All In with Chris Hayes, Transcript 08/19/15

(DONALD TRUMP CAMPAIGN EVENT IN PROGRESS) DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: And he didn`t fold and sit down and apologize. I won`t -- I don`t -- I only apologize -- I do apologize when I`m wrong. But I had -- Rush said, used the word "incoming". Incoming, you know what that means from these people here, incoming. Then it turned out that I was right. And people started to see the violence and the crime. And they saw Kate in San Francisco, a magnificent person, whose family is a great family. And they saw Jamiel and they saw so many people killed violently. The other night, the woman, a 66-year-old veteran, raped, sodomized, brutally killed by an illegal immigrant. We`ve got to stop that. We`ve got to bring back our country. We`ve got to take it. We`ve got to take it back. (APPLAUSE) TRUMP: OK. Yes, ma`am. Go ahead. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Right here, Mr. Trump. TRUMP: OK. Go ahead. Yes, sir? Young man. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello, Mr. Trump. TRUMP: Hi. AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is Caden. I wanted to know if being president is so hard, why do you want to be president? TRUMP: That might be the best question I get all night. Great question. (APPLAUSE) So if being president is so hard, why do I want to be president? Because I love this country and I know that I can make it great again. I know it. For you, you know? And really for you, these folks, they`ve seen it. But it is for you and people your age. Because when they get to be our age, if we keep going the way we`re going, it`s going to be a very unattractive picture. Yes, sir? Go ahead. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I am -- went on you -- I was coming today and I went on your website to see some of your policy positions. And the only thing there is immigration reform. So, I was just wondering, can you speak to any of your other plans or policies? TRUMP: Well, I did I a big policy on immigration and I think most people certainly like it. Certainly, it seems it has been very popular. We`re going to be doing a lot of policy positions. And you know, I say this and I mean it. When I want a deal, I don`t sit down and say, well, let`s see. I`ll give 14 points. You know, the press -- I think the press -- are you a member of the press? I actually think the press wants the so-called policy positions more than the people, if you want to know the truth. Because when I sit down and I really enjoy it and I really feel we`ve hit something special with the immigration policy positions, very formally done, done with a lot of people, including Senator Sessions, who`s a terrific guy, a terrific guy. (APPLAUSE) TRUMP: And, you know, when I do transactions. I`ve made a lot of great deals. I don`t sit down and say, I`ll mark down 14. The first thing I`ll do is call somebody. Next thing I`ll do is get on an airplane. It doesn`t work that way. You go in and you get it. Doral in Miami, everybody wanted it. I heard it might be available. I got on a plane, I went down, I scooped it up before anyone knew what the hell was going. Does that make sense? You know, we have to have flexibility? When you do 14 points, you know, the second point may change. And it may be much better than the second point you put down on the policy position. That will throw off the rest of the points. But they`ll throw it off for the better. I`m doing the policy positions and I`m doing tax paper. I want to put H&R Block out of business because it`s too complicated. No, it`s too complicated. But when it comes to policy, I`m going to give you wonderful policy positions. But I just want to tell you, the great people, and this is including politicians of which there are very few, there are very few, but because they`re only good at one thing. That`s getting reelected. That`s all they care about if you ask me. But it`s really true. Are there any politicians in the room? I`m not talking about you. I`m talking to everyone else. But if you look at policy positions, we`re going to be putting out some very good ones, but you need flexibility. If you don`t have flexibility, you`re not going to make the great ones. I mean flexibility in the proper way, the proper way. As an example, I could give you policy on dealing with China. China is killing us. China has taken so much of our wealth. They`ve taken our jobs, they`ve taken our businesses, they`ve taken our manufacturing. AUDIENCE MEMBER: They`re taking our land. TRUMP: The land? Let me think about that one. The way they`re going, they`ll have it pretty soon. But China has taken so much from us. And then think about it. We have rebuilt China. Somebody said to me, and I said, well, that`s a harsh segment. It is the greatest theft in the history of the United States. Now, I have great respect for China, and their leaders. And I -- hey, look, the largest bank in the world is from China. They`re a tenant in one of my buildings. I love China. I think it is great. But we don`t have the people who know what they`re doing. So, we have lost, I -- you can`t just go say I want -- you go in. CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Donald Trump in New Hampshire right now at a town hall riffing on China, one of four or five riffs that`s we hear on a regular basis at these campaign events, earlier did a press availability. Jeb Bush, it turns out, is just down the road, nine miles away in New Hampshire. Donald Trump speaking as he let the crowd know to about 800 or 900 people in overflow room. Jeb Bush talking to about 200 people. Donald Trump making sure to needle Bush over that saying the audience at the Bush event was falling asleep. I want to talk about what we are seeing unfold here, because I think it`s past the point of a clown show or parody or something comical and turned into something