Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Mollie John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds.
Speaker 2: And South Dakota Governor Christy nom has apparently threatened to
Speaker 2: kill Joe Biden's dog commander. What are we doing here?
Speaker 3: People?
Speaker 2: We have a star studded show today though see it.
Speaker 2: Ed's for Reid Zachariah Stopspy to talk his new book,
Speaker 2: Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash from sixteen hundred to
Speaker 2: the President. Then we'll talk tomsnbc's Ali Velshie about his
Speaker 2: new book Small Acts of Courage, a Legacy of Endurance,
Speaker 2: and the fight for democracy. But first we have the
Speaker 2: host of the Enemy's List, the ligod projects owed Rick Wilson.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Fast Politics. You're a friend of mine, Rick Wilson.
Speaker 4: Mollie Jong Fast, I'm delighted to join you once again.
Speaker 1: Christinome. Perhaps you remember her from Killing a.
Speaker 4: Puppy, noted star of the show Killing My Innocent Puppy,
Speaker 4: also the star of the nineteen nine sitcom what does
Speaker 4: Corey taste like?
Speaker 3: Oh talk, you loved it?
Speaker 4: Don't even play lie?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 4: All right?
Speaker 3: Anyway, moving on, she killed a dog in a goat.
Speaker 1: She defended herself by saying, the fourteen month old dog
Speaker 1: is not a puppy.
Speaker 5: I feel like.
Speaker 3: When you're defending killing a puppy, you're losing.
Speaker 4: My thought here is twofold. One, when you're defending killing
Speaker 4: a puppy, you are definitely losing. And the second is,
Speaker 4: don't try your bullshit among other people. And I will
Speaker 4: say this people from the left and the right who
Speaker 4: actually know about hunting and hunting dogs myself included, don't
Speaker 4: try your bullshit christinome of trying to say, oh, only
Speaker 4: I understand the country, No, honey, that ain't it.
Speaker 1: But also let us pause for a moment and talk
Speaker 1: about how she then said she killed three horses. Now
Speaker 1: I have three dogs, one of whom is ten thousand
Speaker 1: years old.
Speaker 4: I've met your ancient the rhyme of the ancient, the
Speaker 4: ancient hound.
Speaker 3: It's Spartacus.
Speaker 1: Spartaas has half a liver, he has a mouthful of
Speaker 1: rotting teeth, and he is in continent.
Speaker 4: No dream date, ladies, it's spartacast.
Speaker 1: But Spartacus is killing it and we don't put amal.
Speaker 4: Bartacus is living his best life right.
Speaker 1: He is now on a really good arthritis medicine that's
Speaker 1: really making him do much better. But I'm just saying
Speaker 1: she killed three horses because she said they had arthritis,
Speaker 1: Like she killed three horses because she didn't want to
Speaker 1: pay for the food.
Speaker 4: Okay, let me go back on this one more time, because,
Speaker 4: as you know, in addition to having owned many hunting dogs,
Speaker 4: I have also owned many horses, many fucking horses, many, many, many,
Speaker 4: many horses.
Speaker 1: What happens is they get too old to ride, and
Speaker 1: you take care of them because you're not a total sociopath.
Speaker 4: Then you literally send them out to somebody's farm and
Speaker 4: they graze in a field until they drop down dead. Okay,
Speaker 4: that's a good life for a horse. And by the way,
Speaker 4: we had a horse lived to thirty three years old.
Speaker 4: Twenty five is not ancient for a horse. She's completely
Speaker 4: full of crap, this woman. She irritates me because as
Speaker 4: somebody who treats animals ethically and I mean all my
Speaker 4: bullshit kidding aside right now, it's something I really care
Speaker 4: about and I really believe in of treating animals ethically
Speaker 4: and well, especially when they are in service to you,
Speaker 4: as dogs or horses are, and so her cavalier, bullshit,
Speaker 4: her lies about it. The combination of all of this
Speaker 4: garbage from her Here's the amazing part. This was something
Speaker 4: that brought left and right together in this country like
Speaker 4: nothing I've ever seen what You've got Rick Wilson and
Speaker 4: Liz Cheney on the same side of an argument as
Speaker 4: cat Turd and Laura Lumer.
Speaker 1: The cat Turd killed the dog too, well, I think
Speaker 1: he drove over him.
Speaker 4: Right, I'm going to say, this cat Turn Foster's dogs.
Speaker 3: Oh so then who did he kill? Cat Turn?
Speaker 4: He ran over one of his dogs, apparently by accident,
Speaker 4: which I've never done. But okay, look it happens to.
Speaker 3: People, all right, Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 4: But for the love of God, if an issue unifies
Speaker 4: Americans in such a way that it crosses every single
Speaker 4: dividing line between the parties, give it up, Christy, and
Speaker 4: now the peace out this morning in Politico or out
Speaker 4: Friday morning sees me in Politico. Six separate Trump aids
Speaker 4: were like, no, she's done, it's over. We only need
Speaker 4: one person to appeld to the freak show.
Speaker 1: My favorite part of that whole story is when she
Speaker 1: said that she had met Kim Jong un in twenty fourteen, which.
Speaker 3: Has been easily debunked.
Speaker 1: Playbook actually led with the story of all the other
Speaker 1: lies in this book. Here's the thing about these books.
Speaker 1: Politicians write incredibly boring books. They don't and write them,
Speaker 1: and they likely don't read them. But somehow Christy No
Speaker 1: managed to not be able to do that. The woman,
Speaker 1: I've said it before, I'll say it again. She makes
Speaker 1: Mitt Romney look like James Harriet. So let's talk for
Speaker 1: a minute about what's happening with the Trump trial. We
Speaker 1: are in day ten thousand, No, we're actually only like
Speaker 1: eleven days into it, right.
Speaker 4: Where Donald Trump feels a combination of desire and revulsion
Speaker 4: watching Hopepicks testify against him, struggling between his incontinence and
Speaker 4: his erectile dysfunction, wondering which will cause him more distress
Speaker 4: as she testifies in her low, sultry voice, her penetrating
Speaker 4: gaze staring directly at him.
Speaker 3: Yes, we're into Pete Rick Wilson here.
Speaker 4: Take me, Donald, mount me and use me.
Speaker 5: O Jesus savage beast right.
Speaker 3: So, oh my god.
Speaker 4: You guys, I'm not going to stop.
Speaker 3: I'm aware we do this, we know you anyway. So
Speaker 3: Hopex is testifying.
Speaker 1: I mean, so far, we're two weeks into this fucking thing,
Speaker 1: and it seems to me like every single day has
Speaker 1: been bad for Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: It seems like Trump is having an entire sort of
Speaker 4: broken and confused approach here. I mean, look, you saw
Speaker 4: last week he started to talk to Todd Blanche in
Speaker 4: the way that he talks to anyone he's about to fire. You, suck,
Speaker 4: You're not aggressive enough, you don't defend me the right way,
Speaker 4: you don't do what I want you to do. And
Speaker 4: more importantly, he went and said to Todd Blanche, according
Speaker 4: to some of the reporting last week, I don't pay
Speaker 4: bills for lawyers that don't do the job for me,
Speaker 4: which is to say, Todd Blanche, you best start getting
Speaker 4: that shit in cash, brother, because those checks are going
Speaker 4: to get canceled.
Speaker 1: And we saw Maggie wrote a piece about how Trump
Speaker 1: was not happy with Todd Blanche.
Speaker 3: So that's right, definitely coming around.
