Volts podcast: Chris Hayes on how his politics have changed since 2015

In this episode, Chris Hayes of MSNBC discusses how American
politics and society changed after the Obama years, where things
might head in the future, and how his own views have shifted
along the way.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


I often reflect on a particular moment in the summer of 2015. It
was not long after the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal
across the nation in Obergefell v. Hodges. And America was in the
middle of one of its regular fights over Confederate monuments
and flags, which were being pulled down by progressives across
the country.


One afternoon I ran across a cartoon — I think it was on
Facebook? — showing a Confederate flag being lowered and the
LGBTQ flag being raised in its stead.


Hot damn, I thought. Maybe we really do get it right eventually.


I now think back on that moment as the peak of my belief in what
you might call the Obama creed, which the nation's first black
president repeated in one way or another in virtually every
speech: that the essence of America is its continuous struggle
toward the egalitarian ideals of its founding. Again and again it
delays and falls short and takes two steps back, but it never
stops striving, improving, bit by hard-fought bit. The arc of
history is long, but it bends toward justice.


To a first approximation, everything that has happened since then
has sucked. We fell into the ugly 2016 Democratic nomination
fight, followed by the ugly presidential election, then four
years of daily insults to dignity and compassion by Trump, then a
plague that we bungled in countless ways and that has killed more
than a million of us, and now, the Supreme Court is
systematically dismantling the pillars of the modern
administrative state while Biden and the Democrats fumble their
way through a slow-motion catastrophe, setting up an openly
seditious Republican Party to seize near-total power in the
coming two elections.


To put it mildly, these developments have been rough on the Obama
creed, at least for me and many people I know. Much of what Obama
himself did was crushed or reversed by Trump, and Biden has
barely begun rebuilding from the wreckage. More than that,
America's reactionary minority seems ascendent. And its
intentions are clear: to follow Viktor Orban's lead in Hungary.
To whittle democracy down until it's entirely hollow, one-party
rule in all but name. It finds echoes in similar reactionary
backlashes currently rising in nations across the globe.


Is America redeemable? Is white Christian patriarchy ready and
willing to destroy the country before it gives up power? Is the
arc of history bending, or is it merely flailing back and forth,
with no larger purpose or pattern? Is modern multi-racial,
multi-cultural democracy still a viable long-term project?


To help ponder these weighty questions, I've turned to the
inimitable Chris Hayes, who, as they say, needs no introduction.
You've seen his shows on MSNBC, you've listened to his podcast,
you've read his essays and books, you know that he is one of the
leading liberal voices of our time. He’s also a friend. We are
part of the same generation of journalists, living through the
same dumpster fires, seeing the same patterns, and our paths have
crossed regularly over the years. I’ve also been on several of
his shows! We go way back.


I’ve always felt that Chris and I share similar political and
intellectual instincts — one of the few people at the commanding
heights of US journalism and punditry about whom I can say that —
so I’m curious to hear how his political outlook has changed
since 2015, whether he still believes in the Obama creed, and
what he thinks is coming in America’s near future.


So with that portentous wind-up, let's bring him into the
conversation.


Chris Hayes


That was great. I love that. I found that very moving.


David Roberts


Oh, great. Alright, well, thanks for coming on Volts.


Chris Hayes


I should say I'm a Volts reader, too.


David Roberts


Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. We're talking during a
very dark time. Dark. I mean, it's all shades of dark these days.
It's particularly dark in the wake of the latest ...


Chris Hayes


Child murder?


David Roberts


Child murder. Yes, child mass murder. That we're all going
through the motions as we always do, until that fades and
something else horrible comes up in the news. But let's pull the
lens back. I want to do some big picture talking, and then a
little bit more close in, like proximate, what's our proximate
future talk? But let's start with the big picture. So I just want
to start by asking you in the most general possible terms, if you
think back to 2015, which I mark as sort of the last normal year,
how has your political outlook changed?


I think of you as basically sort of a Left liberal, Scandinavian,
welfare-state kind of guy. Has any of that fundamentally changed?
Or if not, have you changed your mind about any big things? How
have you evolved since then?


Chris Hayes


Yeah, I think my basic orientation, which is like, a Social
Democrat, a Rawlsian liberal, a mixed economy, freedom plus
groceries, adherent — freedom plus groceries, a great quote from
a New Deal congressman describing the New Deal, which has never
been improved upon for basically Social Democratic, mixed
economy, rule of law. Broadly, I'm a liberal, and I'll talk about
that in a second because I actually think that I'm more that in a
specific philosophical sense than I ever was before, actually.
But, yeah, that hasn't really changed. But things have changed.
So one, I do think I'm a little less, I don't know what I feel
about progress.


What I do feel with age, and with now going through having been a
sort of professional working journalist for 20 years now, just
like that, there are reformist moments and reactionary moments,
and they kind of alternate and being able to recognize when
you're in one almost the way that an athlete can recognize a
defense. It's like, "Oh, yeah, no, right now we're in a
reactionary moment." I just know what a reactionary moment feels
like because I've been through a bunch of them. And in some ways
there's a little bit of some comfort, I find, in that, because
there's a little of "this too shall pass" about the nature of
reactionary moments.


First sort of reformist moments, radical moments, even. I mean, I
think there were moments in the Trump administration where we're
almost sort of revolutionary in some ways, a level of sort of
radical thirst for and exuberant enthusiasm for taking on
Patriarchy and White Supremacy that I'd never seen before in my
life. I mean, the the sort of both "Me Too" and the Women's March
and then the George Floyd protests. So I think I've gotten more,
just like a little, again, I think a little wisened or sanguine
about the fact that you go through different periods in the life
of a society, in a democracy.


I also think things are more tangibly perilous than they've ever
been. I think that's informed by actual hard facts. And it really
is the case that January 6th hadn't ever happened before. It
really is the case that one of the two parties is openly
seditious, or contains a faction that's openly seditious. It
really is the case that we've pissed away 20 years that we could
have been doing stuff on carbon, and now have a much tougher road
ahead. It really is the case that, whatever you want to call it,
populist ethnonationalism, 21st-century sort of authoritarian
models are on the rise, and there's and there's democratic
retreat in a lot of places in the world.


David Roberts


My experience since 2015 has been sort of comprehensive,
360-degree, sort of disillusionment. It's one of those things
like when you do yoga for years, you're like, "Oh, I didn't even
know there were ... I had muscles there." I still had illusions.


