Evan McMorris-Santoro & Antonia Hitchens

This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed human. No gloss, no filter. Just stories, spoken without fear. A person who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhachon on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. Hi, I'm Molly Zhang-Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And Congressman John Larson has introduced articles of impeachment against President Trump. We have such a great joke for you today. Notice his own. Evan McMorris Santoro stops by to talk about the bipartisan calls to invoke the 25th Amendment on Trump. Then we'll talk to the New Yorkers' own Antonia Hitchens about the Gropor Movement and whether it's the future of the right wing. But first the news. So Molly, there's some interesting stuff we're gonna get into, but last night Tucker Carlson sent a real, I don't wanna say the Franz Ferdinand moment of the Magus of a War, but it's definitely, I think, a line that you can't go back on where he, basically for an hour and a half built up a speech where he says that Donald Trump is the anti-Christ. I tried to listen to all of it, but I got bored, fast forwarded, and you'll be shocked to hear. But among other things, President Trump is fired back and saying he's a low IQ person, but also he said the military should defy the orders of the president and the Candace Owens of the world are jumping on this. What do you think? I think that we're in a real fucking moment here. So basically, Tucker is saying that Trump is the anti-Christ. Tucker is saying this because he's anti the Iran war. He has gone and met with Trump a bunch of times to try to get him not to do this. So it makes sense. Now also Tucker says a lot of anti-Semitic stuff. You know, like we can agree with him, but no, he is not a good guy, right? I think that's a fair, we can both agree with some of the stuff he is saying, but no, that he is very much an anti-Semitic. I don't agree with them, Trump's the anti-Christ. That's Peter Thiel. Right, okay, so there you go. But also another anti-Semite Candace Owens. So this crew, this is the worst people you know thing, right? Where the worst people you know have a good point about Trump and they do. And you'll remember that the thing Trump hates the most, which why Trump was so obsessed with David Frum and Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney. And his first administration was because it was no one Donald Trump hated more than someone who had betrayed him. And so when asked about it, this is, by the way, Donald Trump has spent like much of the day on the phone, but he told the reporter from the New York Post, Tucker's a low IQ person that has absolutely no idea what's going on. He calls me all the time, I don't respond to his calls, I don't deal with him, I like dealing with smart people, not fools. So this is what it looks like when manga comes apart. It's good news because it means that, it's enough of a schism. So probably this crew can't get back together and overturn American democracy, hopefully. But it's high stakes. I mean, we've gotten to, you know, Donald Trump basically saying he's gonna wipe this society off the face of the earth. And by the way, it's not like these people, like we still have never gotten an explanation as to why any of this is happening, which I think could be useful. And he's wildly unpopular. He's wildly, he's as unpopular as he's ever been. He is as unpopular as a Nixon during Watergate. I mean, like, so if Republicans are breaking with him, which it doesn't, it certainly seems like MAGA is breaking, but whether or not elected Republicans, we, you'll see later on, they are not as much. But like, if you are breaking with Trump, it's certainly your own self-interest, right? Yeah, I just, you know, there's a lot of things that you can put the genie back at the ball. I don't know how you campaign and put yourself next to the guy you called the anti-Christ in their world. I don't see a world in which Tucker and Donald Trump are back on the stump together, though anything could happen. Yeah, I think it's mostly bullshit. I mean, like for example, and this is all today, which is Tuesday, which you will be listening to this in the morning on Wednesday, which hopefully will all be alive. And this is Miles Taylor quote, which I think we should just talk about this tweet. The people who got Trump elected are now saying he's demented. Tucker, Megan Kelly, Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor-Grayne, that is a pretty shocking turn of events. So speaking of strife inside the party of the Republicans, they're facing an internal revolt over their plan to end the shutdown because the Freedom Caucus is big mad. So the Freedom Caucus is big mad. Here's where we are. There is a shutdown. It is the longest shutdown. The Homeland Security shutdown is the longest in American history. It's 57 days, or it's 53 days. It's some crazy number of days. We are not funding Homeland Security. Well, Donald Trump is threatening Iran. We are not funding Homeland Security. Like just think about that for a minute. Donald Trump is threatening a country that is deeply religious, filled with zealots, committed to having its people carry out attacks. We are not funding the part of the government that is supposed to protect us from such things. So there's something to think about. The Senate put together a deal. It came back to the House. The Freedom Caucus was like, no, thank you. We're not doing this. That is because the House had been back and forth on this deal before. So here we are, House Freedom Caucus, not interested in a deal. Everyone on spring break, while Donald Trump is threatening the Iranians, if you're a member of Congress, go the fuck back to work. And if you're in leadership, you need to be back at work today. And if you're a Democrat, go back to