City Talk; John Avlon, Author, "Wingnuts: How The Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America"

How I'm Doug Musio, this is City Talk, Berthers, 9-11 Truthers, Oath Keepers, 10-thurs, Tea Potters, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Keith Alderman too, their win nuts. He had a twist of wing nuts as John Avalon, senior political columnist at the Daily Beast and author of Wing Nuts, how the lunatic fringe is hijacking America. He's also a regular commentator on CNN and has served as Chief Speech Writer for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

John was also a columnist and associate editor at the late lamented New York son. Welcome John. Good to see you, Doug. John, I have to tell you, I had up my blood pressure doses. This is frightening stuff, this is dangerous stuff that that you chronicle here. Let's look at this new poll that was that was released last week done by Harris on the Wing Nuts. Just talk about some of these findings. I'll tell you, so the Harris poll respected, run of the oldest most respected polling firms in the country, did a poll based on my book and it just came out today and it is a, it's startling. It shows the degree to which Obama derangement syndrome, which I define as, you know, it's a medical condition. This is a medical condition. It's psychological and it's catching and there was bush derangement syndrome before but now it's much worse than ever before. It's what I call pathological hatred of the president posing his patriotism. Yes, a little range. Thank you very much. I do what I can on that front. But so this poll really is a wake-up call or it

should be. Let's take a look at overall population. 40% of Americans say that President Obama is socialist. 32% say he is Muslim. 27% say he resents America's heritage. 25% say we wasn't born to the United States and therefore he's ineligible to president. 23% say he's racist. 20% say he's doing many of the things that Hitler did and 14% say he's the anti-Christ. That's the general public. Yeah. Now let's turn to the Republicans. Yeah. Republicans in conservative the numbers get markedly worse. 67% say he is a socialist. 57% say he is Muslim. 47% say he resents America's heritage. 45% align themselves with the birther say he wasn't born in the United States, not eligible president. 42% say he's racist. 38% say he's doing many of the things that Hitler did and 24% of Republicans say he might be the anti-Christ. Okay. Now wait a minute. Who are these wingnuts and how do they come to believe what many of us would just see simply as factual on truths? They have

been stirred up and incited over the course of the last 15 months. We've been doing something very dangerous in this country, which is that we have been pumping up fear and hate in the service of hyper partisanship. And we have their enthusiastic new dupes, every generation for these kinds of claims, but they've never quite metastasized this way in our body politic and it's dangerous. On some level, you know, the wingnuts are the absurd. Some people dismiss them as the eccentric colorful fringe on the extreme end of the political landscape, but they're more powerful than ever before. They are therefore more dangerous than ever before. They are of achieving a depth in our society that we haven't seen before, at least not anytime recently. So this should be a real wake-up call to all Americans. Okay. Talk about exactly how are they hijacking America as your, the subtitle of the book alludes to you. This poll shows just the degree to which they're hijacking America, but let's talk about how they're hijacking America. I think there are three reasons the wingnuts are more powerful and more dangerous than ever before. One, the parties are more polarized than ever before. The power in American politics in

the institutionalized parties has moved from the center to the fringes. The parties are more polarized, ideologically polarized, the voting patterns, more polarized. Second thing is the rise of partisan media. We are devolving back to the era. Like in the 19th century, when poll newspapers were owned subsidiaries of political parties, that's happening now on cable news. We see it every day. You know, there's a right wing and a left wing news station. We are self-segregating ourselves into separate political realities. And the final thing is the internet, which has become an echo chamber for many folks and really an incubator of extremism. Okay. Let's take, let's take the internet and let me, let me be political science professor, Madison and federalist 10 constructs, all these barriers for a majority to form. All those barriers are breached with the internet and they've been breached for a while. They are, but I mean, I'm a big Fed 10 fan. So I mean, I think the basic idea still holds, which is that it should be in a society where should be able to transcend our factions if only because we can't agree on them enough to hit 51%. The problem is, is we really are self-segregating into separate