Speaker 1: And also so the judge told Todd Blanche that he
Speaker 1: was losing all credibility. I mean, I feel like that's
Speaker 1: not what you judge to tell you. I'm no lawyer,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to guess that that was not so good.
Speaker 4: Neither am I But I'm thinking that when the lawyer
Speaker 4: reprimands you, not in front of the jury, luckily for him.
Speaker 4: But I'm thinking when the judge reprimands an attorney for
Speaker 4: the defense, they might want to tell their client, do
Speaker 4: me a favor. Donald such a pie hole, no more talking.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's just kind of amazing.
Speaker 1: So Pepper did a pretty meticulous job laying out the story.
Speaker 1: Still likes Trump, No crazy emotional drama there. He showed
Speaker 1: that he did in fact do catch and kill and
Speaker 1: that he in fact knew that he was running a
Speaker 1: foul of campaign finance violations because he talked to his right.
Speaker 4: Because his own attorneys were telling him this ain't great. Yeah,
Speaker 4: this ain't it.
Speaker 5: Chief.
Speaker 4: But look, I mean, I think what we've seen right now,
Speaker 4: and I think we're going to see this pretty constantly,
Speaker 4: is that so far none of these witnesses have exactly
Speaker 4: been great for Donald Trump. No, they're not exactly like
Speaker 4: lighting up the world with a robust set of facts
Speaker 4: that Trump can refute easily. And what we are going
Speaker 4: to also see AND's telling you this in the next
Speaker 4: in the next few days, at some point, Trump will
Speaker 4: wake up from his nap time, and he at some
Speaker 4: point he will say something in the courtroom like I'll testify,
Speaker 4: I'll go on the stand, and at that moment the
Speaker 4: world begins to tear itself apart for Donald Trump, and
Speaker 4: there's nothing but bad outcomes for Donald Trump at that point.
Speaker 1: Right, So we have hope x is on Friday, and
Speaker 1: then next week we're going to have But I want
Speaker 1: to point out, like, here we are on this trial
Speaker 1: and so far we have still not had Stormy Daniels
Speaker 1: or Michael Cohen, and it doesn't matter because we've really
Speaker 1: seen them set the table.
Speaker 4: I think that the most interesting strategic decision the prosecution
Speaker 4: has made so far is to bring in people who
Speaker 4: win Stormy and Michael Cohen come up to the stand
Speaker 4: to testify. All of the attacks that Trump is going
Speaker 4: to make on them have already been kind of mitigated
Speaker 4: by other fact witnesses saying what Michael is about to
Speaker 4: tell you is true essentially, and what Stormy is about
Speaker 4: to tell you is true essentially. And so you can
Speaker 4: call them bad witnesses, you can say everything you want
Speaker 4: about Michael or Stormy, but those folks like David Pecker
Speaker 4: and the other lawyers and everybody else and Hope Hicks.
Speaker 4: They're going to go in there and basically end up
Speaker 4: laying a defensive barrier down for all the attacks that
Speaker 4: are coming on Cohen. I will tell you I predict
Speaker 4: next week you're going to see stuff on Fox like
Speaker 4: Michael Cohen History's Greatest Monster, and Stormy Daniels the Horror
Speaker 4: of Babylon. And I have seen a sort of bubbling
Speaker 4: up in the right word media like, well, Donald Trump,
Speaker 4: so what if he did? It's just his virility, you know,
Speaker 4: and he's a man's man. And yet on the other hand,
Speaker 4: anybody else would be would be slaughtered for the same
Speaker 4: kind of stuff. It's a moment I think where Trump
Speaker 4: expects a different trial than he's getting. Yeah, and the
Speaker 4: nine thousand dollars in contempt charges, you know, Trump can
Speaker 4: raise that in thirty seconds with some you know email
Speaker 4: to the mooks out there. But the thought when the
Speaker 4: judge basically said, okay, you could be sent to jail
Speaker 4: and no, you know what, it won't be my fantasy
Speaker 4: of Donald Trump being admitted to rikers and wanting to
Speaker 4: bleach himself forever and ever after that that would be
Speaker 4: his experience. He could not survive Rikers. But the idea
Speaker 4: of Trump even going to mcc or spending a night
Speaker 4: in any other jail cell in New York without his phone,
Speaker 4: without his hairspray, without his makeup, I think it would
Speaker 4: alter his perspective rather swiftly and dramatically.
Speaker 1: What's happening here is that he has been sort of listening,
Speaker 1: Like he did delete those truths yeah on truth Social.
Speaker 3: When he wrote them.
Speaker 1: So I think he gets the stakes here, which is
Speaker 1: interesting because like so much of Trump is this shamelessness
Speaker 1: and this inability to like behave the way everyone else behaves.
Speaker 1: But like clearly that some of that's an act, right, No,
Speaker 1: I think you're.
Speaker 4: Right, some of it it's an act, and the idea
Speaker 4: that he's going to get away with every transgressive thing
Speaker 4: he ever wants to do. And I will say this,
Speaker 4: I'm a god. I'm going to sound like I'm defending
Speaker 4: Donald Trump, but I'm really not. I think anybody who's
Speaker 4: been president becomes psychologically accustomed to a certain degree of deference, right.
Speaker 4: But in Trump's case, he came in there with a
Speaker 4: gigantic level of sociopathic ego driven wild hair.
Speaker 3: I still don't hear you defending him.
Speaker 4: Continue, yes, yes, well, okay, good, I'm glad. I'm glad.
Speaker 4: It doesn't sound like I'm defending him, because I'm really not.
Speaker 4: But in his case, having been president and thinking he's
Speaker 4: also a god who is immune to the rules of
Speaker 4: the rest of society, all of it, you end up
Speaker 4: with this attitude that how can this be happening to me?
Speaker 4: You can't tell me to shut up? And yet the
Speaker 4: judge has slowly sort of wound down the freedom and
Speaker 4: the latitude Trump has felt to ass off in court
Speaker 4: as the weeks have gone on. I think it's really
Speaker 4: kind of fascinating that that even his own people around him,
Speaker 4: not just his lawyers, but his fans are like, Okay,
Speaker 4: you know what if he did go to jail overnight,
Speaker 4: what would happen? What does happen if he doesn't have
Speaker 4: his fresh bespoke depends every morning.
Speaker 1: But it's also a question of he is being held accountable.
Speaker 1: And the thing that I hate so much and think
Speaker 1: is so bad is when people in pundit world say like,
Speaker 1: if you do this, he will fundraise off of it,
Speaker 1: or if you do this, it will book this right,
Speaker 1: and like, here's the thing is like here's a trial,
Speaker 1: a criminal trial. It's going on. Nothing is happening. Everything
Speaker 1: is fine. There's no craziness at the court. There's barely
Speaker 1: anyone there.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: The only member of his family you could get there.
Speaker 4: Was Eric was slow. Eric.
Speaker 5: Yeah right. You know.
Speaker 3: People saying, well, he's going to do three dimensional chests. No,
Speaker 3: he's not. He does not do three dimensional chess.
Speaker 4: Donald Trump couldn't make a three dimensional castle out of
Speaker 4: his own feces. He's not that smart when it comes
Speaker 4: to the a world that isn't mediated through social media
Speaker 4: platforms or whatever whatever you know, fantasy bubble he's lived
Speaker 4: in for a long time. He's he's a guy who's
Speaker 4: a broken brained old man right now facing actual criminal
Speaker 4: charges in a court of law for crimes. Yeah, for
Speaker 4: real crimes. Yeah, the actual criming that is involved is
Speaker 4: not something made up by the deep state or whatever.
