0:00

Welcome listeners to episode 72 of

0:02

Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sittman, your podcast

0:04

co-host, and I'm here with my great friend Sam

0:06

Etherbell. Hey, Sam. Hi, Matt. How

0:09

are you doing today? Good. I'm good. I'm

0:11

doing well, too. And I'm very excited

0:13

to share this episode with listeners. Guess

0:15

what it's about? Not Whitaker Chambers.

0:19

Right. It's very different than some

0:21

recent episodes we've done. A little

0:23

more contemporary, in fact, very contemporary.

0:26

The man of the moment, the man we're all talking about,

0:28

Ronald DeSantis.

0:29

We decided to actually

0:32

punish ourselves. We are a guilty

0:34

lot here at Know Your Enemy. And the

0:36

self-flagellation kicked in with reading

0:39

his terrible recent book, The

0:41

Courage to Be Free, which is kind

0:43

of his pitch for Florida as the

0:46

blueprint for America. A dark thought.

0:48

But to make it a little more fun than it might have been

0:50

otherwise, we had an

0:52

absolutely amazing, wonderful guest

0:55

who helped us break this book down.

0:57

We had Jillian Branstetter back on the pod.

0:59

You'll remember Jillian from a year ago where

1:02

we first addressed the rights

1:04

attack on trans people and trans rights.

1:06

She is now a communication strategist

1:09

at the ACLU's Women's Rights Project,

1:11

an LGBTQ and HIV project.

1:14

She's a trained and excellent activist

1:17

and communication strategist around issues

1:19

of trans rights, women's rights in general.

1:22

And that

1:22

made it so that we got to have a more

1:24

kind of straightforward

1:27

update on the political stakes, the

1:29

sort of legislative agenda of the right around

1:31

trans rights in the beginning of the episode. And

1:34

then in the rest of it, we waded

1:36

our way through the morass of the psyche

1:38

of Ron DeSantis with Jillian's help. And

1:40

so we were able to make a topic which is otherwise

1:44

pretty bleak, a little bit more

1:46

fun or at least digestible with Jillian's

1:49

help, because she's got such a great mind

1:51

for this kind of thing. And she's

1:53

both so passionate and morally committed

1:56

to fighting, you know,

1:57

the onslaught of the rights attack on trans

1:59

rights.

1:59

also just has such a great attitude and it

2:02

buoyed me to have this conversation with her. Yes,

2:05

well should we get some housekeeping items then? Yeah,

2:07

let's do it. As always, we're grateful to

2:09

our partners at Descent who sponsor the podcast.

2:12

One thing they do for us is if you subscribe

2:15

to our Patreon at patreon.com

2:17

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2:19

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2:22

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2:25

And of course for $5 a month, you get access

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2:29

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2:34

please do consider subscribing. And

2:36

as always, we wanna thank our intrepid producer,

2:39

Jesse Brenneman and Will

2:41

Epstein, who does the music for the show. That's

2:43

right, well should we get to it? Let's do it. Here's

2:45

our episode on Ron DeSantis's

2:48

Florida with Jillian Branstadter.

2:51

Enjoy.

2:52

So, Jillian Branstadter, welcome

2:54

back to Know Your Enemy.

3:07

Thank

3:10

you both so much, it's a pleasure to be here. It's

3:12

been almost a year exactly, since

3:14

you were last on the podcast. Has it been

3:16

a busy year for you Jillian? Busy

3:20

year than others, I've joined the ACLU.

3:23

I amicably and favorably

3:25

part of Waze at the National Women's Law Center who continue

3:27

to do great work. And I mean, when

3:29

we last spoke, if I recall correctly, the

3:32

largest news item in my space

3:35

was the initiative

3:35

by Greg Abbott and Ken

3:38

Paxton to attempt to remove transgender

3:40

youth from their parents' custody. And

3:42

if you can believe it, things went downhill from there

3:45

in regards to transgender justice over the last

3:48

year. First off, that offalness

3:50

in Texas is still ongoing

3:53

and is still really a blade hanging over the

3:55

neck of many of these families. And then of

3:57

course, Texas has joined most other

3:59

states. in introducing just

4:02

a tidal wave of restrictive

4:04

measures aimed at transgender people.

4:06

There's few areas of a transgender

4:09

person's life that are not being targeted

4:11

in state legislators right now. We

4:14

have a legislative tracker up on our website,

4:16

aclu.org, and we're currently

4:18

tracking over 450 bills introduced

4:22

just this legislative session that's more than

4:24

double last year, which was of course more than

4:26

double the year before that. And

4:29

most alarmingly, it isn't just the

4:31

number of the bills that have grown worse, but also

4:33

their extremity and what they're

4:35

targeting. When you two and I

4:37

last spoke, there were just

4:40

two states that had restricted access

4:42

to gender affirming care for transgender youth, Arkansas

4:45

and Alabama. There's now 13. The

4:48

ACLU, along with the ACLU of Arkansas,

4:51

led the first legal challenge against

4:53

the one in Arkansas that was the first in the country

4:55

that was

4:56

passed. And that was

4:58

the subject of a two week trial last fall.

5:00

We're actually expecting that ruling at any point right

5:02

now. And just

5:04

last week in Indiana, we filed our first

5:06

of eight lawsuits that we in our affiliate network

5:08

are going to be filing, challenging

5:10

these bans on gender affirming

5:13

care for trans youth. So, you

5:15

know, to say that I've been busy, yeah, sure.

5:17

I also think that, you know, I live in DC,

5:19

it's a very queer city. And I

5:22

think when I talk with other queer folks here, they're very

5:24

aggrieved at how anyone could wake up every day

5:27

and stare into what is a gaping maw of the future

5:30

civil rights for trans folks. And

5:32

I'm so fortunate to be

5:35

able to do anything about it. I'm definitely a person who

5:37

I would be freaking out if I

5:39

had nothing that I could do about it. And I think a

5:41

lot of people are. So even as

5:43

the extremity of the measures they're introducing, the

5:46

speed that they're passing them into law and

5:48

just the vile rhetoric,

5:50

the sheer lack of humanity, the

5:53

indignity that trans people are being forced

5:55

through.

5:56

If anyone can look at it and feel lucky, I do. have

6:00

any sort of platform to

6:02

both speak out against it and work with a great

6:04

team here at the ACLU opposing it. Well, I

6:06

speak for myself and I think for many, many

6:08

of the listeners in saying thank you so much for doing

6:10

all this work. I do think about how grateful

6:13

I am that people like you are fighting back

6:15

and that an organization like the ACLU has

6:17

made this fight such a priority

6:20

and to articulate it in the terms of

6:22

liberty and freedom I think is really,

6:25

really important. And maybe we can talk about

6:27

that more later. I don't want to get too far into

6:29

this without reminding the listeners

6:32

that we did do something terrible to

6:34

Jillian in inviting

6:36

her on and adding another

6:39

gaping maw abyss to stare into

6:41

which is the life and times of one Ron

6:44

DeSantis. And we asked

6:46

you to join us in reading

6:48

his very recently released book,

6:51

The Courage to Be Free, which

6:54

we might categorize as very much

6:56

not, definitely not a campaign

6:58

book book, which is to say very much obviously

7:00

a campaign book. But there's an easy way

7:03

to connect what you just started talking about and the listeners

7:05

are of course aware of it, which is that DeSantis

7:07

has been both legislatively

7:10

and rhetorically and as an executive

7:13

in Florida leading the charge

7:16

in criminalizing trans people and denying

7:19

gender affirming care to trans youth. Did

7:21

we talk for a moment before we turned to

7:23

this awful

7:23

book that we made you read about what's

7:26

been going on in Florida? Sure. So

7:28

I think you say he's leading the charge, but

7:30

I don't think he's actually quite unique here

7:33

in the measures he's implementing. I think

7:36

he's just doing the Florida what

7:38

they're doing in Oklahoma

7:39

and Tennessee and Arkansas and have

7:41

been doing in Texas for some years. And I guess he's got

7:43

a big platform because he's not

7:46

running, but in fact running for president while he's

7:48

doing these things. Right. So at

7:50

the end, let's start with what I'm

7:52

sure a nasty letter will be sent

7:54

to me if I don't call it the parental rights and education

7:56

bill, but which most people know is the don't say gay law.

7:59

Right.

7:59

was passed last

8:01

year and prohibits discussion

8:03

of, quote, sexuality, sexual orientation

8:06

or gender identity in K

8:08

through third grade, but then also extends

8:10

that to any discussion that might not be, quote

8:13

unquote, age appropriate in any

8:15

grade. And so basically acts as

8:17

sort of having a chilling effect across the whole range

8:19

of school. And then of course, there is a

8:21

bill introduced this session in Florida that

8:24

would expand that well up into the

8:26

eighth grade, which matches, I think,

8:29

one of the many reasons why the ACLU

8:31

tends to take a maximalist approach to its anti

8:33

censorship work, because the

8:36

line on censorship does have a curious habit

8:38

of moving right well beyond where its

8:40

proponents initially put. And we can talk

8:43

more about sort of how he's tried to dissuade

8:45

responsibility, not just for the censorship

8:48

that's been enacted by that bill, but the

8:50

censorship that's been acted by the stop

8:52

woke act. That is the subject of

8:54

actually a lawsuit that they sell you they sell you

8:56

Florida alongside the Legal Defense Fund

8:59

filed. The stop woke act

9:01

is censoring largely discussions

9:04

related to race

9:06

and racism within Florida

9:09

schools and universities.

9:11

You know, we've seen textbooks on Rosa

9:13

Parks getting delineated of any mention

9:15

of race. Who knows why she refused

9:18

to give up her seat? Or Roberto

9:20

Clemente or other major

9:22

figures within black history.

9:25

And there's been this sort of effort to comply

9:27

with the law to sort of sanitize

9:29

them. And I think folks by now might be familiar

9:32

with sort of the images of emptied out classroom

9:34

bookshelves, as well as, you know, teachers

9:37

who have been forced to leave their profession,

9:39

including, by the way, lots of queer teachers

9:41

who have just been afraid that if they mentioned

9:44

their spouse, for example, they may

9:46

run afoul of these two laws. So

9:48

an overt censorship regime

9:50

that is then posed as well, no, we're just opposing

9:53

leftist indoctrination. And then

9:56

the unspoken part of that is sort of replacing

9:59

it with their own. kinds of indoctrination and

10:01

the ideologies that they think are

10:05

more fitting. On top of that, Sam,

10:07

I read your really great piece in The New York Times

10:09

where you talked about Ron's reliance

10:12

on, I'm just going to call him Ron, I guess. Meatball

10:15

Ron. Ronnie Boy. Ronnie

10:17

Boy, right? Ron's reliance,

10:20

particularly around COVID, which he talks

10:22

a lot about in the book, he sort

10:24

of turns this language

10:26

against elites and ranting against

10:29

the so-called experts and things like that, but then just

10:31

suggests, well, no, I just want to appoint my own

10:33

experts who are ideologically

10:36

aligned with me. Yeah, exactly. And

10:38

as much as we saw that with COVID, over the

10:40

last year, we've seen that in regards to gender-affirming

10:43

care for transgender youth. Starting

10:46

last year, the Florida Board of Medicine,

10:48

which was largely hand-selected by

10:50

Ron DeSantis, began its rulemaking process

10:53

to do two things. One was to basically

10:55

defund

10:57

all care for transgender people related

10:59

to their gender transition. So

11:01

banning any Medicaid funds that could

11:03

be used for this, banning any state funds

11:05

that could go to this in state employee plans

11:08

and university employee plans, we

11:10

actually saw where the governor's office was attempting

11:12

to peek into the private medical records of transgender

11:15

students at public Florida universities

11:18

to try and assess how many people have been accessing

11:20

this care. And that follows, by the way,

11:22

an initiative in Texas where not

11:25

only were they targeting trans youth and attempting

11:27

to remove them from their parents' custody, but as

11:29

Washington Post found, Attorney General Ken Paxton

11:31

was going around the normal processes for collecting

11:34

data on transgender people via

11:36

their driver's licenses. So soliciting

11:38

how many people have updated

11:40

their gender marker on their driver's licenses, for

11:42

what reasons, and could you also get us their names

11:45

and addresses? Wow, wow. The state

11:47

has been decidedly quiet as

11:49

to why they're doing that. Anyway, back to Florida.

11:52

The Board of Medicine began this rulemaking process,

11:54

and while also defunding care

11:57

for transgender people of any age, they

11:59

also... moved to ban gender

12:01

affirming care for transgender youth.

12:04

That makes Florida, as I said, now one of 13 states that

12:07

have taken what is a relatively extreme

12:10

measure. The way that Florida has done

12:12

this, however, whereas those other states have done it through

12:14

statute, through writing a law, passing

12:16

a law, getting assigned by the governor, overriding a governor's

12:18

veto in some cases, the Board of

12:20

Medicine has been trying

12:22

to rewrite the best

12:25

practices when it comes to gender

12:27

dysphoria. So transgender,

12:30

I think it's important to know, is not a diagnosis,

12:33

right? Gender dysphoria is

12:35

a diagnosis. And for

12:37

folks who don't know, this is a term for

12:40

an incongruity between

12:43

your gender presentation and your

12:45

gender identity. So for

12:47

example, if I walked

12:50

into a barbershop and said

12:52

shave my head, I would walk away with a

12:54

lot of gender dysphoria related

12:56

to the length of my hair. That's something a lot of women

12:58

would, right? And similarly,

13:01

gender affirming care is

13:03

distinct forms of medical care, which helps to relieve

13:06

this dysphoria, whether that's seeking

13:08

access to hormones for particularly young

13:10

children, seeking access to puberty blockers,

13:13

or for older adolescents and adults seeking access

13:15

to surgery. If you need

13:18

a detailed overview of what gender affirming

13:20

care is for transgender youth, feel free

13:22

to go back and listen to my previous appearance on this podcast,

13:24

but also aclu.org has a lot

13:26

of information at the sort of introduction on this.

