Will Saletan: How Many Coups Do You Have to Attempt?

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morning. Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I am Charlie Sykes. It is Monday, which means I am joined by my colleague Will Saletan. You have a great weekend?

Well, I did, Charlie. I did. It’s lovely out here. It’s the Washington spring or three weeks of spring. Okay.

So I am three time zones away from you right now. I’m in an undisclosed location in a desert community where it was ninety five degrees yesterday. Ninety five. Don’t give me this stuff about dry heat. That’s just freaky hot.

Yeah. Because Charlie, you’re from Wisconsin. You think that fifty is hot. And what is your point? One of the bar counters of the event that was at was complaining it.

It hasn’t been warm here. I mean, it was in the fifties. It’s been the fifty four days and I see, you know, I’m from Wisconsin fifty. That’s spring. That is spring here.

Of course, here in Phoenix. This is not the undisclosed location, but they only have two seasons hot and hotter. So I think we’re getting into the hotter. Okay. We have so

much to talk about today. Wanna talk about something I wrote about in my morning shots newsletter about a bestselling author, Richard North Patterson, who’s been a contributor to the Bulwark. It is an amazing story and a really disturbing story. If people haven’t seen it, I would encourage them to read it. He wrote us an email over the weekend and he had an essay in The Wall Street Journal.

I wanna get to that in a moment. This is gonna be a big week. Joe Biden is going to announce probably

tomorrow that he is running. There are a lot of poll numbers out suggesting that Americans are not exactly jazzed about this prospect. I don’t know whether that’s gonna mean anything. Since you and I spoke, Will, the Supreme Court late on Friday, made a ruling on the abortion pill. They sort of backed away from the edge.

We we have Ron DeSantis speaking to the Heritage Foundation. So that again, there’s a lot going on. Kevin McCarthy bringing a a debt ceiling vote to the House of Representatives. So this sort of deadly Is it a kabuki dance or is it a game of fiscal chicken? Which overused metaphor should we use today?

It’s kabuki chicken. Oh, that’s good. Okay. See, I know I I should ask you, let’s start with abortion. Let’s start with what the Supreme Court did.

They came right up to the edge. And apparently, it looks like they voted seven to two to basically say, yeah, we’re not gonna ban the abortion pill nationwide. And Interesting enough, Justice Alito was was very, very unhappy about that. Was was really had a bundle about that. So let’s talk about what you’re reading from the court’s latest decision, which I mean, arguably is the most important decision on abortion since dobs.

What happened.

Right? Okay. So the Supreme Court has delayed this. They’ve not allowed the lower court rulings to go into effect, which means you will still have access to this pill. While the case goes through the court.

But the case is going through the courts. The merits have not been decided. And so this could come up Charlie Sykes, it could come up next year in the middle of the election that the Supreme Court is deciding the merits of whether we’re going to roll back the FDA approval of Pristone, which means that we would be eliminating if that were approved. We would be eliminating access to the most common method of abortion in this country. It’s also the primary method of early abortion.

Right? So what we’re seeing is the pro life movement increasingly moving from regulating and restricting the later stages of pregnancy to the earliest stages, and not just banning it state by state, but trying to eliminate access nationwide. And it’s not gonna end with this ruling. It’s only gonna escalate as this case proceeds through the courts. I think that

is true. Was it your formulation last week? That we were going to find out whether the court was conservative or was radical? Yes. Okay.

So I think we saw a

little bit of the conservatives going we are not going to follow San Molita over the cliff on this one.

Yeah. So, you know, what does it mean to be conservative? That’s a lot of what we’re debating these days as Trump has kind of upset that whole idea. And in the courts, so the idea of judiciary restraint is the judges shouldn’t be making decisions that we should let legislators — Right. — representing the people make these decisions.

And most of the justices on the Supreme Court appear. It’s hard to tell from this kind of a ruling what they’re thinking. But this Supreme Court ruling suspending the lower court rulings is consistent at least with the idea of judicial restraint. Here’s a lower court judge a federal district court judge in Amarillo. Right?

The pro lifers went in, they judge shop, they set up in Amarillo, to get this guy, to issue this ruling, so one judge could eliminate access to this pill nationwide. And for the Supreme Court to say, not, you know, we’re not gonna let that go into effect yet, at least as consistent with judicial strain. But, Charlie, you put your finger on one guy, Sam Alito, who, in the Dobbs case last year, said, you know, we want judges to get out of this business. And yet a lower court judge does this in Amarillo and Alito essentially wants to allow the rulings below. He says, you know, the FDA doesn’t can’t really show that it’s been harmed by the suspension of access to the pill.

