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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Most of the headlines from CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, over the weekend had to do with Donald Trump giving a speech, but listen to what Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a presumed presidential hopeful, and the leader with Ted Cruz, as many of you know of trying not to certify the election results in the Senate. Listen to our senator Josh Hawley basically denied that this country has any systemic racism to still get over.

Senator Josh Hawley: We heard that we are systemically racist. You heard that once or twice. We heard that the real founding of the country wasn't in 1776, it was in 1619, or whatever.

Brian Lehrer: Or whatever. Then he said this, he called the United States, the country that liberated slaves, and somehow equated talk of systemic racism, with supporting oligarchs.

Senator Josh Hawley: Part of standing up to the oligarchs in tech and in the media and the liberals is reclaiming our history and saying it is good, and we are proud to be Americans.

[applause]

We're proud to have lived in a country that started with nothing and became the greatest country on the face of the earth. We're proud to live in a country that liberated slaves.

Brian Lehrer: Senator Josh Hawley. We'll start there with Jason Johnson, Morgan State University Journalism Professor, Political Contributor to MSNBC, and TheGrio, and host of the new Slate podcast called A Word. Hi, Jason, thanks for coming on this morning. I know you're on the west coast, so thanks for agreeing to an early call.

Jason Johnson: [chuckles] Thanks, Brian. Look, at this point, I'm pretty much used to it. You get up at four o'clock in the morning on the west coast to do your east coast meeting every day, but thanks. Although I must admit, starting my day with the voice of Josh Hawley is never a good thing.

[laughter]

That's never the [unintelligible 00:02:02] I look forward to.

Brian Lehrer: Where do you see it fitting into the context of today's conservative movement? Some of the things in there by themselves are just so outrageous, just dismissing the significance of 1619 as "whatever" and acquainting, getting over systemic racism with supporting oligarchs. Where did you see it in the context of today's conservative movement, since he said that to a big audience, the national audience at CPAC?

Jason Johnson: I see it a couple ways. I'm usually loath to do this, but this context matters. I'm a Politics and Journalism Professor at Morgan. The reason I say that is because there's a journalistic responsibility when we hear that nonsense, and then there's the political reality. The political reality is that the people at CPAC, and I've attended several CPACs, I'm not unfamiliar with what it's like there, I was at CPAC in 2019, obviously, I didn't go in 2020, you have a group of people there that is increasingly only dedicated to the cult of Trumpism.

You can say whatever you want to those people, there's not going to be any pushback, it's not like CPAC is an opportunity for various wings of the conservative Republican movement to debate each other. They are there to worship at the trough of Trump. Josh Hawley is one of those people who thinks he can spit a bunch of nonsense into people's throats like a baby bird.

I think the journalistic side of this is, we have to- if we don't just ignore this nonsense, we always have to point out when people are lying. We can objectively say that there is systematic racism in America. It's not an opinion, it's not something for the woke left, it's not something for the right to argue over.

When you had a country that routinely locked Black people out of the economy, whether that's with the GI Bill, or whether that starts with housing, or whether that's with distribution of resources, public education, we can show that this is factually true. I think that's always how we have to talk about these kinds of Republican movements. No, not only is this untrue, but these are the facts that back up the thing that they're trying to deny.

Brian Lehrer: I was speaking to somebody from the World War II generation over the weekend and learned something about this person that I didn't know. He was talking about having purchased a co-op in Queens, as a very young worker, shortly after World War II, and said it cost $105. I said, "$105 for a co-op in Queens even then?" He said, "It was subsidized by the government." I said, "Oh, what did you do? What kind of category were you in that you were eligible for government subsidy?" He said, "They subsidized everybody."

What he didn't realize, he was saying was that they subsidized all the white people who were coming out of that generation, because a lot of these things were not available to African Americans.

Jason Johnson: Yes. When you hear Republicans say there's no systematic racism, when you hear Republicans say this country is done all these great and wonderful things, when you hear Republicans now try to use your term "co-ops" or capture this term "cancel culture," look, Black people in this country, and Hispanics and Asians, and to certain extent women, have been canceled from all sorts of stuff. [chuckles]

As a matter of fact, we never even got to apply. A lot of what you hear at CPAC, and I'll tell you, the last time that I was there in 2019, I remember meeting former Bernie supporters who had suddenly become Trump people, I spent some time talking to some Black Trump supporters, and by and large, and I think this can't be overlooked, is that these are people who don't tend to have much ideology anymore.

