120. Inside The Racist Republican Group Chat

This episode is brought to you by Revolut Business, the all-in-one business account to manage your finances.

Nothing makes you feel like a sucker faster than bad exchange rates.

Revolut Business, though, keeps it simple.

Over 30 currencies at the same interbank rates that banks use with plan allowance and during market hours.

Don't want to trap markets?

Set automatic orders and price alerts to time your deal.

Paying salaries in places like Dublin or suppliers in Sydney, no problem.

Revolut gets it there fast to more than 150 destinations and without blowing your budget.

Yeah, it really is global business without fine print headaches.

It's transparent, it's quick, and it's reliable.

Exchange like an expert, open a Revolut business account today by scanning the QR code on screen or using this link in this episode's description.

Add money by the 31st of December 2025, and you'll get a 200 British pound welcome bonus or the equivalent in your local currency.

Feature availability varies by plan.

This offer for new business customers in the U.S., UK, Australia, and Ireland.

Fees and terms and conditions apply.

You know the words that dominate our news site.

Private equity keeps investing in the market.

But do you truly understand how they impact your world and your wallet?

In a world that skims the what, understand the why because context changes everything.

Subscribe to learn more at Bloomberg.com.

The global benchmark for business news.

Running a business means I wear lots of hats.

Luckily, when it's time to put on my hiring hat, I can count on LinkedIn to make it easy.

I can post a job for free or pay to promote it and get three times more qualified candidates.

Imagine finding your next great hire in 24 hours.

86% of small businesses do.

With LinkedIn, I can also easily share my job with my network.

No other job site lets me do that.

Post your free job at linkedin.com slash achieve.

That's linkedin.com/slash achieve.

Terms and conditions apply.

Welcome to the Rest is Politics U.S.

with me, Katie Kay, in Washington, D.C., in the belly of the beast, Anthony.

You've escaped, I see.

Well, only temporarily.

I'm here in Dublin, a very beautiful city, a very thriving economy, lots of fun people here.

And Caddy forced me, and my production team forced me to make the bed.

So it's the first time I made the bed since the 70s, okay?

We were doing you a favor.

I think Greg Brady from the Brady Bunch made the bed like that, probably in one of the sitcoms that I remember.

Yeah, it was good.

You did well.

We are proud of your bed-making capacity, Anthony Scaramucci.

Thank you.

It could possibly be the last time until 2040, but that's fine.

If crypto falls much further, you may have a new career in bedmaking.

Well, McDonald's.

I'll be at McDonald's frying french fries.

But go ahead.

What are we talking about?

So today we're going to talk about the second round of group chats this year that has got Republicans into trouble.

I think this is worth talking about in the context of everything that Donald Trump is pushing ahead with doing, pushing the MAGA agenda and MAGA feeling emboldened at this kind of nine-month mark.

And for me, these group texts are a sign of the way that this group of young Republicans is thinking about their party and thinking about the MAGA movement, the kind of confidence they have, and kind of the lack of pushback that we have had from senior Republicans about those texts.

And then, after the break, we're going to talk about a moment that I really think could define not just the 2026 elections, but the 2028 election as well.

And that is the Supreme Court hearing arguments that could weaken the Voting Rights Act in such a way that Republicans would gain a significant number of seats in the House of Representatives around the country in next year's midterm elections.

So we'll talk about that after the break.

But first of all, if you haven't read these group chats, I will give you a very quick summary.

They're pretty gross.

I don't know if you really want to or need to, but this is a group that calls themselves the Young Republicans.

These are people between the ages of 18 and 40 who are Republicans around the country who aspire to have positions within the Republican Party or rise up through the Republican ranks.

And Politico got hold of a group, a whole bunch of their text messages in which they refer to black people as monkeys.

They talk about putting their political opponents in the gas chambers.

They talk about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide.

They laud Republicans who they believe support slavery.

They use the N-word and various racial slurs a bunch of times.

There are anti-Semitic

texts in this.

And since these have come out, some of the people who wrote the texts have been fired from their positions.

It's fair to say.

One of them has apologised.

But notably, the Vice President of the United States, J.D.

Vance,

has said that critics of these texts should just grow up and that this is pearl-clutching.

I think, Anthony, that this is actually a moment where people could learn from these texts and some leadership would perhaps send a signal down.

You talk about what's your phrase, the fish smelling from the head down or something.

The fish thinks from the head down.

Listen, you got a leader.

