Welcome back to miami and date to a booktvs live coverage of the Miami Book Fair. Charlie sykes, van jones gumshoe atkinson are some of the authors you will hear from today and have the opportunity to talk with. The full schedule for the day is available booktv. Org. If you dont already follow us on social media, on twitter, facebook and instagram. Faster behind the scenes videos and photos booktv is her handle. Well, how the right lost its mind is a type of charlies new book indicates of the fair today from the campus of Miamidade College. Live coverage on booktv on cspan2. [inaudible conversations] and, unfortunately, we are experiencing [inaudible conversations] good morning, miami. Good morning. It is the 34th annual book fair. Lets give the book fair a round of applause. [applause] i am the dean of the Honors College at Miami Dade College and is an absolute pleasure to have the chance to share today with you if we are so fortunate in our community to have this extorted it but it would not be possible without sponsors like the Knight FoundationApache Foundation of course the group foundation. Lets give them a round of applause. [applause] and hes acknowledged would not be complete unless we recognize all the friends of the fair which are here in this room right now. Please give yourselves a round of applause. [applause] as you know the date is filled with a series of extraordinary authors, and we have a pretty tight schedule some going to ask a couple things of you. First and foremost, please turn off your cell phones. If you would come just take a moment and leave them off for the rest of the day, let your brains soar. Secondly, i will ask that when we have q a will be asking you to line up behind the microphone. As mentioned with a fairly tight schedule, so when it appears as if were running out of time, i will appear so please know its not personal but it is limited based on our time schedule. And, of course, the room will be switching over what the time the program is over you can exit. The book signing off and he is in the green area to the right of the rescue should you wish to have your book signed. At this point i have a wonderful pleasure of welcoming our very own local hero, host of facing south florida. [applause] good morning. You can respond, good morning. Good morning. Get the blood pumping. This is a sunday so a revival church. I get honor of introducing charlie sykes. Charlie was born in seattle, grew up in new york and for some reason decided to settle in wisconsin. Maybe the weather in south florida will convince them to relocate down here. He once ran for office as a prolife democrat but lost but yet set some, a bar and was a revolutionary race at a think we did find lot of things in wisconsin. Hes also a journalist i background. He covered the Milwaukee City Hall for the milwaukee journal and begun to become the editor in chief of milwaukee magazine. Most folks know them today for his stint on msnbc but before that of course he was a powerhouse radio host in wisconsin hosting a conservative talk radio show for 13 years that was highly influential and did a a great deal. Was basically he want to win office in wisconsin, you came through charlies grills. He became famous as a never trumper. At of course book today is how the right lost its mind, and im going to kindly suggest that as a followup book in it, the title would be an arrest of us soon followed. Ladies and gentlemen, its my honor to introduce charlie sykes. [applause] yes, i think there would be followup books. First of all i want to thank the host of the Miami Book Fair for inviting me here today and the folks from cspan, too. Believe it or not i dont want to spent most of my time talking about donald trump today. I want to talk what donald trump is doing to us, you know, including were all living through this together. 2017, damn, we have hurricanes, full eclipse of the sun, wildfires, Aaron Rodgers is injured. Its almost like the universe or god is trying to tell us we did something wrong. [laughing] i would suggest that if you ask yourself what would jesus do . The edge would not be elect roy moore to the senate. [laughing] [applause] but i may be in the minority among conservative republicans on that issue. Were going to find out. I want to start off by just getting a bit of background, i i was conservative talkshow host for 23 years and i thought he understood what the Truth Movement was about. I thought i knew who conservatives were, and then along came donald trump. This is what i wrote just to set the record straight. In august 2015, which was a few months after donald trump descended that gold escalator to announce is going to run for president , and i wrote donald trump is a Cartoon Version of every media stereotype of the reactionary nativist misogynist right. Except is not a cartoon. Hes the leading gop candidate for president at the moment. To be clear, trump is not only a cynical opportunist, and inchoate ideologue but it generally repelling human being. Even leaving his tweets makes you dumber. Donald trump is an caricature of a a real candidate which makes his current post successful all the more baffling troubling. So point number one, republicans were warned. And not just by me. People keep asking the question what does donald trump had to do . What mine does he have to cross republicans to break within . And my answer is, whatever the light is come hes already trusted. Hes already broken the door. This is not new. So in may of 2016, after trump had successfully nailed down the republican nomination, i was on fox news. I believe this was the last time that i was on fox news [laughing] which means it it would be the last time ill ever be on fox news. Megyn kelly asked me a question, why are you not join anybody else in the Republican Party into the onboard . And i said, donald trump is a serial liar, a convent mocks the disabled women, hes a narcissist and a bully, a name no fixed principles rest of the candidate of emotionally insecure nineyearold. So no, i do want to get him control of the attack of the rs and the