So I’m starting to get the feeling that San Alito is not a judicial conservative,

that that’s all fake. Or particularly consistent in his judicial philosophy. Mhmm. I think you see where he’s coming down on all of this. And of course, the Republicans still debating among themselves where gonna go on all of this.

Did you noticed over the last week you had an interesting back and forth between the wall people Donald Trump and one of the leading pro life groups Susan b Anthony Fun. What do you make of that?

Well, that’s kinda wild. I mean, Trump has an instinct for at least what politically salable because Trump doesn’t care about any of moral issues. You know, he’s not like Mike Pence. You’re actually believing that these are the killing of persons and we have to stop it. Trump’s just looking for political advantage.

So he takes the sensible position politically, which is, you know, I’m running for national office, so I’m just gonna kick this issue to the state. Which was a time honored position among fake pro lifeers for a long time. Susan the Anthony List, which claims to represent a million people, but it is a very prominent pro life group. And it issued a statement saying, this is not acceptable on Trump’s part. We will not accept it.

It’s not acceptable to push this back

to the states. They’ve drawn the line. It has to be a national ban. Right. And they’re trying to send this signal to Trump.

I’m sorry we’re not with you if

you’re not for a national band. An

interesting little power dynamic there. It is.

And, Charlie, this statement from the Susan being anything that was this is an amazing statement. I’m just gonna read you one line from it. They said saying that the issue should only be decided at the state is an endorsement of abortion up until the moment of birth. That’s an amazing statement. I mean, that is an escalation of what counts as pro life in this country.

I think most people in this country who consider themselves pro life are somewhat moderate on this issue. They think abortion should be more restricted than it is. They think it is a form of killing, but they wouldn’t say that, you know, overturning Roe and returning the issue to the states and the people is an endorsement of abortion. Much less an endorsement up until the last moment. That’s crazy.

So

I it’ll be interesting to see whether or not Trump aligns himself with the pro life movement because, I mean, he’s got a lot of chips to play on all of this and, you know, I had Tim Alberta on a podcast couple weeks ago, he said there’s the real gap right now between the pro life movement and Donald Trump. My guess is that they’ll resolve if, in fact, he moves on to get the nomination. Also in a power struggle in the Republican Party between the Susan B anthony Fund and Donald Trump, I have to say that Susan B anthony is about to find out the limits of their cloud within this new magnified Republican Party. The problem is what

do you do if you strongly believe that abortion should be outlawed everywhere, but candidates who say that keep losing. Right? And so we had this lesson in the twenty twenty two midterms. The extreme candidates are tending to lose. And at some point, a political party in order to be viable.

You then have to back off and say, you know, we’d like to be on all the abortions, but in fact, America won’t stand for it. And If the party doesn’t back off, what happens is you have another political cycle, another election cycle in twenty twenty four when these candidates lose even bigger. I suspect, Charlie, that’s what’s gonna happen.

Nancy Mace from South Carolina is having a moment where she’s getting a lot of attention, although she’s also going through some weird things. I can’t quite figure out what her deal is. You know, one day she’s on one of the talk shows and sounding like reasonably rational. And then the next day she’s filming a selfie of herself talking about some weird constraints. You know what I’m talking about here?

I mean, it’s like, wait. Wait. Wait. Is this the Nancy Mace who sounded like she has a clue is stepping up, and then she feels that I I need to, you know, shore up my, you know, batshit crazy cred here with this. Well, she was on one of the the the shows over the weekend talking about this and and about the politics exactly what you are talking about.

And the problem of this poses for Republicans, so is a congresswoman, Nancy Mason, one of her more, I don’t know, mainstream moments.

And we got to show compassion, especially to victims who’ve been raped. The Florida bill, mandated that women who were raped to get that exception, had to report it to the to the police, had to get evidence at a hospital, and I will tell you based on my own experiences, It took me a week before I was actually able to tell somebody what happened to me. And by that time, there is no evidence. There’s nothing you can collect at that point. And, you know, that puts heavy, heavy restrictions on

on these victims, and there are millions of women everywhere who have gone through this. I’m not the only one. Yeah.

I mean, obviously, she’s speaking as a sexual assault victim. And that’s pretty powerful stuff. You get the idea that, you know, down in Florida and in other states, they’re trying to finesse this issue, but they can’t quite get it right. They’re willing to have exceptions in the case of rape or incest, etcetera. But then they have this, you know, they get themselves tied around the axle.

Well, what does a case of rape actually mean? What hoops are we gonna make the women go through? Again, this is one of those things where they’ve had fifty years to prepare for this. But clearly, they don’t have a really workable, humane, compassionate strategy here.