He goes to Beth Page, the Writer Cup location, acts crazy.

Now he's created license for everybody that shows up there.

I mean, they're throwing beer at their opponent's wives.

I mean, it's just sort of a bizarre thing to happen at a golf game.

But this is the type of behavior that Trump gets away with.

And so now he's empowered and emboldened these younger people to say things like this.

And by the way, Caddy, I am not naive.

This is where the vice president is actually right.

People do talk like this.

There are racists in our society.

There are people who are anti-Semitic, unfortunately, in this society and anti-gay and so on and so forth.

But where the vice president is wrong on the pearl clutching, these are people that are going to be running your party in the next 10 or so years.

And they're aspiring to grow and up through the Republican ranks, right?

And they feel that this will do them, or at least they don't feel it'll hurt them.

this kind of language in this Republican Party, I guess.

If anything, it's part of the hazing.

I would imagine there are people on there doing a pylon, a racist pylon, or saying stereotypical nonsense to each other and a ho-ho sort of fraternity hazing sort of a way of doing it.

I think it's important to bring it up because we are so far beyond the political norms now.

It's a question of, are we ever coming back?

And I think this is a big question for people.

I maintain, and this is my optimism, just me talking to people, that the Republicans generally do not like Trump.

They do not like the tariff policies.

They'll say they like them publicly.

They do not like the tariff policies.

They're slowing down the economy.

We have fortified our viewers and listeners with that data.

But the real question is,

is it over again?

Have they now jumped into another realm where this is a completely different party?

Or is there still going to be a fight for more traditional Republicanism as we get to the end of Trump's term?

I don't know.

What do you think?

Well, I think you're right.

They don't like Trump.

I mean, I go back to the conversation I had with a senior Republican senator recently who, you know, kind of said to me, look, you've got leaders who reach for reconciliation.

You've got leaders who take the bait and this leader takes the bait.

And he was somebody who's a Trump ally.

So they will say to, you know, reporters and you and anyone who kind of wants to listen in private that they don't like quite a lot of what the president is doing.

And I think probably some of them have qualms about what they're seeing with the ICE patrols too around the country.

But until they actually stand up in public, it's very clear.

that this is a president who is feeling emboldened and confident.

And these texts, which are taken from January to August of this year, suggest a kind of MA base that is also feeling much more confident than the first Trump administration, right?

I mean, look at everything he's doing around the country.

You can tick off the list of stuff he's doing.

There's a push on ICE, there's the push on retribution, there's the push on cutting government, there's the push on tariffs, there's the push on redistricting that we're going to talk about after the break.

There's all the money that he's sending to MAGA allies abroad.

This is not a president or a movement that is feeling that they don't have momentum.

I guess.

I mean, don't you think?

That's the dichotomy.

So Trump's whole thing is we never apologize.

We never admit that we're wrong.

We double and triple down.

Tom Holman, tell our viewers and listeners what happened with Tom Holman.

Then I want to tell you a Tom Holman story.

He's a Border Patrol czar.

He's in charge of all things related to clamping down on the border.

But go ahead.

Well, you know, I feel very sorry for Tom Homan because when you are Border Patrol Czar or going to be Border Patrol Czar, you don't earn a lot of money.

And so you need a bit more money to fund your lifestyle.

and so before the election a bunch of people went to tom homan and said mr homan we realize you're going to be terribly impoverished when you get a job and in the trump administration and so here is a little bit of money that you might like to take um and this was all caught in an fbi sting uh and it was on video and the whole case has been shut down by the justice department and tom homan of course says no no no you know i had nothing to do with this and i didn't take the money but the video seems to suggest otherwise.

They have an undercover FBI agent that's passing $50,000 in cash.

That's I'm Holman.

And we don't even know if he gave it back.

We also don't know if you pay taxes on it.

Exactly.

So we don't, and we don't any of this, but this is the gall, Caddy.

He goes on the News Nation town hall with Chris Cuomo,

Stephen Smith, Bill O'Reilly.

He's there last night at the Kennedy Center in D.C.

on stage,

staring right into the barrel of the camera.

I did not take the $50,000.

Okay, well, we have you on tape taking the $50,000, but I did not take the $50,000.

You know, don't, you know, look at the camera.

And to me, this is the behavior that is, this is the portal that Trump has now opened.

And he said, and by the way, there's a very large group of people in the country that will believe him.