Chris Hayes


Right.


David Roberts


Yet they're falling. But one of the things I want to talk about
is history because it's odd. I'm not sure why the timing worked
out this way, but it seems like one of the things that's happened
since then is a lot of people on sort of the broad Left have been
getting a little bit more interested in reconstruction and
looking more closely into that period of American history right
after the Civil War, which is not taught very well in schools. I
did not learn, I did not get the full picture in small-town
Tennessee, in the 1980s when I was learning history.


But through the lens of that, and then looking more at American
history, it's sort of come to me that it seems like American
history is not so much reactionary moments followed by reformist
moments, as very brief reformist moments followed by long swaths
of reactionary moments. Like, if you throw a dart at a timeline,
the odds are you're going to hit a period of horrible,
reactionary backlash. Most of it is horrible, reactionary
backlash. What we learned about in school are these brief periods
where the reactionary backlash somehow gets out over its skis or
goes too far, or causes some rupture, and then there's this sort
of reformist burst.


But really, most of it is dark. So in that light, one of the
things you often hear, there's a sort of like, "everybody calm
down" faction in the punditry. I know you're familiar with them.
And one of the things people like that often say is, "Oh, you
know, like, think about the '60s and '70s there were bombings in
the cities, and leaders being assassinated, and blah, blah,
blah." Or think back to like, you know, the 1910s, or think back
to the 1890s, citing these periods of American history which were
genuinely awful, in which things genuinely did seem to be falling
apart.


But you say, flat out, it's as bad as it's ever been. So how do
you think about those historical comparisons?


Chris Hayes


That's a great question. So, yeah, I would agree, probably in
terms of sheer years on the dartboard, you're probably right. I
think I started reading, getting really into Reconstruction right
after Trump's election, and spent several years reading a ton,
including the Du Bois classic on it.


David Roberts


It's so infuriating. It's impossible to exaggerate how
infuriating it is. The deeper you get into the details.


Chris Hayes


It's also like one of those things ... sometimes you read, like,
you encounter some text and you're like, "It just feels like it
could have been written yesterday." There's just aspects of that
that you're just like, "Holy crap, like, wow. This doesn't feel
like the Dead Sea Scrolls. This does not feel like this got
cracked out of some vault."


David Roberts


This feels the dynamics, change the rhetoric a little bit, the
dynamics are so similar.


Chris Hayes


Yeah. And I think the reason that's useful, I think the reason I
got into Reconstruction, I think it's useful is just because it
got covered up, because it is so inimical to the view of
progress, right? Because we had a huge amount of progress and
then this enormous backlash, right? So things move backwards. I
always describe it as like the lost city of Atlantis, of American
multi-racial democracy, where there was a civilization that got
built, and then just flooded, and then completely like, everyone
just floats on the surface and it's like, "Wait a second."


David Roberts


Yeah, lost to history.


Chris Hayes


"Wait a second. There was a majority Black state legislature in
South Carolina in 1869. Wait, what?" never been replicated
before. Like, we've never had a majority Black legislature in any
state since then. So I think, yes, I think that the reason a lot
of people have gone to that. I think precisely because when you
feel like history is being wrenched backward, or reactionary
forces are ascended, that's a real touchstone. And I think also
your point about ... I have some sympathy to the Just Countdown
Caucus insofar as there was tumultuous stuff going on in the
1960s and 70s, and think the way that I square the circle.


And this comes back around, in some ways, to answering the first
question, which is that the biggest change is appreciating the
difficulty and preciousness of liberal democracy. That I just
took it for granted. There's the old David Foster Wallace, who
has a very famous graduation speech he gives called "This is
Water", which opens with him citing the old joke about the big
fish that swims by the two younger fish and says to them,
"beautiful day, boys. Enjoy the water." And the big fish swims
away, and one the little fish says, the other, "What's the
water?"


David Roberts


Right?


Chris Hayes


And democracy is the water for us. It's just like, "Oh, right,
yeah. That's how we have a liberal democracy." And there's, like,
a court system. There's a rule of law. There's inalienable
rights. There are means of redressing grievance through
nonviolent adjudication of grievance and accountability.


There is ...


David Roberts


Peaceful transition of power.


Chris Hayes


Peaceful transition of power. Like, all this stuff is just like,
"That's the water." And then all of a sudden, it's not.


David Roberts


Yeah.


Chris Hayes


And that is the big thing for me, the understanding the
preciousness and the vulnerability of it and the real profound
recency of it as a project, which is to say actual, genuine
multi-racial democracy. I mean, 1965, basically, when we get the
Voting Rights Act, is like when you can really plausibly start
the clock on it.


David Roberts


Yes, younger than many living Americans.


Chris Hayes


Younger than many living Americans, and I mean, younger than,
like, my parents. And that's also true around the world. I mean,
you know, India starts the clock in in '48, and, you know,
Brazil, you know, starts the clock probably earlier, but then has
multiple military dictatorships, and sort of its modern
incarnation of, like, a durable liberal democracy is, what, 40
years old, probably.


David Roberts


Think about Franco in Spain. That wasn't that long ago.


Chris Hayes


No, not at all. And I think that also the other connection that
that gives me. The other thing I think about is thinking about
the generation that survived fascism, and saw fascism and also
Stalinism and authoritarianism in different stripes, and the
appreciation that gave them of how thin it was, how fragile, and
also that they had watched it collapse in on itself. I mean,
that's the other thing I think that ... that experience, which
is, like, the fascists came to power in environments of,
quote-unquote "liberal democracy and elections".


David Roberts


Yeah, talking about hearing echoes. Go back and read about people
living through that, and the sort of like, it's the conservative
moderates that didn't step in and restrain the extremists. It's
those center Leftists who were too comfortable and didn't worry
when they went after this group and that group. I mean, it's just
all ...


Chris Hayes


It's the Leftists who said after Hitler, "Us, the worse, the
better." There's a lot of blame to go around.


David Roberts


But it's all happening again. It's all like mirror image
happening again right now. And this is part of my despair, is
like, yes, we had not just a generation of Americans who sort of
lived through this kind of thing happening, but all of modern
history is full of this kind of thing happening. And full of
people like Hannah Arendt, and on and on, sort of doing these
incredibly, erudite, deep dives into the mentality of it and the
psychology of it and the sociology of it, and really,
forensically laying out, like, here's what happens with,
presumably thinking as they were doing so, "if we make it so
super clear how this works, we'll recognize it next time." And
yet we seem to be walking through the script, beat by beat, and
knowing that we're living through the script doesn't seem to be
helping at all, doesn't seem to be slowing down.