realities. So there's a mutual incomprehensibility because people are getting a steady diet of misinformation or partisan skewed information from even mainstream sources. The internet gets even more particular where you were creating effect, creating little cells of separate realities, intense conspiracy theorists that proliferate on the internet. And a lot of people who in the past might have been isolated by the absurdity of their views to communicate across geographic lines that creates effectively online armies. They are becoming the loudest lobbying block if not the largest. Okay. So, but but then Madison's walls have been breached. What does this mean for politics? I mean, Federalist 10 also talks about the filters that a legislature and representative government would perform and ain't doing it. They're part of the problem. They aren't. And this is where our politicians are aggregating their duty. And I am furious at their cowardice every day. One of the things we've seen over the last 15 months is that the fringe is blurring with the base. The extremes are starting to meld with the party's base. And as the parties have gotten more polarized as redistricting reform has been rigged so that we, you know, redistricting has been rigged so

that a comparatively small number of folks are determining who winning these closed parties and primaries. The politicians are terrified of offending the base in this new world where they don't need to reach across the aisle or win over the regional edge of the opposition. They only need to keep their own most extreme voters happy. They are afraid of doing anything that might offend them. That means they are the only sin in this world of view of politics is that they're not extreme enough. They are not only pandering to the extremes, they are intimidated by the lunatic fringe. That's one of the things that's causing the legislatures to be too cowardly to stand up to the extremes. I keep waiting for somebody responsible on the Republican side of the aisle. And some people do. I mean, Joe Scarborough does this, David from is doing this, but a real leading political figure to do this to call out the extremes and say, look, we may agree that we are embracing unprecedented fiscal year responsibility. That is a responsible issue. I don't consider the team part of your swing. That's I think in many cases, they're motivated by fiscal conservative protests. But what's been baked into the cake is a serious case of Obama derangement syndrome. And Republicans, too many Republicans have tried to cultivate

that to gain from the electoral advantage, from the anger. And no one is doing the responsible thing in the country of standing up and calling it out. That's one of the biggest sides of the wingnut is they always confuse partisanship with patriotism. And it is not the same thing. Last refuge of scoundrels. Damn right. Okay. What do they represent and what do they signify? What what meaning is there in this movement that you can see given your sense of history and both looking in the past and sort of projecting it to the future? Well, the comforting thing, I mean, history is an important guy to politics. You know, I believe that politics matters because politics is history and the present tense. And there is the sense that it can give us a give us a sense of perspective for our current problems. So here's the good news. The good news is we've dealt with wingnuts before. We've faced these forces before. We face the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during the reconstruction and post reconstruction South. We've dealt in the 1930s because demagogues always do well in economic downturn. That's part of what we're seeing.

You know, in the 1930s, you self-other covalent on the right and Huey long on the left. Massively powerful figures, supposedly populous deeply in the 50s. Exactly right. Joe McCarthy in the 50s. What we need to learn from is to say how they were defeated. Some folks say merely play a game of defense. These folks will hang themselves. They always do. The extremes are always their own sides. Worst enemy, they will hang themselves on their own absurdities. But how many people get hung and injured in the price? And that's why I think that's a dangerous game to play. I think we need to play offense. I think we need to approach this problem from position to strength, not weakness because there are more Americans in the center than there are in the extremes. That's the crazy thing. We've got there are more Americans who are registering, who are independent voters now. The Democrats are Republicans, independent so the largest of fastest growing segment of the electorate. So we should be taking on the extremes on both sides who are hijacking our politics and saying stop, you're playing with fire here and we're not going to let you hijack our republic this way. These independence. Are they true? Who are these folks? Who are they demographically? Who are they socioeconomically? Sure. Who are they

attitudeanally? I mean, I would like to be comforted by this centrist independent. I don't see them. I'll tell you, sometimes New York's not the easiest place to if you want to look at it outside, but you're right. Second only to Washington is necessarily, but you know, I love our hometown, but here's who independence are. First of all, largest fastest growing segment of the electorate. That's the demographic trend. They're reacting to the polarization of the two parties. If you look on on any ideological skew, what you see is they're always in between Democrats and Republicans, but closer to Republicans on economic issues, closer to Democrats on social issues, and they hate the hyper polarization and partisanship in Washington. How much do they hate it and does it stimulate behavior? They can hate it all they want. That's part of the problem. Well, there's a lot there's a lot of anger with their hasn't been because the system's been rigged to kind of reward the hyper partisan the two parties. It's effectively disenfranchised the voters in the center and independent voters. And that's where I think we need redistribute form. We need open primaries and we need to start making sure that the center starts standing up. You know, how we stood up to

