Episode Summary
Even though they don’t intend to, many people who oppose Donald Trump are unintentionally helping him by saying that his authoritarian policies are actually conservative.
It’s obviously true that both reactionary authoritarianism and conservatism are right-of-center political philosophies, but they are definitely not the same thing: Conservatives want to keep things how they are; authoritarians want to centralize power and destroy dissent. That means then that when you label them as the same, you’re engaging in the exact same kind of error that Joe McCarthy did when he equated communism and liberalism.
But it’s not just promoting inaccuracy to say that conservatism and authoritarianism are the same. It’s making the job of the authoritarians much easier. That’s because extremist movements throughout history, including Islamists, have frequently used a propaganda technique called “entryism” to disguise their radical agenda in the rhetoric of more mainstream political ideologies.
Robert O. Paxton is one of many historians who have noted that 20th century fascist regimes relied upon conservative voters and parties to open the gates to power to them because they didn’t have enough votes on their own.
In this episode, I’m joined by former conservative radio host Charlie Sykes to talk about all of this in the current moment. We also discuss the right wing’s free speech ruse, how authoritarianism has always been present within the modern American right, and how Republican consultants promoted extremism within their party until it became a monster that they could no longer control.
There’s no doubt whatsoever that the pre-Trump Republican elites bear responsibility for encouraging the growth of authoritarianism within their party, but it’s still important that we avoid telling conservative Americans that Trump’s dictatorial policies are the same as theirs. Joe Manchin is a conservative. Donald Trump is an authoritarian.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
08:23 — Two political strands within the Republican party
13:26 — How extremist groups hide themselves within mainstream ones using ‘entryism’
18:28 — Private actors versus government censorship
23:05 — Did liberals give up on persuasion after same-sex marriage rightfully won?
26:10 — Charlie’s and Matt’s encounters with right-wing extremism during their Republican years
31:44 — How Republican campaign operatives encouraged racism and conspiracism
37:34 — The criminalization of Christianity narrative
41:24 — Final thoughts
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So, today’s topic that we are going to be discussing is, what I’m calling the rate Republican free speech hoax.
And it is something that has been going on for many decades now. And both you and I came out of the world of right wing media. and so we’re going to get a little bit inside baseball today in a way that you don’t typically get to do on MSNBC or other places, I think, right? But I want to go behind the curtain a bit because one of the, key points about Trumpism and the far right tradition of reaction that he comes out of is that.
They also lied to people like you and me, like, oh, just as much as the [00:04:00] voters who will vote for Trump and have no idea what he stands for. They also lied to the talk show hosts like you and the conservative bloggers, former conservative bloggers like me.
CHARLIE SYKES: Well, you know what, I’ve been thinking a lot about, the, argument that you will sometimes hear that, that Trump, that Trumpism is somehow a logical extension of American conservatism. which of course is not. It is a radical break. We, it is not conservative in any sense. It is in fact a radical right wing ideology.
But to your point, for years, and it really peaked, I think in the last couple of years, Republicans and the MAGA world dawned the cloak of being free speech absolutist, that they were the champions of it. Now, this was a reaction I think to some of the excesses that we saw in recent years, on academic university campuses. And one of the through lines, even though I described myself as a conservative, one of the through lines of a lot of [00:05:00] what I did and what you did as well, was to try to revivify classical liberalism that classical liberalism that was deeply invested in academic freedom and free speech.
And you had people know the absolutist like Elon Musk, who decided that this was going to be the banner that they were going to, go into the 2024 election with. That I think has been exposed as a complete and total hoax. It is one of the biggest bait and switches ever. Doesn’t mean they’re not still principal conservatives who are part of that classical liberal tradition, but people like Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, JD Vance have completely abandoned that.
And I know we’re getting ahead of ourselves, but they have embraced. A, rather ranked illiberalism, and I think you and I have talked about this before there have been illiberal attacks on free speech from [00:06:00] the left and from the right, but right now, you are seeing the most aggressive illiberal use of state power to suppress speech that we have seen in decades, if ever in this country.
