← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
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- [00:24]
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- [01:00]
Bill Kristol
Hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome to Bulwark on Sunday. I'm pleased to be joined by my friend, colleague for a long time at the Weekly Standard and now contributor to the Bulwark. Every now and then, maybe a little more in the future, I hope. Tom Joslin, expert on many things. Did a lot of economics work when you were young, Tom, but then quite an expert on the fight against terrorism in the Middle east and then on the fight against extremism here at home. One of the main authors, the main author really, of the January 6th committee report. And Tom, thanks for thanks for joining me today.
- [01:33]
Tom Joslin
Oh, thanks for having me, Bill.
- [01:35]
Bill Kristol
I should begin by saying this is noon Sunday. Obviously last night we had the scary and bad events at the White House correspondent dinner. Very grateful that obviously I know I speak for Tom in this, that no one was hurt. Appreciative of law enforcement's work to make that happen, deplore acts of violence. And I think Tom and I have both been through enough of these kinds of breaking news events that we're both hesitant to speculate and don't really want to contribute to speculation before. We'll know a lot quite soon about the suspect, about security issues and all that. Sam Stein and I discussed this at 9am if people want to get a sort of 15, 20 minute discussion of where we are. But I'll leave it at that. And so Tom, we were going to talk about white supremacy, which it's an important issue, I think the Washington Post had a piece just two or three days ago pretty striking over the past I'll just read a couple of sentences over the past seven months 6% of Elon Musk's posts on X, the platform he owns, about 850 of them have been about race. More than half of these posts have used the word white. The billionaire has posted on X about race nearly daily from last October to mid April. And you and I had been discussing this about a week ago, but before the Post article, actually, you would notice much the same thing, and more broadly, the extent to which white supremacy is an important part of the maga. Right. Sadly. And so I thought it was worth a discussion. So, yeah, I mean, discuss.
- [03:12]
Tom Joslin
Well, you know, I mean, the bottom line from my perspective is I look at what the evidence shows and there are a lot of different ways to show that this is what's going on. The Washington Post article, you know, gave us some cover to report the truth about El Musk's posts, I would say because there's a lot of people who are coward into fear by threats of his lawsuits and that kind of thing. But Musk has been trafficking. I've noticed this way before the Post article, and you and I have talked about it. He's been trafficking in several different white supremacist tropes that have a long history online, going back 10 to 15 years when they weren't mainstream on the Republican right and now they are mainstream within the MAGA right. And that shows you how the MAGA right has gravitated toward extremism over time. More and more so. And I'll give you an example. So the statistics that the Washington Post quoted there, some of what Musk posts about is this idea of white genocide. The idea that the descendants of Europeans who came to America or elsewhere are in the crosshairs of a genocide and are going to be essentially demographically slaughtered over time. That is an absolute white supremacist idea that did not come from any mainstream source. It's something that came from the backwaters of the Internet that then gravitated to Elon Musk's X feed and other things like that, that he's trafficking in that other people in the administration and throughout the US Government, throughout the Trump regime and elsewhere are trafficking. They're the same type of thing. You know, one of the ideas is the great replacement theory. This was a white nationalist theory from the 70s that gained currency online about 15 years ago. This is now mainstream in MAGA politics. And it's something that Musk posts about on X and something about the J.D. vance and other members of the Trump regime have actually openly endorsed.
- [04:56]
Bill Kristol
So why do you think this is? Well, so let's talk about both the gravitation. How much was there, this always there lurking in sort of the conservative movement that you and I were, I think it's fair to say, friendly to and affiliated with. How much of it is new and really striking? How much more extreme is it today and how it could be there but not be still. Could be sort of a sideshow in MAGA world. But I think you, your view is that it's not.
