RadixJournal - January 06, 2023


The McCarthy Situation

Topics
Kevin McCarthy
Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Kevin McCarthy Donald Trump Matt Gaetz Lauren Boebert Mitt Romney John Boehner Sean Hannity Jimmy Dore Trumpism McCain Biden
Confidence Men Discourse Pollution

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

135.46

Word count

1,745

Sentence count

124

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On this episode of Thick & Thin, the boys discuss the latest in the ongoing saga of the tea party rebellion against Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy. They also discuss whether or not the tea parties are really as bad as they seem.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Yeah, I'm ready to just put the pedal to the metal.
00:00:03.500 So is MAGA.
00:00:04.720 I did want to talk about this because I, you know, I was so down on Trump and rightfully, you know, disappointed, certainly by even by 2017, disappointed off the Trump train, voting Biden, making fun of MAGA.
00:00:29.840 Constantly on Twitter, you know, the story, but, you know, there's just something, I don't know, maybe I have this contrarian instinct that when mediocre, boring people start, when they create a consensus and when they start hating on someone, I'm almost like tempted to defend him.
00:00:54.480 And so I have this kind of like weird, weird fascination again with Trump now that he's a wounded animal.
00:01:05.000 I almost like have a desire to defend him.
00:01:09.380 I think I also have a right, a self-righteous, you could say, desire to defend him in the sense that the Republican Party, someone like Kevin McCarthy, and John Boehner actually used this term quite explicitly.
00:01:25.920 He said effectively, we wrangle the crazies.
00:01:29.780 So don't worry about the Tea Party, you know, the adults will lasso them and get them in the right chute.
00:01:36.840 It's going to all be okay.
00:01:38.160 And I feel like Kevin McCarthy, first off, he was so obsequious to Trump.
00:01:44.240 I mean, he denounced J6 and then the moment that, you know, there was a chance to kind of move forward and honestly assess the situation.
00:01:56.180 He decides to go into quasi-semi-J6 denial mode.
00:02:03.140 He supports the revolution the moment it fails, basically. 0.65
00:02:08.020 You know, I kind of don't like the idea of these boring, mediocre people like McCarthy, like pretty much the rest of them.
00:02:20.320 In some ways, like drafting off the populist energy and wave.
00:02:28.980 I mean, and this gets to a theme that's been pretty recurrent with me and Trumpism, which is that the so-called flaws are really its virtues or the bugs are a feature of this thing.
00:02:44.860 So someone like Kevin McCarthy couldn't be as successful as he has been as a national figure, local congressman, of course, but kind of a national figure.
00:02:57.660 If he didn't draft off that energy of the crazies and Trumpism and this deep anxiety that Republican voters feel and that is expressed in all sorts of rather unhealthy and unhelpful ways.
00:03:14.820 And so when they start to try to tame the beast, I almost instinctively support the beast because these people are being fundamentally dishonest in a way.
00:03:28.580 They rode the beast into town and then they're now trying to tame the beast or put the beast in a cage or pretend that the beast never existed or maybe even slaughter it.
00:03:39.340 And I just have a kind of instinctive sympathy for the beast at this point.
00:03:47.680 So you can say a lot of things about the speaker's race.
00:03:54.400 One criticism you could say is that McCarthy has already given in to all of the demands of Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert and company.
00:04:05.140 He's already I mean, there are reports that he agreed to some kind of situation where there could be a no confidence vote in the speaker with like five votes or something shockingly low.
00:04:19.060 So which is which obviously disempowers the speaker.
00:04:22.440 I mean, he was willing to go that far to get the prize because this is what his life, adult life is all about.
00:04:29.840 He's being speaker of the House. So he's willing to do that almost a suicide act of sorts, because you're going to create a rule like that.
00:04:39.360 Someone's going to use it. He's bent over backwards.
00:04:42.540 What do these people really want?
00:04:45.600 Can they express what they want?
00:04:47.880 Can they express whom they want as an alternative to McCarthy?
00:04:53.600 And to a very large degree, the answer to that question, those questions is no.
00:04:59.820 They were now back in a mode of the Tea Party or something.
00:05:06.800 It's this vague anxiety about spending and reining in the government.
00:05:14.820 And it's, you know, kind of rather abstract in a way they're talking.
00:05:20.600 Actually, I've heard talk of term limits. I've heard talk of a few other things.
00:05:25.240 I actually listened to Matt Gaetz late last night on a space that he hopped into.
00:05:30.520 It was one of these conservative spaces that I'll go into, you know, I don't know, once a week or so.
00:05:35.520 And I'll often talk. And he was he was in there kind of explaining these things.
00:05:40.860 And it really reminded me of the Tea Party era and this kind of, you know, vague desire for tax cuts and spending cuts.
00:05:49.500 And the debt is out of control. I think they've gone backwards in a way.
00:05:53.580 So these are some kind of bad things you could say about this rebellion.
00:05:58.560 And you certainly could say a lot of bad things about Gaetz.
00:06:02.320 You could say a lot of bad things about Lauren Boebert. She's, you know, just kind of dumb, etc. 1.00
