Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some.
Speaker 2: Of today's best minds.
Speaker 1: And Tommy Tubervel called democrats as satanic cult.
Speaker 2: We have such a great show.
Speaker 1: Today, Pivot host Kars Wisher stops by to talk about
Speaker 1: her new book, Burn Book, a.
Speaker 2: Tech Love Story.
Speaker 1: Then we'll talk to Sarah McCammon about her new book,
Speaker 1: The Ex Vangelicals, Loving Living and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.
Speaker 1: But first we have the host of the Enemy's List,
Speaker 1: the Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson.
Speaker 3: Rick Wilson, Wally Jong Fast.
Speaker 1: You know that I'm agitated because it is early in
Speaker 1: the morning and we've already talked.
Speaker 3: We talked this morning, like at seven o five. Good
Speaker 3: morning this morning. But that's because you're the hardest working
Speaker 3: woman in show business and you were up at the
Speaker 3: crackass of dawn to do TV.
Speaker 2: That's not even true.
Speaker 1: But first I want to talk about this week. You know,
Speaker 1: one of the things you and I were talking about
Speaker 1: was whether the her hearing was this week or last week.
Speaker 3: Because we now live in dog years and everything seems
Speaker 3: to go so.
Speaker 1: Fast, I just think there are certain things that are
Speaker 1: getting covered and certain things that are not getting covered.
Speaker 1: And so for example, this weekend, this is gonna air
Speaker 1: on Monday, but on the weekend before Monday, when you
Speaker 1: hear this podcast, there will be in White Sulfur Springs,
Speaker 1: West Virginia, at the Greenbrier, which is owned by Jim Justice,
Speaker 1: the governor of West Virginia, the richest man in West
Speaker 1: or maybe there's someone richer in West Virginia, but one
Speaker 1: of the richest men.
Speaker 3: Was Blankenship Richard than Justice. I don't remember.
Speaker 1: This is a rabbit hole I would love to not
Speaker 1: go down. But this guy, he's the governor of West
Speaker 1: Virginia running for the Senate. And there is a Republican
Speaker 1: congressional retreat and only about half of the Republican congress
Speaker 1: and went because they all hate each other.
Speaker 3: It's the fire Festival of Republican retreats. It's a nightmarish healthscape. Look,
Speaker 3: the Greenbrier has traditionally been where the caucus goes. They
Speaker 3: work out any family business, and they plot and scheme.
Speaker 3: There was a superpower of the Republican Party for a
Speaker 3: very very long time, and that superpower was unity. They
Speaker 3: would say, okay, we all want to get to ex goal,
Speaker 3: and so we're all going to sit down, mid out,
Speaker 3: plot it out. But now the few are normies are
Speaker 3: confronted with the insane people like you know, Matt Gaates,
Speaker 3: Rolaur and Bobert, Martorie Taylor Green, you know, all the
Speaker 3: all the kooks, and they're thinking, is this worth my day?
Speaker 3: Is this worth my time to go out there and
Speaker 3: listen to these absolute morons rant about whatever they're going
Speaker 3: to rant it? Okay, it just it makes no sense
Speaker 3: to humans of a certain basic sanity level.
Speaker 1: You know, Republicans have this very very tiny majority being
Speaker 1: held together by.
Speaker 3: A speaker and glue right.
Speaker 1: And a speaker named Mega Mike Johnson, who has at
Speaker 1: this point is decided that he's going to break up
Speaker 1: all the spending bills into as many fragments as possible
Speaker 1: in the hopes that it will distract people from.
Speaker 2: What's actually in them.
Speaker 1: But on Friday, Ken Buck from Colorado just left Congress
Speaker 1: because he was like.
Speaker 3: We're not listen if you're ken Buck. And by the way,
Speaker 3: no one's going to wake up in the morning and
Speaker 3: go that liberal soro shill ken Buck. Ken Buck was
Speaker 3: a conservative stalwart as you get, but ken Buck has
Speaker 3: realized something, something really important. These people are not conservatives.
Speaker 3: They're insane. They're crazy. They're chewing up the scenery, batshit
Speaker 3: nutbar and he just said I'm done. I'm not going
Speaker 3: to play this game anymore. He doesn't want to be
Speaker 3: associated with these idiots. That leaves them now down to one.
Speaker 3: You got Santos saying he's going to get back in
Speaker 3: and run in the primary against the LOTA in New
Speaker 3: York one, which it's like, yes, Alexa, order all the popcorn.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, in the other room, she's like evena
Speaker 3: er popcorn. That also scares you how like sensitive those
Speaker 3: microphones are because the Alexa echo is in like it's
Speaker 3: like forty feet away anyway. But look, you are seeing
Speaker 3: the devolution and death of the Republican Party. This week.
Speaker 3: They put a bullet in the head of the RNC itself.
Speaker 3: They only got rid of the important parts like the
Speaker 3: political operation, the communications operation, the digital operation, the minority
Speaker 3: outreach operation, and the early voting operation. And what's left
Speaker 3: the money slews back to mar A Lago operation. It
Speaker 3: is now basically an email list. I wrote a piece
Speaker 3: yesterday for SUBSEC called the Maga mafia's bust out of
Speaker 3: the RNC. They are going to strip it, desiccate it.
Speaker 3: They're going to break it apart, suck the marrow out
Speaker 3: of every bone that's left, grind the bones up, make
Speaker 3: them into bread. And when it's done, they'll be selling
Speaker 3: off the office equipment and the furniture in the front
Speaker 3: of three ten South cap.
Speaker 1: As they're stripping away the RNC. One of the things
Speaker 1: that I think is real interesting is that one of
Speaker 1: the people who is now in the employee of the.
Speaker 2: RNC, Christina Bob from an.
Speaker 1: So I mean, then get rid of everyone in fact,
Speaker 1: and there was a really interesting article about this in
Speaker 1: the New York Times this morning which was basically, they
Speaker 1: have moved in this election integrity fiasco, right, And the
Speaker 1: one thing that Trump did, or not the one, but
Speaker 1: one of the many things that Trump did, was that
Speaker 1: he is still trying to prevent free and fair elections.
Speaker 3: What they're saying is that we're going to instead of
Speaker 3: doing early voting and mail in balloting and absentee balloting,
Speaker 3: we're going to focus only on election protection. Quote. What
Speaker 3: that means is there going to become this mothership for
Speaker 3: crack headed adult pated Republican lawyers like Christina Bob. No one,
Speaker 3: Christina Bob is like the Michael Avinatti of Elena Habbas.
Speaker 1: She was also involved in the actions that led to
Speaker 1: the other indictment, signing a sworn Affidavid stating that the
Speaker 1: former president had turned over all classified documents in his possession.
Speaker 3: Uh huh. And somehow she missed the sanity check on
Speaker 3: that one. And she missed the sanity check on that
Speaker 3: one because she's part of Trump's concept of my attorneys
Speaker 3: are here to lie for me. That's not how actual
Speaker 3: legal representation works. As you may have.
Speaker 1: Heard, in early twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, Bob
Speaker 1: worked closely with Trump's top advisors on the hair brand.
Speaker 2: And this is the New York Times Okay.
Speaker 1: Fake electors scheme, which led to one of the two
Speaker 1: federal indictments he faced. So she could actually be in
Speaker 1: the RNC doing more crimes right now.
Speaker 3: Listen, she has a proven track record. I would keep
Speaker 3: an eye on her for matters of defamation from the
Speaker 3: election machine, folks. Yeah, I just keep an eye out
Speaker 3: for that. I don't think she's gonna have an easy
Speaker 3: run of anything in the immediate future.