- [05:24]
Tom Joslin
Yeah, I mean, I think this stuff, you know, to some degree was always there. But I would say, you know, in our defense, Bill, you know, you know, back in the days, you know, it wasn't in the driver's seat for sure. You know, it was something that was either in the backseat or in the trunk and a lot of people of other people in the car were uncomfortable with it and, but it was never sort of out in front and center and, and driving the whole car down the, down the road. Now it's very much in the driver's seat. I mean, the stuff is, is traffic daily and it's unapologetically put websites. I mean, you have the White House website, Department of Labor, Department of Homeland Security, they're all trafficking in the types of white supremacist tropes that Elon Musk traffic's in. There's just so many examples along these lines. A big tell. Here's a huge tell for everybody. Right. Just recently, Viktor Orban lost in Hungary. And Viktor Orban is someone that J.D. vance and Donald Trump were firmly behind. J.D. vance actually went to Hungary to campaign on Orban's behalf while complaining about other people supposedly interfering in Hungary's elections. Right, but why is that? Well, Orban was Europe's premier far right white nationalist. His entire agenda was about keeping Hungary white and protecting it from immigration. And as the fears over immigration in the US have grown on the American right, and certainly as Donald Trump's xenophobia has taken over the American right, what it did was it opened the door for more of the more and more explicit racist sort of ideas about immigration and immigrants. And that's where these ideas come from. So this stuff that was basically fringe 15 years ago is now right out front and center.
- [07:00]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, and I'd say 10, 15 years ago, the kind of nativist objections, there were some economic objections and other arguments, but the nativist objections to large scale immigration, let's just say both legal and undocumented, were framed in terms of assimilation worries that maybe recent immigrants were having more trouble assimilating than other ones. Cultural issues, they were having trouble in schools, whatever, sort of at least pretending to be concerned about the well being of these immigrants themselves and that they were, or at least concerned about enough about that and then more broadly that they were damaging the society. I do feel, but tell me if I'm wrong, that we've gone from a more, I don't know, culture, which always maybe was a bit of a mask for race, to just flat out race. So I'm curious what you'd have to say about that. And I'll ask a second question that you can also address if you hit the same time or subsequently, which is. I think it's. I personally think the white supremacist term is a very useful one to conceptualize this. I have the feeling, and I couldn't really articulate this, it's better, it's more accurate in some way than racism, but which of course is. I mean, there's a lot of racism, don't get me wrong. But you know, I just feel like, I don't know, to say a word of whatever order you want about white supremacy as a kind of way to characterize what is behind all of this. And then the question about whether how much has become about race, not simply about, you know, difficulty of assimilating particular groups.
- [08:26]
Tom Joslin
Yeah, I mean, look, the anti immigrant agenda, the nativist agenda in America has a long history, as you know. I mean, racism is always a part of it. The tribalism, rejecting the others that come in for the country from different places. Like on my mom's side, the Italian Irish who came in, they didn't assimilate easily. You know, a lot of my Jewish friends come from communities that didn't assimilate easily. I mean, there's been, there's always troubles with assimilation, sure. You know, but the, but the idea was the melting pot, right? We all came together to form a new, better country. We each give up a little bit of ourselves to form a new stronger whole, you know, and what you see, you know, really on the new right, the MAGA right, is a wholesale rejection of that. Similar to the nativist movements of the past, but with a lot of the white supremacy, white national stuff now front and center. And I. You actually hit on something. I struggle with whether to call it white supremacy or white nationalism. I think I've landed on white nationalism and here's why. Because they don't necessarily need to argue that white people are superior to argue that the America should be a white nation. Right. That America should retain its white nationalist roots. And what you see, is a white identitarian politics that is really bubbled to the surface here for the first time in my adult life anyway, in a way that does make race front and center to what they're pitching and what they're talking about. I mean, there's this obsession. You can see it on Elon Musk's feed. You can see it in the way senior Trump administration officials talk about the world. There's this obsession with demography. Right. They're absolutely obsessed with demographic change, falling birth rates and people of color coming into the country and reproducing faster than white people. I mean, this is all. All like, racial obsession, you know, to the nth degree. You know, we haven't really seen it like that front and center in a long time, I would say.
- [10:01]
Bill Kristol
Yeah. So, I mean, I'm old enough to remember when conservatives were concerned, and not unreasonably, incidentally, about teenage births. Certainly teenage births out of wedlock, births to teenagers out of wedlock. Those kids just don't have the same life prospects that people who are born into a stable family a little later in these. In. In women's lives, even an unstable family, but a little later, they just, you know, it's tough on them. It's tough on the moms. It's tough on the. On the little. The babies and the kids growing up. And so there was a way, which that was not a crazy thing. Obviously, there's limits in a free society to how much one can, you know, one's going to control that. But there wasn't crazy to think about government programs to discourage it or to educate young people and so forth. Now they lament this is because they're so concerned about the white birth rate, which is not. Which has been declining over a long time. It continues to decline a bit, but I think everywhere. But the biggest decline, I think, is with is younger births, teenage births. You know, a lot of people are postponing motherhood, but then a lot of people are having kids in their later 20s or 30s. And so they're now sort of in favor, I suppose, of teenage births, as long as it's to white people, incidentally. I think that's a big kind of giveaway. Right. It's not about the prospects of those kids or the prospects of those moms, incidentally. Right.