more serious and much darker. MSNBC contributor and former DNC chair, Howard Dean, Emily`s List spokesperson Jess McIntosh, and conservative commentator Linda Sanchez. And, Linda, let me begin with you. You have someone right now who is getting huge crowds, who the polling at the top of the GOP field, who the polling shows is beating Jeb Bush by 44 percent to 12 percent on the issue of immigration, calling little children, newborn babies, anchor babies, saying that it`s -- he`s going to use that term which I find it dehumanizing and disgusting. Talking about giving the local police, quote, "the ability" to do whatever they need to do to round up the, quote, "illegals". Talking about building a wall. Talking about basically chasing 11 million people out. Talking about deporting American citizens to, quote, "keep families together". Talking about building what would essentially be the largest, most intrusive police state in the history of the American public to go about this task. That is the person that is right now at the head of the Republican Party`s presidential nominating contest. What is your reaction to that? LINDA SANCHEZ, CONSERVATIVE COMMENTATOR: Well, first of all, he is at the top of the pack right now and leading in a couple of states in Iowa and in New Hampshire. He is leading in the national polls. But if you take a look at the huge field that the Republicans have put forth, he`s got about a quarter of the votes, the rest have about 75 percent of the votes and nobody is as extreme. Look, I am absolutely the biggest critic of Donald Trump that you will find in the Republican Party. I think the guy is a disaster. I think he is a farce. I think he is somebody who frankly, I don`t know what his principles or policies are. I mean, he was busy giving to Democrats until just a few months ago. So, I don`t even think he is a Republican, much less a conservative. But he is unfortunately, playing into a strain of nativism. He is being supported by organizations like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which by the way has roots, not on the right but on the left. They come out of population control and out of environmentalists. (CROSSTALK) HAYES: I wrote the first magazine profile of the founder of FAIR ever put in print, a guy by the name of John Tanton. He`s an ophthalmologist in Petoskey, Michigan. I drove up to interview him and spend a few days with him. He is in fact the founder and he did come out of population control movement. But here`s the facts about the current immigration politics of the country. You have the entire Democratic field supports comprehensive reform, the entire Democratic Party. You basically have comprehensive support for that across the party. You now have a Republican field, Ms. Chavez, in which it is an open debate about whether we should repeal the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, whether we should rescind birthright citizenship, a principle that has been enshrined for 150 years. What is going on in? SANCHEZ: It is unfortunate. By the way, birth right citizenship goes back a lot longer than the 14th Amendment. HAYES: Yes, you`re right. SANCHEZ: It was actually part of English common law. HAYES: Yes. SANCHEZ: And, you know, this idea of talking about revoking citizenship for those born here I think is a disaster. I think if the Republican Party goes down this road, it is going to go the way of the Whigs. It is not going to be a viable party anymore. But I am confident at the end of the day, you`re going to see a nominee of the Republican party who is going to have a sensible free market, more pro- immigrant approach to immigration because it really is inconsistent with Republican principles. I mean, what Donald Trump is talking about is, you know, raising the wages of high-tech workers to be above prevailing wages. That`s a Democratic solution. That`s not a Republican solution. HAYES: Let me bring in Howard Dean. Howard, as you watch this phenomenon unfold, and the fact of the matter is, in this combination of sort of this sort of America firstism, this kind of nativism, this idea that China and Mexico are sort of handing us our own butts in the deals. There is something being channeled here by Donald Trump and there is something when you dig beneath the kind of comedy of the routine, the shtick of it, there is something pretty dark underneath that. It just -- the longer this goes on, the more that that darkness is harder and harder to ignore. HOWARD DEAN, FORMER DNC CHAIRMAN: I think -- yes, I sort of agree with Linda. I think what he is doing is really bad for the party. You know, I -- once in a while, I have these incredible intuitions about what`s going to happen and I had one in 2012 when Mitt Romney looked in the camera at one of his huge numbers of debates he had and said, "I will veto the DREAM Act if it gets to my desk", and I knew he didn`t really understand the DREAM Act and what it meant to the Latino community. I thought that was the end. I never worried one day about the rest of the race about Obama losing. Because -- and I think that Trump has done that effectively. I think the only person who would now at this point have a chance to get Latino vote up to the 35 or 40 percent the Republicans must have in order to win the presidency would be Jeb Bush because of his personal credentials. I think everybody else is toast because Trump has so stained the Republican Party with his language. There was an interesting article. I think it was in "The New York Times" in the last couple of days about what the impact of this is in the Latino community. And it is true. The rhetoric, oh, you know, the Latinos care about jobs, too, and they care about -- yes, they do. But there is nobody who likes to be personally insulted by the president of the United States or somebody who`s running for the presidency. HAYES: Let`s just say