Speaker 2: It's two things, right.
Speaker 1: One is that she's a moron, and two is that
Speaker 1: she's very embolden.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Look, she is like a lot of attorneys around
Speaker 3: Trump that they believe that there is no consequence to lying.
Speaker 3: They believe that what matters is that they rev up
Speaker 3: the adjic prop machine to keep the fraudental elections line running,
Speaker 3: to keep the Trump was cheated line running. And all
Speaker 3: of it is garbage. All of it is a product
Speaker 3: of a Trump culture that has brought down so many
Speaker 3: people who work for him. I mean, the whole making
Speaker 3: attorneys get attorney's joke is real.
Speaker 1: Let us take a moment to think back to your
Speaker 1: former boss one, Rudolph Giuliani.
Speaker 3: By the end of the year, Rudy's going to be
Speaker 3: on the street in New York selling Lucy's We.
Speaker 2: Don't do that anymore. If only we did.
Speaker 1: But let's talk about this which I think is worth
Speaker 1: talking about, which is Trump is effectively trying to delay.
Speaker 2: All of his trials until after the election.
Speaker 3: And this may have worked, it's not a pretty good
Speaker 3: job of it.
Speaker 2: And when we.
Speaker 1: Talk about our institutions holding, this is a really good
Speaker 1: case of where our institutions.
Speaker 2: If you just push on them a little bit. They
Speaker 2: really don't.
Speaker 3: Hold Yeah, And this was something that one of the
Speaker 3: National Review boys, Dan What's the baseball Crank said the
Speaker 3: other day. You know, Trump and a secondary will be
Speaker 3: constrained by guardrails and institutions. I'm thinking what guardrails? Exactly?
Speaker 3: What guardrails? What institutions? The courts? You think it's going
Speaker 3: to work out for you? And again, one of the
Speaker 3: things that just continues to absolutely row is this concept
Speaker 3: that we're both siding it still, the framing of this
Speaker 3: of like low tax Republican Donald Trump and high tax
Speaker 3: Democrat Joe Biden. Right, It's true that frame is poisonous.
Speaker 3: That is a absolute fantasy. This is autocracy versus democracy.
Speaker 3: This is insanity versus sanity. The coverage of this thing.
Speaker 3: I tweeted this on Friday morning. The people who are
Speaker 3: both sizing this do not seem to understand they're going
Speaker 3: to be up against the wall, either metaphorically or literally
Speaker 3: if Trump has a second term. They're not going to
Speaker 3: get a pass from Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and
Speaker 3: Stephen Miller and Cash Mattel and the rest of these people.
Speaker 3: If they're in power again, they keep saying it out loud.
Speaker 3: You know, well, democracy is nice, but we've got to
Speaker 3: stop the left, whatever it takes.
Speaker 1: So as Trump seeks to lay and your processeecutors offer
Speaker 1: thirty day postponements. So that was the Alvin Bragg election
Speaker 1: interference case.
Speaker 2: That was the only case that was.
Speaker 1: For sure going to happen before the election has now
Speaker 1: been punted thirty days. Now again, we could argue as
Speaker 1: to why it's not entirely clear, but no one is happy,
Speaker 1: including Andrew Weissman and the marl Lago documents case.
Speaker 2: We have Judge Cannon slow rolling it.
Speaker 3: Nobody should be playing this game with Judge Cannon, where
Speaker 3: they saw a couple little things in her latest judgment
Speaker 3: that were like not completely in Trump's bag. Right, she
Speaker 3: is still slow rolling this case. She is still delaying
Speaker 3: this case. As we're recording this, we see that in
Speaker 3: the Fanny Willis case she gets to stay on the case,
Speaker 3: Wade has to go. This is just going to be
Speaker 3: another delay in the Georgia case. Look, the audience may
Speaker 3: not love this, but the Fanny Will's case was the
Speaker 3: internal dynamics there were sloppy and they should have known
Speaker 3: from the beginning that any kind of compromising information would
Speaker 3: come out. I wish that case had been cleanly staffed.
Speaker 1: Yes, but now is a great opportunity to fire the guy,
Speaker 1: because a man is very much not a plan. So
Speaker 1: let's talk a little bit about what you're seeing. Ohio
Speaker 1: is having a primary that is like again, these Trump
Speaker 1: Trump has a slate of candidates and they all continue
Speaker 1: to be some of the worst candidates you've ever seen
Speaker 1: in your life. I want to talk about Ohio and
Speaker 1: North Carolina. Both primaries have benefited from enormous APO dumps recently.
Speaker 3: If you are a hyper maga, super right wing, hyper aggressive,
Speaker 3: manly male human who thinks that we need to return
Speaker 3: to traditional gender roles and all that, and your name
Speaker 3: is Bernie Moreno, and your Trump's hand pick candidate, and
Speaker 3: you suddenly are discovered in an OPO dump to have
Speaker 3: been on a site called adult FriendFinder looking for hot
Speaker 3: mail one on one action. It's all these guys. The
Speaker 3: projection is unbelievable. It's never a drag queen. It's always
Speaker 3: a Republican Trump maga dude, who's still you know, the
Speaker 3: guy with the weird bats. You can't turn a rock
Speaker 3: over on the internet without a Democrat or without a
Speaker 3: Republican screaming that you're a pedophile or a groomor right
Speaker 3: certains out. You know, the calls are coming from inside
Speaker 3: the ouse. But yeah, look, Ohios had a couple surprises
Speaker 3: in the last two years on choice and on redistricting
Speaker 3: and some other things. And I have to tell you
Speaker 3: the opening of Trump campaigning for a guy who turns
Speaker 3: out to be another Republican weirdo. Take the win, have
Speaker 3: some fun with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, well, here's the big question is I
Speaker 1: would say, does he still win the primary? And if
Speaker 1: he does win the primary, do voters care? Like Ohio's
Speaker 1: very red share, od Brown is running for reelection. He's
Speaker 1: kind of once in a generation candidate that tends not
Speaker 1: to be subjected.
Speaker 2: You know, if anyone's gonna win that seat, it's going
Speaker 2: to be shared on.
Speaker 1: But like, I'm curious if you think this guy is
Speaker 1: going to win the primary.
Speaker 2: So the primary is Tuesday in Ohio.
Speaker 1: Yeah, God forbid, it should be Saturday when people can
Speaker 1: actually go.
Speaker 3: Matt Dolan is as like a basic bitch, you know,
Speaker 3: pumpkin spice, latte ug boot Republican that you know, Dwine
Speaker 3: and Rob Portman and Mitch McConnell and all these other
Speaker 3: guys want it okay, and he's rich, he's out spending
Speaker 3: everybody else in the field. Club for Growth loves him,
Speaker 3: but Trump loves Moreno. And as we've seen in a
Speaker 3: lot of these primaries, you know you're gonna have Morenos
Speaker 3: out with jd Vance and Donald Trump and all the
Speaker 3: sort of maga world, all of our maga sort of
Speaker 3: you know, coop demo of Maga activist types are out
Speaker 3: there campaigning for Moreno. And if Dolan wins the primary,
Speaker 3: somehow those people are gonna say, meh, maybe not. Because
Speaker 3: Trump voters vote for the person Trump told them to
Speaker 3: vote for. This is the same thing you're going to
Speaker 3: see in Pennsylvania. You know, if Trump doesn't completely like
Speaker 3: blow the horn for Dave McCormick, they may shrug. The
Speaker 3: interesting part of this, there's an argument, not a big one,
Speaker 3: but an argument that even though Ohio is a red state,
Speaker 3: you end up if you've got Moreno on the top
Speaker 3: of the ticket. Who is aside from just the adult
Speaker 3: friend find herself who is a genuine whackad, He's a genuine,
Speaker 3: genuine crazy person. You end up with a situation where
Speaker 3: maybe Republican turnouts down a little bit in Ohio. Maybe
Speaker 3: Trump has to start spending money in Ohio.