Speaker 4: He's not having a good time in this, and I'm
Speaker 4: obviously I'm here for that because I want him to
Speaker 4: be held accountable as everyone should.
Speaker 1: So as we watch this, I mean, I think it
Speaker 1: should be weirdly comforting.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: I often have this conversation with people like, are the
Speaker 1: guardrails holding. That's like a favorite conversation.
Speaker 3: And you know, I.
Speaker 1: Believe, like if you look at the Supreme Court, in
Speaker 1: this Supreme Court, they're not right.
Speaker 3: I mean, these guys are in the tank for Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: Oh for sure.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: But if you look at if you sort of pull
Speaker 1: back and you look at like this criminal case, which
Speaker 1: is something like straight out of Tom Wolf, really the
Speaker 1: law is holding and so it is being held accountable.
Speaker 4: You know what, It's funny you mentioned Tom Wolf because
Speaker 4: a friend of mine just just this morning texted me
Speaker 4: that Tom Wolf would have loved this trial so much.
Speaker 4: He would have gone absolutely crazy about this thing and
Speaker 4: would have done the whole Charlie Croker style story. Because really,
Speaker 4: when you get right down to it, this is a
Speaker 4: tremendously great New York story. Yeah, I mean it is
Speaker 4: a tremendously great New York story. Also, I have a question.
Speaker 4: I know I should be the expert on this. Why
Speaker 4: is Rudy dressing increasingly like the joker?
Speaker 3: I haven't seen Rudy lately.
Speaker 4: Oh, Rudy was wearing like a purple shirt and a
Speaker 4: yellow tie.
Speaker 3: You used to be a member of Rudy's inner circle.
Speaker 4: I did, indeed do we know what's.
Speaker 3: Happening with Rudy. Do you have any uproots?
Speaker 4: He had to go back to bankruptcy court again. From
Speaker 4: what I heard, I don't know what The outcome was.
Speaker 3: Always a great song, right.
Speaker 4: You have to go back to bankruptcy court again.
Speaker 1: No, I do think you have a really good and
Speaker 1: salient point here, which is that there is a sense
Speaker 1: in which Trump World, Wow, maybe he pulls polling well again,
Speaker 1: polls whatever Trump World is in itself really falling the
Speaker 1: fuck apart.
Speaker 4: Trump World internally is highly chaotic right now. And I
Speaker 4: can tell you why. I know it's highly chaotic because
Speaker 4: there's an old rule about campaigns and about white houses.
Speaker 4: Bad campaigns leak, Good campaigns leak on purpose. They're just leaking. Now.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of chatter coming out of Trump World. Now.
Speaker 4: They really need to stop trusting the idea that we're
Speaker 4: paying you a lot of money to run X or
Speaker 4: y area of the campaign and there you're going to
Speaker 4: be loyal. People are already trying to save their own
Speaker 4: asses and protect themselves because I'm hearing that the need
Speaker 4: for money to move money around and get money to
Speaker 4: Trump for both the legal defense and otherwise is putting
Speaker 4: a colossal skin on their fundraising, and even the big
Speaker 4: guys who are like, I'm going to come back and
Speaker 4: help Trump, there are even questions coming from those guys like, yeah, listen,
Speaker 4: I want this to go to actually do something, right,
Speaker 4: You're gonna do something with this money. It's not just
Speaker 4: for the lawyers, right.
Speaker 3: Right, But it is just for lawyers, right, of.
Speaker 4: Course it is. It's all it is. It's just for
Speaker 4: the lawyers. It's all for Trump.
Speaker 3: And you think this is going to affect the campaign.
Speaker 4: I think it is affecting the campaign right now. And
Speaker 4: look they are doing. They're doing a brilliant job right now.
Speaker 4: And so button peak too early, and his polls are
Speaker 4: and they're throwing a lot of these poles out there
Speaker 4: that are fairly low quality surveys, right.
Speaker 3: They're definitely juicing the numbers.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, Oh, they're flooding the zone so that the
Speaker 4: real clear average and the five point thirty eight average
Speaker 4: and all that other stuff. They're flooding the zone so
Speaker 4: that those things will look as if you know, Trump
Speaker 4: is miles ahead in all these states.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that for sure is true. Jesus Rick Wilson.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Molly, Jong, Fast.
Speaker 1: Spring is here, and I bet you are trying to
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Speaker 2: Freed Zachariah is a Washington Post columnist and host of
Speaker 2: CNN's GPS and author of Age of Revolutions, Progress and
Speaker 2: Backlash from sixteen hundred to the present.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Fast Politics for Reid.
Speaker 5: Thanks so much, Molly. Pleasure to be with you.
Speaker 1: Really excited to have you. So let's talk about this book.
Speaker 1: I always feel like you've written a ton of books.
Speaker 1: How did you get here? It's sort of like, how
Speaker 1: did you decide to devote a year of your life to.
Speaker 3: This or more?
Speaker 5: Oh, it was actually almost I mean on and off.
Speaker 5: It's been ten.
Speaker 1: Years, Jesus and someone who has written many books, it's
Speaker 1: a killer.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I know. I wrote two books along the way, two
Speaker 5: shorter books, but this was the big project that was
Speaker 5: ongoing in the background. But it's a very good question.
Speaker 5: It really began about ten years ago when I started
Speaker 5: watching the Tea Party come into being. What I realized
Speaker 5: about the Tea Party was this was something very different
Speaker 5: from normal American politics. Here you had the most hierarchical party,
Speaker 5: the Republican Party, being taken over by an insurgency. And
Speaker 5: there was a wonderful book by theater Scotch Paula Stolard Yale,
Speaker 5: who pointed out in the book that she spent a
Speaker 5: year basically just hanging out and talking to the Tea
Speaker 5: Party grassroots. That while it started as an economic thing,
Speaker 5: you remember, it starts with Rick Santelli on CNBC saying,
Speaker 5: you know, why are we bailing out all these people
Speaker 5: who don't meet their mortgage payments. Let's have a tea party.
Speaker 5: But it actually is animated by all kinds of cultural issues, immigration,
Speaker 5: Obama's birthplace, multiculturally what we would today called the wok Agena.
Speaker 5: And to me what was fascinating is that was not
Speaker 5: the traditional Republican Party platform or message. The Reagan formula,
Speaker 5: if you will, was you know, limited government, low taxes,
Speaker 5: entitlement reforms, spread democracy abroad. These guys were not talking
Speaker 5: about any of that. They were talking all about cultural
Speaker 5: nationalism against multiculturalism. And so I started to think with
Speaker 5: something is happening to politics in America, you know. So
Speaker 5: I signed a book contract actually ten years ago, and
Speaker 5: it was initially called Beyond Left and Right because I
Speaker 5: was feeling like this is something different from our normal
Speaker 5: left right over the economy. And as time went on,
Speaker 5: I felt like I was being proven more and more right.
Speaker 5: You know, we Brexit than you have Trump. And so
Speaker 5: it took me a little longer to write, partly because
Speaker 5: it felt like I was just getting more and more
Speaker 5: material to inform this historical survey, which was really about
Speaker 5: how did we get here? It's the four hundred year
Speaker 5: history of how we got to where we are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so much when we're talking about this,
Speaker 1: about how it's such a good point.
Speaker 3: And I actually know the academic you're talking.
Speaker 5: About Theta Scotch board we did.
Speaker 1: We had her on the podcast and she's really brilliant.