Chris Hayes


And I wonder if that's partly, I do think that's a little bit of
lived memory. I do think there's a relationship between the
generation of people who experienced it firsthand dying out and
what we're seeing. I had a conversation with Francis Fukuyama
recently about this, and he definitely thinks that. And we talked
about that a little bit.


David Roberts


It's disappointing that one generation is all it takes though,
right? I mean, one generation is all it takes to forget this.
Totally forget.


Chris Hayes


But don't you also feel I mean, to me again, it comes back to
like — if I take a step back and I say it is a miracle for a
society to self-organize and self-govern, and it's a miracle to
do it at the kind of scale that the US does it, or Brazil, or
India, right? These are all massive, multi-racial, complicated
democracies with incredibly fraught politics. Like if I take a
step back and say, "That's a kind of marvel and precious and
worth fighting for," then the fact that it is easy for it to come
undone feels in a sort of almost biblical sense or a religious
sense. It's like Moses with the tablets and the golden calf.


It's like it's just easier to worship an icon.


David Roberts


It is pushing against a lot of normal human instincts and habits.


Chris Hayes


Yes. Now, this is, I think, a little bit of intention with some
other ideas that other people have that actually what we want to
be is free and self-organizing. And I just read the David Graeber
& Wengrow book — basically makes an argument that hierarchy
and these social systems and these forms of sort of complex
politics of domination are actually these kind of, aren't
necessary for complex systems. And people have organized
themselves in all kinds of fascinatingly, free and equitable
ways, which I found really a wonderful provocation and really
interesting. So I don't want to overly subscribe to this view
that's about the human nature that's really born of a fairly
small experience of politics.


But that said, it does strike me that it's hard. It's always
going to be hard, and that if you appreciate that, then it feels
less surprising that there's people constantly pulling on the
threads, threatening to undo it.


David Roberts


Yeah, I would even pull that point out a bit and make it slightly
broader. Like, I only in retrospect, realize now that I sort of
took democracy as the baseline, but also sort of took basic
rationality, basic sort of empirically informed argument, basic
decency, the basic baseline of moral equality among people.
Obviously, I know we fail on all those things again and again,
but I guess I just sort of assume that we all agree that those
are the baselines, that's what we want, that's the standard, and
we err when we drift away from them. But now, as you say, I've
sort of flipped around to viewing all those things, especially
rationality, especially any sort of collective rationality, as
miraculous exceptions to the rule.


Things that we can sometimes have achieved if everything goes
just right, but not by any means the default.


Chris Hayes


I mean, to me, the ultimate example of this, right, was like the
COVID experience, where it was like the combination of, like, we
made this vaccine in twelve months, and then people didn't want
to take it, which was just like the most perfect combination of
...


David Roberts


Yin and Yang right there.


Chris Hayes


Yeah, exactly. It's like, wow, we are really, what an amazing
thing we are as humans.


David Roberts


And then also like, wow.


Idiots. So let's talk about Trump. And I'm just curious, did you
think Trump would win? And looking back on him winning, I'm
talking about 2016, looking back on him winning, is the story you
tell about him winning a story of large, structural forces that
made something like him inevitable? Sort of the 2008 financial
crisis, the implications of that, and offshoring of
manufacturing. All these stories we're familiar with, the sort of
sorting, the big sorting by education level. There's lots of
structural factors you could point to. Or is the story you tell
about him winning just like a bunch of random contingent s**t
happened to all line-up and fall the wrong way, and it was just
more or less an accident of history?


I go back and forth, both about which I believe and about which
is more frightening.


Chris Hayes


Yeah.


David Roberts


Which one do you favor?


Chris Hayes


Well, I was always, and I think the record would reflect this in
our program. I mean, people would always ask me, I remember
people that summer asking me after he'd sort of sealed up the
nomination, "Can he win?" And I would say, "Anyone in this
country who wins a major party nomination. And I mean, like, you
the person I'm talking to, anyone starts at about 42% of the
vote. 43% of the vote. So, yeah, it's a coin flip, basically. I
think he's got a 50/50-ish chance of winning, maybe a little
less. But yes, of course, he can win. The major party nominee for
president absolutely can win." So it always seemed real to me,
and possible in a way that I always felt a little frustrated.
That was not ...


David Roberts


Did you think he'd win the nomination, though? Like, where was
your level of credulity about that?


Chris Hayes


Yes, I did. I did. It was in after a little while, but when I
sort of understood how the math was going to work, I did think he
was going to win the nomination. Not in the beginning. I
definitely did not in the beginning think. I definitely was not
like, "Oh, he came down the escalator like this." No, absolutely
not. In terms of how I explain him, I mean, look, one thing I
like to say is that the definition of a catastrophe is that a lot
of things have to go wrong to make it a catastrophe.


So if you read the Challenger launch decision book, which is a
sort of autopsy of that right, it's like there's a bunch of stuff
concatenated together that produces it, and that's just
necessarily the case for a catastrophe. It's true of World War I,
right? And so I think of Trump as a catastrophe, and I think in
the stuff that went wrong, there's two categories: which is the
accidents and then the bigger structural driving forces, like the
sort of alienation of downwardly mobile, White, rural folks, who
felt increasingly removed from forms of sort of coastal, liberal,
multi-ethnic, multi-racial culture. The material basis for that,
the fact that these social misery index of addiction and suicide.


So all of that stuff that people talk about when they talk about
the kind of hillbilly, elegy, Chris Arnade stuff, I think there's
real stuff there. And I think the sort of backlash to
multi-racial democracy, as embodied by the first Black president,
it's obviously an enormous part of it. I mean, I love the, like,
the Michael Tesler research on this, who basically...


David Roberts


Is like, he's the "dying of Whiteness" guy?


Chris Hayes


No, that's Jonathan Metzer. Michael Tesler is ...


David Roberts


You had him on your pod, though, didn't you? Michael Tesler, I
remember being very struck by that episode.


Chris Hayes


He does research on race and Obama, and basically, he goes back,
he had a panel survey, and basically what he's able to find was
that people with high levels of racial animus ...


David Roberts


Yeah, I remember now


Chris Hayes


In his previous panel research were the best predictors of White
voters that flip to Trump, basically.