Speaker 2: I like that math I like that too, and so
Speaker 2: we'll see what happens.
Speaker 1: But it is interesting to see this appo go out
Speaker 1: right before the primary. There's some sort of whispers that
Speaker 1: Joe Manchin is saying he might actually now run again
Speaker 1: in West Virginia. We haven't talked that much about West Virginia,
Speaker 1: but right now, don blanket shief, he is a Democrat.
Speaker 2: I swear to God.
Speaker 1: Jim Justice, who's term limited out as governor, is going
Speaker 1: to run as a Republican. There's a world in which
Speaker 1: Mansion gets in there and wins.
Speaker 3: Right Listen, if there's a Democrat who can win West Virginia,
Speaker 3: it is still Joe Manchell. Yeah, that's just real talk.
Speaker 2: And he knows he's not going to be president.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Look, that's why he said no to the fraudulent
Speaker 3: garbage from No Labels, Because e did Joe Manchin, a
Speaker 3: guy not exactly what we think of as a paragody
Speaker 3: moral virtue, looked at No Labels and said, Wow, this
Speaker 3: drug deal is too skanky for me.
Speaker 1: No, thank you do you think Rick Wilson that No
Speaker 1: Labels like they clearly want all of us to think
Speaker 1: they're running a candidate, But do you think they're They're
Speaker 1: ultimately just can't find anyone.
Speaker 3: They just can't find anybody. Everyone they've gone to and
Speaker 3: they made a big mistake, like they would say, like, well,
Speaker 3: Nikki Haley's getting out, so she's going to be a
Speaker 3: No Label's candidate, And over and over people are like,
Speaker 3: the fuck are you talking about. I have no interest
Speaker 3: in getting involved with you. They are going to have
Speaker 3: a candidate, and it's going to be some statewide official
Speaker 3: somewhere who has been retired for twenty five years, heard
Speaker 3: of no one's ever heard of in today's modern era.
Speaker 3: These are really garbage people. They're really really bad people.
Speaker 3: And you know what, the collapse of No Labels is
Speaker 3: happening fast behind the scenes. We have three or four
Speaker 3: people inside that world that are talking to us now
Speaker 3: telling us how bad and how chaotic it is. And
Speaker 3: no matter what Nancy Jacobson and Mark Penn believe their
Speaker 3: revenge fantasy against the Democratic Party would be, it's not working.
Speaker 3: It's just broken. Their whole thing is based on a
Speaker 3: series of lies. If you look at their electoral map,
Speaker 3: they say that the No Labels candidate will win in
Speaker 3: Florida and also that the No Labels candidate will beat
Speaker 3: Joe Biden in his home state of Delaware. And I'm like, y'all,
Speaker 3: crack kills. You know this from the eighties and nineties.
Speaker 3: Stop it. It's all based on a lie. It's all
Speaker 3: based on an attempt to spoil the election for Trump,
Speaker 3: and the up and that they will receive is coming
Speaker 3: and coming quick.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Rick Wilson, You are welcome.
Speaker 1: Kara Swisher is the host of Pivot and the author
Speaker 1: of Burn Book, a Tech Love Story.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Speaker 4: Kara Swisher, Hi, how you doing good.
Speaker 1: There's a paragraph in your book that is like, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm married to an ed tech VC, so I have
Speaker 1: for a long time been exposed to the real stupid
Speaker 1: side of Silicon Valley as well as the smart side.
Speaker 2: So I wanted to read this paragraph. But then we
Speaker 2: have a lot I want to talk to you about.
Speaker 1: Okay, but I love this so much because it is
Speaker 1: actually completely right. Over the years, Silicon Valley has become
Speaker 1: full of smart people working on stupid things like online laundry,
Speaker 1: food delivery apps, and weird hookup software, so much so
Speaker 1: that I've taken to describing the world they're creating is
Speaker 1: assisted living for millennials.
Speaker 3: It's so true.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there you go. That's why I write, because I
Speaker 4: write words that are true. I don't know what to say. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they created a lot of apps. I got a little
Speaker 4: tired of all the apps that were making like digital
Speaker 4: dry cleaning, digital cleaning service, digital you know, kombucha delivery,
Speaker 4: things like that. It's all whatever.
Speaker 1: Good for them, but it is like PetFood, dot compats,
Speaker 1: dot com. It was during the tech boom, but it
Speaker 1: also that kind of like mushrooming continued and it still continues.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: No, Actually, they're working on some very significant things around
Speaker 4: AI's it's a little more serious and so you're not
Speaker 4: seeing that out of AI right now. You know, there
Speaker 4: will be all kinds of applications and companies, but right
Speaker 4: now it's rather serious stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, I wasn't saying in AI, but I was saying
Speaker 1: just in general. There's still like an idea is followed
Speaker 1: and then there are multiple kind of echoes of it.
Speaker 4: Yes, like you can see it in AI. Everyone's jumping
Speaker 4: in they were in crypto and then they jumped to
Speaker 4: this And that's the nature of Silicon Valley. You know,
Speaker 4: it's a little like Hollywood. You know, suddenly everybody's doing
Speaker 4: a monster movie or whatever happens to be what was successful.
Speaker 1: So much of this book is about the sort of
Speaker 1: rise of tech, right, this wave of tech. The thing
Speaker 1: that I have, like as a bee in my bonnet,
Speaker 1: is just how government has an American government because in
Speaker 1: Europe there is more regulation.
Speaker 2: You can like it or not like it.
Speaker 4: There certainly is. I just interviewed my grade to Vestitur,
Speaker 4: who just they just brought into effect two very important
Speaker 4: acts around content moderation and also antitrusts that are very significant.
Speaker 4: And she just find Apple over two billion dollars. Before that,
Speaker 4: she had done a number of things as the competition
Speaker 4: minister there in the EU. And so yeah, they've done
Speaker 4: a ton of stuff. Europe's done a ton of stuff.
Speaker 4: So of other countries, Canada, Australia, but except the US,
Speaker 4: US has done none. So why money power influence the
Speaker 4: fact that we have such a dysfunctional government at the
Speaker 4: very time that tech becomes ascended. I suppose if this
Speaker 4: had happened during I don't know. The railroad era be everybody.
Speaker 4: Railroads would run everything in our country right because there
Speaker 4: wasn't enough of a backbone by regulators to do something.
Speaker 4: But right now they can't. You know, they can't do
Speaker 4: anything with pass legislation to ban TikTok, although I support
Speaker 4: it actually in some fashion, not the way they're doing it. Look,
Speaker 4: they can't do anything, and this is important. The legislations
Speaker 4: that are at an all time low ken Buck, very articulated.
Speaker 4: Is nothing's happening up there. They just performative dunk artists.
Speaker 1: That was something I've been thinking a lot about through
Speaker 1: so many of these sort of hearings, it would seem
Speaker 1: like there are easy places to start with tech regulation.
Speaker 2: So if you were the American government, where would you start?
Speaker 4: I wrote a column god back way long time ago
Speaker 4: twenty eighteen, called it the Internet Bill of Rights and
Speaker 4: put up ten ideas for it. One would be the
Speaker 4: National Privacy Bill, it's almost too late now. The other
Speaker 4: would be a bill to algorithm transparency and new antitrust regulations,
Speaker 4: to update anti trust regulations, anti hiking disclosure laws, child protection.
