Episode Summary
As he nears the end of his third presidential campaign, Donald Trump is falling apart in public view. He’s holding far fewer public events than ever before where he constantly goes off on bizarre and irrelevant tangents and conspiracy theories about everything from sharks and hurricanes to Kamala Harris’s headphones.
But most people don’t tune into his rallies. Instead, they hear about them from the mainstream media, which often delivers a highly sanitized version of Trump’s insane rants that makes them seem much more normal than they really are.
My friend Parker Molloy calls this pattern of media behavior “sanewashing,” which I think is an accurate description to describe what mainstream journalists have been doing with Trump since he first began running for president in 2015. Whenever Trump retreats from verbatim interviews and focuses only on his rally speeches, his approval ratings go up.
Kamala Harris alluded to this problem during the debate she had with Trump a few weeks ago when she urged the audience to attend a Trump campaign rally to hear the insane and incoherent things he says.
Unfortunately, sanewashing isn’t something that began with Donald Trump, however. Using public relations strategies and playing upon people’s natural inclination to assume good-faith in others, reactionary Republicans figured out how to hack the liberal epistemology by lying. Long before Trump began conning America, far-right activists realized that there’s no limit to what you can accomplish once you realize you never have to tell the truth.
As a result, the American press has been sanitizing Republican radicalism for many decades now: They cleaned up the image of the Tea Party. They refused to question George W. Bush’s Iraq War. They didn’t tell the full story of Newt Gingrich’s fanaticism. And they didn’t fully cover the radicalism of Ronald Reagan and his staff.
One person who knows that story better than almost anyone else is Rick Perlstein, our guest on today’s episode. He’s a historian who’s the author of a series of best-selling books about the American right, including Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980. And he’s got another one that’s in the works as well called “The Infernal Triangle: How America Got This Way.”
The video of this discussion is available. The transcript of audio is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
06:47 — Sanewashing is obsolete journalism for a Republican party that no longer exists
10:51 — Flashback: How the mainstream media sanitized the Tea Party
21:51 — How Republicans and Democrats handle unpopular policies differently
25:47 — How Tea Party activists manipulated the media
29:09 — William F. Buckley, inventor of sanewashing
33:57 — Sanewashing as a hack of liberal epistemology
43:23 — The one positive thing about sanewashing
48:32 — A dual approach to combating the problems of sanewashing
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So the topic of today that we're going to be discussing here, as I said in the intro, is sanewashing. And friend of the pod, Parker Molloy, I believe, was the coiner of that term, and she defines it as basically that when Trump has his rallies, the mainstream media will sanitize them and not tell the public what he's actually saying, how incoherent and extreme that it is.
I think it's a very valid critique, but on the other hand, this is part of a much bigger problem.
RICK PERLSTEIN: Yes, I think it's a fantastic word. Maybe it'll become one of those kind of like, like the Miriam Webster or whatever comes up with [00:04:00] the. The word of the year, that would be a really good one. But it is yeah, I mean, if anything, eight years too late, possibly 80 years too late, right? But I think, eight years too late is eight and a half years.
Let's say is a pretty good benchmark because, I, was doing political reporting in 2015 and 2016, and I went to New Hampshire. And I went to rallies by, all the candidates and, I kept on writing about Trump and my editor was like, why aren't you writing about someone who could win like Marco Rubio? And there'll be 20 people at the Marco Rubio event and like 2,000 people at the Donald Trump event.
And one of the things I did because I take a very literary approach to journalism and wasn't kind of filing, 800 word, kind of dispatches on deadline. I was writing kind of Esquire style magazine articles like, Gary Wills did in the 1960s or Joan Didion or something like that. I transcribed enormous amounts of what Donald Trump was saying. And described enormous amounts of what I was seeing, like looking over the shoulder of someone who was reading the little, town newspaper in some New Hampshire town of 20,000 people and looking at the obituaries and seeing all the 30 year olds and realizing, this must be kind of a place that has a lot of oxy problems and things like that, this dying industrial town.
And, he was just saying, insane things, by the way, there's kind of a maybe I should coin the phrase insane washing, which is kind of like the idea that somehow Donald Trump has kind of circled around the drain and is so off the rails in a way that he wasn't before, I think he's definitely suffered.
cognitive decline, and his kind of, return to the womb kind of fascism rhetoric is purer than it was, but it was plenty like that in 2015 and 2016. So I would, I quoted at length, him saying, if anyone deserts and when I'm president, they'll get shot in the [00:06:00] battlefield.
He told this elaborate story that he told all the time, which I saw covered nowhere, about how General Pershing supposedly solved the terrorism problem in, the Philippines in the 20s whatever, by corralling 50 terrorists shooting 49 of them with bullets soaked in pig's fat, right?
Muslim terrorists and leaving one to tell the tale. And of course it's a utter urban legend and no one bothered to either quote that at any length, including the crazy, grammar and stuff. Or even bothered to look it up, which I did only recently and found out that was a common email chain after 9/11.
Sanewashing is obsolete journalism for a Republican party that no longer exists
PERLSTEIN: The problem is obviously just, no curiosity or any kind of digging into what's happening. There is a genre convention for how a presidential candidate is meant to be reported. And what I talk about just an enormous amount in my writing about this stuff as a historian and a journalist is that the frames are everything, the journalistic conventions are everything, and they're ironclad, and if you want, I can kind of go into my little theory about how this particular Convention came about I theorized with Richard Nixon in 1968, but basically a presidential candidate speech Is should be reducible to five or six take away soundbites about policy positions.