Oh, yes, you know, the hard left is making this stuff up about our MAGA guy, and let's stay there with Tom Hohen.

I mean, we're in an era of AI video where it's possible that people are going to believe that this was AI.

Fairly soon, no one will believe any video they see.

And so you can see why people might say, this is a con job.

But Caddy, we're going to enter an era here where all decorum, all principles are out the window.

So if I was going to write a book called The Trump Playbook, it's a very powerful book.

Here's what I'm going to do.

Very, very shameless.

I'm going to double and triple down on things.

If I'm caught in things, I'm going to lie about them.

I may or may not be in the Epstein files, but it doesn't matter.

You're never going to see the Epstein files.

I'll do everything that I can to make sure that those files don't see the light of day.

I mean, he is a distracting person, but he's got a PhD in distraction.

He is, we're going to build an Arc de Tromp now, or I guess what an Arc de Trump, I guess it is, across the mall.

We're going to build a ballroom.

He broke up the tile in the bathroom of the Lincoln bedroom.

Which, by the way, you thought he should do.

You didn't like those tiles.

By the way, my first reaction when he gave me the tour of the White House.

And of course, ladies and gentlemen, that happened on a Wednesday.

And I know this because I was only there for one Wednesday, so I know it happened on a Wednesday.

And I was upstairs getting a tour from him.

And I walked into the bathroom.

I was like, well, this is so odd.

This looks like my grandmother's bathroom from the 1950s.

And of course, that's when the house was renovated.

And the Trumans, Best Truman, that was her taste.

She had lime green tile, circa 1950, in the Lincoln bread, but it didn't look right.

And so Trump blasted the bathroom.

He didn't do it in his first term.

But the fact that he's talking about it and I'm now talking about it is we're not talking about the brain.

The abstraction is working.

It's fantastic.

I think it's fantastic.

So the point of the A-block of this program is to let you know out there

he's doing it and he now has created space and license for everybody in the party to do it.

I think it's not just license.

I think it's a requirement.

Let me just ask you this.

If you ask me the following question,

can Trump get away with this?

I say yes.

But my question to you, Caddy, is can these other people get away with this?

Can a J.D.

Vance,

who looks like a cabbage patch doll on every Instagram meme, can he get away with it?

Can these 28-year-olds and these 40-year-olds use these racial

epiteths?

I guess are they going to start talking publicly like that?

Or are they just going to do it on their group chats?

And can they get away with it?

Do they have the same

discretion now as the president?

You know, I think now, clearly, you're right.

The requirement from Donald Trump, the message from the top is that condemnation of these texts, which some Republicans have condemned them.

Elise Stefanik, Republican congresswoman from New York, has condemned these texts.

Oh, particularly the anti-Semitic ones.

I mean, she's a Jewish girl from Long Island.

I mean, I mean, the amount of anti-Semitism in these texts, which people don't really talk about very much in this country in the context of the far right, even after Charlottesville, where we saw people walking down the street saying, you know, know, we're going to throw the Jews out of the country.

It's much more talked about in the context of the left.

But if you condemn these texts, you are now

betraying the conservative cause.

I mean, that's the message, right?

That is what comes from the top.

But I agree with you.

I don't think other people can get away with this in the way that Donald Trump can.

I don't think J.D.

Vance, I mean, it's interesting the speed with which J.D.

Vance jumped in there, basically saying, I'm the lead nominee in the Republican primary primary in 2028.

So I'm going to get my voice out there.

Marco Rubio, curiously silent about this, we know he wants that job too.

But J.D.

Vance, who's going to run for president in 2028, feels that the way he ensures his position as the nominee for 2028 is by coming out and saying things like, you should grow up if you criticize these anti-Semitic, racist, sexist texts.

But then on the other hand, I agree with you.

I don't know that he can get away with it.

And I don't know that the other Republicans can get away with it.

But then I look at the speed with which Donald Trump is transforming the country and the kind of full pedal-to-the-metal way he's going about this.

And you wonder whether he's just going to transform the country so much by 2028 if he gets away with all of this that it doesn't really matter whether a Republican can get away with it because they're going to have remade the country in their image and it'll be almost impossible, whoever the Democrats nominate for them to come back to.

I think that is the point.

I think that is such an excellent point.

So I'm going to hammer it a little.

You've got people saying to each other on these texts, I love Hitler.

And so, okay, you love Hitler, and it's a radicalization, and it's a bonding exercise among these people, right?

And they're trying to create this movement culture, right?

