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- [00:00]
A
Hey everybody. Tim Ohr from the Bulwark here. We got into some heavy stuff on MSNBC today, cable news. How about that? Deep thoughts, real feelings. I guess that's where we are in the country right now. I was there with Nicole Wallace and Alex Wagner and we just started talking about where we are in this country, whether there's any hope for actually de escalating and finding common ground, whether what our threat assessment is on where we are when it comes to authoritarianism. And you know, I just, you can probably sense it in me. If you're a daily viewer of the channel. This is the one question I'm really torn about because I just, I have this natural instinct inside of me that is a pessimistic one. If I enter jvl, I see a lot of the warning signs out there and I see things probably getting worse before they get better. Thanks to our president, thanks to AI, thanks to cultural pressure, social pressure, cultural norms. Talk about this more on tomorrow's podcast. So buckle up. And so I feel that pessimism, I feel that worry. I, I feel that just sort of the sort of sense of being beaten down. I get it. I'm there. My, the outlook in my crystal ball, my little Magic 8 ball outlook, not positive for American democracy and for our society. And yet who the am I to give up? It's not over yet. And I see some like, maybe this is why I feel so passionately about this. You can tell I'm working through all this in real time. I see this anger and resentment and grievance building up among the anti magus, the pro democracy coalition, the democrats, the left, however you want to describe it. I see it, I can sense it. I can feel it. I feel it in the comments. I feel it in my life. And I feel a little responsibility because if I'm always negative, if I'm always talking about how bad it is, if I'm always talking about the ways in which these other guys are cruel and ghoulish, then there's good reason to feel anger and resentment and feel grievance. And there is, that's the thing, there is. Everything I'm saying is true. I'm not, I don't come on here and do fake outrage about the black Little Mermaid. You know, it's all true. All the things I'm talking about are things worth being outraged about, worth being aggrieved over. The other side is run by people that are cruel and are indifferent to suffering. That's just, it just is. ICE is behaving horribly Treating people in ways that is, that takes away their humanity. That just is. And so this is where like this little tension comes inside of me, which is like I'm speaking the truth, I'm telling, I'm calling it as I see it. And yet I also don't want the people hearing it to become totally despondent. And I don't want the people hearing it to become so embittered towards folks on the MAGA side that they can't see them as humans, they can't see a path towards living together because we have to end up living together. We have to. This is that we only have one country, we only have one Earth, we only have one body. Like we have to live together. And so I'm just trying to figure out how to find a way to correctly and accurately and passionately share my anger, my rage about what they're doing and the policies they're enacting, share my projections about the path that we're on, while also not making people despair, while also not making people feel like it's impossible and unimaginable to bridge a gap, that there's no way to find redemption. I believe in redemption. I'm a beneficiary of other people being able to believe in redemption. And so I'm not supposed to get into my emotions. This was supposed to be a little 30 second intro to a television hit, but here I am getting verklempt. So that's it, that's where I am. I'm going to give you my real outlook. I'm going to speak the truth about the other side. But I don't want, I don't think it's useful or fruitful to be despairing. I don't think it's useful or fruitful to see people and not feel like they can be redeemed, because we all can. So there you go. Up next, Nicole Wallace, Alex Wagner, me.
- [05:07]
B
Let me show you how many people watch Jimmy Kimmel's return monologue on social media. 19 million and counting. That is 3. 13.3 million on YouTube and 5.6 million on Instagram. And that was just the numbers that we had available to us before we came on the air. Obviously it's a, it's a quickly escalating figure and we'll keep you updated. But this is, this is the response I think that Dominic is talking about. It's Donald Trump's post. I can't believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his show was Canceled? Stop right there. Who do you think at ABC told the White House that his show was canceled?
- [05:54]
A
That's a great question. I couldn't speculate on that. I mean, with Donald Trump, it's one of those things where it's like, did he make it up or is he sharing something out of school? Both are very Donald Trump characteristics. So it's hard to know. I think the interesting that post goes on to talk about how much money he got out of ABC from the lawsuit after the George Stephanopoulos shakedown that Disney, that they settled. And, and I think that, you know, we're getting to an interesting place where he goes on to talk about how he wants, he wants to get more money out of them this time and he wants to sue them again this time. And it's sort of this like, like authoritarianism by lawsuit or I guess what the Ted Cruz line about, about Brendan Carr, a mobster. It's a little different than, you know, kind of authoritarian attacks on free speech in other countries. The kinds of. Jimmy Kimmel was talking about his monologue, Right. Because it failed, like, it failed to shut him down completely. He wasn't on in some markets last night. We can get into that in a little bit. But it failed to shut him down and they failed in some of their most overt authoritarian attempts, which is good. And yet he still is using the presidency in a way that no other president has, certainly in modern times, to bully people, to shake people down, to extort people, to try to get money for himself, to try to line the pockets of either him or his family or his presidential library. And he's doing that in a very overt manner. And in some ways, I don't know, this might be another Trumpian innovation. I mean, obviously there have been corrupt banana republics before, but like this sort of like quasi authoritarian. It is different than what we see when we talk about the authoritarian attacks in other countries.