Speaker 4: There is one right now. We'll see where it goes.
Speaker 4: It's been problematic, but a good one. Actually, we could
Speaker 4: do one two a tax bill, tax the rich, that
Speaker 4: kind of thing. There's a dozen that I would pass.
Speaker 2: Explain does what the net issue here?
Speaker 1: Is it privacy or is it protection for online people?
Speaker 4: It's anything like what's the issue when you're regulating planes, radars?
Speaker 4: It's safety, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's just everything.
Speaker 4: Every other major industry is regulated in numerous aspects, and
Speaker 4: this one is not at all. And the legislation that
Speaker 4: does exist protects it Section two thirty for most of it.
Speaker 4: You can't sue them either, so there's no liability. It's
Speaker 4: a perfect storm in so many ways.
Speaker 1: I mean two thirty is like one of these things
Speaker 1: that is a constant, like talking about it forever. And
Speaker 1: people on one side believe that if you repeal it,
Speaker 1: then you have a shit storm that is created from that.
Speaker 1: People on another side believe you have to repeal it.
Speaker 1: Where do you come down on two thirday?
Speaker 4: You can't repeal it. No, it's again, it's not reductive
Speaker 4: like that. You can't like repeal it. It will cause
Speaker 4: like unlimited damage, and so you have to figure out
Speaker 4: a way to be able to sue these companies, like
Speaker 4: those parents who show their pictures to Mark Zuckerberg can't
Speaker 4: sue him. They can't sue them unless it's for copyright violation.
Speaker 4: They should be able to sue him on something they
Speaker 4: might lose. But there should be an ability to sue
Speaker 4: these companies for their practices, just like you can sue
Speaker 4: anybody else for their practices. And you might not like lawyers,
Speaker 4: but they don't have to deal with them in any
Speaker 4: way at all. I mean a little bit for things,
Speaker 4: but not in the way other companies have to.
Speaker 1: When it comes to the anonymity issue, do you think
Speaker 1: trying to create less anonymity on the Internet it would
Speaker 1: solve problems?
Speaker 2: Or now?
Speaker 4: No, you know, I don't think that's really at the
Speaker 4: center of our problems. They're gonna have that on the
Speaker 4: Internet no matter how you slice it, and it's already
Speaker 4: baked in, so it doesn't matter at this point. I
Speaker 4: guess real names are better. You know, we know Elon's
Speaker 4: Musk's name on the Internet. He doesn't behave any better,
Speaker 4: so I don't know why that would.
Speaker 2: Solve the problem.
Speaker 1: Are you surprised about what Elon Musk has become or
Speaker 1: not really.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, of course I am. He was different and
Speaker 4: now he's not. You know, people change. I guess I
Speaker 4: don't know what to say. You know, I think incredible
Speaker 4: wealth seeing him ounts of wealth and the kind of
Speaker 4: need for him to have affirmation in a quantum way
Speaker 4: is and COVID and you know, you've read about some
Speaker 4: of his issues at Wall Street Channel around drug use.
Speaker 4: You know, I think it all comes together. When you
Speaker 4: get treated like he does, you're in desperate need of
Speaker 4: that constantly.
Speaker 1: He has so much control, not just Twitter, but but SpaceX.
Speaker 4: And you know, yeah, he does, he has control. You know,
Speaker 4: you know he's going to face real challenges at Tesla
Speaker 4: that's already're already seeing that because competitors and there's not
Speaker 4: enough consumer demand right now because given how many competitors
Speaker 4: there are, there will be and he's far ahead, but
Speaker 4: he's far had in the market that is slowing down
Speaker 4: rather considerably. That's one SpaceX obviously is going to go public.
Speaker 4: That'll give him a lot of money. That said, there's
Speaker 4: going to be a lot more competition and some challenges
Speaker 4: from the government if he keeps, you know, up his
Speaker 4: antics and they determine that you know that he can't
Speaker 4: have his clearances, but that's already it could be run
Speaker 4: by someone else, Fine, he'll still own it. And then
Speaker 4: there's Twitter, which seems to occupy a lot of his time,
Speaker 4: although apparently he doesn't sleep, which is another issue. He
Speaker 4: should sleep. And so you know, Twitter has really ruined
Speaker 4: his reputation in so many ways with people who really
Speaker 4: were admirers.
Speaker 2: It didn't solve anything. If anything, it made his life
Speaker 2: much more difficult.
Speaker 4: He made his life much more difficult. It didn't make
Speaker 4: his life more difficult, but being famous, Yeah, no, I
Speaker 4: mean I think he's changed too. I think he's I
Speaker 4: think people who know him. I just had an interesting
Speaker 4: conversation with the Sam Altman at one of my book events,
Speaker 4: and you know, we talked about that. He said, I
Speaker 4: like the old Elon, and so do I. I didn't
Speaker 4: like him as much as Sam did.
Speaker 1: But it seems like a lot of people on the
Speaker 1: Republican side would love him to get more into Yeah.
Speaker 4: I don't think he cares about anything. He'll screw them
Speaker 4: just like he screws whoever. He just doesn't have any
Speaker 4: loyalty to any except himself. He's loyal to himself.
Speaker 2: You don't think he secures trump'sponder.
Speaker 4: He might. He might, I don't know. If it amuses him,
Speaker 4: he will. One of the things that was really interesting
Speaker 4: was like, was he like this this right wing? I
Speaker 4: was like, I didn't know what his politics were. I
Speaker 4: honestly didn't. I did know what a lot of other people's,
Speaker 4: but he didn't know. You know, he had voted for
Speaker 4: I know, he liked Obama. He got mad at Biden
Speaker 4: because Biden didn't invite him to some car contact that
Speaker 4: he had, And that was the heart of this, that's
Speaker 4: at the heart of this. He's Janesee and he got
Speaker 4: picked last at basketball, you know, that kind of thing.
Speaker 4: And he was pissed at this right word shift. You know,
Speaker 4: a lot of people have become especially mad, had become
Speaker 4: radicalized by online conspiracy stuffs, and there he is. He's
Speaker 4: not like different than anybody else. I don't know. I
Speaker 4: think he'd screw them just as much as joined with them.
Speaker 4: Whatever he needs, he will do. That's what it is.
Speaker 4: It is in his self interest. He will do it.
Speaker 4: If he needs to use Trump to protect himself at
Speaker 4: SpaceX wherever, he'll do that. But he certainly he has
Speaker 4: no commitments to end eating that you would that are
Speaker 4: actually principal. He says he does free speech, he's reach
Speaker 4: free speech, but then he like bands people and stuff,
Speaker 4: So honestly.
Speaker 2: It's not really about free speech, right or he thinks
Speaker 2: it is.
Speaker 4: No, what's about Elon Musk. Let's just be clear, like
Speaker 4: whatever's good for him is what he'll do. And he
Speaker 4: talks a big launchline on free speech and that he
Speaker 4: acts differently, so you know that's what he does. He's
Speaker 4: not a serious person, as we say on succession, he's
Speaker 4: not a serious person.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you about the Claudian gay stuff
Speaker 1: because that strikes short as like a moment when tech
Speaker 1: bros decided It does seem to me like a lot
Speaker 1: of these tech guys sort of feel that they know better.
Speaker 4: Than they do that all the time they do that,
Speaker 4: they talk about things they have no knowledge of. In
Speaker 4: this case, it was Bill Ackman, who's you know, right
Speaker 4: up in the grill with them. You know, they're they're
Speaker 4: like in a cuddle puddle of toxicness together. Black's perfect.
