The MAGA movement didn’t disappear after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. If anything, Republicans and extremists outside the party have learned how to effectively organize and seize power in the intervening years. We can look to Florida and Texas, and even to smaller-scale examples like Shasta County to glean what could come from a Trump victory next Tuesday. The Marc Steiner Show looks back on the past two years of key interviews with journalists, scholars, and activists who’ve been fighting the rising threat first-hand. Listen to the full stories here: J.D. Vance is a creature of Silicon Valley, not Appalachia (August 2024) with David Corn, DC Bureau Chief of Mother Jones Trump, Project 2025, and the plan to bring autocracy to the US (November 2023) with Paris Marx, tech writer and host of Tech Won’t Save Us Democrats need to ‘stop talking bullshit and do something’ (November 2023) with Jim Hightower, former Texas State Agricultural Commissioner Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron GranadinoAudio Post-Production: David Hebden, Alina Nehlich Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A corrected version will be made available as soon as possible. Marc Steiner: Welcome to the special edition of The Marc Steiner Show, here on The Real News. I’ve been covering the rise of the right for some time now. At times, it’s unnerving to witness the power of the right, but we have to know what’s in front of us, how to confront it, and how to stop it. As someone who was part of the civil rights movement in the early ’60s, it seems like segregationists, John Birchers, who we once defeated, have been reborn out of the ashes into the MAGA we face today. So as we face this election with the power of the right wing looming, we bring you these conversations, this story that comes out of conversations we’ve had over the last few years with activists around the country. Back in August, I spoke with Paris Marx, who wrote the book Tech Won’t Save Us, so we could delve into the power of the right wing in Silicon Valley, the environment that spawned and brought us JD Vance. *** Paris Marx: A lot of these people in Silicon Valley, a lot of these investors, billionaires, CEOs saying, “We back Donald Trump. We’re backing the Republican Party. We want them to win,” but we know that there has been a much longer campaign happening, more in the shadows, more behind the scenes, especially when you think of how someone like Peter Thiel and his network operates. Peter Thiel is not often… 2016 was the exception. Right? He’s not often the person who is out front, who you’re seeing doing all these interviews, who you’re seeing tweeting a lot or something like that. He is someone who operates in the background. He’s someone who moves money around and who gets his network to do the same thing in order to serve these broader goals that people like him have. And as you’re saying, that’s exactly what you see with JD. Vance. Vance is someone who first ran into Peter Thiel in 2011 when Thiel was speaking at Yale Law School and felt really inspired by what he was saying. In 2016 when he published Hillbilly Elegy, his bestselling book was when he really officially entered Thiel’s network, working at Mithril Capital first, and then founding his own venture capital firm later called Narya Capital, which was funded by $100 million from Thiel and his network to get it started. And then of course, when Vance ran for Senate, he received $15 million from Peter Thiel, which was most of the funding he needed for his campaign. So you can see very clearly how there is this linkage there, and there are reports that apparently when Donald Trump was at a fundraiser in San Francisco before he had chosen his vice presidential candidate, it was co-hosted by David Sacks. He was sitting down with a bunch of these tech figures, very rich people, and basically saying, “Who should I choose as my vice presidential candidate?” And they were all saying JD Vance because they wanted him in that position because he is very much a product of their network and they know that if he is in the White House, if he is the vice president, they will have a lot of influence over the policy direction that the Trump administration or a second theoretical Trump administration will take. *** Marc Steiner: Last November, I spoke with David Corn, who is the DC Bureau chief for Mother Jones Magazine. He’s been covering Capitol Hill for almost 40 years. He knows the ins and outs and does not give in to hyperbole, but is clear-eyed about the workings of the Hill and the White House. Let’s talk a bit about what you see as a clear investment danger here that we face in the coming years, if in fact they win the next election? *** David Corn: The ultimate danger is that they will continue to rig the political system so that they retain power, and this can be done with more gerrymandering. It could be done with trying to pass legislation in the states or win court battles that allow state legislatures to decide who wins in a presidential election in a state and not stick to what the voters want. So ultimately, the threat is that they basically blow up or pervert parts of our democratic system. So I know there are lots of problems with American democracy, so don’t come at me for that, but that they make it harder for anyone other than them to win elections and make it more harder than it might already be. And so that way, they retain power and we move much further from being a democracy. And then under that, there’s all the things that could be done in terms of whether overturning important aspects of foreign policy, trying to leverage the power, because if you can control who gets into Congress, then you can control whether or not there’s a national ban on abortion. I think whether he’s imposing an authoritarian regime or not, one of the other most important things about the election is that he will reverse all climate change action that Joe Biden has with Democrats and the Congress has been able to implement. And it’s been just a pioneering policy that no one has… Not much further than Barack Obama anyone else has. And we