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Welcome to the bowl work podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is Friday the end of the first week of 2023 and damn lot of stuff. I did not have my bingo card. So happy New Year.

A B started columnist associate editor real clear politics welcome back on the podcast A B happy New Year Charlie. It's great to be with you and it's strange to start the year stuck in ground log day with Kevin McCarthy's ego trip.

But it sure is better than a real January 6th from two years ago. So I'll take it.

It does feel like a shot in Freud groundhog day where you experience the same emotions over and over again, which of course we're not supposed to feel about all of this. But let's just put Kevin McCarthy in that weird story aside for the moment. I mean, what's your resistable.

But as you just pointed out today is the second anniversary of the attack on the Capitol. I mean, I think it's amazing. I don't know does it seem longer ago to you.

But with things that are traumatizing when I look back on them, they feel both close and far. So it seems like it must have been so much longer yet it feels so raw.

Yeah, just this morning, my wife and I were talking about, you know, where we were standing as we were watching this unfold that day, how unreal it seemed and how we were saying to one another, where's the National Guard? When is the Army going to show up? When are the cops going to get there?

And I remember this one moment where I saw some guys in camo gear, you know, going up the stairs and I thought to myself, okay, well, they finally arrived and it turns out those were the old keeper.

I mean, the whole thing is so surreal. Let's just step back for a moment. I wrote this morning and I know I'm going to get some pushback on it.

You know that in order to understand what's happening today, you have to recognize that the Republican Party on display this week has been shaped forged crafted by what happened on January 6th.

It is remarkable to think that some of the same supporters of the insurrection who wanted to hold American democracy hostage two years ago today are today holding the House of Representatives hostage.

But also that some of those supporters of the insurrection are poised to become committee chairs of plum assignments are about to move into power.

So two years on, it feels like we have this split screen where half of America is saying this is a horrible thing.

We may have criminal charges coming down soon and yet the party most closely associated with it seems completely unfazed by as if they have learned absolutely nothing.

Well, as you said, the most radicalized the insurrectionist element of the party has been empowered. Dave Nauke empowered.

So I was just on a briefing call this morning with the poster, salinda lake and she has a brand new figure that 90% of Americans expect political conflict this year.

That is a breathtaking number. I'm assuming that means some kind of violence, semi-violent conflict, not just people fighting for committee chairmanship in negotiations about who's going to become speaker on the House floor.

If you think about the people who are holding the House hostage and who, as you said, were so instrumental in the insurrection on Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, you know, Paul Gosar of Arizona and others like Marjorie Taylor Green was now she's on Kevin McCarthy side, but she's going to be very powerful no matter who succeeds.

She was at meetings at the White House about about the insurrection Lauren Bober famously tweeted today that the speaker had left the chamber as if that was some kind of message to the throngs of riders.

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