Joe McCarthy's instructive because it began not all at once. This was a controversial stand to take and not just Ed Murrow on television at courageous job with it, but the first female popular elected senator was woman named Margaret Chase Smith. And I wrote about her in my first book independent nation. She gave a speech called Declaration of Conscious where she was the first person to stand up on the Senate floor and denounce Joe McCarthy as a fellow Republican. She did that. And she said we need to shed our intimidated silence and stand up to the violence and unreasonableness of the extremes. She did that. That's what we need to do now. We need to shed our intimidated silence. Who do you see on the contemporary republicans who's got enough but voice? We can't we can't just wait for politics. No, no, I understand it. But they're not. No, they're not. But that's why it's up to you. It's up to me. It's up to folks at home to start standing up and saying enough. We want an alternative because the extremes of all set up this thing where they say, Oh, there's nothing in the center. The only game in town. You want to stand up to the extremes. Just do it by beginning equally lab person on the other side because they want this conflict. They want this word. The only way we stop this cycle. I'll tell you a quick interesting story.

Whenever I went up in the protest, I go up to someone holding a bomb as Hitler's side. I'd say, what do you think is fun? Oh, yeah, because you know, I try to understand these people as people. What they have lives, jobs, what's motivating you? One of the things you always hear. One of them is they were saying, well, they started it. They called Bush Hitler before and nobody complained, nobody denounced it. So now it's lots legitimate. Now I'm doing it now. The only way we stop this cycle before it really erupts into something you're retrievable is if we stand up to the extremes on both sides. If you fuel the fire and just bet your anger at extremes on one side, you're part of the problem. If you think that calling a president of the opposite party Hitler is the problem, but you know, but not your own, you're part of the problem. It's got to be equal. We need to stand up to extremes on both sides to stop this cycle. That's what we haven't been doing. Okay. Who leads this? I know you're telling me, but I'm not enough and you're not enough. You need one kind of a stab. Don't you need some kind of established leadership and organization to do

this? I mean, being ticked off is what I wake up every morning ticked off. I mean, I need some institutional form where I can channel this ticked offness. We need to challenge the institutional forms to start taking on the extremes and taking them seriously because right now they've been hijacked by them and they're benefiting from them. Yeah, wait a minute. The media, the main U.S. you so eloquently and forcefully put it is an incentive to go to the extreme because you create the natural audiences, which gives you your advertising dollars, who's who stands in the middle and gets ripped because it's almost in the center. But I tell you what, I think are coming back because what you're looking at is the largest untapped market in American politics and American culture is voters in the center, is independence. Most Americans are not screamers. They feel like they're being screamed at from both sides. What we need to do is start putting a clear flag and start playing offense, not defense, not letting the extremes define us, but start having the center to find the extremes. That's why I believe we need to approach this problem from a position of strength from playing offense. If we do that, they're more of us than there are of them. This is a comparatively small number of folks on the extremes who are

saying these things, who are shouting these things and inciting other people to riot. What we need to do is start creating an alternative. It's the old idea of being the change you want to see in the world. It's got to start somewhere. We do have the numbers. What we haven't had is clear forceful advocates for this change. That's what we need to do. Right, that's what I'm trying to do with this and also you need a coherent message and you need money. You know, you've got to communicate. But there's an untapped market here. I'm convinced. In publishing, this book is a rebellious project because even in the publishing time, we've even of course. But even in the publishing industry, even in the publishing industry, they're in the same dynamic that you see in the media and in politics, which is that books catered to the extremes sell. Why? Because they've set up mechanisms or organizations where if a book that appeals to wingnuts on the right or left sells, the conservative book clubs will buy up 10,000 copies and give them away for free with a subscription to their partisan news organization, same dynamic on the left. What we need to do is challenge that conventional wisdom. That's why it's so important, frankly, to show that there's a market for strong positions in the center. I think a lot of what makes the Daily Show successful, for example,