that how this, the magnetic pole that this has created. Jess, let me play for you. This is Jeb Bush talking to Bill Bennett this morning and I`m putting in heavy quotation marks here, so-called "anchor babies". Take a listen. (BEGIN AUDIO CLIP) BILL BENNETT: Governor Bush? JEB BUSH (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: If there`s fraud or if there`s abuse, if people are bringing -- if pregnant women are coming in to have babies simply because they can do it, then there ought to be greater enforcement. That`s the legitimate side of this. Greater enforcement so that you don`t have these anchor babies as they`re described coming into the country. (END AUDIO CLIP) HAYES: Hillary Clinton responding with a tweet. They`re called babies, which seems like a better term for those small human beings. DEAN: That`s the danger. Jeb is going to get dragged into this. That`s the really big problem. HAYES: Jess? JESS MCINTOSH, EMILY`S LIST: I think the governor is absolutely right. Jeb Bush is the only one at this point who normally sounds sane because of his own family situation. He used a derogatory slur to refer to the children of Mexican immigrants today. That`s the guy with the best moral foundation to discuss this issue? I think it is still unlikely that Donald Trump despite the polls becomes the Republican nominee. But I think that he has damaged the field. All 17 or 25 or however many there are of them so thoroughly that no matter who does, their paging a picture of an America that is a dark militarized place where we are terrible to people with different colored skin and we are terrible to women and we disregard science and we absolutely say no to any sort of progress. I think that it`s an awful picture that this Republican field is painting of the future of the country. And listening to this incredibly divisive, I mean, hateful, like it used to be extremist kind of rhetoric, coming from people who want to everybody`s president is just shocking. I never thought Trump would have this much effect on the whole field. HAYES: Yes, Linda? SANCHEZ: Chris, to be fair, it is not just Jeb Bush. I think he is the best on the issue but John Kasich is pretty good on the issue. Marco Rubio was in fact the sponsor. Yes, he`s sort of -- (CROSSTALK) MCINTOSH: Now, he`s anti-birthright citizenship. SANCHEZ: No. That`s just not -- HAYES: Rubio, just for the record here, Rubio is not as far as I can tell, unless he`s changed his position as of late, anti-birthright citizenship. DEAN: He came pretty close to saying that today on MSNBC with Chris Matthews` show. SANCHEZ: It is a crazy position. I mean, you do have an irony. You have Ted Cruz who wasn`t even born in the United States and -- HAYES: And Bobby Jindal who is a citizen because of birthright citizenship who says we need to get rid of birthright citizenship. MCINTOSH: Right. SANCHEZ: Actually, Bobby Jindal, his parents to my knowledge were not illegally present in the United States. But you`re right. HAYES: They were naturalized. SANCHEZ: It is frankly, it is very concerning to me, as a conservative, in part because it goes against the grain. I became a conservative because of Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan is rolling over in his grave over what`s going on right now. This is not what he was about. I mean, if you want to talk about amnesty, he gave a true amnesty - - HAYES: Yes. SANCHEZ: -- and passed the bill that was proposed and supported by Marco Rubio was not an amnesty. They would have had to pay fines. They have had to pay back taxes. You have to undergo criminal background checks. So, you know, look, this is unfortunately -- it`s the summer. People are bored. Donald Trump is a celebrity. You guys have got him on. I mean, I noticed that, you know, MSNBC, CNN seem to be pumping up Trump even more than FOX. So, you know, I don`t know what`s going on here. But it`s pushing ratings. You get people to turn. He`s I guess entertaining to some people. I find him boring. MCINTOSH: But this is about policy agenda. It`s about what he wants to do to the country. It matters. HAYES: Look, if the coverage -- I mean, the coverage is distinct. No amount of cable news coverage is Jeb Bush have to say anchor baby or question the 14th Amendment. And, Linda, to your point, I mean, look, I`ve heard people. We`ve had people come on the show and say what you`ve said. I`m a conservative. I find this outrageous. Here`s what I want to see, is someone get up in the Republican field and say that. Just speak to truth about what this is. Governor Perry sort of did it. It appeared to be a land mine that almost destroyed his candidacy. But the suspicion that is stalking and haunting everyone of the people in the field is that there are more people who have Donald Trump`s views on this matter than share their views. And that ultimately is the thing that is going to have to cash out in this election. That is one of the central high stakes questions of national identity and a policy that has been teed up now, even though it`s August and even though people are bored. Howard Dean, Jesse McIntosh, Linda Chavez, thank you all very much. DEAN: Thank you. HAYES: Up next, do voters, the people that decide elections, even really care about Hillary Clinton`s emails? Plus, one of Donald Trump`s virtues -- yes, virtues -- is exposing the power of the donor class. We`ll explain ahead. And later, hackers released information from tens of millions of profiles from extramarital dating Web site Ashley Madison. Why this is so much more than just another data hack, ahead. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: You know, this thing happens with the news. You read a news item and it`s funny or it`s framed as being funny. A joke, someone gets hit in the face with a football like the four-year-old kid in the Marco Rubio video yesterday. He was fine. But then this other thing tends to happen, where you hear a story and it sounds funny and you scratch the details and it stops being funny. That pertains to a certain hack of an extramarital dating site. We`ll talk about that, ahead. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You`ve got a massive amount of data. In a way, it reminds me of the Nixon tapes. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think this could this generation`s Watergate. I really do believe that. I think this could be much bigger than we know. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: What could possibly equate to the Nixon tapes, to Watergate, or as Donald Trump put it, "Watergate on steroids, frankly." The e-mails that Hillary Clinton sent from private server while she was secretary of state. FOX News reported today, they have identified two of the Benghazi-related e-mails on the server and that were deemed to contain classified information at the time they were sent. And according to FOX, it was those documents that kick-started the FBI investigation into the mishandling of classified information. The Clinton campaign says the FOX report vindicates her position that the issue of clarification is bureaucratic squabbling and she was at worst, a passive recipient of unwitting information that subsequently became deemed as classified. Here`s how the candidate herself responded to questions about her emails in Nevada yesterday. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) HILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: In retrospect, this didn`t turn out to be convenient at all and I regret that this has become such a cause celebre. That does not change the facts. And no matter what anybody says, the facts are stubborn. Whether it was a personal account or a government account, I did not send classified material and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified. REPORTER: Did you wipe the server? CLINTON: Like, with a cloth or something? REPORTER: I don`t know. You know how it works digitally. Did you try to wipe the whole server? CLINTON: I don`t know how it works digitally at all. REPORTER: Is this an indication that this issue isn`t going to go away for the remainder of your campaign? CLINTON: Nobody talks to me about it other than you guys. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Joining me now, Joy Reid, national correspondent for MSNBC. Shrug. (LAUGHTER) HAYES: OK. What is -- where are you on this, Joy Reid? Where are you on this? JOY REID, MSNBC NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: So, you know, I have been utterly bored with the story to the point where I only recently began to sort of dig into it. HAYES: And you keep watching by the way, to the viewers. Continue. REID: The more I look into it, I think it is one of those cases where the trail is really simple but the movie is too hard to follow. What I mean is the idea that Hillary Clinton shouldn`t have had a personal e-mail instead of an official e-mail is simple. That sounds bad. It sounds like you`re not supposed to do that. When you really dig into the issue of classification -- well, she could have sent and received e-mails that were later classified when somebody made a FOIA and then maybe they ended up being classified now but they weren`t then. Look, I`ve never really heard anyone spontaneously bring it up when I`ve been on a trail covering Hillary. So, I don`t know that the American people is are following it with this much detail. HAYES: Here`s where I am. When I first saw it, yes, this doesn`t seem like this is the best -- this doesn`t seem like best practice. That was my feeling. As it played out, yes, there is legitimate question here. But watching the way the press corps is going after it and the Watergate comparisons, it makes me more sympathetic to the perspective of the Clinton campaign, which is that if it wasn`t this, it would be something else because this is how they roll with us. Remember Benghazi and the 17 investigations and all the testimony, that that was going to be the thing that undid Hillary Clinton. And then it was like no, actually it was a horrible tragedy. There were genuine safety and security breakdowns but there was no scandal and no smoking gun. It feels like that again. The more the press is finger wagging about it, the more I`m just like what is going on here? REID: It reminds me of Whitewater. It`s one of those things were -- HAYES: Yes. REID: Because it has water at the end of it, or it sounds like Watergate, oh, that must be good. Then they dig into it and, you`re like, that`s it? And I think the problem that the Republicans are going to have with the e- mail story is that it`s going to really, really reinforce people who already deeply dislike Hillary Clinton continuing to do so and continuing to say she is an untrustworthy figure. I think it gets the press corps, especially the beltway press exorcised because they have this caustic relationship with the Clintons. HAYES: And there are legitimate issues about access, let me -- I just want to say that, like as a fact, like FOIA and that stuff is important, right? REID: And also, we have this other issue, which we really should be talking about, which is the over-classification of information out of the government. You make a FOIA request and half of what you asked for is suddenly classified which is a big deal. But is this Watergate? That`s absurd. And it is shocking for somebody who broke Watergate to look at those two sets of facts and say, yes, these two things are the same. HAYES: Well, it feels like we are watching the beginning of the construction of the Goldberg machine that will be operating six years later -- REID: Absolutely. HAYES: -- should Hillary Clinton be, you know, elected president. If you go back to the way that the Bill Clinton scandal machine got set up, it was like whitewater led to