Tim Miller: Be Happy, Make Babies

Happy Friday, and welcome to the Bulwark podcast I m Charlie Sykes joined by my colleague Tim Miller on what I think Tim is and against the odds podcast today. Okay. Please tell me. Okay. So we had this massive snowstorm here in Wisconsin, which by the way is not breaking news.

It’s It’s March. It’s Wisconsin. This is one of those massively heavy snowstorms. I mean, yes, heavy snowstorm, but also very heavy snow. So it’s sitting on the trees and breaking off branches, causing trees to fall down.

So when my alarm went off this morning, We had no power in the house, no power in the entire neighborhood, no WiFi, no nothing, absolutely nothing. And I think the last time something like this happened, we were we were out for, like, twelve hours. So I’m thinking, I don’t know. And be able to do the podcast. So the miracle of, you know, Wisconsin Energy, I guess, that we are we are back up.

Although, I will tell you, You know what my day is gonna consist of? Walking around picking up broken fallen branches and an epic snow blow that will probably take me an hour and a half. So if you’d never hear from me again, it’s that. Charlie, I went to

see Ron DeSantis speech a couple weeks ago, and he he’s been this gusting about how a lot of people, you know, in your generation, let’s say, are are moving to Florida, you know, and how they’ve got a lot of folks that are coming down there now. And, you know, maybe you don’t love Florida, but I was in Tucson the other weekend. Tucson seems very nice. They have a a not insane governor. Tucson is, like, Wisconsin South.

Yeah. I bumped into two Charlie Sykes fans. I was in Tucson too. Yeah. And there was, you know, one sister Madison, not one you know, some other city I’d never heard of.

Macocata or something. The snowbirds is a real thing.

Something

for you to consider.

Well, that’s that’s true. I actually don’t mind snow blowing. I mean, this is kind of a dirty Secret Podcast get a sense of accomplishment. I mean, just take my word for it. I’m here a California guy, but Take my word for it.

There there is something about it. Although when it gets to be ten inches and it’s really really heavy —

Yeah. —

you’re dealing with heart attack weather. Sure. It’s gonna take forever to do my driving. Can

I revise and extend my remark really quick? Sure. One of the two Charlie Sykes fans. Actually, it was a Charlie Sykes hater who’s come around on you. Well, there are people who go both ways in.

Wow. It was one longtime fan and then one former banner turned fan. So that’s pretty good about the Bolton Tucson on the street. Just walking down the street. So

you’re

you’re just walking down the street and they go, yo, Tim Miller. Tim Miller? Yeah. We’re from Wisconsin. Of old Charlie Sykes experience.

It happened two separate times. Wow. Two separate

times. That’s a lot of knowledge there. I have a ton of stuff I wanna talk to you about it. It feels like this has been a really busy week and Maybe we’re all tuckered out, you know, on on Fox News, and I wanna talk to you about this. What I think is the cognitive dissonance in a new poll from Florida about Ron DeSantis, his agenda, but I wanted to start with this.

I have to say I loved. You’re not my party this week. Were you take on Vadoom and gloomers, including one Taylor Lorenz, who is a young woman on the staff of the Washington Post, and absolutely miserable. Could I just play, like, the first minute and a half of this? Then I wanna talk about the people who have just decided that everything has gone to hell that we live in a hellscape.

Let me just play you for yourself to mill. Is too late to reverse climate change.

Gonna be nice, making a meltdown or realizing I’m never gonna escape. Who was up?

Income inequality is worse now than it was during the French revolution, and I don’t know how to make a guarantee.

Okay, Dumer.

Here’s another idea. Make babies and be happy. OBE. Hey. This is not my party.

Brought you by the bowler. This week, I wanted to take a little break from the news cycle to discuss a disturbing idea. I’ve seen from progressives on social media.

It’s called numerous

homeless. Wikipedia defines tumors as people who are extremely pessimistic or fatalistic about global problems ups, like overpopulation and climate change

at the end of times.

Internet culture commentator Taylor Lorenz encapsulated this ideology by eating the other day, the teens are unhappy because we are living in a late stage capitalist house kick during an ongoing deadly pandemic with record inequality, zero social safety net job security as climate change cooks the world. That is bleak. She concludes that you have to be delusional. To look at life in our country right now, and have any hope or optimism depressing. We’ll color me delusional then from our miracle vaccines, to our decently sturdy social safety net, to our record low unemployment, almost all our teams about society are wrong.

You are wrong. And

if you think twenty twenty three America is a hellscape, may I suggest you go out? Get some ice cream touch grass. Let

me see a show. You need to chill a little. Just

a little. So this is the bright and sunny side. Of Tim Miller that we should all to show him and look around and go, guys, he is not the end of the world. But the kid’s stuff really bugs me is what I’ve

done. That we shouldn’t have

kids. It has consequences. Right? Yeah.

That that and that’s the second part of the episode. Like, that’s the part that gets me. People

listen

to Secret Podcast. We all have concerns. I have concerns. I think it’s okay to be alarmed about various threats to democracy. It’s okay to be alarmed about the climate.

But when we start to do two things with kids. One is just saddle them with grown up neurosis and anxiety to the point that we’re saying it’s okay for teenagers to be depressed at an unprecedented scale, really. If you look at the numbers because of the climate, I think that that’s the grown ups doing a bad job. Right? Because there’s always been problems.

This climate change or, you know, like, the issues that Taylor lists Some of those are just not true, but others of them that are that are legitimate, like, are not that different or in some cases better than problems in past generations. And this leads to choices. The the next part of the episode that I get to is I saw several people not just her. I was reclined out about this, to Ray, treated about this. Several others have seen prominent progressive commentators about how either they or people in their lives are not having kids because they’re worried about this.