David Roberts


He's the guy that showed, "Grab any thread, pull it long enough,
and you end up back in race," basically.


Chris Hayes


Right. And so you could basically predict people's ACA views
based on their racial animus score. But one of the things that
he, one of the amazing findings of his research, really one of
the major takeaways is that people are real checked out of
politics and that tens of millions of people didn't know which
party was, quote, "on the side of Black people," basically, until
Barack Obama was elected.


David Roberts


Truly the mind blower.


Chris Hayes


That like, that, basically, was like, "Oh, wait a second." And
for decades, it's not been like an apparent piece of knowledge
that a lot of White voters were walking around with and that
Barack Obama just is like, "oh, okay, whoa, now, okay, I
understand."


And obviously, when I say on the side of Black people, I'm like,
that's a tongue-in-cheek reduction of the two-party system. But I
just mean like that, obviously, Black voters vote for Democratic
candidates up and down the ballot in the 80%, 90% range, but also
sort of in the sort of demographic cleavage of the two main
coalitions, that Black folks were in one of the two
predominantly, and that there was a responsiveness to their
interests represented in that coalition, was just not a known
fact to a lot of White voters.


David Roberts


Yeah. I feel like another trend of the last few years, at least
for me, is coming to appreciate more how much political analysis
mine and others has been confounded by and continues to be
confounded by underestimating the near-total ignorance of most
voters. You have written about this very eloquently, and it's
something that you can sort of learn, but you have to just
relearn it over and over again. You know what I mean? You got
pounded into your head. They literally didn't know that, most
people didn't know that Democrats were basically the party of
Civil Rights.


That's just, like, hard to absorb for someone like us. So let me
ask you a related question. Similarly broad, and probably the
answers are somewhat related, but this, I feel like, is the sort
of central bafflement of our time, at least for liberals. So
there's sort of two stories you can tell about kind of American
politics since 2015. On one hand, you have the sort of political
scientists saying despite all the theatrics and the human cry and
the sort of social media heat and et cetera, et cetera,
basically, things are going roughly how you would predict they
would go, based on the fundamentals, right.


Trump's victory, and his approval rating, and all that were more
or less what you'd expect from a generic Republican president in
the same circumstances, and vice versa. And you would sort of
predict his loss in 2020, and he did lose. And then the
fundamentals would predict that Joe Biden would be unpopular
based on inflation and everything else. So on one sense, you
could just tell a story the last five or six years of American
politics that are like, there's this, it's producing a lot more
heat and insanity and social media hand-wringing, but basically,
things are more or less unfolding normally, as you would expect.


And then the other story is that the Republican Party is going
crazy, just very visibly crazy, right in front of us,
progressively, as time goes on.


Chris Hayes


Literally. It's like watching someone degenerate in front of you.


David Roberts


Yes. And I feel like I'm losing my mind. Like, how can this
continue to go on and not matter? What level of it would matter?
On the one hand, you're like the fundamentals. Yes. Predictable,
normal. On the other hand, why are things still normal when one
party is so clearly invisibly going off the deep end,
accelerating off the deep end? How do we reconcile these two?


Chris Hayes


I mean, I was just having this thought today because I was
watching Herschel Walker, who basically is, he's now the nominee
for Republican Senate seat in Georgia because he was anointed by
Trump. He doesn't live in Georgia. He went to the University of
Georgia, quite famously, where he was an incredible running back
and went on to have a very good pro career. But he lives in
Dallas. And people have been talking for a while about, the
whispers, you know, the Republicans, he's not a very good
candidate. But he hasn't done much media, and I thought the
reason for that was like, he pointed a loaded gun at an ex-wife
and said he's going to blow her f*****g brains out.


There are multiple accusations of domestic violence that he has
acknowledged. I don't think he denies them. He says he's sort of
a changed man and found God, et cetera, but I didn't quite like I
just listened to an interview with him, and I was just like, "Is
this a bit?" Like, very obviously this person should not be a US
Senator. And, I mean, I feel that way about, like, Tommy
Tuberville, too.


David Roberts


Literally, if you were a middle manager at a shoe dealership, you
would not hire them.


Chris Hayes


I don't know if you've heard Tommy Tuberville, but it's like
ludicrous. It's like an SNL joke. And there's other people I
don't feel that way around. I don't feel that way about Tim
Scott. I don't feel that way about Mike Lee. There's people it's
like, yeah, I don't like that person. I don't like their
politics. And the reason I bring this up is because it's a
perfect test case right now, of this battle between what I call
normal politics and abnormal politics. I'm always talking about
this show, the two tracks, right? Because we have the track of
normal politics, which is like, Democrats control both houses of
Congress and the White House. Inflation is 8%. They're going to
get their butts kicked.


And again, that's democracy. I don't like it. It's bad. But that
is normal politics. Republicans holding a grandstanding press
conference to be like, "The price of milk is too high." Any
democracy on Earth, that is what the out-of-power party is going
to do. When inflation is 8%, that's the most bread and butter
normal thing in the world. Meanwhile, there's an ex-president
stalking around, like, trying to get pro-coup insurrectionists,
including a guy who bussed people to January 6th, who is now the
Republican Nominee in Pennsylvania.


David Roberts


Running on a promise to send his state's votes to Trump no matter
what.


Chris Hayes


Yes, exactly. To never let a Democrat win the electors of the
state of Pennsylvania. And it's like. So I totally feel the same
way about the weird, and I think the, what it comes down to is
this: voters don't actually — again, we talk voters we're talking
about 100 million people. We're talking about people with all
kinds of different things they're thinking about and dealing
with. There is no within, and this is, I think, the thing that
Hannah Arendt and the generation that saw the rise of fascism
learned, and we have to relearn — there is no penalty in normal
democratic politics for anti-democratic forces.


David Roberts


Yeah.


Chris Hayes


Which is to say you cannot win elections by saying, "Those people
are authoritarian fascists," because people will vote on the
price of milk. And that underscores how precious and dangerous
this stuff is, precisely because within the confines of the
battle over people's votes, there is very little penalty for
being essentially illiberal, authoritarian, or fascist.


David Roberts


Yes. Another way of saying that is you probably couldn't get the
Bill of Rights through a popular referendum. You probably
couldn't get democracy itself through a popular referendum.
People want their team to win, basically, much more than they
feel any fealty toward these sort of abstract third-party rules
that are supposed to govern everybody.


