Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittles, Senior Elections correspondent at the
Federalist and your experience shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on ex at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is political strategist and policy leader John Tillman,
author of the new book Political Vice, How the Radical
Left Controls America and the Path to Regaining Our Liberty. John,
thank you so much for joining us in this edition
of the Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: Great to be with you, Matt, Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, you have seen a lot of the left in Illinois.
You have covered politics and policy for a long time,
and I think the left is the dominant feature. The
radical left is the dominant feature in Illinois under Governor J. B. Pritzker.
Give us a little sense of how all of this
domination from the left started, because you ask a very
interesting question, how does the radical left keep winning even
when it's losing?
Speaker 2: The radical left understands that politics is about pressure, and
in order to apply pressure to politicians and the political system,
you have to gain power. And where does power come from.
Power comes from media capacity. Power comes from being able
to activate normally dormant or latent voters into taking action.
And there's two kinds of that. There's orchestrated and we're
seeing a lot of that on the political lef Now
that all the riots and protests that you see in
the streets, these are all orchestrated by nonprofits and political
organizations that are fomenting the discord to try to create
a narrative and apply pressure to the political system and
politicians in it. And then lead influencers are the third part,
and the lead influencers are the most important part in
the traditional political vice because they apply direct pressure to
political actors and they also apply and manipulate the media
and the public. And so the reason that Illinois is
the way it is, or California or New York is
part of it is just the belief systems that exists there.
But don't forget that both those states, all three of
those states at one time voted reliably republican. So what
makes it change. And also don't forget that Florida, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana.
These are all one time blue and or purple states
become reliably read. So the question is what happens in
each of these cases to change it. And what I
believe my theory of the political device is that there's
a specific kind of capacity you have to build in
the media, in grassroots and people engagement, if you will,
and building elite influencers in order to apply pressure and
thus have power in the political system.
Speaker 1: Lawfair plays a significant role in all of this, and
the left has made lawfair one of their leading vices.
We saw all of that, of course, employed after President
Trump got out of office. They did everything they could
to stop him from being a candidate from president again,
everything from impeachments to indictments to prosecutions on bogus charges
in very deep blue jurisdictions. How much does law fair
play into the left strategy.
Speaker 2: It's a huge part of it, and it's a part
that has really emerged over the last ten years with
the emergence of Donald Trump. And so lawfair really engages
every aspect of the political advice. It's brought. The lawsuits
are brought by elite influencers, often attorneys general, prosecutors in
these Democrat localities where they have control of the system,
and then they run media campaigns and have their friends
in the corporate legacy media run the stories as those
cases are brought, and those stories and the contextualization of
those stories of course have a negative slant in terms
of the treatment of the subject of the Lawfair and
the case you're talking about Donald Trump, but not just
Donald Trump, all the J sixers that were prosecuted viciously
Roger Stone. I mean, pick anybody you want who's been
prosecuted by the Lawfair strategy the left. And then of course,
simultaneously they're running campaigns to try to persuade the American voter,
American citizens that the the subject of the law Fair
is guilty and unworthy of continued support. And in that case,
they were trying to essentially preempt Trump not only legally
from being able to run, but they wanted to destroy
his brand loyalty among voters. I think it failed in
spectacular fashion because of the unique nature of Trump, and
also Trump is one of the perhaps the very best
politician in the history of the world to build his
own direct marketing channels to voters and really bypass corporate
media's ability to control a narrative.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, And you think about what's happened over the
better part of the last ten years, and it's breathtaking,
to say the very least. How do I guess the
question is, as we've seen the disorder in the streets
with the protest against ice again, as you mentioned, all performative.
Isn't it curious that you see all of this stuff
happening in a mid term election year, just as we
saw in twenty twenty with the Black Lives Matter movement.
But the left does so many things that are truly
appalling to much of America, the majority of America. How
are they able to continue to do these sorts of
things and have electoral success.