is that a satire is the only way to break through the spin cycle these days. B, because they're equal opportunity offenders. And that is part of what we need to do, though. We need to show, stand up, create a strong alternative, and then show there's a market for this kind of change. The people are disgusted, by the way, the extremes of hijacked our politics. And we can change the, change the media. Think about it, 324 our cable networks. And at least two of them that are overwhelmingly partisan, and not any show for the 42% of Americans who identify as independents. But a half dozen for folks who are on the far right or far left. That is a disconnect. The problem is, traditionally American politics disconnects get filled by parties who end up reaching into the center pragmatically. But now the special interests of rig the system, and they're so powerful that there's a disconnect that the politics isn't doing what it's supposed to do. The two parties aren't reaching out to the center, which is why you're seeing independents rise up in reaction. Do you see a third party who leads it and what's the agenda? I think that, you know, down the road, we could see that, because this disconnect is profound. I mean, you know, most folks in the center say, look, I'm too fiscally conservative for the Democrats. I'm too

socially liberal for the Republicans. But the parties can't seem to reach out to those voters in the center. It's a generational thing, by the way. The younger you are, the more likely are you to be independent. The more likely are to be fiscally conservative, but socially liberal libertarian. The problem is, is that the parties are so controlled by their extremes. The influence, the religious right, and, you know, interests on the left that have an endless appetite for big government spending. That they're unable to reach out into the center. That's part of the challenge. One thing is, I think you could see, and this is what the Tea Party movement in parts about. It's not an independent movement. It's a conservative populist movement. I think what you could see is folks on the far right leave the Republican party because ironically they believe it's not polarizing and radical enough. That then could provoke folks on the far left to say, you know, same thing. People, President Obama, people don't appreciate how much he's being attacked from the far left who consider him a corporate seller. You know, so you may have the left spread out. And then what you could see is actually centrist Republicans Democrats realizing that, you know what, they are much more, much more in common than they do it. The extreme is a hard way to say. How many centrist Republicans are there? How many hands do you have?

No, seriously. I'm not sure. Well, there are some, believe it or not, but may look, you know, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, these folks, John McCain, absolutely set that standard before he won the nomination and nominated Sarah Palin. He had a deep appeal with it. But what's interesting is that Republican Party had a right about this book. There's this thing called rhinohunting, Republican and name only, where the conservatives are trying to drive the centrist out of their party. But, you know, you're starting to see the same thing in the Democratic Party called dino-hunting, you know, where they're trying to chase out all centrist Democrats. That's an unhealthy impulse torque. It's intolerance for genuine diversity. It is in a healthy impulse that it is actually really about conformity. Here's what drives me crazy. If they say, these folks say, drives you crazy, John, come on. But here's what they say, you know, these folks will say, hey, look, if you're a good party line vote, that means your show great courage by voting 100% of the time with the party. They've totally confused conformity with courage. That's cowardice. That's not a courage. And yet these folks, these ideological enforcers, try to enforce that. They're more powerful and never before, but they're totally insane. Okay. This politics has a racial element to it. I mean, clearly

much of it is an anxiety of what is now white minority politics. Let's talk about that. Well, you know, I've turned what's going on the birth of white minority politics, because I do not believe that simple racism, the old brutal stupid racism of the Bull Connor variety is behind the vast majority of opposition to President Obama. And I think a lot of folks in the left, reflexively pay the race card. And I think it, I discredits their larger argument. What you do have when you interview folks in the field at these protests, one of the dates you hear a lot, you hear 20, about 20, 42, and 20, 50. These are the dates that the CO census estimates that non-whites will become a majority in this country. Now, I personally don't believe the word white is even particularly useful, but it's certainly race. You need to deal with it. I mean, it is the fundamental, it has been a fundamental fault line in American politics. And it's not incidental that these sort of spontaneous outbursts and anger that you're seeing have coincided with the election of the first African-American president. I think it's the birth of white minority politics. It