work. If you are an elected official on the left or the right, in the Congress or the Senate, you should go back to work. The fact that Donald Trump is making these threats, even if they're just threats, they're not the people that elected you, want you in your office. They do not want you on vacation. They don't even want you in your district office. They want you there in Washington, doing anything you can to run a check on the executive. Your job, Republicans and Democrats. And I understand that Mike Johnson has sent you home, but Mike Johnson only has one move, which is send everyone home. And quite frankly, if you are in leadership, if you are John Thune, you know better, right? You know your people are gonna have to run. You know you have this wildly unpopular president. You know your job is to run a check on the executive. And so I really do think go back to the office. Your people have sent you to Congress in order to protect them from a rogue president. Okay, we have a rogue president. He is taking to the internet. Like if Alex Jones is saying that this guy is out of control, then I think it might be a moment to go back to work. So what are the signs of how rogue he is, is that the ways Republicans are defending him are very, very pathetic and not coming off as the most confident moments I've seen on television. Well, if you're a member of Congress, like either go into work or hide, but don't go on television. So John Thune and Mike Johnson are smart enough to not comment because you know it's just insane. And so we have some people though, the sort of lesser Republicans in there. We've got Michael Aller who has to both run in a Hillary seat, right, it's a seat Hillary Clinton won, but also just defend anything Trump does. So he was on CNN saying Trump wasn't talking about ending a civilization, despite the fact that Trump was in fact tweeting about ending a civilization. He says he's talking about the energy and civilian infrastructure. That's what he's talking about. By the way, he shouldn't be doing that. That's a war crime anyway. That is a war crime, civilian infrastructure war crime. John Berman who emphasized that Trump's message stated never to be brought back again. Berman said, you know, never to be brought back again. That's pretty much like the end. And Mike Lawler just tried to defend. I mean, look, the good news about Trump is that he makes everyone defend the indefensible. The bad news about Trump is everything else. Yeah, that's the indefensible's in charge. So, judges blocked Trump's $10 billion child care funding for blue states, because obviously this was ridiculous, but more good news in Judgeland. Yeah, so look, a federal judge on Friday granted an injunction in a case concerning the Trump administration's freeze on $10 billion in child care and family planning to five blue states. Trump, a lot of this stuff gets knocked down in the courts as it did in the first Trump administration. It's illegal. It's not okay. It'll get overturned. The problem is, and I think that's the real problem, is that like eventually the highest court in our land is the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court is filled with MAGA extremists. I mean, not all the way, which way around, but certainly quite a lot of MAGA extremists. So, like, you know, when it comes to social programs, they're not fans of social programs. So, I do think it's going to be tough for them to win on all these things, but certainly this one will likely, I mean, blocking, I think likely it'll end up being the dams will be able to do the simple steps. No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. Addiction is a disease, and it should be looked upon as any other disease. How did you cope with a reckless father like me? Join me, Pooja Bhatt, as I sit down every week with directors, actors, musicians, technicians, and beyond. You don't need to work with the biggest people and the biggest sound to have great music. I have gone through the sub-CD, Hachakar. Reached the pinnacle, stung by the snake, and I've fallen down again. I am not writing actively anymore, and when I see my old work, it kind of saddens me. I'm only as good as the last shot that I gave. Mom's gone, but don't shut the theater. The show must go on. Listen to my weekly podcast, the Pooja Bhatt show, and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Come for the honesty, stay for the fire. Evan McMorro Santoro is a reporter at Notice. Evan! Molly, how are you? I'm agreeing with Alex Jones because Alex Jones said Donald Trump is crazy and that we need to do the 23rd Amendment. I don't think I should be agreeing with Alex Jones, but he sounds more sensible than all the Republicans in Congress. Well, this is really what we're dealing with, is that this whole Iran thing has been the strongest, the biggest stress test of this MAGA idea that we've seen the entirety of Trump's arrival on the scene, right? The whole thing is that this is the guy who said, I can go out on Fifth Avenue, I can shoot five people, and people will still love me, I can do whatever I want. And as this Iran thing has both begun and gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, we have seen more and more people who were, fellow travelers with Trump and with MAGA, get really freaked out. I mean, Alex Jones has kind of had his ups and downs with Trump, and Marjorie Taylor Green is somebody out there who, she's saying, Front Fifth Amendment as well, and she's had her ups and downs, obviously. But you mentioned Congress, Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin who is like a pretty MAGA-y guy, he didn't say Front Fifth Amendment, but he did say the rhetoric that Trump has been using, the promises he's making to attack civilian infrastructure in Iran, this is over the line, this is stuff that I hope is butchered, I hope it's not real. You're really