13:28

And of course, the American Psychological Association,

13:31

the American Academy of Pediatrics, and a slew of other

13:33

medical experts who could sort of speak to

13:35

this. But the Board of Medicine moved

13:38

to functionally ban all of that. And

13:40

they did that by Ron DeSantis, effectively

13:42

hand-selecting what is basically

13:45

a group of conversion therapists,

13:47

folks who don't think that trans people actually exist,

13:50

folks who have been roundly rejected by

13:52

the medical establishment. And as

13:54

we can talk about, it bears a really striking similarity

13:57

to sort of how he's tried to approach the pandemic.

14:00

sort of selectively picking

14:03

out which experts he's actually inclined

14:05

to listen to, even if they aren't actually

14:07

experts at all. It's not getting

14:09

rid of a system which

14:12

designates

14:13

particular experts who have

14:15

this sort of

14:16

powerful influence and control over people's

14:19

lives and choices. It's not getting rid

14:21

of the sort of hierarchy, it's just replacing

14:23

the people at the top of it with, in some cases,

14:26

sort of pseudo-scientists and ideologically

14:28

inclined scientists who will agree

14:31

to implement the sort of care

14:33

or non-care regime that he prefers.

14:36

So that's the way in which it's sort of similar to what

14:38

he did with COVID. It's like, keep this sort of

14:41

oligarchy intact, but make sure that the

14:43

scientific experts who are in charge of it agree

14:45

with me. I just

14:46

want to add to that, Sam. We

14:49

have talked in past episodes about the

14:51

way the right credentials people, the

14:53

kind of network of think tanks,

14:56

the way they kind of move through that system.

14:59

And it seems to me that this is one place where it really

15:01

matters. You know, like there is a kind

15:03

of pool of people friendly to

15:05

the right who people like Rhonda Sanus

15:08

know they're on the same team. It

15:10

is kind of like a parallel form of credentialism

15:12

and expertise rather than a critique

15:14

of those things in and of themselves. Well,

15:16

and one founded in sort of an ideological

15:19

rigidity. So, for example, I mentioned the

15:21

American Academy of Pediatrics,

15:24

which has been around for decades.

15:26

It represents tens of thousands

15:28

of pediatricians across the country. If you've

15:31

taken your kid to a pediatrician,

15:33

it's likely they were a member of the American Academy

15:35

of Pediatrics. The right wing

15:37

then over the course of the last few decades started

15:40

the American College of Pediatricians,

15:43

which on top of promoting conversion

15:45

therapy and other debunk practices shows

15:48

up in the context of banning abortion

15:50

and banning birth control. And I think

15:52

similar to the initiative

15:54

to dissuade the need for things like vaccines,

15:57

they really just need anyone in a white coat who

15:59

can. and stand by a podium and look

16:02

official. And what you spoke

16:04

to is sort of the credentializing. I think

16:06

it's a particularly sensitive point for

16:09

trans folks, because if you look

16:11

at the history of transgender

16:13

people's healthcare, it

16:15

has been kind of a push and pull

16:18

between a medical establishment

16:20

that was at once hostile

16:23

and then kind of indifferent, and

16:25

trans people who want autonomy

16:27

over their own bodies. And in that

16:30

way mirrors, especially the pre-Roe

16:32

era around abortion access.

16:35

So for example, before Roe, if you wanted

16:37

an abortion, you needed to go in front

16:39

of a hospital board and make your case

16:42

that you deserved an abortion, that

16:44

an abortion was in your best interest, that

16:46

an abortion would be productive to you. This includes,

16:48

by the way, in the fifties and sixties, what were called therapeutic

16:51

abortions, which were abortions which were

16:53

offered in order to reduce suicide,

16:55

which

16:55

I think has particular periods to

16:58

gender affirming care, considering that's usually the

17:00

use case that's most often brought up. And

17:03

it's not terribly long ago, and still is, in

17:06

some people's instances, that the metric

17:08

that trans people had to meet in order

17:10

to access gender affirming care was

17:13

very heavily based in how

17:15

much they could appease a

17:17

doctor or a medical board's standards

17:21

of gender. And that included,

17:23

by the way, if you're going to transition

17:25

to live as a woman, you better date men. Or

17:28

if you're going to transition as a man, you better date women.

17:31

Or I'm going to deny you hormones

17:33

or surgery because I don't think that you'll actually ever

17:35

pass as the gender that you're

17:37

trying to be. I'm going to deny

17:40

you this because you're refusing

17:42

to get a divorce. In fact, if

17:44

I'm gonna give you this care, you need to pick

17:46

up stakes, leave town, change your name,

17:48

and start an entirely new life because

17:51

I just don't think that you're going to assimilate your new gender

17:53

into your existing heteronormative

17:55

life. Over the, like, 60s and 70s, that

17:58

was really how this care... was

18:00

considered. And over

18:03

the last two decades, really, there's been

18:05

a move towards instead

18:08

of the metric of a quote-unquote

18:10

successful transition being how

18:13

well they complied with gendered

18:15

standards of normativity, over the

18:17

last decade the metrics of success started

18:20

to turn towards personal well-being. It

18:23

started to turn towards mental health. And

18:25

what folks found was that an informed

18:27

consent model, one in which you educate

18:29

somebody about the actual risks, you know, most

18:32

birth control prescriptions, for example, are given out on

18:34

an informed consent model. And

18:36

that has been where gender affirming care has been

18:38

moving. And at the same

18:41

time that the evidence in support

18:43

of that model has grown stronger, it's

18:46

not by coincidence, I think, grown more politically

18:49

contentious. That's what I

18:51

saw in your piece was this sort of push

18:53

and pull between whose experts you're

18:55

listening to and whose experts you're not. I

18:58

think trans people would suggest that

19:00

every trans person is the expert in their own identity

19:02

and that you are the only expert

19:05

of your own gender. And

19:06

I think the conversation still ends

19:08

up sort of ping-ponging in the way that

19:10

you describe. I totally understand what

19:13

you're saying. It does suggest that in some

19:15

ways what the right is doing is

19:18

not only sort of like going back to a model

19:21

of removing trans people's

19:23

autonomy and sort of expertise

19:25

over their own bodies, but taking

19:27

the sort of impulses of that system, which is that

19:29

like you don't know what you need, we

19:32

need experts to tell you what you need, and then

19:34

moving in an even more reactionary direction.

19:36

Well, we're seeing that with Judge Kazmruk right

19:38

now in the Smith and Pristone ruling out

19:40

of Texas where they're trying to override the FDA

19:43

and very much lining up their,

19:46

you know, list of favorite doctors,

19:48

no matter how fringe or quack, in defense

19:50

of it. Right. Is there anything else

19:52

we need to make sure we cover in terms

19:55

of catching up our listeners on the quite

19:57

terrible year in right when...

20:00

tax on trans people? Well, to pivot

20:02

it back to Rodding Boy, the Florida legislative

20:05

session started a couple months ago

20:07

and not only is there wanted an effort to

20:09

codify through statute the ban on gender

20:11

affirming care, but it would also, similar

20:14

to Texas, qualify the provision

20:16

of gender affirming care for somebody under 18

20:19

as a reason to remove that young person

20:21

from their parents' custody. And it actually

20:23

goes even further by suggesting

20:26

that anyone in the household who's

20:28

accessed this care then serves as a reason

20:31

for that person losing custody of

20:33

their child. So that, by the way, would target

20:35

trans people who are themselves parents

20:38

or if their sibling is trans, right?

20:42

Then there's HB 999, which

20:44

Equality Florida, I like, has taken a calling MAGA

20:46

University. And this is basically an effort

20:48

to censor what topics can be talked about

20:51

at the collegiate level from universities

20:53

which receive public funds. And

20:55

that includes obviously wide swaths of

20:58

critical race theory, as well as just banning

21:00

gender studies majors overall. And

21:03

then there's one that would threaten venues

21:05

if they host a drag show while a minor

21:08

is present, they could lose all sorts of licenses

21:10

and tax benefits. There's a proposed

21:12

ban on pride flags on public property.

21:15

And unless we forget the six-week

21:18

abortion ban that is currently racing to

21:20

Governor DeSantis' desk. It's a

21:22

suitably daunting and despair

21:25

inducing list of attacks.

21:27

Yes, indeed. On the liberty and autonomy

21:30

of really all people. That's

21:31

otherwise known as my inbox. Yeah. Yeah.

21:34

Yes. And it is crazy that it's the same people

21:36

harping on parental rights in other contexts.

21:39

I mean, this really is like the

21:41

perfect example of the Frank Wilheliot quote,

21:43

to say it again on the podcast, conservatism

21:46

consists of exactly one proposition.

21:48

There must be in groups whom the law protects but

21:50

does not bind alongside out groups

21:53

from the law binds, but does not protect. Just

21:56

the kind of shift between we're going to take your

21:58

kid away if this law passes. and

22:00

the parents are fine with the

22:02

child receiving gender-affirming care and

22:05

the way they stand up for parental

22:07

rights in other contexts, seemingly giving individual

22:09

parents a veto over what books can be in a classroom,

22:12

say, right? But I think we should get,

22:15

since dealing, you brought us back to Florida.

22:17

We know that the Florida model is what Ron DeSantis

22:20

wants for the United States as a whole. Make

22:22

America Florida, as he says at the end of his

22:24

book that we're going to talk about. Sam,

22:27

you mentioned that this book came out in February.

22:29

It's called The Courage to Be Free, Florida's

22:32

blueprint for America's renewal. And I just

22:34

want to make a nerdy joke here that The Courage to

22:36

Be Free, it's not an homage

22:39

to the existentialist theologian Paul

22:41

Tillich, his book The Courage to Be Free.

22:44

But before we get into the book, just

22:47

for listeners, a little bit of biographical

22:49

details about Ronald Dion

22:51

DeSantis, his middle name's Dion. He

22:54

was born September 14th, 1978. Our

22:56

birthdays are almost the same. We're both Virgos. So

22:59

I don't know what that says about him. No, that makes sense.

23:02

Typical, typical. So he's currently 44.

23:04

We'll turn 45 in September. He

23:06

was born in Jacksonville, Florida, as he's

23:09

not tired of letting anyone know. He went to

23:11

Yale as an undergraduate where, by the

23:13

end of his time there, he was captain of the baseball team.

23:16

Then he went to Harvard Law School. He joined

23:18

the United States Navy in 2004 and

23:20

eventually became a legal adviser to SEAL Team 1.

23:23

He served at Guantanamo Bay in 2006. We'll

23:27

get there. And was deployed to Iraq

23:29

in 2007. And then in between

23:31

kind of that stint serving in the Navy

23:34

and his first run for Congress in 2012, he

23:36

was a special assistant US attorney

23:38

at the US Attorney's Office in the middle district

23:41

of Florida. So after he got

23:43

back from Iraq about eight months later, he

23:45

got that job as a special assistant US

23:47

attorney. And then, of course, he was first elected

23:50

to Congress in 2012, where he served for three

23:52

terms before running for governor in 2018. Co-founder

23:55

of the Freedom Caucus. Yes, co-founder of the Freedom

23:57

Caucus. And he's married to Casey.

25:39

just

26:00

how charmless DeSantis is. There's

26:03

something kind of grasping and insecure.

26:06

There's not really a lot that's likable or

26:08

endearing about him. He kind of just

26:10

comes off as a bully, like someone with a plan.

26:13

And if you like that, if he's on your side, then

26:15

he's kind of your bully. Even anecdotes

26:18

from his youth that could be somewhat charming.

26:20

Maybe I'll get us started with an example here from

26:23

early in the book, Kim playing Little League Baseball.

26:25

When he was 12 years old, his team made it

26:28

to the Little League World Series in Williamsport,

26:29

Pennsylvania, which as he

26:32

puts it is the Shangri-La for

26:34

Little Leaguers. Even such a possibly

26:36

charming story about making it to the Little League World

26:38

Series. He's drawing lessons from

26:40

it.

26:41

Because what I came to understand about the experience

26:43

was less about baseball than it was about life.

26:46

It was proof that hard work can pay off and that

26:48

achieving big goals was possible. I

26:50

also think it may have informed some of my later political

26:53

judgments. For example, my hostility

26:55

toward the Chinese Communist Party and

26:57

my support for Taiwan reflected

27:00

my general political outlook. The respect

27:02

I had for Taiwanese baseball no

27:04

doubt made my pro-Taipei stance more

27:06

natural. After all, I remember

27:08

playing ping pong against these guys and

27:11

they were normal kids just having fun, not

27:13

Maoist trying to further a cultural revolution.

