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We have a very special guest with road island senator, Sheldon Whitehouse, who is going to be talking to us about a wide variety of subjects, including how dark money is affecting this country and how the GOP has become a toxic force.

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So can we start talking about the essay you wrote on medium about how the Republican Party has lost its way. Tell me what I mean this feels very right of the moment, especially considering the tapes yesterday, the Woodward tapes.

I happen to feel like a healthy Republican Party is good for democracy. How could you see the Republican Party coming back from this?

I think it's going to take kind of an internal revolution of some kind. You can plot a trajectory for the early work like what's the matter with Kansas that showed how the party propaganda had been able to convince regular Republicans to vote against their interests.

And then when it looked like Trump was going to lose to Hillary, there was this little burst of confession by Republicans about that's what happens when you've run something that basically is going to scam has been consumer fraud on a political level against our own voters.

And now they've kind of turned on us and then you've got the further expansion of that view through the never trump Republicans who are disappointed in where their party has gone, which has had a little recent explosion in the it was all a live book.

So there's been this sort of thread running for quite a while in the common feature of it is that very clever people who are paid a lot of money by people who have immense money are running a propaganda operation to scam Republican voters in order to get power and get advantage tax advantages polluting advantages, the kind of things that are traditional grist for political mischief.

You have been very involved in environmental causes it's hard right now as we have these fires racing across the west. Talk to me about where you think we are with the environment what we can do how we can come back from this what you're working on right now.

So this stood up to mask the fossil fuel industry's own role and put a veneer of science on their climate denial and to be the political muscle that breaks people if they cross them.

So that's why they took over the US Chamber of Commerce that's why they took over the National Association of Manufacturers and became why would those two groups become the two worst climate obstructors in America doesn't make sense given their membership, but it happened.

So I think for that you've got to follow the money. So the two ways out of this are you follow the money and you disable and you discredit this operation that has seized control of the Republican Party.

And the second is you wait until the Republican Party is so discredited and it's climate denial that a surge of new Republicans come in and sweep out those who were complicit in the phony baloney operation that the fossil fuel industry ran.

So it probably takes too long for climate. So we probably are going to have to work in a partisan fashion to get a build on if November is good to us, although I hate to see that be the case.

Maybe if it's inevitable some Republicans will come over because they see the future and want to switch to the right side and now it's inevitable.

Could you see that happening?

Yeah, I mean I talked to probably a dozen Senate Republicans who understand quite clearly that climate change is real that it's a terrible threat that it hurts their home states and threatens their home states.

And they're looking for a way to get something done, but they want it to be a way that doesn't force the opposition of this whole apparatus that the fossil fuel industry has set up, which is completely dominant in Republican election politics.

I mean if the chamber goes against you, national association manufacturers goes against you, API goes against you, Americans for prosperity goes against you, now you're looking around for who else is going to support you and it's mighty thin gruel at that point.