Speaker 2: Well, they do it for a number of reasons. First
of all, let's go back a little bit, and because
what's happening over the last twenty plus years is not
the way it used to be. It used to be
that you ran affirmative campaigns, try to persuade the persuadable
middle voters and win a majority, and you had your
base coalition. The Democrats had working class union households, rural households,
Southern whites primarily, who are all Democrats back in the day.
And then you had suburban and affluent to the country
club Republicans if you will, and an independence and everybody
in between. And it was a persuasion game. What started
to happen, and I'll use it started before this. I'd
say it started really in twenty the two thousand election,
but we really came to be able to see it
in the twenty twelve election when Obama was reelected. The
hidden story during that period of time is that people
always talked about how Republicans have a gender gap problem
and they don't do well with minority voters, all of
which was true. But the other side of that coin was,
over time the Democrat Party had a white voter problem.
So in twenty twelve, Barack Obama beatn Romney, as you
may recall, and he got Obama got sixty percent of
the eighteen to twenty nine year old vote, He got
sixty seven percent of single women, he got seventy one
percent of Hispanic voters, and he got ninety three percent
of black voters, so huge supermajorities across the spectrum, and
those were rucial to him winning because he only got
about thirty nine percent of white voters, and if you
took out white millennials and white single women, he was
probably down around thirty two to thirty three percent of
white voters, and that really brought to the four The
problem was that Democrat Party had a problem with white
voters because their policies were creating division and alienating people,
and so group identity politics as an electoral strategy really
went full force from that point on. And that is
why all the protests that you see, all the riding
you see DEI ESG, these are all designed gender transitioning.
You know, I think there's a consensus in America about
gay marriage, but some of the other things going on
and the more crazy stuff, you know, transvestites dancing for
children in elementary schools, all these crazy things, and people saying, wow,
what the heck happened? I thought we just wanted to
have a gay marriage be legal and everybody can move along.
How's all this is happening. It's because they're trying to
create ever more slices of the grievance coalition based upon
your identity, because economic differences no longer mattered as white
voters broadly moved to the right, and so all these
things that you see going on that don't make any
sense are part of the lefts strategy to knit together
a grievance coalition. And so all the other things that
you just asked about in terms of why do they
do these protests and all these things that they're fomenting
in the public and the media and through politics, is
because they need to gin up anger to maximize turnout
of these different groups and get those supermajorities. So we've
gone from those big four I mentioned in twenty twelve,
single women, Hispanics, African Americans, and eighteen to twenty nine
year olds then called millennials. Those groups now have been
supplemented by the LBGTU TQ coalition, Asians, suburban moms who
have empathy for children who may be having mental health problems,
and they decided that gender transitioning is the solution, and
on and on, and of course on top of all
that Trump arrangement syndrome helps feed it all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, indeed, and a lot of that going on in
America today. I thought, as I look back at twenty twelve,
I thought Mitt Romney lost because he put his dog
on on the top of his car as he was
on a family vacation, and he had binders of women.
I say all of this, John, of course, by way
of noting the corporate accomplice media. You cannot do what
the left has done in this country, all of the
crazy stuff that you just laid out without a complicit media,
and I do mean a complicit media. You take a
look at the numbers of the negative coverage on Donald
Trump at ninety two percent. You have late night talk shows,
although you know fewer and fewer people are actually tuning
into these, but they are just at nightly, you know,
talking points for the Democrat Party in this country. How
much has the media played in all of this over
the last you know, fifteen years or so, And that said,
is their hold on the control of the message loosening
with the you know, with the changing of media and America.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a great question. I think it's instrumental
for your listeners to understand what is going on in
the country. And it's a fairly big topic and I'll
try to dial it down a little bit. I write
about this in the book The twentieth century was an
anomaly in human history. It was the first time in
human history where you had mass communication. So it really
started about nineteen twenty seven, I use as the beginning
of this period, and then really started to end in
nineteen ninety seven. That's when you had the first twenty
seven is when you had a first national radio broadcast.