the deposition to Monica Lewinsky. You know, we started with this e-mail question and then there is an inquiry. Where is this going to go? It feels self-sustaining. REID: Remember the Whitewater, it is, started with just hair cut gate. And then they fired people on the travel office. You can`t fire people from the White House -- so it starts with things that don`t even sound bad, like having Gmail. By the way, the idea whether or not the server was secure, let`s talk about the government e-mails servers are secured, because they`ve been hacked. I mean, there are a lot of other things -- HAYES: Or like the entire OPM file there. REID: Exactly. It`s like maybe Hillary Clinton on the cloud was actually somehow safer and more secure than the actual government e-mails? I don`t even understand it. HAYES: The other thing that I can never get with these stories. I can never tell how much of this was the special Clinton rules treatment, right? Or how much of it is the Clintons acting in ways or Hillary Clinton specifically in this case, acting in ways that`s different. But the tenor of the coverage ends up retroactively convincing me. You know what I mean? REID: Yes. HAYES: It`s like, you know, meanwhile, it`s like her role in Libya like no one cares. Let`s talk about the e-mail server. REID: Exactly. HAYES: What is going on? REID: And you have previous secretary of states, you know, since the era of email, Colin Powell had a personal e-mail, so it`s not as if this is sui generis and she`s the only one who ever did. But because there`s hyperventilated coverage of everything they do, everything the Clintons do is just like Watergate. Well, once you make everything like Watergate -- HAYES: That`s right. REID: -- nothing is Watergate. HAYES: Everything gets priced in. Thanks for joining me. REID: Thank you. HAYES: Up next, the story of an 81-year-old renowned historian executed by ISIS for protecting the ancient remains he dedicated his life to studying. Incredible story. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: As the Syrian civil war rages into its fourth year, the horrors often seem never ending. Just this week, the Assad regime is being decried by human rights groups for bombing a Damascus market, killing nearly 100 civilians. Meanwhile, ISIS stands accused of using chemical weapons against Kurdish fighters in Iraq and even taking into consideration those events and the very high bar of ISIS and Assad atrocities. There`s something else this week that stands out. Yesterday, the jihadists executed Khalid al-Asaad, the 81-year-old retired director of antiquities for Palmyra, an ancient Syrian city. The internationally regarded antiquities expert spent some 40 years studying and restoring the city`s Roman ruins. In May, the 2,000-year-old town, a UNESCO World Heritage site, was taken over by ISIS. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Another city, fallen to ISIS. This time it was Syrian government troops who ran away. As ISIS stormed into Palmyra. This isn`t just another town on a map. It has lucrative oil and gas fields and is a cradle of Western civilization, one that is about to be robbed. HAYES (voice-over): While many fled after ISIS took control of the city, Khalid al-Asaad stayed. His nephew telling "The New York Times" he said that whatever was going to happen to the people would happen to him. Just weeks after ISIS began occupying the city, the retired archaeologist was taken into custody. He was released and taken once again about a month ago according to his family. UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): According to the Syrian government, it was all about hidden treasure. ISIS wanted to know from Khalid al-Asaad, the ex-antiquities director, where supposed hidden treasures were buried inside Palmyra. According to the Syrian government, Khalid al-Asaad refused to cooperate, wanted to defend his sites, did not want to give any information of any kind to ISIS. HAYES (voice-over): The antiquities scholar was beheaded yesterday in a public square, according to a human rights group. His blood-soaked body was then hanged in effigy in the streets. This is a man who studied the long sweep of history, the wars fought, evil done and the judgments history renders on it all. And I have to think he went to his death with a proud defiance of knowing that his noble devotion to his work will outlive the barbarity that resulted in his death. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: There have been, to put it mildly, a lot of things not to like about Donald Trump`s presidential run. But the best thing about Trump`s candidacy has been his calling attention to the fact that most presidential candidates spend a lot of their time raising a lot of money from rich people who tend to want something in return, something he just did just a short time ago. DONALD TRUMP, ENTREPRENEUR: All of that money that`s going to Hillary and Jeb and Scott and Marco and all of them, the people that are putting up that money are -- it is like puppets. Bing, bing, they`re totally controlled, totally controlled by special interests, lobbyists and donors. HAYES: The power that donors have over candidates can cause them to behave a little like CEOs desperate to placate their shareholders in order to keep them from being fired. Scott Walker, who`s been declining in polls in Iowa and nationally, reportedly nationally held a lunch and conference call this week to reassure jittery donors and other supporters he can turn things around. The side of campaigns that most Americans see is the shaking hands and giving speeches. That`s just a tiny slice of what a modern campaign is about. Candidates who work the crowd while wearing a pork-branded "Be Inspired" apron at the Iowa State Fair also meet with hedge fund billionaires, who have very different views -- I think it`s safe to say -- than the average Iowa voter. And it isn`t easy to keep both sides happy. Consider the Common Core education standards. Three different GOP governors running for president, Walker, Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie, have all turned against Common Core after initially appearing to support it, presumably to placate a Republican base that has come to loathe the standards. All three appeared today at a GOP education forum in New Hampshire. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) BOBBY JINDAL (R), GOVERNOR OF LOUISIANA: I personally don`t think the standards are as great as people think they are, as some of these folks in D.C. think they are. SCOTT WALKER (R), GOVERNOR OF WISCONSIN: So I want high standards. I just want them set by people at the local level. GOV. CHRIS CHRISTIE (R), N.J.: I listened over four years in 130-plus town hall meetings to complaints about Common Core. And they finally got my attention. That`s why I changed. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Now Christie`s flip-flop on the issue is not playing well with wealthy GOP donors, who are, for the most part, huge fans of Common Core. Those standards encouraging by the federal government but developed by states to establish uniform academic benchmarks. According to "The Wall Street Journal," Christie`s reversal has even prompted some wealthy donors to turn away from Christie. Instead, they are turning to John Kasich, Jeb Bush -- Bush supports Common Core though he has distanced himself from the phrase itself, while Kasich today declined to disavow Common Core, despite pressure to do so. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) GOV. JOHN KASICH (R), OHIO: For me, I won`t change my position because there are four people in the front row yelling at me. I don`t operate that way. (END VIDEO CLIP) HAYES: Music, of course, to the ears of many GOP donors. But it isn`t going to endear Kasich to those folks in the front row or GOP base convinced that education standards are a disaster. Joining me now, Dana Goldstein, staffer at The Marshall Project, author of the fantastic must-read, "The Teacher Wars: A History of America`s Most Embattled Profession," which you are all assigned to read tout suite. OK. Why -- this is fascinating. And it is one of these issues, where these candidates are trying to straddle two trains going in opposite directions. Why does the donor class care so much? This is the most interesting question. DANA GOLDSTEIN, THE MARSHALL PROJECT: Well, they always have. But to start in the present day, the Common Core really starts from the assumption that we`re being outeducated by competitors around the world, that children in Singapore and China and Japan and Finland are doing much better than kids here in the U.S. And that`s true. And businesses care about that because they want smart and able workers. There`s nothing new about that. If you go back to why we have a public education system in the United States in the first place, in the 1830s, it was railroad industrialists who were some of the people saying let`s have public schools. (CROSSTALK) HAYES: Basically, you keep sending me these hayseeds from farms to operate my brakes. And this is not working. That`s really sort of how it starts. GOLDSTEIN: Yes, that is how it started. And even to get factory workers that were able to do the task that businesses were looking for in the 19th century, they wanted people at that time to just have, say, an elementary school education. HAYES: So there really is a donor class in the GOP, big business folks who really are invested in Common Core. What has been happening at the grassroots level that that is now threatening? GOLDSTEIN: You think about the other people in the conservative coalition, for example, Christian conservatives. They have a whole different way of thinking about education. They really prioritize the type of education that happens in the home, the parent-child relationship. When it comes to schools, they`re really into the idea of local. HAYES: Local, local, local. GOLDSTEIN: That`s a big idea on the Left as well. It`s sort of this weird place where the Far Left and the Far Right are coming together in a critique of the Common Core. And that it seems to some people to be a threat to localism. So what you see with the candidates is some folks are going with that more grassroots conservative critique of the Common Core. And others are sticking with what the donor class wants. HAYES: This critique of the Common Core, which there is a lot of grassroots activists on the Left and the Right and there are lots of reasons people don`t like the Common Core, a lot of with it the implementation, a lot of it having to do with the way that the implementation has been tied so tightly to standardized testing, which parents have rebelled against. I think if you just canvas a neighborhood even in upstate New York, people don`t like the Common Core. It has a bad reputation. Are you surprised by how much traction that grassroots opposition has gotten? GOLDSTEIN: If you go back to No Child Left Behind, which was the first time the federal government really pushed big on these yearly standardized tests, at that time you also saw big opposition. More from sort of lefty- type parents who just thought that there was overtesting in the schools. It is not surprising to see a companion movement on the Right. They`re focused less on the critique that maybe arts and music are getting pushed out, although we did hear Carly Fiorina today make a critique like that in this Republican conversation in New Hampshire. They`re focused more on the threat, the idea, in a way, the myth that President Obama himself, that the Obama administration -- (CROSSTALK) HAYES: They call it Obama Core. GOLDSTEIN: -- yes, that they`ve written this set of standards. And that`s actually not true. And if you listen to what Jeb