27:16

As

27:16

if if for some reason played ping

27:18

pong against like Chinese kids, they

27:20

would have been inhuman animals

27:22

that he couldn't relate to. Yes, for listeners,

27:24

just the background is often the Taiwanese baseball

27:27

teams were very good. And so

27:29

it was often like a Taiwanese baseball

27:31

team versus an American Little League team in

27:33

the Little League World Series. And

27:36

to me, that was like first five pages of the book.

27:38

He's talking about Little League and then the hard

27:40

swerve into taking a shot at the CCP

27:43

based on his Little League baseball

27:46

experience.

27:46

It may have informed his

27:48

later political judgments. No doubt. What a precocious

27:50

young man. It sounds like he's talking

27:52

to like the graduating class of an MBA.

27:55

Yes. To your point, it's very free

27:57

of personality or emotion or...

27:59

or anything like charm? Well, I also

28:02

just wrote down

28:03

bitter, whiny, self-aggrandizing,

28:06

utterly without the sort of redeeming

28:08

camp or charm of a Trump. Not

28:10

that Trump's books have that, but he

28:13

has all of the same kind of grievances

28:15

of Trump, but none of the charm.

28:18

And I think he's got a meritocratic

28:20

driver's absolute fixation

28:23

on his own exceptional nature. He's

28:25

certain of his own wisdom and the righteousness

28:28

of his perspective on all things. And he

28:30

has unmitigated rage at anyone who gets

28:32

in his way or denies his specialness,

28:35

a narcissist

28:36

with no charm or humor about himself.

28:38

Yes, that's what I was going to ask both Sam

28:40

and Jillian. At any point in this book

28:42

did you laugh? Does he even make a joke? I'm

28:45

not sure if I can recall any. So

28:47

there's one moment that I could see

28:49

who he was trying to humor.

28:51

I think it was Hurricane Matthew. And

28:54

he was seeking hurricane relief. And he talks about

28:56

this interaction that he had with the Trump White House. And

28:59

he released that. He called

29:01

the president up and spoke about what

29:04

Florida needed to recover from this hurricane.

29:07

And President Trump was whatever they

29:09

need. I love Florida, Mar-a-Lago,

29:11

blah, blah, blah. And then I think it's Mick

29:13

Mulvaney who

29:14

ends up getting in his way and saying,

29:17

he may have over-promised. And we'll get

29:19

to this and that. And what

29:22

he's doing there, if I had to guess,

29:24

is portraying Trump as basically

29:28

a puppet of his advisors, as

29:30

not really

29:31

having any power. Everyone was having

29:33

to dance around him and actually

29:35

pull the levers of power. And I

29:38

think that fits in

29:40

just the low-level punditry that

29:42

you hear about the comparisons between DeSantis

29:44

and Trump, which is that DeSantis is a more

29:47

finessed version of Trump.

29:49

That he actually knows how to pull the levers

29:51

of power, whereas Trump is just sort of

29:53

a toddler flailing in the background. That's

29:56

definitely where the DeSantis campaign

29:58

and its surrogates want to go.

29:59

with their critique of Trump. I think it's notable

30:02

and something that was interested in me as a sort of subtext

30:05

in a lot of moments is exactly what you're pointing

30:07

to, like what kind of contrast are they trying to draw

30:10

with Trump while having to consistently

30:13

present him as a lover of Trump

30:15

who stood up for Trump right

30:17

away during the Russia investigation

30:19

even when that was being done by fellow

30:22

Republicans, just always being

30:24

on Trump's side, loving having Trump's support in

30:26

his gubernatorial campaign 2018. But

30:28

at the same time, there has to be,

30:31

if this is a campaign book in which he's ultimately

30:33

going to run against Trump, there has to be some moments

30:35

where it peaks through, you know, the sort of

30:38

distinctions he's trying to draw. I was pretty

30:40

alert to that. I think that was a good example

30:42

sort of presenting himself as capable and competent

30:46

and pragmatic in a way that Trump is not

30:49

having so much knowledge of the working

30:51

of the constitutional system that's so, he's

30:54

constantly talking about the role of the executive

30:56

relative to the other branches, his sort of theory

30:58

of the administrative state. He's

30:59

showing off his intellect, you

31:02

know, his good education. I mean,

31:04

he's meant to. I think he's

31:06

meaning to. And then I think there is one

31:08

moment where he puts criticisms

31:11

of Trump in the book

31:13

and it's describing other people's opposition

31:16

to Trump,

31:18

but I think it's worth noting it just because

31:20

it's the only place where direct criticism of Trump

31:22

appears. It's on page 66 where he

31:25

was saying that most of the Republican Party hierarchy was

31:28

opposed to Trump in the primaries. And here's

31:30

the quote. Some of this opposition was rooted in Trump's liberal

31:32

past, including his big donations to liberal

31:34

candidates like Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and

31:36

Harry Reid, and his support for liberal abortion

31:39

laws and restrictions on gun rights. Some

31:41

of the opposition was rooted in Trump's unique but polarizing

31:44

persona and his efforts to avoid being drafted,

31:46

which they found unbecoming a

31:48

presidential candidate. It's

31:50

like some people were complaining about Trump

31:52

for being a closet liberal who

31:55

avoided the draft. Not me. Some

31:57

people were saying that. People are saying

31:59

I wouldn't say that.

31:59

Yes, I would say too often

32:02

Sam as you're getting at there's that kind

32:04

of not even explicit criticism

32:06

of Trump often It's much more by implication

32:09

and I do feel like especially in

32:11

some of the material on his response to kova 19

32:14

By implication, I mean who's

32:16

letting Fauci do these things

32:19

right implicitly Trump? But also he

32:21

really goes out of his way to act like well,

32:23

I was reading all this data I was

32:26

sifting through all the studies. I was

32:28

like making decisions based on my

32:29

own intelligence based on studying these

32:32

matters I think that's very clearly meant

32:34

to draw a kind of

32:35

Contrast with Trump and just as Jillian

32:37

was saying that he said that a puppet of his advisors.

32:40

Yes, exactly I mean, I was

32:42

this isn't like getting a news political philosophy,

32:45

but to the point of just his lifelessness I was

32:47

just shocked at how little if his personal life is actually

32:49

in the book Yes, and the fact that

32:51

to your point like even a youth baseball

32:54

story becomes a conversation about foreign

32:56

policy and there's this

32:59

anecdote about how he met his wife Casey

33:01

Nate black DeSantis and It

33:04

was on a golf course where she was

33:06

formally a news anchor covering golf

33:08

tournaments And he's golfing

33:11

and he says I looked to the next day over to make sure

33:13

nobody else had designs I'm hitting the leftover

33:15

balls. I saw a beautiful young woman practicing

33:17

her swing Let's just say I no longer cared

33:20

about hitting those golf balls She

33:22

was dressed in classy golf attire and

33:24

was generating an impressive amount of club head speed I

33:26

initially thought she might be a college golfer. She

33:28

looked the part and had a great swing Now

33:31

this is the part that fascinates me now

33:34

Not every guy would have the gumption to make an introduction

33:36

and strike up a conversation with someone so striking

33:39

But my philosophy and everything I've ever done

33:41

is not to fear failure You

33:44

will definitely not win if you don't even try

33:46

There's no way I was leaving that driving lane without

33:49

asking her out on a date and he musters

33:51

up all his charm and all his swagger

33:53

and

33:54

Approaches her grabs the abandoned bucket

33:56

of balls walks over to her and

33:59

says quote Hello, someone

34:01

left these balls behind. I told her, would

34:04

you like to have them? Sure, but

34:06

you should take some too, she replied. So

34:09

we split the bucket as I dumped some of the balls in

34:11

her hitting bay. I introduced myself and

34:13

we started to chat.

34:14

Wow. Okay, man. I really want to know

34:16

what she thinks of that. It's like when in

34:19

dirty dancing, I brought the watermelons. Yeah.

34:22

I also thought about the way that he has

34:24

to bring it like this moment that could be most in

34:26

most of these books, you'd imagine it's sort of a moment where

34:28

he looks like a fool. He's a fool

34:30

in love. He's clumsy in his approach.

34:33

He has to make it. He can't do the aw

34:35

shucks thing. He can't be humble even for

34:37

a second. It has to be, I'm the

34:39

type of guy who always takes the

34:41

risk because you never win if you don't try.

34:44

Throughout

34:44

the book, every moment where he sort of

34:47

sidles up to a potentially winning

34:50

moment of humility. Something humanizing.

34:52

Yeah, he can't do it because he has to

34:54

keep presenting himself as sort of saintly and

34:57

bold and better than everyone else. The other point

34:59

is the birth of his daughter. He actually

35:01

brings up the birth of his son first in

35:03

the book, in the chronology of the book, but then mentions

35:05

the birth of his first child who is his oldest

35:07

daughter. And it's mentioned

35:10

in two sentences, one of which was

35:12

if meeting my wife was the second

35:14

most pivotal moment of my life, meeting my daughter

35:17

was my first and then zero explanation

35:19

as to how it influenced him at all. And I bring

35:21

that up because you mentioned earlier

35:23

that so much of his rhetoric

35:26

is around parents' rights. And he talks very

35:28

little about himself as a parent. And

35:30

it's not that I think someone in public service needs

35:33

to be an open book about their personal life.

35:35

But I think if you're going to make other people's personal lives

35:37

a big part of your political life, then yeah,

35:40

it might help to have some explanation about what your

35:42

motives are there. Julian, you're so right. It's

35:44

not a very

35:44

personal book in that sense. Instead,

35:46

it's filled with kind of a mix of like

35:49

fortune cookie wisdom and self-help

35:51

mantras like be bold, go

35:54

for it. Fortune favors the bold. And

35:56

just a detailed account of every single

35:58

great thing he's done in his public.

35:59

career. And it's also interesting. So

36:02

he kind of claims that he's from working

36:04

class roots. He goes on a

36:06

lot in the early parts of the book. He kind of

36:08

races through, you know, by page 30 or 40,

36:11

you know, we're on to his congressional career. So

36:14

his early life, college, law

36:16

school, military, that's all

36:18

kind of in the first 30 or 40 pages or

36:20

so. Well, he also skips over. He

36:23

was a teacher. Yes, notably,

36:25

considering how much he demonizes teachers,

36:27

considering the giant chunk of his administration

36:29

that his education plank is. The

36:32

fact that he doesn't mention that he taught school

36:34

for a year. Should we guess why he doesn't

36:36

mention it? I

36:38

don't want to speculate. We know he went

36:41

to parties with students and

36:43

there are pictures of him with girls

36:46

as the reporting coming from his world

36:48

insistence goes, seniors, they're seniors, they're

36:50

seniors. But pictures of him partying

36:52

with girls who are high school students when he was their

36:54

teacher. The New York Times story on

36:57

his year teaching came out back in November.

36:59

It says things like as a baseball and

37:02

football coach at the school, Mr. DeSantis

37:04

was admired and respected by his team

37:06

as a teacher. He was remembered by some

37:09

former students as cocky and arrogant. He

37:11

once publicly embarrassed a student with a prank,

37:13

hung out at parties with seniors and got in debates

37:16

about the civil war with students who questioned

37:18

the focus and sometimes the accuracy

37:21

of his lessons. He was a total

37:23

jock. That was his personality, said

37:25

Gates Minnes, a 2003 graduate

37:27

who lives in Colorado. He was definitely proud

37:29

that

37:29

he graduated Ivy and thought he was very special.

37:32

It says he was pretty popular

37:34

among the students as many younger teachers are.

37:37

He was definitely one of the cooler guys, said Tripp

37:39

Barnes, a student whose mother taught at the school.

37:42

Tripp really liked him? Yes. But one thing I

37:44

was thinking was, one thing Trump has

37:46

done with this story and even some

37:48

people on the left is kind of turn the groomer

37:51

thing around. Trump literally said, here's a

37:53

picture of DeSantis grooming students. Yes.

37:56

I actually think the really

37:58

telling part of that story is

37:59

not that he necessarily did anything wrong

38:02

per se, but it just shows

38:04

how much of a tryhard he is, how

38:06

much he wants to be affirmed or something, right?

38:09

Like we all know the kind of guy who's not

38:11

popular with people his actual age,

38:13

but can kind of seem cool to people

38:15

a bit younger. That is what struck me

38:17

about this story, that he's the kind of guy who

38:20

would get kind of chuffed up by hanging

38:22

out with high school students and them thinking he

38:24

was cool and him really liking that. What

38:26

struck me about that New York Times story about his

38:29

time as a teacher was that a common

38:31

refrain at his press conferences and from his

38:33

administration is education

38:36

not indoctrination. So it's

38:38

striking to me that something that the students remember

38:40

most about him was that he was vociferous

38:42

about his own political opinions, that

38:45

he was challenging them on, let's

38:47

say, the role of slavery in the Civil

38:49

War or the actions of the Confederacy. No

38:52

AP African American history, but you have to listen

38:54

to me do my lost cause rant.

38:56

Right, yes. And he did actually tell

38:58

his students

38:59

that he would be president someday. A

39:01

very cool thing for a 23 year old to tell

39:03

his students. Another

39:07

anecdote from early in the book that I wanted to

39:09

get in here is how he defines elites.

39:12

It's amazing because as the example of

39:14

someone who is not an elite, he

39:17

actually name checks Clarence Thomas. And

39:19

I want to read from the book. This is in the introduction.

