Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Dover. Our guest today? Congressman Dave Bratt, who represents

area around Richmond, Virginia, but that's not why most people know him. Most people

know him because he made history in 2014 beating Eric Cantor, then the House Majority Leader,

in a primary, the first House Majority Leader ever to lose a primary, and lost it despite

having a 40-to-one money advantage, a lead in the polls that everybody thought was impenetrable,

and no expectation from anyone that he was going to win.

Brat came in as a Tea Party star, but also a representative of something that seemed to be going

on in the country more than most people had tapped into,

and that in fact, it seems like when you look at what happened with Donald Trump, was ahead of

his time. We talked about that. We talked also about him being the main agitator, one of the

main agitators, on the pushback on the House Republican plan for Obamacare repeal.

Of course, he is a House Republican.

He's a Tea Party member.

He is a former economist.

He talked a lot about how all of those things come together in his mind.

We talked about if Paul Ryan and Donald Trump are conservatives by his definition.

Spoiler alert.

He's not super impressed with either of them at the moment.

And you know what else?

We talked about Nietzsche and his larger sense of what's going on with ethics and philosophy in this country.

So we got a little deep toward the end.

Stay in for that.

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