Eventually got all consolidated with television after the war. By
the time you got into the sixties, seventies and on
through the rest of the century, you had three broadcast
networks that were associated radio networks, two newsweeklies, and about
a dozen daily newspapers, with the New York Times in
Washington Post being the two most important. Who really controlled
the content in news that the American people got, and
they controlled distribution. So if you were General Motors or
Ford or whoever you were, Procter and Gamble, you could
reach ninety seven percent of the American audience with a
singular message about your soap or your automobile by buying
those three networks, those newsweeklies and those daily newspapers. And
it was an amazing thing. It created a shared experience.
From the assassination of Kennedy and the other things that
went on in the sixties, to the riots in the
sixties and seventies, to the Challenger crisis, to football and baseball.
We had national shared experiences because we're all watching basically
three or four channels and consuming a monolithic news feed,
and so in some ways it was good. But the
bad part of it was is that the content was
and distribution were controlled by about fifty people, and they
all had a similar workview. Matt I make the argument
that the Civil rights movement succeeded and the Civil Rights
Act passed in the nineteen sixties because the elites controlling
the media finally decided it was time. All the predicates
to have had that happen in the fifties were present
in the fifties. They all did you go back and
look at what was going on in the fifties. The
Civil Rights Act could have passed in the fifties when
Eisenhower was president, but the elite media didn't flip the script.
In the fifties. If you look at the news coverage,
they were still somewhat sympathetic to the states' rights and
what was going on in the Democrat control South. By
the sixties, that completely flipped, and that's why it happened then,
and that's how important the control of narrative and corporate
media is. So now you roll to the twenty first
century and all that started fragment because of full maturation
of cable penetration and the Internet. So you roll forward
and we look at what just has happened over the
last ten years. I already wonders why did we get
into the censorship complex, and that all happened is because
those corporate media legacy players wanted to put the genie
back in the bottle and they wanted to continue to
control both content and distribution. And they still have a
large degree of control over narrative. But the beauty of
it is because of the Federalists and everybody else on
the center right media landscape is they can't control. And
thank god that Elon Musk bought what is now the
next Platform. All of these things continue to erode their
ability to control the narrative. My final comment on this
subject for now is that if you and I were
in charge man of all the media and the United States,
do you think that ten years from now the culture
would be different. I think the answer is obviously yes.
And people of the left control those levers. Obviously, that
has an effect on what people believe because of what
they consume and how they learn.
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Speaker 1: And they worked alongside the government, as we know, certainly
the Biden administration was a perfect example. It's happened before,
of course, but the Biden administration and COVID really brought
this to the front. And as you noted, thankfully Elon
Musk did purchase Twitter, which is now X and we
were able to get those Twitter files part of a
massive collusion effort between the Biden administration and the major
social media networks to suppress the conservative right point of view.
You studied this, how how impactful was that? And you know,
to put it in scooby Doo terms, would they have
gotten away with it? If it hadn't been for that
meddling musk.
Speaker 2: They would still be getting away with it today we'd
be in a very different world. Because what happens now
with X being an open platform or free speech still
reigns is they cannot And even though you know, the
number of people on X in any given days not
that large, but it has a ripple effect. X is
the rock into the middle of the pond, and those
ripples affect the entire population and all of the narratives.
But I'm still stunned by how many people who are
not on X and are just consuming the legacy media
really believe things that are untrue. You know that just
have I live in an affluent suburban community one of
my I have a home in Naples and in Chicago.
I'm now a Florida resident, but I have to say
that for the I R S and the State of
Illinois auditors. But my home up in Chicago rval for
many years. He's also fairly affluent largely Republican modern Republican community.
Most of my neighbors think Ice is horrible. Most of
my neighbors think Donald Trump is a terrible person, and
that his presidency hasn't had any successes because they've consumed
the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN, among others.
And so we still have a long way to go
to get and penetrate with those voters who are gettable,
but they just are being indoctrinated and propagandized by the
corporate media.
Speaker 1: It is very frustrating and one of the most frustrating
points that I have seen play over and over again
by longer than I want to acknowledge career in journalism
is that you have a lot of Republicans who have
been beaten and bruised and battered over and over again
by the same corporate media, by this complete monolith media,
all pumping out the same message, anti conservative, anti Republican,
obviously anti Trump, and yet they keep going back to
these sources because they I think it's like the you know,
the the abused spouse or you know in that vein.