seeing a blowback on this president and on this White House from people who he never has to worry about usually, now he really has to worry about them. Yeah, you know, I think today, I went into Morning Joe this morning, and the vibes were like, oh my God, this is really scary stuff. And it is, this, you know, Democrats spend so much time being like, we can't break through, when can we break through, how do we break through, how do we get people to hear our message? This was something, those crazy tweets, like I think it's hard to find someone who's not like very freaked out about eight o'clock tonight. Yeah, look, I can tell you, my texts all day are like from strategists and stuff who like wanted to say smarky thing that was going on in the political world. You know, this person's an idiot, a look at this idea is never gonna work, that kind of thing. And today, one of them just texted me, he said, can I say something like really dark? Do you think that the bomb went back to this don't age means like the nuclear codes? I mean, what are we talking about? And obviously I have no answers for any of this, but people are like actually pretty freaked out. I mean, this is the president of the United States saying this stuff. And I think to more than just kind of this moment, because who knows what's gonna happen, we're all sitting around waiting to see what this actually means. But there has been a real shift in the rhetoric and tone of how we think about our military, in every way, obviously you can think of many mistakes the military has made, many things that the military has done that we wish they hadn't done or a lot of you wish they hadn't done. But this is the first time I can really think of a president saying like, yes, civilians, we are coming for you. We are going to punish you for the actions of your government. That's what we are actually going to do. That's our plan. And not only are we gonna do it, we're gonna wipe your civilization off the map. This is just not stuff that you hear people talk about. And it's one thing when it comes from like sort of like a blustery person on social media, but when that person is the commander in chief, it really sends a pretty chilling message, I think all around the world, right? I mean, this is the one military that can actually do the thing that Trump is promising. And we don't know if he's gonna do it or not, but the fact that promise has been made feels like a certain set of glass has been broken, right? A certain kind of thing that we didn't ever really talk about that we could actually do, but we won't do. We're not those people. Now maybe we are. It's very confusing, I think. Yeah, I mean, I also think there are no grownups in the room. There is no John Kelly. There is no, like the closest you get to a John Kelly is Suzie Wiles. And Suzie Wiles is allowed to stay in that job because of her refusal to say the hard things to Donald Trump, right? So there's no one who can say like, you can't do that. It's a war crime. And that's why the refusing illegal orders video got Trump so upset. Now today, Tucker Carlson said the exact same thing. Yeah, I don't know if he's gonna be indicted for saying that or not, but yes, listen, I think that there are people in this political movement who are really concerned about the future, their political future. Like this is a group of people who came in because they really had the Democrats on the run, right? They really had this wokeness stuff that really kicked off and kicked through a whole bunch of your internet debate. Remember Joe Rogan, oh my God, Joe Rogan, he's like the best and he loves us now. And he's moved away from the Republicans as well over this stuff. And so I think that when you think about the people who are saying that when thinking about Tucker Carlson and these folks, they're not having an epiphany today of like, oh my goodness, I can't believe, I was wrong about Magga, I was wrong about, no, they want Magga to do the things they've always wanted it to do. They think that this is gonna cost them the opportunity to do that, that they're really moving away from having any political relevance whatsoever. And right now it's them saying it, there are a lot of Republicans who have to run for office in the next few months, a few of them are saying it, but they're the ones who are gonna be on the front end of this thing. Well, I don't know if they are or not, because that's the thing, Trump is very powerful over them. But this thing that you're hearing is people crying out, I think we're losing the plot here. Much less, they're really dangerous, scary things we were talking about, but there is this fear that like, this is going away from us. We had a chance to break the universities and take over all the media outlets and silence all these people we've always wanted to silence, maybe roll back the calendar on LGBT rights, all that stuff was in their hands. And this kind of adventurism in Iran could cost them that. I think that's what they're afraid of. I think that's a really good point. The thing is, Jesse and I have this ongoing argument about, it's not really an argument, we have an ongoing conversation about Ben Shapiro, because Ben Shapiro is losing his audience. And the question is, is Ben Shapiro losing his audience because of anti-Semitism or because he is still towing a pro-war line, which the rest of MAGA really, unless you're Trump, there's pretty much no one who is, there's not no one, but it's very hard to sell this war to MAGA when MAGA's whole thing was no war. So the question I think is, like, how much of what Tucker is doing is trying to keep the project going, and how much of it is him trying to reflect his listeners, his viewers, the comments he's getting? Well, I would say when it comes to that question about Ben Shapiro, the answer can be both, right? I mean, Tucker Carlson and these folks