harkens back to a simpler future. It is partly the last gasp of resentment at the influence of the far left in the 1960s where anti-war protesters became seen as anti-American. But the fury that's being seen has an element to it that's mostly, if you look at these protesters, they're all about defending American heritage, right? They really feel that America's heritage is under attack. It's not simple racism. You don't see a lot of folks dressed up as Confederate soldiers at these protests. All you do see Confederate flags, and I write about that. But as American revolutionary soldiers, they really feel that American heritage is under attack. And that's another thing you hear when you interview a lot of these folks. They talk about how long their family has been in America. How many generations? So this is a complex dynamic, but it's what I call, it's the birth of white minority politics as influence. Yeah, but I mean, if you look at the statements, eight states having, you know, curging secession that the 10th amenders, the healthcare bill passage triggers a eruption from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and John Gambling. States sued a black healthcare bill,

say it usurps this sovereignty. We're in the pre-Civil War with John Calhoun, nullification, and secession. What's going on? This is what's amazing is that some of these folks, I don't think, fully appreciate the historic resonance. I mean, go back to, go back and listen to Martin Luther King. I have a dream speech and he talks about, you know, lips dripping with the words of null, you know, nullification and interposition. This is the language that preceded secession. It was the language that created a constitutional argument against desegregation, or what was called the massive resistance to desegregation in the 1960s, when anger at liberal centers for public and oral war in court, I ended up enforcing Brown v. Board or inciting Brown v. Board, and desegregation in the United States. These are arguments with deep historic resonance. There's actually continuity between a lot of the conservative arguments made by southern Democrats during the Confederacy and the arguments by conservatives today, but these are troubling arguments. That's why it should be a wake-up call because we've wrestled with these questions before. You have a movement I write about in the book where folks on the far right are

flirting with secession. There are literally people are talking about it, not only, you know, nullification and interposition, but this movement going on, the 10th Amendment movement, which theoretically lays the groundwork for secession. They are largely historical debates that are interesting debates, about all the power of the states versus the federal government. But when you started voking these specific clauses that have been used by some of the worst villains in American history, as well as theoretical defenders of countries. Let's do civil war, excuse me. We're playing with ugly dangerous stuff here, and that's the larger point of the book. Okay, let's talk about endings here. There are a couple of possible, maybe even plausible endings looking forward here. What are those from the most troubling to you to the most benign? Well, let's do it in the other direction. The most benign is that the extremes effectively punch themselves out. Extremes are always their own sides of worst enemy. There's an inherent absurdity to these folks, and there's always the likelihood that when you have unhinged

people, leading movements, or people leading movements of the unhinged, that they end up showing themselves. Well, they do unhinged thing that precipitate once scale violence. Well, I'm getting there yet. So the one thing we could talk about, John Brown, irrespective of where you could go ahead. But I do think, you know, the reason I wrote this book is also because it's a wake-up call. Not only should people connect the dots about what's happening in the historic precedent of this, in the larger residence. What's funny, by the way, a lot of the snake oil, these folks are selling is the same stuff that's been sold by the Jane, Jane, John Birch Society, 50, 60 years ago. A lot of the same themes. I closed the book with a one in poster for John F. Kennedy that was pastor of Dallas that has many of the same themes. But the danger is is that if we don't wake up, if we don't appreciate the real danger and start encouraging folks to stand up to the extremes, because we have the numbers and I think we can. That it won't end until there's violence. And then we're going to wake up one day and say, my God, how did this happen? And that is an important thing that we need to be aware of in this country that we are playing with dynamite when you demonize the president and pump up fear and hate for hyper