So now I love Hitler, you love Hitler, ha, ha, ho, ho, hee, he.

Look at us, how we are.

And I don't know.

I feel like there's a numbness now in our society.

I feel like they're talking about gas chambers, Caddy.

Seriously, you're talking about gas chambers?

2,900 pages of Telegram chats where you guys are talking about gas chambers?

Okay.

I don't know.

I don't know who poopons like that, Caddy.

I think it's the craziest, craziest thing ever, but this is bad because

these things continue.

A guy like Reagan, he'd get everybody in a room and he would say, knock it off.

Okay.

And he would say, this is absurd and this is embarrassing.

Some heads would roll.

You pointed out that some people got fired, but there would be many people's heads decapitated from a guy like Reagan.

And the message would be, we're going to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

Hold ourselves to a higher standard.

But Trump and Vance are like, this is great.

You love Hitler?

You want to put up gas chambers?

Oh, we know you're joking.

We're not going to clutch our pearls.

But what about next year, Caddy?

What are they going to say next year?

How are they going to get

the downward slope of behavior and deviancy to make them all feel bonded to each other?

And this is a young movement.

Now, I don't want to,

it's probably inappropriate for me to invoke Charlie Kirk.

It probably is inappropriate.

But he wasn't like this.

You know, I knew him, as I pointed out.

I campaigned with him.

I would imagine he would be shocked by this.

And I looked to see if there was any messaging coming from him in here.

Can't find any, but I just think he wasn't this.

Well, look at what his wife said at his memorial, right?

The answer to hate is not more hate.

This is a normalization of extreme discourse, basically, which is something I think is really bad for the democracy.

I also think it's not just rhetoric that people are feeling is that this is a kind of normalization of this violent rhetoric.

You look at what is happening now around the country with the ICE clampdowns where five-year-olds are being put into zip ties, having their hands zip-tied.

And you've got peaceful protests where the Justice Department is now pointing to those people and calling them terrorists and police are throwing tear gas at peaceful protesters.

Now, last time I checked in America, peaceful protest was a right that Americans had.

There's a febrile atmosphere in which this extreme language and extreme language by the government against people and these ICE arrests is all part of a sort of push to remake America that the president is succeeding at.

I mean, I've watched the ICE stuff from Chicago quite a lot this week.

It's tough what those ICE people are doing out there against peaceful protesters and against kids and against American citizens.

At what point does somebody in the Republican Party stand up and say,

we don't do this to American citizens?

We don't actually do this.

I mean, you've had former ICE directors saying, we don't do this generally.

This is not the way we do roundups and deportations in this country.

But now it's becoming, like you say, normalized.

Well, I mean, listen, like, you know, the Obama administration deported a lot of people.

They did it more delicately and more subtly.

But this is different because this is an

attempt to downplay

or normalize rather than confront something.

Okay, it's almost like they want this radical content and they want the radical action of ICE to be absorbed into the culture and accepted, Caddy.

You see, so if I were a social engineer and I'm like, okay, I want to numb out the American people to my behavior.

And I also want to create some intimidation with the American people so they step over the person that's zip-tied on the ground or they ignore the bellicosity of this type of racial screed.

It becomes now part of the fabric.

So I'm now shifting the bell curve of content, the physical content.

that we're going to execute in the country, as well as the verbal content that's going to impact our culture.

and Vance is telling you, yeah, don't worry, guys.

There'll be no robust accountability.

There'll be no robust rubber meets the road in terms of right and wrong.

We're going to allow you to have this linguistic discourse with each other that's mean and rough, which is matching the mean and roughness of our jackboot masked ice workers.

You see, the masked thing, of all the things that is going on in this country that has me super upset, the masked thing has me at the top of the list.

So you're taking people without due process.

You're pulling them out of their cars.

You've got kids afraid to go to school, but you won't show your face, Caddy K.

We're going to be masked while we're doing this.

And by the way, Tom, $50,000 Tom, I mean, by the way, if he was in a mob, there'd be so many great nicknames about this guy, you know,

fat knuckle 50K Tom, you know, shit like that.

But this guy's unbelievable.

You know, I mean, he's out there saying, yeah, no problem.

We have to have the mask.

That was good.

We have to have the mask on.

You have to have the mask on.

We've got to protect ourselves.

What do you got to protect yourself from?

If you're doing something so right and you're so righteous with what you're doing, why do you need a mask?