have really engaged in some rhetoric and invited in rhetoric. I mean, look, it's, you know, these group chats that have been exposed and things like that, it's been pretty bad on the anti-Semitism front. But also I can say that there would be nobody who would advise anyone in American politics at this moment to start a war with Israel. The country, Israel itself, has really trashed its reputation among basically every American under the age of, I don't know, 50, maybe even younger than that. And so there is that aspect of like, the more sort of standing with Israel that you do, the sort of less appealing you are to a broad swath of the electorate. In addition to that, there is this real kind of, you know, it has never really gone away, but like sort of like breaking out anti-Semitism that people are talking about. But, you know, this is, this gets us, you know, this pulls it away from Tucker to the other side of the conversation too, which is that it's still not entirely clear that what the Democrats totally think about this moment, right? Because they have the right sort of political issues to deal with. So it's not like you're seeing a lot of lawmakers say, I mean, you're seeing an increasing number say, but you're not seeing a lot of them say, hey, if we were in power right now, we would shut this whole thing down tomorrow. It would be over, all the money would go away, we'll be pulled out, we'd be finished with this whole conflict. You are seeing a growing number of Democrats starting to talk like that, but you still, you know, just a couple of weeks ago, my colleagues, you know, we're in the Senate talking to Senate, you know, to senators, you could find plenty of Democrats who were like, well, I could be open to funding this war if they were, you know, if they made a good enough case to me. This is still a problem for the Democrats too, to figure out sort of where they stand politically in this moment. Ben Shapiro was facing it earlier from, if you mentioned from the truth. Because of his very Zionist, yeah. But the suit the Democrats are in is also exists, and they have not yet figured out exactly what to do. Trump has really blown up American politics by striking Iran the way he has. And the fallout, I'm not sure exactly what it's gonna be in the end, but we are seeing right now, MAGA sort of coming apart of the seams, and we are seeing a really emboldened anti-war left now that feels very confident in sort of pushing aside those, establishing that Democrat notions of being, you know, afraid of being cast as peacemakes or whatever, or, you know, too soft, and saying, no, well, this is bad, we're not doing this, no more money for this, any of this, you know, this is all bad, even to the point that some people like AOC are talking about no more military aid to Israel at all. The Democratic Party's having this conversation too, it's different and sort of uglier on the Republican side from my read of it, but both are sort of in it. It's so insane because it seems so obvious nobody wants this war, the fact that we're even involved in it is insane, it's for no one, it does nothing, the fact that they could have maybe had a nuke, like that's not a reason, if we're gonna go to war with people, like it just feels such a moment for moral clarity, like nobody wants this, it makes no sense, nobody shopped us any bit of information as to why we would be doing this, and so you have no explanation for it and why we're in it, I mean, there's just, in my mind, unless you're Netanyahu, even if you're just a random Israeli, unless you're Netanyahu, there's absolutely no reason for this war. Well, I'll say the way I look at this whole moment in time now is just, if you think about Trump as being Biden, it all makes much more sense, because you know what happened with Biden is that a lot of people who voted for Biden thought he was gonna run for one term, and all of a sudden his people are like, well, look if you parse the words that he said and actually say that, so he's running again, and that's actually not a lie, he didn't lie to you, with Trump, Trump was like, a lot of people who supported Trump were like, this guy doesn't like wars, this guy's against war, the Iraq war, he thinks is stupid, he called out John McCain for being shot down in Vietnam, like the guy was a stupid thing, this guy's against wars, I'm a peace guy, I don't like wars, I'm against it, maybe I'm gonna pull us out of helping Ukraine, that's how against war I am, we're gonna be done with this. And then now that the war has happened, his people are doing the same kind of parsing that Biden's people used to do, like well actually he's always said around, there's a little bit of a thing here, there's a little bit of a thing there, this is that thing, the old adage, when you're explaining you're losing, like they are really trying to explain, and they cannot get people, like a broad swath of their own base on board with this, and that is a huge problem for them because they have to convince the whole country, especially with this escalation that has been promised, if this escalation really is real, and we don't know where we're sitting right now, what's gonna happen, but if you can escalate this war into more and more and more without public buy-in, that really is a real sort of uncharted territory for me in my lifetime, like I've never seen anything like that, so I don't know what that would do to politics, but I don't think it would be good for the guy in charge. No, and it is, I mean, even now, the fact that we're seeing such high level defections from MAGA, I mean, obviously they're not defections, but the fact that we're seeing people like Tucker are speaking out, that's meaningful, you know, he spoke out before, but it's so loudly, and the sense that Trump is so unhinged is a real breakthrough moment, whatever that means. Yeah, I mean, 