Dude, did you see the video Tucker Carlson dropped to promote his new The End of Men documentary?

Just manly men doing manly things like chopping wood and fighting each other and milking cows, and they all apparently function in a world with no shirts.

I'm not gonna say anything more except there is a Vitruvian man with a Tesla charger heating up his balls.

Ha ha ha ha!

Look, I lived in the gay village in Toronto, the West Village of New York, and the West Village of Los Angeles.

And I am sure I have never seen anything quite so homeroerotic, which is great.

But I think that Tuckums was making the exact opposite point.

Ha ha ha!

Hello, and welcome to the Politics Girl podcast. I'm your host, Lee McGowan. Let's get into it.

America is deeply divided. That's not news. But the authoritarian ruler of Russia deciding to invade a Democratic neighbor and American ally to execute civilians, commit war crimes, and destroy cities for sport is the type of international crisis that traditionally would have inspired Americans to set aside their differences and unite against a common enemy.

As Georgetown professor and writer for the Guardian, Thomas Zimmer says, conservatives are usually very committed to the idea of patriotic unity when it comes to foreign enemies, especially one that has played the leading role as our country's nemesis as Russia has throughout our modern history.

However, instead of bringing us together, a united force of democratic values rally around our president as he strengthens NATO and stands up to this tyrant.

The rights reaction to Russia's attack on Ukraine has ranged anywhere from, we should go head to head with the Russians in an all-out war to who cares about Ukraine to enthusiastic admiration for Putin and his bold, strong man behavior.

It's bizarre. It's almost as if people have been so brainwashed against Democrats that even an all-out war being waged against freedom and democracy itself can't bring the people to stand on the side of the American president if that president happens to be a Democrat.

It's almost as if the Republicans have been forced or chosen to take the counter position, even if that means supporting Russia in a war with America.

The party of Reagan now seems closer to the party of Putin, and I would like to explore how we got here.

Here's the reality. American democracy, though never perfect, has been eroding rather than evolving for about 50 years.

In the creation of the American Legislative Exchange Council in the mid-1970s, to advance the free market through partnership with legislatures and the corporate sector, the basically turned into a backroom arrangement where corporations could pay a fortune, have lawmakers introduce bills that they wrote themselves.

To the 1976 Supreme Court decision, Buckley V. Villéjo, that struck down the amount of money individuals could contribute to their own campaigns, opening the door for rich people to buy their way into government,

set the precedent for Citizens United, which opened the floodgates for unlimited dark money to flow into our elections.

Ronald Reagan took the country on a sharp right turn in the 80s, to paraphrase a response on the Washington Post website by doing racism, sexism, and greed with a movie star smile, a whispered dog whistle, and a flag on his lapel.

It's the Reagan presidency that got the segregationist evangelicals on board, made the abortion one-issue voter, resurrected the age of the Robert Barron, demonized drugs and gay people, and set up the media for a destructive bias by killing the fairness doctrine.

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