obviously all know that it’s not sufficient, but it’s further than what any other politician has achieved in America, and that certainly, we need to do more. And certainly, going backwards, as Trump would do, would further imperil the planet and its inhabitants, meaning us and others, and creating a regime in which political opponents are explicitly targeted by the president for criminal prosecution. I know Republicans claim that’s what’s happening to Donald Trump, but we can run through that over and over again. And it’s clear that the Biden Justice Department has been trying to use special councils and do it the right way. Trump wants to be able to snap his fingers and explicitly say, “Mark Steiner should be investigated,” and poof, it happens. *** Marc Steiner: Last November, I traveled to Texas with my colleagues, Max Alvarez and Kayla Rivara, to meet those who are organizing workers and in communities to fight for a just future in the midst of a deep red world of the right that is Texas. One of the people we sat down with was a legendary author, organizer, commentator, and former Texas State Agricultural Commissioner, Jim Hightower. We talked about how they won before and how the movement is working to reclaim the future. *** Marc Steiner: Yeah, this great quote that you said that, “The delusional is no longer marginal. It’s come in from the fringe to sit in the seat of power, and that’s where we find ourselves.” And my thought when I read that quote, thinking about coming here today, was that you’ve spent your life fighting for the kind of world that is economically, racially, politically, environmentally just, even as Agricultural Commissioner. You fought hard as Agricultural Commissioner to make that a reality in Texas. And now, well, you’d be sitting on your porch. You’re 80, I’m 77, and you watch this go on around you. So what are your thoughts about that and the struggle that has been fought from the populist Party on to this moment, to see that happen and how we work together to influence other people to fight back and make that change? Jim Hightower: Well, the struggle is what matters, and we’ve been through this in Texas, the populist movement, as we indicated, 1870s, basically was crushed by the banks and the railroad corporations and others by 1900. But then came the progressive movement out of that, Fighting Bob La Follette out of Wisconsin, a terrific movement. The labor movement then rose up, civil rights movement came forward. The women’s movement came forward, environmental movement came forward. So we’ve always had the struggle and bringing that to fore, we’ve had times when I ran in 1980 to be the Agriculture Commissioner, ’82- Marc Steiner: And you won. Jim Hightower: Yeah. Yes, I won. Ann Richards ran his Treasurer. She won. Jimmy Mattox, Attorney General. He won. Gary Morrow, Land Commissioner. He won. We were all young people with our own individual constituencies to add to the mix. And then we ran together. We campaigned saying, “It’s not just elect me, elect a government, and we’ll put this government on your side,” and we did that. And then again, the money came in in the late 1980s, and the corporate money began to dominate all of our politics. So grassroots organizing went aside. Now, the good news is that organizing continues. The most encouraging thing to me in America and my travels around the country and here in Texas, are the grassroots progressive movements. The environmental justice movement, for example. A woman named Diane Wilson down on the Gulf coast, shrimper, fourth-generation fisher woman, fought this huge plastics conglomerate out of Taiwan for 40 years, 40 years. She battled and battled and battled, losing, and even progressives gave up on her, some of them, environmental groups, and said, “Well, maybe she’s too loopy. She just keeps fighting.” And then suddenly she won. Two years ago, she won a court case that she had filed that brought this Formosa Plastics Corporation to their knees, and they had to give in to the demands of the fisher community down there, and they began to make change. And the judge put the compliance focus, not on some government, but on the local grassroots people. And so they were in a position to enforce it and make it happen. That’s a tremendous victory. Family farmers are doing the same thing right now, reviving, revitalizing, and we’re electing people. Greg Casar got elected here in the Austin, San Antonio District, a young Latino worker advocate, major, major change, who’s become a force already in his first term in Congress, or become a force within the Democratic caucus saying, “Stop talking bullshit. Start doing something.” And that is change. That is what produces the change, when the people get riled up and then begin to organize and create their own networks of power, and that is what is happening. *** Marc Steiner: I’ve been producing and hosting this series, The Rise of the Right, so we can all clearly see and understand what we’re up against. This is not an anomaly. It’s nothing new in American history. When we fought a Civil War that ended African enslavement and attempted to create a true interracial democracy in the South, it was ultimately defeated by the political resurrection of the Confederacy and their northern allies that brought us legal racial segregation, and gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan, to maintain racist domination and control through terrorism. We’re now facing a 21st century redux of that moment. After the civil rights union movements gave us a more equitable America who had struggles in organizing, we’re here once again. We at Real News will keep covering this, bringing you stories with people who are standing up to the racist right, and exposing what we face as we fight for our future. Please write to me at [email protected] and let me know what you thought about this broadcast, and share with me your ideas about what you think we should be covering. So for Kayla Rivara, Cameron Grandino, Rosette Sewali, Max Alvarez, and the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Thanks for joining us. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.