 a lot of the degradation of the norms and the institutions is coming from the other side, and it happens in a more, perhaps more subtle way than Trump's blatant claims of election fraud and conspiracy. One thing I'm continually fascinated and horrified by is the extent to which Democrats and some of the hardcore anti-Trump Republicans who constantly sermonized about how our hallowed democracy is in trouble if the MAGA movement gains ground are actually willing to prop up MAGA candidates. In fact, we know from the WikiLeaks email, yeah, I know it happened to you and I want to talk about that in a second, but on the biggest scale it happened. The WikiLeaks dump showed that that was a strategy of the Hillary Clinton campaign to push as much media attention as they could towards Trump. They called it the Pied Piper strategy. And yeah, it happened in your election race. Let me just pull up the New York Times article on it. Democrats aid far-right candidate against Republican who backed impeachment, that being you. And they note that $425,000 of advertising went from Democratic groups, went to your basically it was an ad that was kind of pretending to attack your opponent, but really was just like highlighting all the attributes that would be appealing to a hardcore conservative. So it's this kind of like sneaky advertising in favor of your opponent because they thought he would be easier to beat in the general and turned out they did beat him in general. So their political calculation might have been right, but the moral calculation is what's more troubling and interesting to me and what I'd like you to comment on. Yeah, I mean, to me, just for the record, so I lost by my primary by three points. It was not exactly a blowout. Ultimately, I take responsibility for that loss, but I thought it was very rich the way that I would hear the Democrats rail against what a threat these guys are and at the same time doing everything to boost, right? And that's where I am very much a kind of pox on all houses mentality. I think it's there's a sort of I think both sizing something gets a bum rap because it's often, well, it's fine if we do this because they do it too. And my point is no, like, everyone here has has some blood on their hands in terms of producing the moment that we're in. There may be degrees of difference in terms of who's done more in this case or more in that case. But ultimately, both parties and all folks are living in glass houses on this. So just, you know, as a Republican, I want to be able to condemn when, you know, mobs try to intimidate lawmakers. And that can become a hard thing if I spent the whole time condoning or making excuses for, you know, January 6th, right? Like, because consistency matters to me. And that's not going to say that I'm, you know, there aren't places where I look back and say, Oh, well, I probably should have done this, or how do I find that thread? You know, I'm not going to pretend to be perfect in that, but that is my aspiration. That is my goal. And that stands in contrast to a political system who's, I mean, the amount of times I've seen the post and I've or somebody's comment, and I'm like, I cannot tell sincerely, if you were being sarcastic or not, because I could I could find the rationalization for, you know, a sincere interpretation of this tweet, or for it to be entirely tongue in cheek, because, you know, it's all unmoored, right? And again, getting back to the beginning of this conversation, that feeling of like, you know, what actually matters, who actually believe something? Where are we actually going? Or are we just, you know, all these whirling dervishes, you know, spinning around and staying in the same place? I would just like to be able to affirmatively, you know, out or have, you know, government officials, you know, folks making policy, affirmatively outlining a position and consistently defending it, as opposed to, you know, well, you're going to forget about what I said last week. So I'm just going to, you know, adopt whatever the flavor of the day is, because, you know, or again, our attention spans may not be long enough for anyone to recall it, and anybody who points out that inconsistency, you know, I'll just call them a nerd and somebody who, you know, is, you know, if you're explaining you're losing or whatever and just drive forward. I'm sure there's some happy topics we can kind of wrap up on, but that broader trend, and, you know, this week, the Supreme Court, the case about whether or not Donald Trump can be thrown off the Colorado states, the Colorado ballot, the Maine ballot. The 18th Amendment argument that we've covered a little bit before on this show, yeah. No, and I mean, the thing I just, I want to grab some of the folks who are advocating for this and saying like, well, so what would you, what would your defense be if that same argument was applied to you? You know, and it's always, this is different or Trump is unique or X or Y or Z. It's like, okay, but, you know, that's a value judgment. You're saying that you're setting a precedent. How would you like it if that was, you know, used against you or what, what would you say? And if you would scream bloody murder, if somebody would do to you what you're doing to them, you know, I mean, every kindergartner is taught the concept of like the golden rule and doing unto others, you know, but within our political process, you know, it just becomes a, you know, might and right, you know, if you have the power, then you have the power to use it. And that's all well and good, but eventually you're going to be in the minority and, you know, you're going to get good and hard, whatever you gave to somebody else. And I think the challenge is, you know, if you don't have folks who are thinking of that long term, if they're not thinking past the end of the month or the year or the selection cycle, you know, then there's no inherent disciplining mechanism to