No, they don’t. And rape is in particular very difficult issue for pro lifers. Because, look, if you believe that this is a person, the fetus is a person, it doesn’t matter how it was conceived. Right? It’s not the fetus’s fault that there was a rape.

So all fetuses should be protected, including those who born of rape. Well, the problem is that just runs up against the intuitions of lots and lots of people, including Charlie, so many moral conservatives who don’t like abortion, but they also, Charlie, kinda, distinguish between whether you went out and chose to have sex and whether somebody just you know, walked up and raped you. And in that case, they sort of feel like, yeah, you know what? You should have some choice in the matter. And so what Nancy Mace is articulating is first of all that intuition.

And secondly, Charlie, the personal experience of a rape survivor. That’s very, very difficult for the hardcore pro life people to go up against congress woman who is herself a rape survivor talking about how in that situation a woman deserves choice. And as you we were just talking about the polls are on her side.

Let’s talk about the polls briefly. I don’t wanna spend a huge amount of time talking about this, but there is a new poll showing seventy percent of Americans think the Biden should not run again. This comes out, you know, days before he said to announce his reelection bid, Americans just think that he’s too old and they’re kind of exhausted. This is the NBC news poll. So seventy percent of Americans don’t want Biden to run for a second term compared to just twenty six percent who do and among those who do not want the eighty year old president to pursue a second term sixty nine percent site age as a reason why with forty eight percent calling it a major reason.

So deep breath here. The obvious unfortunately stupid question is, is this going to be a problem? For Joe Biden. It’s one thing to say, I don’t want to run. I really don’t want to run.

But if as it increasingly looks like, it’s going to be a rerun of Biden Trump. Does that matter? Just give me your sense of Biden going into this race with pretty bad poll numbers and that pretty horrific number of people just wanting him to shut it down. What do you think?

Yeah. I mean, he’s not in a great position if you’re referring to the historically incumbents. Right? So he’s got the people who don’t wanna burn again. He’s got all those who don’t want him to run again.

He’s got low approval rating, but that’s like a forty one fifty four kind of situation. Not great. But Charlie Sykes guy was not hugely beloved in twenty twenty. Right? He was okay.

He was the acceptable candidate. Remember, he did terribly in the beginning of the primaries. So there wasn’t great love for Joe Biden. He was the guy everyone who could agree on. And then, Charlie, in the twenty twenty election, we had the greatest turnout.

For a winner in history. Right? Eighty one million people showed up to vote for Joe Biden. Why? Was it because they loved Joe Biden?

No. No, it wasn’t. It was because the guy on the other side was Donald Trump. So if the guy on the other side in twenty twenty four, is Donald Trump again, you won’t have any trouble turning out people for Joe Biden. Wouldn’t have trouble turning out people for any Democrat.

Somebody on Twitter over the weekend was saying, you know, if it’s Trump versus Biden, it’s I’m gonna predict it’s gonna be the lowest vote turnout in thirty years and I jumped up and I said, I’m willing to take that bet because I don’t think so. I think you could have a massive vote turnout. Yeah. Speaking about the other guy, you know, I think it’s a Bidenism that, you know, you don’t have to beat the almighty, you have to beat the alternative. And right now, as bad as Biden’s poll numbers are, Trump’s poll numbers are even worse.

Biden has a thirty eight percent, you know, positive rating. Donald Trump is down to just thirty four percent. We don’t have a positive view. So I do remember back in twenty sixteen looking at Donald Trump’s numbers and Hillary Clinton’s numbers and thinking, you know, there’s no way either one of these is electable except they’re running against one another. And, you know, unfortunately, we we we have that.

I think that the the motivation for people to turn out if we are faced with Donald Trump two point o with everything that Donald Trump is promising, if that’s not enough motivation I don’t know what would be. I think it will be a record turnout. And it is interesting that Trump continues to escalate what he’s promising slash threatening he would do in two point o. I mean, this is not one of those cases where there’s any room for Well, maybe he’ll grow into office or maybe he’s joking. He’s laying down one mark or after another, isn’t it?

Yeah.

He is. I mean, the Trump twenty twenty four campaign is more explicitly authoritarian than the Trump twenty twenty or twenty sixteen campaign. I mean, he’s basically saying, I am your justice. I am your retribution. Elect me.

I’m gonna go in and purge the service. I’m gonna go in and annihilate all your enemies. So it’s just classic strong man. And Charlie Sykes polling that you’re talking about, the NBC poll, The most displaying number to me is not I mean, so he’s got a thirty four percent who positive feeling about it. The negative feeling, Charlie Sykes only fifty three percent of Now that’s better than forty three.