They just that they say they can change them. They
think they can change these people. That is not the case.
Speaker 2: It is absolutely not the case. I am not opposed.
I have my philosophy on media, especially for active as advocates,
politicians campaigns, is that you need a two pronged strategy,
and I think Donald Trump has been the greatest example
of this, and that is the first strategy is use
the legacy media, third what I call third party channels,
use them with your eyes wide open, but use them
in a way that fits into your strategy. And you
have to have a strategy. What is your rategy? I
think too often the people you're talking about don't have
a strategy. They just think tactically or ad hoc, and
somebody comes to them and says, you know, do you
want to come on CNN or do you want to
be interviewed by the New York Times? Well you should see? Okay, Well,
how should I do that? How does that fit my strategy?
What's my goal? Okay? Tactically? How am I going to
approach it? If you actually do it that way, Half
the time you'll turn those down because they don't fit.
Other times you'll do it because it does fit. And
Trump has been He hasn't been perfect, but he's been
really good at that but the second strategy is to
develop your own independent, proprietary channels to reach your target audience.
Trump has done this brilliantly by developing a massive list
so you can text directly, developing a massive list so
you can email directly, confone directly. And then of course
he's now built his platforms with true social and so forth,
and all of that shows that what we have to
do as believers in liberty and a class of the
liberals who want to see the country return to an
American consensus of our nobility as a nation, that our
free enterprise system is noble, that entrepreneurs are noble, capitalism
is noble. How do we create once again an American
consensus on that we have to build alternative channels not
just to the right, but to the middle and the
guttable soft left and reach them and then persuade.
Speaker 1: I think that is so critical because, as you mentioned before,
there's so many issues, myriad issues, ice and budget cutting,
waste out of government, and fraud. Trump campaigned on these
kinds of things and he was very successful. Americans wanted
and they still support, the removal certainly of violent criminal
illegal immigrants specifically, but in the main they support the
deportation policies going on right now that Trump promised he
would deliver. Why is there such a disconnect, though, between
what the voters said and say they want and how
they are polled in the corporate media.
Speaker 2: I think, well, there's no disconnect among the voters. The
voters have reliably wanted those policies you just articulated. There
is a total disconnect between how the media portrays these
actions in keeping with the public's interest. And the reason
for that is that the corporate media, they are not
objective observers, as you well know and most of your
listeners know. They are political activists masquerading as journalists. And
they understand the point I made earlier, which is for
the Democrats to continue to win and compete in elections,
they need these illegal aliens to be here and to vote.
And you know, it's a myth that, first of all,
that they don't vote. They do vote in significant numbers,
and eventually they'll all vote if they're here long enough.
As we've seen, and so that grievance coalition that I
talked about earlier, these voters aren't indust These illegal immigrants
are instrumental part of it. So that's part of why
they're reporting and handling it the way they do. The
second reason is because of what. I don't know if
I'm pronouncing his name correctly, but he's brilliant on the
X platform. God Sad GAA D.
Speaker 1: Sad Probably not I know who you're talking about, but
pronunciation is a problem for yours truly as well.
Speaker 2: Anyway, most of your listeners probably know who he is. Anyway,
a brilliant thinker, and he has developed this term I
don't know if he invented or not, but certainly popularized
it about suicidal empathy. You know, it's interesting to me
that the left has chosen to be extremely empathetic to
criminals who come into this country, some of them violent,
over American citizens who've been victimized by those violent criminals.
It's very bizarre, and the only explanation of it is
they think political power comes through this policy. And that
is an absolute appalling commentary on where the political left
has gone. And I think this is one of the
you know, there's that cartoon you've probably seen about the
moderate conservative who's standing still, but the left or even
moderate liberal, who's standing still and suddenly they look like
the right wing, because the left has moved so far
to the left and become so extreme, and whereas people
on the right generally not change their views, and you
know Elon Musk and many others, Bill Maher, Bill Maher
still a liberal, but when it comes to speech, he
is hardcore a free speecher, and to some that makes
him conservative, which of course he is not. But thankfully
he's a pro free speech guy. And that's that's good
for the country that you have people on the left.