say, well, maybe don't pick up the thing that's just lying right in front of you because, you know, of what that effect will be on our broader system. But when you don't have individuals who care about that, when, you know, everything is short-sighted and well, you know, if you're run out of town, run out of DC on a rail, you can always pick up a nice, you know, kind of cable network gig or, you know, start your own company selling, you know, you know, Sandra Day O'Connor, Bobbleheads or, you know, you know, Beat Pills, that's going to be a very different incentive structure than that oriented towards, you know, thoughtful long-term governing. When you first learned about Democrats backing and supporting, you know, the person who was trying to primary you and was ultimately successful in doing that, who was very far to the right of you, when you first learned about that, A, did you feel like a conspiracy theorist? Like, did that feel too crazy to be true? And B, like, how did you process that? What did that feel like in that moment? I mean, I wasn't surprised. I was surprised that it came through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. That was actually their first independent expenditure of the 2022 midterms. It's pretty blatant, right? Like, they're not even trying to hide it. It didn't come through some, you know, kind of, you know, like, it was, it was blunt, paid for by DCCC. And I have my own conspiracy theory behind that, that they make it blunt to basically send the bat signal to, you know, Democratic voters in the district to say, hey, you know, there's really no competitive Democratic primaries. You can vote in either. Now, I don't think that had a large impact, but, you know, yeah, it, you know, I think I called it sanctimony as bullshit on, on, you know, see an end of just, like, again, like, what do you actually believe? And what you believe, you know, be willing to be held consistent to it. So it, I should put it this way, very few things that happened while I was in Congress came as a surprise to me in terms of me just objectively being like, I can't believe this is happening so many times where I would look at, you know, the, you know, possible kind of decision trees and events and I was like, you know, what is probably the least inspiring or the dumbest or the, the outcome that would make me say, yeah, that feels about right. That ended up being the outcome nine times out of 10. So a lot of my worst assumptions or worst predictions or just, you know, most my lowest estimation assumptions ended up being affirmed, but I was rarely surprised. You know, it's, it's still, it's still happening and you, that's probably the, the right approach is to just assume the, you know, adopt a sort of strategic cynicism, because you will be proven right when it comes to electoral politics at this level. Like the, the latest example of that that struck me was our colleague Matt Welch wrote an article about kind of the third party challenges that are likely to appear this cycle, between RFK and the Libertarian party and the no labels group that there's very likely going to be a sizable percentage of voters that are, that are voting for neither Trump or Biden, possibly, you know, covering the spread. And that's got these, that's got the Democratic party and probably the Republican party to panic and their surrogates are engaging in these kinds of behaviors. They're trying to, you know, one of the, Matt describes a vicious level of interest in the no labels party. There's these tactics that third party watchers are very familiar with, you know, denying ballot access, engaging in lawfare, the normal, you know, routes of political running political ads. So it is more of this like kind of undermining democracy to supposedly protect democracy. I'm reading a book right now that was recommended by one of our listeners by Emily Finley about this concept she calls democratism, where, which is more of a romanticized version of democracy that isn't just a mechanism for selecting political leaders, but is actually an ideology that leads to certain social outcomes. So I guess my question for you is, is there any antidote to that kind of establishment Tarianism that that do you think that, first of all, I guess do you think that's real and be, can it be contained? Are there any methods to counteract that? No, to me, the strongest method is having trusted objective folks who can look at a situation and just say, okay, you know, Democrats are railing about gerrymandering and how, you know, it's, you know, the Republicans are being evil down in Texas. So defend what you guys are doing in Illinois, defending what you're doing in New York. I think it needs to be called out. It needs to be pointed out. You know, it cracks me up the amount of times where, again, everything is the most important. This time is different. You know, we need to throw the rules out the window up and until the time where we want those ruled back because they protect us like up and until the next time is even worse. And now trust us now. I mean, if you look at the way in which President Biden, every single time he wants to blame Republicans for something, it's always mega Republicans. It's always extreme mega Republicans. It could be, you know, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, you know, and they are, you know, extreme mega Republicans. And I think that is certainly not helpful. It undercuts whatever argument. And I think just drives us back into a cynical polarization where, you know, you don't feel like you're going to have a home. But boy, is it more comfortable to, you know, at least be in one shelter or the other than in the middle and the wilderness. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week. So subscribe to ReasonTV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens or to the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify, or any other podcatcher. See you next week.