You know, the ICE agents that deported the people during the Biden administration and the Obama administration didn't have masks.

What are you going to have the masks?

Well, we've got to rough these people up.

We're telling our people, if they want to stay in the Department of Homeland Security and get their pensions, get tough, get rough.

I don't think you want to be the person who's zip tying five-year-olds in Chicago, honestly.

Anyway, as we talk about this, we should remind you that the person who is masterminding all of this, the crackdown of ICE, is Stephen Miller.

And we have done a special series on Stephen Miller for our members only.

The second episode is out this Friday, looking at how successful he is in this administration about pushing these extreme policies around immigration.

If you'd like to listen to that, please do become a founding member.

You can sign up at the restispoliticsus.com.

And we've left a clip for you at the end of this episode.

We're going to take a quick break and come back to talk about the Voting Rights Act.

We're not going to be talking about Egghead Stephen or 50K fat and

the next half.

No, we're leaving those guys out.

I think 50K Fat Knuckle Tom is better than Egghead Stephen.

I don't see Egghead Stephen in a mob.

Do you?

Do you see him in a mob?

I I like the cheap it.

I like the cheap.

I like the cheat it.

Okay.

Well, I'm going to have to think of one for you.

We'll be right back.

This is an ad by BetterHelp.

October the 10th is World Mental Health Day, a moment to pause and reflect not just on our own well-being, but on the people who help us navigate it.

And my goodness, don't we need that moment of reflection here in America?

Yeah, and advice is everywhere.

Friends, headlines, social media.

But sometimes it takes real counsel, the kind that cuts through the noise and asks the right questions.

That's the counsel that can change everything.

That's the craft of therapists, not shouting over the storm, but showing you the way through it.

BetterHelp has been creating those turning points for more than 12 years.

With over 30,000 qualified professionals worldwide, they've supported more than 5 million people in helping them move forward.

And finding the right fit, Caddy.

I mean, that also matters.

So, BetterHelp begins with a short questionnaire.

It matches you with someone who fits.

And if it doesn't, you can keep switching until it does.

If you're ready to find the right therapist for you, BetterHelp can help you start that journey.

Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/slash tripus.

That is better.com slash T-R-I-P US.

Ah, Smart Water, pure crisp taste.

That's really good water.

It's the kind of water that says, I have my life together.

I do feel more sophisticated.

Smart Water, for those with a taste for taste.

Grab yours today.

This episode is brought to you by CBS.

DMV is a brand new workplace comedy turning misery into magic and chaos into comedy.

Starring Harriet Dyer and Tim Meadows, DMV is here to to serve you laughs.

Watch Mondays at 8:30, 7:30 Central on CBS and streaming on Paramount Plus.

Look, we want to talk about a case that is going through the Supreme Court at the moment, which is Louisiana versus Calais, which will determine whether you can have race-based redistricting of congressional districts in the country and whether that is still constitutional or not constitutional.

And it sounds, I realize, kind of dry and arcane and complicated technically, but the reason we want to talk about it is because I actually think this case is essential not only to the 2026 midterm elections and whether the Republicans managed to retain control of the House of Representatives, but also potentially to the 2028 presidential election.

You can draw a line from this case that is being heard this week in the Supreme Court to whether J.D.

Vance becomes the next president of the United States.

I don't think that's too much of a stretch because if the Republicans take back the House of Representatives and this redistricting that would be allowed if the Supreme Court agrees to this case and overturns a segment of the Voting Rights Act,

this redistricting would allow the Republicans to win the House of Representatives in 2026, hold on to it.

That gives the MAGA movement and Donald Trump two more years of his agenda, unfettered.

It gives them momentum.

I realize a whole load of other things can happen on the economy, and that could be a problem, but it sets up whoever is the Republican nominee for the 2028 election.

If the Supreme Court were to say, no, we're going to keep these districts, these race-based districts, and give black voters essentially more of a weighted say with these districts around the country.

That gives Democrats an advantage.

Let's say Democrats take the House of Representatives in 2026.

They might impeach Donald Trump.

They could cause problems of his agenda.

It would be seen as a sign that the MAGA movement had lost some of its momentum.

There'd be a lot of press coverage of how Donald Trump had lost the midterms and his agenda was failing.

And that would put whoever is the Republican nominee in 2028 in a weaker position.

So basically this case means that around the country,

if the Supreme Court overturns this section of the Voting Rights Act, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, around the country, the net outcome would be that Democrats would stand to lose something like 19 seats.