SHEFFIELD: I mean I would say that the closest analog that we’ve had was the Japanese internment. And Trump, he’s saying he wants to lock up people who are-- who he accuses of being part of Antifa, quote unquote. But Antifa doesn’t exist, it’s not an organization nobody can get. Like no one can give them money. It’s literally not possible to give antifa money because they’re anarchists. You cannot have an organization of anarchists, and antifa hates the Democrats. So the idea that the Democrats are somehow setting up this little puppet of antifa super soldiers like it, it is just complete garbage.
And it’s an obvious lie. But it’s, they don’t want you to think that through.
SYKES: Yeah. But they, but it’s convenient for them. To take some of [00:07:00] the protestors and, obviously there’s a certain symbolism about Portland, there is no such thing as an organized antifa, but there are people who go under that banner and they’ll often wear masks and, they will behave badly.
But you know, what Trump has done is he has inflated them because he needs an enemy, right? He needs a pretext for the deployment of truths and for the suppression of various kinds of, speech. And so this has become his pretext. If that doesn’t work, he will simply shift some other target because again, it’s all a pretext.
So it may be antifa today it will be somebody else tomorrow, but it’s all a pretext to go after George Sorrows, to go after other critics and to declare various kinds of emergencies to gave him super presidential powers, which by the way, speaking of non-conservative, I mean, are you old enough to remember when conservatives were in favor of small government and they emphasized constitutional protections [00:08:00] and it was all about individual liberty, and the Second Amendment was all about people being able to resist tyranny.
Now it’s like, bring it on. Bring on the super state, right? Bring on the dictator, who one day for one one term. It’s a tremendous abandonment of everything they said they were for 10 minutes ago.
Two political strands within the Republican party
SHEFFIELD: Absolutely. And and, I think we do in historical accuracy, standpoint that this tradition, it was always there.
Some of these people were into authoritarianism from the very beginning, including William F. Buckley in his early years. In the beginning he wrote a book explicitly saying, look, there should be no free speech on college campuses.
SYKES: Yes.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, God and Man at Yale. And that professors who don’t believe in Jesus should be fired, and professors who are atheists or professors who are Jewish and want to-- he wasn’t even saying that they were [00:09:00] promulgating their specific beliefs. He was just saying they don’t believe in the resurrection and so they need to be fired. Like that was, and then he wrote a book defending Joe McCarthy and saying he was great, and that you should leave him alone. Like it was, in many ways, Buckley was kind of the. With McCarthy, he was like an anti McCarthy.
That’s essentially what he was doing. And a lot of people, they, it wasn’t just him like that this whole idea of Dwight Eisenhower as a communist. And that we have to stop him. Like that was a, very big thing. And the whole paranoia about United Nations, which Trump, of course is buying into as well.
SYKES: Right.
SHEFFIELD: So, so that stuff was always there. And, I’m curious though, from your personal experience as a former conservative talk show host like how often did you see that facet of, this authoritarian reactionism when you, when your callers and the people that you dealt with?
SYKES: Well, it was always there. And I’ve described this as the recessive [00:10:00] gene of conservatism, that it was always there beneath the surface.
And you can go back even further than that. So, I would encounter it, although, the conservative movement that I was part of was, I think, more aligned with classical liberalism. So let’s talk about, I want to go back to your comments about Buckley, because you’re absolutely right. But Buckley grew, he went through evolutions on race, on speech, on a variety of things.
And eventually, a decade after of defending Joe McCarthy, he is playing a crucial role in expelling and excommunicating some of the far right you to some of the John Birch Society, the Robert Welch’s, the KKK, the antisemites, et cetera. He also played a significant role in exiling, at least temporarily, people like Pat Buchanan from the conservative movement because of their antisemitism.
