sopranos? if not, hit pause and go watch all of the seasons and come back in a couple weeks and start this again. the first season of the sopranos is 13 episodes long. the sopranos, oppositely, is one of the greatest achievements ever in american drama and contention for one of the greatest television shows ever made in any country on any subject. in season one of the sopranos, you have to get through half the whole season. i think you have to get to the seventh episode or something before you get anything that seems like it is a back story on your lead character. here is a story about a man in therapy. yes, he is a gangster but he is a man in therapy. right from the very start of the first episode, you will get there >> to tell me about your childhood. it is not until seven episodes into it that we get a glance at tony soprano as a little kid. in that scene here is young tony and his uncle comes looking for tony's data. tony's dad hops in a car and takes off with the uncle. tony, himself, the kid ends up missing the school bus and while he is not at school he ends up finding his dad and his uncle and see what they were up to. basically, sneaks up on them. what he sees is is that an uncle just beating the but jesus out of the sky on a street corner. this happens in episode seven. it is two more seasons. you're all the way into season three of the whole series when you get another flashback to tony as a little kid with his dad. this time, once again, young tony is not supposed to be there. he has snuck in and dad does not know he is there. his dad collect from a local butcher and the dad not only beats the living daylights out of the butcher, he takes amy cleaver to the guy. it is absolutely horrible. it is impossible to watch. young tony, young tony soprano, the kid, he sees it. yes, the sopranos is a gangster tv show but of course there will be violence. it is also a really, really, really good gangster tv show. it is never that simple. in the sopranos we get the flashbacks to give us back story on our main character but also to understand what is wrong with tony soprano. of course, he idolized his father. we learned that he inherited his own position and the mafia from his father and built on that position to become a boss himself. as an adult, as a big tough mob boss, as our hero/antihero of the series, tony also makes all the time. he has panic attacks. he has done this, this most gangster the thing and put himself in therapy. what is the matter with my boss tony soprano? we romanticize gangsters and the way that they live in american life. tony soprano romanticize as his father. basically as an obstruction as a gangster. a small part of the genius of what david chase did in the sopranos in that in the flashbacks, which he makes you wait for and wait for and wait for, ultimately, what you get. what young tony soprano sees as a kid with his dad doing is disgusting. it is gross. and it hurts tony soprano to see it. it kind of breaks him. what young tony sees as a kid, what happens and the flashbacks is not romantic it is not cool. it is just violence. it is unprincipled, unromantic. it is not art or sport or anything noble or anything with any elegance to it. it is just a mess it is gross. as the series unspools you come to learn in a complex way that this is part of why tony soprano is the sad, sick pastor that he is and it is why he is doomed as a character. gangster theme tv and movie violence is something that we are very good at in this country. we know the tropes. making business people protection to the mob. they don't pay their protection money than the mob guys beat them up and maybe even kill them. the mob guys are running the card games and the other gambling rackets where the odds are against you while you are playing but the odds are you will get yourself killed if you get in debt to them. and extortion, stealing and prostitution and drug dealing and armed robbery. we have all seen it in 1 million shows. you can create warm and's and drama around it. we do as a country. when it is done right, like in the sopranos, the irreducibly brute boring violence never goes away and it messes people up. in an unsexy, lasting, awful, unromantic way. it makes big tough, you know, my bosses straight up paint. which is not cool in so many ways. we are living through an area in our country's political life right now which is not politics. if you want to call it the most moran -- romantic thing but i think you could call it revolutionary. we also romanticize a revolution and revolutionaries as much as any country on earth. what we are contending with and our politics right now is a movement that is not doing normal politics and not competing in normal political terms. they are trying to end the american system of government and bring about a revolution against the american system of government and annexed -- against the united states of america and in the story we are the americans. being revolutionary sounds very cool in the abstract, just like being gangster sounds cool in the abstract. in the specific, what they are offering is boring because it is just gross force. it is the end of politics. let us do it by force because physically, we mean it just the way we are saying it. we mean it just the weight you are hearing it. we are coming for you. >> mr. fbi tough guy, why does he wet himself on national tv? he is -- scared because he understands the end is near. brother, you and all the other people -- these are torturous conversations don't torture yourself. don't torture yourself. get your passport and get out of the country because we are coming. you are not going to like it one bit. your crime and treason, coming for all of you. go ahead. go to the end of the earth. we will hunt you down and bring you back. drive the bourbon out of 1600 pennsylvania avenue. biden, you and your crime family are nothing but trash. for joe biden and dr. jill biden and hunter biden, they are a bunch of feral dogs. it is a family of feral dogs. we will have to fumigate the lies of joe biden and the treason of joe biden. after that, it is not the tapes. we are coming after lisa monaco, merrick garland and the senior members of doj that have prosecuted president trump, jack smith. you are the vanguard of this revolution. we will do what the romans did at cartridge. we will solve the earth around us so they will never be another building there again. we will rebuild something else. there will be something that comes up and is rebuilt. we have got to go back to the beginning. we have got to go back to russian gait. we have to go back to who did that. we have got