Right?

I couldn’t bring myself to read that because I I didn’t wanna have this conversation. It was like, are you kidding me? After all of this, only fifty three percent of you have a negative view, honestly. I mean, how many coups do you have to attempt to get that negative number higher than fifty three? Don’t know.

Yeah. The Washington Post had a piece about it. How explicitly I thought of carrying these being, former president is proposing the deploying the military domestically purging the federal workforce, building futuristic cities from scratch, mandatory stop and frisk, deploying the military to fight street crime, breakups freak gangs into port immigrants, purging the federal workforce and criminally charging leakers. Look, he’s basically saying, you can’t claim I didn’t tell you you know, can’t claim that. This is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast.

Thanks so much for listening to this show where every day we try to help you make sense of the political world we live in and remind you that you are not the crazy one. If you enjoy this podcast, I’m sure you’re going to find my free morning shots newsletter, a great companion for understanding what is happening to us. And every morning as I prepare for this show, I share with my readers what’s trending and what to pay attention to, including my latest writing and essays on the events of the day. To sign up for my free morning shots newsletter. Go to the bulwark dot com slash morning shots.

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That’s bolen branch, b o l l a n d branch dot com, promo code bulwark, Exclusions apply seaside for details. Let’s talk about Ron DeSantis over the weekend, another rocky weekend. I think people are, by the

way, are making too much of that comment he made in Japan where they asked him about that he plunging poll numbers and he says, well, you know, I’m not a

candidate yet. Right? I mean, I just thought that was a throwaway line. Yeah. But he spoke at the Heritage Foundation, which by the way is becoming, you know, less and less conservative and more and more manga.

Let’s play a sound bite from Rhonda Sanders. Where he’s talking about local control. You and I are old enough to remember when conservatives and Republicans actually believed in local control and to Sandoz is basically explaining, like, no. Let’s play that song.

We’ve also enacted legislation that bars local governments from defunding the police. I mean, you can have three Yahoo’s on any city council do something stupid. But we’re not gonna let their citizens suffer as a result of that. We’ll keep the cops on the street and put the money back in.

Okay. So, I mean, that’s obviously a winner for the heritage crowd, but but it is kind of sort of nakedly, we’re

not going to trust local communities to make these decisions. Right. I think DeSantis is an interesting figure in history because he’s the guy who’s coming in after Trump So Trump was this kind of, you know, crazy self absorbed and dangerous guy who just sort of I’m gonna reinvent the Republican party. All that’s Reagan’s stuff about, you know, free enterprise and local computer. I’m gonna, like, trash that.

But DeSantis is coming on after him. DeSantis is a more rational figure, but he’s institutionalizing. A lot of the changes that Trump did to the so the the Reagan Charlie Sykes version of conservatism is being discarded, and they’re coming in with this populism stuff. And the Heritage Foundation is perfect place to encapsulate this because it’s supposed to represent conservatism. So this speech to me is part of the transformation of conservatism and the obliteration of what went before.

And this local control issue is kind of fascinating because one of the things conservatives used to talk about is the government closest to the people is the government that governs best. This historically what conservatism was. And here’s Ron DeSantis talking about how he’s gonna override, what’s his phrase, three Yahoo’s on any city council. Imagine, imagine Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden or anyone dismissing local government as three Yahoo is on any city council on saying I’m gonna override that. Fox News would be up in arms about that four weeks.

But here’s the governor of Florida, a nominal conservative saying he’s going to do that and crickets. The Heritage Foundation in the crowd is fine with that. Speaking of Yahoo is taking over

local governments, you’d read that story in the Washington Post over the weekend about that county in Michigan where you had these batching crazy mega folks who’ve taken over Ottawa County government, you have to read the whole thing, but it really reads like the plot of a dystopian series on Netflix. Okay. Let’s go back to Rhonda Sanders. So local control, so last century. He continues to campaign on his war against American corporations that disagree with him or whose politics don’t align with his.

Let’s play the sound by where he talks about the woke corporations and why we have to go after them.

We can win elections. We can say the right things. We can even do the right things. If the left can just impose its agenda through corporations or other private means, and we don’t do anything about it, then we are going to be losing. What they are trying to do is they’re trying to do an end run around our constitutional system They know these policies like a war on fossil fuels and domestic energy, war on the second amendment and other types of individuals.