There are others Glenn Greenwald, who are for free speech
even though they're of the left. But there's a doctor
naire thinking now on the left that you really can't
be for free speech anymore. It's wild.
Speaker 1: It is interesting to see folks like Bill Maher looking
at the modern left today. And let's face it, he
has been liberal and has made no bones about that,
that's where his political philosophy is. But he's looking at
the craziness the insanity on the left and calling it
out because you get to a certain point, and as
you said, the left, the radical left in this country,
keeps pushing the liberals forward in this insane agenda. Our
guest today is political strategist and policy leader John Tillman,
author of the new book Political Vice, How the Radical
Left controls America and the Path to regaining our Liberty.
We're going to talk about that path in just a moment.
But you had mentioned before about the suicidal empathy. It
does remind me of a situation playing out in Des Moines,
Iowa that drew national headlines, and that was the hiring
by the very progressive Des Moines School board of an
illegal immigrant who turns out had a very violent criminal background.
This was the guy who was hired because he was black,
because he checked off the boxes of the liberals on
this board. So you know, you have this sort of
stuff going on in communities across this country where they
are trying to virtue signal and do all of the
things that you know, the social justice so called left
wants to do. And then they find out this guy
has been apprehended by Ice because indeed he is an
illegal immigrant, and we find out his record, and you
have people on that board saying what this guy sold them.
It was the concept they called radical empathy, and that
kind of stuff has gotten this country in a lot
of trouble. You know, a lot of people in Des
Moines woke up to the fact, Hey, we got duped here.
But why are we at this point to begin with?
Speaker 2: Because the controllers of our narrative, the ones who currently
have and have long had the commanding heights of the
American cultural narrative, create the among whites, in particular, especially
suburban whites, this idea that you that to be a
virtuous person, you need to hire an unqualified or perhaps
in this case, dangerous person to demonstrate to the world
that you are worthy of respect and admiration because you
are so empathetic. It's a very, very strange idea, but
I think it's it's it's what's going on, and I
can see it because I remember when I'm still in
shock about this. This is a really weird topic, but
I think it's important because it goes to the core
of how the left controls narrative and how they curtail
critical thinking and speaking out against this insanity. It was
not that long ago, Matt that I'm sure remember that
the left and the right were unified in opposing I
believe it was in Africa, the genital mutilation of young women.
It was a sort of a ritual that was going
on then and everybody was protesting and trying to bring
attention to it. And then just a few years later
you had the political left supporting the genital mutilation of
children in America under the guise of gender affirming care.
One of the most bizarre transitions I've ever heard. And
when when that happened, I remember thinking that your transition
children who and they're being given We want to listen
to the children and hear them out when we can't
even have somebody who's younger than eleven years old legally
babysit in this country, but we're going to have the
eight year old choose their gender. This, of course is insanity.
But people who raised their hand and said this is
insane were shouted down by that corporate media and the
political left. And I remember the first time. I certainly
wasn't early. I was earlier than most, but I was
not one of the first. But I remember the first
time on a radio interview when I decided to use
the term gender genital mutilation of children as part of
gender firming care and to speak out against it. I
was terrified, Matt because the power of the woke mindset
and the power to cancel was very very real, and
I thank god enough people have spoken out against that.
I've spoken out against men and women's sports that I
do think the tide is turning. But all of it
is rooted in this radical, extreme, suicidal empathy that we're
talking about as a way for white people in particular
to demonstrate virtue. It's sick and wrong.
Speaker 1: I think the line that drove home all of that
to Americans even more so, Americans have really many, many
Americans have really rebelled, if you will, against this insanity.
At the State of the Union address, the President says,
we are going to make sure that kids are not
mutilated through these so called gender affirming surgeries and chemical
castrations and whatever. And he called upon Congress, all of
Congress to stand up in support of that. The left
side of the aisle could not bring themselves to do that.