This is lunacy. This is bad. This is algorithm induced psychosis. You don’t wanna have kids because that’s a choice that you’re making, that’s fine. If you don’t wanna have kids because you think that your one child is gonna be make or break difference on the sea level rising.

That’s crazy. As recline and his friends should be having lots of kits. Because hopefully it’s one of those kits that gets us over the edge on nuclear fusion. So we can actually fix these problems or if we wanted those kids that solve the problems of the future. If all the smart people are just sniffing their own farts, and riddled with anxiety to such a degree that they can’t have children.

And, you know, Josh Hollies out there having a hundred kids. Like, the math out there isn’t really working.

That’s kind of the subtext there. These are not just anecdotes. I mean, you cite that recent poll to see sixteen to twenty five year olds show that, you know, thirty nine percent of them are uncertain whether to have kids because of climate in those issues. The question he gets most from readers is should I have kids given the climate crisis. So you tell you, look, there are well intentioned worry warts, but I love your phrase algorithm induced mass psychosis.

There’s real evidence that the kids are not necessarily alright right now that they are depressed. Now is that because of this or is it be just kind of a pandemic hangover? Is it just I mean, how do you sort all of this out? Have we really convinced kids that there is no future it is old doom or gloom and gloom.

I don’t think it’s helping. I I I saw on the phone side of the argument here as being a big problem, just the peer comparison that is required based on social media, and there’s been a lot of research on this. Just general, you know, phone addiction, general awareness of too much. Like, we weren’t wired as humans to know every single one of our classmates, internal thoughts, and, you know, ideas and private, right? Like, it’s just it’s too much.

It’s overload. You know, I thought I saw something to say that there’s fifty one percent of young women who identify as liberal. Also, have been diagnosed from some kind of mental health issue. What do we pull out from that that is unique about young women right now, and it’s phones, it’s Instagram. Right?

To me, that’s it. And Taylor was rebutting this when she sent the tweet. Like, her tweet was like, oh, you know, all these white guys like Tim. She wasn’t particularly picking out the exact same thing yet, but it was other people in my cohort, you know, are saying, that it’s phones when really it’s all these other actual real issues that have people depressed. And it’s kind of like, I don’t think that that’s true.

And if the answer is the Social SafetyNet, then why aren’t we seeing more depression among people on Medicaid in Kentucky? Right? Like, why weren’t we seeing more depression among folks in the seventies during stabilization. There have been plenty of eras where the economy is worse than it is now.

This is like a reality check. You know, thank God that people in during the nineteen thirties and the nineteen forties and the nineteen fifties did not have the same mentality — Yeah. — because you know, you may forget, you know, back in that day, you were concerned about nuclear annihilation. I mean, there’s always been something out there Right? But there does seem to be this, the doom and gloom.

So your take on this, so rather than doom and gloom, your advice is go forth and try to make shit better. Enjoy all the bounty and the beauty in the world. And when you find the right he’s chic or they go ahead and make a baby with them. Make

your baby’s great. Wish I could make more. I can’t. I’ve been trying, but it’s not working. But if you can, if it’s working for you, you should you should make babies.

Babies are great.

They are great. And they’re also an investment in the future. Aren’t that? Yeah. We need them.

Our

JBL wrote a pretty good book about this. What to expect when you’re not expecting? Like, The demographic pyramid issues are real. And and we could solve some of this with immigration, but we’re not doing immigration anymore either. And so, like, we have real problems.

It’s not It isn’t good for society, just on balance. We can look at Japan. We can look at other societies like this. We look at China setting down this path. Like, it isn’t good for society when when the balance of the demographic pyramid is off, to such a degree that there are a lot of old people and not very young people.

Like that is not good for the society’s future economic growth. If you’re worried about economic issues, Taylor, it’s not good for the dynamism of the society. There are a lot of downstream negative effects from that. And so, you know, I mean, like, there’s a reason we should be trying to have two point two kids per couple I’m failing on this front. So I guess I’m a little bit throw in a rock from my glass house.

But again, I have no judgment of people that decide that parenting is not for them. Or whatever. Like my concern is that we are creating this fake narrative that our societies on this inexorable path to construction and so people shouldn’t have kids because it’s like good for the world to not have kids. Like, that is not true. Like, our society needs kids we need young people to to replenish the population and to actually go and Bulwark.

So we have, you know, when we’re old, so we have people creating, you know, economic value. And having kids is good for your mental health, like having kids is is a blessing and lovely. It’s the best thing that’s happened to me. And so this notion that that people who wanna have kids or who might wanna have kids shouldn’t because, like, they’re worried about climate change in forty years is lunacy. Right?

I mean, it’s lunacy.

And I care about climate. Yeah. I mean, shots fired you went after what you call the bunch of neurotic faedalus who wanna make us so riddled with anxiety that we don’t go out and do anything. So what kind of blowback have you gotten? Have you gotten any yet?

I mean, what’s it like? I mean, basically, your neurotic fatalist feel the need to share their neuroses people with their aggressive way. Yeah. I hit the Snapchat crowd on the nose, actually. And who

is the target audience for this? Right? Yeah. I’ve heard from a lot of, like, teenage you know, guys in college mostly. We’re like, thank you.

Like, it’s so weird that everyone around me is, like, so wound so tight about all this, and it is true to their experience in their in classes and college, etcetera. So I’ve heard positive feedback from them. Some of the other social media outlets, I’ve heard critiques from people who I’m usually with you, Tim, but society is terrible. And the climate thing is terrible. And our social the issue that is terrible and then Comey Klady is terrible and I kind of wanna save them like, yeah, I get it.