But, as you point out, there’s a long tradition of this in American culture. In fact, we can go back [00:11:00] you were mentioning McCarthy era as one of the worst areas. Keep in mind that Joe McCarthy was not president of the United States. We talked about this is the worst sinces McCarthy, well, let’s talk about that, because Dwight Eisenhower was the president, not Joe McCarthy. Imagine Joe McCarthy with the power of the presidency, the power of the FBI, the power of the Department of Justice. What, the would have looked like. We’d gone through a previous red scare, believe it or not, under Woodrow Wilson, kind of forgotten about that American nightmare where we had the Palmer raids, where we had a, an extremely weaponized department of justice that we now and suppressed free speech, particularly socialist speech in some of the most aggressive ways. For some reason, that’s all been memory hole.
But I always think going back with your question, there was always a push and pull on the right. Where some of the people, and again, you’re seeing the same thing right now where you have this sort of nationalist nativist right [00:12:00] versus what I thought was the ascendant part of conservatism, and this is what I got wrong. I thought the, reformist, wing of the party that embraced classical liberalism, that brace Cree speech, academic freedom inclusiveness was in fact the future of the party.
You look back on that now, and it was clearly a delusion. Donald Trump and MAGA decided that, no, that’s a dead end. We’re going to go with blood and soil. And blood. And soil also means that we’re going to use the state to shape the culture in our own image as opposed to what conservatives had argued for a half a century.
That government has a very limited role, and what’s crucial about small government. Is that the smaller government is the greater the sphere for individual freedom. The larger government was the more that sphere of individual freedom [00:13:00] is truken. Well look at Trump and JD Vance and the FCC right now. They are expanding government power and ly every corner of American life and culture, which again, is so diametrically opposed to what we were told.
Conservatism was back in well again from, since the end of World War II.
How extremist groups hide themselves within mainstream ones using ‘entryism’
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. So you have these two ideologies, conservatism and reactionism, and, a lot of people I think don’t understand that there are, that these are different things.
And from a historical standpoint, the analog is looking at the Soviet Union and liberalism. So with McCarthy both, he was saying that everyone who was a liberal was a communist. Right. But also the communists were saying that they were just good liberals.
SYKES: Liberals in a hurry, right?
SHEFFIELD: Liberals in a hurry. Yeah. That was their catch phrase. That was [00:14:00] this phenomenon of extremist groups trying to label themselves as part of a mainstream, nonviolent, free speech associated movement. This is called entryism political science, where that’s what they do, is that they wrap and this happens across the world, across ideologies.
This also happens in, in Islamic dominated countries where Islamism is an ideology which says there should be no democracy. There should only be religious authoritarianism. And, but I’m just a regular Muslim. This just happens over and that’s what the key to Trump’s continued support is. That he’s lied to conservatives and told them I’m one of you.
But he is a reactionary authoritarian who as you said wants a, gigantic government and he literally is taking pieces of private businesses like Intel and and doing everything that they said Joe [00:15:00] Biden was tiring for. Donald Trump is doing it. And then the same thing with, all of these I conspiracies like of Alex Jones, about all the globalists are taking over the world.
They’re trying to get rid of American sovereignty. Well, you know what? There are people that are doing it, and it’s people like Peter Thiel. It’s people like Bellagio, Serena Bassan. It’s like, these tech oligarchs, they’re the ones that are doing it. And the same thing with the NRA. And the government’s coming after you and wants to round you up as a citizen.
Well, yeah, they are. And it’s your side that’s doing it. Like that. What they, that’s what they tell you.
SYKES: Well, I radically agree with you. I think this is an important point for, progressives to realize because, and again, I am frustrated with the people who are saying that there is this straight line through all conservatism that you know, that, if you supported MIT Romney, supported John McCain or any of the Bushes or wild Reagans that you created Donald Trump, this plays into.
the Trumpian hands because it normalizes what’s happening now. [00:16:00] It says that it’s just a continuation it, that it’s just the same old, and I think you and I are arguing here. I think this is very important that. It is a big mistake. I think this is the same old, or that this is normal or that this is a continue.
It is a very radical break. Now, again, there were these recessive genes. They were always there, but it was not the whole story. And I think the distinctions that you know, that are so important, it is important to make a distinction between say Hubert Humphrey and she guvera. It is a major, it is very important to make a distinction between-- and again, I’m dating myself-- between, an A CLU liberal, and Trotskyites they may do all on the left and to the right. They all look as alike.