Speaker 1: Saying a Yale academic is brilliant not a huge stretch,
Speaker 1: but she is really brilliant. And she did talk so
Speaker 1: much about the fundamental underlying notion being so radical. It
Speaker 1: reminds me so much of Susan Faludi's ideas about backlash.
Speaker 1: I mean, isn't that sort of this thesis that you
Speaker 1: have progress and then you have a sort of revolution
Speaker 1: in a backlash or is that not quite the thesis.
Speaker 5: The central thesis here is that whenever you have periods
Speaker 5: of very big structural change, and that's for me, revolution
Speaker 5: I'm talking about when it really is upending the old system.
Speaker 5: So for example, the massive expansion of globalization and immigration
Speaker 5: that's taken place in the last forty years in the
Speaker 5: Western world. The massive expansion of the information economy, really
Speaker 5: the creation of a new digital economy, the massive expansion
Speaker 5: of the rights of women, minorities, gays, all that. You know,
Speaker 5: these things have always had a two effects. One is
Speaker 5: they always produce a backlash, and two they always change
Speaker 5: the politics because the politics has to adapt to all
Speaker 5: these new changes and the backlash. I think what's really
Speaker 5: fascinating to me is the backlash tends to be mostly cultural.
Speaker 5: You know, Tony Blair had a very good line. He said,
Speaker 5: you know, one of the central insights I've had in
Speaker 5: politics is that when people feel deeply insecure and unnerved,
Speaker 5: they don't move left economically, they move right culture. In
Speaker 5: other words, you know that they start to worry by
Speaker 5: my world is disappearing. I want to go back to
Speaker 5: when it was, you know, when all this craziness wasn't happening.
Speaker 5: And that is why demogogues like Trump are able to
Speaker 5: play on that, because it's what they offer is the
Speaker 5: politics of nostalgia, you know, the make America great again.
Speaker 5: We're going to take you back to when it was.
Speaker 5: Nicky Haley wants to tweet it wasn't life so simple
Speaker 5: when you were growing up? You know, there's always this
Speaker 5: imaginary of course, you think yourself, Nicki Haley grew up
Speaker 5: in the seventies, that period of you know, Wardegate, Vietnam, staxlation,
Speaker 5: oil prices, court grupling. I mean, what is she talking about?
Speaker 5: But that's always, you know, in our memory, we always
Speaker 5: think back nostalgically to the period when we were young,
Speaker 5: and that's the appear yes.
Speaker 3: And that is an important point.
Speaker 1: I actually just read a book about the rights obsession
Speaker 1: with authoritarian governments, which was really really detailed and talked
Speaker 1: a lot about how even in the not the seventies,
Speaker 1: but earlier times in the twentieth century, we saw conservatives
Speaker 1: sort of have a love affair with authoritarian dictators, everyone
Speaker 1: from Pinoche to Hitler and you see that right now
Speaker 1: with the rights love of Erdulaan. Can you speak to
Speaker 1: how that fits into this narrative.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a very interesting point because what we're seeing
Speaker 5: come out is a kind of older right. You know,
Speaker 5: what we're now realizing is that the Reagan Right was
Speaker 5: a much more libertarian, internationalist, free market, free trade right
Speaker 5: that took over the Republican Party, but that the core
Speaker 5: of the party in its historical essence is actually not
Speaker 5: that it is chauvinist, isolationist, protectionist, and as you say,
Speaker 5: somewhat enamored of authoritarianism. And so it's not just you know, Pinochet,
Speaker 5: but the right was fascinated by Franco Let's don't forget,
Speaker 5: you know, the Spanish Civil War. The writer has always
Speaker 5: been fascinated by these kind of strong men who were
Speaker 5: able to deliver in some sense. And if you go
Speaker 5: back to the thirties, there was a great fascination in
Speaker 5: the right in the early thirties with Mussolini and Hitler,
Speaker 5: and there was a deep isolationism. A lot of the
Speaker 5: isolationism on the right was, you know, we shouldn't be
Speaker 5: thinking about going to war with these guys. They're modernizing
Speaker 5: their country. Charles Lindberg was frankly admiring, you know, Lindberg
Speaker 5: admired what the Germans were doing. So there has always
Speaker 5: been this deeper right, you know, the kind of cultural
Speaker 5: right wing, and in a weird way, we all lost
Speaker 5: track of it because Reagan really did remake the right.
Speaker 5: But after the Cold War, that facade or that phase
Speaker 5: of right wing politics has withered away. Well we're left
Speaker 5: with this Trump in some ways Hawkins back to the
Speaker 5: thirties exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean, that will make America great again is actually
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties slogan of Lindbergh.
Speaker 5: Right, well, and certainly America First.
Speaker 3: Was right, America First, That's what I mean.
Speaker 5: That's where it originated from. And when Trump was told that, interestingly,
Speaker 5: his response was yeah, So you know, in other words,
Speaker 5: I don't mind being associated with the Republicans of the thirties. Well,
Speaker 5: most people forget is even after World War Two, the
Speaker 5: Republican Party was still quite isolationist. There was wings of
Speaker 5: the party, Vandenberg in the Senate who was an internationalist,
Speaker 5: but the core of the party, even after World War Two,
Speaker 5: wanted America to come home, no entanglements. Robert Taft, the
Speaker 5: leading Republican senator from Ohio, who was the most likely
Speaker 5: nominee in the nineteen fifty two presidential campaign, was deeply
Speaker 5: opposed to NATO. He goes to see Eisenhower. Eisenhower is
Speaker 5: at this point the head of NATO, the supreme Allied
Speaker 5: commander in Brussels. And Robert Taft goes to Brussels and
Speaker 5: says to Eisenhower, please don't run for the Republican nomination.
Speaker 5: If you do, I don't have a chance. And so
Speaker 5: I'm asking you now. Eisenhower is the most famous man
Speaker 5: at that point in the world, right, and so there
Speaker 5: was no chance anyone could could win against him. And
Speaker 5: Eisenhower says to Taft, and we know this is truegers
Speaker 5: both sides have reported of this. Eisenow sester Robert Taft,
Speaker 5: I will issue a showmanes declaration that I will not run,
Speaker 5: and if nominated, I will I will not take the
Speaker 5: nomination if you issue a one sentence declaration that you
Speaker 5: support NATO. Robert Tafft says, I cannot do that. This
Speaker 5: is too core to my belief. So Eisenhower said, well,
Speaker 5: then it sounds like we have a race, and that
Speaker 5: so eisen Ower ran for president, to keep the Republican
Speaker 5: Party internationalists, sort to make the Republican Party internationalist. And
Speaker 5: so it's you know, it's been again. As I say,
Speaker 5: it's what you're seeing is the re emergence of a
Speaker 5: very old Republican party that is protectionist, isolationist, culturally, shaubnist,
Speaker 5: you know, and has elements layered onto it of the
Speaker 5: kind of the old Southern Democratic races.
Speaker 1: It's so funny because it's like, I come from this
Speaker 1: family of communists, so you know, my grandfather.
Speaker 3: Was hard fast. So growing up, my grandfather always say
Speaker 3: like Reagan is the worse. You know, there's no one worse.
Speaker 1: Than Ronald Reagan, you know, and you would go on
Speaker 1: and on, and you know my mother too, oh and
Speaker 1: the military industrial complex and YadA YadA. But the truth is, like,
Speaker 1: if you're looking back, Reagan really was sort of a
Speaker 1: high point in a lot of ways, pro immigration, pro
Speaker 1: a sort of more inclusive America.
