welcome to morning joe at 6:00 a.m. in the morning willie geist not with us today, trying to relive some of the more exciting mornings of the 70s yes, that s him on chopper 5 going across it is not. see the little chopper 4, i m sorry. get it right. in the 70s, we didn t really numbers didn t count channels didn t counfreelancersi and i were. you were just there. beautiful look at new york city over the morning. it s friday. yes thursday was a very rough day for elon musk. oh, i don t know about that $3 billion rocket exploded. i m going to question that framing. they get a lot of great data out of that. it exploded. but it was a planned explosion. no. it was they got what they wanted they got massive data. it was a step forward. it was an unscheduled disas disassembly, as they call it. i have had many of those. exploded. i ve had many of those. then he planned to make people pay for twitter verification his plan to do that bl
everything, and as mika pointed out, on, you know, terrible things happening in classrooms that are not happening, that have never been happening. exactly so they build up these st strawmen and performatively knock them down. maybe there s a segment of the republican base that just loves it and it makes them really enthusiastic, and the rest of the country shrugs and then votes the other way. well, more morning papers straight ahead this conversation brings us to our next guest. professor of history at rice university and presidential historian doug brinkley. associate processor in global politics at university college london, brian kloss. brian, your latest piece for the atlantic is entitled, the red states experimenting with authoritarianism. you write, in part, quote, beyond attacking elections or trying to interfere with their results, republicans are testing out different ways to wield