Chris Hayes


Yes. And again, keep in mind that the only reason we have, the
second founding of this country and the key to the democracy we
have now, which is essentially the 14th Amendment, came at the
point of a gun. It was over the bodies of 600,000 dead Americans.
And because the South's representatives weren't seated in
Congress. Like, we only have it because they were under literal
military occupation and didn't get votes and had to ratify it to
get readmitted to the Union. And the 14th amendment is,
basically, the linchpin of what modern liberal democracy in
America looks like.


The 14th amendment, which incorporates the Bill of Rights into
state governments, which hadn't happened before, which has the
Equal Protection Clause, all of the stuff that we think of as
being like in a free society, which is really at a real level,
protected by the 14th amendment, much more than the Bill of
Rights, which, again, is only Congress, right? Congress shall
make no law. Congress will make a law right. That itself didn't
come about in any democratic way. It came about through mass
violence.


David Roberts


But it's not just anti-democratic stuff. There's book banning,
and book burning, and then just a general sort of ugliness. And
if I'm being honest with myself, I'm a classic coastal liberal.
Like, I'm all the stereotypes.


Chris Hayes


I've been telling you this forever. You got to play up your
Tennessee bona fides.


David Roberts


I know. I got to drop that.


Chris Hayes


You got to constantly just be like, "look, I'm just a simple gun
over from Tennessee."


David Roberts


As a small business owner...


Chris Hayes


You're a small business ...


David Roberts


Who is originally from Tennessee.


Chris Hayes


You're a White man from Tennessee who's a small business owner,
basically a MAGA dude.


David Roberts


I know, what's wrong with me? But I will say personally, it's not
just that I find all this stuff, the violence, and the obvious
love of violence, and the very theatrical sort of to me, almost
like parodic sort of sweatiness about masculinity. And all of it
is not just morally repugnant to me, but aesthetically repellent
on almost every conceivable metric. You've said before,
everything's lining up into these one big side versus one big
other side, and everything I hate and loathe and find repulsive
on both aesthetic and moral grounds, is all coming together in
one. Which leaves me, again and again, thinking, "Why is my
repugnance at this," — which I find so fundamental and like
preconscious, more than I could explain. I couldn't even explain
it. I couldn't even argue for it. It's preconscious. "Why is that
so rare? Why are the rest of Americans not repulsed by this?" I
know it's a naive question, but I can't get around it. It keeps
coming.


Chris Hayes


I would say a few things on it. One is they do pay a penalty for
being nuts. Like Donald Trump lost the national vote to Hillary
Clinton, lost it by 5 million votes. He was an incumbent
one-term. There aren't a lot of one-term presidents. They
normally win reelection. They do pay a penalty for it. They could
have had a Republican president who is 20% less repellent and
weird and corrupt and probably won reelection. They've lost,
count the Senate seats that they have lost over the last from
like Sue Lowden to Todd Akin to Christine O'Donnell, I mean
Herschel Walker, like that should be a walk.


They should win that in a walk. It's going to be a tough race. I
just watched that interview with Herschel Walker and was like,
"Oh no, no no no." And there's a lot of voters who are going to
feel that way. So they do pay a penalty, it's just not that big,
but it's at the margin, and it gets back to this like 45%
problem. The other thing to think about is they are playing on a
tilted playing field because of the way that a. that states have
been gerrymandered and the electoral college and the Senate, such
that they can lose the total national popular vote and win the
House.


They can lose the total national popular vote and win a big part
of the Senate. They can lose the total national popular vote and
win. So when you combine those things, they have an advantage
already, and they're already like pissing away some of that with
the insanity. But fundamentally, the structural factors are what
produced 90% of the outcomes, and then the last 10% is everything
else, that they can go very far with that 90% even if they give
away the 10%. And then the final thing I would just say is that,
you're sort of somewhat tongue-in-cheek when you talk about the
repellents, but it's like there are, there's aspects of liberal
culture that I find aesthetically repellent. and there's lots of
cringy, "in this house, we believe."


David Roberts


There are aspects of virtually every other human being.


Chris Hayes


Totally. And I think a lot of people feel that way about preachy,
cosmopolitan liberals. There are times where I could subjectively
access. There are certain things it's funny, there really are
differences. Like, there are certain issues that I can access
subjectively, and some I can't.


David Roberts


Project yourself imaginatively into the position of the person
who believes it.


Chris Hayes


Right. But I agree that fundamentally, the penalty they are
paying for being as wild as they are is really insufficient. And
I also think there's another aspect of this. And if people have
watched my show, or I've talked about this may be like, and
again, this makes me feel a little like, "Am I doing that thing
that people do as they age? Or like, when I was younger?" But I
feel like when you would call someone, if you would use the
adjective, like, "he's very political" or "he's like a
politician" or even "diplomatic", right, it all had a pretty
similar cluster of meaning, which is: a person who's just trying
to be inoffensive and, like, liked by as many people as possible.
Because the basic math of either diplomacy or politics is to not
offend and turn people off. And it's very bizarre that the
personality of a shock jock, which is the opposite, which is
like, "the troll who tries to strip controversy," is now the
personality of a lot of politicians.


David Roberts


Everything else has fallen away on the Right.


Chris Hayes


It's weird.


David Roberts


That is the only route.


Chris Hayes


Performing being an a*****e to people. It's like Rob. Just the
difference between Rob Portman and J. D. Vance, a perfect
example. Rob Portman is just like a bloodless, inoffensive White
dude, who has terrible politics but is not, like, going out his
way to offend people. And J. D. Vance is like, "Alec Baldwin just
shot and killed someone." Like, "Jack, you got to let Trump back
on Twitter." And it's like, what are you doing?


David Roberts


Or Marjorie Taylor Greene. Let's just take another example.
Literally, the only thing there is about her to recommend her to
even Republican voters is that she will say the grossest,
nastiest, most offensive thing. That's it. There's no record,
there's no policy proposals. There's nothing else but that. That
is the sole desideratum now, on that side. It's wild.


Chris Hayes


Yeah. And I think, again, I think that, like, well, that relates
to something that I'm writing a book about, but I I do think that
there's — the attentional incentives have gone pretty haywire and
have have wreaked havoc with our politics.


David Roberts


Well, let me ask about that, because the natural follow-up here,
is if you're talking about the sort of gap between the sort of
theatrically repugnant behavior of Republicans and the weird
normalcy of public reaction and public opinion, you have to look
at the media. I think that's what comes up, is the media. And we
could easily do a whole podcast about media, and what's happened
to it, and how much it is to blame for all this. But sort of,
this is another thing that has changed markedly, I think, since
we started out.