Former President tried to describe it. Trumpism is whatever Donald Trump feels like that morning when he wakes up after he watches Fox & Friends. It's about an ideology that anybody else can capture, which is why when Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, and maybe one day Ron DeSantis, started running around saying, "I am the next inheritor of Trumpism." You can't be, because it's a personality cult. There's no philosophy behind it.

That's something else that I think people need to understand. Remember, the Republican Party didn't have a- they didn't have a platform for 2020. Literally, their party platform was a fealty pledge to Donald Trump, which is why you can have people attacking the White House or having people attacking the Capitol, and having folks running around and saying whatever this man claims is the fact. I'll be honest with you. Arguments can be made about deep platforming, but I think America is a much quieter, peaceful place if that guy's been off Twitter.

Brian Lehrer: Yet, they talk about policy. They talked about policy at CPAC. Trump certainly talked about immigration, talked about the Biden administration and Trump's opinion, weakening America in foreign policy. Let me land on that for a second and get your thought, because I noticed that former Secretary of State under Trump, Mike Pompeo, spoke at CPAC and called for big military spending and worried that the Democrats would cut military spending to fund climate and jobs programs, and he put it like this.

Mike Pompeo: When I hear Democrats say they want a strong America, I know that they are working to undermine it, sadly. Mark my word, they're going to cut the defense budget that we worked so hard to build. They'll do it to pay for their Green New Deal, kind of makes me mad. They're going to trade army green for AOC green.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, he had to name check AOC there, but trade army green for AOC green, smaller military for more climate protection, and more jobs programs.

Jason Johnson: This is what's funny about this. One, Mike Pompeo, every time I hear him talk, it's like clueless, like quit trying to make fetch happen. You're never going to be president, Mike Pompeo. You're [unintelligible 00:08:18] win the nomination. The man is as boring as paint drying. When you hear someone deliver a line, like military green for this, I'm sure some focus group thought that was witty, it sounds horrible in delivery.

From a more practical level, that's a series of opinions. It's not really policy. Quite frankly, military spending isn't policy, what you spend the money on in the military is policy because it says what your government priorities are.

Here's the thing, and argument can be made about this, and it's one I happen to agree with, regardless of what one may think about the impending doom of climate change, all you have to do is look at what just happened in Texas, and recognize that extreme weather in the United States and across the world, whether it's hot or cold, is a major issue. The destabilization that can happen across the world because of extreme weather is the kind of thing that leads to military and economic instability.

The idea of taking money out of the military and saying, "Hey, look, let's do this for the environment. Let's help soil erosion in this country. Let's help water facilities in this country," those are the kinds of policies that prevent dictators from rising. Those are the kinds of policies that stop mass migrations of people because there's floods and droughts, migrations that then lead to ethnic conflict and war.

It's the peak of naivete for Republicans to paint this use of resources as an either or. No, a more stable world means you don't have to use your military as much because you can't shoot a bunch of starving people who've had to leave in mass from their home country because they've had five years of drought.

Brian Lehrer: There's also a contradiction that I've mentioned here before, because I think it ran through the entire Trump administration, and they're leaked into Pompeo's speech and CPAC. Contradiction between Trump and his people being so proud of all this military spending, "Oh, Obama decimated military spending, and I brought it back up. We're the biggest, baddest military in the world, and that's our place." At the same time, as criticizing both Democrats and Neocons from past administrations for getting us into wars.

They're trying to be pulling back from being the military of the world and, at the same time, boasting that they're building up defense spending. I guess, on some level, those contradictory things push the same buttons in some voters, but they really don't make sense together.

Jason Johnson: No, Brian, it's all cognitive dissonance, right? I don't want to really recognize how these two things don't fit, they just both make me feel good. It's the same way that you can say like, "I really, really like the idea of working out, and I really, really like the idea of McDonald's." You can't have both those ideas in your head, but people do it all the time. They eat McDonald's, and they still think working out is important. That's one of the problems with the modern Republican Party, again, to the degree, they can call it populism, you can call whatever you want, but to the degree that it's focused on the personality of one guy, and one guy who's not particularly informed, it's very easy to have these kinds of asinine opinions, one way or another.

Again, I say this to somebody, not like I'm anti-military spending, it's just that, what are you using the money for? Just throwing money at the military just because it's not policy, that's a feeling. If you're saying, "Hey, we want to increase the military because, what? do we need aircraft carriers anymore? We really don't."

What we need is, increase in national security. What we need is, better on-the-ground intelligence. What we need is, a new generation of students of all colors, who speak Farsi, who speak Chinese, who can go and negotiate and engage with these worlds in different countries around the world, so that conflicts don't start. That's also military and intelligence spending, but that's not what Trump is talking about. He's talking about tanks riding down the street on a regular basis so that he can put a bunch of badges himself like a third-world dictator.