And that would be very hard for them to overcome, right, Anthony?

I mean, you and I have spoken about redistricting before.

I've made the kind of sort of big, broad political case, but talk about it in the context of why conservatives are arguing that this bit of the voting rights act should go.

This is where Newsom, Gavin Newsom, says the Republicans got a plan.

The Republicans are ruthless.

The Republicans are bringing a machine gun to a knife fight.

And we're writing letters and playing the victim and complaining to each other, right?

So this is why Newsom is like looking at this saying, okay, I got what you're doing.

So let's just tell our viewers and listeners what they're doing.

They want to liquidate blacks.

They want to liquidate or dilute their ability to have voting power in these districts.

And they're going to use the yoke of the 14th to 15th Amendment and say, well, we shouldn't have a racial test.

And so a result of which we're going to unwind the racial test to make minorities harder to have power in these districts.

And so these districts will typically then flip to the Republican.

Can I ask you a very quick question from a conservative point of view just on that?

So the conservative argument to me seems to be that, okay, when the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, it was fair enough that we weighted districts to make sure that black voters had

strong representation because they'd had, you know,

slavery and then discrimination.

They'd only just got the vote.

There'd been separation.

You had whites-only bathrooms, years of lynchings.

Obviously, voters in 1965 and black voters in 1965 were in a very different position in America than they are in today, 60 years later.

You could hear it in the hearings this week that that was the conservative question in the Supreme Court, right?

You're the lawyer.

I'm not a lawyer.

Well, you play a lawyer anyway.

You play it pretty well.

Is that a reasonable argument?

It's a reasonable argument.

I'm not going to say that it's not a regional argument, but then you have to tell me what you want for your country.

So

that Civil Rights Act was we want more integration in the country and we want there to be empowerment for all voting blocs.

You know, this is a little bit of a digression, but I wrote my third year paper in law school about the Starrett City housing in Brooklyn.

And I'm going to tell you why it's relevant here.

So what happened at Starrett City, the housing administrator was affordable housing, and he was accepting black and white applicants.

And he was told by the housing authorities that it had to be a mixed-use, meaning mixed-race building.

But you get something called white flight.

And so when the blacks get to be over 50%,

the whites move out to Long Island, and the building no longer is of mixed race.

So what did the housing administrator do?

He kept rejecting white applicants.

And why did he reject white applicants, Katie?

Because he said, hey, listen, if it goes over 50%,

there won't be blacks and whites in this building.

It'll be 100% white.

They sued him, and

he lost the case.

They said that you're discriminating because you got to let the blacks come into the building.

But he then said, yeah, but now we're losing the integration model that we wanted.

Now, the Supreme Court failed to hear the case.

And my...

My paper was about, well, what if the court heard the case?

What would they have done?

It's relevant here

because the conservatives on the court are going to rule the way they did on the Starr at City case.

See, I think the Republicans are going to win the case.

I definitely think they're going to win this case.

I could be wrong about that.

The court already ruled against affirmative action.

This has made it pretty clear that this court doesn't think there is a basis that race should be considered in pretty much any part of American public life.

Right.

So now the question is:

you guys are playing this way.

You brought the machine gun.

Do I bring the ICBM?

Now Newsom can do it, right?

He can go prop 50.

He can knock every one of those Republicans that sit in the Congress.

Because let's face it, California is a very blue state at this point.

And they've had a little bit of a peace treaty there where they were going to let some Republicans represent parts of the state.

But he can now say, okay, no problem.

You're going to do that in Louisiana.

You're going to do that in Texas.

No problem.

Let me call up my buds in Massachusetts, super blue state, and let's do the same thing to you.

So this escalation, it's almost like an ideological redistricting arms race.

This escalation will be very bad for the country.

This will, again, take the country in a direction that I don't think anybody really understands the

long-term implication.

Because if you silence the black voter in the country, you will have, you're taking Obamacare away.

I love these guys, okay?

They're taking Obamacare away.

They never mentioned they're taking Obamacare away.

When Trump mentioned it in the first term, McCain voted it down, thumbs down.

We're not taking Obamacare away.

Now we don't mention it, Caddy, and we're taking it away.

No one's getting to a microphone.

Tap, tap, is this on?

Hey, we're going to repeal the Voting Rights Act.

No, we're not doing that.

We're going to boil the frog slowly and remove these rights.

This is an incredibly well thought out

plan.

