again. you get to the birther lie about barack obama and you get to pizzagate and qanon. like a stairway of increasingly lunatic conspiracy theories. the result being that eventually people lost sight of whatever it is that we might have recognized in the past as reliable truth. essentially they departed the plane of reality and you end up with the kind of folks who are planning to rally in defense of who they say was in donald trump s words, persecuted on january 6th. hey, evan, it is sam stein here. i would have gone with an escalator as opposed to a stairway, but that s just me. look, i ve been thinking about this stuff, first of all, a deeply ambitious book. i ve been thinking about this stuff too and the reason i have, one moment that stands out to me, i m curious what that moment is for you, one moment that stands out to me that symbolizes that escalator, that stairway, where things clearly were going off the rails in retrospect was the debate over the so-called ground zero mos
he called a jihad prevention act, which was lunacy, which meant it was to bar immigrants from bringing sharia law into this country, something that wasn t happening. and eventually he expanded that to the point where he said i m not going to participate in a debate in which people are broadcasting in spanish. there was this drift over time in which you saw one form of legitimate fear give way to this much broader permission to be xenophobic more broadly and you get an artifact like donald trump who is the product of that. mike barnicle has a question for you, evan. evan, i want to talk about sid mueller from clarksburg, west virginia. after world war ii and the korean war, there were a lot of sid muellers living on my street and they did okay. sid mueller came back from the war in afghanistan, and he did not do okay. what has happened? yeah, thanks for raising it, mike. you know, sid mueller as people will find out in the book is an extraordinary story of a marine
joining us now, evan osnoss, author of wild land: the making of america s fury. good morning. great to see you. this spans post 9/11 up to the attack on january 6th. it took years and traveled thousands of miles to tell this story. tell us the backdrop of what you sought to explain with your reporting here. in some ways this is the product of spending a decade abroad. in all those years i was overseas, living in egypt, working in iraq, lived in china for a long time, i often found myself in conversation with people living in authoritarian countries and i would be sort of subtly making a case for america, to be honest with you. saying, look, i know we re not perfect, we make a lot of mistakes, but we re fundamentally oriented toward a couple of big ideas, the rule of law, the power of truth and the idea you can have a better shot in life. and i came back to the united
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