Speaker 4: He's a really rich guy who gave money to Harvard
Speaker 4: and thinks he's an expert on diversity inclusion. Well, you
Speaker 4: know I has been joking on this book tour that
Speaker 4: I'm going to do a ninety parts series on hedge
Speaker 4: fund investing, about which I know nothing, But that does
Speaker 4: not going to stop me from hang angry about my wife,
Speaker 4: the hedge fun person whatever, I don't. You know they
Speaker 4: do that. They're like pontificating on Ukraine or you know, geopolitics.
Speaker 4: It's laughable. It's laughable. There's ridiculous rich people who have
Speaker 4: a lot of time on their hands, who you know,
Speaker 4: because they're good at one thing, they think they're good
Speaker 4: at another and they're not. They're just not. They're incompetent.
Speaker 1: But Ackman created a belief among a certain group of people.
Speaker 1: And again, I'm not at Harvard, and so I am
Speaker 1: not read in enough.
Speaker 4: Look, they have problems at Harvard. We're not dismissing the
Speaker 4: problems at Harvard. But honestly, why are we talking about
Speaker 4: Harvard this much like everyone wants to get into Harvard
Speaker 4: and they hate Harvard, but let's stop talking about Harvard.
Speaker 4: There are serious issues about speech on campus we should addressed,
Speaker 4: and it's an important issue. I'm not dismissing as an issue.
Speaker 4: It's just that you know, in this case. You know,
Speaker 4: they had a gotcha on her and she had been
Speaker 4: sloppy and she got caught. You know, she's in the
Speaker 4: wrong place at the right time, are the right place
Speaker 4: at the wrong time. Whatever, you know, she got caught
Speaker 4: in it and sort of was a mob. It was
Speaker 4: a mob because she didn't answer it quite the way
Speaker 4: they wanted to, and she did answer badly. So if
Speaker 4: you're at that high level, you have to answer well.
Speaker 4: So that's too bad for her. I feel bad for her.
Speaker 4: But honestly, if you take that job, you got to
Speaker 4: really know how to do that job.
Speaker 1: It was an interesting moment that testimony because it was
Speaker 1: one of the few times you really saw Republicans just
Speaker 1: get lucky, right, I mean, at least Stephonic.
Speaker 4: No, it wasn't lucky. They just well, yeah, she's a
Speaker 4: terrible person. Whatever.
Speaker 1: But she had this moment where if she asked this question,
Speaker 1: and obviously, you know, anyone who has a soul knows
Speaker 1: that anti Semitism is bad, just like Islamophobia is bad.
Speaker 4: And they just couldn't answer the question. They have been like,
Speaker 4: I don't know why they couldn't. I think they were trying.
Speaker 4: They had been prepared from a legal point of view
Speaker 4: and were trying to like cross all their t's. I
Speaker 4: don't know, you know, they didn't understand that it was
Speaker 4: a PR stunt by police, staphonic and they should have said,
Speaker 4: of course, we hate hate just like you, at least
Speaker 4: not really. I might have made a reference to Donald
Speaker 4: Trump at that moment, go well, at least just like
Speaker 4: what he said about this, you know, just like we
Speaker 4: don't think Mexican's are rapists, you know, like some people do.
Speaker 4: Just like we don't think you know, this and this
Speaker 4: and this, we think this is terrible too. That's would
Speaker 4: have been the answer.
Speaker 1: It did seem like corporate speak versus like just actual speak.
Speaker 4: Right people in Congress have no interest in actually doing
Speaker 4: anything of significance right now. So that's where we are
Speaker 4: with them, and so that's what they'll do. You know.
Speaker 4: She's obviously trying out for vice president of the United States,
Speaker 4: which let's let's see, she gets it. He's not.
Speaker 2: She's not when you get she's a really low someme care.
Speaker 4: She's you know, when they said, you know, you hate
Speaker 4: to say this, but she's really unpleasant, like as a person,
Speaker 4: what man or woman, you know, she's you know, Barack
Speaker 4: Obama justifiably got in pillory for saying, you know, Hillary
Speaker 4: Clinton was likable enough, but it struck home for some people,
Speaker 4: of course, But she's just unlikable as a man or
Speaker 4: a woman. You can't be unlikable if you want to
Speaker 4: have everybody vote.
Speaker 1: When you look at this TikTok bill, basically they didn't
Speaker 1: have any lobbyists, right, And I mean that's what they know.
Speaker 4: They completely did, They completely did. It's it's just it's
Speaker 4: an emotional argument, and it's actually a real one. Four
Speaker 4: or five, six years ago, I can't remember, I wrote
Speaker 4: a column saying I love TikTok. It's the best new
Speaker 4: app right when it got started to get popular. But
Speaker 4: I use it on a burner phone because Chinese Communist
Speaker 4: Party CCP, and it's there are national security concerns. They
Speaker 4: just the government has to make the case for it
Speaker 4: in that regard and then point out very pertinent things
Speaker 4: is our social media sites can't operate in China. They're
Speaker 4: not allowed there. It's a different site in China. We
Speaker 4: have to be able not just to prove that they're
Speaker 4: manipulating propaganda and they're doing surveillance or Propaganda's enough any
Speaker 4: one of them is enough, which they are. I'm sorry
Speaker 4: they are, just you can see it on the site.
Speaker 4: But that they're doing it in a systemic way, that's
Speaker 4: another issue, and that why should we let them do this.
Speaker 4: We can't own the Washington Post, they can't own CNN,
Speaker 4: they're not allowed. Why are they allowed to use a
Speaker 4: service that media media company. It's an entertainment company that
Speaker 4: has one hundred and seventy million people using it. Just
Speaker 4: we don't let foreign ownership, you know, neither can the
Speaker 4: Germans own it whatever. So I don't know. I just
Speaker 4: feel like it's kind of we sh have to focus
Speaker 4: in on the fact that we're not allowed to operate
Speaker 4: in China in the same way they're allowed to operate here,
Speaker 4: and it's a potential. I cannot imagine they're not using
Speaker 4: it the way we think they're using it, and that
Speaker 4: needs to be proven by our government.
Speaker 2: Kar Swisher, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Sarah McCammon is a national political correspondent for MPR and
Speaker 1: author of the x Vangelicals, Loving Living and Leaving the
Speaker 1: White Evangelical Church Welcome Too Fast Politics.
Speaker 4: Sarah, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1: Molly you're a politics supporter at MPR. Why did you
Speaker 1: decide to write this book?
Speaker 5: Well, mostly because I had this weird and sometimes uncomfortable
Speaker 5: and kind of unexpected clash rise between my personal backstory
Speaker 5: as somebody who grew up in the evangelical movement in
Speaker 5: the eighties and nineties and my professional life covering the
Speaker 5: Trump campaign in twenty sixteen and everything since. You know,
Speaker 5: in some ways I got into journalism to try to
Speaker 5: get away from all of that. And that might sound contradictory,
Speaker 5: but I didn't want to work in like an ideological space.
Speaker 5: I really just wanted to be in a space where
Speaker 5: I could ask questions and it was okay to ask questions,
Speaker 5: because growing up I felt like there were a lot
Speaker 5: of answers but not a lot of questions.
Speaker 4: So I covered all kinds of things.
