Welcome back to The Red Letter.
The government shutdown is entering day 41, and while there’s finally a glimmer of an end in sight, both parties are bleeding internally.
Let’s start with the Democrats.
There’s growing fury inside the party over Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s quiet dealmaking. Democrats accuse him of giving a wink-wink, nod-nod to eight members of the Democratic caucus who voted with Republicans to reopen the government and they’re furious that he did it without securing concessions to renew the expiring Obamacare subsidies at the start of the new year.
That one move could spike health insurance premiums by up to 30 percent. And the irony? More than half of Republican voters actually want those subsidies renewed.
Still, the latest Quinnipiac University poll shows Democrats were winning the shutdown blame game: 45 percent of voters blamed Republicans, compared to 39 percent who blamed Democrats. So why cave when you’re ahead, even if it meant some holiday chaos and flight cancellations? Maybe some were quietly relieved to skip those Thanksgiving table debates anyway…
Now, a group of House Democrats including Ro Khanna and Rashida Tlaib are putting out statements, calling for Schumer’s resignation. But that’s not the story I’m most interested in. After all, their contagion hasn’t reached Senate Democrats where a call to remove their leader would be a much bigger headache for Schumer.
The more dangerous unraveling is happening on The Right.
The GOP’s Civil War
The MAGA movement is now openly at war with itself, torn apart by the rise of white nationalist factions inside the Republican base.
Did they invite this? Of course, with years of anti-immigration rhetoric and dog-whistle politics. It’s given extremists permission to crawl out of the shadows, like people who say women shouldn’t vote, who believe America should be “white and Christian,” and who now call themselves “Groypers.”
The breaking point came when Tucker Carlson handed white supremacist and Groyper leader Nick Fuentes a microphone, in the form of a softball interview on his podcast.
Fuentes, who has praised Hitler, mocked civil rights, and described women as “baby machines,” has become the lightning rod for a fight the GOP can’t seem to contain. Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, and other high-profile conservatives condemned Carlson for “normalizing Nazism,” but the damage was done.
This isn’t a fringe movement anymore — it’s metastasized.
And that’s what I wanted to unpack in this week’s show.
The Former White Nationalist Who Knows the Movement from the Inside
, a former white nationalist turned MAGA skeptic, speaks candidly about what drives these extremists, why they’re drawn to power, and how they’ve already begun reshaping the Republican primary field for 2028.Hanania says what few on the right are willing to: this isn’t a blip, it’s an ideological infection, one that’s rooted in the party’s base, and it’s too valuable and too activated for GOP leaders to fully disown.
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