Speaker 3: I mean, certain things that he did.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously I'm hardly you know Reagan fairly, but
Speaker 1: there's certainly things that he did that were incredible for
Speaker 1: this Republican Party.
Speaker 5: It was a much more sunny, optimistic, kind of conservatism.
Speaker 5: And in a way it speaks to this point I
Speaker 5: make in the book, which is Reagan was right wing
Speaker 5: on the old left right spectrum in terms of the
Speaker 5: state's room of the in the economy right, the old
Speaker 5: left right spectrum was the left wanted more state, a
Speaker 5: less market, and the right wanted less state, more market.
Speaker 5: And Reagan was very much a right winger in those stones.
Speaker 5: But in terms of the new spectrum, which I call
Speaker 5: open versus closed. You know, do you want to open,
Speaker 5: open economy, open information flows, open multicultural society, diversity, immigration.
Speaker 5: On that spectrum, Reagan is actually very much open. You know,
Speaker 5: he was for all the things and Trump, interestingly as
Speaker 5: opposed to all those things that Reagan was in favor of. Right,
Speaker 5: if you think about it, Reagan wanted more immigration, Trump
Speaker 5: once less. Reagan wanted you know, was more than happy
Speaker 5: comestable with diversity. Trump wants less. Reagan was a free trader.
Speaker 5: Trump is a protectionist. Reagan loved the idea of America
Speaker 5: being the symbol of democracy and spreading democracy around the world.
Speaker 5: Trump hates that idea. It's fascinating that on the new spectrum,
Speaker 5: Trump is basically disaviving the Republican Party, what the Republican
Speaker 5: Party has stood for for thirty five years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's talk about the economic questions, because protectionism I
Speaker 1: am so sort of horrified by it, but it's happening
Speaker 1: both on.
Speaker 3: The left and the right.
Speaker 1: Right, I mean the tariffs, I mean, Trump is definitely
Speaker 1: not as organized and a lot of his tariffs seemed
Speaker 1: more emotional than they are strategic. But we're seeing it
Speaker 1: on the left too, right, I mean, tariffs have become
Speaker 1: all of a sudden a sort of popular tool in
Speaker 1: the economy, which they hadn't been throughout my youth. So
Speaker 1: can you speak to that and why?
Speaker 5: Yeah? First of all, you're one hundred percent right. The
Speaker 5: creeping protectionism is there in both parties. Trump is almost
Speaker 5: certainly much more protectionists. So for instance, he's talking about
Speaker 5: campaigning on a ten percent tariffs on all imported goods.
Speaker 5: He's talking about sixty percent tariffs on Chinese goods, which
Speaker 5: would have a very significant sect. You know, people worry
Speaker 5: about inflation, Well, you know, there's nothing more inflationary than
Speaker 5: putting on tariffs because by definition, right, you're raising the
Speaker 5: price of goods, You're raising the price of everything that
Speaker 5: comes in and it's not just the goods we buy,
Speaker 5: but everything that's made in America, lots of it has
Speaker 5: imported parts. So you might buy an American car, but
Speaker 5: maybe thirty percent of the parts come from around the world.
Speaker 5: And if all that is more expensive, now, why is
Speaker 5: it happening? It's a very good question. Basically, what's happened
Speaker 5: is there is an narrative that has taken hold in
Speaker 5: America that yeah, globalization was good, but it hollowed out
Speaker 5: the middle class, it hollowed out the working class. The
Speaker 5: statistics don't completely prove that, but it is true that
Speaker 5: there are certain parts of the country that turned out
Speaker 5: to be politically very sensitive, the rust belt, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
Speaker 5: Michigan where the effects are felt very strongly. So even
Speaker 5: though in aggregate, I would argue there's no question that
Speaker 5: the thirty years of globalization raised America's GDP income, average
Speaker 5: income for everybody, lowered costs for food, for clothing, for
Speaker 5: appliances for everybody. It did have this effect in Ohio,
Speaker 5: in Michigan, and those are so important politically in a
Speaker 5: fifty to fifty country that, in my opinion, we're sort
Speaker 5: of overreacting to that. Look, I'm an old fashioned liberal
Speaker 5: in the sense that I believe we should. This is
Speaker 5: FDR's view. We should use the market to generate well,
Speaker 5: we should embrace free trade because it lowers costs and
Speaker 5: gives you more efficiency, and then we should use that
Speaker 5: money to redistribute to the people who get left behind.
Speaker 5: Our biggest problem in my view, is over the last
Speaker 5: thirty years, we did a lot of the first which
Speaker 5: is embracing globalization, and we didn't do it enough of
Speaker 5: the second. Right, you know, that's the most efficient thing
Speaker 5: to do, rather than to have tariffs where you know,
Speaker 5: there was a calculation that Obama put tariffs on tires
Speaker 5: at one point, and it was calculated that the cost
Speaker 5: of saving each one of those jobs in America was
Speaker 5: one million dollars.
Speaker 3: I shouldn't laugh.
Speaker 5: But you know you'd be much write better of writing
Speaker 5: a check for half a million dollars to each of
Speaker 5: those displaced workers. But the problem is we never did
Speaker 5: enough of that. You know, we never did invest in
Speaker 5: retraining and all that stuff. And so this has bitten
Speaker 5: us in the back because we you know, that was
Speaker 5: the great failure in my view. We embraced a lot
Speaker 5: of the good things that allowed for openness and innovation
Speaker 5: and efficiency. But the flip side of that, if you
Speaker 5: want to maintain a stable country and community, is that
Speaker 5: you've got to help those who get left behind. But
Speaker 5: we tend to have this view, which I think is
Speaker 5: the you know, part of the kind of an inherent
Speaker 5: American view that people get left behind as their own fault,
Speaker 5: and I think that profoundly misunderstands how capitalism works. You know.
Speaker 5: It's like something becomes more efficient, some industry becomes more efficient,
Speaker 5: some other industry becomes less efficient. The workers working in
Speaker 5: that steel plan, they could not have adjusted. They're not
Speaker 5: in a position to adjust to the new more efficient right,
Speaker 5: that's a decision being made, you know, by the CEOs
Speaker 5: and by Wall Street, and those guys are the ones
Speaker 5: where I'm saying we should be helping, you know, and
Speaker 5: we somehow forget that those people are as much, you know,
Speaker 5: victims of structural changes in the world economy, and we
Speaker 5: should be helping them. We should be giving them more,
Speaker 5: you know, for so just more cash, help with retraining,
Speaker 5: help with relocating, whatever it is.
Speaker 1: This is a certain sort of hearkening back though because
Speaker 1: of the tariffs.
Speaker 3: I totally agree with you.
Speaker 1: You cannot have capitalism without having, you know, some balance
Speaker 1: with the capitalism, whether that's regulation or taxation or what
Speaker 1: that looks like. The Chips Act was this idea to
Speaker 1: bring manufacturing which had been to sort of pump up
Speaker 1: manufacturing in the United States. That is a sort of
Speaker 1: way to solve that problem, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So the Chips Act, it tries to address a
Speaker 5: kind of different problem, which is there's some things in
Speaker 5: America that are so vital to our national security that
Speaker 5: we probably should make them at home. And I basically
Speaker 5: agree with that. I think that we should keep that
Speaker 5: list of essential vital national security related technologies small because
Speaker 5: it's very expensive. The way we are getting these chip
Speaker 5: plants to come back to America is by giving massive, massive, Yes, right,
Speaker 5: we're talking about in the tens and tens of billions
Speaker 5: of dollars. And I would just point out if we
Speaker 5: were to take that money and spend it on early
Speaker 5: childcare and education, I wonder whether we would get in
Speaker 5: the long run of bigger banks for the buck. So
Speaker 5: but as I say, I'm okay with it. But let's
Speaker 5: not let this turn into the ever expanding list of
Speaker 5: federal subsidies for things that we think are neat and
Speaker 5: nifty to have. Let's keep it really focused, national security oriented,
Speaker 5: and then I'm okay with it.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, as is totally fascinating and really
Speaker 1: appreciate having you.
