incorrect at the time, going on hardball, talking about how what kevin phillips and other people in the media were saying about the republican party and race were a lie, that the southern strategy was an oversimplification, that my family, we were conservatives and i explained why we were conservatives, why people in my community were conservatives. and i was proven wrong. i was shocked by what i saw over the past five, six years, donald trump and the muslim registry, donald trump saying hipanics are breeders, telling people to go home, black members of congress. help me out. david and i will wrestle with where our church went in the past five, six years. talk about race. how could it be that people like david french and myself and other republicans grew up saying everything that liberals said about our party was wrong when
even references very precise quotes and references, you know, that they heard the conversation and yet still the lies come. but there s also another part of this, joe, that i think is really interesting to me, and it s a window into the six years and extreme version of six years of conversations, that go like this behind closed doors in private conversations, people give vent to their concerns about donald trump. and i mean give vent to it. but then when it s in public, they will deny they ever said it, it s trump, trump, trump all the way, and you feel you know, you have whiplash because the same person you ve seen on tv glorifying donald trump you know because you heard was absolutely lacerating donald trump behind closed doors. it s been going on for six solid years. and that s just an extreme version of the kind of conversation, joe, i know you ve had, i know you ve had with
donald trump actually seemed to validate much of what they were accusing us of? well, you can t write american history without writing the history of race in america. so race does play a big part in my book, joe, and the conservative movement s relationship with the civil rights movement and also the changes in the civil rights post the civil rights act and voting rights act of 64 and 65. i think that one problem is that there are no longer any gate keepers. i talk about how buckley jr., after the 1960s and 70s made a great effort to kind of police the boundaries of what american conservativism would be. and by his later career, he was definitely saying that opponents of civil rights, opponents of political equality for black americans, were not part of the conservative movement. we no longer have gatekeepers like that because of changes in the media, but i also say on a
falsehoods. you have mccarthy saying something, the new york times reports it, reporters report it, he lies about it, says it never happened, a tape proves he s a liar. it happened when he said that donald trump was on putin s payroll in 2016. he was continue fronted with it. he lied and said he never said it. he was shown a transcript. he said it was fake news. then the tape comes out, proving again that he lies. trump of course lied about the election, tried to undermine the election by lying about it, lied every day at press conferences during the covid press conferences so much that they had to yank him off the air after a while, lied about even weather patterns, hurricanes. i want to get your reaction to kevin mccarthy and the culture of lies in my former party. yeah. i mean, the lies there and the brazenness, because the new york times talks about this and