- [11:16]
Tom Joslin
It's totally. Yeah, no, it's exactly right. I mean, that's why they're totally obsessed with birth rates. Birth rates are falling across anywhere where any society that's affluent, basically, and really elsewhere, too, and across the world. And a big part of that is because, you know, as you, as human society gets more affluent, it doesn't need as many children in order to produce economically. Right? So the whole idea here is that you need less children in the long run. And that's a big part of it. And so that, that freaks them out, that freaks the racists out because they want white people reproducing faster than brown or black people. That's what they want, you know, and so they're just totally obsessed about this, this transformation.
- [11:54]
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- [12:14]
Tom Joslin
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- [13:45]
Bill Kristol
Now that's so important what you say. And I say a word more about the kind of. Because I do think a lot of some of our friends and so allies politically, understandably, I suppose, are nervous about taking this on frontally. They, you know, people are uncomfortable. You know, people don't like change. They grew up in a certain community, looked a certain way and had certain things in common, or at least they felt like they did. They probably, there's probably less, there's probably more stuff going on than they realized when they were 12 years old. But that's their, you know, their, their sort of nostalgic memories of a certain America and they block out some of the less attractive part. And then they don't look around now and it's confusing and a little bewildering and stuff they're not familiar with and they get unhappy about it. But I think it is worth explicitly. And so there's some political types on our side don't, I think understandably, maybe correctly, from the point of view of short term politics, don't want to sort of take that on in a kind of flat out way and say no, this is actually the tradition we should embrace and it's a good thing for the country. It doesn't mean we obviously have immigration laws and border security and so forth. But they don't want to flat out defend multicultural America. But you've been doing that a lot recently and I'd like expand on that a little bit.
- [14:58]
Tom Joslin
I find myself defending multicultural America a lot more than even the progressive types do. Because the funny thing about this is linguistically think about it. What's the opposite of a multicultural America? It's gotta be a monocultural America. And what would a monocultural America be? It'd be a white Christian America. And that white Christian nationalism is a thread, it's sort of marbled all throughout Detroit regime. That's what they're trying to push on people. And I think a lot of Americans, to be honest with you, including a lot of white Americans, if you actually make it explicit and explain to them what they're about, they aren't for it. There are some, of course in the MAGA base, the diehards, the core, who are for it. And I don't know that you're going to convince them at all. But there are people I know, like I have, I have friends and family members who are Trump supporters, for example. And when I say, hey, did you see that? They're doing X, Y and Z and do you know where that comes from? And you explain it a little bit. I think there is a little bit of a shock that sets in that this type of extremist ideology has gravitated now all the way to the top of the American government. So multicultural America, I mean, the way I put it is, you know, we've got Lin Manuel Miranda, they've got Kid Rock, right? You know, which America do you want? You know, do you want, do you want? You know, and I think it's obvious to me what I want. Now, obviously the MAGA base wants the Kid Rock America, you know, but you know, multicultural America is absolutely worth defending. It's worth defending multiculturalism. And by the way, to the politicians out there, the politicos who are only concerned about the short term calculations you're talking about, polling actually shows that Americans want multiculturalism. There was a gal poll, I think it was last year, that when you put these, these ideas to American people and you say, do you want to live in sort of, you know, a one type of society with one type of person, one type of ethnicity, or do you want multiple ethnicities? You know, they prefer the multicultural vision of America. It just has to be communicated, I think, differently. I think the way a lot of progressives and leftists have been talking about this stuff has been unfortunately divisive as well. I think that, I think there are people on the left who have rejected the melting pot ideology as well. They think that we should remain separate in our historical grievances. And I think we have to reject all of that and put, put forth a new vision of Americ America, which in some ways has been a vision of America we've been fighting for all along.