39:21

This is after a paragraph where he blathers

39:23

on and on about how elites are progressives

39:26

who believe our country should be managed by an exclusive

39:28

country

39:29

of experts who wield authority through an unaccountable

39:31

and massive administrative state, blah,

39:33

blah, blah, right? And then he says this, well,

39:36

they are elites in this context.

39:38

The word elite does not signify someone of

39:40

tremendous aptitude, great wealth or major

39:42

achievement. Instead, it signifies someone

39:45

who shares the ideology and outlook of the ruling

39:47

class, which one can demonstrate by

39:49

quote unquote, virtue signaling, i.e. speaking

39:51

the in language and by seeing

39:53

Americans as subjects to be ruled over,

39:56

not as citizens to be represented. These

39:58

elites do not include some individuals.

39:59

who reach the commanding heights of society.

40:02

A major figure in our government, like U.S.

40:04

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a

40:06

graduate of Yale Law School, is not a part of this group

40:09

because he rejects the group's ideology, tastes,

40:11

and attitudes. Someone who acquired

40:14

great wealth, be it an oil man from

40:16

Texas or an automobile dealer from Florida,

40:18

are also part of the outs because they do not

40:20

subscribe to the prevailing outlook and

40:22

philosophical preferences of the ruling

40:25

class. There you heard it. An

40:27

elite is not someone with power, money, and prestige.

40:29

Who sits

40:29

on the Supreme Court. Or sits

40:32

on the Supreme Court, for example. It's like bureaucrats

40:34

who happen to share a progressive ideology or

40:37

something. Those are the real elites. In the moment

40:39

that you sort of separate class consciousness

40:41

from class status, it then becomes

40:44

this signifier that can be applied

40:46

as used to fit. So if you're

40:48

suggesting that Clarence Thomas

40:51

can not be an elite, and

40:54

so is the used car salesman in Florida, then

40:57

you're also suggesting that somebody

40:59

without much

40:59

material access can be an

41:02

elite themselves because they advance the

41:04

ruling class. So, for example, if

41:07

a teacher who's making under $50,000 a year and

41:10

scraping to get by is

41:12

speaking to a worldview that you don't support,

41:15

you can simply accuse them of being an agent

41:17

of the ruling class. If they're sufficiently

41:19

woke, it doesn't matter how little money they make. And

41:22

I think it's worth bringing this in now. In

41:24

the prologue, the introduction before the even

41:27

numbered pages begin, he mentions

41:29

the first

41:29

conservative intellectual who is not one

41:32

of the founding fathers. He's basically sort of trying

41:34

to define what he meant by the elite

41:37

in the preceding pages. And he says, in an essay

41:40

in the American Spectator in 2010, Angelo

41:42

Cotevilla identified the source of America's

41:45

political divisions and policy failures as

41:47

the ideological, incompetent and self-interested

41:50

ruling class that has consolidated

41:53

power over American society in the past 50

41:55

years. These elites control the federal bureaucracy,

41:58

lobby shops on K Street, big business,

41:59

corporate media, big tech companies, and

42:02

universities. They all also

42:04

obviously go to the same schools and embody

42:06

the same values and quote, and this is from

42:08

Cote Villa, have the same tastes and

42:10

habits and offer remarkably uniform

42:13

guidance. So I don't

42:16

want to do a long, long thing on

42:18

who Angela Cote Villa is. I'm not sure if he's

42:20

ever come up on the podcast. I don't believe so. If

42:22

so, only briefly as like an example

42:25

of a West Coast Straussian. Is a West Coast

42:27

Straussian a student of

42:29

Jaffa? I think he was briefly a student of Strauss.

42:32

He got his PhD from Claremont and

42:34

he became something of a sort of defense intellectual.

42:37

He was a Senate staffer for various

42:39

defense

42:39

and intelligence oversight committees where he developed

42:41

a sort of critique of the CIA. He

42:43

was a hardcore

42:45

global war on terror advocate

42:48

though of a kind of idiosyncratic variety

42:50

because he was not a neocon. He was not

42:53

one of those East Coasters. His vision

42:55

was that we needed to fight these wars

42:57

to win them and send a message, but not to

43:00

change the regimes of Muslim

43:02

countries abroad. He was described

43:04

during the early part of the war on terror as a super

43:06

hoc because of those sorts of positions.

43:09

He later developed a sort of reputation sort of as a critic

43:11

of the Iraq war, but that's really because he was

43:14

supportive of the invasion of toppling Saddam

43:16

Hussein, but then thought that the whole regime

43:18

change part of it was a mistake. So

43:20

anyway, that's Cote Villa, but then as Ron

43:23

is getting at here, and he's one of the only

43:25

conservative intellectuals that he even references,

43:28

so it's notable. He's using Cote Villa's

43:30

later work where he becomes a sort of populist,

43:34

quote unquote, class warrior, quote unquote,

43:36

against this narrowly defined elite,

43:39

defining exactly the way that Jillian you were

43:41

just pointing to. It has nothing to do with one's

43:43

sort of relationship to production, to

43:45

your wealth, to your income. It's all

43:47

about whether you share a set of

43:50

ideas that are supposedly shared

43:52

by people who have in

43:55

this sort of syllogistic way, all the

43:57

power because they have those ideas, so they have all the

43:59

power.

43:59

And I think Cotevilla's

44:02

idea of the ruling class in 2010 was

44:05

all about, there's either people who rely

44:07

on the government, and that's the ruling class,

44:10

and then there are people who

44:12

are the country class who don't rely on the government.

44:14

So an oil baron is not ruling

44:16

class from his perspective if they

44:19

don't, of course it's ridiculous because they would

44:21

receive all kinds of subsidies and stuff. But a bureaucrat

44:24

is, a teacher is, even a person

44:26

on welfare is ruling class because they have

44:28

this relationship to the government. It's very

44:30

stupid, but it's very of the moment of the Tea

44:32

Party. Makers and takers, kind of. Yeah,

44:35

makers and takers. But then this language

44:37

then becomes so useful in the way that you're describing,

44:39

of making elites and the ruling class

44:41

sort of empty

44:42

signifier for the sort of contemporary

44:44

populist, Trumpist, new right to

44:47

sort of identify their class

44:49

enemies as anybody who

44:52

shares basically broadly liberal progressive ideas.

44:55

And that becomes very important for DeSantis.

44:57

I don't know how much coda villa he's

44:59

read. They have a sort of shared

45:02

biography in the sense that they were both

45:04

Navy officers and then involved

45:06

with Congress and then libertarian

45:09

hawks and culture warriors. It has

45:12

been kind of a minor recurring theme on

45:14

the show of how a kind of libertarian-ish

45:18

freedom caucus, Tea Party

45:20

era perspective and position eventually

45:24

blurs into Trumpism. At

45:26

one level, Trump was supposed to be all about breaking

45:29

up the lock that economic

45:31

libertarianism had on the Republican Party

45:33

and the right.

45:34

So I feel like what you're

45:36

getting at with coda villa, kind of him being

45:38

someone who articulated a more sophisticated

45:41

version of the Tea Party position,

45:43

eventually becoming a Trumpist, that's DeSantis'

45:46

trajectory too. Yes, exactly. One

45:49

person who does get mentioned in several

45:51

places throughout Ron's book is Chris

45:53

Rufo, who I think envisions

45:55

himself as the Alexander

45:58

Dugan to Ron's Putin.

45:59

and who I envision as the

46:02

lafoo to Ron's Gaston. They

46:05

definitely speak in this odd

46:07

appropriation of class consciousness

46:10

that doesn't actually do anything to challenge

46:13

the existing class order. What

46:15

they're referring to as the

46:17

ruling class, I think I had kind

46:19

of known as like the neoliberal consensus,

46:22

right? Like this very centrist

46:25

vision of the appropriate

46:27

realms of debate. I'm

46:31

aware of those lines because

46:34

as a transgender person for

46:36

most of my life and

46:39

for pretty much most of American

46:41

political history, with the exception of the last decade,

46:44

we were on the outside of that, right?

46:46

There was a liberal consensus

46:49

that trans rights were fundamentally ludicrous

46:52

and that trans people were not to be listened

46:54

to. I was reinforced by a cultural

46:56

consensus. And slowly,

46:59

like so many other things, this is a great book called

47:02

The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism by

47:04

Joseph Darda. And it's

47:06

looking specifically at how sort

47:09

of more mainstream forces sort of adopted,

47:12

assimilated and weakened

47:15

very radical ideas

47:17

that were born of the civil rights movement

47:20

and how they sort of

47:22

pulled away something

47:24

like identity politics from its radical

47:26

origins, right? Identity politics being coined

47:29

by the Combeheu River Collective and

47:31

watered it down to

47:34

the point that it becomes, oh, I don't know,

47:36

a DEI training and an unionized

47:38

workplace. And

47:41

that's been the story of queer politics

47:43

over the last 10, 20, 30 years. So

47:46

that people who are protecting

47:48

a specific kind of class interests

47:51

will evince a sort

47:53

of inclusivity towards queer

47:55

people that

47:57

is largely shallow and symbolic.

48:00

And if it's not, it's aimed at

48:03

queer people who share those class

48:05

interests. And you know,

48:07

like right now, as we're talking, no

48:09

small part of the right wing media sphere is desperately

48:12

upset at Anheuser-Busch because

48:14

they allowed a transgender influencer,

48:17

Dylan Mulvaney, to do spawn

48:19

con for Bud Light. And

48:22

I don't know how to tell them that that is not the Marxist

48:24

revolution. Like that is not the overthrow

48:27

of the rule. Much less is it like

48:29

the exploitation of the

48:31

kinds of working class that somebody working

48:34

at the Daily Wire thinks that they're speaking on behalf

48:36

of. That is sort

48:38

of an adoption of these liberal

48:41

narratives of progress, this inevitability

48:44

of sort of growing inclusion. And

48:46

we know that you're concerned about

48:49

these trans people who are being basically

48:51

eaten alive in state houses across the country. And

48:53

if you want to support them, all you need to do is start

48:56

buying Bud Light. I bought Light,

48:58

yeah. Right, exactly. Jesus Christ.

49:00

So I think when I see somebody

49:02

like Coda Villa, or Peter Thiel

49:05

for that matter, who I imagine also does

49:07

not consider himself part of the ruling class despite

49:09

being a billionaire. And notably

49:11

Peter Thiel was a research assistant for

49:13

Coda Villa. Right. And Ron

49:16

DeSantis, I think, does this very well too.

49:18

Like he targets these symbolic

49:20

gestures and then sort of calls

49:23

them out

49:24

as

49:25

shallow and hypocritical. And

49:27

we're like, yes, and what? Right. And

49:30

it points to that symbolic progress as the excuse

49:32

for a material backlash. And one thing

49:34

we can get into, of course, is his war against Disney

49:37

that he talks about in this book, which

49:39

I think is a useful tool

49:42

for both of them, really. Well, you've

49:44

talked before, I forget what your exact shorthand

49:46

is. What is it? I think

49:48

last time I had said that visibility without

49:50

protection is a trap. And that's

49:52

pretty well-worn in queer

49:55

spaces. I don't want to

49:57

make any claim to have coined that. trap

50:00

then like here's Dylan Mulvaney

50:02

drinking a Bud Light in a bathtub.

50:05

Nothing could be more visible. It's all over the internet. We

50:07

see you. Yeah, and Rufo

50:10

and all these people being like, okay, this

50:12

is all the excuse we need to

50:15

say like there's a war on the working class

50:18

and we need to pass materially

50:21

punitive legislation across the country

50:23

to stop

50:25

people of every class from having access

50:27

to healthcare because we saw this Bud

50:29

Light at. There's a bank here

50:31

in DC and they have a rainbow

50:34

pride flag and a trans pride flag hanging

50:36

in their window. And I think about most

50:38

people who have a relationship to that

50:40

bank as a debtor, right? As

50:43

a logo that they see in the mail and as

50:45

another reason that they're not getting

50:47

ahead in life because they owe money to this bank

50:50

or as somebody who's they need to beg for

50:52

a loan in this, you know, in dignifying way

50:54

that so many people are

50:55

forced to. And

50:57

when they go to that bank, my

51:00

concern is that they see

51:02

that pride flag and then think, okay,

51:04

so this bank is working against my

51:06

interest, but they're working in trans

51:08

people's interests, right? And

51:11

I hate to break it to you, but trans people are twice as

51:13

likely to live in poverty. Trans people

51:15

are three times as likely to go hungry and we're

51:17

a fourth as likely to be homeowners. That

51:20

bank is not working in trans people's interests.

51:23

Trans people are not benefiting materially

51:25

because that bank hung a pride flag in its window

51:27

and yet somebody like

51:30

a Chris Rufo or any of

51:32

the folks at the Daily Wire and Fox News

51:34

will then accuse that bank of being

51:37

woke and then accuse that bank

51:39

of betraying what they think

51:41

is a working

51:43

class initiative in favor

51:45

of trans people. So then the

51:48

imposition becomes, well, all we need to do

51:50

is weaken trans people's place in society

51:52

and then that will somehow help yours. You'll

51:55

get a loan suddenly. Right. Exactly.

51:58

And then when that bank eventually goes under, they'll blame it.