Like, this was not an episode that is everything is rainbows and unicorns. Everything is perfect. Like, our social safety net is impenetrable. Like, the the point is that if you look at the broad scope of history, like, our current economic condition and our current socialization head is, like, pretty good compared to where it has been. That doesn’t mean it’s good or it’s great or it’s perfect that that comparatively, hungers down, alliteracies down, child mortality is down, child poverty is down.

You know, we’re we’re in a much better situation that we’ve been in the past. And so it’s pretty strange that when you look at these charts, you can look at these charts together. It’s like all of these indicators of things that should cause human misery are all going down while people saying that their personal misery is going up. True. And to me, like, that is a social cultural issue.

And maybe, you know, there might be some value in in kind of assessing what we’re doing to young people to make them feel like their misery is up when all of the objective measures. Would indicate that it should be down.

Yes. But, unfortunately, so many of the boomers who are too depressed to have children or to get out of bed in the morning are never too depressed to tweeting. Yeah. Never

Boy, I’m not gonna judge anybody for tweeting too much. Alright. Now now that’s hitting a little too close to home, Charlie Sykes.

So I want you to explain something to me as a political professional because I am I am perhaps irrationally interested in this this new poll out of the universe City of North Florida. Got some very good news for Ron DeSantis and some bad news for Rhonda Sandis. And I I’m gonna put this in the box of cognitive dissonance and You know the one I’m talking about. Yeah. This is the one that shows him just destroying Donald Trump in a head to head Republican primary.

Fifty nine to twenty eight you know, in a more crowded field, the Sandoz, this is Florida Republicans. Not surprising, I suppose, but it’s still compressor. The Sandoz gets fifty two percent Trump gets only twenty seven percent, and then everybody else is, like, at four percent, three percent, two percent, Mike Pence, is at two percent. So pretty good news for Rhonda Sandd as they like him personally. Okay?

However, this is where we get to the mixed message. They also pulled some of the hot button culture war stuff that he is pushing. And the numbers are kind of staggering Floridians may be moving red, but they’re not all in on the right wing agenda. So for example, when they ask, what about legislation that would ban? Critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on university campuses.

Sixty one percent of Florida voters oppose that. They’re against that. Seventy seven percent of Floridians oppose this crazy idea to, you know, allow concealed carry without a permit or a license. Seventy seven percent say they think this is a terrible idea. Including sixty two percent among Republicans.

Okay. So one more here. When they ask, you know, Florida voters, how do you feel about these six week abortion ban that may come to Ron DeSantis’ desk and that he will sign seventy five percent oppose it, including within sixty percent of Republicans. So can you, like, just parse this out for me, Tim, they like DeSantis, but I have real questions about how the DeSantis agenda is going to scale up and it’s going to play when you have these kinds of numbers in his own backyard.

Well, Charlie Sykes, humans are complicated.

Yeah. Right.

It was a striking poll for sure. Really quick on the politics of it. It is legitimately good news for DeSantis. A lot of people forget this. A lot of people want to cite the twenty sixteen race Trump’s victory as being, you know, mostly due to the circular find Scott among the sixteen of us that were running against him.

But in Florida, Trump ran basically head to head against Rubio. John Case accidentally stayed in. Rubio and Cruise cut a deal where Cruise stopped you know, when focused on some other states that were running that day. So it was basically head to head against the home state review. And Trump crushed him.

I don’t have the number in front

of me. I think it was by twenty. Upping. Yeah. It was it was brutal.

That was that was that was the end for

him. So for that to be inverted Ron DeSantis Trump. Now, obviously, the campaign has started yet, etcetera, etcetera. That’s a legit sign that like something is different from twenty sixteen versus twenty twenty four as far as beating the bad orange man. So there’s something to be said for Yes.

Now the pull itself on the on the issues versus the DeSantis popularity. This extends beyond, so you listed guns, abortion, and the DEI. The DEI was the most encouraging

number for me.

CRT. Yeah. CRT, like these these sort of bands and colleges. Because I I just wasn’t sure. To me, it was kind of like don’t say gay, where I was like, on its face, I think it’s illegal and horrible.

You know, it’s easy to do a bumper sticker you know, thing about how, you know, we don’t want our schools teaching kids to be racist. You know, we don’t wanna sexualize our children. Like, those are easy bumper stickers and and rebutting them is a little more complicated. Right. So I was disillusioned when they don’t say Gabriel ended up pulling pretty well.

I’m happy to see the inverse happening here. On the DEICRT bands. So, you know, that’s good news. But at least the question, okay. Well, then why is this unpopular at all?

Right? And this extends by the way to weed legalization, which is which is popular in the state, seventy percent of Florida voters

want to legalize recreational weed.

Yeah. And Florida had a ballot initiative don’t think it was this time it was in twenty or eighteen, about fifteen dollar minimum wage that passed overwhelmingly. So it’s like, what do you people want? Right? It’s the you don’t want the abortion ban.

You don’t want a crazy constitutional carry. You don’t want the the DEI bands and schools and CRT You do you do you do want legal weed and you do want a fifteen dollar minimum wage, but you want Ron DeSantis over Joe Biden, like, why? Right? Like, why? Yeah.

You know, an element of this is Florida has a lot of we talked about the snowbirds at the top of this podcast. Like, Florida has a lot of these kind of maga, socially liberal people that lived in Long Island and moved Florida. Right? Like, so there’s just some element of this where it’s not Alabama. K?

It’s, like, it’s a different type of Republican a little bit Ron DeSantis attractive. I think that the economic situation in Florida is real. I know that this always drives JBL crazy. It’s like, why doesn’t Joe Biden get hurt for this? But I I think that people besides inflation, like, feel pretty good about, you know, job availability, housing as compared to other states, etcetera, in Florida.