- [17:00]
Bill Kristol
No, that's well said. You mentioned white Christian nationalism just in passing. So let me ask you a little bit about the religious side of it, if I can put it that way, the Christian side. It is striking to me. Tucker Carlson went after my colleague Katherine Ramphel pretty recently, sort of out of the blue, retelling and falsely retelling, I think a conversation they had 10 years ago or something like that where Catherine mentioned, and I'd never heard of this before. So this is not like an think she's obsessed with, but that when she was growing up in Florida. So this, I guess would be in the 90s. Her father, her little brother, I don't know, was disinvited to a birthday party, I mean, I think when he was literally five years old or something, at a country club, as they didn't admit Jews and her father didn't sue them or anything like that. Made a fuss about it, though, in the local press and they, I guess the club, I think they changed their ways and Tucker Carlson went on a big tirade about open this free country and people should be able to exclude whoever they want and have their own country clubs, whether it's by race or religion. I suppose all these different things, leaving aside the kind of legal and constitutional arguments, I guess I was struck how much he wants to go there now. Tucker's his own person and his own obsessions and, and, and whatever. You know, things happen.
- [18:13]
Tom Joslin
Yeah. I mean, I mean, you know, we've
- [18:15]
Bill Kristol
had to go to anti Semitic, I mean, to defend. I just felt like this is. I was sort of amazed this was still going on in Florida in the 90s, honestly. I think we got by where you and I sort of are from in the New York area and stuff, that that kind of was something from our parents, even my parents generation and your grandparents generation. But. Okay, so we're be it. But I do think the anti Semitism is part of it for that reason.
- [18:35]
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- [18:35]
Bill Kristol
I mean, even though it is striking how much and I so talk a little about the Christian side, is that a fig leaf in a way, to make it sound nicer? Is that an actual part of it? I mean, what's your take on that?
- [18:45]
Tom Joslin
I mean, the Christian nationalism is a close cousin, if not just a sibling of white nationalism, and they always go hand in hand. And it's the idea that not only should America be a white nation, but it should be a white Christian nation and certain values. Now, if you actually get the history into the history of Christianity in America, you realize that Christianity, he's been divisive. It's not been this unifying force. I mean, the reason why Thomas Jefferson enacted the wall of separation and defended it between church and state was because of two warring factions of Christians in Danbury, Connecticut. You know, so. So the idea that Christianity is always this unifying force is, is silly. But I would say right now, if you look at this Trump regime, you are seeing the absurdity of Christian nationalism.
- [19:26]
Bill Kristol
Right.
- [19:26]
Tom Joslin
I mean, think about his faith minister who's in the White House in some position, Paula White, comparing Trump to Jesus. Right. And she does that, you know, in an Easter procl you have Trump, you know, putting out a post on true Social of him as Jesus, you know, healing somebody, which is just insane. You have, you know, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, you know, misquoting the Bible by using a Pulp Fiction phrase. You know, he doesn't really even know Christianity. And his pastor, Doug Wilson, the guy that Tim Miller just recently eviscerated in one of these shows, you know, Doug Wilson is a guy who pitches this Christian nationalist vision as well. He's the pastor for, and I agree with Tim, I won't call him a pastor, but for Pete Hickseff, he's a pastor. He's somebody who that Pete Hexith relies on for advice. So this stuff is very, you know, it's very prominent. It's very front and center. It's something we saw on January 6. There were definitely Christian nationalist tones both leading up to that and on January 6 itself is something I would like to write more about, actually. But it's part of the whole vision that there's a America that is receding, that is declining, that is going away and we must save it. Right. And that is, that is part of the whole idea of white Christian national.
- [20:35]
Bill Kristol
And it's been getting stronger. Right. Including in the 15 months of the Trump presidency.
- [20:40]
Tom Joslin
Yeah, I mean, Trump people don't take Trump's overtures to Christian nationalism seriously because it's so, you know, obviously ridiculous. The idea that he's some sort of moral Christian is nonsensical on its face, given his lifestyle and everything we know about him. But it's actually been a source of political power for him. Right. So you have Billy Graham's son, for example, being one of the real loudest defenders of Donald Trump. You have like, like I said, Paula White in the White House as part of this White House initiative. They have actually, it's marbled throughout the executive orders and other decisions. The Trump regime put out there this whole idea of anti Christian bias. Right. That they're countering. This is part of the grievance, sort of ideology of maga, Right. That rest of modern society is attacking Christianity. We need to defend it. It sort of comes in from that same place. So it is absolutely part of the Trump regime. It's something that people need to take more seriously.