And he called it like he saw it, and I
think like the majority of Americans definitely see it. He said,
these people are crazy, and he's right. Yet they keep
doubling down and doubling down on this. And one of
the areas that I'm very interested in and how this
happened to be is the Marxist leftist movement for so
many different areas in our public schools, on our college campuses.
This has been going on for many, many years. It's
been a training ground in indoctrination camp How much is
this movement, this leftist radical leftist movement, counting on that
to continue moving forward.
Speaker 2: I think it's core and it goes back to what
we've been talking about. Is the reason all this is happening,
the reason you have a grievance coalition based upon identity
and identity politics, resentment, et cetera, is because class warfare.
The Marxist original theory of Marxism was class warfare, that
the working class and poor would rise up against the
olive arks, as Bernie Centers is fond of saying, and
take power and have a government of the people. And
the reason that failed and failed with that construct is
because working class and poor people thrived in a capitalist
society and rose to become the bourgeoisie. Where I grew
up in rural Michigan, the auto workers from downland Detroit,
they all union members, you know, they largely all had homes,
summer homes, lake homes up in our neck of the woods,
and some of them ski some of them had snowmobiles,
they went fishing, they were living a great life. So
the grievance didn't work very well with them. So the
group by identity politics as a replacement for class warfare.
And part of that is this suicidal empathy is what
brings you into that coalition.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Part of it is it's really very brilliant what they
have done, because we on the right, really at our
own peril, don't understand the appeal of their arguments, and
their peal is quite compelling. And their peal is this,
First of all, there's two sides in this context to
the human condition. The one side is that we all
at some point face a calamity in our lives. Are
many calamities in our lives. Something doesn't go right. We
didn't get the job we wanted, We got fired from
the job. Our daughter didn't get into the school we'd
hope she'd get into the girl that I wanted to marry,
decided I wasn't worthy. On and on we have these calamities.
And the construct in America had long been that when
you have when you fall down, you get up, you
dust yourself off, and you go back at it. And
that had been our construct. What the Marxists are doing
and what the political left is doing is saying no, no, no,
you've been knocked down, and the way we will help
you get up. But in order to help you and
to create equity and fairness in your life and to
write this terrible wrong that these rapacious capitalists and exploiters
of you and your identity have done, you must vote
for us and give the government power, and then we
will put our foot on the scale and create equity
and fairness for you and create opportunity for you. That
is very compelling when you're victimized and you feel like
something hasn't gone right for you, which happens to all people.
The other side of the coin that we have to
appeal to is that you know the natural. The other
side of the national human condition is that we're we aspire,
We hope, we dream, we want to have it better
tomorrow than we have today. We like achievement and feeling
of achievement, and in particular, we love collaboration. We're a
gathering species. We like to work with other people to
create great things, and that is our appeal. And the
problem is that we don't understand that that is part
of what we have to sell and always be selling
that there will be setbacks and challenges as you go
down this journey of pursuing the American dream. And it's
the journey itself that is more important to the destination
as you try to build and collaborate and build your
family and your community. And we have to acknowledge that
the other side has an appeal and talk about why
it's not a good choice for you, because basically, once
you choose the less idea, you've conceded you created an
artificial ceiling on your upside potential. There's a reason Europe
is continuing to fall behind because they have gone all
in on this and Mississippi is more wealthy, as has
now been well known than all of Europe. How can
that happen? It happens because they have chosen the state
as their benefactor. And when the moment you do that,
you limit your upside potential and you limit your aspiration.
Speaker 1: Yes, but remember John aspirations. I mean, that was what
the message of a Kamala Harris Vibes campaign.
Speaker 2: It's all about.
Speaker 1: If you recall in twenty twenty four, she kept trying
to sell would be voters on her aspirations of aspirational thought.