And it doesn't matter if Donald Trump, pulls down his pants and poops on the stage. As long as he says something that can somehow be abstracted into five or six policy takeaways, that's how it will be reported in the New York Times, on CNN, and all the rest. And, I mean, you can't separate the dancer from the dance. Form and function. Form and content, I should say. [00:08:00]
What is in the speeches is a function of the fact that he's doing this diuretic rant meant to terrify people and present himself as the savior who's going to prevent them from bodily disintegration. And that cannot, that story simply cannot be told and be recognizable as mainstream journalism.
SHEFFIELD: Because yeah, you're telling a truth that cannot be said.
PERLSTEIN: it just, it's almost like, it's, like duck speak. It just doesn't, it's like, it doesn't fit, duck speak from 1984. They come up with this language that's kind of meant to be descriptive and keep people from having, other thoughts.
Duck speak just means like, party rhetoric. It's just a really, just kind of, like Mad Libs. Every article about a presidential speech is going to be Mad Libs. You can kind of fill it in. And therefore that which does not, kind of meet that format will not, it's, yes, it's unrepresentable.
SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah. And it's also, and it's not newsy either. Trump says the same policy positions in his speeches, says the same jokes that, like that idiotic—
PERLSTEIN: The snake.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. That was a cliché in the nineties like Hannibal Lecter.
PERLSTEIN: Yeah. And no one says that when he says the Hannibal thing, he's actually kind of doing a dog whistle that migrants are cannibals.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think so. But, I mean, but the point being though, like when they talk about, and then he said he wants to build a wall and then he said he wants, tariffs or whatever, like those, that's not news at all that he said those things. He says those at every rally. So what you actually have to do if you're going to these rallies, you're going to cover them, is to cover this ambiance, is to cover the impromptus, is to cover the asides, and the insanities.
PERLSTEIN: That's right. And the crowd too.
SHEFFIELD: This other stuff is not [00:10:00] news.
PERLSTEIN: I mean, one of the things that, when I first started, like the first time I, started covering presidential campaign events in 2004, when I was writing for the village voice, I walk into my first rally in Claremont, New Hampshire, and I'm like, why are these guys all behind a iron?
Great. It's like the journalists literally caged themselves. I was like, Why aren't they? Like, it's not that hard to go out into the crowd. you could tell these guys apart, they were the guys, with the, the press khakis, it was 2004. They had cell phones pressed their ear, which was pretty rare.
And they only talked to each other . So they weren't actually, yes, they were not actually quote unquote covering the event. They were waiting for their little mad libs to, to, fill in. And that was 2004. Right. And John Kerry or whatever, but you know, it's so they're, covering Donald Trump just like they cover.
John Kerry, even though, it's apples and oranges,
Flashback: How the mainstream media sanitized the Tea Party
SHEFFIELD: It is. It's, and we'll get into this further, but you're working on book right now. And, one of the big portions of the book which you shared with me is how the media did this exact same, washing practice with Glenn Beck and the Tea Party when they came along and and both before and after it kind of collapsed on itself.
So, when they first got started, it was, Oh, wow. Look at all these independents. And they're just politically moderate people, look at them. They're just want something different. They're upset. And then, after it all kind of went completely, I mean, revealed itself undeniably for a far right movement, and then Glenn Beck, did his rehabilitation to her. So take us back there.
PERLSTEIN: Yeah, it was truly grotesque, and a really important kind of way station to how we got here, right? Subtitle of the book I'm working on is how America got here, and really, I mean, I start with the 2020 South Carolina primary between John McCain and George W. Bush and, kind of, Go to the present, but the beginning of the book, I do this 2009 [00:12:00] to 2010 period, because it's so, it just exemplifies all the crises that, have become unmanageable right now.
And the biggest one is, the press. So we get this new president. Barack Obama and some of your younger listeners may have heard telegram by talking about how unbelievably exciting it was. If you were anything other than, a conservative and that this, African American president, there was an enormous wave of progressive.
Energy if you look at the polls, it's ridiculous polls, like, 75 percent of the country wanting to raise the minimum wage in 2007. and, like, and like 68 percent of small business owners wanted to raise the minimum wage. I mean, it was a truly a progressive movement.
The sky, comes along and, we can kind of skip over, the complications of Obama himself, but it's really true that a lot of the, kind of big foots of the mainstream press, the agenda setting elite political journalists. I tried to find a good acronym for them, but I haven't, but I call them the agenda setting elite political journalists, which basically means, the people with titles like Washington correspondent or, chief, chief chief, capital.
Columnist or whatever, the Bigfoots, we're very excited and his election was treated as ending a chapter in American life of racial division. I mean, it was quite astonishing, quite naive but for the purposes of our discussion, it was so over the top that I think the ideology of balance, Which, obviously is their religion, just kind of demanded a countervailing narrative.
Right? So they were, they needed the Tea Party. Right? They needed the idea that there was this backlash against Barack Obama to kind of right the scales. Because, unless they do that, they're not, they don't see themselves as professional. They don't see themselves as doing their job. They had [00:14:00] a guilty conscience, right?