51:59

it all on wokeness rather than talking about any

52:02

kind of structural economic factors. Are

52:04

you talking about how they found that

52:06

there was a woke brown

52:08

woman in charge of SBBs, something

52:11

or other? Although it was specifically that

52:13

they led a pronoun training and included

52:15

neo-pronouns like students. That's

52:17

why the bank went under. Trans

52:20

people took over the bank, which

52:22

trans people are taking over banks, give me a call.

52:27

I've been keeping a running list of sort of the

52:29

oddball

52:29

things that not insignificant

52:32

figures on the right people with massive audiences

52:35

have been blaming on trans people.

52:38

There's JD Vance who blamed the war in Ukraine

52:40

on

52:41

Biden's support for transgender rights.

52:43

Checks out, checks out. I just heard Marco

52:46

Rubio actually endorsed that idea,

52:48

by the way, specifically citing Dylan Mulvaney and

52:50

Bud Light and saying the rest of the world looks at that and is

52:52

laughing at us. A man pretending

52:55

to be a woman gets paid millions of dollars to sell

52:57

Nike sports bras and Bud Light.

52:59

So the world looks at that and said, this place is a laughingstock.

53:02

We are being embarrassed on the world stage. Our

53:04

adversaries are taking advantage of it and our friends are saying,

53:06

hey, we may have to go on our own here because these

53:08

guys look like they're about to commit societal suicide.

53:12

That was truly incredible that like other

53:14

leaders are making foreign policy decisions based

53:16

on seeing a Bud Light ad rather than like

53:19

American military might the context

53:21

of a certain situation and so on. Charlie

53:23

Kirk blamed trans people for

53:25

inflation. When you believe that men

53:27

can become women, why wouldn't you also

53:30

believe that you could print wealth? And then Margie

53:32

Taylor Greene, who never misses a chance

53:34

to blame trans people for any

53:37

rain cloud has blamed us

53:39

for formula shortages, for tampon

53:41

shortages. And you know, a lot of the

53:44

scapegoating, it can seem really laughable.

53:47

But

53:47

the implied

53:48

message of blaming trans people

53:51

for everything wrong with your life is wouldn't

53:53

your life be so much better if we just got rid of all

53:55

the trans people? Yeah, yes. And

53:57

they appropriate the language of class.

53:59

consciousness

54:00

to lend it a veneer of

54:03

credibility because then they can point

54:05

to these shallow gestures at

54:07

conclusion from corporate America

54:10

or from mainstream politicians or wherever

54:12

else and then claim that, oh, so

54:14

they're working in trans people's interest, but they're not

54:16

working in yours. So therefore we

54:19

need to harm the trans people. Yeah. I

54:21

think also

54:22

I was thinking about how do you turn

54:25

what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida,

54:28

which is basically like criminalizing

54:30

and traumatizing trans people who are

54:32

just trying to live their lives. How do you turn that

54:35

into a fight on behalf

54:37

of the people against

54:40

the elite imposition of

54:43

alien values? You know what I mean? Like how

54:46

can it be that the governor of a state

54:48

who is making the lives of people who live there

54:50

worse on purpose can

54:53

be seen as like a populist endeavor

54:56

on behalf of the people of this state? And

54:58

I think the way that they have to do it is describe

55:01

trans rights and the existence

55:04

of trans people, as you're pointing to Jillian, is an imposition

55:06

from above, which the lowly vulkish

55:08

masses must be protected from. Because

55:11

they have to do that, I think, and

55:14

this may be, I'll sound a little Pollyanna-ish here

55:16

about American political impulses, but I do

55:18

believe this, that they have to do that because

55:20

they have to do everything in their power to suppress

55:23

a often muted, but never totally

55:27

excised live and let live

55:30

impulse in American politics,

55:31

in American people. There

55:34

will be a lot of people in Florida who would see trans people

55:36

as just like, not my problem. I'm

55:38

not trans, my kids not trans at

55:40

the moment, it's not my problem. And the conservatives

55:43

have to figure out a way to turn

55:46

the trans issue into something that

55:48

justifies what is just like

55:50

cruelty on purpose. And to avoid

55:53

people thinking of it in the terms that the

55:55

ACLU, I think, is doing a really good job of

55:57

describing it as like, this is just

55:59

a lib issue. This is a freedom issue.

56:02

People want to live their lives and shouldn't they be

56:04

allowed to? And I think Americans actually, without

56:07

the like rufoian and desantist

56:10

twist on the trans issue,

56:12

can really understand it in those terms and wouldn't

56:15

necessarily be particularly susceptible

56:17

to being recruited into a campaign

56:20

to demonize them or sort of criminalize

56:22

them or make their lives more difficult if they were allowed

56:25

to sort of indulge in that. It's not

56:27

my problem. Live and let live impulse. Yes,

56:29

and

56:29

trans people are I think particularly ripe

56:32

for that kind of targeting for a few reasons.

56:34

One, there's not many of us. It's 0.6%

56:38

of adults in the country identify as trans and

56:42

two, only one in four people.

56:44

It varies depending on the survey you're looking at, but

56:46

somewhere between like one in three and one in four adults

56:48

say they know a trans person. So

56:51

we're very ripe for mischaracterization

56:53

and misrepresentation. And because

56:56

there is sort of these adoptive measures

56:59

from nominally liberal institutions

57:01

who sort of greet trans people as the

57:04

next step in society's

57:06

inevitable progress forward, they

57:08

then do sort of introduce trans people

57:11

as kind of a

57:12

list of rules that you need to follow. As

57:15

part of this work, I've been doing some like focus

57:17

group work and polling work, right? And sort

57:19

of assessing like how most people encounter

57:22

not just our own messaging, but the rights messaging

57:24

and everywhere in between. And a

57:26

common theme that you hear come up

57:29

is that a lot of people encounter trans people

57:31

as something that's being mediated to

57:33

them through institutions that they don't trust,

57:36

whether it's mainstream media sources,

57:38

whether it's politicians. So

57:41

on top of sort of the declining trust in public

57:43

institutions

57:43

overall, those

57:45

tools, which are now all

57:48

the weaker, are now being handed to trans

57:50

people. And they're saying

57:52

best of luck and trying to convince people

57:54

that you're deserving of subjectivity and dignity,

57:57

and you're sort of forced to do it through

57:59

the. assimilationist practices that

58:01

most people sort of recognize as bullshit.

58:04

And I think the right

58:06

recognizes that.

58:08

And to your point, sort of must always

58:10

propose trans people as something that's being imposed

58:12

upon people. And DeSantis in

58:14

this book uses the phrase multiple times, but

58:16

he speaks of

58:18

gender ideology, which

58:20

is a word with a really old

58:23

pedigree. It was coined by the Vatican

58:24

in the

58:26

1980s. And, you know, it

58:28

has a very porous definition. It

58:30

sort of gets used in lots of ways. But in its initial

58:33

definition, it was the idea

58:35

that you have any internal identity

58:38

outside of your gender as assigned

58:40

by nature, God or both. And

58:43

therefore was weaponized against most

58:45

of the social progress and lessons

58:48

of the sexual revolution of the 60s.

58:51

So everything from contraception and abortion

58:54

to the idea that

58:56

women don't have to be caregivers, or for that matter,

58:58

that men don't have to be breadwinners, to

59:00

the rise of no-fault divorces, to

59:03

criminalization of spousal rape, even. Gender

59:06

ideology. Right. Depending on your definition

59:09

of how men and women should

59:11

behave, anything that falls outside

59:13

of it is gender ideology, because you

59:15

can simply declare anything that falls

59:18

within it as simply natural and

59:20

innate and good. What's the drill tweet? This

59:22

whole thing smacks of gender. This whole thing

59:24

smacks of gender. Yes. As

59:26

I holler and overturn my uncle's barbecue grill and turn

59:28

the 4th of July into the 4th of shit. That's

59:32

basically the DeSantis campaign. This

59:34

whole thing smacks of gender. Gender

59:36

ideology is a relatively new import into

59:38

American politics, but it's been around for quite some

59:40

time. Like, Vladimir Putin has ranced against gender ideology

59:43

for some years. Victor Orban, who's seemingly

59:46

an idol of Ron DeSantis,

59:48

Yerba Bolsonaro, and Brazil,

59:50

as well as a coterie of other lesser strong men,

59:53

have all sort of landed on gender

59:55

ideology as something that they need to war against.

59:58

And I think it's helpful to... to sort of talk about

1:00:00

like why gender panics

1:00:03

of the kind that Ron DeSantis is

1:00:06

inspiring in schools and in school boards is

1:00:08

particularly useful. You know, it's not

1:00:11

that transgender people are a set of rules, it's that

1:00:13

gender is a set of rules. Gender

1:00:15

is a way that you order and structure

1:00:17

your life. It is a way that you order and structure

1:00:20

the people in your world. And

1:00:22

you make assumptions about people conscious

1:00:25

and many of them unconscious based

1:00:28

on your assumptions based

1:00:30

upon their gender presentation,

1:00:32

based upon how they look and how they meet your expectations

1:00:34

and or defy them, right? So

1:00:36

therefore, if you're looking to

1:00:39

animate people on behalf of order,

1:00:42

on behalf of a consistently

1:00:45

restricting sense of identity, whether

1:00:47

that's national identity or a class identity

1:00:50

or whatever else, if you can animate this fear

1:00:52

around gender nonconformity, you

1:00:54

can sort of justify this all

1:00:57

totalizing and never

1:00:59

ending campaign

1:01:00

against nonconformity. And

1:01:03

a while ago at CPAC, I think in Florida,

1:01:06

Michael Knowles, who's his podcaster on the Daily Wired

1:01:08

said, well, we must eradicate transgenderism

1:01:10

from public life entirely. And

1:01:13

a lot of people on Twitter and elsewhere were like, this is a call

1:01:15

for genocide. And then his response was

1:01:17

to say, no, I said transgenderism not transgender

1:01:20

people, which is a bit like saying, I said Judaism,

1:01:22

not Jewish people. But to call

1:01:25

them genocidal is I think actually letting

1:01:27

them off a little bit easy, because this suggests

1:01:29

that what they're upset

1:01:30

about is simply the existence

1:01:33

or the public visibility of this relatively

1:01:35

small group of people known as transgender people,

1:01:38

I think is to undersell the actually full scale

1:01:41

of their campaign. And I think Ron DeSantis

1:01:43

is a perfect example of this and the

1:01:46

totalizing approach that they have to

1:01:48

censoring not just what kind

1:01:51

of gender presentation is allowed or

1:01:53

how gender should be discussed in schools,

1:01:55

but

1:01:56

banning gender affirming care, banning

1:01:58

abortion. These are all. all part

1:02:00

of this same project of sort of narrowing

1:02:04

the individual freedom that you have

1:02:06

to navigate these gendered expectations

1:02:08

yourself. Yes. Yeah. That's

1:02:11

very helpful. And I want to draw in here a quote

1:02:14

from DeSantis' book that I think connects

1:02:17

to this. It's the introduction, the Florida

1:02:19

blueprint, quote unquote. But

1:02:21

this is literally the first sentence of the book. Most

1:02:24

Americans instinctively know that something

1:02:26

has gone wrong with our country over

1:02:29

the past generation.

1:02:29

And I feel like

1:02:32

that is such a perfect way for him

1:02:34

to open this book because it's kind of saying

1:02:37

something that's true in a way that we have real

1:02:39

problems in this country, that people are feeling

1:02:41

desperate or uncertain,

1:02:44

increasingly precarious, more and

1:02:46

more people struggling to make ends meet. There

1:02:48

are a lot of people who face a lot of difficulties

1:02:51

in this country. And rather than talking

1:02:53

about, you know, real ways to solve those, it

1:02:55

is a lot easier to point to scapegoats. And

1:02:57

I felt like that framing of the whole book and

1:03:00

the way he said it, people instinctively

1:03:02

know something's gone wrong. In your heart,

1:03:04

you know he's right. Yeah. In

1:03:06

your heart, you know, our country's fucked up. Well,

1:03:09

and to his timeframe as sort of the last generation,

1:03:11

I think an easy starting point for a lot

1:03:14

of this, and it came out in the Code of View, a piece two,

1:03:16

was the 2008 recession, right?

1:03:19

And Wendy Brown in her fantastic book, In the Ruins

1:03:21

of Neoliberalism, she talks about how

1:03:24

the imposition of a lot of right-wing

1:03:26

reactionaries was to

1:03:28

begin to blame the exploitation

1:03:31

that I would suggest is

1:03:34

inherent to late capitalism on

1:03:36

sort of external forces. You

1:03:38

see this in Putin when he's blaming the West,

1:03:41

and you see this in Orban when he's

1:03:43

blaming the EU, or the West too,

1:03:45

for that matter. And you see this in DeSantis

1:03:48

and a number of other figures on the right right

1:03:50

now where they're sort of finding, whether

1:03:52

it's an odd collective of the

1:03:55

Democrats and gender radiologists

1:03:57

and BLM and whomever else. It

1:04:00

all gets sort of coded under this idea of

1:04:03

the ruling class and this

1:04:05

appropriation of class consciousness and sort

1:04:07

of like inciting that anger,

1:04:10

but pointing at the wrong targets, pointing

1:04:13

at targets that actually aren't going to solve

1:04:15

any of those problems that are caused by those

1:04:18

class divisions. It also strikes

1:04:20

me that I was thinking about your point,

1:04:22

Gillian, about how

1:04:24

by dint of the problem of

1:04:26

the way progressive liberal institutions

1:04:28

that more or less just want to signal their affinity

1:04:31

with the next good step.

