Upping the Vigilante

Politix

Politics, News Commentary, News

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2023

⏱️ 66 minutes

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Summary

In the past few years, the Republican politics of crime and racial scapegoating have given way to the outright glorification of vigilante killers like Kyle Rittenhouse, Eddie Gallagher, and most recently, Daniel Penny. Last week, Penny choked a Black street artist to death for the crime of being mentally ill on a New York subway. In response, Ron DeSantis called him a “Good Samaritan” and said America has his back. Why has this trend taken hold? Is it new? And, most importantly, to what end? Host Brian Beutler welcomes Matthew Dallek, a professor at George Washington University and author of the new book Birchers, which details the founding of the far-right John Birch Society and its attempt to take over the GOP. Brian and Matt discuss the ever-shrinking line between violent right-wing extremists and mainstream Republican politicians, why the GOP is turning racist vigilantes into folk heroes, and how the groundwork for MAGA to take over the Republican Party was laid 50 years ago by a group of wealthy, extremist bigots.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boyther.
0:22.9	If you're a regular listener here, then I'm going to assume you're broadly familiar with
0:27.6	what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia in August, 2017. The Nazis marching with
0:33.5	torches, the United the right rally, Donald Trump's sanctification of white supremacists,
0:39.5	and ultimately the murder of Heather Hire. We begin tonight with that breaking news,
0:43.8	a horrific scene in Charlottesville, Virginia, a white nationalist rally that descended into deadly
0:50.0	violence and chaos, the image is just coming in. Yes, I think this blame on both sides. You also
1:01.5	had people that were very fine people on both sides. Looking back on the low moments of the Trump
1:08.8	presidency, I think many people remember that 24-hour period as the lowest, if not one of the lowest.
1:15.7	And you can kind of intuit that even Trump loyalists know it was the low moment because they
1:20.7	don't celebrate it. They don't talk about it unless they're trying to nitpick criticisms and
1:25.8	retellings of the event and of Trump's role in it. But I want you to imagine for a moment what
1:32.0	might have happened if Charlottesville had been a somewhat lower wattage event, less well covered
1:38.0	in the media, less well attended, if the counter protests had been a bit smaller, if Trump had never
1:44.1	been confronted with questions about it and cameras weren't rolling when James Alexfield's
1:49.3	junior accelerated his car into a crowd of counter protesters. What have the news out of Charlottesville
1:54.4	had been hazy and hard to reconstruct? But all we knew for sure is that a right-wing protestor
2:00.0	had driven through a group of resistance protesters and one person had died.
2:05.2	If that's how most of America had learned about Charlottesville, I'm not sure to be a particularly
2:10.0	well-remembered event today. I also think Republicans and conservative movement leaders might
2:16.0	to this day herald James Alexfield's as a hero and a murder persecuted by the justice system.
2:24.0	Now I don't mean that as hyperbole at all and I don't mean to define Republicans by their
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