Jen Senko’s dad (The Brainwashing of My Dad)

This is an amazing podcast. Rick Wilson as you know is a former GOP strategist who has left the fold and in his words, “I’ve sort of tried to do penance  for a decade now.”

I’ve noticed what Marc Elias articulates in his first question to Rick Wilson about why former Republicans are able to speak with greater clarity about Republican behavior and psychology than Democrats can.  We should pay better attention to what they say because they know how it works.  They were on the inside.  They participated.

From Nicole Wallace who has said time and again, “Republicans count on Democrats to not fight back” to Liz Cheney who said “America will not survive another Trump presidency” to Rick Wilson who explains in this video how the Republican party creed is “win at all costs.”

In this podcast Wilson explains how they manipulate low information voters by activating fear, disrupting their ability to use reasoning and logic.  It is critically important for the survival of democracy that we are clear eyed about who they are and what they are willing to do to achieve and maintain power.

Regular Americans don’t like to think anyone is capable of evil. I believe it is part of the mainstream American culture that we don’t like to “point fingers.”  We tend to give the worst people the greatest benefit of the doubt. This is a form of denial or placating with the aim of avoiding conflict and not having to face that some of the people in power or who we have to work with on a daily basis, or neighbors or family members, are despicable human beings and need to be held accountable and no one wants to do it.

Here is a portion of the interview I think is the most important part.  I have transcribed this part verbatim to the best of my ability. If you prefer to watch the video, it takes place at the beginning. Scroll down.

Marc Elias:

Who are the commentators who are speaking the most clearly and with direct, non-hedging, language about the threat? You have almost all former Republicans. There is you, Bill Crystal, The folks at the Bulwark. It’s really noticeable the language that I hear from my friends and colleagues on the left and the democratic party, the folks that were former republicans just seem to have a more direct language that they use around this.”

Rick Wilson:

“Being able to articulate a threat like Trump is not about party, in my opinion. It’s about being willing to say I’m going to put aside my policy preferences, I’m going to put aside my biases, my desires to do things a certain way and I’m going to get to the X, I’m going to get the job done. I’m going to figure out what I have to do to win.

“In the Republican party you grow up with this. When you’re a consultant as I was for 30 years, you grow up with this sort of catch phrase. Just win, baby. And the corollary to just win, baby, is stay on message. And the old joke used to be if you have trouble understanding point 1, refer to point 2. I you have trouble understanding point 2 refer back to point 1.

“I’ve been opposed to Trump since 2015 publicly, loudly, sometimes probably too loudly, much to the detriment of my old career, my friendships, my relationships, across the board. But I also came out of that culture that created the creature that became Donald Trump.”

“Trump is different from every other republican who has ever existed. But he was an inevitability given what we did for a long time, which I’ve sort of tried to do penance for for a decade now. We activated the low propensity, low income, low intellectual or low educational achievement voter. We activated them with fear. We poked their amygdalas over and over and over and over again.”

“And so I know the creature that emerged from that laboratory and he is that creature.  I remember Marc, I was on a conversation back a few day s after January 6th with a bunch of Democratic donors and consultants and elected officials like what should we do now? And a very serious person who I respect said, “Well, we’ve got to get back on our prescription drug coverage. I did a Rick Wilson – I was like the fuck are you talking about? The capital is on fire still. There’s still broken glass on the ground. You’re going to talk about prescription drugs when the constitution was on the razor’s edge from being shredded by these guys? Are you kidding me?”

“So, I mean, I guess it’s because I know the fear that or I know that the nature of the monster is, and I know that if people don’t fear it appropriately, it will win.”

“One of the things about the Epstein files is explained by the origin story of Trump in 2016. A right wing conspiracy theory was made up out of whole cloth, completely out of whole cloth, that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George Soros, a whole variety of Democratic elected officials, consultants, leaders, donors, were involved in a DC based but global child trafficking cannibal pedophile sex ring. And as absurd as that sounds, it was promoted very heavily by Russian disinformation, by American conspiracy theorists like Jack Bobic, Alex Jones, Mike Cernovich, all these folks that were on the fringes of reason, as a rule, and they promoted this because it had massive interest by the base. Something about it clicked with that Republican base. And even though it didn’t disappear after 2016 and she was never ‘brought to justice.’ There was never mass arrests of secret pedophiles that Q-Anon kept promising…

Marc – “…which, by the way, was supposed to be going on in the basement of a pizza place in Washington, DC..

Wilson: “correct..”

Marc – which led to a deranged man going to the place and firing a gun.

Wilson: 

“They did this in a way that wired itself into the brain of the MAGA base and it gave them permission to hate Democrats because they’re like, “oh, they’re all pedophiles. They’re all sex traffickers. They are all child molesters. And it was beaten over and over and over and over again in all these social media channels, all these alternative spaces that the right wing media and right wing political activists know exist.

“But it turns out it was projection. It turns out that the guy really involved with a guy who ran a global pedophile sex ring was Donald Trump being involved with Jeffrey Epstein. They were friends for decades. They were running buddies in the social scene in both New York and Palm Beach. And as much as they have said, “Oh Democrats are all pedophiles, it turns out that Donald Trump is a guy who has now put Ghislaine Maxwell, who was the facilitator of this ring, into a cushy club fed and DT has for months or years now covered up the vast trenches of documents that it took a congressional discharge petition to pass a law to excise from their hands. And even now they’re trying to pull back information on Epstein right this minute that was released today. Now they’re trying to pull it back again.

None of this works with this Republican base. They are psychologically broken about it. They are angry. They feel betrayed. And I think one of the things Mark, that they also feel is the ring of truth. They knew DT was a degenerate. They knew DT was a bad guy, a liar, an adulterer, a con man. But they thought, well, he hates the people I hate so it’s ok. So I have found this to be an absolutely fascinating issue to watch him squirm on it and watch his base. And they’ve kind of given up contorting themselves on it because it’s unspinnable. There’s not enough mayonnaise in the world to turn it into chicken salad.”

“They are stuck with this story forever.”

“The attraction that remains now for the base is a very narrow slice of the culture war aspect of the GOP. It’s the owning the libs guys. It’s the media is evil and I’m going to help Trump own the libs. I’m going to hurt the people that I think look down on me. And you know that is a fairly narrow and sort of small number of folks. But if you’re a working class person who thought Trump was going to bring you economic prosperity, you were wrong. If you’re an evangelical who thinks he shares your Christian values, you’re wrong.

The base has shrunk by about a third and it used to be about 40% of Americans and now it’s in the low 30s high 20s who are like the Trump hotties I call them. He’s broken faith with them as he would inevitably break faith with everybody. He’s a guy who has never kept in his life a business deal, a marriage vow, a promise of almost any kind that wasn’t about himself.

So I don’t have a lot of pity for them, they’ve made their bed with Trump and he’s as horrible a person as can be imagined. But they have to own it now. This is what they chose. This is the world they elected to live in.

ELECTION/MID-TERM

“we should expect absolute lawlessness.”

MEDIA

A lot of those shows have both-sided themselves into irrelevance. That is a really poisonous kind of situation for media because if you’re trying to pretend both sides are the same in a world where one side wants to burn American democracy to the ground and one side wants to pass policy proposals you’re not dealing with the actual comparable political parties.