Speaker 5: Mollie is such a pleasure. I hope I see you soon.
Speaker 2: Ali Velshie is the host ofmsnbc's Felshie and the author
Speaker 2: of Small Acts of Courage, A Legacy of Endurance and
Speaker 2: the Fight for Democracy.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Fast Politics, my brand and also one
Speaker 1: of my favorite television hosts and also a really good writer,
Speaker 1: Ali Belshie.
Speaker 6: Nice to be here.
Speaker 1: I'm listening to your audiobook right now. It is so good. First,
Speaker 1: it's so good, second.
Speaker 3: Of them all. You ride a motorcycle.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's definitely one of those thing that people don't
Speaker 6: know about me. And it turned out, and by the way,
Speaker 6: at the time that I write about riding the motorcycle,
Speaker 6: my parents I was a grown man, but my parents
Speaker 6: didn't know at a motorcycle, so they learned about it
Speaker 6: much later. It was the way I got to the US,
Speaker 6: and I still have the bike. I must say, I
Speaker 6: don't use it much, but I'm a man of a
Speaker 6: certain age, so if I get rid of it. I
Speaker 6: can't get it back right. A four year old man
Speaker 6: can't buy a motorcycle because that means you're having a
Speaker 6: midlife crisis.
Speaker 5: So his grandfather did.
Speaker 6: My wife was like, could you get rid of the
Speaker 6: motorcycle please?
Speaker 1: I love this book and I really love the story
Speaker 1: of how Ashley Banfield was mean to you.
Speaker 3: Ali.
Speaker 1: The book is called Small Acts of Courage, the Legacy
Speaker 1: of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And that's the good thing is that's the point
Speaker 6: of the book that small acts are what we need
Speaker 6: in a world that feels entirely overwhelming, where everything seems
Speaker 6: to be collapsing all around us. People can really change
Speaker 6: things with the small things they can do in their
Speaker 6: families and their communities, you know where they are.
Speaker 1: And I think that's a really good point because I
Speaker 1: do see a lot of people they're either distraught or exhausted.
Speaker 6: Yes, correct, And I think we have to understand that
Speaker 6: it feels like you need to boil the ocean to
Speaker 6: get any of these days.
Speaker 5: But you can't.
Speaker 6: Right, we can't end the Russia Ukraine War on our own.
Speaker 6: We can't end Israel gods on our own. What we
Speaker 6: can do is be fully engaged citizens, and that helps
Speaker 6: because these people who are fully engaged go on to
Speaker 6: do other things, or support candidates or fix things in
Speaker 6: their communities, and that encourages others to go farther than
Speaker 6: they did, and that those people can become senators or
Speaker 6: presidents or members of Congress, or journalists or whatever the
Speaker 6: case may be. I think we need to not underestimate
Speaker 6: our own power as people anywhere in the world, and
Speaker 6: particularly as voting citizens in the United States. We actually
Speaker 6: have power that a lot of people in the world
Speaker 6: don't have. And I want to get people sort of
Speaker 6: motivated and feeling good about the fact that I have
Speaker 6: agency and responsibility over how this can all turn out.
Speaker 6: I don't have to just be a victim of the
Speaker 6: waves that are coming over us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was glad you talked about that. And I
Speaker 1: also do think we do have a lot of power
Speaker 1: and a lot of agency. And also what we've seen
Speaker 1: in a lot of these elections is these are tight elections.
Speaker 1: As upsetting as it is that there's a large percentage
Speaker 1: of this country that wants some form of wacky at
Speaker 1: talk or say these are close elections, so we have
Speaker 1: you know, if Democrats are not engaged, they lose.
Speaker 6: Yes, And you know, this is the electionist year in
Speaker 6: modern history, right. I think like half the world's population
Speaker 6: is going to vote, and a lot they're not real
Speaker 6: elections like Russia or Iran. In a lot of them,
Speaker 6: they're not close elections like Hungary's had one. India is
Speaker 6: in the midst of having an election. Takes a long
Speaker 6: time in India. They're not going to be closed mode.
Speaker 6: He's going to win, probably by a landslide, and he's
Speaker 6: sort of an anti democratic sort. We still have in
Speaker 6: America democracy. We still have the right to vote, and
Speaker 6: I think we still have more people who believe in
Speaker 6: democracy and rights than not in America. We don't want
Speaker 6: to be giving that away and we don't want to
Speaker 6: be falling to trend that's going around the world. It's
Speaker 6: always gone around by the way, it's historical that when
Speaker 6: things feel overwhelming, elect the guy who says I can
Speaker 6: fix everything for you, right, because that doesn't generally work out. Well,
Speaker 6: we have agency, we can fix things. That's fine. Don't
Speaker 6: give up here. Democracy don't happen through revolution. They happen
Speaker 6: through people voting themselves out of power. They happen through
Speaker 6: people voting anti democratic democratic people into power. So that's
Speaker 6: the thing we have to be conscious of in this
Speaker 6: next few months.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you right, really well about that, about this, you
Speaker 1: know what it looks like to go from an autocracy.
Speaker 3: You know, India made this choice.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. It is choice, which is
Speaker 6: kind of wild because India under Gandhi, which is really
Speaker 6: part of my story because later a role in my
Speaker 6: family's history. India in nineteen forty eight got independence from
Speaker 6: Great Britain because of literally a series of small acts
Speaker 6: of courage by people like Gandhi and others around him.
Speaker 6: They actually designed this, in fact, to the point that
Speaker 6: the Indian flag has a spinning wheel on it. It's
Speaker 6: a wheel on which you weave cloth because Gandhi told Indians,
Speaker 6: you know what your small act of courage is, weave
Speaker 6: your own cloth so that you don't have to buy
Speaker 6: imported cloth from Britain, which was you know, cotton that
Speaker 6: came out of the ground in India that went to
Speaker 6: Britain and got resold a higher prices. To to Indians,
Speaker 6: that's actually the symbol of their independence. And yet they
Speaker 6: are prepared to vote for an autocrat because people they
Speaker 6: find the stuff intoxicating, people who say they can fix things,
Speaker 6: people who say they can give you things that are
Speaker 6: outsized and not reasonable. So we've not fallen full victim
Speaker 6: to that in the United States. But the idea that
Speaker 6: Donald Trump still has standing and still is the presumptive
Speaker 6: Republican nominee, tells you there is a danger.
Speaker 1: You're not a Nepo baby, but you do have famous grandparents.
Speaker 1: As a Nepo baby, myself, I'm always trying.
Speaker 3: To worry baby. We're actually I was saying this too
Speaker 3: at Leastia the other day.
Speaker 1: We're not Nepo babies, were Neposaurus because we're too old
Speaker 1: to be babies. But your great grandfather was involved with
Speaker 1: Gandhi right noe.
Speaker 6: And my grandfather was his youngest student on his commune,
Speaker 6: his ushram, which was highly influential to my family because
Speaker 6: it taught him. You know, this ushram was was sixty
Speaker 6: miles away from where my grandfather was living, but in
Speaker 6: those days is of sixty miles in dirt roads in
Speaker 6: nineteen ten, so that was a two day journey, which
Speaker 6: meant he didn't go home. He lived on the farm.
