Hey, everyone, before we get started, the union joined the union dot us. We need every one of you out there.

Join the union dot us. Join the pro democracy army that is going to take it to the anti democratic candidates this fall.

That's going to support the pro democracy candidates and groups that are going to help us defend this great, messy, noisy, loud American experiment.

We can do it, but we can't do it without you.

Join the union dot us. Sign up today and get involved and now on in the show.

Welcome back to the Lincoln project. I'm your host, Reed Galen. Today, I'm joined by co-founder of the Lincoln project, host of LPTV's The Breakdown,

an author of Everything Trump Touches dies. Rick Wilson, Rick, thanks for joining me. Hey, Reed, glad to be back.

So Rick, we're in to April. Now it's hard to believe. And if you had said on January 1st that this is what the world would look like,

I don't think I would have believed you. I'm not sure you would have thought that this is what the world would look like,

but this is why as Stuart likes to say, the biggest crime in American politics today is lack of imagination.

You know, we could not have forecast that the world was going to in 2015 go into the spiral we've been in ever since then,

but at this point, people have no one to blame but themselves for being shocked by the way that the forces that have been unleashed in this country and the world are continuing to act upon us.

And would I have predicted a war in Ukraine? No, probably not. Or a global inflationary spiral, probably not.

But I think it's important that nobody wakes up every day and says, oh, that ludicrously insane thing that I think could never, ever, ever happen.

That's the worst case scenario. They should never think those thoughts. You should always have keep an eye on the on the potential apocalypse that hovers out there over these days.

Well, and Rick, maybe politics throughout history has always been driven more by externalities than we would hope,

but it certainly feels that way now, which is it is the as Donald Rumsfeld would have called it the unknown unknown that seems to have such a driver, i.e.

COVID-19 two years ago or the invasion of Ukraine, you know, six weeks ago by Vladimir Putin, these things that I suppose in a science fiction novel or a Tom Clancy novel, you could have imagined, but in real life,

seem too far fetched to ever really consider as a possibility. Exactly. But I think it's important that people reframe how they think about the world around us right now, because we are in a moment where, again, those forces I was describing a little while ago that are loose in the world, just like in the late 1850s and in the early teens and in the late 1930s, those forces are happening at a scale where it's hard to see it locally,

but it's easy to see it when you pull back the aperture to 30,000 feet. And I want people to keep themselves prepared for bigger shocks in part because a lot of the forces that are out there in this world, a lot of the institutions and individuals who would love to bring on this new era of authoritarianism, they in part rely on shocking your sense of normality so badly that you can't respond to it.

They want to paralyze you with fear and anxiety and distress by shocking you all the time, constantly throwing things at you that seem not just the externalities of a thing like COVID or the war, but a constant sense of outrage and depression and fear. They rely on that very deeply.

And it's a fear that can only exist within the fictional world that the radical media creates for its viewers.

...