1:04:33

Which the left criticizes as much

1:04:35

as anyone. Oh, yeah. As a result

1:04:38

of that, that some people experience

1:04:40

the whole trans issue as a

1:04:43

question of new rules, like

1:04:45

of the imposition of new constraints

1:04:47

and new rules. I was thinking about that in the

1:04:49

context of what you were just saying about this more capacious

1:04:52

definition of gender ideology

1:04:54

and what is being policed by people like DeSantis,

1:04:57

which is also rules. And it's not

1:05:00

just rules about how you're supposed to

1:05:02

address someone or create a space

1:05:05

where everyone feels welcome. These are rules

1:05:07

that they want to enforce using the full power

1:05:09

of the state. Surveillance, policing,

1:05:12

the denial of healthcare if you violate

1:05:15

them, the denial of access to your children.

1:05:18

What is more rule bound than policing

1:05:21

this sort of very normative

1:05:24

and even sort of outdated

1:05:26

notion of gender using the full

1:05:28

power of a state or a federal government to

1:05:31

maintain it? I mean, if you want

1:05:33

to live in a world with less rules, you're picking

1:05:35

the wrong side. Well, and I see a lot

1:05:37

of that as a campaign of revenge

1:05:39

against the existence of civil rights laws.

1:05:42

And I say that because a lot of it has

1:05:44

roots in the conservative legal

1:05:47

movement, right? And groups like the Alliance

1:05:49

Defending Freedom and others that

1:05:52

position themselves as like, well, no, we're

1:05:54

about religious liberty, right? Like a

1:05:56

case that's before the Supreme Court now about

1:05:58

a website designer who wants to

1:05:59

able to turn away queer couples. Like

1:06:02

they see the imposition of

1:06:04

her needing to follow a civil rights law

1:06:07

as akin to what DeSantis

1:06:09

is doing and sort of imposing these other views

1:06:12

onto people. Like they view the existence

1:06:14

of a pluralistic society and the protections

1:06:17

that enable a pluralistic society as

1:06:20

the set of rules in which they're working in opposition

1:06:22

towards. And tellingly,

1:06:24

they aren't really pointing to those all

1:06:27

the time. Like somebody like Rhonda Santas isn't, they're

1:06:29

pointing to these sort of like odd

1:06:31

gestures in the same way that they've

1:06:33

sort of like pulled anecdotes out of like Oberlin

1:06:36

and Stanford and other places. Like you

1:06:38

see that in the K through 12 context

1:06:41

and how DeSantis and Rufo

1:06:44

have sort of gone after schools. And

1:06:46

they're suggesting that like this is some Marxist

1:06:49

plot to like convert your children

1:06:51

to the ideology of this vague

1:06:54

ruling class. And a lot

1:06:56

of times it's these institutions, like whether

1:06:58

they're schools or colleges or workplaces

1:07:00

or corporations trying

1:07:02

to ward off more radical

1:07:05

angles at power. Right? Like a

1:07:08

DEI workshop, in my experience,

1:07:10

is the worst thing ever. Well, it's

1:07:13

most often introduced as

1:07:15

a means of warding off a union drive.

1:07:17

Right? Yeah, for sure. And you know, a

1:07:20

book that I've been quoting from

1:07:22

liberally for most of the last year

1:07:24

is Olafemi Taiwo's Elite Capture.

1:07:26

Yeah, yeah. And when she talks about how

1:07:29

elite interests have sort of captured the notion

1:07:31

of identity politics, and he uses this

1:07:33

great metaphor of the house.

1:07:35

And in one room is the

1:07:38

people who have the most resources

1:07:41

and the most material wealth, and

1:07:43

in all the other rooms, all their

1:07:45

resources of material wealth flow into

1:07:47

this other bedroom, right? Where the ruling

1:07:50

class is, the actual ruling class, the actual

1:07:52

billionaires of the world, the actual people who are benefiting

1:07:55

materially from power arrangements

1:07:57

in societies right now.

1:07:58

And he...

1:07:59

presents Elite Capture

1:08:02

as this idea of slowly

1:08:04

inviting some people into

1:08:06

that room while never actually questioning

1:08:08

the benefits that flow to that room. Never

1:08:10

actually questioning the benefits that flow

1:08:12

to that upper class. And it gives us an example

1:08:15

of this, for example, REI,

1:08:17

the company that makes like outdoors gear, had

1:08:20

put out an internal podcast recommending

1:08:22

that folks do not join the union drive

1:08:25

and started it off with a land acknowledgement.

1:08:27

Or one of my favorites, recently

1:08:30

was in the New York Times,

1:08:32

which has been facing a tirade of

1:08:34

criticism internally and externally for

1:08:37

their very misshapen coverage of

1:08:39

transgender health care. And

1:08:42

internally, this has taken place within an

1:08:44

employee resource group, right, like a group

1:08:46

of queer employees who got together to speak about

1:08:48

like health insurance plans and the like, and sort

1:08:50

of like self advocate. And

1:08:53

an HR representative for the Times went into

1:08:55

this employee resource groups black

1:08:57

channel, and said, just as a reminder

1:08:59

that if you have complaints about the workplace, you should be

1:09:02

directing them to HR and not to

1:09:04

each other. So please do that,

1:09:06

folks, F O L X S,

1:09:09

or you know, the Marine Corps putting

1:09:11

out a pride month campaign of a helmet

1:09:14

with rainbow bullets, or a

1:09:17

commemorative post for transgender

1:09:19

day of remembrance from the

1:09:22

Commissioner of the NYPD. And

1:09:25

I think somebody like a Chris Rufo,

1:09:27

or even like a Tucker Carlson sort of looks

1:09:29

at these institutions and calls them

1:09:31

captured, and suggests that like,

1:09:34

these are the ideals of this ruling

1:09:36

class, and they're sort of forcing it on you. And

1:09:38

what they don't recognize is that

1:09:40

those institutions themselves are adopting those

1:09:42

because they're trying to avoid criticism for all

1:09:44

the ways in which they fail the very people

1:09:47

they claim to be supporting.

1:09:48

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. You know, when

1:09:50

you were saying about how a lot of

1:09:52

what's at the root of the resentment is just

1:09:55

civil rights law, a sort of personality

1:09:57

who I both despise and find fantastic.

1:09:59

fascinating is that guy Richard Hanania

1:10:02

on Twitter. I don't know what he's famous for. He's

1:10:04

just like a really weird conservative

1:10:07

creep who has like sort of sympathies with race

1:10:09

science and so on. But he had a blog post

1:10:11

a few years ago addressing

1:10:14

conservatives that just said

1:10:15

Wokeness is just civil rights law.

1:10:18

And then he just went into it like showing

1:10:20

how your problem is with civil rights

1:10:22

law. That's your problem and we need to do something

1:10:24

about civil rights law if we care about Wokeness. And

1:10:27

it was like refreshingly like yeah, of course

1:10:29

that's the problem. Some conservatives

1:10:32

actually do know in their private moments that

1:10:34

their problem is not with some new thing. Well

1:10:36

Christopher Caldwell's book. Yeah, same

1:10:38

thesis. It's basically a broad side against civil

1:10:41

rights laws and what they brought.

1:10:43

When I was last on we talked about

1:10:45

what was behind this very sudden very

1:10:47

sharp rise in bills targeting queer

1:10:50

people but transgender folks especially and we

1:10:53

talked about the Supreme Court's decision in Bostock

1:10:55

in 2020. It's a decision recognizing

1:10:58

that if you discriminate

1:11:00

against somebody based on their sexual orientation

1:11:02

or gender identity because they're gay or transgender you

1:11:05

are discriminating against them on the basis

1:11:07

of sex and therefore violating

1:11:10

in this case Title VII which covers

1:11:13

employment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And

1:11:17

this was greeted as this apocalyptic

1:11:20

event by so many figures on

1:11:22

the right. And I think honestly more

1:11:24

so than Lawrence v. Texas or

1:11:27

Obergefell for that matter, even though those

1:11:29

I think netted far more headlines

1:11:31

and media coverage. Because Lawrence

1:11:34

which was a Supreme Court case which ruled that it was unconstitutional

1:11:37

to criminalize same-sex

1:11:40

relations and Obergefell which

1:11:42

ruled that it was unconstitutional to prohibit same-sex

1:11:44

marriage.

1:11:45

Those are inherently

1:11:47

private rights. They're in the bedroom.

1:11:49

Right behind closed doors, consenting

1:11:51

adults, etc. Whereas if

1:11:54

you have the right to be openly trans

1:11:56

in the workplace suddenly you're around other people.

1:12:00

suddenly other people might actually have to

1:12:02

respect your rights. They might actually

1:12:04

have to abide by your

1:12:07

existence as another person. And so

1:12:09

much of what I hear in the panic

1:12:11

around trans youth in schools

1:12:14

or for that matter, the COVID-19 pandemic

1:12:17

is this idea that you live in a society

1:12:20

and you are going to bump up against other people

1:12:22

whose needs are going to be different,

1:12:24

who live different lives than you who are going to force

1:12:27

you to question assumptions about

1:12:29

the world and how you move

1:12:31

through it. Yes.

1:12:32

I mean, I think at the end of the

1:12:34

day, what we see on the right now

1:12:37

exemplified in some ways by DeSantis is

1:12:39

simply like a rejection of pluralism.

1:12:42

And as you're getting that, Jillian, just having

1:12:44

to kind of navigate a world that is not

1:12:46

made over in your own image in which you encounter

1:12:48

people different than you and having to have

1:12:50

some minimal level of respect or decency

1:12:53

towards them is just enraging

1:12:55

to some of these people. Let's

1:12:58

dive back into Ronald Dion

1:13:01

DeSantis' book here. I

1:13:03

wanted to just offer one more selection

1:13:06

from early in the book because it was

1:13:08

too good to pass up. It's in

1:13:10

the very first chapter called Foundations. It's

1:13:13

just kind of amazing. And I'll read

1:13:15

a short paragraph from this section.

1:13:17

He's talking about growing up in Florida and

1:13:20

he says it's unique because depending on the region

1:13:22

of the state, you'll likely have different cultural experiences,

1:13:24

blah, blah, blah. But then he says this, I

1:13:27

was geographically raised in Tampa Bay,

1:13:29

but culturally my upbringing

1:13:31

reflected the working class communities in

1:13:33

Western Pennsylvania and Northeast

1:13:35

Ohio from weekly church attendance

1:13:38

to the expectation that one would earn his keep.

1:13:40

This made me God fearing, hardworking,

1:13:43

and America loving. I just

1:13:45

love that it was such a pathetic

1:13:48

grasp for a political

1:13:50

nod to these very important states, Pennsylvania

1:13:53

and Ohio. And my favorite Georgia peaches come

1:13:55

from DeKalb County.

1:13:59

there's a sense of like what this book

1:14:02

is about. How grasping and... Yeah, how

1:14:04

grasping and also just kind of how pathetically

1:14:06

lame it is. It's also interesting,

1:14:09

he doesn't really talk that much

1:14:11

about his own faith in this book, at

1:14:14

least not in any kind of moving or substantial

1:14:16

way. He kind of leans upon

1:14:18

the Italian background, De Santis,

1:14:21

and you know, the culture he inherited. Going

1:14:23

to church was a real value, but

1:14:26

we know that Mr. De Santis, Governor

1:14:28

De Santis, he wasn't married in a church,

1:14:29

he was married at Disney World. It's

1:14:33

included in the book. Yes, it's included in

1:14:35

the book and it's kind of lame. He's like,

1:14:38

well, my wife really wanted to get married at Disney

1:14:40

World. It's

1:14:42

interesting all the ways that... I mean, this is basically

1:14:45

the shorthand thesis of

1:14:47

my New York Times piece, but I do think that

1:14:49

he's essentially a kind of anti-woke,

1:14:53

technocratic, meritocrat. In

1:14:56

every single way, he has lived

1:14:58

the life from Yale to

1:14:59

Harvard to the Navy to Congress

1:15:02

to a governor. This is the trajectory

1:15:04

of a power-hungry

1:15:06

meritocrat. And his whole ideology

1:15:08

is so meritocratic. It's like, I worked

1:15:10

hard, I got it. He talks about

1:15:12

his time at Yale and how he sort of reacted

1:15:14

against the radical chic

1:15:17

and Marxist kind of impulses of

1:15:19

his fellow students or his professors or whatever.

1:15:22

And we've talked a bunch of times on the podcast, including

1:15:24

when we've had Young Conservatives on, about

1:15:26

how so many of them follow

1:15:28

the path of the Ivy League meritocracy

1:15:31

and arrive there and then react against

1:15:33

it in a way that it's basically like

1:15:35

a

1:15:36

mirror image of what they perceive

1:15:38

as the sort of woke meritocratic values.

1:15:40

I'm going to adopt the conservative values

1:15:43

of the meritocracy. And I just see him as sort

1:15:45

of so much that. There's

1:15:48

nothing weird about it. It's not

1:15:50

particularly religious. It's really like

1:15:52

I went to Yale. I grew up

1:15:54

in Florida. I didn't like the other

1:15:57

people I met in my sort of skyrocketing

1:15:59

through. the American elite meritocracy

1:16:02

and then adopted the opposite sort of positions.