Again, at CPAC, you can talk about that stuff, because everyone's going to worship you like the golden trumpets that they were rolling through the building, but I don't think any of that stuff sells outside of the building.

As Ben Sasse was pointing out, the fact that Trump has basically just have a record of losing, he lost the popular vote in 2016, he lost the House in 2018, he lost the Senate in 2020, and he lost the presidency, and Georgia flipped blue, and Arizona flipped blue. If that guy is your keynote speaker, that's one of the most idiotic things in the world, because he doesn't have a record of winning, and that's the thing that I think the Republican Party probably should figure out eventually, that the man you're worshiping has driven you into a political ditch.

Brian Lehrer: If that's been happening, and you're right that the language we've been talking about doesn't sell outside the building or CPAC is taking place, then is it something to be very worried about, or not so much?

Jason Johnson: Obviously, it's something to worry about, because we had an insurrection at the Capitol just on January 6th, and that was the topic of my first new podcast, A Word, with Slate. I talked to Malcolm Nance, who many of you all familiar with. He's a national security analyst for MSNBC. We talked about how Trump is basically the God of the many men and women who went and attacked the Capitol.

You don't have to have a message. The idea of that message resonating outside of the room isn't a problem when you think in terms of elections. It's like, okay, your average person, and suburban Dallas, and outside of Cleveland, and living in Richmond, Virginia, they don't care about that crap. They just want to go send their kids back to school and live healthy and safe.

If you have a bunch of knuckleheads in that room, who really believe in these fantasies, who really believe that the only way to save their country is to engage in armed insurrection, that is dangerous. The fact that we have a country where the men and women who engage in this behavior are not held accountable, sometimes not by the press, but certainly not by our legal system, it means it's much more likely that the rhetoric that we heard at CPAC is going to lead to more violence. That's the kind of thing that I really want to make sure I not only tack on the podcast, but I think in general, and all public discourse, we can't let these people off the hook.

Brian Lehrer: Just to finish up, I pulled the Hawley and the Pompeo clips because I thought they were actually more newsworthy than anything Trump said in his speech, which I feel like we've heard a million times.

As he was speaking yesterday, you tweeted, "Wondering who might be listening to a certain speech right now and take a listen to my new podcast, A Word from Slate, as Malcolm Nance and I discussed the cop, soldiers, and white nationalists behind the Capitol insurrection."

You want to tell us, as we run out of time, so this will be your last answer about the podcast and how that first episode, how that idea of cops, soldiers, and white nationalists, to whatever extent you can say cops or law enforcement people were involved, because we also saw the extreme irony of Blue Lives Matter flags being used to assault cops. There are things like that. How that all fits together into what you may have been watching and perceiving at CPAC last night?

Jason Johnson: The most important thing to remember is this, that white nationalists and terrorist organizations in America have been encouraging their supporters to join the military, join local police departments, and learn about combat skills and guns. Those kinds of people, over 20% of the people who are involved in the armed insurrection against the Capitol, the failed coup are either current or former military or law enforcement, and that's dangerous.

We have to go into these agencies, we have to go into police departments, we have to go into the army and get these people out. It's not about ideology, you can have whatever ideology that you want in America, but what you can't do is engage in treason and coup activities. You can't try to overthrow the government.

One of the things we're going to talk about a lot in A Word, and that's why it was great to have Malcolm Nance as my first guest, we're going to have uncomfortable conversations. I want to talk about race. I want to talk about movies, and violence, and politics, and culture, and interracial, relations, and love, and politics, and finance, and everything else like that. There are too many places where we only talk about the surface of racial and cultural issues in America.

A Word is a place where people will be able say all that uncomfortable stuff that they don't think they can say anywhere else, you can say it on my podcast. I'm really excited about it. First, we talked about the Capitol insurrection, where these people come from, what they're driven by. Next, we're going to be talking about cancel culture. We have some celebrities coming up, where they're going to be asked some questions that they haven't been asked in most entertainment shows before. I'm really looking forward to it. You can sign up for it at Slate and we drop every Friday morning.

Brian Lehrer: Jason Johnson, Morgan State University Journalism and Politics Professor, Political Contributor to MSNBC and TheGrio, and now host of the new Slate podcast called A Word. We always like when you come on with us, Jason, thanks a lot.

Jason Johnson: Thanks, Brian. Appreciate it.

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