25th Amendment is not even criticism, they're literally saying remove this man from office now. I mean, that's the kind of thing that you could never have said before, and they would never say, because there were a lot of people who liked, who really liked Trump a lot. I mean, it'll be interesting to see what happens with these guys down the road, you know, if this is in fact actually Taco Tuesday and not, you know, War Escalation Tuesday, if they change their tune tomorrow about what Trump said about civilization, you might drop them out, it'll be interesting to see what they do, but this is really for them, I think that they do not feel afraid of crossing this bright line now, just saying that Trump is actually a bad president, this is not going well, we need to stop this now. Which again, is sort of some voices were starting to say, how Biden, they were ignored by the establishment, kind of like what's happening now, and it did not work out that well for them. But you could not, I mean, Biden, like just for a minute, you would have- Yeah, I'm not drawing a direct line here between the two things. I'm saying like, I think there are voices. Imagine, right, Trump is bombastic, but like imagine Biden even being like, we might bomb this country back to the Stone Age, and I mean, the rhetoric was so shocking, and this is for Trump who was so shocking, that I mean, I think there's a feeling that it's hard because Trump has plumbed the depths, right? I mean, over the last decade, we've certainly seen tweets where we've been like, huh? But this weekend between his tweets about Easter and the sort of like anti-Muslim stuff in the tweets, and then his stuff this morning about Iran, like it's hard to see this not be a huge escalation in his ability, in his inability to use his frontal lobe to moderate his behavior. Well, I can't even go that far. I mean, we've been talking about Tucker and all them. This is what makes this hard for me, right? Somebody who's been studying this and covering this since the very beginning, it's all fun and games with this rhetoric until it gets to this point where maybe he's gonna bomb, you know, Iran in a way that you don't like. I mean, these people, this political movement has embraced a style of sort of violence in rhetoric, politics, even actions when you look at things like the immigration stuff that they really into, that now all of a sudden to be like, oh my gosh, I can you believe this is quite surprising to me that they're trying to do that, which is why I sort of keep pushing myself back towards the line of like what they're afraid of is that they're losing their chance to finish their political revolution that they started. Because you've never, I had never seen them, you know, they love to be, to laugh at people who are upset by this rhetoric from this president. I mean, they love to, you know, poke at them, they love to do this stuff. You think back to just back in Minneapolis, the way that they treated those two Americans who got shot by federal officials, you know, the language used around them, this kind of thing is like very exciting to them. And this level of like we have to stop this, like 25th Amendment is like stop this today. That's like the big break button, like get him out of office today. That is like less of a, in my opinion, I will say from what I've seen and what I've been, you know, reporting on for a long time, that is less of an introspection and more of a, oh, holy shit, like we are in real trouble now. Yeah, we've taken it too far, right? We've gone too far. It is... Or we allowed things to go on too far without kind of just like waving a little, like maybe waving a flag a little earlier, you know, I mean, Margie Taylor Greene is interesting case, obviously, but she's had a lot of crazy stuff herself and put up a lot of crazy stuff for a long time. Now is sort of warning that it's bad. She's a canary in the calm mind. I mean, a lot of people say to her like we already knew that it was bad. The question now is what are you, like what are you really telling us? And when you're telling us is that maybe something is over that we thought was gonna be around for a long time. That's just the way it looks to me. It is kind of interesting though, like today, well, this is happening. Margie Taylor Greene, the runoff for Margie Taylor Greene's seat in Rome, Georgia is happening. And the Democrat who is not expected to win because it's a very red seat is running on an anti-war ticket. And the Republican is running in this very strange way of having to defend a war that nobody, I mean, at least in Wag the Dog, the war had a purpose, right? It wasn't a real place, it wasn't a real war, but at least, you know, this is like, the purpose is what? Because Iran has been a bad actor for the last 47 years. Okay, but like, so has Russia, so has North Korea, so has, I mean, we're just gonna go to, you know, why not just, any number of countries have been bad actors. And any number of countries could get nukes. So none of that is enough of a reason to go to war with them. I mean, this has been the problem for Trump in this whole war right along. Is that, you know, they sort of debuted the Chakras aspect, you know, on that Saturday, or you guys show us a Saturday or Friday, and everybody was like, what? And they have never said what it was. I mean, every speech he's given has sort of been more meandering as in terms of the actual, you know, solutions to this thing. And those of us who were around, you know, for the Iraq war, that's where it gets you. Where, you know, those guys had plans, but when they weren't, there's plans weren't happening. They actually had plans. It wasn't working, yeah. Yeah, so we skipped over all that part. We skipped over all the, let's get excited about the potential for this. And just to the like, we're doing it, you gotta believe us that