So when the Tea Party came about, it's really quite extraordinary. One thing I really stress in my book is there was always amazing coverage, but it would come from alternative media. The same alternative media that was telling the truth about Iraq. When, the New York Times was running, White House propaganda at the front page, right?
So in the case of the alternative media, it was really fascinating that, you remember the, first kind of clarion call? Of the Tea Party on CNBC. Do you remember that story? This Rick Santelli guy. Right? So how much, I mean, it's just basically, there was this business reporter named Rick Santelli, this kind of douchey kind of frat boy guy.
and yeah, Chicago based and Barack Obama had just you know, fulfilled a campaign promise by putting together a very small program to to help people basically subsidized banks to help people get back into their houses when they were foreclosed. It was really kind of one of these win policy solutions, it was cost barely anything.
The banks would get a really nice, flow of revenue at a time when they were, ready to go out of business. People would get to go back in their homes, neighborhoods that were kind of falling decrepit because of the subprime prices. And the government would earn their money back.
And it was also, like, completely neoliberal. It was really hard to apply for. It was means tested, all that good stuff. It was very mild. And of course on the right it was, greeted as well, literally, in the case of Santelli, he said, this is, I've been to Cuba and this is what they did, so this clown, Santelli, gives up this kind of speech, political speech, on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. And he says, we're going to start a movement, you can see it on YouTube, and we can even call it a tea party. And it really seems like he's kind of dreaming it up from the top of his mind.
Right? And then, basically nine days later, these Tea Party rallies all over the country being promoted by Fox News. Well, the first piece [00:16:00] in the New York Times completely plays it straight. It basically says it's like, Tea Party organizers insist, movement is spontaneous, right?
So they're already kind of, on the back foot, but they're getting to kind of redeem themselves. And the astonishing thing is these two bloggers on Huffington Post writing for free on their kind of like citizens vector. And one was kind of like a, yeah, spare time. One was like a, like an entrepreneur woman woman in somewheresville.
And there was this guy who I've become an acquaintance with who was just struggling with mental illness and trying to put together a journalism career, basically. Just on their own, found publicly available message boards in which the conspirators Who were working with the Koch brothers to start something to kind of, create a grass simulated AstroTurf groundswell against Barack Obama.
Or I should say, because obviously there was a lot of resistance to Barack Obama, but to basically kind of meld this into a kind of marketable thing. They literally said before that rant went on that supposedly started the tea party, wait for Santelli. Before kind of hitting, send on your websites, organizing the tea party.
So it was literally, they found smoking gun evidence that this was, a conspiracy, that this was all planned, that it was in fact not spontaneous. And yet for like another two years, the word spontaneous and rant and grassroots movement, literally the first New York times article said, well, yeah, I don't there was some work done on a website by a grassroots group called FreedomWorks.
a grassroots group. Now you have to laugh. As FreedomWorks is like the AstroTurf
Kind of silo of the Koch brothers empire, right? Run by run, by who was the guy? Dick Army. For a 700, 000 a year salary out of, a lobbying [00:18:00] shop, on literally on K street.
So this was the grassroots movement.
SHEFFIELD: And former Republican
PERLSTEIN: Yes, and former, congressional leader.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PERLSTEIN: I mean, basically, there was a lot of grassroots activity because, people hate liberalism and, for all the reasons you know. But a lot of it was kind of coordinated by Fox News, right? Which kind of played this kind of convening function.
And yet, for years and years and years, well, months and months and months and months, because it really only lasted for two years the narrative that you would read in the New York Times and the Washington Post was that this, it was a grassroots movement. they would, kind of do polls and it would turn out that, 40 percent of the Tea Partiers or something like that would identify as political independents.
The Scholar Theta Scotch Bowl actually, kind of did the interviews and found that a lot of people who were calling themselves independents didn't identify as Republicans because they were, Ron Paul libertarians. John Birch Society members, consider the Republican Party, part of the, deep state or whatever.
So, like, these, right, so these people were being reported as if they were undecided centrist voters who were anguished about, fiscal responsibility, which was non existent on the part of Barack Obama. the, actual stimulus bill that they were protesting was like the most, they, Joe Biden was basically in charge of making sure all the money was spent responsibly.
And they were just like in the classic democratic way, like Boy Scouts kind of dotting their eyes and crossing their keys, but it didn't matter. Most of the initiatives were spectacularly successful.
SHEFFIELD: yeah, and I'm sorry, and the actual left
PERLSTEIN: Of course.
SHEFFIELD: and
PERLSTEIN: And we, well, yeah,
SHEFFIELD: Obama.
PERLSTEIN: it's like all the,
SHEFFIELD: but that's,
PERLSTEIN: Yeah. And all the economists, were like, you need, it needs to be at least like 1. 2 billion trillion dollars because you have to replace the money that was sucked out of the economy by these banks. And it was, Rahm Emanuel said it couldn't be above a billion dollars, had eventually turned out to be 700 million.
Be that as it may. And then one of the fascinating things, I mean, I tell the whole [00:20:00] story, right, in this book that'll come out, next year, basically. But I think. One way to kind of sum it up is there was a poll in 2011 after all these Tea Party people who are like nuts, I mean, people like Alan West, who literally ran on the fact that he tortured an Iraqi soldier, I mean, as crazy as anything you hear from any kind of Marjorie Taylor Greene, These days, some of these people.
