00:00Joining me now to talk about where the political moral compass is pointing and what feels like the broification of our political discourse are Ricky Schlott, a columnist for The New York Post, who has written about both of these topics, and The Post's Hill reporter, Ryan King.
00:14Thank you guys both for joining me.
00:16This is a â it feels like a pretty wild topic to get into.
00:20I never thought I would be reporting in a world where the term Nazi gets thrown around almost casually.
00:29Ricky, you've written in depth about these topics.
00:32I mentioned sort of vaguely at the top of this episode some of the ones with maybe J.D. Vance or, you know, I mentioned a sitting senator.
00:40Can you break down a few of the bigger headline-making, you know, head-scratchers that we've had in the last couple months?
00:48Yeah, I think there were kind of two examples that were interesting both sides of the coin recently where you had Bernie Sanders basically excuse Graham Plattner having a Nazi tattoo and said that, you know, people have bad chapters in their lives, which I think is a little bit of a stretch.
01:06I mean, most people, if they have a bad chapter, don't go to that extreme.
01:10And then on the flip side of the coin, there were some pretty nasty and egregious things that were said in a Young Republicans national group chat.
01:17And J.D. Vance went more or less out of his way to say that this was a bunch of college kids and don't really worry about it, like they're a bigger fish to fry.
01:25But in the scheme of things, they were like in their 20s to mid-30s.
01:29They weren't actually college students.
01:31They were members of national leadership.
01:35And I think that it's pretty easy just to say, you know, Nazism or people joking about Hitler and saying, I love Hitler.
01:43I mean, it seems to have been a joke in the context, but like it's pretty simple to say, you know, that maybe that was inside a group chat and they would never say that out in public.
01:52But that does not color our party and certainly is not the sort of thing we want to hear from future leadership.
01:58And then more recently, there was a scandal about Tucker Carlson having Nick Fuentes on, who some people accuse of having Nazi sympathies.
02:06And he has some very extreme views.
02:09And the Heritage Foundation went out of their way to defend Tucker for having him on and then ended up kind of backtracking.
02:16But that's caused a lot of buzz about kind of how far is too far in the right.
02:20But it's interesting that you had the right and the left kind of shrugging that off at the same time earlier this year.
02:26It almost seems like the shrug off feels to me, at least from my perspective, so that no one creates any kind of issues where you may alienate any voter, even though I think a lot of voters have most voters take umbrage with Nazis.
02:44I mean, that is a sentence that I shouldn't have to say, that Nazism and, you know, joking flippantly about Hitler or inking your body with a Nazi symbol, those are not appropriate things for either someone in leadership or people who work in the world of politics who are making our laws.
03:04I mean, I feel like I'm crazy.
03:05I mean, Ricky, is it worse than it seems?
03:09Or are we putting a spotlight on it and maybe this is how it's always been?
03:15I think that social media is definitely playing a large role here, where even if you're a politician, it feels like these people that exist on the fringes are a much larger percentage of the population than they actually are.
03:27And I do agree with you that there's this sense that you don't want to alienate even the far extremes of your party or or push anyone away.
03:35And certainly someone like Nick Fuentes is unfortunately having a large impact on younger Republicans and younger conservatives.
03:42But at the same time, I think it's remarkably short sighted and it kind of is a myopic view on the country.
03:49And also, realistically, like, where are those voters going to go?
03:53I mean, perhaps they're not going to vote at all, but I don't think they're going to say, OK, well, I'm just going to flip to the opposite side now because I'm at someone criticized someone talking about Nazism in a positive way.
04:05So I think it's it's an unfortunate reaction to partisan politics.
04:10Now, the voting habits of these extreme opinions are something I definitely want to get into in this conversation.
04:15But before we get to that sort of granular level of it, Ryan, from your perspective on the Hill in Washington, are Ricky and I kind of hitting the nail on the head here that there is this idea that you don't want to alienate a type of voter by being too strongly against something?
04:35It just seems like a lot of politicians are trying to play kind of both sides here.
04:40And as she said, it does seem like these extremes are people on the fringe.
04:44There are not as many people who agree with this as they are loud and loud and noisy seems to be the issue.
04:51For sure. I mean, politics is really all about addition.
04:55If you're subtracting from your supporters, you're potentially hurting yourself, particularly, you know, we're in, you know, basically a 50 50 country.
05:01So a lot of these politicians are really mindful of that and they're fearful about alienating their base, particularly, you know, in the House where a lot of these congressmen and women are really just concerned about their primaries.
05:17They don't a lot in a lot of cases have to worry about the general election because of all the gerrymandering that's been happening over recent years.
05:25So it is tricky. There are some pretty tough incentives, but we do see some politicians calling this out a bit.
05:33They tend not to get as much traffic.
05:35They tend to be a little bit drowned out by all the noise from these people, but certainly they're not as forceful about it as when they're going after the other side.
05:45You know, Ricky, I am of the cancel culture era. That was what it was like when I was in high school and college and, you know, right out of college.
05:57So is this somewhat a backlash to cancel culture? Because it began as something not, you know, canceling someone for saying something as wildly inappropriate as yay Hitler is something that we would have in my generation canceled someone for.
06:12But now it seems to be like, hey, I have the right to say whatever I want. It is a free country. You do have the right to say whatever you want.
06:19But now there seems to be the thing of, OK, if someone yay Hitler's, which, again, I can't believe I'm even saying that, you almost can't say, well, that's inappropriate.
06:30You probably shouldn't be the teaching children, working on the Hill, you know, being an accountant, whatever their job is.
06:36So is this a bit of that backlash, the pendulum swinging in the other direction?
06:41Yeah, I mean, I think that one thing that's very interesting, specifically on the right and in terms of like how the fringes operate, is that there's this edgelord culture where it's you might not even believe what you're saying on Twitter, but you want to prove that you can push the envelope further than the person that tweeted before you.
07:01And I think it is a direct rejection of having, especially with young men in particular, grown up in an extremely PC culture, probably coming of age during the pandemic on top of that and feeling like you're living your entire lives online and your online avatar becomes a much larger part of your conception of self.
07:21And, yeah, I think that edgelord culture is definitely a reflection of this rejection of cancel culture.
07:28And I mean, some people have argued that the reaction to Nick Fuentes and going on Tucker Carlson was cancel culture, which I somewhat agree with.
07:34I don't believe that we should deplatform him.
07:36And I think that if anything that actually gives him more power, however, I think it is also the responsibility of someone like Tucker to challenge someone like Nick Fuentes, if he's going to have him on and have done his homework and to not let him say things like he did on his podcast.
07:52Like, I love Joseph Stalin and then just leave that there and not circle back to what that means or push back.
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