to go back to andrew weissmann and msnbc and the new york times and all of it. every fbi agent, all the cia, dhs, all of them. it is going to be a new day and maga will run things. they will know that maga has not only ascended, maga is in charge. it is simple, victory or death. >> this isn't, you know, red meat for the base. this is retribution as much as tony soprano's dad was providing protection to the local butcher. this is not a response to anything. what this is is just menace and physical threat. it is not politics, just power and force. they are just promising violence. that is what they are offering in this election. this is how we should run the country now. we will hunt you down and you will know that we are in power. we are going to get rid of law enforcement and salt the earth. we are just going to hunt you down. this is not some random right- wing media guy for this is the guy who was the campaign manager for donald trump and the senior white house adviser to the former president who is now the nominee again. it is not like he is the only one who is saying this. this is what they are offering. and they love it. they are super excited to be getting done with politics and right to the force and violence part of it. >> the next six months will be intense. we need to strap on our, let us see -- what we want to strap on? we will strap on our seatbelt. we are going to put on our helmet or your kari lake ball cap. we will put on the armor of god. and maybe strap on a glock on the side of us just in case. >> we will throw out the signal. we will go after the big news media and liberate america once and for all. >> do not think for a second he is not will unleash -- on all of his political enemies. this is where we are and now we have to finish it too. >> we have to finish it. once and for all. they keep saying things like that. finish it and vanquish them. this is not politics. in a contest you compete against your fellow citizens with whom you have disagreements. the rival political party, whoever loses that fair race concedes, literally concedes and then they come back. they have the opportunity to come back in the next election cycle and compete against you again. in real politics, nothing is ever finished. you never take power once and for all. your enemies are not vanquished. they are not trying to win a political contest. they are trying to do away with political contests in the united states of america. it might be why the not putting much energy in the normal way of competing in this year's political contests. you may have seen this weekend. the former president went to detroit, which seems like a normal thing for a political candidate to do with a big city and is -- in a swing state. he has room to grow. he goes to this black church in detroit and his campaign does not take any steps to avoid the pews and completely filled with white people with white trim supporters. and then on the date the message of his opposing campaign is he is trying to appeal to black voters. that is the point of doing this photo op. he goes straight from the venue, stuffed with white people, to a conference hosted by this guy, who has been in the news for the last few months for saying, quote, we made a huge mistake when we passed the civil rights act in the 1960s. saying that he thinks of black people are not qualified to be airline pilots and he worries if he is on a flight and sees that the pilot is black. he has been posting things like, quote, whiteness is great on social media. he has been hosting gas on the podcast to talk about how black people are biologically inferior and incapable of advanced intelligence. someone who said, literally, mlk, dr. martin luther king journey -- junior was awful. not a good person. black voters look at me, aren't i appealing? going to church that is inexplicably full of white people right from there to go do an appearance with a guy who set mlk was awful and the civil rights act was a mistake guy. you are not trying very hard. that is in normal campaign terms. they are not trying hard in normal campaign terms. they are trying very hard to compete on normal political appeals. what they're trying to do instead is take power by menacing and chasing out of the country anyone who opposes their leader. destroy anyone who contradicts him. let alone anyone who dares to compete against him. if you are done with politics and want to be in charge forever by force, then no one can be allowed to contest the leader or to question the leader . informally, no one can be allowed to offer any alternative source of authority to the leader. there cannot be journalists. they cannot know stuff and report it. there cannot be opposition politicians, are you kidding? there cannot be anyone who runs against him that would mean taking your life in your hands. there cannot be law enforcement that does anything independent of what the leader wants. the whole government has to work for the leader. there is no, you know, government providing information and services like we are used to. there is no state. there is a deep state which is terrible and evil and against the leader and it must be purged. replaced us with people he likes and who do what he wants. the government cannot have a civil service that has subject matter experts. because everybody has to work only for the leader. >> we should be recommending you to be prosecuted. we should be writing a criminal referral because you should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity you belong in prison, dr. fauci. >> and the trump air in the republican party this is what is like to be the nation's most esteemed public health official. the nation's top subject matter expert on infectious disease. dr. anthony fauci was the head of the national institute of allergy and effect is disease for 38 years. he has a book that is out tomorrow called on call: a doctor journey in public service. he says that in the early days of the hiv/a.i.d.s. pandemic, the hate mail that he got was, quote, homophone likely motivated, criticizing me for wasting time trying to save mostly men who brought this all on themselves by their supposedly a horrid behavior. with a bola it was white supremacist types that i favored black africans over the health of our country. that is the kind of hate mail he got in the a.i.d.s. era and the hate mail he got in the ebola area. in this area in response to our most recent disease threat and the context of america, now, the torrent of hate and threat is of a different order and a magnitude. >> it needs to be dealt with. the criminal gang leaders, the bid heads of central banks. the pfizer had, thanked me for, all of them that like to trump we know created the dis-info and already have the vaccine ready years before they release the virus. they need to go to prison for the rest of their lives. it is the right thing to do if they be executed. i am not a wimp and i think it should be public. and i will pull the lever. i don't want people to do work i would not do. >> dr. friendly ford news book he tells -- seven different president starting with ronald reagan helping -- with the attacks after 9/11. 