- [21:33]
Bill Kristol
The anti Christian thing is really just amazing. Donald Trump, J.D. vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, I believe they're all Christians and most senior positions in our government. We had to be clear and fair. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Tim Waltz, the vice presidential nominee Lloyd Austin I don't know. I could go through, I guess, the different cabinet, with one or two exceptions. A lot of Christians up there, a lot of white Christians, honestly, in pretty high positions and throughout government and society. The idea that this is a hostile environment for Christians and it's amazing they've been that, that's been, they've been able to sell that a little bit, huh?
- [22:10]
Tom Joslin
Yeah. And I mean there's, there's a big difference obviously too between individual Christian beliefs. Right. I, I absolutely defend to my dying day people's, people's right to believe whatever they want to believe personally. And then the idea that you're going to impose your beliefs on everybody else, especially if they're not white men. Right. If you're gonna. And that's, that's the trick. That's the little sleight of hand that white Christian nationalists play. It's, it's always interesting, isn't it, how the people who need to have imposed on them are not white men, but other people. Right. They're women. They're, you know, people who are black or brown in the United States. It's these types of, you know, other people who believe different Religious. Religion. Religious beliefs. You know, one of the things that they're doing right now, just in terms of all this, you know, MAGA has had this big campaign, this big boogeyman, this idea that Sharia law is going to be imposed on the US they did this in Texas, they've done this elsewhere. Steve Bannon's out there been reporting it. It's ludicrous. Like the, the Muslim population in the US is like 1% or something or whatever it is. You know, it's, it's minimal. It's de minim idea that Muslims across the country are going to impose Sharia law and defy the U.S. constitution. That this is a real threat that has to be countered is, is insane. But this is part of the, the Christian nationalist dynamic. What they want to do is invent a grievance or a fear, you know, this fear mongering that they need to stand up to and respond to. And so they're able to get away with it even though it's on its, on its face, it's absurd.
- [23:29]
Bill Kristol
Yeah. I'm sort of very struck by Hegseth, what he's done in the Pentagon itself with those Christian services that they're not mandatory, of course. I mean, luckily and they' official. Well, they are official as they write in the Pentagon, but. And of course the military has a long tradition which is A good one, I think, though Madison objected to it. So from a very strict separation of church and state point of view, maybe there's objections, but they have a long tradition anyway, Madison lost that fight, I believe, of having chaplains and accommodating religious beliefs to the degree that it's practicable in the military and having services where practical on ships and at bases and so forth. And many faiths or as many as there are represented there certainly of different Christian denominations that'll merge Catholics and Protestants together in a way that would make them uncomfortable. So it's not as if we sort of worked a lot of this out, is the way I sort of think of it. And I feel like that's actually why I'm a little stunned by having it all come back. You know, I, I'm old enough to remember casual anti Semitism in this sort of country club sphere. I don't, didn't suffer from it at all. By the time I was applying to college, it was gone and all this. And so I knew people who, who had, didn't have, you know, hadn't been admitted to medical school into universities who would have been certainly 20 years later. And I knew people who had, whose careers had been somewhat hampered by this and who had personal experiences, I think of refugees from Europe, of course, and all that. But so I'm not complaining. I'm not one of these people who's been full of grievances at all about any of this. But I kind of thought we had gotten beyond this. And then of course this with Muslims are newer, Muslims are newer immigrants and there's not 11. So it's to be expected, honestly, that there'll be some, some discomfort and a bit of upward. But again, that had worked. I would say if you had come to, I think if you would come to the US in 2014 or 2011, let's just say 10 years after 9, 11. And people at the time thought this is going to be are we up to this? Are we up to being discriminating between there are some pockets of terrorist supporters here who might well be breaking the law, and there are others whose views aren't great from the point of view of condemning those things. But that's not most American Muslims and are we capable of maintaining that discrimination? I think one would say if one came here in 2011, one would say, you know what, that's pretty impressive, what America's done. Barack Obama's president is elected, you know, with a middle name, Hussein, eight years after 9 11, five years after the Iraq war and we're fighting in the Middle east without shutting down mosques here and without persecuting people here. And in fact, we're kind of proud that we're, that we're doing two things at once, fighting terrorism abroad and being tolerant at home. And we're proud that we are better at this than our grandparents were in World War or our grandparents, generation great grandparents in World War II with Japanese. I mean, I feel like the regression there has been so rapid and for me, surprising. I don't know.