we're doing it. And like, that has been very difficult sales job for the president. And so I think it's, I mean, it's a real challenge. It'll be interesting to see what happens in that runoff race. And just how many Republicans sound like that candidate who's running to replace Margaret Taylor Green, the Republican sounds tonight. How many of them actually sound like that in November? We'll see. It's hard to imagine the candidate who sounds like that, like this war is making us safer, which seems like such a stupid line could ultimately win, but I guess we'll say. Yeah, well, I mean, these congressional races and these runoffs, I mean, the turnout will be tiny. The lines are very tightly drawn, but we saw Mike Lawler, who's kind of like this, he's a real canary coal mine guy, because he's in this purple district. Everybody's, you know, Democrats want to get rid of them. And he said, you know, on Meet the Press, I think over the weekend, he was like, look, if this goes on until, you know, for 60 days, maybe Congress should have to do something about that. Well, that would be April 29th. Yeah. So, you know, he started to throw a couple of flares up about this, but we'll see how long that goes. And, you know, and what happens. But it really is, I think, again, as clean a political failure for the, for our president, as we have seen, is this, with, is this war with this president? That's why he has, supposedly allies on his own base, you know, calling him out. That's why he has, you know, senators that are really strong and supportive of his like Ron Johnson, being like, hey, they have not figured out how to make this into something other than a mistake. Evan, Evan, hope you'll come back. Of course. Antonia Hitchens covers politics for the New Yorker. Welcome, welcome, Antonia. Thank you so much for having me. You spend some time with the Groypers. First, why don't you explain what Groypers are? It can be a little bit of a contentious definition to some, you know, it would just be a follower or, you know, occasional watcher of the streamer, Nick Fuentes, you know, it could be just a symbol kind of fandom of tuning into that show. For others, it's a more kind of overarching worldview that entails being very skeptical of Jewish influence and very incensed about having America refocus on the rights of white people. So they're anti-Semitic, though they would say they're not. I think is an important point on this. Agreed or no? One of the first times I asked a Groyper, what are the things you follow? They said, you're the most inclusive movement as long as you love Jesus Christ and peace, you can be a Groyper. And so I think the kind of definitional strangeness of it, we a bit hesitant to quantify them all as one or another. So if you love Jesus but are Jewish, can you be a Groyper? These are the kind of hair splitting conversations one gets into when you spend a lot of time with a Groyper. So to me, what was interesting was that the kind of defining characteristic in so far as it's politically relevant is that they're very impatient with what they see as Trump's kind of moderation as a leader, which to me, I think looking at a group of much younger people, you know, they tend to be called Zoomers. The feeling that Trump, whom they'd grown up with as the president was almost like this kind of weak liberal leader, I think has led them toward wanting a much more radical solution in politics that is not being met currently by this administration. So they want Trump even worse, but as a Jew who has tried to make the case to a lot of my fellow Jews that the Republican Party is not broadly supportive of, you know, like, did you meet any Jewish Groypers? I did not meet any Jewish Groypers. I met some Groypers who say that the pernicious influence of the Jewish people is the most profound threat to politics. Of course, I think those could be quantified as you describe. And then I met some who just occasionally like to watch Nick Fuentes and you find his clips on kind of Israel's influence in our politics to be interesting. So in that way, I think it's a range. OK. So I want you to sort of explain who Nick Fuentes is and what his relationship to Groypers are. In 2019, when Charlie Kirk was first going on to campuses around the country to speak to, you know, I think what he imagined to be quite liberal audiences about conservatism, he was already being met with some resistance by those in the audience who, you know, were against many of the tenets of conservatism that they found to be, you know, exclusionary of certain rights. Nick Fuentes, however, felt that Kirk was insufficiently radical because he wasn't speaking about demographic replacement. He wasn't speaking about kind of civilizational erasure. And he wanted those kind of ideas of paleoconservatism to be brought back into the GOP. And so at this point, he had a lot of online followers, many of whom used a kind of variant of the Pepe the Frog meme, which you might remember 2016. And there was a kind of chubby, smug-looking frog called a Groyper or an Easter Toad. And so Fuentes dispatched his followers to campuses to confront Kirk about, you know, did Israel do 9-11? Should Black people be allowed in the Republican Party? Very fringe internet views that I think at that point, even the kind of tone in which they were speaking was not considered part of the Republican Party. But by, you know, last year when Kirk died, a lot of the positions that Groypers initially brought up about kind of the role of white people in the Republican Party had become much more mainstream. And so I think Fuentes has been influential mainly in the sense that the seemingly very fringe internet streamer who's kind of ranting about organized Jewry all day and is monomaniacally focused on the Jews actually ends up kind of having a prominence in the mainstream GOP, at least the younger members