I mean it was you know, I guess I'm talking
about this little tongue in cheek, but I mean that's
what the message they were trying to communicate. Unfortunately, I
think a majority of them, for at least unfortunately for
the Democrats, the majority of Americans were getting a full
understanding that the Democrat parties aspirations were aspirations denihilism, destruction,
and so, you know, so here we are now at
twenty twenty six, and in twenty twenty four, there were
in November of twenty twenty four, there were a lot
of people writing the obituary of the Democratic Party in
this country. And we have seen this that happen many
times before the Democrats and to the Republicans. It was
a bit premature, But all of that said, you have
this battle really for the soul of America and for
the soul of just basic morality going on. Will people
on the right, or let me put it this way,
will the rational human beings of all kinds continue to
engage in this fight?
Speaker 2: Oh, I think there's going to be a lot. Yes,
I do believe there will be a lot of engagement.
You're touching on a subject that I'm so glad you're
brought up, because I have been stunned by how many
people that are running organizations, practitioners on the right, running
nonprofits or political organization to advacy organizations as well as
the donor class kind of like dust off their hands.
If you can hear me doing that and say, oh
my god. You know, we have majorities in both the
House and the Senate, and Trump is one. We're in
the driver's seat. It's all good. Now, we don't have
to fight anymore. Yeah, is insanity. We are we haven't
even landed on the beaches of Normandy were you know
where we're at right now is we're steaming toward midway
and we still don't know if we're going to prevail,
and the odds are still against us. It really is
frightening to me how many people on the right don't
understand just how existential this fight is. You know, one
of the things I talk about a lot is that
American greatness is not a birthright. Know, every generation must
earn it and by fighting for these principles we're talking about,
and the fact that you know, European greatness of post
World War two is not a birthright, and we're watching
them commit national suicide right before our eyes. And so
we must reject that. We must have pride in the
Western canon. We must have pride in the American unique
application of the Western canon. We must understand that we're
noble and fight for and we must make moral arguments.
And what moral When you make a moral argument, what
that means is sometimes I'm not going to have empathy
for you, or I might have empathy, but I am
going to reject your position though I feel empathetic towards you,
because you are wrong. It is wrong to side with
the criminals who come here illegally. It is wrong to
allow too much immigration from people who have a faith
that wants to destroy the West and destroy the United States.
And of course I'm talking about Islam. The fact that
the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful is irrelevant when
you have somewhere north of two hundred million who want
to destroy the West. So you have to manage all
of this with a pride in the West and Western
thinking that judo judo judo Korea Christian ethic, which I
had for getting out. So we are nowhere near winning,
and we have to fight even harder.
Speaker 1: You mentioned before the outset of this conversation that there
certainly is a lot of hope, and you lay that
out in this book. I mean, take a look at Florida.
How long had Florida been not just a blue state,
but a deep blue state. Republicans have absolutely turned that
around and it is has become a reliable red state.
I will note that having come from Wisconsin, I can
tell you that that was a long time a blue state,
certainly a union and government union state. Scott Walker came
in and changed that dynamic along with the Republican in
twenty ten, and it was swing states, certainly, but definitely red,
leaning red, and now it is leaning back blue. So
all of these things are subject to change. What is
the secret sauce for the right in as you mentioned,
not not just getting elected but saving this republic. There
are several factors. I've looked at it deeply.
Speaker 2: As you note, I write about it in the book
as to why do some places go red that had
once been blue and vice versa, and how does that
apply to the country. And the key is, you know,
let me just kind of go back for a second
to discuss a larger point, which is what the term
grand strategy and the Cold War ended because Ronald Reagan,
along with Margaret Thatcher and the help of the Pope,
but Reagan in particular, implemented a grand strategy to defeat
Soviet communism. And grand strategy the word strategy simply means
to create a plan. Grand strategy is an overarching plan
that governs everything you're trying to do to accomplish a
very big goal. So what we're trying to do is
restore faith and belief in American nobility, the American way,
and all the things that we're talking about here. And
in order to do that, you have to control the
commanding heights of culture. When I first got involved in
this world after selling a business in two thousand and four,
I asked two very sophisticate, caated players and names that
your listeners might know, why is it that we've given
up on fighting in culture? And I was told that
it's all politics. Is now an all inside game. We
can get done when we want what we want by
playing on the inside. The left controls too much. It's
too big, it's a giant elephant. We can't do it.