Speaker 6: He didn't have the upbringing of his mother and father.
Speaker 6: Gandhi was his person who taught him stuff. My grandfather
Speaker 6: was Muslim, Gandhi was Hindu. And when my great grandfather
Speaker 6: let my grandfather be gandhi student, said to Gandhi, there's
Speaker 6: one condition you have to teach him is religion. Well,
Speaker 6: Gandhi didn't know Islam, so he read it. He learned
Speaker 6: Islam to teach it to my grandfather. He learned Judaism,
Speaker 6: he learned Christianity, and of course he understood Hinduism. And
Speaker 6: that was the birth of this concept of pluralism in
Speaker 6: my family, which has persisted through the decades to the
Speaker 6: point that my parents when they finally emigrated to Kenya
Speaker 6: and then to Canada, all they wanted was a society
Speaker 6: in which people are not judged or separated or distinguished
Speaker 6: by the color of their skin, by their race, by
Speaker 6: their religion. And they taught me to realize that what
Speaker 6: value there is to live in a society where not
Speaker 6: only are people different, but people have different ideas And
Speaker 6: how do we value that, how do we nurture that?
Speaker 6: What does that dialogue look like? And that's sort of
Speaker 6: where I am today, That's why I am the journalist
Speaker 6: I am today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you would talk about the diaspora in such an
Speaker 1: interesting way, and what it means to be as jew
Speaker 1: who has a similar team on having been so moved
Speaker 1: from like nobody in your family lived in India for generations.
Speaker 3: Can you talk about how that informed?
Speaker 6: Sure, you know, I hear actually a lot from a
Speaker 6: lot of people who read the book, but from my
Speaker 6: Jewish friends who say, this sounds like my family's history
Speaker 6: a little bit right. It's the idea that sometimes you
Speaker 6: move by choice because you could see the writing on
Speaker 6: the wall. Sometimes you moved by force. Sometimes you were
Speaker 6: kicked out, but you went to places where maybe you
Speaker 6: knew the language, maybe you didn't, Maybe you knew the culture,
Speaker 6: maybe you didn't. Maybe you were welcomed, probably you weren't,
Speaker 6: but you you so loved the quest for freedom that
Speaker 6: you'll make it work. So even if any kind of
Speaker 6: immigrant shows up somewhere where the streets aren't paved with
Speaker 6: gold and everything's not as good as it sounded when
Speaker 6: you made the decision to get there, you try and
Speaker 6: make a go of it. You try and make it work.
Speaker 6: And when I see and it was very relevant to
Speaker 6: the immigration conversation we're having in America today, because you
Speaker 6: and I live in New York and when I walk out,
Speaker 6: chances are greater than I'm going to run into a
Speaker 6: an immigrant or a migrant than I am a native
Speaker 6: born New Yorker these days. And I just look at
Speaker 6: it and I think, I wonder what these people's grandchildren
Speaker 6: are going to write about them as they deliver food
Speaker 6: or they offer some service as part of our economy.
Speaker 6: Migration is the way of the world. It has always been.
Speaker 6: It will only be more so between climate and wars
Speaker 6: and economic migration, and we need to understand it better
Speaker 6: because to me, this is a bit this book is
Speaker 6: a bit of an ode to immigration. In some cases,
Speaker 6: migration people who make the choice to move for a
Speaker 6: better life for their family. It always works out, Molly.
Speaker 6: People who do that end up being massive contributors to
Speaker 6: the places to which they move.
Speaker 1: Oh, my grandparents except one of my grandmothers is born in.
Speaker 3: England, but all of them were born in New York
Speaker 3: and they lived in New York. And my parents lived
Speaker 3: in New York, and I live in New York. My
Speaker 3: kids live in New York City.
Speaker 1: And I often think, first of all, immigrants are the
Speaker 1: reason that we have such a good economy, right, because
Speaker 1: I was on with these Brits yesterday and they were
Speaker 1: talking about how much their economy suck, and it's because
Speaker 1: of Brexit, because of the same stupid ideas that Donald
Speaker 1: Trump had, right that you know, immigrants are bad and
Speaker 1: we can grow the economy by who knows, yes, right, right,
Speaker 1: by whatever, by being more racist.
Speaker 3: And so I do think about that a lot.
Speaker 1: And there's zero difference between me and the guy delivering
Speaker 1: the food, right, except that my family came here a
Speaker 1: little earlier.
Speaker 6: That that was exactly right. And your trajectory is influential
Speaker 6: to them. If they look at your family and your
Speaker 6: history and my family and my history, they say, hey,
Speaker 6: we can make a go of it, and they generally do.
Speaker 6: Despite all the nonsense that we hear these days about
Speaker 6: committing more crimes, I mean, it's statistically proven that immigrants
Speaker 6: don't commit more crimes than native born populations because there's
Speaker 6: a massive disincentive to commit a crime. If you're here
Speaker 6: is an immigrant. If your is an undocumented migrant, it's
Speaker 6: even more serious. You will get yourself deported. It's as
Speaker 6: simple as that.
Speaker 5: You've seen them.
Speaker 6: They just work hard. And when I talk about my
Speaker 6: family having moved from India to South afric in the
Speaker 6: late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. You know, I
Speaker 6: grew up thinking they were business people. They were business people.
Speaker 6: They had carts like wheelbarrows into which they put things
Speaker 6: and sold things. Some had vegetables and some had dried goods.
Speaker 6: So we see here in America they're people doing whatever
Speaker 6: work is available so that they can live to fight
Speaker 6: another day. But they will, they will live to fight
Speaker 6: another day, and they will have children who will get educations.
Speaker 6: And God knows we need them because we're short of
Speaker 6: everything in this country. We are sort of odors. We're
Speaker 6: short of doctors, pharmacists, everything we need. But we have immigration.
Speaker 6: You know, immigration in America falls under the Department of
Speaker 6: Homeland Security, which I think is terrible framing because I
Speaker 6: talk about Canada and our immigrants experience there. Canada understands
Speaker 6: that immigrants turned Canada from a sort of a podunk
Speaker 6: provincial place into a country that punches above its weight.
Speaker 6: We frame it as a security threat, and I'm not
Speaker 6: saying that the border is not a real issue.
Speaker 4: You have a door.
Speaker 6: You should be able to close your door and lock
Speaker 6: your door and open it whenever you want. But that's
Speaker 6: not all of immigration. Immigrant is what the country's built on,
Speaker 6: and it's an economic imperative that we have to solve.
Speaker 6: And what we're doing is we're falling victim to language
Speaker 6: and discussions that don't do it justice.
Speaker 1: The right has gained the system in an insane way.
Speaker 1: And the truth is, you shut the border and people
Speaker 1: in Texas are furious with you because they go to
Speaker 1: Mexico all the time. They go shopping, they go to dinner,
Speaker 1: they go to the mall. I mean this whole idea,
Speaker 1: you know, down Trump's like shut the border. You know,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of Republicans who are driving to
Speaker 1: Mexico right now.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of crossover.
Speaker 1: And the idea that we're somehow static in this continent
Speaker 1: is insanity. I would also add that Canada is a
Speaker 1: nicer place to immigrate too, because they have more services
Speaker 1: for people.