I think that, again, I don’t agree with this, but there’s from a vibe standpoint, people felt good about Ron DeSantis kind of being vindicated on the COVID thing. I don’t find it that he’s been vindicated. I think he dabbled way too far with with the anti vax stuff that I think that there were certain things, like, the beaches, etcetera, that stick in your head. Right? The, like, he was right about.

Right? Like, we didn’t need to have bands on beaches. Probably we should have had people. We should have been encouraging people to go on the beaches really. So I just think that the kind of economic COVID leadership.

I there’s this sense among your kind of soft Republican in the state that I he did a good job and that what is happening in the blue states was over bearing. And and is, I guess, how I would answer it. We might need to see a Sarah Longwell well focused group down there to really dig deeper on this. This is, like, disconnect. But in a national campaign, like you’re saying, like, things get very different.

Right? You know, if you pass this constitutional carry, the six week abortion ban, for example, that are two thirds to three quarters against you. And you have a hundred million and paid ads come down on your head on it. You know, all of a sudden, the voter that is less entrenched in one side that is a little bit more low information, you know, some of that stuff starts to come into focus a little differently. I will say there’s just one more thing.

We had a test on this. Kemp and Abbott both passed very unpopular abortion bans. And one overwhelmingly. So there clearly is a voter that is attracted at some level to the Magna Republican leadership that disagrees on the abortion and that it’s not enough to get them to change their vote. There’s

also the question of candidate quality, and I know we’re we’re now going into in the tricky, you know, area you know, and you made this point. I mean, you know, in Texas, Beto O’Rourke was probably not the man for the hour. Charlie Sykes was, you know, clearly flawed candidate against Ron DeSantis. I guess the question is, have Democrats succeeded in capitalizing on these vulnerabilities seems that their messaging hasn’t lined up with these cracks. Yeah.

If you dump Josh Shapiro into all those states, what happens? I would love to do that. I wish we could just have eight earths and and test everything out. Does Joshua win in Florida or Georgia or Texas? I don’t know.

Maybe maybe not.

Probably not. Probably not. More competitive though.

Yeah. Crime is another issue. I mentioned the economy and COVID, I I I think crime is another thing. Like, Shapiro was really good on all of this. Right?

Like, he you know, this shouldn’t be that hard. Right? But for some reason, it is for politicians across the board. But, you know, Shapiro tried to neutralize vulnerabilities. He did a little bit of punching left on the crime issue, right, to demonstrate that he was gonna be tough on that while really going at you know, mastriano on being in a lunatic on democracy, but also on abortion.

And so these other social issues in the in the suburbs. And running up his numbers there. So, you know, could that have been done in Georgia with a different candidate than Stacey Abrams? Could that have been done in Florida? I think that that’s an open question.

But clearly, DeSantis had some vulnerabilities that Charlie Chris didn’t do

a very good job of prosecuting. You mentioned the crime issue. And as as we know, there are a lot of progressives who are really, really angry that Joe Biden has pivoted on the crime issue. I’m gonna describe it as a pivot. Yeah.

Signing he was gonna sign the legislation that would overturn the District of Columbia’s new crime bill, which, of course, had a lot a lot of stuff in it. But it it included in this would attract a lot of attention lowering the penalty for car jacking. And he basically said, look, I’m I’m gonna go along with all this. He knew this was gonna be a huge Republican talking point. I thought it was very interesting this week that the vote in the senate overturned that was eighty one to fourteen or something like the vast majority of Democrats went along with all of this.

So here you have once again the acknowledgement that Joe gets it. That if you want to, you know, go into twenty twenty four in a competitive way, you have to move to the center on a couple of these issues including crime, including immigration, progressives are furious about it, but these were two significant liabilities the Democrats had going into next year. And Joe Biden is figuring, hey, you know, I’m gonna give you progressively a lot of goodies in this budget. I mean, this is this is like a, you know, festival of progressivism. But in order for me to move left on these fiscal issues, I have to take some of these other issues off the table and I am not going to be the soft on crime candidate in twenty twenty four.

What did you think about that? Yeah.

I think you had a lot of cover. Look, Biden’s comfortable space on crime has always been, he is a police guy. Right? I mean, you know, how many police funerals has Biden spoken at over his hundred years in in office? You know, he is kind of comfortable with the black kind of mayor that sort of, you know, Eric Adams type.

Right? Like, that’s a comfortable spot for him. Like, he’s dealt with a lot of, you know, folks in, like, majority minority cities, you know, who put mayors who come from the machine. Right? And And this is the mayor of D.

C. Was against us, actually. The the city council supported over our objection. And so I just think that he was in a comfortable space for Biden to oppose this. And like you said, since there was so much stuff in there and some good stuff, by the way, you know, on criminal justice reform, but but some stuff that just at least sounded really bad, which maybe, you know, shouldn’t be how we judge everything, but but for the Democrats on an issue, it’s very vulnerable.

Lowering the penalty for car jacking is just a really bad talk pinpoint. Right? And you just don’t wanna give folks. So I I think Biden was was in his comfort zone unopposing this. And you know, if you can take this model, and I I wrote about this.

Right? This idea of, you know, we’re gonna be tougher on guns, but also be more supportive of police. That is the place that binds control. And in Colorado, I’m writing an article for Monday about what happened to Colorado, how it got so blue. And and, you know, Polaris right now is pushing forward

the governor, Jared Polis.