Well, the left is in many ways making the same mistake. They look at the right and they think, well, all of you people have the same, essentially have the same ideological roots.
That [00:17:00] is not true. And by the way. And th this is related to a, maybe it will sound like a digression. Here’s another thing that frustrates me, is the, is that Donald Trump and Maga will often wrap themselves in the cloak of conservatism. And you’re right, they told people, go along with all of this because for years you considered yourself a Republican and you cons conservative.
See what we’re doing in your name now. A lot of us are saying, no, that’s not what we’re doing. But think about the whole doctrine of constitutional originally, that they’re, constantly talking about to justify many of the things that, that they’re doing. I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent time going back and reading the Federalist papers and reading about what the founding fathers were thinking and what they were doing and what is not originalist, what Donald Trump is doing right now, the original focus of that constitution was to prevent tyrants. They were obsessed with blocking tyrants, limiting tyrants, [00:18:00] keeping tyrants out of office, and then constraining their power if anybody became tyrants adjacent. This was the fundamental original of originalism. And yet somehow you have a lot of people who are going into the ballot box voting for Donald Trump, calling the pollers.
They support what Donald Trump is doing, but they would consider themselves constitutional conservatives. I mean, I think we need to call bullshit on them.
Private actors versus government censorship
SHEFFIELD: Absolutely. Yeah. And another thing that they’ve also done that is a key lie for them is that. They equate private actors with, government actors.
So if somebody is on, is criticizing some, if a bunch of private citizens are criticizing some, somebody for doing something racist or doing something, sexually harassing somebody that’s not the government, that’s not a violation of free speech. Right? If a whole bunch of people say, you are a jerk [00:19:00] and you did something awful, I don’t like you, that’s not censorship.
That’s somebody saying that this is, these is private citizens in using their free speech. that’s, the difference between what Donald Trump is doing with, with scientists. I mean, he literally issued a a list of prohibited words to scientists, words that have nothing to do with, politically correct terms.
Like they, they, flag scientists who use the word woman. And, yeah. And that’s the difference. Like they want you to think that this is the same. Like that’s, they just do this over and over that they equate everything and try to muddy the waters and trick people who don’t pay attention.
SYKES: Okay. I want to agree with you and disagree in, part, okay. I want to agree that it is a, crucial distinction. Private actors versus government actors. There’s a reason why we [00:20:00] treat them differently. I mean, first of all, the Constitution treats them differently because government power is so great because government power is coercive because the government can take away your freedom and your life and, can and destroy you.
So that’s why, the First Amendment says that private individuals can engage in the suppression of speech, but the government cannot. Now, having said that, the, that the distinction is important. I do think that that the, cancel culture that existed for the last what decade or so was primarily private actors, but it was an attack on free speech
It was not an attack on the first amendment. And those are, there’s a slight distinction and the attack on free speech. I think serve to hollow out the support for the values that you and I are talking about here. You, I’m watching [00:21:00] this juggernaut attacking pre expression and the lack of effective pushback, and I’m afraid that what happened was there was a tenser movement from the illiberal left and the illiberal, right?
Basically saying, yeah, we think it’s okay to suppress speech. Let’s call, let’s equate speech with violence. Let’s say that words make me feel unsafe. let’s say that there are certain things that you know mean that you should be driven out of light society or lose your job for, and, I think there, there has been a sense that, yeah, I, I’m, we’re actually in favor of censorship of the ideas we don’t like.
And so when the right comes in and says, well. You folks on the left have been saying the speech you don’t like is violent. We’re going to do the same thing. So I think this is where we kind of need to step back and go. We need to have this relearning of what [00:22:00] liberal tolerance is about. Again, the distinction between government and private is absolutely essential, but on the other hand, there is a connective tissue there that if you become intolerant of ideas that you don’t like.