I'll say two things about it. In 2011, there was a poll, and the Tea Party, because of these people, and because of what they were doing, trying to shut down the government, were listed as the most hated group of people in America, more so than Muslims and Atheists. Whereas, the same kind of poll, in 2009 was, oh, the Tea Party sounds great.
So when people actually, all they knew about the Tea Party was what they saw in the evening news or read in the newspaper they were fine. And then when they actually got into, actually, Got power. Everyone saw they were crazy. And, I found these unbelievably fascinating examples of news reports where the actual copy in the newspaper or the voiceover of kind of the Associated Press syndicated TV news segment would talk about, yeah, they were all, these, middle Americans were spontaneously erupting in protest against the Fiscal irresponsibility, which, by the way, is the one issue that, these kind of bigfoot journalists are most conservative about.
They're obsessed about deficits. No actual Americans care about deficits, but the media sure does. Right. That is just a grassroots, spontaneous, logical commonsensical uprising against high deficits. And then the picture of the crowd would have, fight the new world order or America is a Christian nation.
Right? So you can kind of see
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PERLSTEIN: saint washing, right there.
How Republicans and Democrats handle unpopular policies differently
PERLSTEIN: And, I mean, just to not let Barack Obama off the hook, and then when, in 2010, when this often based on, outright [00:22:00] rank, chewing on like lies, that there are going to be death panels in the Obamacare, they win office and take over Congress.
So, Barack Obama really only gets, Two years to kind of shoot his shot, right? The next morning when I compare it to Ronald Reagan in the morning, after his shellacking in 1982, he says, we're going to stay the course. Right? And even though the unemployment rate was even higher than it was in 2009, 2010, inflation was terrible, basically deindustrialization was, taking off like a rocket ship.
Ronald Reagan said, well, the only reason, my program hasn't worked is we haven't given it enough time. Which was kind of a smart thing to say because of the way economic cycles worked. He knew that like, basically by the time 2000, 1984 ran around, came around, the economy would have recovered.
And it did. And that's when he won 49 states, right? But he laid down this marker, stick with me, stay the course. Barack Obama said, well,
SHEFFIELD: Yep.
PERLSTEIN: I've been going around the country and listening, and people say that they're really disappointed by what I'm going to do, what I'm doing, so I'm going to change. He's saying
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, this is it is, I think a great example of why.
PERLSTEIN: his, negotiating partners, right? The ones who tried to shut down the government the next year.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, he did. He did. Yeah. And this is an example of why polling is, can be very problematic for what you're doing. You use it for it. Like polls are useful to in, in a lot of different ways. I used to be a pollster. So like, obviously I like them. But at the same time, they, when you're asking people, what do you want when you're asking them abstract political theory or economic policies, they don't actually
PERLSTEIN: Right,
SHEFFIELD: talking about.
A lot of people
PERLSTEIN: right.
SHEFFIELD: And so, like you, even if you ask them. what's
PERLSTEIN: Right.
SHEFFIELD: They [00:24:00] don't really actually know, or if they do like, or they might give you an answer, but ideas are all over the map. And so that's why self assessment is usually in sociology. And so. You got to use a battery of
PERLSTEIN: sure.
SHEFFIELD: that are not explicitly ideological. And when you do, what you find is that, there's this, in the mainstream media, there's this obsession with the idea of the
PERLSTEIN: Right.
SHEFFIELD: voter, and that they think that the most of the public is in the middle politically. And it's just not true. It's simply not true. That the reality is that there's a lot of people who are socially, very conservative, like a lot of black Americans are that way. A lot of democratic voting formerly democratic voting white non college educated voters were that way. A lot of his, and. And they, so they have very right wing religious viewpoints, but then on economics, they have
PERLSTEIN: Right.
SHEFFIELD: wing viewpoints. So are they centrist? Like those people are never called centrist in, in, they're never even talked
about
PERLSTEIN: it's, always these pre existing media narratives of what the world looks like. When we were talking about how the Christian right reasons, when we had our kind of discussion during the democratic convention, during the Republican convention, and I mean, the democratic convention in Chicago. And you, taught me the philosophy behind the idea of inductive reasoning.
And I told you my favorite word, which is eisegesis, right? Which is the opposite of exegesis. Exegesis is what you do when you have a body of information and you try and, use your critical thinking tools to interpret, it and come with conclusions. Eisegesis is the opposite where you have a conclusion and then you use a body of evidence to kind of.
Affirm your conversion, your conclusion.
How Tea Party activists manipulated the media
PERLSTEIN: And frankly, there was just a staggering amount of isogesis on the part of the elite media, and they, polled tea partiers.
And they're like, what is the [00:26:00] main reason you identify with the tea party? And it was five or six things. And by the way, the, best New York times, most important headline was. Tea Party avoids divisive social issues. Right? Again, this is the one where they have big banners, the things right in front of the camera, which you can see on camera, but they don't talk about in the media.
Molin lobby, don't take away our guns and all that stuff, right? Oh, here we go. New York Times published a poll. The day before the 2010 tax day tea party rallies. Oh, and there's another great poll And it's like deciding which polls to report is important. There was only one person I ever saw who Noted this poll and it was in business It was in forums actually of all places that the public thought that taxes were just right in 2009 At a higher level than at any time before the Eisenhower administration.
So, what did T, stand for in Tea Party, do you remember? Taxed Enough Already.