Yeah. The governor. Yeah. This twenty one year gun ban, like, strengthening the red flag laws. I just didn’t think that there’s a lot of space here you know, for Democrats to maintain popularity, to support criminal justice reform, to support, like, pretty not gun grabbing stuff, that some pretty strict gun regulations and also, you know,

also

not circle the drain of of where you know, some in the party want them to go on police abolition or whatever. I’m glad you brought up Colorado because, you know,

there’s a lot of tension on a lot of these states that have drifted off and become solidly red, you know, Florida and Ohio, now solidly in the red category, Iowa, which used to be a swing state. Now very, very red. But the flip side of that is, look what’s happening in Pennsylvania, look what’s happening in Michigan, look what’s happening in Colorado, or Arizona or, you know, a lot of these states where, in fact, the democrats are scoring the victories in areas that they had never performed that well in because you have these swing voters and they do exist who are being alienated. And I kind of wonder, that’s why I was, you know, asking about the DeSantis thing. I don’t see that Ron DeSantis reverses these trends at at least in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan.

I don’t know about Arizona. I mean, Arizona is just going completely crazy. Okay. So you and I have not spoken since you went to CPAC and had a wild and wonderful adventure, including, I have to say, I absolutely loved your face to face conversation with Cary Lakes who made fun of your clothes. How old are you?

Forty one. You dress like, a thirteen year old. My mother was like, I gotta say

yeah. She was like, I think you got the better of her, but I gotta admit she had a boy.

I was like, mom. Ouch.

Yeah. Carrie went at me. I was happy that I could make my time useful because I wanted to be with you going toe to toe with John Bolton. We both had our had kind of spirited conversations, if you will. Okay.

Put it that way. I loved your John Bulwark conversations. Secret Podcast has been great all week, actually. But Yeah. Carrie and I had a little, you know, had a little discussion, and I I wanted to go I had hoped that we were gonna have more time together.

She stormed off after she made fun of my my age. But I had a couple of things I wanted to get at. And the very first thing, which was the only one I could get to, was know, mocking her a little bit, yelling at her and being like, you’re lying. You’re lying. It’s not true.

It’s not fraud. Like like has some limited. Value in my opinion at this point. Like, everybody knows its faults, everyone knows she’s lying, you know. So I have not listened to the Secret Podcast the one I haven’t gotten to yet.

So maybe I should have listened to that before talking to Carrie and got some tips on on cornering her. But the strategy I just had to go with, was kind of in a mocking way, mentally being like, you know, is it possible that you just lost because you told McCain voters to go to hell? Yeah. Like, because it may be have you maybe considered this alternate explanation that it wasn’t the machines, you know, and that it wasn’t some nefarious caball of Neilcons and Neil Liberals in the deep state that worked together to stop you and that really you just lost the campaign because you had a really stupid strategy of turning off the voters of people that had won the state before, like John McCain and Jeff Flake and Doug Doosey. And and so we kind of went back and forth on that.

And You can see the wheels turn in her brain a little bit, but she was not giving an inch on the point.

Give me your overall take on C pack because, I mean, obviously, it was a Trump festival. Yeah. You you talked about the sad vibe of the event. It felt like was very diminished. A lot of people who had been there in the past were not there.

You know, heritage is not there. You know, the TP USA Charlie Sykes people apparently were not. Fox was not there. Was the NRA there?

No. I didn’t see them actually. You’ve

been to these things before. Right? Yeah. I mean, I hadn’t been since

sixteen. So, like, I had not really been during the MAGA hay day. So, this was my first time since during the sixteenth primary.

Yeah. So, what is your overall take? I mean, how much of it is it did look sad. It really did look diminish. On the other hand, you know, Donald Trump got out of it, what he wanted to get out of it.

So where we have with CPAC? You know? Yeah.

It was really sad. I hope if people haven’t read my diary, I hope that they would enjoy that. I I wrote a pretty enjoyable diary, I think, kind of mocking the proceedings. But So it was sad, it was smaller. The question then is, okay, so what?

Right. Right. Like, the reality is we I don’t think that we’ll have a good answer about that till next. Year, which is why I decided to just do a a a silly little withering diary about about the nature of CPAC rather than try to, you know, make broad diagnostications about it because because here’s the thing. We know that it has gotten smaller.

The energy wasn’t quite as there. Though that the people that were still there were like the core of the crazy Ron DeSantis all Trump and he wants to struggle by fifty points almost. I

was surprised by the way that he didn’t get ninety percent of the

vote. Yeah. Yeah. Right. The question is, okay, why?

And

there are a couple of potential reasons for why. Maybe as we saw in that poll in Florida, there’s a a significant amount of Republican voters who are just kinda ready to change the channel from the Trump show, you know. And they like him, still, and they had fun, and it was a good decade. But, you know, they want a new program. It’s season nine and their bores.

Maybe. That’s maybe that’s a top line. Maybe the match slap controversy led people to be like, I don’t know that I wanna pay three hundred dollars to go into the slush fund of this guy that is allegedly pummeling another conservative man’s penis against their will — Yeah. — fumbling junk. Yeah.

Junk phone. The other thing is there’s there’s a lot of options here. The America Fast that I went to in Phoenix that I wrote about in December was not sad. Really? It was kind of scary, actually.

And it was there’s a ton of energy there. Many more people and, I mean, ball parking it, but to my eye, many more people were there. And so now you have CPAC used to be this thing when I went in twenty sixteen where it’s like this one gathering where you had the crazies there, but the establishment was also there because I felt like they had to work You know, they like, we had to butter up the crazies. I wrote a book about this. And, you know, see, the whole ping and a play of the party, all gathering.

Well, now it’s like, oh, you’ve got turning point USA. They’re like eight CPACs a year now. You know, they have one in different parts of the country in Hungary. Yeah. In Hungary.