Speaker 5: I covered like water issues in Nebraska and wind farms
Speaker 5: and the coast. And then all of a sudden, I'm
Speaker 5: recruited to NPR in twenty fifteen to cover the twenty
Speaker 5: sixteen campaign. I'm assigned to the Republican primary. And who
Speaker 5: am I covering ultimately? But Donald Trump? And what's the
Speaker 5: big story? It's what are white evangelicals going to do
Speaker 5: about this guy. So I've spent a lot of time
Speaker 5: thinking about that ever since, and I get a lot
Speaker 5: of questions about it, and I decided to write a
Speaker 5: book to kind of try to answer some of those questions.
Speaker 2: Talk to us about your own experience with the evangelical church.
Speaker 5: I was born about two weeks after Ronald Reagan was
Speaker 5: first sworn in, So I'm like an old, old millennial
Speaker 5: when I was growing up, you know, I was not
Speaker 5: everybody's evangelical experience is the same, but for me, I
Speaker 5: was absolutely ensconced in an evangelical world. And I think
Speaker 5: a lot of the evangelical kids of my time were
Speaker 5: two because you know, this was a time when the
Speaker 5: moral majority was rising, when the sort of political machine
Speaker 5: was being built around the evangelical Christian movement. There were
Speaker 5: Christian schools and homeschooling were huge trends, and you know,
Speaker 5: I was educated entirely in Christian school. We went to
Speaker 5: church every Sunday. Most of the entertainment and information that
Speaker 5: came into our house, much of it was curated through
Speaker 5: an evangelical lens. So we're talking like a special teen
Speaker 5: magazine for evangelical kids. Produced by Focus on the Family,
Speaker 5: Christian Radio Christian TV. I had some exposure to the
Speaker 5: outside world, but it was all kind of carefully curated,
Speaker 5: and I was protected from a lot of things. A
Speaker 5: lot of things were seen as bad influences, and we
Speaker 5: were also taught that we were expected to try to,
Speaker 5: you know, save the world and evangelize with that. There
Speaker 5: was a clear sort of political project that was increasingly
Speaker 5: aligned throughout my childhood with that theological belief system.
Speaker 1: God.
Speaker 2: Did your parents grow up that way or did they convert?
Speaker 4: Neither one of them really did.
Speaker 5: I mean, my mom was raised Lutheran, like all of
Speaker 5: her ancestors. Her people were like German Lutheran immigrants, and
Speaker 5: so that was a pretty conservative tradition. But like it
Speaker 5: was also just kind of the culture. My dad's family
Speaker 5: was really not very religious. I think they sometimes attended
Speaker 5: like a mainline church on occasion, but it wasn't a
Speaker 5: big part of their lives. I think they both kind
Speaker 5: of got caught up in the Jesus movement in the seventies,
Speaker 5: and you know, this was a time when young people
Speaker 5: who were you know, baby boomers were young at the time, right,
Speaker 5: were really influenced by the Jesus movement.
Speaker 4: There was a lot of sort of youth group activity.
Speaker 5: From what I understand of their story, they had an
Speaker 5: experience that evangelicals describe as getting saved, giving their lives
Speaker 5: to Jesus through experiences they had with other Christian teens
Speaker 5: in youth groups and Bible studies and things like that,
Speaker 5: and it totally changed the direction of their lives and
Speaker 5: shaped everything about the way that they would raise their family.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a really common story, but it is
Speaker 1: just really meaningful.
Speaker 2: Tell our listeners a little bit.
Speaker 1: About how you kind of came away from that and
Speaker 1: broke out of that, and do you have siblings and
Speaker 1: are they still in it.
Speaker 4: I do have siblings, They're in or out to various degrees.
Speaker 5: And I interviewed my brother for the book, who talked
Speaker 5: a lot about just the stress that we both felt
Speaker 5: because of this pressure to sort of convert everyone make
Speaker 5: sure everyone was saved. A central character in the book
Speaker 5: is my grandfather, who was one of very few people
Speaker 5: we knew who wasn't an evangelical, wasn't a Christian of
Speaker 5: any kind, and we would pray for his soul at
Speaker 5: dinner almost.
Speaker 4: Every night before we as we prayed over the.
Speaker 5: Spaghetti or the lasagna. We'd also pray that Grandpa would
Speaker 5: get saved. And you know, for me, that was a
Speaker 5: huge source of cognitive dissonance. It was something that always
Speaker 5: presented a real foil to the things I was being
Speaker 5: taught and forced me to reckon with the fact that
Speaker 5: there were people who were different. I talk about learning
Speaker 5: a little bit later in my childhood that my grandpa
Speaker 5: also had come out as gay after my grandmother passed away,
Speaker 5: and so that added an extra layer of excitement tension
Speaker 5: to the family dynamic. But you know, one of the
Speaker 5: things I sort of discovered and that prompted me to
Speaker 5: write this book was that there were lots of people
Speaker 5: sort of of my generation, a little older, some a
Speaker 5: little younger, some who had grown up in this evangelical world,
Speaker 5: had been shaped by this subculture and were also in
Speaker 5: many cases in the wake of sort of the Trump
Speaker 5: moment that forced such a reckoning with what it meant
Speaker 5: to be an evangelical. But there were other people who
Speaker 5: were having conversations about these experiences. Many times in social
Speaker 5: media spaces, in podcasts, people were using hashtags like exvangelical
Speaker 5: to describe you know, what it was like to once
Speaker 5: be part of that subculture and then to in one
Speaker 5: way or another sort of reckon with it and deconstruct it,
Speaker 5: think it through and come out the other side.
Speaker 1: Do you think that Trump made a lot of evangelicals
Speaker 1: leave the party or Now.
Speaker 4: That's hard to say.
Speaker 5: I mean, there are so many different things happening at
Speaker 5: once when I look at the data around that question.
Speaker 5: On the one hand, white evangelicalism is shrinking and has
Speaker 5: been for a long time, and so you can't attribute
Speaker 5: all of that to Donald Trump. The country is becoming
Speaker 5: less religious overall, the group of people. You probably saw
Speaker 5: that study that got a lot of attention, and it
Speaker 5: should because it's important. You know, the Pew study recently
Speaker 5: that found that people who identify as nothing at all,
Speaker 5: the nuns in onees are now a larger share of
Speaker 5: the population than white evangelicals, which some of those I
Speaker 5: guarantee were once white evangelicals or came from a white
Speaker 5: evangelical background when you consider just the size of that
Speaker 5: demographic in the country, So there's a lot of shifting
Speaker 5: going on. There's also some interesting data from a few
Speaker 5: years ago that suggests that some people, even as you know,
Speaker 5: white evangelicalism in white Christianity decline as a share of
Speaker 5: the population. That some people are newly identifying as evangelical
Speaker 5: because of Trump, because they like that message. And so,
Speaker 5: you know, from my research and from talking to people,
Speaker 5: the sense that I come away with is that evangelical
Speaker 5: increasingly has It's always had kind of a political connotation
Speaker 5: my whole life, but increasingly that is front and center.
Speaker 5: And so if people use that word more often than not,
Speaker 5: that means they are, you know, fairly right wing Republican.
Speaker 5: There are exceptions, It's not one hundred percent, but there's
Speaker 5: just an increasing alignment between those terms.
Speaker 4: And so I think for people who who retain.
Speaker 5: Some kind of faith or Christian belief or what have you,
Speaker 5: who don't subscribe to the rest of that, you see
Speaker 5: people the people I've talked to sort of wrestling with
Speaker 5: what to call themselves and where they go next.
Speaker 1: There aren't a critical mass of white evangelicals who were
Speaker 1: so turned off by Trump that they became Biden voters.