of it, in terms of feeling like it represents where they want politics to go. These Groypers want, they feel that Trump is too slow and too woke. A terrifying statement. Do they understand just sort of how crazy that is or now? Well, I think that some of their critiques doesn't even register in a traditional left or right paradigm. I think a lot of the kind of statements Trump made that they took at face value during the campaign, whether it was about no new wars or about doing things for the working class, I think they feel that the president didn't deliver, especially in breaking from Israel, which they hoped he would do. And so I think the new war that is ongoing in Iran, in addition to kind of the continued funding of what they have called a genocide in Gaza, I think led many of them to fear that he was controlled by Israel and kind of confirmed all of these online conspiratorial kind of floating ideas that they already suspected the president might, you know, Howard Lutnik stands behind him. What does that mean? And so I noticed this kind of mainstreamification of weird things you see online and don't think much of suddenly became pretty mainstream talking points. And so I think the support for Israel is definitely kind of the main critique they have of Trump. But I think that often goes hand in hand with a critique that he's not adequately focusing on white America, which, you know, to critics of this movement would say, in fact, he's being quite vocally supportive of white America in many of the policy decisions that he makes and his own rhetoric, but they feel that it should go much further and that it needs to be closer to kind of a dictatorial regime. This all sounds like real Nazi stuff. I mean, I'm having trouble understanding what this movement is. I think it's a very opaque and in some ways very silly movement led by online teenagers who have grown up into online 30 some things who like to joke about the Holocaust all day, but right, who's to acknowledge that any of it has anything beyond a kind of ha ha, I think part of the difficulty in reporting on it initially was just done that there's, you know, I think a willingness in some corners to take it very seriously and to write, you know, as the ADL would do reports on the kind of extremist movement. And then there's also a tendency to say, you know, this is the most fundamental encapsulation of online brain rot that kind of has funneled itself into politics and people who would have been, you know, jocks or nerds or Goths or something in a different time now get to be grippers. But, you know, I don't think that they they don't encourage violence. I mean, that actually is denounced within Funtas as followers. So it's much more of a kind of silly tendency to focus on kind of the idea of if we can make fun of the Holocaust, we can liberate ourselves from this post war liberal religion that we found to be stifling. I think it's closer to Nazi cosplay than it is to kind of a real movement that would be kind of in the streets. Okay, so they have a candidate. Talk us through this candidate who's running for governor in Florida. So James Fishbach is running for governor in Florida. And interestingly, he's running against the America first endorsed candidate Byron Donalds. Your Trump has put his full support behind. And I think, you know, a few years ago, the America first candidate would have been the most right wing candidate by far. And it would have been kind of America first versus a rhino. Now those America first Trump endorsed candidates are seen as these kind of pathetic weaklings who take money from a pack and you have to be primaried by James Fishbach, who, you know, I will say it's the most Holocaust jokes I've heard at an Applebee's but has managed to take kind of a lot of the talking points of grouperism off the internet and off of Fuentes' live stream and bring them into a normal electoral context in which he's giving a stump speech kind of infused with jokes that might be made on live streams and that, you know, would not be necessarily distilled to a campaign flyer that would make sense to anyone above the age of 25. But he's arguing for burning down abortion clinics. He's arguing for bringing back public hangings. He's arguing for Chinese students paying a million dollars to attend our universities. And for as he put it to Tucker Carlson, kind of this idea that only true Americans who have a blood and soil connection to this country can understand in a kind of spiritual sense what it means to be a citizen and that this notion that anyone else who can kind of consider themselves part of the country in a propositional nation sense that they actually have no right to this country. So I think it's the most radical version of that kind of politics I've heard expressed in a traditional stump speech and goes far beyond what one met here at a Trump rally. Yeah, it feels like it's the worst of Trumpism, the shit coasting. Are there other tenants of it besides anti Semitism? I think there's a skepticism of most of the progressive advances of the past, if not century, then at least decades, you know, women voting definitely is not something they think has been favorable to the country. Gender roles that go beyond kind of traditional 1950s gender roles are seen as kind of an error that should be undone. You know, Fuentes would say something like the Jim Crow water fountains, you know, no big deal. It's a very retrograde movement that is channeling a lot of resentment and anger about a kind of current situation they feel themselves to be part of by wanting to undo the kind of excesses of progressive boomers that they feel kind of ruin their lives. Of course, many of the critiques are inaccurate, but I think have found a really massive appeal to the younger people who see them over and over again online kind of the same thing and realize