SHEFFIELD: Taxed
PERLSTEIN: no criticism of that. So here's a poll that was published in the New York Times on April 14th, 2010, before the big Tea Party rally. By the way, the immigration rallies that year were much bigger than Tea Party rallies.
It asked adherents, what should be the goal of the Tea Party movement? And these are the possible responses, it wasn't open ended. Reduce federal government, cutting budget, lowering taxes, electing their own candidates, creating jobs. Or something else. So the idea that the tea party was,
SHEFFIELD: That's
PERLSTEIN: keep our guns from being taken away.
Keep immigrants out of the country, all these stuff that you would actually, and actually there was a sociologist, again, alternative media or the best reporting on. The ties to the Koch brothers and, how they kind of came up with the idea of workshopping with the tobacco industry, in the 90s came from scientists, tobacco scientists who were doing work on the tobacco industry and use when, so they, came out with an article in like [00:28:00] public health Quarterly or something that like totally nailed, the coke brothers footprints all over this stuff.
Was a sociologist who was a graduate student and a professor now who just went to tea party meetings and he literally showed the leader who was kind of like this, literally came from Numbers USA, the kind of white supremacist immigration group, right,
SHEFFIELD: immigration.
PERLSTEIN: training them about what to say to journalists and saying, don't criticize Barack Obama, say we're just as mad at Bush, right?
Don't have any embarrassing signs. Glenn Beck banned signs when he had his big rally at the Washington Mall, which was on the anniversary of the I Have a Dream speech, right? So, I mean, it was, what if the New York Times instead of saying Washington had said, you have a disciplined cadre of leaders who are explaining to people exactly what they say to the New York Times?
Instead, they would reach, reach into their Rolodex and use their, kind of, sources in town. And they would be told, well, of course, this is just a movement of middle Americans who have no interest in divisive social issues but just want, their grandchildren not to have a, big deficit passed on to them. national debt.
William F. Buckley, inventor of sanewashing
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, it's true. like, I think that this. And, the right wing keeps doing this to the left and the mainstream media, especially, and they've done this as you've documented and many others have documented over the years. Like, I mean, William F Buckley Jr was, I think, the original sort of promulgator of this idea, like, This was a guy who was, friends with many
PERLSTEIN: Right.
SHEFFIELD: Actively wrote in favor of segregation was friends with
PERLSTEIN: And said Africans will be ready for self government just as soon as they stop eating each other.
SHEFFIELD: yeah, exactly. But at the same time, he would go and, use multi syllable words on
PERLSTEIN: Yeah, he would, it would take
being with him.
SHEFFIELD: then he like threatened to punch, he threatened to
PERLSTEIN: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: Vidal. And that's still. Did not harm [00:30:00] his,
PERLSTEIN: Now there was an interesting kind of there was an interesting kind of movement in the early 60s when the John Birch Society really kind of burst out of the scene, kind of the Q anon of the early 60s, crazy conspiracy theorists. Thought that Eisenhower was an agent of the communist conspiracy.
And they were just, savaged in the press. So, Buckley was kind of seen as, creepy and scary maybe. But yes, he did a great job of, laundering, kind of these right wing ideas. He was brilliant at it. that's what his, that was his value proposition.
That he, was, you could basically just keep on just steadily pushing the center to the right. And I have a lot about that. I have a great spilling tea account of going to A dinner party at his house, and recording the things that they say when they think that no one is listening. But we'll, no spoiler alerts for that one.
The other thing is I compare I com i, point out that, time Magazine, would cover the, John Birch Society and say there are one, one goose step away from the formation of Goon squads. Right. So there was this kind of raising of the alarm by a generation that, remembered Hitler, right?
And, I compare that in the book to the cover article on Glenn Beck, which showed him kind of blowing a raspberry at the viewer. And it, and it was just crazy. It was just a puff job. It was about what, how great his business acumen was. It was about how funny he is, how he didn't really have a serious ideology.
I know no one took him seriously. And meanwhile, literally there were people shooting at cops and there was a guy who shot a cop. And actually, no, I think he he shot a cop on the way to, I think it might've been to Nancy Pelosi's house and his defense lawyer said, well, all he's doing Is responding to what Glenn Beck says on TV.
At the same time as time magazine is putting Glenn Beck on the cover and [00:32:00] saying, he's kind of charming and harmless. So if you want to know, what, why, the media and the democratic party wasn't ready for Trump. I mean, this is a pretty pretty good explanation, I think.
Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: It is. Yeah. And, it's like, I mean, Republicans invented political consulting and
PERLSTEIN: Right.
SHEFFIELD: really
And then, the tobacco industry kind of pioneered
PERLSTEIN: AstroTurf stuff, yeah, they came up with the phrase the Tea Party.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. but also like the, idea of, well, we don't have to refute your arguments, we just
And
PERLSTEIN: there's a debate, creating a debate, creating,
SHEFFIELD: yeah,
PERLSTEIN: of times saying there's, a debate.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PERLSTEIN: Yeah, the right says this, the left says this. There's a pretty good obscure book about the history of think tanks by a guy named Jason Stahl, who, S T A H L, whose, job now is starting a union for college football players.
But he, demonstrates how the American Enterprise Institute in 60s, literally came up with an idea of saying, if we say that everything is a left right debate, then that will automatically get more right wing ideas into the media. And, they would say the Brookings Institution, which would do these kind of technocratic, kind of crazy scientific public spirited kind of studies were the left pole and the right pole was them and later the Heritage Foundation.
