Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly 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 Ronda Santis, Tim Poole and Ben Shapurou are all
Speaker 2: defending Elon musk santi Semitism. We have such an excellent
Speaker 2: show today, So before as Dave Weigel stops by to
Speaker 2: talk about how wokeism was not a factor in the
Speaker 2: twenty twenty three election, then we'll talk to the Guardians
Speaker 2: Margaret Sullivan about the media's recent failures covering the twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four election. But first we have the host of
Speaker 2: the Enemy's List, the Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson.
Speaker 1: Rick Wilson, thank you, thank you, thank you. I appreciate
Speaker 1: you for making the time to cover the podcast all
Speaker 1: the time, but it's because we need you.
Speaker 3: It's the best half hour of my week.
Speaker 1: Molly, it's twenty minutes, it just feels like a half
Speaker 1: an hour. I want you to do a two second
Speaker 1: rip for me. In a world where the Republican Party
Speaker 1: was not a complete unmitigated shit show, you guys, and
Speaker 1: I know you're not even in that party anymore, but
Speaker 1: you would be able to get your shit together and
Speaker 1: nominate Nicki Haley and get rid of Donald Trump. Right.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's what can happen because the Republican Party
Speaker 1: is a mass, right.
Speaker 3: The sixty five percent of the Republican Party that are
Speaker 3: Trump potties with you know, the bomb vest strapped on
Speaker 3: their chest, ready to meet the seventy two virgins who
Speaker 3: all look like Ivanka. Those people will never leave him.
Speaker 3: But if he passed from this earth by whatever modality,
Speaker 3: the Republican Party is full of really smart operators and
Speaker 3: strategists and consultants and campaign people. I tell my Democrat
Speaker 3: friends is to let don't mistake the people who go
Speaker 3: to the rallies with the people who organize the rallies,
Speaker 3: and so yes, Nicki Haley would be a formidable candidate
Speaker 3: in every other universe. Again, I'm not standing Nicki Haley.
Speaker 3: She's got a lot of significant flaws, but she's not
Speaker 3: terrible on camera. She's not untalented as a candidate, and
Speaker 3: that really does matter, That really does have an impact
Speaker 3: on electability that she can perform. Why is Ron DeSantis
Speaker 3: a better candidate on paper but an obviously worse candidate
Speaker 3: in real life because he stands there and looks like
Speaker 3: a fish having some sort of seizure with his mouth
Speaker 3: moving up and down. He can't make himself have expressions
Speaker 3: that are normal human beings can parse. I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: facial expressions have this long genetic heritage in the human
Speaker 3: race of warning people against danger or or signaling approval
Speaker 3: or desire or hunger or fear. D Santas's case, it's
Speaker 3: like all of it's in a gumbo any second. It's like,
Speaker 3: I'm looking at you with lust and yet loathing.
Speaker 4: It's just madness.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about that for a minute, because because
Speaker 1: it is, I mean, what happened, I want you to
Speaker 1: like clearly, Ron DeSantis is not going to be the president,
Speaker 1: largely because he is terrible retail politician. I mean, look,
Speaker 1: I was worried about his autocratic, fascistic ideas, but those
Speaker 1: are not the problem for the GOP base. The problem
Speaker 1: for the GOP base is that he wears high heels
Speaker 1: and makes weird faces and screams at kids about how
Speaker 1: many calories icys have.
Speaker 3: That does a lot of sugar, and it doesn't that
Speaker 3: young Lady Raptor should report to a re education camp.
Speaker 1: I mean, that was crazy ass.
Speaker 3: Yesterday, I was joking around with a friend of mine
Speaker 3: who does a lot of advertising branding. We're talking about
Speaker 3: what the worst brand of twenty twenty three. I said,
Speaker 3: Moms for Liberty Summer camps. Terrible but a terrible Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I mean that's I think a really good point, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The party itself, the apparatus part of the party, the consultocracy,
Speaker 3: the lobbyist, the money people. They all want to get
Speaker 3: past Trump. They desperately want to get past Trump. But
Speaker 3: they also all recognize that Trump's going to win the primary,
Speaker 3: and so not going to get out there and do
Speaker 3: this has always been the problem in this Republican primary field.
Speaker 3: The three people who actually spoke out against Donald Trump,
Speaker 3: to their credit, limited, but to their credit were Chris Christy,
Speaker 3: Asa Hudgerson, and Will Hurd. Well, Will Hurd is gone,
Speaker 3: Asa Hudgerson is at somewhere like point one percent. I
Speaker 3: think that includes family members. And Chris Christy is going
Speaker 3: to come in fifth place in New Hampshire, the state
Speaker 3: He's invested all his time and money. All of these people,
Speaker 3: if they had gone at Trump early, if they had
Speaker 3: done what you know, again, I'm beating my head against
Speaker 3: the wife said this back in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3: You have to never stop attacking Trump. Once you attack Trump,
Speaker 3: you must never blink. You must never seed an inch
Speaker 3: of ground. You must never say that Donald Trump was
Speaker 3: at one time nice to someone. You must never give
Speaker 3: him a fucking inch. We've got President Biden willing on
Speaker 3: a stage with China's President g to call the guy
Speaker 3: a dictator, and not one of these Republicans on that stage,
Speaker 3: at any of these debates has been willing to say
Speaker 3: Donald Trump lost the election. None of the ones that
Speaker 3: have a possibility of winning. Donald Trump lost the election.