- [26:16]
Tom Joslin
Yeah, I mean, I experience the same way. I mean, obviously there are people who would probably disagree with us. They'd say it's there all along and it was always front and center, which I just don't agree with. I think it absolutely has digressed pretty rapidly. And I think that's a function of social media, that's a function of this Internet age in which these ideas traffic. I mean, again, you know, take one, take, you know, I like to track the ideas because that's how, you know, the things have really gotten extreme. And take the Great Replacement theory, this idea that the Democratic elite, the Jewish elite, are looking to replace white people in America with immigrants of color in order to change America. Right. This is an idea again, I mentioned it earlier. It comes from the 70s that was reborn really about 15 years ago online, maybe a little, maybe not quite that long ago. It was something that, you know, certainly like Mitt Romney or John McCain wasn't going to touch politically because it is a white nationalist, a white supremacist idea. Now that is actually an idea that is trafficked openly by people at the senior levels of the government and I would argue is countering the so called great replacement theory is the basis for their immigration scheme, their mass deportation scheme is the whole idea of we've got to get rid of anybody who isn't white, keep them out of here. You know, you could bring in the Afrikaners from South Africa, but we don't want anybody else, you know, I mean, and that that's an explicitly racist idea. Right. And that's what it's rooted in is this great replacement sort of theory of the world. And that's something now that like we talked about Elon Musk and Washington Post reporting on his posts. That's something he traffics in regularly.
- [27:42]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, it is striking. You commented to me earlier this week. Tuesday night, the Justice Department, Todd Blanche and Cash Patel at a press conference announced an indictment against the Southern Poverty Leadership Conference. I think most serious legal observers have thought it's Not a strong indictment and it's in fact pretty dishonest. You could talk about that a bit. But what you told me a couple of days ago, three or four days ago, and one of the reason I wanted to have this conversation was how much this has taken off online on the right, that this is a big obsess. Honestly. I'll just say this. It's a group that I'd not been involved with much. I had some disagreements with them and also I think to the degree I knew of them, I thought they were a little unfair in some of the people they were criticizing in the 2000s and 1990s and 2000s. It's not a group that is at the front, honestly. They're a pretty big group, I guess, and they do some good work and maybe they do somewhat not so effective work. They were very effective way back when in helping undo attempts to have the resurgence of Ku Klux Klan and other forms of white racism in the South. It was a southern group and started out of that after the 60s and the killing of civil rights workers down there and when discrimination was still a real thing, God knows down there and a governmently, government supported thing in some respects anyway. So this group is not, I wouldn't say front and center in the headlines the last five, 10 years. You know, if you were thinking of effect left wing groups that are doing a huge amount in America that were front and center in the Biden administration, I don't know that you would pick this. So they ended up, they do this indictment, whatever. And as you say, but to talk a little bit about, I mean I did wasn't paying attention. So for me it was like, okay, the lawyer, the legal types have kind of discredited this and I, I guess it's going to get thrown out in court. Presumably it's still a harassment, it's still an attempt at intimidation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'm alarmed about it. But you say it's really. I was struck when you told me that how much this has become front and center in the online. Right.