SHEFFIELD: the Thing is though, like all this this prison, this fake. Layer of Republican PR. Like I call the people who do it they call, I call them fictitious Republicans. So, people like Ronna McDaniel or Hugh
PERLSTEIN: Professional conservatives.
Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: TV. Yeah. That, that their goal, they're, they have been in the business of sane washing
PERLSTEIN: Right.
Sanewashing as a hack of liberal epistemology
SHEFFIELD: But it's the thing is though, like these, [00:34:00] practices that they developed of of sanitizing and covering up their motives and not talking about their, their ultimate motivations, their actual full agenda. What it's done is. It actually, it is a hack of the liberal epistemology because right wing worldview is this is a fallen world.
We're all, everyone is a sinner. They're awful people. Life sucks. It will never get better. So you might as well get what you can and fuck everyone else. that's, the right wing you worldview. And The left wing worldview is, well, people are good and we shouldn't judge them.
We should, think about them full persons and not question their motives. And
PERLSTEIN: We all want the same things.
SHEFFIELD: what, yeah, we all want the same things. I think it's an example of entryism though, because that, was a practice that was very commonly done by communists in the cold war, people working for the USSR, that they would come into labor groups or, Democratic party groups and say, well, actually I'm a
PERLSTEIN: Right. Yeah, And
SHEFFIELD: to
PERLSTEIN: as I point out in Before the Storm, a lot of these guys were literally based their techniques on Stalinists. But, I have a completely different theory about left, right, conservative, liberal that I kind of spell out a little bit in the book, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that liberalism This is also a beef against the left where they say, oh, liberal liberals are the people who, believe in the free market, like they did in the 19th century, right?
Liberalism is always just the people who wanna maximize lib liberty, right? Expand the, ambit of the people who are considered fully human. Women used to be vessels of men. Surfs used to be, literally belong to the land where they lived, right? Gay people work pollution, black people were pollution and each generation expands that [00:36:00] circle.
And I'm very, it's very unfashionable in academia, but I really have a kind of wiggish view of progress, even though, we have. 50 million people dying in World War II and the possibility of nuclear annihilation. I think the circle of people who are considered fully human has steadily expanded.
The latest is, people who are, have gender dysmorphia, which have existed in all societies, but suddenly get to be full citizens. And, but there's always reaction against that. So to me, conservatism, the right reaction is just a kind of natural function of this fact of what I consider kind of a fact, the expansion of human dignity.
And the 19th century in Manchester in the 1850s, the kind of economist magazine was liberal because deciding what you can buy and sell individually instead of by the sufferance of the crown was an expansion of human liberty, right? It's not now, but it was then. So anyway, that's the basic rough outlines of it.
But it's a little bit in the clouds.
SHEFFIELD: Oh, actually I hear your, I think I
PERLSTEIN: I'm going to go outside. It's a lovely Chicago day. It's about 70 degrees, and now we're out in the,
SHEFFIELD: nice.
PERLSTEIN: the veranda. Find
SHEFFIELD: Okay. Well, good. So, but just going back to what I was saying though, that, wing PR and, fictitious Republicans invented sane washing.
But they did it to hack
PERLSTEIN: Totally, agree.
SHEFFIELD: the
PERLSTEIN: Yes. It's very clever stuff.
SHEFFIELD: it's, it is. And what's so frustrating is that, you've got, the democratic party is filled with PhDs is filled with, political scientists filled with people, consultants who have done this forever, and they don't seem to be aware that this happened. And the media is filled with people, who. I mean, well, I guess they're not
PERLSTEIN: Yeah. I mean, I've heard, I've, heard at least on the democratic side that things are getting better. [00:38:00] That there are kind of generations who have been kind of absorbing what people like me and you and lots of other people have been pointing out.
SHEFFIELD: It's like a normalcy
PERLSTEIN: right.
SHEFFIELD: Like the, liberals think well of human, their fellow humans, and they don't understand that some
PERLSTEIN: Right, that's true. It might also be that they all come from kind of Ivy League schools where basically using the right salad fork as J. D. Vance, reveals in his memoir is kind of the paramount skill and kind of etiquette. And a certain way of believing in. The solidity and good intentions of elite institutions are kind of baked into your identity, right?
And a certain kind of idea about sort of pluralism and tolerance, which, to use, the philosophical terms of Karl Popper creates the fallacy of tolerating the intolerant. So,
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PERLSTEIN: right, the paradox of tolerance, so, the way I like to put it in one of my new formulations is that journalistic norms should not be a suicide pact. You know the phrase, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, right? So we're not, if, someone wants to destroy the country, maybe we can cut some corners in order to destroy them before they destroy us, right?
But the journalistic norms, the usual kind of both sides, you quote what someone says and you don't editorialize by saying whether it's wrong or not, you don't dive into how conservatives weaponize, the norms of, fairness, liberal norms of fairness in order to eventually uproot them in a very cynical way.
That's just not part of journalism. But unless. This generation of journalists, which is gonna be very hard figures out a way to kind of deal with issues of, fairness, which has to happen and some kind of sense of, objectivity, whatever, or, fairness or however you conceptualize it.