partisan gain. We need to be aware of the forces we're playing with. We are not immune from the forces of history. You can't stir up and incite and cite people right to the verge of violence. It's a lot I use in the book. Your hate is a cheap and easy recruiting tool, but it can be murder on a democracy. These are the forces we're playing with. We've played with them before. They usually end in violence. Look at the rise of the militia movements in the 1990s that led to the Timothy McVays bombing the Oklahoma City building. We have a new militia movement in this country. The Southern Poverty Law Center put out a report last month that said 300% increase in the number of militias. It's what I call the hatred movement in American politics that we're seeing. These are dangerous forces we're playing with. We need to be smarter and wiser than that. We've seen what can happen. And that's why I wrote the book as to serve as a wake-up call to say that these are just new echoes of these old themes that have been deeply destructive and that we need to stand up and stop this before it leads to real violence. That's the obligation we have. That's the opportunity and the obligation. We can do it. I am confident. We have the numbers. I believe that look we're never there

always can be cranks and conspiracy theorists among us. But what we need to do is stand up and try to assert our real influence on politics. And remember what Eisenhower said, which is, you know, the middle of the road is all the usable surface. It's the extremes are left and right that are in the gutters. Okay. Let me just turn very briefly. We don't have much time to a couple of you of columns. That is that have appeared in the daily beast. I just couldn't help myself. Let's just let's start with two of them. Iran and U.S. wingnuts, a 9-Eleven love story. Talk about sort of the confluence of craziness. One murderous craziness and the other response to it. Right. So in that particular case, I'm going to declare it himself not only a Holocaust denier, which is widely known in his case, but also somebody who is 9-Eleven truth, requesting whether or not Al Qaeda was behind the attack saying perhaps it was an implosion, you know, set up by the U.S. government. One of the things I talk about in my book is, and he called it a big lie, which is convenient because that's a term come up with Hitler. Right. Gurbles came up with about how people,

if you keep, you're telling a big lie long enough that some people will believe it. Excuse me, according to the survey, lots of people believe this big lie. That's the dangerous thing. And you've got an interplay between the rise of the 9-Eleven truthers immediately after Bush and the rise of the birthers after the election. The birthers are people who believe that President Obama is not born in the United States and is therefore constitutionally and algebraic president. They're very similar kind of things. They both are about delegitimizing a president by aiming at their core attribute or thing. And they're very prevalent and they're dangerous. And they're fairly widespread. In 2007, a poll said that 60, nearly six percent of Democrats either thought that Bush knew about 9-Eleven at the attack, 9-Eleven tax in advance, where they didn't know whether he did or not. Similar numbers of Republicans say the same thing about Obama and the birthers. It is a fertile field for conspiracy theories. And they need to be confronted. The problem is, as Jonathan Swift once said, you can't reason someone out of something they weren't reasoned into. But in the case of Amdena shot, it's an opportunity to point

out that for those of us in New York who lived through non-eleven, who take this very, very personally. This is an offensive thing. And the fact that they try to wrap it up and conspiracy theories always try to paint themselves as the true patriots. They're the truth tellers with special knowledge. I mean, that's the thing is that they're certain continuity of that all these folks have. And you can say, let's believe they have special knowledge. Right. They believe the truth. Yeah, exactly. And that's what makes it so dangerous. So whenever anyone comes to your town, we, you know, when the old demagogue outfit, they won't come looking at that way. They'll come saying, I'm a truth teller, and I've got special knowledge to sell you. And the whole knowledge is based on dividing our society into us against them. And there's an elite group of us and a big group of them, and they're dangerous and malevolent, and they want to tear down this country. That sales pitch has been resuscitated by folks on the far left and the far right forever. And it's dangerous. Oh, okay. That's enough. I can't take anymore. My thanks to John Avalon, author of Wingnuts, how the lunatic fringe is hijacking America for

being on the show. Join me next week when my guest will be New York state controller, Tom Denapoli. See you. Hello, I'm Doug Musio. Let us know what you think about this show. You can reach us at cuny.tv. When you get there, click on the board that says contact us and send your email. Whatever it is. Thanks. No thanks. I'm not just do it. Send it.