They know that that would not work at the ballot box. So they can just do an end run around that process, engage in this to try to change policy or change culture, without ever being held accountable, they’re gonna take that opportunity to do it, but that is going to change our country for the worse. And so I just think as as conservatives, you know, it’s not conservative to just simply defer to every corporation in America. That’s being a corporateist.

Okay. So, like, five minutes ago, corporations were people. Yeah. Five minutes ago, the private sector was different than the public sector. And now you have Rhonda Sanders talking to the Heritage Foundation, basically saying, you know, hey, this whole idea of private individuals and private companies doing their own thing, that’s a loophole in the constitution.

You know, we can take over government. But if private business can pursue its own values, then that’s bad. We you think through the philosophical underpinnings of what you just heard, Trust me for the progressive listeners to this podcast. This is really mind blowing to hear a conservative Republican talking about, yeah, we can’t let the private sector go its own way. We can’t let them do things in the culture that we disagree with.

So it’s not just enough to have government power. We need to use government power to control what they do culturally. My favorite phrase in

that whole brand of this is not a brand. He’s he’s reading from a script. This is a whole prepared, you know, abandonment of what used to be conservatism

— Yeah. — and

run. He keeps talking about how corporations are trying to end run the system. What he’s saying there is that private universe the universe of people acting outside government is trying to end run government. Yeah. And people we can’t have this.

Right? We can’t have people acting with this phrase, acting through private means, because that’s against us, that’s changing our culture. So we, the nominally, the conservatives in the audience, that Heritage Foundation and the Conservative electorate are going to use the state to stop these private corporations from acting. And what are the private corporations doing that’s so awful? Just a couple weeks ago, DeSantis was giving a press conference and talking about what he objected to in Disney’s behavior, and it was that they were advocating for gender ideology.

Advocating — Guess what? — advocating if you’re a private citizen or corporation where you can advocate that’s called freedom and that’s something that conservatives used to recognize, but now that’s end running the system and we have to stop them. Alright. So the other big story line of

the last week was the latest hair trigger American carnage. What was unbelievable about it? Is that we’ve gone through the cycle where America has been numbed by the mass shootings. And last week, we saw another version of the American carnage teenager goes up to a door, rings the wrong doorbell, gets shot. Share leaders get into the wrong car.

Share leaders get shot. You have a young woman and her friends pull into a driveway in New York. A guy comes out, shoots, kills her, you have a six year old plane with a basketball. Basketball rolls into the neighbor’s yard, guy comes out, starts shooting at the six year old girl and the father. It’s like, what is happening to American culture?

I mean, for all of the well regulated militia people, the people who said, what we need is more good guys with guns. You know, an armed society is a polite society. Well, hell no. Mike Pence was out there yesterday, you know, being asked about this. And let’s just play Mike Pence’s reaction to the latest episodes of Americans just going off and shooting one another.

The tragedy should not require us to forfeit our liberty. Yeah. And the right law abiding citizens to keep in bare arms is enshrined in the constitution of the United States. I don’t know the facts of those case. I’m confident that local law enforcement will move forward and apply the law in a proper way, but I can’t help but suspect that this recent spate of tragedies is evidence of the fear that so many Americans are feeling about the crime wave besetting this country.

So the nugget of truth there is yes, will. You have a lot of people who are fearful, who are paranoid, who think that somebody who comes to their door and rings their doorbell is probably part of, you know, the great replacement hoards coming for them. That’s true. Right? But the fact that he throws this out, I mean, the fact that Mike Pence can’t come up with something better than, of course, you know, go back to the d.

Second amendment being in drive. We’re not gonna take the peoples’ liberties away. So young woman drives into somebody’s driveway, loses her way, a guy comes out, shoots and kills her. And Mike Pence has asked about this and as I, well, he was second amendment writing, you know, he was probably afraid because he’s watching Fox News and, you know, seeing all this, you know, crime. The mayor of Kent City actually had a good Ponce.

Quentin Lucas is the mayor of Kansas City, and he was asked about this. Let’s play him.

I think that actually, it is this culture of fear and paranoia. That’s drummed up by some, including politicians like the former vice president, who mentioned it almost in a way as if it’s an excuse for this type of action. This was in the safest neighborhood of Kansas City or one of our safest neighborhoods. And this was a man who in his statement to the police said, I was scared of this in essence large Bulwark person outside of his door. He thought the child was six feet tall.

He’s only five eight. He thought he was a threat. He was on the other side of two locked doors. This is the sort of thing that happens when you have this culture of paranoia. And fear that’s being drummed up by politicians and some of the media, and of course, this fetishization I’ve said before, of God.

So

we’ll Yeah. Yeah. So what’s going on here is we we have a mix of two things. One is guns and one is fear. And they’re both a major problem.