Right? That [00:40:00] allows. The liberal institution of journalism not to be destroyed if the MAGA types win, then they will be placing their own profession in existential jeopardy. And there won't be any independent political journalism, right? As there are not in authoritarian countries. And I see very little of that in journalism.
I see very little methodological self criticism. I tried to start these conversations. There are wonderful journalistic critics. I mean, in the school of James Fallows and all the rest who understand this perfectly sophisticated people who have been, like James Fallows, the editor of us news and world report, right?
One of the three big news weeklies, he was in the Carter administration. He's not some crazy far out, hippie. Right. And he understands how this stuff works perfectly, but he has not received a hearing. And, I, in Reganland, I'll tell, I tell the story and you talk about how they kind of weaponize, kind of liberal journalistic norms of fairness of accuracy in the media, Rita Irvine, kind of the forefather of kind of the work, you were doing, right?
How he bought stock in the New York times in order to get into a stockholders meetings. And he would just sabotage them. He would just start trolling. And so, Abe Rosenthal or whatever, the patriarch of the, not Abe Rosenthal Sulzberger. The patriarch of the Klan was like, okay, will you leave us alone at our meetings if we have regular, meetings in which you share your concerns with me in my office?
So the guy literally bought his way into the New York Times office and started like filling, the ear of the publisher of the New York Times with all this nonsense about communist infiltration. And it's in the book. I mean, Max Frenkel thought it was, like horseshit, in 1980, during this period I'm talking about where the right was already, working overtime, working the refs, they really started with Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew by, getting people like Pat [00:42:00] Buchanan and William Sapphire Columns, because the liberal was supposedly, the media was supposedly biased towards the left.
Right. Right? There was a Butthurm Emails situation and the Carter campaign, was like completely flummoxed by the fact that Jimmy Carter's brother was this clown who was, taking cash on the barrelhead from the, dictatorship of Libya and, trying to influence his brother.
Completely, it didn't succeed. There was no fire there. And meanwhile, the Reagan campaign had their main national security staffer, a guy named Richard Allen, who's still alive, was completely corrupt, kind of doing corrupt business with Japan. It came out. During the campaign, again, the alternative media, Mother Jones Magazine, which did amazing frickin stuff on the Tea Party and their ties to the militia movement, and the only reporting on on, the Oath Keepers at a time when they came out, which was during the Tea Party.
The Oath Keepers was basically the militia auxiliary of the Tea Party. Right? Mother Jones did an article, an expose of this guy and they delivered it to every reporter who went to the the 1980 Republican Convention and it got like no pickup whatsoever, where the New York Times had 50 articles within the space of like a couple weeks on Jimmy Carter's brother.
It was the butter emails of 1980.
SHEFFIELD: And
PERLSTEIN: And Hunter Biden, exactly.
The one positive thing about sanewashing
SHEFFIELD: It's a serious problem, but I will say on the other hand, that. I mean, there is a, paradox of saying Washington the media not telling the full truth about Republicans is that it does enable them to get access inside these
PERLSTEIN: Right. Access is a tricky one.
SHEFFIELD: political circles. So there are a lot of important critical stories that we did get out of the Trump administration because of this access journalism. So it's not pleasant to have to admit that, but I think we have to admit that, that. The right wing doesn't [00:44:00] tell us what they want and they don't tell us what they're doing. public needs to find this information out somehow. And so maybe some of this is
PERLSTEIN: I mean, I think it has to be kind of a multi front war, right? I mean, if, the people at the New York times didn't hold kind of their lesser colleagues in such contempt, they would see them kind of involved in the same project and they're like, okay, we can do the Maggie Haberman stuff and find out that, Donald Trump wanted to like New Greenland or whatever, and was talked out of it by, general Mattis and, these, Activists, kind of at like, Southern Poverty Law Center are, talking about how, they want to link up all the National Guards in order to kind of, take over the border or something like that.
They're, if they saw themselves as kind of part of the same enterprise, right, as comrades and colleagues and, basically just coming up with the truth and understanding the stakes, but that's, not how the New York Times thinks about things. I mean, there's the tradition of what they call the beat sweetener, right?
And in my journalism that I was doing in 2016, I wrote about NPR's beat sweetener, Michael Flynn. And one of, they interviewed one of his colleagues at one of his jobs at, I think, like the Army Intelligence Chief or something like that. And he talked about, the, colleague, she talked about how charmingly messy his desk was.
And then literally she starts saying, and he's so disorganized that I think that, like America's intelligence capabilities will be in grave threat. And they're like, okay, we have no time. And you can just kind of see enough saying, wow, we're not going to get anywhere with this Michael Flynn guy.
If we, tell the truth about how dangerous he was. And this was, a time when, the stuff he was doing with Turkey and he was a loon even then.
SHEFFIELD: I mean, he got fired by Obama for
PERLSTEIN: Right, barbed wire for being corrupt and crazy. So, can you do beat sweeteners? I think you have to do it in a very tactically shrewd way.
I think you have to do it as part of a long game. I think you have to be willing to burn sources if they screw you. I think instead it becomes the kind of [00:46:00] coziness between journalists and sources that You know, Timothy Krauss wrote about brilliantly in The Boys on the Bus, which is, I think, it's one of the most morally penetrating books about power and its uses.
And, people will just remember it as this true, this book about how, reporters drank a lot and, womanized. But it's a really great book. And one of the things he talks about is how, how this buddy stuff works. And also how conformist journalists are.