- [07:39]
B
Tim, I want to read this line one more time from Jimmy Kimmel. He says maybe the silver lining from this is we found one thing we can agree on and maybe we'll even find another one. Maybe we can get a little bit closer together. We do agree on a lot of things. And I thought about the clip I texted you about your appearance this week on a panel with Piers Morgan, where I wondered, in watching that, if you think that's possible, if you think there is still enough that we agree on to even talk to each other.
- [08:13]
A
I want to. I hope so. Right. If you don't believe that it's possible it's kind of like, what are we all doing here? You know, might as well quit doing this work and, I don't know, go to a beach somewhere and whale away our days. So I think so. I hope so. I think that there are a lot of forces working against it. As Alex mentioned in the last segment, the President of the United States is working against us all being able to come together and agree on things and lower the temperature. Several of the people I was on that panel with on Piers Morgan working against it, talking about how on the right it was Kari Lake and Eric Bolling talking about how they wanted to go to war against the left and how the left is violent and how everyone in the left is violent and sick. And you hear Trump saying that type of stuff. You do hear this stuff from the left as well. I don't think we should pretend like there aren't some folks in the left that say that kinds of things about maga. Paint them with a broad bush. And so I do hope we had this shooting today, which I guess you'll get to later at the ICE facility. I just think it's important for all of us to take a breath and talk about as. As much as we disagree about the things, we cannot just resort to political violence or minimize it or just think that that is the inevitable end game to this. Because if we think it's the inevitable end game to this, it will be the inevitable end game. And what I liked about what Jimmy Kimmel did last night is he modeled what I think a temperament and a rhetoric that, that I think everybody on the left broadly or the pro democracy movement could learn from. He was defiant, he was stalwart. There's no question where he stood when it comes to questions of democracy or questions of political violence or what his ideology was. Even you played that clip where he listed out the issues that he cares about. So he was defiant against this administration, against political violence. He wasn't weak or both sidesing it or anything like that. But he also was empathetic and authentic in talking about it. And he talked with emotion about how he felt about the assassination of Charlie Kirk and Erica Kirk's speech. And he talked about how he felt about what they must be going through. He talked, as you mentioned, about his agreement here with Ted Cruz, his unlikely agreement with him. He did it with humor. And I think that if we could get to a place where you can talk with humor and with passion and with authenticity about your disagreements with the other political side, but also the ways where potentially you can Find some common ground. I mean, that's the only frickin hope we have if we can, if we can't get to that place and we are speed running our way, like I said in that clip, to something looks more like Yugoslavia, something that looks like one of these countries where political violence just happens all the time and you have these different political tribes or ethnic tribes and you're in a hot war. I don't think anybody wants that. And I think that you can be opposed to that while also being clear in opposition to what the Trump administration is doing, you know, or if you're in maga, you know, being in opposition to the left.
- [11:06]
B
Tim, what do you take? Yeah, it does. And I'm taking it all in. I'm listening. But I want to ask you if you take this moment and feel like the collective empathy I think that Jimmy Kimmel expressed. What a lot of people felt when they saw Erica Kerr grieving her husband and forgiving his assassin, his murderer was deep regard for her strength and deep empathy for her pain. And I think what a lot of people felt when Jimmy Kimmel was taken off the air was deep fear for the rights to disagree with the people in power. And I wonder if you think those two universally experienced emotions endure or if you think we're just at such a velocity that nothing endures.
- [12:01]
A
Yeah, I wish I could tell you I was optimistic about that enduring. I'm not. I think that we're in a very like. I think the fever pitch is very high right now. And I think that there's a lot of irresponsible people stroking it, starting at the White House at the top. And so I'm concerned about that. But in order to actually de escalate, you need folks like Jimmy Kimmel to do what he did last night. And I do think there's a good start. And I do think you also need to believe that there's some hope. And this is going back to my slight disagreement, I think, which was mostly an agreement with Alex. In the last segment we were talking about where are we on the authoritarian pipeline. One of the reasons that I like to say to point out the silver linings when I have a rare opportunity to do that, is I think it's important for people to believe we're not on a path or not nearly Pyongyang or not Russia, because if we're Pyongyang or for the Soviet Union, there's no point in fighting. It's hopeless. And if it's hopeless, then people do turn to potentially, you know, rationalize violent actions. And I don't want people to feel hopeless. It's bad. We should be clear eyed about what's happening. It's unprecedented what this president has been doing, you know, attacking the rule of law and attacking our democracy. But we've also seen successful pushback. And I think people, you know, and so you know you didn't have that in Russia, right? People that do successful pushback in Russia get thrown out the window, they start falling downstairs. We're not there yet. And so we should take these moments of successful pushback to galvanize people, to make them feel hope, to make them realize that they can have victories. And if you realize you can't have victories against the other side, then maybe it doesn't seem quite as scary and maybe these more extremist radicalizations that we've seen aren't as likely. I mean that's a little bit Pollyanna even say just coming out of my mouth. I even skeptical of my own argument there but I just think that we have to at least try that, try to believe that and try that path.