Bad combination. Yeah. Yeah. So so we have, what, four hundred million guns in this country. That’s more than people.

We have, like, about half the household have guns. And, Charlie, a lot of the people who have guns, if you look at the stats, about thirty percent of Americans have recently bought a gun as a precaution against gun violence. In other words, there’s a gun arms race. I don’t necessarily want a gun for myself, but other people have guns and they’re scary and dangerous. So I need a gun — Yeah.

— to protect myself. So now you have all these people who have guns and then you add to that this element of fear. And Quentin Lucas is exactly right here. Mike Pence and many other conservative politicians and Fox News and the whole right wing media sphere is stirring up fear of crime. And Charlie Sykes Crime is up recently, but it is concentrated not in the areas, in these white areas where these people are, and it’s not nearly as high as it used to be.

So there is some escalation of it, but the fear element way exaggerates the risk to people. And it used to be that you could just go out and scare people and that was a good way of raising money politically, electing your candidates. But now we have this additional element that if you work out there telling people that there is some massive crime wave that is threatening their neighborhood, which is not true, some of those people are going to shoot other people fearing that those other people are criminals. Especially

when you have these laws and You you know that I’m exhausted talking about this, but you know, Even back in the pre Trump days, I got in this nasty fight with the NRA when they were pushing for what they called constitutional carry, which was concealed carry without any permits, without any background checks, without any training, anything. And I thought this was absolutely nuts. And back in the day, in the before times, even Republicans to Wisconsin recognize that. Yeah. You can have concealed carry, but let’s not just have, you know, anyone be able to do this because, you know, They’re gonna shoot their nuts off or they’re gonna shoot their neighbor.

You are pushing more and more people to carry guns without any indication they know how to use those guns or should be armed. Push them out into the community, having convinced them that they are going out into this absolute hellscape of people who are threatening them and criminals and there’s violence everywhere. And so, you know, go into, you know, the neighborhood Walmart and, like, you know, sixty percent of the people are hacking, maybe forty percent of them know how to use the gun. Maybe twenty percent of them know the circumstances which you’re supposed to use the gun. Maybe ten percent of them would actually be trusted.

To pull that gun and fire it, you know, in a crowded store. You know, bad things are going to happen. And Mike Pence, I can pick on Mike Pence, but this also reflects the culture right now. In the Republican Party. You can’t even say, this is outrageous.

This is terrible. We need to talk about responsible gun ownership we need to rethink this idea of arming people without any permits, any training, any background checks, whatsoever. But he can’t do it. He’s just gotta go through the knee jerk second amendment sort of thing. And, yeah, well, you know, I mean, there’s this terrible crime thing because, you know, I’m on a campaign on American carnage.

So what do we have? We have more guns in the hands of people who have no fucking idea what to do with those guns. In an environment where basically the information space has been taken over by competing meth dealers who are competing with one another of who can stoke the most anger, paranoia, etcetera. About what’s going on. And what a surprise that bad things are going to happen?

And look, this isn’t just about the second amendment. I mean, the second amendment the right to bear arms is just the first level of this problem. What we’ve had is an escalation from the second amendment to everybody buy a gun because you would need to be scared of other people having guns. So we have this massive increase in the percentage of people, in the number of people who have guns, then we’re gonna try to prevent background checks, which are a way of preventing crazy people from getting guns. We’re going to encourage open carry.

So as you’re pointing out, we’re going to have more and more situations in which people are armed. There’s one thing to have a gun at home, but now you’re carrying a gun. Well, now we’re promoting standard ground laws. So we’re telling people, you know what? If you see some guy outside your door, your window, you can at them and will probably protect you legally.

Where they’re opposing red flag laws, which, you know, someone’s telling you, I have a mental health problem. No, you know, you can still have your gun. So all of these things are escalations from the second amendment that encourage more people to have weapons and to use weapons. And then, Charlie, you lay on top of it. All of this rhetoric about how there’s a massive crime wave that’s endangering you.

And all of that combined is gonna lead to more incidents like this. And, Charlie, Mike Pence has no excuse in these cases, like these people pull into a driveway. It’s the wrong driveway. They’re on their way out. They’re leaving the driveway and the guy is shooting him.

There is no rationale for that based on an imminent threat. That’s just somebody with a gun and a hair trigger. That

is not the second amendment.

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wanna talk about this Richard North Patterson story. This is not a new story and it’s not an isolated story. So I just wanna, you know, make it clear for all people who are about to write, you know, Charlie has been going on for some time. So we got an an email from Patterson over the weekend, and he’s been a contributor to the Bulwark. And I would say that he would be one of our, you know, he’s a liberal Democrat.