Don’t be surprised when it leeches out the way it is now into government action. Are you following me? I’m, because the, these distinctions I think are very, important. I mean, I, lemme tell you what I’m thinking about. Few years ago, do you remember that, Harper’s letter you had a lot of senten sent center, right center left.
Writers write a letter, talk to you about, Hey, we ought to have vigorous debate in this country. We ought to have free speech. We ought not to destroy people’s lives because of what they say. There was tremendous blowback against that declaration of free speech. Almost all of it from the left, from the Identitarian left, so that now I do think that they have [00:23:00] eroded some of those values that’s made it easier for what Trump is doing with government
Did liberals give up on persuasion after same-sex marriage rightfully won?
SYKES: And I’m sorry to have gone on for so long then.
SHEFFIELD: no, that’s all right. I mean. Yeah, it’s there, is something there that I agree with. For sure. And it’s, I think what it, but I’m not, I don’t think I agree with everything. But you know, what I would say is that the idea that I would like the left to go to, to learn from how same-sex marriage became the law of the land.
and people were voting for it because that was a movement that, and I know a lot of the people that were involved with it. They were saying, look, we’re, we are going to make all the arguments for what we want and what we believe is morally right, including arguments that are not morally based at all.
So we’ll make practical arguments. We will make legal arguments, we will make pragmatic arguments about in terms of family so, so [00:24:00] they, they just offered. All possible arguments, including religious arguments because in fact there’s, a strong case for religious, viewpoint of same sex marriage.
and, they won by doing that. And there’s, so after that though, people did not pay attention to how that movement won. And instead they said, well. We’re just going to only make moral arguments, about our subsequent beliefs. So whether, it was things like, transgender rights, which I support a hundred percent.
but like, you can’t bully people into supporting a position that they don’t understand. So it, but if you can phrase it in a way that is saying, look, from your standpoint, this makes sense and it doesn’t hurt You And because you know the reality is. The percentage of people who are trans in the world is, way less than 1%.
So, and Charlie Baker, the [00:25:00] NCAA president, said, look, there’s, there were fewer than 10 trans athletes in the entire ncaa. This is more than 550,000 people, less than 10 of them. So this is not a thing to get upset about if you have people that are trans in sports, like it’s a distraction. That’s what it is.
And, but we have to be able to make these arguments that don’t require people to, because we have to be able to separate between the reason for wanting something and, people should be able to agree with you for a different reason. and I think that was the flaw of, the pre-Trump left, if you will.
SYKES: Well, yeah, I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole to tell you about the, trans issue in, any depth. But, there was this attempt to, impose this orthodoxy that you must believe all of these things, otherwise [00:26:00] you were, going to be cast in outer darkness. And I think that backfired badly.
that. Rather than having an open discussion about it they tried to shut it down and I don’t think it’s working.
Charlie’s and Matt’s encounters with right-wing extremism during their Republican years
SYKES: lemme take the conversation in a slightly different direction. And I know you and I have had this conversation before and I was thinking about the question you asked about when I was back in conservative media, did I see some of these other trends out there?
And, the answer is that, yeah, I, remember in the before times that there was the stream of the Christian right. It felt like it was from a completely different intellectual tradition than the one that I thought was becoming dominant conservatism, by the way, I was wrong about that, obviously, and I mean, I remember having discussions where I was very much taken aback by the sort of latent authoritarianism on the part of many people who clearly did not like the idea.
A [00:27:00] separation of 13 state would deny that it actually even existed or that it should exist. I remember a caller, I can’t even remember what decade it was, who it was kind of challenging him. He said, so do you think that school should have, prayer in school? Yes, he did. I said, which prayers?
good. The good prayers. Okay. Would it be appropriate for a public school to require students to say the Hail Mary every single day? He said Yes, I think that would be a really, good idea. And I’m thinking, okay, well wait. We are a long way from sort of, I, I think the general consensus opinion on all of this.
But there were people out there who took a very different view. The other area that I always found kind of disturbing and I-- look, I mean, we, have a, very complicated history in this country, including in places [00:28:00] like Wisconsin about race, and there were latent attitudes, particularly about immigrants and about other issues. And every once in a while that would break through and somebody would say something that was, egregiously, bigoted back in the four times you could push back against that.
