These nutty ideas, those that are propagated by people who call themselves cat turd and Bronze Age

Pervert and all these other things, they are so close to those in power.

They really are like the guidance that people like Vance and Vought and Stephen Miller and

all of these people are being guided by, right?

Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us on the Mona Charrin Show. I'm delighted this week to welcome Laura Kay Field.

She is an advisor to the Illiberal Studies Program at George

Washington University and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. Also, she is the author of a

very important new book called Furious Minds,

The Making of the Maga New Right.

This is the book.

Thank you very much for joining me.

Thank you, Mona, for having me.

I'm really happy to be here.

First question.

What prompted you to write this book? Well, I mean, it's, I'll give you the sort of

medium-length version of this, but I'm a political theorist by training and studied mainly

with conservative Straussians, so, you know, followers of Leo Strauss. And, and then, you know, I graduated,

I was in that world for quite a long time. And then in 2016, when when Trump won the first

time, I was pretty shocked to discover that Michael Anton at the Claremont Institute had written

this big pro-Trump

screed, essentially, this intellectual defense of Trumpism. And that was sort of an adjacent

world, right? That was a world that was sort of familiar to me that I was, you know, not of of,

...