to where the people are and just talk straight.

And I think that kind of thing has to happen again because people are not getting the information.

Yeah.

And I think the Democrats should, I think there's a good lesson to that, just both about going to the people, going outside of their bubbles,

but also just on the policy of the war.

I don't think regular people that voted for Donald Trump want us to be doing a war in Venezuela.

No.

I don't think people are for that.

No, I saw the poll today.

No, they don't.

Yeah.

And so it's about educating them.

All right.

Anything else in the committee for the First Amendment you want people to know?

Well, you know, we're not looking to build an organization.

We're looking to help build a movement quickly that can confront authoritarianism.

And I'm so glad you're part of it.

And if you can help us get more Republicans, independents, that would be great, Tim.

I'm on it.

I am on it.

I have a question for you.

One last question for you.

You made a face when I told you I binged Grace and Frankie.

Did you not like that?

Do you have, do you have, are there...

I love Grace and Frankie.

I'm just surprised at all the things that you could have seen of me that that was what you got and thought thought I was okay.

So, what should what should I watch?

Give me some watch.

I thought you were going to say you saw the documentary about me, which is a really good documentary.

I did see that too.

But give me something else.

Give me something from the deep lore, you know, something from the past.

Clute.

Have you ever seen Clute?

No, I've never.

Well, I mean, they mentioned it in the documentary, but I've never actually seen it.

You wouldn't dislike me if you saw Clute.

Well, I don't dislike you already, but I might just see Clute just for fun.

It's a good movie.

It's a great movie.

Yeah.

Do you know that you're on this podcast it's you and bill crystal i bet you i bet that would have surprised you in the year 2007 for you and bill crystal to be back-to-back on a podcast no i i used to read you know he what is what was it called the weekly the weekly standard yeah yeah i religiously read the the weekly standard really yeah why i wanted to know what they think how

you got it all right

Well, you and Bill now, I mean, are basically aligned.

I think on basically everything except the Iran bombing, you and Bill Crystal are like like probably

We don't have to be that's what I like about this committee of ours.

We don't have to agree on anything else except our right to speak freely to express ourselves.

Amen.

Amen.

Well, we're going to keep doing that.

I'm going to keep expressing myself.

I appreciate you, Jane Fonda.

Anything I can do to help the committee, you just ask, all right?

Okay.

This has been such a delight.

Thanks.

All right.

Well, how lovely was that?

I'm just tickled to have gotten a chance to talk to Jane Fonda and to pair her and Bill Crystal.

It's a long, strange trip we've been on, people.

And we'll keep it going tomorrow.

So stick around.

We'll be back for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast.

We'll see you all then.

Peace.

Looking good as Jane Fonda.

On a Vietnam tank.

You can't get something for nothing

Gotta energize your base

But she was young enough, she was blonde enough She was about at perfect 10

Had millions of admirers But not one single friend

But it's a it's a little uncanny

What she managed to do

became a symbol for a pain she never knew.

You know, Ronnie Reagan,

he was a shoe salesman's son.

He got himself in the movies.

Yeah, he impressed everyone.

He thought trial by fire

was America's fate.

He made a joke of the poor people, and that made him a saint.

But he was tan enough, he was rich enough, he was handsome like John Wayne.

And there was no one at the country club who didn't feel the same.

It's a little uncanny

What he managed to do

got me to read those Russian authors through and through.

The Board Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.