My distinct memory of the George W. Bush years was there's this
sort of normal political world and normal political media. And
then over here on the periphery, kind of like a weird, buzzing
horsefly, is this Right-wing swamp media, with its crazy
conspiracy theories. And they were just as crazy back then, over
there on their margins. You remember the Jade Helm, like Obama is
going to take over the US and declare martial law, just endless,
one after the other. And I sort of ended up kind of taking that
as my baseline model. Like you've got media, and then you've got
this weird peripheral thing, and just very, very steadily, step
by step, piece by piece, as we've watched over the years, that
peripheral crazy has eaten the Right-wing media entirely.


And so now the media and that machine has grown, and has been
measurably strengthened by social media too, of course. So now we
have this weird situation where the sort of 800-pound gorilla in
the media room is explicit Right-wing propaganda, and then this
husk of the mainstream media, if it's left, which seems entirely
defensive, entirely not up to the task of pushing back. So how
much do you blame the fucked up media situation for our state of
affairs?


Chris Hayes


I will say, that I do think that what happened in the wake of
9/11, and what we saw happen in the Bush years, was the beginning
of the Right-wing media swallowing, like moving towards this,
like infiltrating the mainstream and dominating the things that
we talked about. I don't know, I feel really, I don't have a
simple answer here. Here are two things I think. One is that
everyone in the media underestimates how much power they have
over people's attention. Everyone in the media thinks they're
just chasing, and everyone outside the media overestimates how
much power they have. I think part of what produced Trump, and
part of what has produced our current situation, is balkanization
and attentional changes to the institutions of attention and the
markets for attention.


David Roberts


Right. This is your book, right? This is what you're writing a
book about?


Chris Hayes


Yeah, this is what I'm writing a book about. But I also think,
again, let's go back for what, 500 or 600 years? All they did on
the European continent was murder each other over there, whether
trans-substantiation was happening or not. The joke I always make
about disinformation is like they didn't have Facebook during the
Salem witch trials. Like, it turns out humans are perfectly
capable of passing false information, dangerous false information
in circles.


David Roberts


False information is the baseline and good ...


Chris Hayes


Exactly.


David Roberts


... fact-based media is another one of these ...


Rare.


... Effinescent miracles that sometimes shimmers into view but
can easily vanish, if not actively tended.


Chris Hayes


Right. So I have a million critiques. I do think that, here is
the one thing that I think is true. A thing that people don't
understand about the media, and media consumption in this
country, is that there's basically two large political
coalitions. One of them, the center Left, make up the audience
for all of the media. So everything that's out there, from
small-lifting magazines, podcasts, blah, blah, that's all the
center Left.


And then the other half of the country, it's like Fox, Fox,
Right-wing talk radio, and some Right-wing podcasts, but they
don't read The Washington Post. They don't read the New York
Times. Increasingly, they don't watch the network evening news.
That whole universe that we call the media is basically, and even
when we have these debates about cancel culture and what the
media got wrong about the Lab Leak theory, those are all
intracoalitional debates amongst one of the two major coalitions
of people. And the other coalition really does just get
propaganda.


David Roberts


They've been setting it up. They've been working for that goal
for decades.


Chris Hayes


And I cannot stress this enough, how much it's propaganda. And I
know this because I'm a practitioner. I know what it would look
like for me to do propaganda, and I choose not to. So there is
this really crazy thing that happens. And then to get back to —
now, here's the most fascinating, complicating part of this about
how much the media is at fault. Here's the real black pill. Okay.
After the election, this is an amazing moment, after the
election, by and large, in the weeks after the position of Fox
was that Trump had lost the election.


David Roberts


Yeah. Famously called it. Who was it calling Fox trying to get
him to take it back? But they called it that night. It was a very
pivotal moment.


Chris Hayes


Exactly. Yes. They called Arizona before anyone else. But what
I'm saying is that even after that, they did not go fully in on
the ghost of Hugo Chavez hacked the Pennsylvania machines.


David Roberts


Or the Chinese ... what was it?


Chris Hayes


The Chinese? The bamboo paper. Yeah. You got to get the UV lights
so you could see the Chinese bamboo. Okay. And here's what
happened. Fox's ratings tanked worse than they ever have, and for
the first time ever, OAN started getting audience, and they even
beat them for 1 hour. And I see the ratings every day. I don't
look at them every day like I used to, but it was wild, and you
could just see it was direct. It was like people were just like,
"Click. I don't want to hear you telling me Trump lost. I'm going
to go to this place where they tell me that he won."


David Roberts


And, yeah, they've been trained. The audience has been trained.


Chris Hayes


And then Fox realized what was happening, and got much more ...
now, they never quite went fully because they have a legal
department. They can't just openly lie for people. But they
started doing a lot more of big lie stuff and flirting with it,
and they got those people back. But that moment was, like, that's
where you see the dark agency of the audience.


David Roberts


And there's no firebreak on that. There's no force or
constituency left on the Right with the power or the inclination
to thrust itself into that process and try to even slow it down.
It's less and less friction.


Chris Hayes


Perfect example. This is like the career trajectory of David
French, who is a completely doctrinaire conservative, pro-life,
religious, Christian, low taxes, low regulation, whatever, name
the issue. He also believes in liberal democracy, that the
election was not stolen, and that Donald Trump is like a moral
monster as a person. These are just like all, like just to me,
completely obvious.


David Roberts


Seems like they are obvious. Seems like it.


Chris Hayes


And David French now writes for The Atlantic because that's a
place, that's the ecosystem in which we can have debates about
this stuff.


David Roberts


No one can predict the future. But I don't see anything on the
horizon that would disrupt this basic dynamic. And I just wonder
how far ... it's gone so much farther, so much faster than I
predicted, even though I, like many netroots types from the early
2000s, came online b******g about the media. That's what I was
doing from the second I started commenting on politics. All the
same patterns, all the same dynamics. But even as a longtime
media critic, I think I underestimated just how far and how fast
it's going, and it's just accelerating. So where does that end
up?


I mean, this is sort of a cliche at this point, but you can't
really have a self-governing democracy without shared trusted
sources of information, and we don't have them. So is that it?