Yeah. Yeah. The whole part is a whole part is a CPAC. Right? And so, like, actually, it’s just the same level of crazy as just dispersed among more places.

Right? And so it could be any of those things. I hope it’s category one of people ready to change a channel from Trump, but I just I don’t think that we can really be certain about that until we get deeper into the into the primary and see what it’s like when Trump’s out there, you know, trying to put his own crowd. Together. In your piece, you quoted Rick Wilson, who was

sitting in for you on the podcast last weekend, comparing the event to a collapsing neutron star. It’s smaller. It’s hotter. It’s more intensely crazy. Yeah.

I know that which I think is pretty — Yeah. — I was out. That was good. So my favorite line in your piece I mean, there’s there’s so many good ones. But the description of Rick Scott speaking to the event, it didn’t sound like it went very well.

Your description of Rick Scott Rick Scott comes to the stage to dead silence. To say you could hear a pin drop would dramatically understate the case. On the big screen, it looks like an amphibious human alien hybrid whose whose endoskeletal and exoskeletal are inverted. This man is an energy vampire. The lack of enthusiasm is so palpable.

You could cut it with a butter knife. I think he said destroy our country twelve times in the first three minutes. We’re not getting big dick energy from Rick Scott, are we?

No. I tickled myself as you can tell. It’s just you know, I guess, the number one goal of writing. He’s how I mean, it’s, like, the notion this man is so delusional that he that he said there’s this puck article about how he thinks that maybe if DeSantis blames that he can come in late, like Fred Thompson did, I guess. I I

think it’s Fred Thompson. As

well as Fred Thompson. Mitch McConnell has just kind of be, like, thanking his luckiest to ours that the person challenging him, inside his own conference, has the least charisma that I’ve ever encountered in a politician, in a public space. I I don’t who does he appeal to? It’s like the Anyway, there was no interest in him. There was very little interest by the way in Pompeo and Haley.

There were day two, so it wasn’t part of my diary. I’m not just gilding a little here. And the Rick Scott thing, it was dead in there. I mean, like, he sucked I I think before him was like Todd Storns or some lunatic radio host and people are cheering and then God comes in at a

time. So it

wasn’t quite like that for Haley and Pompeo the next day, but man, not a lot of not a lot of excitement for them either.

So people are probably wondering why we’re taping this. We’re recording this on on Friday morning. We haven’t talked yet about that big New York Times story yesterday afternoon, cater signal criminal charges for Trump are likely this will be in the Stormy Daniels, porn star, hush money case. I guess the reason I’m not leading with it today and I’m how you feel about it is, I think everybody takes a deep breath. We’ll wait.

We’ll wait to see what happens. They’ll either drop the shoe or they won’t drop the shoe, and it’s the first of many shoes that are potentially out there. This is, I think, the least dangerous least significant case for Trump. But again, it might be the first crack in the dam. The dam might be breaking.

Turns out that nobody is above the law. And we’ll see what the reaction is to New York. This is Manhattan’s DA. We’ll see what happens in Florida. We’ll see what happens with the Department of Justice.

But I don’t feel any need to say the walls are closing in on Donald Trump again because it can’t feel we’ve been there, Tim. What do you think?

Yeah. Well, for people who are upset, we didn’t get a thirty nine minute mark. Can we just can we just make them a pledge? Which is if Trump gets perplexed. K?

If Trump gets actually invited and gets perplexed, We Will Saletan special We will tape a podcast immediately on the video being revealed and and we will we will put it up for everybody Even if it’s not a Friday, we won’t make you wait till Friday. We’ll do it immediately and get it up as soon as possible so everyone can just relish in it together with us. I’m with you. The story handles thing. In some ways, I get that my only thought of this is that I I get that it’s kind of the least serious.

Right? To campaign finance violation. But it’s also I think it’s not the most cut and dry. He has a lot of cut and dry crimes, but it’s about as cut and dry as you can get. You’re not allowed to do this.

You’re

not allowed to do

this. You’re not allowed to pay off I guess it’s not because he he did it through a cutout and it’s like whatever. It’s complicated, man. The notion you’re not allowed to campaign funds to pay off at ports or that you had sex with is, like, pretty straightforward. The legal particulars, I guess, can get things more complicated, but I mean, Cohen did serve time for this.

Right?

So I think it’s always been one of the outrage that Michael Cohen goes to prison for doing what Donald Trump told him to do. There seems to be something wrong there. It’s

the same as January sixth, by the way. It’s the same thing that pisses you off about

January sixth. Absolutely. Oh, totally. So this is from the New York Times article that this is a complicated case. So they write and this is the they’re the ones that broke the story saying that looks like he’s going to be invited.

And they’re basing that on the fact that he’s being invited in to testify. And generally, the way it goes is that with these New York grand juries, somebody’s about to be indicted as always, given a chance to come in and tell their side of the story. But once that invitation is given, it’s pretty good indication they plan on charging. But then again, we don’t know this album brag and what they’re doing, and and then the New York Times reports, even if mister Trump is, they always call it mister Trump. Even if Trump is indicted, convicting him or sending him to prison will be challenging.

The case against the former president hinges on an untested and therefore risky legal theory involving a complex interplay of laws, all amounting to a low level felony, but still a felony. If mister Trump were ultimately convicted, he would face a maximum sentence of four years, though prison time would not be mandatory I think it’s also significant worth mentioning that this would be the first time in American history that a former president was indicted on felony Charlie Sykes. Saying? Yeah. I mean,

I’d be happy with an ankle bracelet. I’d like to see him in prison, but an ankle bracelet would feel pretty good

for me. Convicted felons. I

hear you. I I don’t I I don’t have much word to add on this one. Okay.