Bush had to say today in New Hampshire, it was so interesting because he spoke about, quote, "academics and experts" as the people who we would look to set standards for our schools. Well, that is definitely the consensus among experts and academics and it has been the bipartisans centrists` idea that we should empower experts to set standards for our schools but aw lot of people don`t agree with that. HAYES: This is the big question. It`s fascinating to watch. The person who comes out as the nominee, do they come out with Common Core support intact? My bet right now -- saying on the TV program is no. GOLDSTEIN: Well, Mitt Romney had to be very careful on this four years ago. HAYES: Yes. Dana Goldstein, thanks for coming. GOLDSTEIN: Thank you, Chris. HAYES: All right. Coming up, hackers release the information of over 30 million users of the extra-marital dating site Ashley Madison. Why this breach is far, far more than just a punchline. That`s ahead. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: Ladies and gentlemen, it may the summer of Trump but things are really looking up for another presidential hopeful. The latest polling in North Carolina shows Donald Trump leading the Republican field there. He`s now at 24 percent. Next comes Ben Carson, who`s also having a very good month, 14 percent; Jeb Bush at 13 percent while Ted Cruz gets 10 percent of Tarheel State support. But it is the sudden surge of a dark horse candidate, an independent that has grabbed people`s attention. Deez Nuts is polling at 9 percent among North Carolina voters. That is when he is presented as a third-party candidate in a Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump match-up. The emergence of Mr. Nuts in the 2016 race is apparently causing some confusion prompting one local television station in Raleigh to issue this tweet, "No, we were not hacked. Deez Nuts is the legal name of the candidate and he is polling at 9 percent in North Carolina." But the saga of Mr. Nuts and his quixotic presidential ambitions does not end there. "The Daily Beast" offers a depressing reveal. Deez Nuts, polling at 9 percent in North Carolina, is not an actual person. He is, who would have thunk it, the creation of a 15-year-old, Brady Olson of Wallingford, Iowa, who filed to run for president with the Federal Election Commission on July 26th as Deez Nuts. Now if you`re concerned that Mr. Olson as Candidate Mr. Nuts are making a mockery of our election system, I would remind you again of who is leading the latest polls. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) (MUSIC PLAYING) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Other than my wife, other than my wife, Ashley Madison is right. I`m looking for someone other than my wife, other than my wife, Ashley Madison is right. HAYES: For more than 10 years the website Ashley Madison has been the most controversial dating site on the Internet. The entire conceit of the business is that it helps people have extra-marital affairs. Their slogan, "Life is short, have an affair," pushes at best a live-and-let-live attitude and at worst a who-cares attitude about betraying and hurting a person you love. Well, now for the millions of people who actually have an account with the service, things have taken a very unsettling and serious turn. You see, news came last month that Ashley Madison had been hacked and at first blush it seemed like one of the many hacks that we`ve seen over the last few months at Target, the Office of Personnel Management, the IRS, millions and millions of people`s information stolen, hacked. And yet all of it always feels like a tree falling in the forest that no one hears, as in, someone out there has some set of people`s personal data. But the effect of them having that data just isn`t immediately clear. And then things took a turn because, yesterday, people saying they were the Ashley Madison hackers dumped 9.7 gigabytes` worth of stolen user account and payment information online, data including login details, e-mail addresses, payment transaction details and encrypted passwords and programmers are already building searchable databases so that actual people today are watching their lives change, a day that for them will suddenly alter everything in the way that can be permanent and profound, that is likely for them a day of genuine misery and crisis for their families because of this hack. For its part, Ashley Madison is obviously crying foul. In a statement that reads in part, "This event is not an act of hacktivism, it is an act of criminality. The criminal or criminals involved in act have appointed themselves as moral judge, juror and executioner, seeing fit to impose a personal notion virtue on all of society. "We are continuing to fully cooperate with law enforcement to seek to hold the guilty parties accountable to the strictest measures of the law." Now this is not some unknown entity in Russia with your credit card information. This is households being broken up, op-ed in "The Post" reporting that law firms like the Manhattan-based divorce firm Yaniv & Associates said they were already experiencing an influx of calls from potential clients. And here`s the thing. This is just a tiny little glimpse of the future that we are all entering. Today it is Ashley Madison. But who knows what it is tomorrow? We`re going to talk about that and what that means when we come back. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) HAYES: Joining me now, John Herrman, co-editor of "The All," who wrote an incisive piece on the subject today and tech journalist Xeni Jardin, founder and editor of "Boing Boing." John, your piece in "The All" was titled something like, you know, welcome to the first day of the rest of the Internet. And you sort of wrote these quick notes, as it was becoming clear this had leaked. And I was one of the people who saw the news and thought, it is like all these hacks, what do I do with it? And you really persuaded me this was a big deal. What do you mean welcome to the first day of the rest of the Internet? JOHN HERRMAN, CO-EDITOR, "THE ALL": I think Ashley Madison is hard to relate to for a lot of people because it is a site you go to to cheat on your spouse. It makes for easy jokes. You think like, oh, divorce lawyers are going to make a lot of money, like you know, it serves them right, whatever. HAYES: And also like, this is karma or your come-uppance because you decided to go do this. HERRMAN: Right. But if you think about it in a more abstract way, Ashley Madison is a website where you go to conduct business that you think is private. Most of the services you use, the big apps that billions of people use depend on relationships like that. Ashley Madison is a site that facilitates transactions that a lot of people would frown upon between two parties. But Facebook is a service that facilitates private transactions between two people that no one would frown on. HAYES: But are still private. HERRMAN: Yes. I don`t know, I think it calls into question a lot of assumptions people have about just how secure communications they`ve taken for granted are. HAYES: Xeni, I keep thinking about, when hacks happen, it is always hard to figure out what the harm is because it never cashes out in quite this way. The two exceptions that are Sony, they got hacked and all of a sudden, everybody`s e-mail was on the Internet and it hurt Sony. It had tangible effects. People got fired. There may be lawsuits from what was in those. We`re seeing Ashley Madison. Is this the future of hacks where it`s not a criminal syndicate in Russia is going to buy your credit card, but this kind of malevolent desire to expose that ends up in a situation like this? XENI JARDIN, FOUNDER AND EDITOR, "BOING BOING": This is definitely the past of hacks. Not all hacks, not all leaks of private data are done for cash profit, for making money. It is really hard to know exactly what the motivations of these hackers were, but look, I have advice for anybody out there, watching the show who wants to get in on some Internet hanky-panky. First, buy a burner phone. And use that as your signup number -- I`m not kidding. You want to also get a gift card at the supermarket cashier, cash register, so your credit card can`t be traced. And use a freaking, anonymous e-mail. Make up a burner e-mail account. We really don`t know how many abusers in this database were in fact actual people and actual users of the site. The real number may be far lower, so it is hard to tell exactly what the damage will be. HAYES: But there was some great reporting at "Fusion" and this to me is what is so chilling about this. Again -- JARDIN: The "Fusion" piece was great. HAYES: It`s that it is tangible. There are actual people who today are having the worst, like, and I`m not even talking about the people who subscribe (INAUDIBLE). I`m talking about maybe their spouses or their kids. Those are actual human beings. This hack, this abstract thing, this data breach is right now the most important life-shaking crisis in those households happening right now. It is a real thing. JARDIN: The crisis began when they reached out to conduct infidelity online, the argument might go. But let`s remember, too, that lots of people have lots of different structures in their marriages. And for some people, maybe this was not cheating at all. Maybe this was part of the private agreement. I think Ashley Madison and their parent company are the real villains here. They actually charged users to -- don`t let Hillary Clinton get confused about this -- but to wipe their data from their servers for a fee. So they took money for that extra service and they didn`t do it, obviously. They didn`t protect their users with some of the profits that they raked in. HAYES: But here`s my question for you, John, like when you talk about this, the next Internet. Everybody, you know, whatever it is, search history, text messages, your inbox, your medical records, IRS. Everybody has some digital trail that they wouldn`t want to be in a torrent file on the Internet that anyone can search and look up. And is that the future? Honestly, is that what it will be? HERRMAN: Well, it is hard to think about this in terms of near future science fiction. You tend to think about low-hanging fruit. What are the most embarrassing things I`ve done online? That`s not really the way to get to the heart of the issue. The most intimate place on the Internet is the Google Search box. The conversations you have with that box are conversations you wouldn`t have with other people. This is the argument you hear a lot from tech, from Silicon Valley about privacy. There is actually a different sort of conception of privacy that the existence of Google, that existence of these centralized platforms that provide an interface, allows people to have new types of privacy. You don`t have to go to the next town over to avoid seeing a doctor whose kid might be in your class, that kind of thing. The flip side of that is that the services that facilitate this have unprecedented amounts of data. And people trust them so deeply that the type of data they`re handing over is new. HAYES: And not only do they trust them so deeply, the thing I kept thinking about here, when I think about other things that are not Ashley Madison, that we all have that we don`t want to be public on the Internet is I have no way of knowing whether it is well protected. That`s the craziest thing. I`m using all this and it`s like, well, I hope the Google engineers are good at their job. John Herrman, Xeni Jardin, thank you very much. All right. That is ALL IN for this evening. "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts now. THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. END