This episode contains audio and descriptions depicting violence,

as well as some harsh language. Please take care when listening.

The 90s serve as a radicalizing decade for the right in the United States.

People in the United States had a lot of reason to be angry and discontented and dissatisfied.

These numbers should hit the White House like a fire alarm.

It was a decade that started off with a sharp recession.

The crisis in short is real. Continuing layoffs are no surprise to workers.

For many people who lived in factory towns or industrial areas,

the jobs that were going away were not coming back.

28-year service. I'm 52 years old. It's going to be hard to find something else.

It's an era of growing inequality where people are getting into more and more debt,

so there's real frustration. This is Nicole Hemmer.

I am an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University,

and I am a scholar of conservatism, media, and the far right.

Hemer says that in the 1990s, as Middle America was an economic decline,

a new and increasingly vocal group was on the rise.

What you see is the dominant political archetype of the early 1990s,

the angry white male.

While it's tempting to think that the archetype of the angry white male appeared in the 2010s,

white men raged underneath much of the politics of the 80s and 90s.

Good paying jobs were being farmed out to foreign countries.

Policies like affirmative action intended to level the playing field for minorities,

...