Speaker 5: I think that people tend to not call themselves evangelical
Speaker 5: anymore if that's where they're at. I mean, there's always
Speaker 5: been about twenty percent of the white evangelical base that
Speaker 5: hasn't voted for Trump. But I think you know, I
Speaker 5: covered the Nicki Haley campaign, so I met some people
Speaker 5: in that category. I mean, all sorts of religious backgrounds
Speaker 5: or otherwise. But there's just not a huge market for it.
Speaker 5: But you know what I think is interesting is as
Speaker 5: we go forward and we see these shifts continue to happen,
Speaker 5: where the country becomes more diverse and also less religious,
Speaker 5: which are two separate trends. I should be clear not
Speaker 5: to say that more diverse people are religious, because often
Speaker 5: some of the growth in Christianity is really in the
Speaker 5: more diverse churches. I'm really curious about what that means
Speaker 5: for our politics, right because of white evangelicalism has been
Speaker 5: such a huge voting block for the Republican Party. You
Speaker 5: know what I say in the book is we're seeing
Speaker 5: a lot of shifts, a lot of cross currents, shifts
Speaker 5: in the way that people describe themselves, shifts in religious identification.
Speaker 5: And you know, at some point, I don't think that
Speaker 5: the white, even deelible base is going to be the
Speaker 5: reliable mobilizing force for the Republican Party that it has
Speaker 5: been in the past.
Speaker 4: When that tipping point occurs.
Speaker 5: I don't know, but I think that, you know, some
Speaker 5: of these conversations are part of that picture, that bigger picture.
Speaker 1: A lot of times we'll talk about white evangelical voters
Speaker 1: voting for Trump, and we'll talk about how they kind
Speaker 1: of made a deal with Trump for the judges and
Speaker 1: the policy right, that they took policy over personality versus
Speaker 1: everyone else who voted for Trump who took personality over policy. Also,
Speaker 1: do you think that a that that's true and b
Speaker 1: that they feel they got a good deal.
Speaker 5: I think it's true that they made a deal with Trump,
Speaker 5: but I think the reluctance with which that deal was
Speaker 5: made has been somewhat exaggerated. I think there's a misconception that,
Speaker 5: you know, Trump sort of hijacked the evangelical movement, that
Speaker 5: it's like this host parasite relationship. But I think it's
Speaker 5: much more of a partnership than that. I mean, I
Speaker 5: certainly met many conservative Christian voters in twenty sixteen who
Speaker 5: would say things like I'm going to have to hold
Speaker 5: my nose and vote for Trump.
Speaker 4: You know, I don't really like the way he tweets.
Speaker 5: I wish he wouldn't tweet so much, but you know,
Speaker 5: he's the guy who aligns with my policies.
Speaker 4: And I get that. I mean, there's a logic to that, I.
Speaker 5: Suppose, But I think when you fast forward and you
Speaker 5: see in twenty twenty four that white evangelicals were a
Speaker 5: huge force once again in the Republican primary, and I'm
Speaker 5: sure you saw the same exapoles I did, instrumental in
Speaker 5: the early voting states and making Trump the presumptive nominee.
Speaker 4: I don't get the sense that there.
Speaker 5: You know, there have been so many articles written about like,
Speaker 5: when is the evangelical movement going to move away from Trump?
Speaker 4: Is there a fracturing? There's really not.
Speaker 5: I think all that's happened is that the people who
Speaker 5: aren't of that mindset just don't use that label anymore.
Speaker 5: And that label just means increasingly it means Trump isn't.
Speaker 5: I don't think it's what a lot of people would
Speaker 5: like it to mean, but it does increasingly have that association.
Speaker 5: Do they like the deal that they got? I think
Speaker 5: by and large yes. I mean, the reality is that
Speaker 5: Trump made promises. Trump needed a voting block, he needed
Speaker 5: a base. Evangelicals needed someone to carry forward their agenda.
Speaker 5: It was kind of a match. I don't want to
Speaker 5: say made in heaven.
Speaker 2: No, but I get it.
Speaker 1: I get what you're saying that it was as much
Speaker 1: they are doing as it was his.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know, he crafted his messaging to them,
Speaker 5: He courted evangelical leaders, and he made promises, which many
Speaker 5: of which he kept to evangelicals. Right, he was instrumental
Speaker 5: in the overturning of Roe Vade. So I think they're
Speaker 5: by and large very happy with that. And again, I
Speaker 5: think that's reflected in the in the exit polling we've
Speaker 5: seen so far this year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, who knows, but yes, they definitely are
Speaker 1: an exit polls I do think are way more accurate
Speaker 1: than regular polls.
Speaker 2: But I do think that's a really good point.
Speaker 1: And I always sort of think of evangelicals as having
Speaker 1: a little less agency, But what you're saying makes a
Speaker 1: lot of sense.
Speaker 2: And look, I mean they want right. I mean, a.
Speaker 1: Very small group of the country decided that they got
Speaker 1: real overturned and now they control the Supreme Court.
Speaker 2: So that is kind of amazing.
Speaker 5: And what I try to show in my book is
Speaker 5: that it's it shouldn't really be a surprise. This was
Speaker 5: part of a longstanding effort to build a political coalition
Speaker 5: around these issues, and Trump was sort of the vehicle
Speaker 5: for it, and I think continues to be. But to write,
Speaker 5: evangelicals are a shrinking minority of the country, and you know,
Speaker 5: one of the things that Polster, Robbie Jones and others
Speaker 5: have argued really well is the idea that that those
Speaker 5: two ideas are correlated. That the fact that white evangelicals
Speaker 5: see their cultural power on the decline as their numbers decline.
Speaker 5: And I've been seeing that for decades, but it's very
Speaker 5: precipitous today. That in part explains the alliance with Trump,
Speaker 5: because you know, Trump talked about when he said make
Speaker 5: America great again, in some ways that sounded like things
Speaker 5: that evangelicals were hearing from their pastors, this idea that
Speaker 5: you know, the country was once great and is now
Speaker 5: in moral decline as it becomes more secularized and more
Speaker 5: diverse and more progressive. And so I think in many
Speaker 5: ways he was speaking, though he did it in a
Speaker 5: way that maybe evangelicals wouldn't have chosen, he was nonetheless
Speaker 5: speaking to something that they felt right.
Speaker 1: That's such an interesting point as you look towards this election,
Speaker 1: what do you think the lesson that can take from
Speaker 1: Trump's relationship with the evangelicals.
Speaker 2: I mean, do you think that they.
Speaker 1: Are as energized to vote for him as they were before?
Speaker 1: Do you think that having gotten what they wanted now
Speaker 1: means they're less committed? Do you think they feel they
Speaker 1: owe him for this? I mean, do you think they're loyal?
Speaker 1: I mean, what's your sense of this voting block which
Speaker 1: is really his base, and they really do at this
Speaker 1: point control a lot of the legislature that we're legislating
Speaker 1: that Republicans are doing.
Speaker 5: It seems like the sort of Christian, nationalist minded portion
Speaker 5: of the evangelical movement, which I don't think is everybody,
Speaker 5: but they seem to feel in and empowered. I'm seeing
Speaker 5: more and more rhetoric around people openly saying, yes, this
Speaker 5: should be a Christian nation. Yes, Christianity is right, so
Speaker 5: let's let's make laws based on it, rather than, you know,
Speaker 5: a commitment yeah, rather than a commitment to pluralism.
Speaker 4: I don't think that's everyone, though.