And if you listen to, and whatever you think about George W. Bush or MIT Romney or John McCain, they did throughout their careers would say, wait, This is not who we are. We’re not going to engage in that kind of racism or bigot tricks. We need to appeal to our better angels. And again, for a long time, I felt, and I’m not sure I was totally wrong about this.
When you did that, people would go, okay, That was sort of in the back of my mind, or that’s what my uncle might say. But yeah, I don’t want to be that person. I let’s think about this differently. So there was an alternative pen out for conservatism when you had [00:29:00] leaders were morally based.
And again, whatever you think about their politics. Remember how George W. Bush handled the question the question of anti-Muslim bigotry after nine 11. You remember how John McCain pushed back against somebody at a rally that said that, you got a accused Barack Obama being a Muslim terrorist or something.
Those voices are gone. So now what you have is you have people like Donald Trump and Stephen Miller who are, and JD Vance and others. Ing on the worst impulses. They are giving permission to people to indulge in the kinds of, I don’t hate his that we thought that we had exiled from the movement.
And this is the other big law. I think of
SYKES: all of the efforts for years that people had to. Up right wing [00:30:00] politics or conservative politics, and the Trump era has just completely blown that up. So again, I get frustrated with the people who say, well, you’ve always been raised.
I mean, look at what Buckley wrote back in the 1950s. Look at the Southern strategy. Look at various other things. All of that was there, but I thought that the arc could have been bent the other way. Clearly it didn’t. Maybe I was wrong, but it’s not a straight line continuum.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it isn’t. And again, that’s a great point.
And and I personally also encountered that in as a conservative blogger that I Had colleagues that they would write posts saying that they would get mad at, CBS for having a character that was a lesbian Yeah. On their show. and they would, write that up and I would look at that and say.
This is, junk. Like, I don’t want this on my site. who cares if they have a lesbian [00:31:00] character? Who cares if there’s a gay couple on this show? Like, if you don’t like it, don’t watch it. You know it. They’re not doing anything to you by having these characters and, they’re not saying, oh, you have to be gay.
No, they’re not saying that. They’re saying gay people exist. And you know what? They’ve been alone. You don’t have to support same-sex marriage, whatever their existence is not an oppression. And and, but they continued to have those opinions and I continued to see ‘em and that was, it was a source of friction for me with, some of my former colleagues because they didn’t believe, and they still don’t so I did see that, that it, was like two strands that were always there, but even,
How Republican campaign operatives encouraged racism and conspiracism
SHEFFIELD: This idea, of this recessive Eugene, as you’re calling it, or, what I call the reactionary tradition, it’s the political operatives, the, they knew it was there and they encouraged it a lot more. They exploit it.
SYKES: [00:32:00] Yes, they did.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and I think that’s something also that, a lot of people on the, center to left don’t quite understand is that people like you and I, we were also Duke.
That people lied to us about what they were doing and who they were courting, because while they might have while a lot of them would publicly say, oh, I don’t want this racism stuff, they would also want them to vote for that. Like they would, or they might say, well, don’t say the Christian nationalist stuff in public, but make sure to vote for me.
And like, so it was like they created this. Well, Frankenstein Monster in a lot of ways. Well, they, didn’t let us know that they were doing it and we didn’t we had no idea.
SYKES: Well, in fairness, okay. I would like to agree with you on that. But I think at some level we did, or I did you need that they were going on because.
I mean, again, I mean, I, can go back and find things that I wrote and I was like, [00:33:00] we need to fight against these people. We need to, distance ourselves from these people. We can’t be the party of idiots anymore. We need to, I did a cover story for a public policy magazine before Tom saying we need to get rid of the crap poss and everything.
But I think part of what was going on though, and I’m, I wish I could say they all lied about it. But I think that a lot of us simply made that sort of, let’s look the other way, let’s look the other way because this is the coalition and we needed the coalition. We needed all of those votes.