This is not some fire breathing right winger here at all. So he writes, last January, my agents began submitting the publishers the manuscript my first novel in nine years. On the surface, I had reason for confidence. Of my twenty two prior novels, sixteen had been New York Times bestsellers, and in general, Reviewers had treated them kindly, and my agent shared my assessment that this one called trial was equal to my strongest Bulwark, whatever, you know. And like my most successful previous books, it’s a law based narrative culminating in a murder trial.

So it’s pretty interesting. But this is what he wrote to us. The novel was repeatedly rejected by major publishers because as a white author, I chose to write about some of our most vexing racial problems. Voter suppression unequal law enforcement through the prism of three major characters, two of them Bulwark. Now, there is this vocal segment of the left that is insisting that this kind of fiction is a form of cultural appropriation and some reason, it’s really vicious in the world of young adult fiction.

But it’s popped up before where people are like, you can’t write about Native America because you’re not native Americans, you can’t write because you don’t have the right identity. But Richard North Patterson is really well known, really successful. So that’s why in my newsletter this morning, I said, that’s why this felt like an escalation or at least an exclamation point on what’s going on. So this is what Patterson wrote to us. This preemptive censorship reflects the new but militant insistence that authors of fiction should stay in their lane and therefore that the identity of the author overrides all of the other elements indispensable to good fiction.

The ironic result is to repress the very voices, the preemptive sensors proposed to amplify. In this case, the numerous black residents of southwest Georgia that I interviewed in the course of my research. So he wrote it in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. The issue isn’t really about me or my book. The core question applies to anyone who bears to write fiction whether empathy and imagination should be allowed to cross the lines of racial identity.

This goes to the heart of what kind of literature we want and what kind of society we aspire to be, you know, kidding. People are free to dislike any book on whatever basis they choose. But to repress books based on the identity of the author is a liberal, intolerant, ignorant of the ways of creativity, and inimical to the spirit of pluralist democracy. And he wrote to us, I didn’t write this book because I was spoiling for a fight. And his agents warned him that I’d be running into some serious trouble, but he did find an independent publisher, Adam Bello, and post Hill press, who’s willing to, you know, buck this new creed of mandatory identity authorship, and they’re supporting his resolve.

He has a sub stack newsletter. And they’re putting up installments of the book twice a week over the next seven weeks, you know, so that reviewers can judge for themselves. But but you can tell that this comes as a shock and he said, this issue transcends fiction, and this is what he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. It is time for the literary community at large to reject a creative segregation that reflects the ills of a society too often driven by fear anger and polarization. The way Ford is by fostering understanding across the lines of identity, not by subordinating capaciousness of spirit to the defensive crouch of tribalism, literature should expand our humanity, not shrink it.

So I just find this amazing, that this culture, does it mean that men can never write books about women or women can’t write books about men. I mean, think of all of the works of literature in which the author or author ask writes about somebody who is different than them. What’s going on here,

Will? So I am not surprised at this, Charlie Sykes the reason I’m not surprised is because of the greatest novel ever written, which is animal farm. Right? Animal farm, George Orwell’s work about a group of people represented by animals who start out as revolutionaries and become authoritarians and conservatives. And that is the nature of revolutionary movements.

And so what has happened in the case of attention to race and gender and all these other categories is. At first, society was kind of blind to this. And so there were people who used to call themselves woke. They were awake. To the role that race played in society and in perspectives, the blindness of many white people to their situation and to their privilege and all that stuff.

And that was all true and important, and it served an important function in history, and it’s still serving that function. But what happens to the ideology of wholeness over time is that it hardens. It hardens into this idea that you are only your race. So somebody like Richard North Patterson, look, you’re just white. So we stopped looking at the content of what you’re bringing to us.

And we just say only certain people can write about certain things based on — Yeah. — their color or based on their gender. So the trick to being woke is to stay woke. And part of staying woke is noticing when the movement that you joined that was originally enlightening was originally opening your eyes and the eyes of other people hardens into a dogma and ceases to pay attention to the world and sees everything only through a lens of what color are you or what gender are you? No.

You’re exactly right. And and that is profoundly liberal. It’s also profoundly antihumanist. Interesting reaction to this, Yale’s Nicholas Christakis tweeted out over the weekend a modest proposal. Fiction writers can write whatever they want and can have it minds of anyone they can imagine.

