On MSNBC's The ReidOut, Angelo Carusone discusses how the Trump administration is speaking to right-wing media: “They don't care about what popular opinion is anymore”
Carusone: “They don't care about what popular opinion is anymore. They're speaking very specifically to a rabid, highly engaged, highly energized core ... It's a fundamentally anti-democratic, you know, notion of how you govern”
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From the February 20, 2025, edition of MSNBC's The ReidOut
JOY REID (HOST): And that's not the only extremist JD Vance has celebrated. He also loves a guy you probably really have never heard of. Curtis Yarvin, a 51 year old writer who is the darling of people like Peter Thiel, Charlie Kirk, and Tucker Carlson. Why? Because he wants to replace American democracy with a pseudo technocracy, saying America needs "a hard reset" or reboot, and not political reform.
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Get over our "dictator phobia." Joining me now is Hugo Lowell, White House correspondent for The Guardian, and Angelo Carusone, President and CEO of Media Matters. Angelo, I'm going to start with you. Tell us more about this Curtis Yarvin fellow.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I mean, I'll start with something that people will know about, the concept of a red pill. That's his, he invented -- he came up with that term. And it is sort of the notion in the early 2000s of sort of, you know, taking the red pill and seeing the light, seeing the ideology that he has inspired. And when he wrote about it, he was describing exactly what he, you know, you heard in that clip, which is a process by which we sort of shed our phobia of dictators, and we embrace the idea of a dictator or a CEO. And he is really started to push that notion. And obviously he shied away from using the term dictator and is leaning into the concept of a CEO.
But the fact is, and the reason I start there is that's only one example. He personally may not have a ton of influence individually, right? I mean, his relationships with some of these figures are probably overstated to a degree. But what's not overstated and what is significant is that he was like Johnny Appleseed of bad, crazy right-wing ideas, right? He's spread these things around years and years and years ago, and they have germinated. And now you have massive techno billionaires who loved his notion of techno feudalism and sort of this techno -- technocracy. So yeah, I can get behind this idea. Going out there, as you know, a guy in your 40s or 50 and still pushing Ayn Rand seems a little strange, right? But now you push this guy, which is basically the same concept. And it sounds much more authoritative.
REID: Is it the idea that, you know, you've got this, right? They want certain things like tax cuts and deregulation, but they want to have like an intellectual firmament to it. They create these, you know, sort of Claremont Institute sort of pseudo intellectualism, right? And they want to put something -- he provides that, like, Steve Bannon, you know, he didn't create the term alt-right and actual neo white supremacist created it. And then he said, "I'm going to make Breitbart the home of the alt-right." And then they mainstreamed the idea of alt-right, which literally means white nationalists.
CARUSONE: That's precisely it. And by putting it out there under the term of not just like something that is not sort of wrapped in hate, which a lot of these things tend to make their way into the zeitgeist, but rather, as, you know, an interesting thought piece, right? It's like, "Oh, well, that's not so terrible. He's just asking questions, he's just proposing these ideas. We should challenge ourselves to explore these concepts." And that's sort of -- the thing is it's sort of this veneer of thoughtfulness and intellectualism, but what it really is, is dictatorship, extremism wrapped in, you know, sort of like, you know, serious thinking. And it's not.
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REID: I mean, so CPAC is today, obviously, right? So, you have a lot of Republicans there. Weirdly enough, the attorney general of the United States is at CPAC, which is very strange. But it's not just that Trump has been red-pilled by all of these ideas, these very far-right ideas that would have been considered too far gone for the Republican Party even five, ten years ago. The whole Republican Party has been brought into it. And somebody like a Ted Cruz, who'd be a hawk, or Marco Rubio, who was like a Russia hawk, they either have to fake it or they really believe it.
CARUSONE: And this is the part that I think is very disturbing, because one of the things that's happened within the Republican Party is that, over the years, because of Trump and because of his relationships to these right-wing figures, these extreme right-wing figures, they organized and built political power on what used to be considered the fringes. And when you bring those people into the political fold and you actually build power on them, you now have to maintain that power, which is why you're, you know, one, they could be genuinely hopped up on some of these ideas. And on the other hand, people that may not be, don't really have a choice. They're held captive because that is where the political center of gravity is now.
And it's not that disconnected, you know, what we talked about with Curtis Yarvin or Jack Posobiec, who's tied into Charlie Kirk now, who's deeply embedded with the administration. He's flying with the vice president. You know, there's a reason JD Vance today at CPAC talks about, "So men need to be men. It's okay, everybody, you should not feel bad even if you're kind of a bad guy, because it's okay." That is -- he's speaking to these audiences. And that's the real thing that helps partly explain what's happening these days, is that they've brought these people in, and now they are continuing to serve them. So, they don't care about what popular opinion is anymore. They're speaking very specifically to a rabid, highly engaged, highly energized core that is reflective very much of what Jack Posobiec does every day, what Curtis Yarvin believes, what you see in Elon Musk's Twitter feed. That is who they're speaking to. It's a fundamentally anti-democratic, you know, notion of how you govern.
REID: And the thing about it is, if you do -- if you're governing that way and you're locking yourself in -- I mean, they're even like, "We won't even allow anyone in the administration to read The New York Times or The Associated Press." They all have to read Breitbart or whatever it is. They've now locked themselves in. That's all they've got. The polls show that this isn't popular broadly, but they don't seem to care about that, which leads me to think, they aren't worried about elections. They aren't thinking about trying to have popular support, or the public will. They don't care.