- [29:29]
Tom Joslin
Yeah. It's as much an information operation as it is a criminal indictment. It may be even more of an information operation. I mean. And what's going on here? So the Southern Poverty Law center had this informant program and we don't know a lot of the details about these informants. Okay. But they paid people, extremists in extremist groups for intelligence about these extremist groups. What the Department of Justice and the FBI have done is They've said, well, that was actually sponsoring extremism as opposed to trying to get intelligence on extremist groups to dismantle them. And therefore they defrauded their donors, none of whom, as far as I could tell, have really complained loudly, by the way, or at least instant number of them, because they weren't really trying to dismantle these groups, which is what they were telling donors, but instead they were actually sponsoring them and trying to gin up these racial fears. Here's the thing about this. SPLC has absolutely been at the forefront of combating white supremacy for 55 years. I'm not going to endorse everything they did. I'm not going endorse all their arguments. Right. I didn't have anything to do with them like you said either, Bill, until I saw this indictment start reading and just, you know, commenting on it. But the bottom line is their disinformant program is something the FBI does. The FBI actually was sharing intelligence, or the SPLC was sharing intelligence with the FBI from these informants, some of them anyway, to try and go after these groups. And the idea that this was a really a form of sponsorship is insane. But here's the. Here's the thing that's most important about this. From my perspective, what this serves as. And by the way, Elon Musk is trafficking in this now, this indictment as a conspiracy theory. It's over X. I think there are easily hundreds of millions of views for this conspiracy theory. Now, that SPLC was the real source of sponsoring white supremacy in America, which is totally insane. This is a group that took down the Ku Klux Klan, for example. But the real point here is it's a way of psychologically inoculating themselves against the charge of their own extremism. So think about it. At the same time, Elon Musk is promoting white nationalism and white supremacist tropes on his own X account and pushing this stuff out there to his however many millions of followers. He wants to say, well, wait a minute, you know, it's the splc. They were the ones who were really sponsoring white supremacy, you know, and it's a deflection. It's a way of saying, how dare you call us white nationalists or white supremacists, you know, oh, but by the way, isn't the great replacement theory true? You know, and it's a strange thing to do. It's a way of inoculating themselves against the charge that they are actually extremists and that they are pushing extremism.
- [31:46]
Bill Kristol
And it's also very much part, don't you think, of the conspiracy mongering. I noticed that Trump mentioned the SPLC in the context of the 2020 election in one of his truth social posts a couple of days ago that, you know, this massive conspiracy to seal the election for me and this recent indictment of the SPLC is just another piece of evidence. The SPLC is, I mean, this is not involved in the 2020 election so far. And having a few paid informants in extreme right wing groups that have a propensity to violence where you would want to know if they're going to seek to enact violence against minorities or against anyone and you might like to protect yourselves. Also let the FBI know. And no one accused them. They were not players in the 2020 election. But Trump latched onto that. I was struck by that. I mean he, for all of his personally not quite being as rabid as Elon Musk on some of this stuff, he's pretty engaged in it. I mean, someone told maybe someone else to tweet for him or the post for him, but he's perfectly willing to put it out there. Right. And to lump. And it's his administration that's indicted them, obviously. So he's very willing to loop it all together.
- [32:53]
Tom Joslin
Yeah, it's the conspiracy brain of our modern politics. This is how these people think. This is how a lot of his followers, and it's something that's very familiar to his followers. Remember the number one conspiracy theory about January 6th when it comes to the American right is the idea that the Deep State used informants to somehow trick Trump supporters into attacking the Capitol. Well, this conspiracy is a cousin of that. And this is where the cognitive dissonance comes in. Because on the one hand you have people on the right say, well, January 6th wasn't that bad. The violence wasn't that bad, but they made us do it.
- [33:24]
Bill Kristol
Right.
- [33:24]
Tom Joslin
And so which is it, you know, is it not that bad or was it not that important or is it they were asking actually set up by this, this boogeyman. And so this is part of the cognitive dissonance, I think that happens when anytime extremism takes hold, you see this type of thing. I saw it throughout all the extremist groups I've studied. You know, going back a long ways, I won't compare MAGA to some of them. But, but by the same token, it's a, it's a common psychological phenomenon, I would say.
- [33:50]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, no, that's, that is interesting and, and worrisome. You, you've Told me a couple times over the last week too that I said, well, how much is this penetrating? You know, it's beyond mega world. And I think you said hard to tell. But also. Well, I'll let you answer. And what, what is its utility if it's just, you know, if they're all just talking to themselves, so to speak.
- [34:11]
Tom Joslin
I look at this, you know, and what they're doing is hardening the base. They constantly want to harden the base. And what that means is you keep them sort of in this echo chamber, this cocoon where contrary facts, reality doesn't impede and doesn't come after you. So it's very. They want a way, for example, to inoculate themselves or defle from their own white nationalism the own extremism on their side. And this is what this does is it hardens the base by giving them a boogeyman to say that's the real enemy, that's the real problem. You know, and just to give you, you know, one other example of how prominent now the white nationalism is, there's a guy named Rodrier who I'm sure you know, he's a far right author. He's not a progressive lefty right. He's not a centrist. He's not even, he wouldn't even be described as like a moderate Republican from back in the days. He's a pretty far right character who, you know, lived and worked in Hungary and was sponsored by Viktor Orban's regime. And you know, he wrote past year that upwards of 30 to 40% of young Republicans have been taken in by Nick Fuentes, a very prominent anti Semite white nationalist online. So this stuff is caught on like wildfire on the right. Like there are a lot of people now on the right, including the younger generation Gen Gen Z who believe in this stuff, who are basically attracted to white nationalism. And stories like this SPLC indictment and the conspiracy theory that's embedded in it serve to deflect from the growing radicalism of, of their own side.