nuclear codes. Thats just me. I dont want but my confession is that trump does not bother me as much as what he has done to us, and to my fellow conservatives who, one after another, look at him and said, okay, we can support them to be the president of the United States. And i have compared it to, and i part this line from jonah goldberg, compared it to watching invasion of the body snatchers, one after another people who i knew did not disagree with me about my assessment, i decided in our physical error in this political age, from this moment we are in right now, that it was essential for them to get in line to capitulate to him, to enable him, to rationalize his behavior, to defend the indefensible. So i am, if you follow me on twitter, you know i am horrified by a lot of whats happened with what the president does, and it is not surprising if you paid any attention in 2015 or 2016 what hes done as president , but its still shocking to see it taking place from somebody with the mantle of power of the presidency of the United States. Now, and my one and only conversation with donald trump on the air, actually said to them, i said, mr. Trump, you are running for the office once held by abraham lincoln. You know, is this language appropriate . Of course we know what the answer is. So what i want to do in my brief comment, im going to open it up to questions can what i tried to do in the book is to take the focus off trump, our obsessive focus on the orange god king, which is so riveting, and to turn it around to us, how did we elect him president . How did the conservative movement go from william f. Buckley to ann coulter next how do we go from Ronald Reagan to donald trump . How do you go from edmund burke to sean hannity . What happened to us . And, of course, one of the key things when i started writing the book was to figure out what just happened to us. Was this a oneoff . Was a onetime thing . Wasnt something we missed in the conservative movement . Did donald trump just parachute in and take over an otherwise Healthy Movement . Or was Something Else going on . I concluded reluctantly, very reluctantly, that donald trump is not merely a cause. He certainly makes things worse but is also a symptom. The dysfunction was a preexisting condition which will also not be covered by Republican Health care plans. [laughing] what weve also learned, and you think this is the shock that a lot of us are experiencing, and i have described it, and debate on our politics with different reactions. For me 20152016 was a soul crushing, disillusioning slog as i watched this habit. I think was a shock to other folks who are realizing that this was something i think new in our politics. Its a reminder of our fragility that our system and our democracy is more fragile than we thought, that a lot of what weve taken for granted in terms of the democratic norms, things like, for example, checks and balances, that these are not to be more metaphors and hard and fast rules, that our government and our system has really been based on an honor system with the assumption was that the man or the woman in the oval office was a reasonably honorable person. And now we are trying to find out what if that is not the case . How we react as a democracy . We are also realizing i hope, im not going to try to be too dark here, that america, the United States of america, this shining city on a hill, this great rest of the community is not in fact, immune to history. That we in fact, can squander our democracy, that we can take the path that other democracies have taken. That were not necessarily entitled to simply go on by violating these norms. Because we are living through a time now where i dont think is going to be specifically defined by donald trump and by that i mean even after he leaves, the damage is going to remain because of what has happened to us and is happening and is accelerating, this rise of win at all cost partisanship, this tribal identity, the posttruth society that we live in, our post ethical society, our post knowledge politics. Now, i argue in the book that one of the things, i argue because, for me, one of the most troubling parts was, was watching the repudiation of the conservative mind. All throughout 2016 we heard that this was an assault on the establishment, or the elites. Was actually an assault on a lot of things. There is an establishment, there are elites but it was an assault on decency. It was an assault on traditions of thought, coherence, that we are still living through right now. Somebody asked me earlier today, so what about the conservative thought leaders . You know, the people who care about some of these ideas. And my answer is, well, most of those are in exile. Most of them have been labeled have been excommunicated from the movement. One of the stories i tell in the book is about william f. Buckley, jr. , the godfather of the modern conservative movement who, in the mid1960s, understood that if conservatism was ever going to be taken seriously it had to clean its own house. It had to get rid of the bigots, the crackpots, the lunatics. It had to expel the john birch society. Society. Had to make it clear that the ku klux klan was beyond the pale. He didnt do that because he was anticommunist or because he was a squish. He realized if you ever want to be taken seriously you need to drain your own deeper swap. And was successful fever they never went away because when they made their comeback in 2016, we found there was no william f. Buckley, jr. Who had the moral and intellectual and Political Authority to say stop, to expel you again. In fact, what we saw was the rise of these forces, the empowerment and the emboldening of folks that i will confess, you may think i am 90 for this, i thought wed marginalized didnt do we always knew that the angry drunk at the end of the bar wasnt there, right . Your bigoted uncle at thanksgiving, right . The one you take and images tun the television and stop talking about politics. But it turns out that it was a huge mistake to ignore the existence of these folks, to push