like, Oh, yeah, maybe maybe it's the Jews, like that's why I don't have a job. Basically, it's anti Semitism. Well, sometimes it's Jews, sometimes it's other minority. Sometimes it's women. Sometimes it's, you know, it's a cope. It's a kind of it's a lack of agency as expressed via anti Semitism, but you know, a number of other things. At the same time, it's a very diverse movement with, you know, lots of women who call themselves the groy pets, lots of non white people. And I think kind of they're much more like a fandom than an ideology. It's kind of, you know, we're all on tour with the Grateful Dead, but it's a different kind of concert. Right. The concert is the Holocaust are to see this as other words as anything other than terrifying. Yes. I think that the kind of true success of the movement as they imagine it, which would mean a full political takeover seems incredibly hard to imagine because these aren't popular ideas in America. Right. I mean, but Trumpism seemed that way too. Yeah, no. And I think that's why it mattered to me to take this seriously and not to just scoff at it. But I also think in response to your question about, you know, is Nicholas J. Fuente is going to be the president in 2036. I would I would hesitate to say, you know, this is the inexorable future of the right. I think if anything, there may be a real correction after this where, you know, we've seen Republicans lose even in the past few months, given that a lot of the country is not, they don't want to go further with something they see is not working. And I think some of these people might end up voting for Gavin Newsom because he's white. So it's difficult to parse where it goes. And they, you know, they loathe Trump, they loathe JD Vance. It's a very kind of death spiral movement of downward energy. I think a lot of it might just be they voted for Trump last time and next time they stay home. So but you would say that Nick Fuentes is the leader of this organization. I think even to call it an organization is a bit, you know, it's a coterie of people in online replies who watch a live stream. But I do think that insofar as those views have been popularized and brought into kind of the sphere of political normals. They have a candidate. So, you know, I mean, as much as anything is an organization. Yeah, I would say James Fishback is the most kind of real world test case for where Fuentes's ideas can go. And we have seen with younger people, it's incredibly popular with voters above 55. It's essentially, you know, I think maybe 3%. But at least the last time I was looking at the polls for this, Byron Donaldson is being beaten by a factor of four by James Fishback with voters under 35. And so I think it is a it's an articulation of something about our politics that really isn't working and also something about America First and MAGA that, you know, the road has run out for them with convincing young people it's a movement that's going to make their lives better. And so in that way, I think if anything, there's there is a shrewdness to them kind of breaking with something, even if what they've replaced it with is perhaps much, much worse. Really something. Was there anything about Gropers that you were surprised by reading the piece? I wondered if it was something that you had followed for just I mean, it just so tied with anti-Semitism, it's hard for me to, you know, to get past that. But it's certainly interesting. And you know, it needs to be covered. When I do think it is a huge problem for the GOP going forward because they don't have, you know, if you take JD Vance as an example of a potential torchbearer, he hasn't been willing to weigh in on this and say, we're against this. He'll say, you know, we don't want to focus on purity tests. But I think in the absence of being willing to find a new way of gatekeeping, whether they like it or not, they've become all of them bound up in kind of an association with anti-Semitism that again, I think is broadly very unpopular with Americans. You know, the outer border doesn't want to do Nazi salutes at a political conference. Right. And they do until they don't. But yeah, I do not think that you can trust the American people to have sense about a lot of stuff. So we'll say, Antonia, thank you. That was great. Thank you so much for having me on and for reading the piece and being curious about it. Jesse Cannon. Molly Jung fast. So you know, when the American people are hurting, they're thinking about gas prices going up inflation, that's about to be insane. We see headlines today that the White House's forecast of the gas prices will be going down anytime in the foreseeable future. Trump's thinking about a new archway. Yeah, he's very into decorating. We're not trying to destroy other countries or kill everybody in the world or kill the Iranians. He is very focused on decorating. So he plans to spend $15 million in the national endowment for the Arts and Humanities Fund to finance the construction of a massive archway. Why? An archway to build across the Lincoln Memorial. This is like this whole insane thing where he just is, you know, his idea of legacy is building, right? Is building and doing, you know, anything he can. And it's just like he's so scary and he's so erratic and the stuff he wants to do is so crazy. And then he's just building stuff. Like it's like, I'm going to kill everyone. And then it's like, no, no, we'll just build an archway. So we're not doing scary stuff. He is decorating. Well, like our former colleague, Swin said, he's a catty theater mom at heart. He really is. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening. No gloss, no filter, just stories, spoken without fear. A person who is not generous cannot be an artist. The world will be at peace only when it is ruled by poets and philosophers. 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