Chris Hayes


Yeah, I mean, the key-word there, and this is the thing that I
think everything comes down to. So there's two, basically, I
think there's two themes when you get down to the fundamentals of
this. And I'm writing a book about one of them. And then the
other one is what my first book about. But I'm writing a book
about attention, because I think attention is the most important
resource of the 21st century, and the way that people marshal it,
attain it, achieve it, mine it from our minds, determines
fortunes and empires and everything, okay.


But the other is trust. And fundamentally, you can't run a
low-trust democracy. This is really what it comes down to: you
can't run a low-trust democracy.


David Roberts


And it seems so much easier to degrade trust than it is to build
it. So it just seems like on that front, democracy is constantly
an uphill climb.


Chris Hayes


And I think that's part of the reason that it's such an uphill
climb. But I also think, like, we really got to think the trust
problem. I mean, we really saw it .... there's all sorts of ways
that you can measure this across countries, right? Like, "Do you
think most people can be trusted most of the time?" And you can
ask it in a bunch of different languages, and you can rank just
how people feel about other people in their society. And we're a
very low-trust society. We're like, near Russia. Russia is like a
famously low-trust society.


David Roberts


I read an article, one of these sort of research roundups on this
question of social trust. And the sort of conclusion, as far as I
can tell from the sociology world, is a. social trust is the coin
of the realm without which nothing else is possible. Nothing. No
good media, no good politics, no good policing. Name your thing.
Without social trust, it's all impossible. And b. what creates
social trust? How do you preserve it? How do you revive it when
it's flagging? No one knows. Like, no one has a f*****g clue.
It's like the mystery juice that makes everything run, but no one
knows really how it works or how to create it, or how to stop it
from leeching away, which is what seems to be happening.


Chris Hayes


You see a theory of it amongst the Democratic Party leadership
institutionalists, which Barack Obama was, Joe Biden, which is
basically like, just keep willing the institutions to try to
work.


I'm serious. That's the only way to soldier on and to recreate
the social trust that's lost, is you got to just put your
shoulder to the wheel and work through it. And it's like, again,
I don't want to dunk on it because I don't necessarily have a
better alternative.


David Roberts


Yeah, exactly. Well, I will say, though, the one perhaps, maybe
not alternative to that, but a different strain that I found more
hopeful was Warren's sort of approach during the 2016 primaries,
which is to say, the problem is lack of social trust. And the way
to create social trust is to create a government that works. So
pay attention to whose staffing agencies, pay attention to how
agencies work, and who they report to. Like, the procedural
mechanisms of building an administrative state, as boring as they
are, that's the nuts and bolts of what will create trust is the
thing working, right?


And yet she couldn't get like, the supposed Pragmatists of the
center Left didn't care. They have their catechism about
austerity and all the rest. They don't actually care about
Pragmatism. And then on the far Left, they just want the
beautiful results of socialism, right? The Medicare for all and
everything else. No one cares about the mechanisms.


Chris Hayes


The meetings, lots of meetings.


David Roberts


Meetings are where you live or die.


Chris Hayes


Bureaucracy, there's paperwork, there's spreadsheets. All of that
stuff is like, what? Yes.


David Roberts


And again, she was the champion of that, and it got her nowhere.


Chris Hayes


Yeah. And I think that's partly because that, again, is a hard
thing to win on. But again, I guess here's what I would say to
conclude this about where my politics are, I have never been more
acutely aware and convinced that things are truly, genuinely
perilous and never less clear on the solution. And I don't mean
the solutions in a like, "You get to wave your wand and pass the
agenda you want to." Because I think those solutions are
actually, like, I think we should have single-payer health care,
and I think we should massively boost up our investment in clean
energy.


And we should probably put a price on carbon. That's not going to
be enough. And there's a million different crash programs we
should be doing. There's a bunch of stuff that if you said,
"Okay, you have a supermajority in both parties and just you
control it." I don't mean that. I mean getting from where we are
to something has never been less clear to me, like, what that
answer to. And I find myself very frustrated with every single
faction of the coalition, from the most doctrinal Marxist to the
most milquetoast Centrist.


David Roberts


Well, everybody just seems to be reinforcing their priors. And
I'm like, "Things sure seem different now."


Chris Hayes


That's part of it.


David Roberts


I think there's something notably different, like some fresh
thinking.


Chris Hayes


That's it.


That's part of it. It always feels everyone is giving a "now more
than ever" argument. It's like, "Wait a second, a lot of s**t has
happened. Have we changed our mind on anything? Really now more
than ever?" About all the things.


David Roberts


I know. And just imagine when Democrats get beat up in the
midterms, which seems inevitable for a thousand different
reasons, there is going to be a festival.


Chris Hayes


Everyone's going to get to say, yeah, exactly. It was too far
Left, not Left enough.


David Roberts


We're running short on time. So I'm going to combine my last few
questions into one mega question. And it's probably unanswerable,
but I'm sort of curious about, in terms of our proximate
situation, your outlook on the 2022 and 2024 elections. Things
sure look bad to me, but maybe you see something else.


And then sort of the second part of that question is if, as seems
statistically likely at this point, Republicans romp in the
midterms and then take the presidency in 2024 and thereby control
all three branches of government and are thereby unleashed to
pass all the voter restrictions they want and make it much more
difficult for Democrats to ever get back into power. Well, a. how
fatalistic are you about the upcoming two elections? And if you
are as fatalistic as I am, how fatalistic are you about 2025 and
forward, I guess, at this point, do you have an optimistic story?


Chris Hayes


I'm not fatalistic about 2024. I just don't think about it. It
just seems too far and too much craziness. I don't know. We had a
Pandemic. We had the land war broke out in Europe, the largest
one since World War II. Who knows? I don't know. That's a long
time away. I am really a Serenity Prayer kind of person, even
though I'm not sober, but what I can control, what I can't, the
wisdom to know the difference. So I think Democrats are likely to
get walloped in 2022. 1946 is a really interesting analog because
I'm trying to think of a year that's similar.


And it's funny you think of 1946, you'd think, like, people must
have been pretty psyched like the war was over. Like the boys
come home and get to meet little Billy, the son he's never met,
and they're kissing the nurse in the Times Square. We defeated
fascism. But 1946 was like a brutally dyspeptic year in American
life. Inflation was through the roof. There wasn't enough housing
for everyone that was returning. There was huge disruptions.
There was massive racial strife as, like, basically the Black
people who had gone into the factories to work were kicked out.
And there was, like, factories that had been kind of like
integrated under basically the wartime exigency being recently.