This is a vision.

This is, hey, America, we have 27%

of the registered voters.

We are the minority party in this country, but we know how to game the system, Caddy, to turn ourselves into the tyranny of the minority.

The founders wanted to protect minorities.

And again, not black and brown people, but the minority voter, the one that lost the popular election, they wanted to protect it from the majority.

They called it the tyranny of the majority.

But the Republicans have flipped over the table and said, we're going to use these laws to create the tyranny of the minority Republicans who have the lowest level of registrations of the three groups, Independents and Democrats.

Well, first of all, I'm very impressed that you can remember your third year.

law paper because there is no way I can remember anything from my finals exams at university.

So that's you get kudos points for that.

Okay, well I'm going to take them.

Okay, I

probably shouldn't admit this on the air, but

my first wife, I think, set the paper on fire.

I can't find it anywhere.

But anyway, so I don't remember exactly what was in it.

But anyway.

You did a pretty good job on that.

Yes, you can leave that in the podcast, Fiona.

It's no problem.

Okay, I think it's funny at this point that she lit my third year paper on fire, but that's

let's hope that your ex-wife doesn't listen to the podcast.

No, she probably would listen right now and she probably listen listen right now and think of other things she could burn, babies, you know.

We're trying to make things

more harmonious in the Scaramucci household, not less harmonious than Scaramucci household.

I laid out that conservative case earlier and I've had conservatives just this week saying to me, look, between 1955 and 1995, Democrats held the House of Representatives for 40 consecutive years.

And this map of districting helped them do that.

I would have more sympathy with this case on its kind of face or on the merits of what they're saying if it weren't for the fact that the Republican Party at the moment, and Donald Trump is pushing them to do this, is really trying so hard right around the country to crack down on voting rights, kind of particularly based on the lie that he lost the 2020 election, which he was reiterating again.

It clearly still bugs him in the Oval Office.

And so he's pushing the party around the country to make it harder to register to vote, make it harder to vote by mail, make it easier to disqualify ballots.

He is restricting voting on college campuses.

He's making it harder for black people to vote.

So he's trying to push the Republican Party around the country with all of these propositions to do all of those things to restrict the vote, which I think

shows or gives a very political, I don't want to cast aspersions on the good Supreme Court justices, but it puts a very political spotlight on what the court is doing this week, right?

I mean, it's this is not just about this argument that it's time for the country to change and move on.

I want you to channel your Amy Coney Barrett.

I'm going to be the jurist now arguing the case for the Democrats.

I'll say, well, this colorblind doctrine, let me provide some criticism.

This will preserve existing inequities and and therefore it will ignore the structural racial disparities, which in itself prima facie is inequitable, which is against the spirit and the law of the Constitution.

It should be our job not to make the equitable status quo, but it should be our job to make this a more perfect union where people, despite their race, for the colorblindness for a second, despite their race, should have a voice in the society.

So by making this colorblind, you're going to preserve these existing inequalities.

What say you, Amy Kony-Barrett?

Amy Coney Barrett says it is time to move on and have a non-race-based society.

Exactly.

That's what's going to happen.

It is exactly what is going to happen.

Very important to know because it sets up 2026, it sets up 2028.

It impacts Democrats' ability to take not just the House of Representatives back, but this, what the justices decide on this case, I think impacts their ability to take back the White House in 2028 as well.

How tough is the response going to be from the Democrats?

What are they going to do now?

Are we going to have this arms race escalation of redistricting?

An arms race which Republicans will win.

They've got the court.

They've got the numbers.

They're going to win because they've got six jurists on the court.

That is all for today.

Our next episode on Stephen Miller is out on Friday.

Do sign up at therestispoliticsus.com to hear it.

Here's that clip that we mentioned earlier for you.

I think what is also important to realize about Stephen Miller and compared to other Republicans is that it's not just that Donald Trump leaves office, of course, in 2021.

He has January the 6th.

And at that point, you have a stream of Republicans.

including Senator Lindsey Graham, saying, okay, I'm off the Trump train.

Stephen Miller takes takes a totally different approach.

And there aren't many of them that do this.

Stephen Miller, in the days after the January 6th riots, goes on television and defends Donald Trump.

At this point, remember, Donald Trump's a bad smell.

The Republican Party want him to get on that plane out of Washington, D.C.

as fast as he can get out, and they don't want anything to do with him.

Companies are dropping him.

Facebook is dropping him.