If readers admire the work, then it it stood on its own. So, you know, Flaubert, not a written madam bovary. Should Tolstoy, not a written in a Carerenna. I mean, it becomes absurd when you begin to think about it, but it’s also become just a cudgel for bullying people, I think. I found a link to an article that was written back in in the before times back in twenty sixteen by somebody who was making a presentation about something he was doing and just encountered this massive blowback because of identity politics.

And it really was an attempt to stifle his voice and to cancel him So bear with me here. You can have two things happening at lunch. You can have demagogues like Ron DeSantis and Christopher Ruffo. Try to exploit, you know, quote unquote, wokeness. But there is a real thing there.

Whatever you wanna call it. If calling it wokeness, doesn’t work for you, then get rid of it. But this hyper identity politics, this, you know, stay in your lane kind of attitude, this is spreading. And there’s a real problem here, particularly when we don’t deal with one another as human beings. We don’t deal with one another as arguments or with quality of our mind.

We don’t deal with the product of the writers. We don’t engage with the poetry or or the novels. We just engage with their racial identity. I mean, that doesn’t sound like a step forward to me. That seems like a radical step back.

Yeah, it is. And this is just

reminding me of, you know, I went to college and I studied a lot of this critical theory This is the kind of thing Ron DeSantis make, you know, and Donald Trump called cultural Marxism and whatnot. But the trick is and you don’t have to go to college for this. You just you just notice what’s going on in society and you say there’s something wrong with the way things are and you may you start it with a critical mindset and what’s really important is to maintain the critical mindset and apply it to your own side. Mhmm. So you start out in the civil rights movement.

You start noticing the function of race and more and more of our institutions and you try to clean it up. But you’ve got to be alert to these moments where your side tips over into, you know, as you’re calling it, Charlie Identity politics, where it gets lazy. And it stops looking at the quality, the nature of what Richard North Patterson is writing, and it only looks at look, is this author white or black or brown and then we start vetoing people based on that. That is just lazy, but it is what happens to every movement. And it’s the conceit of many people who think of themselves as woke, that the fundamental thing is to look at everything through the lens of race or gender.

No. The important lens is that critical insight and you have to notice when you’ve crossed over and become part of the problem as in this case. I agree with you. Okay. So what are you gonna be looking at this week?

You know, Charlie, at some point, I wanna write about this all this transgender stuff. And you and I have talked about this issue and have views. I think Lea Thomas should not have been allowed to compete in the women’s bracket, but that’s a minor, minor case. What we have is this major attack by Republicans on not just the idea of genital mutilation for children, but I was really interested to see Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, talk this week about why he Vito. Here’s a Republican governor who vetoed an anti trans bill.

Yeah. And he talks about how the bill was restricting the rights of parents. All of this abortion stuff we’re talking about and transgender, there is a Republican attack on the rights of families to make medical decisions, not just minors, but parents. And I think we need more attention to how parents rights can represent freedom and how progressives and democrats should be talking more about certain cases where that is being trampled by the right. I’m gonna be very interested to

see that I did something a little contrarian this morning in my newsletter. I think it is safe to say that Andrew Sullivan is not a friend of the Bulwark or an admirer of what we do. And yet, He had a really interesting piece about Dylan Mulvaney, who is the the influencer who, you know, got caught out in the various culture wars. It’s a very provocative piece and I will put a trigger warning on it for some folks, but This is a multi front war. It’s not just about the athletes who are upset, who I think raised some interesting issues.

But also from women who are saying, okay, so where do women fit into all of this? And what images of women are being embraced by all of this. And I have to say there’s some pretroubling aspects of this, but I’m not gonna get into it. If you’re willing to dive into that particular world and keep in mind that that Andrew Sullivan is we’re not gonna be having beers anytime soon, I don’t think. But it’s an interesting and

provocative read. Let me just put it that way. Well, you and I should talk about this because the whole idea that transgender is a war on women is I think it’s part of a right wing movement to try to exploit. So you and I can have a good argument about that. Okay.

You read Andrew Sullivan’s piece and then let’s

have that conversation. Okay. Okay. Cool. We’ll do that.

Then we’ll talk next week. Have a great week. Well, you too, Charlie Sykes thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We’ll be back tomorrow, and we’ll do this all over again.

Bulwark Podcasts produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

Dissecting politics with exclusive interviews, commentary and humor, useful idiots. With Katie Halper and Aaron Mate. Check out this story that comes via wedding planner, Georgia Mitchell. I’d say that’s a deal breaker. If you were to catch your partner being breastfed by their mother, the thing is she’s here in the second hand.

So Right. We really The

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So Terrible if true. And definitely a deal breaker. Useful idiots. Wherever you listen.