The best scene in there is where there's a democratic debate. And there's a guy named Walter Mears, who was like the Bigfoot AP guy, kind of like the, the Maggie Haberman of his day, and Peter Baker, around forever, yeah, and literally people would look over his shoulder to see what their lead was supposed to be for the next day.
I mean, it's a very cliquish bunch of people. And the fact that, no journalists no longer kind of come out of this kind of hardscrabble kind of working class attitude, but come out of this, very refined either academic world or upper class world where you can afford to do an internship, it doesn't help any, anything.
It's that they're just not very worldly people, right? And,
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
PERLSTEIN: Behave like an aristocracy.
SHEFFIELD: And they also, the Republicans that
PERLSTEIN: Right, they're fine.
SHEFFIELD: are also not,
PERLSTEIN: not representative.
SHEFFIELD: I mean, David Brooks, now currently ransom
PERLSTEIN: Right. He was up, he was,
SHEFFIELD: but he
PERLSTEIN: yeah.
SHEFFIELD: changed
PERLSTEIN: he was up for, it was, when, William F. Buckley was getting ready to retire, the talk was that two of the people that would possibly replace him were David Brooks and David Frum. And there was a fascinating profile of They were both Jewish, literally.
So William F. Buckley and George Will, right, who's still on the scene, literally agreed that the person who edits the flagship conservative magazine, you'll appreciate this, had to be Christian. It's exactly what we wrote about when I wrote the profile of you.
SHEFFIELD: Even though George will is an
PERLSTEIN: and I did not know that. I'm sure he played, he is, he pays [00:48:00] tribute to, to, the Prince of Peace, right?
But William F. Buckley is somehow recorded by history as the guy who kicked the anti Semites out of the Republican the conservative movement.
SHEFFIELD: It's you couldn't get a better example than what he decided to do with it. And it's like, I don't know. So, so it, to go back to the idea that, that. The solution to sane watching has to be a
PERLSTEIN: Right,
SHEFFIELD: thing. Like there is some value in, this beat sweetener in this both sides journalism for public knowledge. Like, unfortunately that's true,
A dual approach to combatting the problems of sanewashing
SHEFFIELD: but at the same time, the right wing, they figured out. Decades ago that the mainstream media was not going to put forward their message. So they were
PERLSTEIN: right,
SHEFFIELD: themselves.
And so they invested
PERLSTEIN: right.
SHEFFIELD: now, billions of dollars in creating these enterprises
PERLSTEIN: They're very good at creating study like objects, which look like academic papers. Like, the
SHEFFIELD: Well, and,
PERLSTEIN: and
media.
SHEFFIELD: Like, talk radio I mean, God, now there's like, what, six Fox
PERLSTEIN: Yeah! And it's really mind blowing. So, like, me and my wife have, a cabin downstate in rural Illinois, and we have some friends who are kind of from this, kind of media bubble. And one of them said, oh, did you hear about the big accident in Lakin, which is the next town over?
I'm like, no, Tell me about it. It's like, I read about it on Newsmax. So like Newsmax somehow is kind of like stuck. It's kind of like tentacles into local news. They have kind of like a patch function. So you don't have to ever leave Newsmax something like that. Remarkable.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And Mark Cuban,
PERLSTEIN: Right,
SHEFFIELD: who has now become an open advocate for Kamala Harris. He actually made this point perfectly.
He said, right wing media is the mainstream media. They have the bigger audience. And That's
right.
true. The biggest political YouTube channels are right wing. All the biggest podcast channels are right wing. That's just the reality.
PERLSTEIN: Yeah. [00:50:00] when I did a piece about I did kind of a similar profile to what the one I did about you about Jeff Charlotte, and he's very big on, fascism, the signs of fascism in America. And he had this very extraordinary zoom encounter at an event with a New York Times reporter who absolutely refused to accept any criticism of what the New York Times reported.
And he said, well, we have 10 million subscribers, so we must be doing something right. Well, one of the things they might be doing right is not scaring people and making them feel comfortable when they read it by not talking about this stuff. But another thing is, yeah, he pointed out what you pointed out.
That the New York Times does not have the biggest audience when it comes to this kind of stuff. Glenn, Glenn Beck does. Tucker Carlson does.
SHEFFIELD: Right Side broadcasting or Yeah. Any of these other ones? Like where are the MSN BBC alternatives? I don't. I don't see them. It's like MSNBC is regarded as the pinnacle of left wing media, but it's owned by a gigantic multinational, billion dollar conglomerate.
PERLSTEIN: till you read about how they helped oil the the march to war in Iraq, man. Well, of course they, fired Phil Donahue, yeah.
SHEFFIELD: They fired Phil Donahue. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, but anyway, there's, a lot more we could talk about here. But we don't want to keep everybody all day. So what's tell it for people who want to
PERLSTEIN: Well, so I got my weekly column at the American Prospects over at prospect. org. I do Twitter, @rickperlstein. I do Blue Sky, also @rickperlstein, and you might have been able to sometimes an opening comes up on my 5,000 Facebook friends so they can try that, which I have a pretty lively community there.
SHEFFIELD: All right. So that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the conversation and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show. We've got the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you're a paid subscribing member, you get full access to every episode.
And I thank you very much for your support. And I'll see you next time.
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