Speaker 5: I mean I talked to some pastors in Iowa when
Speaker 5: I was there covering the caucuses, you know, one of
Speaker 5: whom was really concerned about what he described as kind
Speaker 5: of a messianic language around Trump, and he said, you know,
Speaker 5: the people talk about Trump like he's a chosen one.
Speaker 5: And this was a conservative guy, conservative Christian pastor, but
Speaker 5: he just said, you know, I don't like hearing that
Speaker 5: kind of language applied to a political leader.
Speaker 4: And another pastor I talked to, who's also a state.
Speaker 5: Lawmaker there, talked about, you know, the idea that we
Speaker 5: have to have a commitment to pluralism. People have to
Speaker 5: choose religious ideas for themselves and it can't be imposed
Speaker 5: through the government. That can get really dangerous for everybody
Speaker 5: really fast. Right when you start saying my religion is
Speaker 5: right and I'm going to use the government to implement it, Well,
Speaker 5: all you have to do is get on the wrong
Speaker 5: side of that, and it gets nasty really quickly, which
Speaker 5: history teaches us, and which are Founding fathers, for all
Speaker 5: of their imperfections recognized when they set up this country
Speaker 5: with freedom of religion. So I don't think that all
Speaker 5: evangelicals want that, but I think there is sort of
Speaker 5: a growing extremism on the right wing, and a lot
Speaker 5: of it has religious I don't even want to say undertones.
Speaker 4: A lot of it is pretty explicitly religious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there definitely was a thinking that when these people
Speaker 1: got what they wanted, they wouldn't be so embold in.
Speaker 1: But in fact they're ten times more embold than.
Speaker 5: It's hard to say for sure, I mean, look at
Speaker 5: what happened with IVF right in Alabama. There are certainly
Speaker 5: many people who oppose abortion who believe quite literally that
Speaker 5: life begins at conception, that embryos have moral significance. At
Speaker 5: the same time, most Republicans don't support banning IVF, and
Speaker 5: people I've talked to some of them have kind of
Speaker 5: complicated feelings about the morality of all of that, but
Speaker 5: they generally want people to be able to get in
Speaker 5: vitro fertilization. But there is a segment of the Christian right,
Speaker 5: and that this exists within evangelicalism and catholosis. I should
Speaker 5: say that does see IVF at least the disposal of
Speaker 5: embryos is morally equivalent.
Speaker 4: To and don't want it now. I think it's a
Speaker 4: small percentage.
Speaker 1: But the problem is the legislation they do is so
Speaker 1: poorly written that even in a state like Alabama, which
Speaker 1: then wrote legislation to protect IVF, they still ultimately all
Speaker 1: of this is written with this idea of embryonic person.
Speaker 3: Huh.
Speaker 5: And it's a real problem for Republicans politically, and it's
Speaker 5: also seems to be a challenge legislatively because, as you said,
Speaker 5: once you start legislating around some of these issues, it
Speaker 5: gets really messy, really fast. And I don't think that
Speaker 5: the majority even of Republicans want to ban IVF, but
Speaker 5: as we have seen, a small minority, because of the
Speaker 5: way our system is set up, can sometimes gain power
Speaker 5: and achieve more than you would expect.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's what we're living through right now. Sarah,
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, so interesting.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 3: Were no spone.
Speaker 1: Rick Wilson, My moment of fuckery involves the incredible inability
Speaker 1: of the mainstream media to fucking cover the vice president. Okay,
Speaker 1: she went to Planned Parenthood in Minnesota on Thursday. It
Speaker 1: was the first time that a president or vice president
Speaker 1: has ever gone to a clinic that performs abortions. What
Speaker 1: I think is meaningful is that a Planned Parenthood is
Speaker 1: a huge network of clinics right that does everything from
Speaker 1: STI care to pre cancer screenings for some people.
Speaker 2: It's a primary care place. It's really important.
Speaker 1: I think to take a moment to compare them to
Speaker 1: like pregnancy crisis centers that religious organizations prop up to
Speaker 1: try to trick women.
Speaker 3: The ones that the Cate of Florida pays thirty million
Speaker 3: dollars a year.
Speaker 1: Two Right, the ones that where you go for a
Speaker 1: pregnancy test and they tell you you need Jesus.
Speaker 2: This is the opposite of that. Right.
Speaker 1: You go in there and they say, let's scan you
Speaker 1: for STDs and let's check you for get a papshmir
Speaker 1: so we can make sure you don't have cervical cancer.
Speaker 2: This is the opposite.
Speaker 1: Right, This is like doctors treating women for health problems.
Speaker 1: And again, like what we see again and again is
Speaker 1: that abortion is healthcare. Right, tell the woman who has
Speaker 1: been sent to sit in her car to bleed out
Speaker 1: her miscarriage that abortion isn't healthcare. So we have the
Speaker 1: highest elected woman, black, white, or you know, of any
Speaker 1: race or ethnicity, she is going to an abortion clinic
Speaker 1: and healthcare clinic. To highlight the Republican war on choice.
Speaker 1: And and by the way, in Iowa, they're shopping another
Speaker 1: embryonic personhood bill. So the legislation these Republican legislators are
Speaker 1: not stopping right. They are going to make IVF completely impossible,
Speaker 1: legally impossible, because if you kill a frozen embryo, you
Speaker 1: are a murderer. And here we have this really good
Speaker 1: historic vice president going to highlight it and it gets
Speaker 1: very little coverage. And that is my fucking moment of fuckery.
Speaker 3: You know what, Molly, that is a pretty damn good
Speaker 3: moment of fuckery. The moment of fuckery for me this
Speaker 3: week is one of the secret sugar daddies of the right.
Speaker 3: It's a guy named woe Win Yee. This guy is
Speaker 3: a Chinese billionaire who has spent years and years now
Speaker 3: shoveling tens of millions of dollars into the law of
Speaker 3: every eager little bird in the right wing Steve Bannon,
Speaker 3: Jason Miller, Getter, all these scams, all these people that
Speaker 3: are out there in the right wing media space are
Speaker 3: dependent on the largesse not of the Koch brothers, but
Speaker 3: of a Chinese billionaire.
Speaker 2: Because there's only one Coke brother. Now it's Coke.
Speaker 3: Well, that's true, I know, rip all that, but this
Speaker 3: guy is the sugar daddy's It was his yacht on
Speaker 3: which Steve Bannon was arrested right, this is a guy
Speaker 3: who is a figure in American political wife without you
Speaker 3: knowing it. And if your podcast or my podcast was
Speaker 3: being underwritten by a Chinese billionaire, what do you think
Speaker 3: the reaction would be on Fox? What do you think
Speaker 3: the reaction would be in the Wall Street Journal? What
Speaker 3: do you think the reaction would be across the whole
Speaker 3: maga social media world? And this guy has funded all
Speaker 3: of these weird ass epic times hype epoch epoch excuse me,
Speaker 3: epic epocha. It's not apic, it's epic bullshit. But he's
Speaker 3: just somebody nobody knows, and he's declared bankruptcy now. And
Speaker 3: this entire Rosetta Stone of all these things he's done
Speaker 3: inside the Republican universe is coming to fruition, and God
Speaker 3: bless people who want to use their money for things.
Speaker 3: But as usual with the Republicans, it's the weird hypocritical
Speaker 3: nature of the thing. Where you got Steve Bannon out
Speaker 3: screaming about influence from foreign powers on American elections, and
Speaker 3: yet here he is taking money from a guy who
Speaker 3: is a turns out to be kind of a weird
Speaker 3: pyramid skene grifter. But b also turns out to be
Speaker 3: the sugar daddy of some of the craziest right wing
Speaker 3: crap that's out here.
Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
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