So let’s do a little cleanup on ILFox. Another extraordinary week of document dumps showing the incredible hypocrisy and duplicity of Fox House, Tucker Carlson, hates Donald Trump passionately. Yeah. I mean, where are we going on all of this? I want the Tim Miller treatment.

On Tucker Carlson, who, you know, continues to be exposed as just as awful as some of this long suspected, but damn, it’s right there in print. He put it in writing. I was I think blessed with the

opportunity to watch a little bit of Eric Boling’s program on NewsMax last night. He had on Cary Lake. So I just I can’t quit Kerry. So I had to I had to watch the clip of him with Kerry. And Eric is unhappy because he got pushed out of Fox, but man, he was with a rank going after Tucker on this.

And I do think that Tucker under appreciates, like, the potential vulnerability here. I I know that you know, look, nothing matters. Trump can shoot somebody in Fifth Avenue, etcetera, etcetera. There will be no actual Ron DeSantis, but there are at least some true believers out there. Right?

Not everyone is an analyst Okay? And when they see this, that does at least make a certain category of person, a news max viewing person, say, Like, this guy is a phony. Like, this guy is not telling us the truth. He’s actually the same as Donald Lennon. He hates Donald Trump.

He hates us. Just like everybody else, he just is faking it better. And so I I there was another line in there. I hate him passionately. He’s just so visceral.

That’s the one that everybody pulls out. But I I pulled out another line from the emails that really struck me. He was talking to his producer here. That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it.

Because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on, there isn’t really an upside to Trump. I mean, to me, that was even a more astonishing quote because that betrays the final Right? Like the final line that they all tell themselves and they all tell their viewers and each other, the maggots, the people who know Trump for who he is. That still feel like they need to go along with it.

The final lie they tell is that, you know, the tweets might be bad, and he might be a big hit, and he might be a little corrupt, or whatever. But, we got these great policies out of it. Like, we actually got something that we can feel good about and we can just hang on to that. And here’s Tucker saying no. Actually, that’s not even true.

Right? Like, this has been a total disaster and there’s no upside to at all. And so I thought that was extremely revealing, accurate, by the way, that you do kind of wonder, like, how deep the rationalization set for some of these folks. Oh,

it’s pretty deep.

Yeah. And that they’re clear eyed enough to about Trump’s disaster as to then continue to go out every night and do the show the way they do it. It’s really just that part of it is just really sick. I’m

gonna agree with you largely here. You know, you said not everybody’s a nihilist, which is true, but also you have dueling nihilism here. You have dueling nihilists. Because I I think there’s a cockiness within Fox and certainly within Tucker Crossman. He he will never be held accountable.

Had played yesterday that amazing sound bite from two thousand three where he’s talking about what a phony Bill O’Reilly was. And a brother. He’s like, oh, a man of the people, but the moment he’s exposed — Sure. — or being, you know, not really the man of the people, it’s all over. He’s done.

Because what Bill O’Reilly was doing on the air was Stick, which tells me a couple of things. Number one, that Tucker Cross and No Stick he knows what he is doing, that he knows its phone, he knows its stick. But also, I think that he thinks that the rules have completely changed. That even though, somebody being exposed in two thousand three would be the end. In two thousand twenty three, he thinks he’s immune to that.

Right? That he thinks he’s in this alternative reality bubble. But you make an interesting point here. And this is a big question, Mark. Because that alternative reality bubble is not impenetrable when you have other folks like Steve Bannon and you have, you know, Eric Bowling and other people who see the vulnerability and who are telling the Fox audience.

This is what’s going on. And we say, so if we lived in a world where Tucker Carlson’s audience would never hear anything else, anything outside, then he’s safe. Right? And to a large extent, there are those people, but there’s leakage, isn’t there? Right?

There’s real leakage because you do have other people who are taking the shots. You have the OANs. I don’t know what they’re doing on OAN. I don’t know what they’re doing, you know, with the other hosts on on NewsMax. But Steve Bannon seemed to have devoted a lot of his speech at CPAC to ripping Fox.

And then, of course, you know, the big, you know, joker here, is, you know, the orange caligula down in Mar a Lago who continues to attack them and call them out. And now he hasn’t gone after Tucker Charlie Sykes there is real vulnerability there. There’s vulnerability from within their own base. And I mean, look, he doesn’t give a shit what New York Times writes. He doesn’t care what the Bulwark says or NPR.

Any of that stuff. But those things, I think he’s gotta be looking over his shoulder, which is basically the whole story of why Fox freaked out. Right? Because they’re afraid their audience might leave them.

I’m not a corporate legal expert, and I’m not gonna pretend to play one on this podcast. This is why I don’t understand why they didn’t just settle. I just feel like the risks are so high of all this for them. The one caveat to what you said is that bullying and banning are free to do this because they don’t have any chance to get on Tucker’s show. Right?

Tucker’s bet, I think, is that I have the most highly rated show on cable. Sometimes it’s the fives that beats them. But — Right. — one or two. And these guys all want to be on my show.

They all want me to say nice things about them. Me. So they’re not gonna go out and trash me. Right? Because they need me.

And so Maybe that’s true. Right? Maybe you survives it because of that. But there are enough wild cards now out there in this fracturing mega universe. That folks that don’t feel like they need them.

No. They’re not gonna get invited on Fox anyway, that they really can go and start to chip away. And then once this DeSantis Trump primary gets hot, you know, then you’ve got to balance, okay, I can’t make the Trump people too unhappy. I can’t make the DeSantis too people too unhappy. I I think that Tucker and all of Fox is in a little bit of a tenuous position.