back. Now, ive tried to go back and look at the key moments how and when this happened. Theres no definitive answer. Ive had interesting conversations. You know, was it when sarah palin was nominated to be Vice President . Was at a key moment, or was before the . Was it when Newt Gingrich weaponized politics act in the e 1990s, or was before that . Was it when Richard Nixon adopted the southern strategy . Was of a recently . When the drudge report, by the way, how many people are familiar the drudge report is basically a website that for many years was the assignment editor for much of the conservative media. Every conservative talk shows, every conservative person within the first hour of the day would read the drudge report which was a series of links to various things. Sometime in the last ten years i was never able to identify the exact moment, drudge again linking to alex jones from info wars. Alex jones, i can tell somebody of your family, is not your garden variety conspiracy theorist. This is a most toxic part of the paranoid fever swamps. 9 11 9 11 was an inside job, buo was sandy hook. That was staged. This is sick stuff, but he was injected into the mainstream come into the bloodstream of the conservative movement. If you want to know what happened with this explosion of fake news and propaganda, how was the immune system of the Consumer Movement destroyed . That was one of them. You can go back to what happened with the tea party, which i have a somewhat competent relationship with your the tea party more into this perpetual outrage machine that i think was taken over by drifters and charlatans, but also that the conservative movement into this place we are in now, where, its kind of a shock of realization that conservatives are not the clear what they are for. They are very clear what they are against. And who they hate. To a certain extent politics today, conservative politics can, and i will be of course criticized for this, but can be summed up in whatever makes liberals upset. As long, excuse me, but as long as i pissed off liberals, and it must be good. As long as i make liberals their heads explode, then it must be good. No matter what that is, it is essentially a form of negative tribalism that is incredibly powerful and important to understand. The other thing that i think were going to have to grapple with is the rise of the alternative reality silos in our media. And this is this is a very dift thing for me because i was, i was part of the conservative right wing media for two decades, but i thought, perhaps naively, that we were presenting a different point of view, not that we were creating an alternative reality. I knew that this was morphing into an echo chamber, but what we found in 2016 is the silos become impenetrable, that information could not penetrate in, and that all kinds of bizarre, sick and twisted stories would circulate, and were impossible to refute. A lot of my year in 2016 which i recount in about is pushing back the people that i had known for 20 years, 20 years, and in the past i would be able to say you know thats a hoax, thats not true, or heres the actual facts of this. And people would say okay, thank you, charlie, for point that out. But in 2016 that changed with the explosion of facebook, wih the rise of the breitbart media infrastructure. And i would point out, look, this is not true and i will send you a link to the Washington Post or the New York Times. The response i got increasingly was all, those liberal rags. They wouldnt bleed anything outside the bubble. Thats the moment we realize we have succeeded in delegitimizing, not just criticizing the media but delegitimizing all factbased journalism. And i think that we have seen the consequences of that, and i think that the fact that the president of the United States is weaponizing that particular phenomenon is a real and present danger to our democratic discourse. So for me writing this book was a bit cathartic because its asking the question, as a conservative, who are we . Who do we really believe in . What is really important to us . And what did we miss . What did we adore . What were the failures to take the stand at the right moment . And i will be honest with you that im still wrestling with all of this. Still wrestling with the power of tribalism. And i dont think that weve actually plumbed the bottom of it yet. If you ask the question, what you been . By the way, a lot of conservatives, understand theres an alternative reality. A lot of considered safe the title of my book is ridiculous how the right lost its mind, are you kidding me . We won the election. Being crazy doesnt mean you wing election. We have a Supreme Court justice, were about to get this wonderful tax cut bill, all of these things. My answer to how did the right lose its micro look at alabama right now. Look where were going. Im going to wrap up because of what to get to your questions in a moment, but you almost get the sense that even in the heart of trump world, they realize that they cannot fully control all of the forces they have unleashed. They had been nourishing this, alligator in the bathtub. The alligator has grown and its loose and it is still angry. Republicans are fine with one another to be the last one eaten buying to borrow a phrase from winston churchill. But you are seeing this, the tribalism was having to evangelical christians and the notion that this character action matter anymore. Im going to wrap up on this and say one last thing. We are more polarized than ever. If we had a diagram of the left and the right, theres not a lot of overlap. But the part that there is an overlap, that small sliver is intensely important. What is that overlap . Decency, truth, constitutional limits, the rule of law. All of those things i think are absolutely crucial, and that the dialogue that i think that we urgently have to have if we are willing to break out of our own bubbles. Thank you very, very much. [applause] we are going to take questions now. Light up your im going to become the bad guy because im going to just, please come well h