So there was a little bit of wink win. I mean, I, remember going to certain meetings and there’d be some craziest person. I mean, just there out off the wall. And it was like, okay what am I going to do about that person? Am I going to throw them out of the room? Or they’re going to end up voting.
For the candidates that I was supporting. So I, think that there was a moral feeling on the part of people like me that we knew that was going on, [00:34:00] and yet thinking that this is just part of, this is the way, this is the way it works. I mean, the southern strategy was not a secret.
some of the stuff that, some of the, so Who was, who was the Bush? actually, I’m sorry. Forgetting his nickname. Water Thelia. We kind of knew what Leet waters were up to and it was like the game playing and, this is something I worry about in politics today and in the media, which I call a hack application of the media.
Is that we have too many political operatives and too many political consultants who we now treat like somehow as if they are legitimate journalists or pundits. And the reaction is these are hired guns. These are people who basically, you bring in, you give them the money when you go out and say, get the job done.
And I don’t really want to know how it’s, I don’t really want to know all the stuff you do. And so I [00:35:00] think that. Unfortunately, there’s some, not a real distinction between the people who are sitting around thinking what is right, what is wrong? What do we believe, what do we not believe? And that we’ve seeded a lot of that to what works, what is effective, what moves the dial?
How can I raise more money off this outrage? But yes, for years and years. I think, politicians, Republican politicians tended to be one thing while exploiting something who was below them, and they were very surprised that what was below them was uncontrollable.
The analogy that I’ve used is imagine. You’ve been growing, you’ve been growing ba at a baby alligator in your bathtub for years, and then suddenly you were really surprised that it got big and it crawled outta the bathtub and it’s going down the street and it’s eating people. It was your alligator.
You should have known. Right. But you are somewhat responsible for the baby alligator. [00:36:00]
SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah. Yeah. That’s and definitely a true point. And, like Bush when he was going against John McCain, his people put out a false rumor that John Mcgain had a black child out of wedlock.
and of course they, denied that it was them, but yeah, it was them. Yeah.
SYKES: But it was, yeah.
SHEFFIELD: And and so, yeah, so like there, there was this, continuous operation. And the same thing I remember also seeing, some of this Christian nationalism that like for me, ‘cause I left this world before Trump. And it was a lot harder, I’ll tell you, because there was no infrastructure out there saying, okay, what’s happening to the Republican party? Nobody was, nobody wanted to, pursue that story when I was trying to tell them about it.
But, I remember watching Tony Gherkins, the, the head of the American, family or whatever it is and he was saying, that Christians who believe in same-sex [00:37:00] marriage, they don’t deserve religious liberty because it’s just fake. It’s fake. They’re lying. They’re not real Christians. And so if they want the religious right to perform same-sex weddings, well, they shouldn’t have it because they’re not having a traditional
SHEFFIELD: belief, so therefore they, to get I religious liberty and I thought these guys were marginalized.
SYKES: See, this was my mistake. And I think a lot of our mistake, we thought those voices were on the fringes and were marginalized. It turns out well, they certainly are no longer, people like that. Now they’re at the table.
The criminalization of Christianity narrative
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And yeah, exactly. And so like for most of my career as a conservative operative and commentator I didn’t really pay attention to the people because I thought, well, they’re dumb. their arguments are crap and who cares whatever. eventually I realized, oh gosh, these people actually, comprise plurality of the voters, and, but it’s also that the conservative be, a lot of them [00:38:00] became more radicalized because they were lied to because so many people who are religious conservatives, they don’t understand that just because people don’t agree with you doesn’t mean that you are going to be criminalized.
And that narrative of the criminalization of Christianity. Like they really have sold that to people and it’s been very, effective to them. They tell you that disagreement is oppression. Well, it’s not.
SYKES: Well, and very, effectively what MAGA has done is it has really played the victim card.
And again, this is very, convinced their supporters and particularly Christians, that they are persecuted, they’re coming for you and you are the victim. The irony is, and this was, I’m dating myself of course. Is that back in the early 1990s, I wrote a book called A Nation of Victims.