What there was in 1946 was the end of this era actually produced
its own set of disruptions because normalcy did not snap back.
And a new era had to be born. And the way it showed up is that
the Democrats got annihilated at the polls in the worst midterm
loss in years. And it was functionally the end of the New Deal.
And in fact, the first thing they did was they passed
Taft-Hartley over the veto of Truman, which rolled back the NLRB
and was the first reactionary blow against social democracy that
had been achieved on the New Deal was to a frontal attack of the
unions.


But all that said, like, Truman improbably wins in '48. Of
course. Famously. Right? you think you won, and he ekes it out. A
lot can change. So I'm not there yet on the fatalism of 2024, or
what comes after. I think this election is going to be bad.


I do think the abortion matters. I do think they have an
untenable position on abortion. I do think they have a problem
with their own activists who are going to push for wildly
unpopular s**t. And I do think that the vast majority of
Americans think that forcing a 15-year-old to give birth to her
rapist child is insane and that abortion illegal after six weeks
is insane, under any circumstances. That hunting down doctors for
possible criminalization, or banning Plan B imports, or whatever
crazy s**t they're going to come up with between June and
November is nuts and bad and will hurt them, and really will hurt
them.


And particularly in these gubernatorial races like as Josh
Shapiro, the AG in Pennsylvania, who's the Democratic nominee,
said to me, the Republican legislator of Pennsylvania will pass a
total abortion ban that will come to the governor's desk and it
will either be vetoed by Josh Shapiro or signed by Doug
Mastriano. It is not an abstract, like women of Pennsylvania.
That's going to be what's going to happen.


So I do think that actually has a tremendous amount of salience,
and I also think it kind of reminds people who are
cross-pressured or in the middle some of the things they like the
least about the Republican Party. That said, there's also, like,
the human tragedy of it. So I don't want to, like I'm just
focusing on the midterms here, but I don't want anyone to come
away thinking I think that's the most important thing. The most
important thing is, like, women's bodily autonomy and their
control of their own bodies and reproductive health care.


So I don't know, but I think it's going to be bad. And I think
the broader thing I would say, is that the problem we have now is
it's not tenable. You can't run a democracy in which you have to
win every election, otherwise, the other party, when they get in
power, is going to ...


David Roberts


Destroy democracy.


Chris Hayes


Destroy democracy. We can't play this as an iterative game. And
that's why I do think, I honestly do think from a harm reduction
standpoint, I think that if you say that that is the most
important thing, and to me, it is now, I mean, climate is, but I
don't think I would choose a climate-friendly dictator over a
democracy or don't, although it's an interesting choice.


Then you got to be serious about, like for me, it's like Brad
Raffensperger's primary win was a big deal. The Idaho governor
beating his lieutenant governor, Brad Little beating Janice
McGeachin, that was a big deal. I think I will very much root for
Ron DeSantis over Donald Trump in that primary.


Really?


Who I think is like really an odious, vile person, but I think is
like several degrees closer to believing in the basic
fundamental, liberal, democratic order than Donald Trump.


David Roberts


That's so grim. Well, just finally, then, to really conclude,
when I try to not be depressive and fatalistic, which is rare
these days, but when I try not to, I can think of little things
like that. But when I try to think of, if it's just sort of like
a politically disengaged, low-information normie, who's just
living their life and just seeing these dire headlines
occasionally and comes to me and says, "it seems like things are
falling apart," what is the long-term story you tell about how
America pulls out of what feels like a nosedive? I no longer ...


Chris Hayes


Yeah, I don't have the story.


David Roberts


I start hand waving and talking philosophically, right, about the
arc of history because I don't have a story.


Chris Hayes


I don't got it. I agree with you on that, and I really don't have
it. And that's what I mean. Again, I could give you ten bills to
pass day one, you know what I mean? But the story from here to
there is ... I do believe it's unwritten, and I do have hope and
faith in it being unwritten and us being able to will it into
being. But what the steps of it are, are really, really unclear
to me.


David Roberts


All that I can sort of see at this point, the only optimistic
story I see is the reactionary backlash overextending itself into
some sort of flailing, massive harm that we then ... you know
what I mean? Sort of like things fall apart, and then something's
born out of the wreckage, in some way. That's the best I can do
for optimism. I don't see how you get around the falling apart
stage from where I stand now.


Chris Hayes


Yeah, I don't know. I really don't know.


David Roberts


Well, this is not a great place to conclude our podcast.


Chris Hayes


No, but here, let me end on this note. Let me just say this.
There's lots of things that I was certain of that didn't happen
in other directions, which is, like, I was quite sure they were
going to repeal the ACA. Like, I really was. I was also quite
sure that, like, Roy Moore was going to be an elected US Senator.
And I was actually really skeptical the Democrats will win those
Georgia seats. I mean, really, really skeptical.


David Roberts


Me too.


Chris Hayes


So politics does have the ability to surprise, and they have paid
a price. Again, it's not enough of one, but they have. Like, it
turns out, nominating Roy Moore in Alabama is a bridge too far,
even for Alabama. Now, Tommy Tuberville is just a ludicrous
figure. Just the right amount of bridge, the perfect amount of
bridge. So I guess I would say if there's anything, the thing
that I just come back to is like, I just have no certainty about
the future and what will happen. And often that means that things
far worse than I could have imagined happen. Like a million
people dying from an infectious disease.


David Roberts


That's the way things surprise us, most often lately.


Chris Hayes


But sometimes they are surprising the other direction. And like,
who knows, really? Who knows?


David Roberts


Yeah, this was I wrote a column about when I was leaving Grist. I
was writing these sort of valedictory columns, and one of the
columns I wrote was about hope. Because anybody who writes about
climate, everybody's constantly asking, "Like, are we screwed? Is
there any hope?" And I sort of said, I came down basically
exactly where you just did, which is, "Sure, if you look at any
particular event or trend, it seems super bad. But then again,
life is chaos."


Chris Hayes


Yes, exactly.


David Roberts


"And anything could happen. And so that means good things could
happen too." It felt so utterly inadequate, but it really is.
That's about all I got.


Chris Hayes


Yeah.


David Roberts


Well, thank you for coming on. I mean, we could ... it's
difficult to step back under what feels like constant incoming
fire. So this was fun.


Chris Hayes


I enjoyed that. Yeah, it was great.


David Roberts


Let's do it again sometime. Thank you for listening to the Volts
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