1:16:05

It's really just that. There's

1:16:07

not much more to it. I mean, even when

1:16:09

he's running for Congress the first

1:16:11

time, you know, he portrays it as this underdog

1:16:14

kind of experience and

1:16:16

he's meeting people and telling them his

1:16:18

story. And he does underscore

1:16:21

in the book, like the applause line, I'm

1:16:23

the only person who went to Yale

1:16:26

and Harvard and came out more conservative than

1:16:28

I went in. It's like, wow, that's totally new.

1:16:30

There was legal challenge filed by

1:16:32

a district attorney that he dismissed

1:16:35

as governor of Florida, who was

1:16:37

saying that he was going to refuse to enforce

1:16:39

bans on abortion and gender affirming care. And

1:16:43

he said that he was dismissed because

1:16:45

he was too woke, quote unquote. And so

1:16:47

the state's attorneys in court had

1:16:50

to define woke and they

1:16:52

defined it as the belief that there are

1:16:54

systemic injustices in America

1:16:56

and the need to address them. A

1:16:59

controversial proposition, I guess. And

1:17:02

what's amazing to me about that

1:17:04

definition among many things is that

1:17:06

it doesn't just suggest that other

1:17:09

people are being unfairly disadvantaged

1:17:11

by these institutions, but that

1:17:13

other people are being unfairly advantaged

1:17:16

by them. And so I think that,

1:17:18

yeah, it probably is a deeply

1:17:21

attractive viewpoint for

1:17:23

somebody like DeSantis, who imagines that

1:17:25

he got where he is, right? Everything

1:17:27

from his college degree to

1:17:30

his time in the military, to his electoral

1:17:32

record, to his wife, as he talks

1:17:34

about through hard work, in consumption and through

1:17:37

being uniquely qualified to access

1:17:39

these things, as opposed to having

1:17:41

been the recipient of a lot of privilege. I mean,

1:17:44

the right absolutely adores

1:17:46

people

1:17:46

who have gone through elite

1:17:49

institutions and come out the other side

1:17:51

saying, I disagree with them about

1:17:53

all this. I mean, we're recording this just

1:17:55

a day or so after it was announced that

1:17:58

Ken Griffin, who is

1:17:59

one of DeSantis's big sugar

1:18:02

daddies gave, what, $300 million to Harvard.

1:18:04

So now the name

1:18:07

of the Harvard Graduate School will be the Ken Griffin

1:18:10

Graduate School and blah, blah, blah at Harvard University,

1:18:13

right? And it's like they hate elite

1:18:15

institutions while not

1:18:18

so secretly craving their approval.

1:18:20

I mean, you look at some of the main think tanks

1:18:23

and pundits and writers

1:18:25

and the right, and they're all elites,

1:18:28

but they live to tell the tale and they came

1:18:30

out the other side. And it's the very

1:18:32

fact that they've been through these institutions, but

1:18:35

disagree with them. That is like

1:18:37

a source of their credibility. Well, and Trump

1:18:39

spoke that way. Peter Thiel spoke that way about Silicon

1:18:41

Valley, right? This sort of like dropout mentality,

1:18:44

right? Like I tasted

1:18:46

of the waters and rejected them. In

1:18:48

his time at Yale, he uses

1:18:50

the phrase revolutionary chic, right?

1:18:52

And this idea that, you know, people are sort

1:18:55

of adorning different political

1:18:57

values as a kind of

1:18:59

fashion. He sees it as like empty

1:19:01

virtue signaling, but it's not like

1:19:03

he would agree with them if they meant it, right?

1:19:09

I've never understood sort of like just the hypocrisy

1:19:11

claim on its own, because if they

1:19:14

were actual student revolutionaries

1:19:17

in the streets at the barricades, I don't think

1:19:19

he was going to like them anymore. None of them ever

1:19:21

put me up against a wall and shot me with an AK-47. I

1:19:23

don't think they really mean it. I

1:19:26

went to Penn State and one of the radicalizing

1:19:29

moments to me when I went to Penn State was

1:19:31

not running into a bunch of leftists or

1:19:33

young Republicans or whatever else. It was actually

1:19:36

when assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was

1:19:38

indicted, I think 20 times for sexually

1:19:42

abusing young kids.

1:19:44

And it was specifically when Joe

1:19:46

Paterno was fired because he barely lifted

1:19:48

a finger

1:19:50

to do anything against it. That night

1:19:52

when he was fired,

1:19:53

I watched as my

1:19:55

classmates ran into the streets

1:19:58

and rioted because they lost

1:20:00

a

1:20:00

football coach, not because

1:20:03

of the horrors that we were learning from these indictments,

1:20:06

but specifically in defense of a football

1:20:08

coach. And I call that

1:20:11

a radicalizing moment for me, because

1:20:13

I think it was one of the first moments

1:20:15

in my political life that

1:20:18

I realized like, oh, wow, all these people

1:20:20

around me could be very easily swayed

1:20:23

into loyalty on behalf of really

1:20:25

nasty causes, right? Like, it's not

1:20:27

like I was upset that they were virtue

1:20:29

signaling, like, you don't actually

1:20:30

care about football. No, I disagreed

1:20:33

with what they were fighting for. So

1:20:35

when I hear sort of the narratives that like DeSantis

1:20:37

does, or like I read Adrian Taub's book,

1:20:39

What Tech Calls Thinking, and he talks about

1:20:42

all the tech moguls who went to Stanford

1:20:44

and then dropped out, and how to become sort of like

1:20:46

a part of their mythos. It seems

1:20:49

like they're sort of just reaching for justification

1:20:51

for beliefs that happen to end up working

1:20:53

in their own self-interest. And they're sort

1:20:56

of just picking on like the easiest targets. They're

1:20:58

then using that to divert from their

1:21:00

actual beliefs, which are in direct opposition

1:21:02

to the very things that they're accusing these people of being

1:21:05

hypocritical about. Well, they still see the

1:21:07

entire world is consisting of the people they

1:21:09

went to college with. Yes,

1:21:11

I don't. I don't know how to tell you. I'm

1:21:14

a little thankful for it. Well, you

1:21:16

know, we mentioned that DeSantis' book

1:21:18

that we've been drawing from, it is

1:21:21

rather boring. It's terribly written. And

1:21:24

in some ways, the most interesting parts

1:21:26

of it have to do with the absences, the

1:21:29

things that DeSantis does not

1:21:30

really talk about in detail. And

1:21:33

one of them does have to do with his military

1:21:35

service, in particular, the

1:21:38

time he spent at Guantanamo

1:21:40

Bay as a lawyer for the military.

1:21:43

And this has been something that

1:21:45

the press has reported on, but in

1:21:47

this book, the courage to be free. He

1:21:50

does not have the courage to discuss his

1:21:53

participation in force feedings

1:21:56

at Guantanamo Bay. Exactly.

1:21:58

And so I think it might be worth talking

1:21:59

about that a little bit. So

1:22:02

according to summer boarding and according to at least

1:22:05

one interview with a former detainee

1:22:07

at Guantanamo Bay while he was stationed

1:22:09

there he personally oversaw the

1:22:12

end of a hunger strike that was being led

1:22:14

by detainees of Guantanamo Bay which

1:22:17

included functionally strapping people

1:22:18

down and force feeding

1:22:20

them in sure nutrition shakes

1:22:23

until they vomited. Part of this

1:22:25

was also that you know he was laughing

1:22:28

that he was practically gleeful reportedly

1:22:31

to be overseeing these incidents. To

1:22:33

be very specific for the sake of our listeners

1:22:35

and any any lawyers listening these

1:22:37

are the accounts of a couple of people

1:22:40

who were prisoners at Guantanamo

1:22:42

Bay they reported that he

1:22:44

behaved in this way. As I was reading

1:22:47

these reports I was hit with sort

1:22:49

of first

1:22:49

off disgust but then a second

1:22:52

wave of disgust and recognizing that it's probably not

1:22:54

going to hurt him at all. If anything

1:22:56

it might end up helping him because

1:22:58

I think that there is still this sort of imposition

1:23:01

of bloodlust I don't know what else to call

1:23:03

it as well as just you know rampant Islamophobia

1:23:05

right within the

1:23:07

electorate

1:23:08

that will be

1:23:10

animated towards him. Well presumably

1:23:12

the things that he said in this book are the things

1:23:15

he thinks will win him the Republican primary

1:23:17

right and what he says about

1:23:20

his time as a lawyer who had

1:23:22

to advise Navy Seals

1:23:25

on the rules of engagement and then would

1:23:27

be responsible for prosecuting

1:23:29

them if they violated them. This is in Iraq

1:23:31

by the way. This is in Fallujah yeah he said

1:23:34

I knew the chance that the Navy Seals

1:23:36

would intentionally flout the laws of war

1:23:39

was very low but you know as I

1:23:41

wrote my notes but it's possible they would make some boo-boos.

1:23:45

So the two sort of examples of boo-boos

1:23:47

that he notes is like one is you

1:23:49

could be sent to kill a quote-unquote

1:23:51

high value target an HVT on

1:23:54

faulty intelligence and then quote operators

1:23:57

can end up at an incorrect

1:23:59

residence.

1:23:59

or other building.

1:24:01

So what he's saying is you could end up

1:24:03

shooting an innocent person,

1:24:05

and that wouldn't be the operator's fault, that would

1:24:07

be the fault of the faulty intelligence. Legally

1:24:09

speaking, I could see how that's the case. But

1:24:11

brushing off the idea that the

1:24:14

Navy SEALs would ever make a mistake and then

1:24:16

saying, well, we might burst into a home

1:24:18

and kill a bunch of people who are innocent. And

1:24:20

then the other one that he points to is that because

1:24:23

Al-Qaeda in Iraq would be hiding terrorists

1:24:26

inside of mosques, that we had to be really,

1:24:28

really careful when we went and did

1:24:30

an operation inside of a mosque. Because if that was

1:24:33

this terrible encumbrance

1:24:35

upon their ability to do their

1:24:37

jobs that people want to pray

1:24:39

despite being under occupation. And

1:24:42

when he does talk about detainees

1:24:45

and interrogation, although he does not talk about

1:24:47

his own involvement in Guantanamo, he

1:24:50

talks about how, quote, the cloud

1:24:52

from the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal

1:24:54

was still hanging over everything.

1:24:57

And he talks about how the media had a field

1:24:59

day with Abu Ghraib largely

1:25:01

to further partisan attacks against

1:25:03

George Bush. That's one of the things

1:25:05

that really stood out to me about that section.

1:25:07

It ends up being a critique of the media being

1:25:10

too hard on Dubya

1:25:12

for all the abuses that we now know occurred

1:25:14

in Iraq, especially at Abu Ghraib. I

1:25:16

mean, it was, it's just disgusting. Like

1:25:19

that's the story. It's a, it's media

1:25:21

overblowing the fact that we were torturing

1:25:23

people and treating them in disgusting ways.

1:25:26

It's insane. To go back to the Cote

1:25:28

d'Ivila piece and Cote d'Ivila as a warhawk,

1:25:30

right? I think something that's been curiously

1:25:33

downplayed on the right since

1:25:35

Donald Trump's election is

1:25:38

any real sense of imperialism, any

1:25:40

real sense of sort of the American empire.

1:25:43

And in Cote d'Ivila's terms, what

1:25:45

was the language from Augustine about

1:25:47

like road to security lies

1:25:50

through the opponents to peace.

1:25:53

And yeah, yeah, similar to the

1:25:55

idea of war on terror, this sort of like abstract

1:25:58

concept that you're fighting it then sort of justifies

1:26:01

all manner of

1:26:02

foreign policy adventures

1:26:04

that happen to kill tens of thousands

1:26:07

if not hundreds of thousands of people, as

1:26:09

well as enable the kinds of abuses that you saw at Abu

1:26:11

Ghraib. And it's not

1:26:14

very difficult to see how somebody

1:26:17

like a DeSantis could invite

1:26:20

that mentality back into

1:26:22

the right-wing mainstream. And

1:26:24

sort of

1:26:25

emphasize it in a similar manner

1:26:28

that he does and going

1:26:30

after leftists or the woke mentality

1:26:33

or whatever else. And sort

1:26:35

of that this is about preserving American

1:26:37

values, right? These odd sort

1:26:39

of like dodges and defenses

1:26:42

that he's putting up around

1:26:44

his own

1:26:45

military career, I think, speak to exactly

1:26:47

how we would see that shave. Yes. I mean,

1:26:49

essentially, what Cotevilla's

1:26:52

argument is, is that we were wrong

1:26:55

to try to nation build. And the real

1:26:57

problem is we weren't vicious enough in killing

1:26:59

our enemies. It was a mistake to

1:27:01

try to civilize the savages, right?

1:27:04

We tried to import democracy to people

1:27:06

who just were not capable of it.

1:27:08

And the other problem

1:27:10

was that we just weren't vicious enough in

1:27:13

killing and brutalizing them. What a similarity

1:27:15

that is to the sort of law and order

1:27:17

language, right? And the language around policing

1:27:20

and

1:27:21

his grasping at the death penalty

1:27:23

or his blaming migrants for

1:27:25

fentanyl or for that matter,

1:27:27

his blaming of COVID on China.