This new culture that everybody wanted to be a victim because it gave you political clout. provided a certain amount of innocence. But I never imagined that [00:39:00] conservative Republicans would embrace that culture of victimization as aggressively as they have, or frankly, as effectively as they have.
In fact, if you listen to Donald Trump, and he has done this very, effectively. When he was being charged criminally with all those indictments, he would say, they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you, or they’re coming after me because they want to get you and identify I am in the way.
and in the, on the Christian right, this, sense that you’re talking about, that that, they are somehow under siege all the time. It’s critical to understand their radicalization and their politics. It’s also important to understand why they’re willing to tolerate so many things it seems so aggressively unchristian, which is they’re basically saying we’re huddled in the basement. They’re kicking down the doors. We can’t afford to have qualms about these other things other, and they’ve convinced these people, [00:40:00] in the absence of any evidence, that in fact that’s going on.
SHEFFIELD: They have and they’ve just completely turned around the ideas of Jesus saying that my kingdom is not of this world, so, oh my God the entire point of what he was saying was, look, people are going to, most people will disagree with you. Most people won’t like you. The government isn’t going to implement your ideas, and you should be okay with that because that’s not what you’re here for.
You’re not here. To put your values into the law. You’re here to be a good person and to, do good works. That’s the point of what this is.
But they’ve, switched it. They’ve completely inverted and said, no, my identity is what matters. And that was always one thing that I always thought was interesting when Trump was very first coming along in the Republican primaries in 20 15, 20 16, that I predicted in 2015 that he would win.
SYKES: Did you?
SHEFFIELD: Everybody thought I was nuts. but I was Right. And I mean, one of the things that I noticed was that the [00:41:00] people who were the most supportive of Trump in the beginning were the, self-identified Christians who never went to church.
SYKES: yes.
And I thought, yes,
SHEFFIELD: And that, that’s really what has kind of become, because it makes sense Trump himself, of course, doesn’t, church doesn’t know anything about Christianity, doesn’t know anything about the Bible.
SYKES: He doesn’t seem to bother with it.
SHEFFIELD: No, because it’s about power.
Final thoughts
SYKES: So for, to underline your point about the complete switching about what Jesus said about, government, it, it is interesting watching the, these right wing evangelical Christians now embrace what’s being called Red Caesar. That they want their own Caesar, but as long as he is the red Caesar, they’re all in favor of it.
And I think that once you begin to understand. That we also understand, again, going back to our original theme, the radical rate from values that used to be taken for granted, or at least I thought it was to be taken for granted [00:42:00] or maybe had been in a subterranean way or maybe you and I had simply you less than me.
I mean, because you paid attention to all of this. We’re always sort of there and latent sort of like a chronic disease.
So this is not going to go away. Donald Trump leads the scene we’ll, we won’t have a cult of personality, necessarily, but, things have been un unleashed in our culture and in our politics that are not going away anytime soon, because they have some pretty deep roots.
But again, please, for the listeners of, this discussion, don’t make the mistake, don’t buy the MAGA lie that this is normal conservatism. Do not buy Trump’s
SYKES: bait and switch that somehow what he is doing is a continuation of, legitimate reformist conservatism. Because it’s not.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly.
All right. well, I think you, have, a hard out here in the [00:43:00] next couple minutes, so. Thanks, for being here. So tell us what you’re doing, real quick or any, anything you want to promote here before we head out.
SYKES: Well like you, I’m on Substack putting a little most of my energy into independent media these days.
So if you, if you have a chance to subscribe to, the contrary newsletter and the to the Contrary podcast. we have been putting out a newsletter pretty much every single day trying to remind everyone that. We are not the crazy ones. Even though it does feel like the world’s losing its mind.
SHEFFIELD: All right.
Yes, absolutely true. Right. Cool. All right, well thanks for being here, Charlie. Good to see you.
SYKES: Thank you so much, Matthew. Anytime.
SHEFFIELD: All right. Thanks everybody for watching.
SYKES: Yeah, thank you.