Nobody wants to be associated with Donald Trump.

And Stephen Miller goes on television and defends the guy that no one else will defend.

And I think that is the kind of loyalty, right, Anthony, that Donald Trump wants from him.

And that is what makes Stephen Miller, even in those four years out of office, that is what makes Stephen Miller still very close to Donald Trump.

That's what he wanted.

He wanted loyalty.

I think it's important because it's an amazing setup for the amount of concentrated power that Stephen Miller gets in the second term.

The administration leaves power.

Donald Trump flies off to Mar-a-Lago.

And Stephen Miller spends four years trawling through the statute books.

He leverages his connection to Donald Trump to build relationship.

He knows that they're going to need a lot of money because he still wants to do this big deportation with the American military.

He still wants to deport if they ever get back into power.

He wants to be ready to carry on the project of deporting illegal immigrants.

So he raises over $40 million.

He's very successful at raising money.

And this is, remember, Donald Trump's out of power.

A lot of people at this stage aren't thinking Donald Trump's going to come back into power.

But Stephen Miller is a believer and he wants to be ready.

He builds a new relationship with our old friend Elon Musk.

And

that helps him, of course, with access to money and access to people of influence.

He builds relationships with MAGA members of Congress on Capitol Hill.

And he's building quietly behind the scenes.

I mean, I...

I don't think I was really aware of the extent of what Stephen Miller was doing in those four years.

Were you, Anthony?

were you watching what he was doing?

Well,

I was and I wasn't, okay, because one of the things that he did, which fascinated me, is he built something called America First Legal, which was called the AFL, which was sort of a counterdote to the liberal ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union.

And so what Miller was doing was he raised millions of dollars.

He got people that were tied into the

Heritage Foundation and others to help him create this core litigation strategy to push anti-immigration.

He filed suits against race-conscious omissions

in critical race theory in K through 12 schools as well as private universities.

If you're a conservative and you're a anti-woke culture war fighter, you'd have to be impressed with this.

So I was not aware of all the things he was doing, but because I went to law school and I was fascinated by the lawsuits that he was bringing.

I mean, he brought hundreds of lawsuits that shaped Supreme.

Why are you laughing?

Well, because he's out of office and he's just like, you cannot let it go.

Yeah, exactly.

So he brought hundreds of lawsuits related to things like affirmative action and religious liberties.

And then, you know, he was flying back and forth to Mar-a-Lago, acting like a

war room wartime consoliare on policy to Donald Trump.

You know, he drafted memos and talking points.

He was always pushing his memos and talking points at the House Freedom Caucus.

And then, of course, very famously with the Heritage Foundation, he was one of the drafters of Project 2025.

And he was the one that came up with the Schedule F idea.

Hope you enjoyed that clip on Stephen Miller.

Become a founding member, and then you can hear the rest of it.

And we'll bring you more mini-series, we promise, as well.

And next week, we'll be back answering your questions.

So send us those for a QA as well.

You can ask us anything, really, Anthony, right?

I mean, politics, dating,

career.

You can ask me anything.

I know you like that.

What do you call it?

The Aunt Polly or

Ant Agony or whatever it's called.

I don't know.

I kind of like the way you say Aunt Agony, so I'm not going to remind you that it's agony.

I've given great advice on ant agonies, particularly, you know,

I've great advice.

We'll have more ant agonies next week.

Thanks, guys.

See you next week.

Hello, I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.

And I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst, turned spy novelist.

And together, we're the hosts of another goal hanger show called The Rest is Classified, where we bring you the best stories from the world of secrets and spies.

That's right, Gordon, and our new six-part series tells the story of John F.

Kennedy, the CIA, and Cuba.

It's a covert war of botched invasions, mafia deals, and CIA plots to kill Fidel Castro.

The CIA has a secret army, the mob has a vendetta, and Kennedy is caught in the middle.

So what if the answer to the 20th century's most infamous assassination is found not on the streets of Dallas, but 90 miles off the coast of Florida?

And for our declassified club members, oh, you're in for a treat because we've gone even further.

We have an exclusive three-part miniseries that digs deep into these conspiracies.

We've also got, as part of that, a jaw-dropping episode with Anthony Scaramucci, the mooch himself, who says he has insider evidence that ties the mob directly to Lee Harvey Oswald.

All this sounds good to you.

You can listen to the rest is classified wherever you get your podcast.

If you think you know who killed JFK, think again.