The beauty of the twenty first century is we can
bite off hunks of culture. The federalist is biting off
a hunk of culture. The right of center media is
biting off a hunk of culture. The Harmon Brothers and
Angel Studios is biting off a hunk of culture. What
we have to do is continue to build capacity, and
our donor and investor class has to invest in building
capacity to compete for those commanding heights. So we have
to compete for mind share in podcasting, in news, in
film and entertainment, in the high schools, in corporate communications,
and build capacity one step at a time. Don't try
to bite the whole thing off. And if you look
at where we are in media today, conservative media today
versus where it was when I got involved twenty two
years ago, it's night and day. We are so much
better off. And that is why we're actually on the rise,
and that is why we're winning despite the left dominance
of culture. And when you look at the way we're
winning back mind share on all these issues. We've been
talking about gender affirming care with children, which is one
of the worst phrases I've ever heard in my life.
It's a children destroying care. We are winning these arguments
and part of the reason so that Part one is
investing in these capacities. Part two is making moral arguments
and taking the moral high ground. You talked about President
Trump during the State of the Union asking people to
stand He also did that with respect to immigration. Do
you protecting American citizens as the primary purpose of the
federal government and they refuse to stand for that. He
is making moral arguments that cast the decision that the
issue in stark terms. That is what we have to do.
We have to be absolutely fearless in making moral arguments.
And the third thing we have to do is understand
where the battle really is. We tend to think the
battle is in the election season, and of course there
is a battle during the election season, but the real
battle is at the headwaters of the river. And what
do I mean by that? Andrew Breitbart was very famous
for having popularized the term that politics is downstream of culture.
That's true. That's why one of my organizations is called
the American Culture Project, and one of my others is
called the Commanding Heights, because it's about gaining the commanding
heights of American culture. And so these battles are actually
at the headwaters of the river. And yes, politics is downstream,
the idea is, and views and people's belief systems are
being formed way earlier than election cycles. They're being formed
in the years, months and years prior to a given election.
And that is why so when Donald Trump won in
twenty sixteen, it was years of disaffection that preceded him
that allowed him to win. And what we have to
do is and what we have to convince our investor class,
our billionaire class, and our centimillionaire class that we need
to be investing in capacities to compete for mind share
at the headwaters. And I'm very encouraged that that is happening,
but we need far more of it, and we need
we need deeper investments across that spectrum. And the other
thing I'll just add to this is that part of
the problem in the donor class is they're all generally
very successful business people, of course, and they want to
rationalize our capacities. Well, let's just have one group that
appeals to young count Let's have one group that appeals
to high school students. Let's have one digital marketing agency
over here. That is not how the works. We need
many different kinds of deodorant, and we need many different
kinds of practitioners and activists appealing to all kinds of people.
And let you know, we're venture investing in freedom and
we need to do that liberally.
Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the great successes is the diffusion of
course of media and communications over the last particularly twenty
twenty five years in this country. And we saw the
results in twenty twenty four. Definitely play out, definitely have
an impact at the end of the day. This is
for me as I see it a battle between the
sane and the insane. It is a battle between rationality
and irrationality. And you sound like you're encouraged that sanity
will again win the day. On that final thought, how
encouraged are you.
Speaker 2: I'm very encouraged, But it is not inevitable. And I'll
add one more framework for you. It is a battle
between those who believe in persuasion and consent versus those
who believe in coercion and submission. The Western canon is
in essence about persuasion consent because individuals have agency. I
believe if we build the right capacities, make the right
arguments that humanize these principles in that compelling fashion that
persuasion consent will prevail, and that's why I'm optimistic.
Speaker 1: Well, he lays it all out in the book, and
it is available everywhere you find your books. Today, thanks
to my guest, John Tillman, CEO of the American Culture
Project and the founder and CEO of the Whole of Giants,
will have to have you on again to talk about
those projects you are involved in a lot of different things.
So he's also the author of the new book Political Vice,
How the Radical Left Controls America and the Path of
Regaining Our Liberty. You've been listening to another edition of
the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent
at the Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then,
stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.