1:27:30

There is sort of this like idea that

1:27:32

we need to loosen the reins on

1:27:35

the people with the guns. Yes. And

1:27:37

I phrase it that way distinctly, by

1:27:39

the way, because it's not just limited to police.

1:27:41

It's literally just open to the people who

1:27:43

are on our side with guns. People standing

1:27:46

their ground, you might say. Yes. And

1:27:48

if you can sort of empower them,

1:27:50

then they can at the

1:27:52

very least provide a more safe place.

1:27:55

I mean, there's an irony here about what

1:27:57

Coda Villa's critique of the

1:27:59

the administrative state

1:28:02

of the war on terror became, because

1:28:04

he became a big critic of the Patriot Act in

1:28:07

a weird way, because what he was saying was, we

1:28:09

have been sacrificing our liberties because

1:28:12

we weren't willing to just win these

1:28:14

wars via extraordinary

1:28:16

violence. But he combined,

1:28:19

by the time he was writing about the ruling elite, the

1:28:21

ruling class, this critique

1:28:24

of the administrative state and the bureaucracy

1:28:27

with the oppressive, apparatus

1:28:30

that was brought home, the war on terror, came

1:28:33

home in a form of policing

1:28:35

internal enemies. And now,

1:28:38

on the right, people who are fans

1:28:40

of Coda Villa have

1:28:43

taken up that argument about the way

1:28:45

that January 6th protesters

1:28:48

are being policed, or suspected

1:28:51

seditionists on the right are being investigated

1:28:54

by the FBI, the CIA, or whatever.

1:28:57

In some ways, this is a critique that the

1:28:59

left has had of the war on

1:29:01

terror for so long. The

1:29:04

ACLU, for example, has done a good job

1:29:06

of defending people's rights to have

1:29:09

good and bad ideas and not be

1:29:11

investigated as potential seditionists for this

1:29:13

reason. And I feel like

1:29:16

the right, in its current guise

1:29:18

and deciding that there

1:29:20

are a rate against the intelligence

1:29:22

community and the FBI and stuff like that, they

1:29:25

still just want those

1:29:27

agencies to be back in their hands

1:29:29

so that they can use them exclusively to go

1:29:32

after the people they hate. There is

1:29:34

no prevailing sense

1:29:37

of a principle at work. Civil

1:29:39

libertarianism does not really

1:29:41

exist on the new right. Because as we know,

1:29:43

they're saying all the time, libertarianism

1:29:46

is bullshit. You need to use state power to

1:29:48

achieve your ends, to form

1:29:50

a moral orthodoxy that

1:29:52

comports with your values. It makes me so

1:29:54

mad when people like Glenn Greenwald think that conservative

1:29:57

critiques of the intelligence community are a thing.

1:29:59

the FBI or prosecutors or whatever

1:30:02

are

1:30:03

in good faith. No, they just

1:30:05

want them back. That was sort of my basic

1:30:07

argument about the Santas. He doesn't want to get rid

1:30:10

of the administrative state, at least

1:30:12

the parts of the administrative state that can be

1:30:14

used to punish his enemies. They just

1:30:16

want the FBI and CIA to

1:30:18

be back in the hands of

1:30:20

exclusively punishing their enemies,

1:30:23

pursuing American empire according

1:30:25

to their own perception. I think

1:30:27

that's at work in Coda Villa too. Notable,

1:30:29

it's not just limited to public

1:30:32

institutions, right? One thing we didn't

1:30:34

talk about is that Florida passed this law

1:30:37

banning a kind of viewpoint discrimination

1:30:39

from software companies. So basically,

1:30:42

if you're going to allow your app to be

1:30:44

used in Florida, you can't ban

1:30:46

people

1:30:47

for saying something you don't like. And

1:30:51

when I look at how Matt Taibbi

1:30:54

or other folks have sort of talked about Twitter

1:30:57

denying people a platform, they

1:30:59

view this as akin to the imposition of

1:31:02

a Patriot-X-style form of censorship

1:31:04

or surveillance. And

1:31:06

they sort of have unified these two

1:31:09

forces in public and private. So then

1:31:11

they then want to use the public, they then

1:31:13

want to use the public arms, they then want to

1:31:15

use the state and its monopoly on violence

1:31:18

to force these private

1:31:20

institutions to support viewpoints

1:31:23

that

1:31:23

they don't actually support. Mm-hmm. Well,

1:31:25

one thing just to kind of pay off what we mentioned

1:31:28

about DeSantis at Guantanamo, I'm

1:31:30

drawing here on a Washington Post

1:31:32

article last month, March 19th,

1:31:35

by Michael Kranish, that goes

1:31:37

into some detail about what actually happened

1:31:39

there. I'll just quote from the article some,

1:31:42

former detainees, defense lawyers,

1:31:44

and other human rights advocates said in interviews

1:31:46

that DeSantis' actions at the base and

1:31:49

his continued view of what happened there is fully

1:31:51

legitimate, present one of the most revealing

1:31:53

and troubling chapters of his life,

1:31:56

noting that he never publicly expressed any

1:31:58

concern or questioned his own

1:31:59

role in what transpired. J.

1:32:02

Wells Dixon, a detainee lawyer

1:32:04

who said he remembers meeting with DeSantis

1:32:06

at the base, said that the experience

1:32:09

should have convinced the governor the base should

1:32:11

be closed. If DeSantis is

1:32:13

honest with himself, having served as

1:32:15

a naval officer and as a lawyer at Guantanamo,

1:32:18

then he surely knows that Guantanamo is a human

1:32:20

rights disaster and its continuing

1:32:22

existence demeans the United States and

1:32:25

is an affront to human rights in the role of law, said

1:32:27

Dixon. And then later in the piece,

1:32:30

it mentions Mansoor Adefi,

1:32:32

a Yemeni who was 19 years

1:32:34

old when he arrived at Guantanamo and

1:32:37

describes, he wrote this memoir called

1:32:39

Don't Forget Us Here that describes the force

1:32:41

feeding process. And he

1:32:44

describes a male nurse forced

1:32:46

that huge tube into my nose, no

1:32:49

numbing spray, no lubricant, raw

1:32:51

rubber and metal slice the inside

1:32:53

of my nose and throat, pain shot

1:32:56

through my sinuses and I thought my head would

1:32:58

explode. One day, Adefi

1:33:00

said in an interview with the Post,

1:33:02

DeSantis watched all this happening from

1:33:05

outside a fence as he was tied to a chair

1:33:07

and force fed. He recalled that DeSantis

1:33:10

stood among several people who were smiling

1:33:12

at him, which he said made him angry.

1:33:14

So he spit out food at them with

1:33:16

some hitting DeSantis. Good for him.

1:33:19

I did it intentionally, he said. The

1:33:21

Post could not independently verify the

1:33:23

claim and DeSantis's office did not

1:33:25

respond to a question about it. But

1:33:28

that's what we're talking about. DeSantis literally

1:33:30

standing there smiling, watching as

1:33:33

people are force fed, which in my

1:33:35

view is clearly a form of torture. Well,

1:33:37

it has been defined as torture by various international

1:33:40

organizations. Yes. None of this

1:33:42

is in DeSantis's book. And it's

1:33:44

really, I feel like it's maybe not

1:33:46

a bad place to end this episode because

1:33:48

it really gets to the

1:33:51

kind of viciousness and cruelty

1:33:53

of DeSantis, which I think also

1:33:56

speaks to why certain people on the right

1:33:58

love him so much, which is why I said

1:34:00

at the start, right? If you read this

1:34:02

book of DeSantis's, The Courage to be Free, there's

1:34:05

not a lot of charm there. There's not a lot of

1:34:08

personal anecdotes. There's not even a lot

1:34:10

of policy. The main takeaway is

1:34:12

that he's a bully on behalf

1:34:14

of the right, and that's why they

1:34:17

love him. It's just cold efficiency

1:34:20

and shared enemies. That's what he's

1:34:22

selling, right? It's like getting a moral lecture

1:34:24

from a gun, especially

1:34:26

in the context of, you know, what you just

1:34:28

read. Like, it's extremely grim

1:34:31

that he decides to

1:34:33

not discuss that with the public, to not

1:34:35

have any sort of moral reckoning or any

1:34:37

sort of serious discussion or even any sort of defense.

1:34:40

But he does have a discussion about Leah

1:34:42

Thomas swimming in the NCAA.

1:34:45

Like, it's just strictly,

1:34:47

I am for sale, right? Like,

1:34:50

here are the people I'm looking to target, and I'm going

1:34:52

to do so with as cold an efficiency

1:34:54

and as clean a policy

1:34:57

record as I possibly

1:34:58

can. And he's, you know,

1:35:00

I think very consciously hoping that will contrast to

1:35:03

Trump's sort of, you know, madman in the

1:35:05

attic attitude. Yeah,

1:35:07

he's like, you know exactly what you're getting. It

1:35:10

does what it says on the label. I mean, this is

1:35:12

how he closes the book. The

1:35:14

last chapter is titled Make America

1:35:16

Florida, which God help us. But

1:35:19

he says, he says, Florida

1:35:21

has shown that we have the capacity to win

1:35:23

against these elites.

1:35:25

It takes determination. It requires

1:35:27

strategic judgment. It calls for strength

1:35:30

in the face of attacks. Most of all,

1:35:32

it requires, can you guess? Everyone

1:35:35

together. Courage. Courage. Yes.

1:35:37

Can I just say one thing about making

1:35:39

America Florida? It's something I think about all the time.

1:35:42

It comes up when I think about DeSantis versus Trump,

1:35:44

but also just in general, Florida

1:35:46

is such a weird place. It's a very,

1:35:48

very weird state. Like

1:35:50

a lot of people there are so weird and

1:35:53

crazy and weird. And like

1:35:55

there's so much different

1:35:57

shit going on. Like the idea that you can

1:35:59

try to present

1:35:59

Florida for the purposes of your

1:36:02

hyper patriarchal hyper masculine

1:36:05

normative and punitive campaign for

1:36:07

the nomination of the Republican Party as like Florida

1:36:10

the the most normal place in America

1:36:13

is like it's laughable

1:36:16

well it's also I don't know if Ron

1:36:18

knows this but Miami is gonna be underwater

1:36:20

in 30 years like is he paying

1:36:23

attention to that like it does he

1:36:25

have any sort of sense of like crisis

1:36:27

he showed up in his little boots when

1:36:29

there was

1:36:29

a hurricane his white boots and

1:36:32

he did what he had to do but I there's

1:36:34

not a mention of climate change in this book there's

1:36:37

also I just want to say

1:36:38

there is literally nothing about economics

1:36:41

in this book besides about ESG

1:36:44

about the idea that like woke investors are

1:36:47

perverting the sort of profit motive for

1:36:49

big companies like the idea that there's

1:36:51

anything about his populism that

1:36:54

is not just exactly the

1:36:56

kinds of distortions we were talking about earlier

1:36:58

where it's like you're working class so

1:37:01

banks like trans people and so

1:37:03

we're gonna punish trans people instead of banks

1:37:06

like besides that there's literally nothing

1:37:09

there's

1:37:09

nothing to recommend him from a kind

1:37:11

of working-class class

1:37:13

interest perspective in this book not a single

1:37:15

thing that I can remember there is one point in

1:37:18

the cover chapter he's talking about the cares act and

1:37:20

he's talking government largesse that

1:37:22

was provided right so even as

1:37:25

he's sort of like donning this working-class

1:37:27

appropriation he's then a sailing

1:37:29

you know something that kept millions of people

1:37:32

out of poverty millions of people in their homes he

1:37:34

loved everything about COVID except for the

1:37:36

fact that like some poor people got money

1:37:39

right

1:37:39

yeah yeah it's kind of

1:37:41

like okay so post Trump

1:37:44

what do you do it seems like for DeSantis

1:37:47

it's none of the economic populism

1:37:49

even if it was mostly rhetorical with Trump right

1:37:51

because we know yes yes it's

1:37:54

just

1:37:55

turning the culture world dial

1:37:57

up to 11 you know yeah

1:37:59

that's

1:37:59

That's his pitch to working class people. And

1:38:02

then calling that class for, and

1:38:04

then suggesting that that is being waged on

1:38:06

behalf of a working

1:38:07

class and against a ruling

1:38:09

class while actually doing nothing to

1:38:12

rewrite those stratifications of class,

1:38:14

which are written by money, right?

1:38:16

Are written by material assets. Yeah.

1:38:19

Ron DeSantis, a bad dude. Yeah,

1:38:23

I said this off the air, but when Trump rolled

1:38:25

out his Ron DeSantis monicker

1:38:28

for Ron, I think everybody thought that's not Trump's

1:38:30

best work. But actually after reading this book, I feel

1:38:32

like sanctimony is pretty much

1:38:34

all he has. It was on point.

1:38:37

Jillian, thank you

1:38:38

so much for coming back in the podcast and

1:38:40

for taking so much time. This was extremely

1:38:42

fun and just as illuminating and

1:38:44

sophisticated as I thought it would be. Thank you

1:38:47

for reading this horrible book and

1:38:49

talking about this horrible man with

1:38:51

us. It was much more enlightening

1:38:53

and fun and interesting because you were a part

1:38:55

of it. So thank you so much. Yeah, thanks. Thank

1:38:58

you for your time.