450 page book. it comes out -- every new crisis is a detective story and a science thriller and a political pot bowler all rolled into one. the last hundred pages or so are about the covid crisis. also about serving and trying to handle the covid crisis under the most recent republican president, under donald trump. even though that part of dr.'s career in public service is over , he retired in 2022 after serving as the chief medical adviser. even though he is not out of public service after all these decades, the trump movement and its members in congress and supported in the media are still going after dr. foutch he as aggressively as ever if not more so. even two years after he left government and because he epitomizes one of the things they are trying to destroy. what of the things that they need to destroy in their revolutionary war against the american system of government. it is not that they disagree with him. it is not that they misunderstand. it is that he represents expertise. authority, earned by expertise. the way we use -- the way that we say that is that he is a person who knows what he is talking about and that is toxic for that little project. that cannot be allowed to stand. he is still in the bull's-eye for them even now. >> i would love to see the book thrown at him. i would love to see him thrown in jail. >> you say he lied to congress and should be arrested? is echoing a little far? >> i don't think he should be arrested but i like the idea. >> they are still going after him even now. this is from the book from august the 2020 . it says i have been absent from work for a few days because i have benign polyp removed from my vocal cords but i would just going back into the swing of things and having music on my desk in my office and going through mail that i piled up. was about 10:30 a.m. and i picked up a letter. the envelope for a jacksonville, florida return address but it was typewritten in an unusual font that otherwise look like the fan mail that i got every day. most the time people asked me to sign a baseball card or an index card. sometimes, occasionally, they told me they hated me. i opened the envelope with a letter opener and took out a single sheet of paper. as i unfolded it, fine white powder shot up from the paper and drifted down onto my face, tie, shirt, hands, pants, desk and chair. i instantly veered anthrax or worse. i immediately shouted -- to my assistant, kim, do not come into my office! i yelled don't move, stay where you are. don't come out because you will contaminate everything else. calling the instructs i put the letter and on the into a plastic bag for forensic. george called the hazmat team who came to my office in their spacesuits. they had me remove all of my clothes, which also went into a plastic bag and they sprayed me down with chemical phone. i thought this is insane there i was standing naked being sprayed down by guys in spacesuits. my feet hinge on call giving me a glimmer analysis of the powder. there were three possibilities. it was a hoax and merely a harmless powder, it was anthrax spores and i would require four weeks of the antibiotics but will probably survive or it was ricin and no matter what i did, i would be dead in a few days. ricin, which is formed from the seeds of castor beans is lethal when inhaled or injected. christine, his wife, and our daughters were terrified that i might die. jenny was also furious, which is probably a reflection of her fear and concern for me. megan and allie called multiple times asking, dad, are you all right? they dreaded they might say i was starting to feel sick . my own emotions are complicated. i felt like an idiot for opening what was a suspicious letter. i was fatalistic about the outcome. my mother died at age 56. my father is 97. at age 79, myself, i lived along full and happy life but my legal papers were in order because they are always in order. as a physician i have held the hands of many people as they died. i do not fear death but i was not ready to be this early yet, not by a longshot. this should not be something that happens in the life of a public servant, of a public health official. but here we are. 1.2 million americans have died from covid. dr. fauci's book explains the government response with the challenge of dealing with a novel coronavirus, something new. learning as we go. he also tells the story of trying to build a government response with a president who, literally, did not understand what was going on with some very fundamental ways. who told him, told dr. fauci that he did not understand why he would get a flu shot if he did not have the flu. as if he did not understand the difference between a treatment and a vaccine . a president to ask, why the flu vaccine could not just be used to prevent covid? as if he did not understand diseases and viruses are different from one another. a president who believed of fox news post, more -- when she said there was a miracle cure for covid. a president who did not understand how clinical studies is proving that had any more validity than what had been heard on the grapevine from someone he saw on fox news, who had no subject matter expertise. it got worse from there. this is also from dr. fauci's book. on april 22nd i attended a task force meeting where we are briefed by william bryan acting under secretary for science and technology. brian explained two studies that showed how sunlight and humidity could kill the virus. and substance such as isopropyl alcohol and disinfectants could be used to clean up nonporous surfaces. the following day he briefed the president and the oval office on the studies. without deborah birx or me being present. he then joined the president on the podium in the briefing room. the result was the infamous press conference where donald trump appeared to endorse using bleach as a way to disinfect the lungs from covid. the president told the white house press corps, quote, then i see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. one minute is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside are almost