Now, is Fox gonna collapse? Or, you know, or all of our dreams gonna come true? No. Right? But might you know, they see some ratings slippage.

Might some of these hosts end up getting cycled out, you know, in the in the creative destruction process of the twenty twenty four primary? I think And I think the

doctors is more vulnerable than he’s been. To your point about the settlement, I mean, I know why haven’t they settled because it’s a really big check and Dominion doesn’t want to settle on the other hand. If you’re really asking yourself, Will Saletan eventually settle? The key question is, will Rupert Murdoch want to go through a trial? Can you imagine what the trial would be like?

So instead of just reading these things, we would have Tucker Carlson on the stand day after day I mean, this would be one hell of a trial. So just the trial itself would be, let’s say, reason enough to settle, by the way, just you know. I listen to a lot of cable stuff when I’m walking the dogs, listening to SiriusXM, just so you know. And I’m so I’m walking in my driveway and you were on the other day, you were on the co wallysis show and you were talking about these text messages and the emails. And my favorite line was when you said.

So it turns out that these Fox hosts you know, behind the scenes sound like the Bulwark podcast. I heard you say that. That was great. There you go. Thank you.

I’m always, you know, I’m always I’m always gonna

think it’s funny because it’s true

as you go there.

Bring people into the fold here. Right? You can hear it here first on the Bulwark podcast, and then you

can hear it in the Fox House text message three years later. Apparently, the the Fox News Green Room sounds pretty much like the Bulwark podcast speaking of podcast, you have a new thing coming. Tell me about it.

We do. I hope people will check it out. So the next level is to be behind the table. We’ve taken the next level podcast out from behind the paywall, and so now it’s gonna be two times a week on Wednesdays. It’s me and JBL and Sarah Longwell kinda bantering about the news.

Mhmm. And then on Sundays, to give people a little bit of a break, you called a palate cleanser at the top of your podcast. Mhmm. We’re gonna be bringing in people who are not political pundits. Outside of the pundits or two worlds, actors, athletes, business people, military.

Who the hell knows? I I comedian’s idea is welcome. And we’re gonna talk to them a little bit about the news, but also about their life, learn some life lessons, banter, have a little bit of laughs, and give people a weekend break from this. So now the next level will be two times a week. I’m begging people to go over there and subscribe.

There’s daily wire assholes. I mean, Charlie Sykes podcast is killing it. It’s at the top of the rankings. And I just I love to be a part of it. They’re there.

But those daily wire assholes, they got, like, four in the top twenty five. Okay? So we need to start getting a couple other of our pockets to focus groups, their long wells, beg the differ. Go subscribe to the next level. The guy we have coming on Sunday — Mhmm.

— particularly if you are in my age bracket, you know, you’re you’re gonna get pretty excited. But

if you’re in my age bracket, you’re gonna be having celebrities I never heard of.

No. No. I you’ll have heard of it, but he just won’t he won’t have been a teen idol for you. You know what I mean? Charlie Sykes guess, I don’t know who was a teen idol in your age.

She’s like, maybe we could get David Cassidy or something for a future or punk

I bet

Foneciello. I don’t even know what that is. So let’s think about who the teen idols were for

your

Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. You do not know who Foneciello was.

No. I I I thought I really thought a joke. Okay. I thought I thought it was like

Shoot me now.

Annette, Vernicello.

No. Burman Shelly. And and that what? And that is she alive? I’m sad.

If she’s alive and we get to it. This is what I have to deal with people. I do not want this podcast

to be generationally discriminatory. We ask the great cast coming that are not millennial teen titles. It just happens that we’re starting with a millennial teen title because he is promoting

a movie that is out this week. Well, you promised to actually just even Google and that funny channel just just just make me happy. I don’t

know how to spell it. You have to put it in Slack. I have to spell the same channel, and then I can Google it. Yeah.

Oh, my well, I guess the the big question is, whether you’ll have Mark Hamble before we do here. Do

you want Mark Hamble?

I want Mark Hamble. Yeah.

You’re fine. You can have them all good. Alright.

This is the way it’s done.

Yeah. I want anyone that’s in the punditry world or anyone that loves that Charlie Sykes loves to take it. But, you know, just a little zag, a little break. I think we we taped this first one, and it’s gonna be fun. People are gonna enjoy it.

And then, you know, one hour, fifty minutes of Charlie Sykes a day, you know, far super fan isn’t quite enough. Right? I mean, you got two commutes, you know? We need we need to get more content. We need to knock that anti transgender, transphobe, Michael Knowles.

Out of the rankings. We got a I just dropped my microphone. We got a knock that transphobe out of the rankings. That’s how excited I am about fucking up Michael Knowles and the rest of the daily wire trail. So, you know, go subscribe.

Okay. There is something to look forward to. There is a reason to live. And if we don’t do it, the babies that we are churning out will for us. Hey, so have a great weekend, Tim.

Great talking with you.

Go forth and have a baby. Make babies this weekend. Alright?

Life’s gonna be okay. Every little thing is gonna be alright. I’ve outsourced this. Now I’m making grandchildren, which is actually kind of cool and much easier. Much, much, much easier.

I love that.

Thank you all for listening to this weekend’s Bulwark Secret Podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We Will Saletan Monday, and we’ll do this all over again.

The

Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, an engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

We’re all juggling life, a career, and trying to build a little bit of wealth. The Brown Ambition podcast with host Andy and Tiffany, thebudget Neistah can help. Randy and I are the same age. So she came out, she really popularized natural hair via braids, and so all of us had braids. It’s and then dress codes and like schools and even some workplaces where braids, locks are not considered appropriate.

It needs to be, like, written into the law. You cannot discriminate against us for our hair, brown ambition, wherever you

listen.