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Welcome back to the Lincoln project. I'm your host, Reed Gaelin. Today I'm joined by Joe Walsh, former congressman, former member of the Republican Party, former presidential candidate, and current host of White Flag with Joe Walsh, in which he has a conversation where he interviews guests that don't agree with him in search of common ground.

Joe, welcome to the show. Hey, Reed, I'm a fan of what you guys do, man. It's good to be with you.

So Joe, where to start? You've had probably as unique a journey as anyone. We all have this path of those of us who were Republicans. I'm an independent. I believe you're an independent.

Yeah. Rick Wilson, Stuart Stevens, on our team are now independence. You though we're actually an elected official, right?

You were conservative considered a conservative member of Congress, I should say, pretty staunch in your beliefs. And I just want to take people down the path because I think for a lot of us who've already done it, it seems easy. Like, oh, well, it was this, and it was this, and it was this, and it was this, and so therefore I came to this place.

But I think it's always interesting to hear other folks and how they came to this. So just give us a sense of how you go from being a, you know, for lack of a better way to put it, pretty fire breathing conservative member of Congress to running against the president of your own party to decrying that party and looking for common ground with folks you disagree with.

And read your being very kind because you probably despised me seven or eight or nine years ago. A lot of people did. I appreciate you being kind. Yeah, I was the fire breathing tea party maniac. I went to Congress that class of 2010 to raise hell shut down the government, go at Republicans and Democrats. I was all of that.

And philosophically read I still am I consider myself to be a pretty decent tea party libertarian conservative. It was the hardest thing I've ever done this journey. I've been on and I'm still on it. I don't know anybody else who did what I did. I come from the cult.

I call myself a reform gang banger. I talk about how I left the cult. I come from the GOP base. Trump's people were my people. They were my followers, my supporters, all of that. I come from conservative talk radio, Tucker Carlson, and Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. That was the world I was in.

And that is right now you can talk that is the Republican party base. That's a radicalized base. So I left it and it was really really hard to do. But in a sense read it was really easy to do because if you're a conservative like I am and you believe in the truth and limited government and the Constitution and the rule of law and democracy.

You can't support what this Republican party is. So it's been easy in that sense. But yeah, it's been a hellish five or six years.

Well, let me ask you though because you said something which is your core beliefs haven't necessarily changed. You know, there are all those Republicans who said I didn't leave the Republican party, the Republican party left me.

Jeremy Peters of the New York Times wrote in his latest book that today's Republican voter base voter, I should say, is not a Republican and is not a conservative. They're an anti liberal.

They live to own the lives. That's their whole reason for being. There's not much more belief beyond that other than whether or not it's the ugliness of Trump, the ugliness of Carlson, whatever it is.

So therefore when they vote for a Republican, the only thing they care about is that there is sort of wild eyed as they are as opposed to is this person going to be good for, you know, American governance. Are they going to be a good public servant? Are they going to serve with honor and decency and uphold their oaths?

Were you that person and do you believe that the majority of Republican voters are those people or is it a healthy but narrow slice of a party that has been overtaken by these folks?

And there's more vestigial sort of moderates out there who are just either scared, disaffected, disgusted, whatever the case might be.

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