Speaker 6: Well they do, and by the way, universal healthcare being
Speaker 6: the main one, because fundamentally that doesn't become a strain
Speaker 6: on the system. Canada accepts the fact that if you
Speaker 6: are coming into the country, you will probably sooner than later,
Speaker 6: become a contributing member of society. In the economy and
Speaker 6: so week or so, I was in Toronto for a
Speaker 6: fundraiser for the Toronto Public Library System. The beneficiary of
Speaker 6: the fundraiser was new arrivals to Canada. How do we
Speaker 6: provide them with financial counseling, how do we provide them
Speaker 6: with language training? How do we help them find housing?
Speaker 6: Because Canada still leans into that idea that without immigration
Speaker 6: will fall apart. I mean, the truth is, so will
Speaker 6: we in America. But we've so framed the discussion around
Speaker 6: dangerous people coming across the border and flooding our cities.
Speaker 6: And you know, some of our northern politicians are not
Speaker 6: helping that situation. They lean into the alarmist language about
Speaker 6: this stuff. So people tell you, you know, you can't
Speaker 6: get housing in New York. It's too expensive because of migrants.
Speaker 6: How there's been too expensive in New York for one
Speaker 6: hundred freaking years. London, New York, Vancouver, San Francisco, Chicago,
Speaker 6: every major city in the world has a housing infrastructure
Speaker 6: problem which should be solved whether or not you have immigration. Right,
Speaker 6: we should be building transit and housing for our people
Speaker 6: and airports or whatever it is that we need to
Speaker 6: be doing. So blaming immigrants for the stresses of our
Speaker 6: cities is sort of cowardly and empty and economically not
Speaker 6: going to work in the long run anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the whole idea, the division is just such a
Speaker 1: large part of publican politics. Jesse just sent me an
Speaker 1: interesting tax saying that throwing out Airbnb ultimately has helped
Speaker 1: with the housing situation in New York, which makes sense.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but we're far from a solution, and like this
Speaker 6: or anywhere, and if you, you know, the smart thing
Speaker 6: to do economically would be really figure that out, Really
Speaker 6: figure out what the growth rate of this city and
Speaker 6: our cities are, and really figure out how to create
Speaker 6: lots of housing mixed housing come for rich people and
Speaker 6: some for low income people. And then it doesn't it
Speaker 6: doesn't sort of have this backward influence on your immigration policy. Right,
Speaker 6: if everybody can get healthcare and everybody get housing, we
Speaker 6: certainly have the jobs that we know we have. We
Speaker 6: certainly know that all of these immigrants that Donald Trump
Speaker 6: warns about, these migrants, all of these dangerous people, they're
Speaker 6: not driving our wages out because our wages are up.
Speaker 6: So so we need to think about this differently. And look,
Speaker 6: I'll say this Democrats didn't fix it when they had
Speaker 6: the chance. Republicans, many of them, used to speak very
Speaker 6: positively about immigration, particularly governors in Western states where they
Speaker 6: knew they needed the labor. Or w Bush paints nice
Speaker 6: pictures of immigrants these days, which is nice. But we're
Speaker 6: all kind of in the wrong place on this, and
Speaker 6: we need to redesign our conversations around the fact that
Speaker 6: this is our future. It's our past. By the way,
Speaker 6: all of us are immigrants in some fashion or children
Speaker 6: of immigrants. We need to refashion how we think about
Speaker 6: society and build our future on the basis of equal
Speaker 6: rights for everybody, real civil rights for everybody, and the
Speaker 6: fact that we're just going to be a constantly evolving society.
Speaker 6: And that's a great thing.
Speaker 1: We're one hundred and seventy ish seventy six seventy eight
Speaker 1: when this airs days to the election.
Speaker 3: What do you been surprised by?
Speaker 6: I sort of am surprised by the resilience of Donald
Speaker 6: Trump in this thing. If you or I got into
Speaker 6: a fraction of the trouble that this guy gets into,
Speaker 6: the reputational harm done to us would be remarkable. And
Speaker 6: I don't know whether he's just hit up bottom so
Speaker 6: that he can't harm himself anymore. There's a bunch of
Speaker 6: people who will just stick with him. Remember the core
Speaker 6: who sticks with him sort of the same core number
Speaker 6: of people percentage of Americans who believe in a lot
Speaker 6: of conspiracy theories and things like that. So you can
Speaker 6: get sort of a third of the American population to
Speaker 6: believe a lot, particularly in the days of misinformation. I
Speaker 6: do think that the Democrats are going to have to
Speaker 6: get it together in terms of dealing with what their
Speaker 6: message is on democracy, what their message is on reproductive freedom,
Speaker 6: which seems to be a remarkable motivator for people to
Speaker 6: turn out to vote. And they're going to have to
Speaker 6: figure out what their message is on the Middle East,
Speaker 6: because they're losing support in greater numbers than the margin
Speaker 6: by which Joe Biden won some states. So there's work
Speaker 6: to be done. I think they're working very hard toward
Speaker 6: a ceasefire, which might help that situation, might help that
Speaker 6: discussion a little bit. But this is by no means
Speaker 6: an obvious outcome in November, and one that has me
Speaker 6: quite worried right now. Oh, we have agency, We have agency.
Speaker 6: That's the other part. That's the book part that you
Speaker 6: know what we can do?
Speaker 4: Think about it?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 5: Good.
Speaker 3: I am also worried to thank you Alli. I hope
Speaker 3: you'll come back.
Speaker 6: I would love to thank you, my friend.
Speaker 3: No moment, oh fuck Rick Wilson.
Speaker 4: Yes, ma'am.
Speaker 3: Do you want to know who my moment of fuckery is?
Speaker 5: I do.
Speaker 4: I would love to know your moment of fuckery.
Speaker 3: Mighty Mike Flynn, everybody's favorite.
Speaker 1: I don't know if Trump knows this, but he's ready
Speaker 1: to be Trump's VP.
Speaker 3: Pick I like it.
Speaker 4: You know, since Mike Flynn is presently suing me for
Speaker 4: ten million dollars, I'm going to refrain from comment for
Speaker 4: once in my life.
Speaker 1: Well, in my mind, Donald, you cannot go wrong picking
Speaker 1: Mike Flynn, and that is why I say to you.
Speaker 3: Definitely pick Mike Flynn.
Speaker 1: If a Baca's not around, hard to think of someone
Speaker 1: better than Mike Flynn. Luck to all who definitely pick him.
Speaker 1: I think that'll be great.
Speaker 4: Have fun storming the castle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, good luck, team, it's gonna be great.
Speaker 4: It's gonna be great. Well, my moment of fuckery, and
Speaker 4: I know you're gonna be shocked, absolutely shocked to hear this.
Speaker 4: But on Friday the Securities and Exchange Commission charged bf
Speaker 4: Borgers CPA with systemic fraud, banned him permanently from practicing
Speaker 4: as an accountant for any business regulated by the sec
Speaker 4: and charged him fourteen million dollars in civil penalties. Wait,
Speaker 4: who is what's the connection?
Speaker 5: You ask?
Speaker 4: He happens to be the auditing firm for Truths Social.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, amazing. That is amazing. That is an
Speaker 3: amazing moment of fuckery. You win.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, I was laughing. I laughed so hard
Speaker 4: on Friday that I wished for a moment I had
Speaker 4: Trump diapers. I know you can't stop me. There's no
Speaker 4: force of nature that will stop me from being a
Speaker 4: twelve year old asshole.
Speaker 3: I'm aware. That was bad. That was so upseting.
Speaker 1: Oo God, that's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Speaker 1: Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the
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Speaker 1: for listening.