Transcript
A (0:03)
It's Friday, January 16th. I'm Jane Coston, and this is what a day. The show that is simply noting a man on threads who appears to have trained crows to attack red hats. See, crows are incredibly intelligent. They can even hold grudges and remember human faces for years. So training them to be able to swoop and grab a red hat from someone's head was a bit of a process, but it appears to have been very successful. And why red hats in particular? No reason. No reason at all. On today's show, President Donald Trump reveals his great health care plan. That's not sarcasm. It's literally called the great health care plan. And what's long, boring, and often ends in stalemate. No, I'm not talking about Congress. I'm talking about soccer. But let's start with conservatism and the American right. President Trump is declining in popularity with voters, but his rhetoric and that of the Trump administration is only growing more extreme. But to understand how we got here in this place, we have to go backwards to the Reagan administration. The 1980s were the heyday of a very particular kind of conservatism. It was hawkish on foreign policy, as in yay wars. And very conservative on cultural issues, as in boo gay people trying to exist in public life. Right wing conservative figures held sway in politics. People like Phyllis Schlafly, an anti feminist activist who spent a lot of time telling other women not to pursue jobs outside the home while working outside the home. But there was an entire wing of the conservative movement that seemed to think that Reaganism was for losers. They wanted something even further to the right, and for that, they looked to the past. Some of these right wing conservatives had supported former Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, a candidate who opposed the Civil Rights act and school integration. Others were fans of a former speechwriter for President Richard Nixon, named Pat Buchanan, a culture warrior and non interventionist who would run for the White House twice and give this memorable speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention about the evil changes that would come if Bill Clinton got into the White House.
B (2:18)
Abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units. That's change all right. But that's not the kind of change America needs. It's not the kind of change America wants, and it's not the kind of change we can abide in in a nation we still call God's country.
A (2:45)
I don't know. A lot of those changes sound dope to me anyway. The wing of the conservative movement that claimed Goldwater and Buchanan thought that the conservatism of the 1980s and 1990s and even the early 2000s was weak, even referring to mainstream conservative institutions as Conservative, Inc. And at think tanks like the Claremont Institute, a conservative organization about 90 minutes outside of Los Angeles, right wing academics and thinkers worked together to create a counter revolution, a nativist, populist counter revolution of sorts, an anti immigrant, anti minority politics that would support the rights of the people as long as the people are ideally white and straight and male. And then came President Trump, the answer to the prayers of the nativist populace. In Trump's second term, the nativist populace are in charge, calling themselves the New Right. One example. Guess who absolutely loves the Claremont Institute? He's a certain current vice president here, accepting the organization's statesmanship award in 2025.