00:06:09.220 But I don't know. I just I just I have a certain sympathy for what they're doing. 0.99
00:06:16.960 And I guess because the the GOP has relied on this populism to get elected and absent populism, the GOP's got nothing.
00:06:32.320 It's just got a bunch of unpopular policies that have been pulled for some time and are clearly unpopular.
00:06:42.660 And so they need populism. They need that dark energy.
00:06:47.780 You know, Clarice Starling has to go visit Hannibal Lecter. 1.00
00:06:50.780 They've kind of got to go there in order to be successful.
00:06:55.020 But then when they when they completely deny the basis of their own electoral existence, I just I move from like being opposed to them to just having outright contempt for them.
00:07:09.920 You know, I mean, that donkey is the thing you rode into town on. 0.73
00:07:17.260 And you guys are nothing. I mean, I get it. 0.96
00:07:20.100 Trump's a wound wounded at this point, maybe fatally wounded, but you're nothing without that type of energy.
00:07:27.440 What you are is Mitt Romney in 2012 or McCain or whatever.
00:07:32.820 You're just unpopular policies, maybe a decent person at the helm in terms of Romney, but just over.
00:07:39.880 You can't win, but you can do something.
00:07:43.240 You can win, first off, and you can at least capture imagination and create a grand spectacle.
00:07:50.480 If you tap into the dark side and and that's what these people are tapping into.
00:07:59.040 And so I just kind of like it on some level.
00:08:03.860 And like the other thing that I noticed is that this I mean, this whole dynamic is laid out through Matt Gaetz nomination of Donald Trump for speaker.
00:08:22.960 And this is there is a precedent for this.
00:08:25.040 They talked about doing this.
00:08:27.440 Matt Gaetz himself was saying, like, give us a majority in 2022.
00:08:31.160 You'll have Donald Trump, a speaker of the House.
00:08:33.320 So it was, you know, that sounded a lot like bold talk, but it's actually maybe happening.
00:08:42.400 And I don't know.
00:08:44.260 I just I just have a certain sympathy and fascination and kind of love for lack of a better word for the old chaos candidate coming back.
00:08:57.820 And the other thing about it is that it disarms the opposition to the rebellion, as I wrote on Twitter.
00:09:06.580 In the sense that, you know, even after the midterm loss, Sean Hannity was licking Trump's booze. 0.71
00:09:15.620 You know, maybe a little, you know, maybe a little less saliva on those licks, but there were licks nevertheless. 1.00
00:09:23.760 And six months ago, a year ago, he was bending over backwards for Trump.
00:09:29.340 And so this rebellion, which is in the name of Trump on some level, even if it's not supported by Trump directly.
00:09:40.020 Is a kind of disarming maneuver towards the Republican establishment, because it's like we're doing this in the name of MAGA.
00:09:49.380 You know, MAGA, that thing that you said was so great two months ago.
00:09:53.280 Remember that?
00:09:53.760 And it kind of it disarms the opposition, I think, in a very interesting way.
00:10:01.340 And so I don't know.
00:10:03.140 There's just a lot about this whole thing that, you know, look, am I joining in this?
00:10:09.980 Do I believe in any of their rhetoric?
00:10:11.840 Like we're going to cut spending or any of that stuff?
00:10:15.540 We're going to drain the swamp.
00:10:16.980 Do I believe any of that?
00:10:18.140 Of course not.
00:10:18.780 It's all just nonsense.
00:10:20.200 But and I've heard it a million times in my relatively short life.
00:10:25.280 This is what the conservative movement was, at least rhetorically speaking, for my entire lifetime.
00:10:32.740 But now there's something added.
00:10:35.960 There's something extra to it.
00:10:38.460 There is that specter of chaos or breaking through the antagonism towards the Republican establishment,
00:10:46.700 which was the Trumpian dynamic in 2015 and for at least half of 2016.
00:10:54.560 There's just something very attractive about it.
00:10:58.640 Perhaps you could say I've gone into Joker mode.
00:11:02.340 But I basically think this is wild and crazy and fun.
00:11:06.680 And I support it.
00:11:08.040 And I do find it interesting because it is a powerful political move.
00:11:13.340 I think actually on Tuesday, I briefly mentioned the whole force the vote movement from two years ago.
00:11:22.120 And, you know, that thing is associated with Jimmy Dore, even like Jackson Hinkle, like people I generally don't like, to be honest.
00:11:32.520 And and sure, certainly they blew it out of proportion.
00:11:37.260 But they are actually right in the sense that, like, if you have a truly dedicated minority, you can actually do something.
00:11:50.540 Now, what that is, at least in the case of this rebellion, remains to be seen.
00:11:55.580 In 2020, it was about let's have a four vote for Medicare for all.
00:11:59.240 And Medicare for all would have failed.
00:12:00.560 But at the very almost 100 percent certain it would have failed.
00:12:05.500 But you could kind of get Democrats on the record and be like, look, you talk a big, big game about health care.
00:12:14.700 But, you know, when the rubber hits the road, we saw where you were.
00:12:18.140 You voted against it.
00:12:19.580 You came up with some song and dance as an excuse and blah, blah, blah.
00:12:23.560 But you you failed us.
00:12:25.040 We're in the middle of a pandemic and you won't vote for Medicare for all.
00:12:28.520 So even if it had limited aims, I kind of appreciate the effort.
00:12:35.200 And in this case, the aims are ambiguous or nebulous or non-existent or hokey or whatever.
00:12:45.320 But I don't know.
00:12:47.220 I kind of appreciate the effort.
00:12:50.740 Maybe that's the best way to say it.