- [35:31]
Bill Kristol
I guess they. Yeah, and I guess from them. For them, psychologically it justifies the radicalism we have to fight fire by fire. Look, look what the left has been doing all these years, right?
- [35:40]
Tom Joslin
Yeah. The whole idea is, you know, how dare you call us white nationalism. But by the way, isn't white nationalism a good idea? You know, it's a very strange psychological dynamic.
- [35:48]
Bill Kristol
So I guess it's maybe common as you say, in extremist groups both to deny, you know, deny and embrace at the same time somehow or, or the more respectable ones deny and the more, the more forthright and radical ones embrace the, the extremism of the movement.
- [36:04]
Tom Joslin
Yeah, there's, there's a scrambled eggs to the whole thing, you know, where the whole thinking is, becomes totally scrambled and there's no real clear logic to it. But it's that cognitive distance. It's, it's, it's sort of, you know, how do you. How do extremists get their extremist ideas to hold? They have to break sort of the norms of somebody's psychology. They have to break the norms of their perceptions of the world in order to shatter their perceptions in order for their extreme ideas to get to be trafficked and become normalized and something that is actually acceptable. That's what Elon Musk has done with his X account. That's what other leaders have done. Now, in a way, that's really frightening.
- [36:37]
Bill Kristol
Now, that's a very shrewd, I think, observation, I suppose, when we should close on anything else, you tell people, I mean, how do they. How to judge this, how to follow it, how to. And then, of course, what, what arguments might work to break the fever a little bit.
- [36:51]
Tom Joslin
I think we just have to be open about. There has to be a lot more commentary and focus on the actual ideas they're trafficking in, because those ideas have roots. And when you follow those roots, you find they go back to a extreme place. And I think there's been this perception of Trump in particular, because of his cult of personality and how he gained power in our society, that he was just this businessman, a celebrity, and sort of. That has sort of served to inoculate him or act like a defensive shield for him, for the extremism he's enabled on his own side and that he draws power from. And I think it's very important to constantly keep focus on how extreme really, some of these ideas, some of these people really are.
- [37:27]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, that's such an important point. You made it very quickly. Alto still, you know, that the following things can both be true. I think Trump wouldn't have been successful if he had sounded like Pat Buchanan or had the background of Pat Buchanan. I mean, he's successful because of the businessman stuff, because of the celebrity, because of a certain demagogic ability and being in touch with middle America and not seeming like he's imposing something he read about in some French novel from 1972 or something on America. So he's kind of. He's the right carrier of this for those reasons. That doesn't mean that what he is carrying into the bloodstream, however, is any less pernicious or dangerous than if it were just flat out racism and nativism of the kind we're familiar with from the 20s and 30s or from Pat Buchanan and many others, unfortunately, in the 90s and 2000s. Right. I mean, there's a. I mean, that's unfortunate that in a way he was an effective bridge, you might say, from, I don't know what celebrity and business America to nativist and extremist America.
- [38:34]
Tom Joslin
Yeah. And, you know, every time he makes a racist comment, for example, by saying that the Somali immigrants are all low iq, which is just, just a nakedly racist, you know, comment. Right. There's like this, there's this, there's this weird phenomenon goes on that like, he doesn't really mean it. He's just being, you know, vulgar, because that's how he is. You know, he's sort of like that kind of guy. And my point is, if you actually start adding up all that type of stuff and see it actually being enacted, this policy, it isn't just some Celebrity Apprentice guy mouthing off. It's far worse. I mean, it's bad enough to be openly racist like that, but to actually make that the policy of the US government, which is what they're doing, is where it becomes a real problem.
- [39:11]
Bill Kristol
No, that's really well said and means we all have to pay attention to this. Tom. We'll be discussing this in the future, I'm afraid, because I don't think it's going to go away of its own very quickly. So we'll be fighting this for quite a while. But thank you for everything you've done on this and thanks for, for joining me today.
- [39:27]
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