Speaker 3: Donald Trump is a losing loser who loses. They're so
Speaker 3: fearful of anything that would arouse the anger and wrath
Speaker 3: of the base that they will accept everything, including this
Speaker 3: week's fascist palooza from Trump and his allies.
Speaker 1: No, I mean, and I think this is a base problem, right,
Speaker 1: This is a base problem. This is a Republican base
Speaker 1: that has control of the levers of power. And there's
Speaker 1: not a grown up in the room, right.
Speaker 3: There are no grown ups in the room. I wrote
Speaker 3: about this this week. I actually dug up an editorial
Speaker 3: I wrote for The Washington post in twenty seventeen, right
Speaker 3: after he fired Comy Jesus, and I said, if you
Speaker 3: work for Trump, it's time to quit. And I wrote
Speaker 3: about it, and a lot of my friends who were
Speaker 3: in the administration who had gone in saying things like, well,
Speaker 3: I'm going to be a guard rail. I'm going to
Speaker 3: make sure we channel him into conservative policies, and all
Speaker 3: these ideas that somehow Jared and Ivanka will come back
Speaker 3: and soften the edges. Boy, that this time he's going
Speaker 3: to govern like a conservative from the Old School Heritage Foundation,
Speaker 3: limited government, then personal responsibility. Oh, get the fuck out
Speaker 3: of here.
Speaker 1: But did you think that the Old School Heritage Foundation
Speaker 1: would go fascist before he'd like? I mean, they have
Speaker 1: now a plan for if he gets back into power,
Speaker 1: which makes fascism look fashionable. I mean, it's a basically
Speaker 1: a whole plan of how they're going to get in
Speaker 1: there and fire everyone normal and just have a complete autocracy.
Speaker 1: I mean, Heritage, which was never great but was at
Speaker 1: least a little more normal, has become just an organ
Speaker 1: of Trumpism, right, correct?
Speaker 3: You know, Molly, Look, I actually dug up a copy
Speaker 3: of nineteen eighty four's Heritage Foundation report to Ronald Reagan
Speaker 3: called mandate for leadership, and if you read it, it's
Speaker 3: like peering back into the Middle Ages, because it's things like,
Speaker 3: we should improve the processes of government operations to reform
Speaker 3: and make it swifter for American citizens to get their
Speaker 3: taxes refunds returned and there, and the bureaucrace should be
Speaker 3: streamlined to improve, you know, using modern technology to improve
Speaker 3: the bureauc I mean, and it's all this like honestly,
Speaker 3: today it reads like do gooder stuff right and now now,
Speaker 3: and you can you can mark the time when Mike
Speaker 3: need them.
Speaker 1: These were the most evil people in the eighties are
Speaker 1: now like the philanthropist space.
Speaker 3: They're like saints at this point. The thing about it,
Speaker 3: too was always like their contention whether it was right
Speaker 3: or wrong, but their contention was, we have to operate
Speaker 3: under the rule of law, because communists and socialists do
Speaker 3: not operate under the rule of law. So we're going
Speaker 3: to operate under the rule of law. It's going to
Speaker 3: constitution and rule of law are going to define everything
Speaker 3: we do. Okay, that aspirational thing. And even if it
Speaker 3: was just aspirational, Okay, today you've got Stephen Chung Trump
Speaker 3: spokesperson saying that the lives and existences of Trump's abouts
Speaker 3: will be crushed and destroyed.
Speaker 1: Right if they don't like the autocracy, don't worry, because
Speaker 1: they won't have We won't have to hear from them
Speaker 1: because they'll be in Gimo was basically the net net event.
Speaker 3: Trump's speeches from Veterans Day since he has in the
Speaker 3: last week or ten days, Trump has repeatedly gone over
Speaker 3: and over and over again to overtly tell us, because folks,
Speaker 3: Republicans always tell you what they're going to do. One
Speaker 3: hundred percent of the time they tell you what they're
Speaker 3: going to do. I have an example that I cite
Speaker 3: sometimes and people don't always like it. But when Rogue
Speaker 3: was overturned, and anybody was surprised by that, Like the
Speaker 3: Republicans were telling you for fifty fucking years they were
Speaker 3: going to stack the court in overturn Row. They said
Speaker 3: in every goddamn election cycle, over and over again, we're
Speaker 3: going to stack the court and overturn Roe v.
Speaker 4: Waite.
Speaker 3: Okay, you know, so when it does happen, Wait, you're
Speaker 3: shocked at the leopards are eating your face because you
Speaker 3: put yourself in a room full of face eating leopards.
Speaker 3: What the other part of this is when you're calling
Speaker 3: people vermin, when you're saying you're going to put them
Speaker 3: in prison because they're your political opponents, Unlike with Trump.
Speaker 3: You know, the Trump people are very quick about this,
Speaker 3: and so online it's like, well, yeah, that's because Trump's
Speaker 3: fucking criming twenty four seven for the last forty years
Speaker 3: and he got caught. The fundamental question underneath all this,
Speaker 3: you know, do we say the F word if you
Speaker 3: don't know that Donald Trump is a fascist by now?
Speaker 3: Because if it looks like a fascist and talks like
Speaker 3: a fascist, and walks like a fascist, and promises to
Speaker 3: govern by a fascist like a fascist by putting its
Speaker 3: political opponents in jail, to porting ten million people, ignoring
Speaker 3: the rule of law, centralizing all power with the president,
Speaker 3: firing all the federal government officials who were not directly
Speaker 3: controlled by the president. If you don't think that's fascism, folks,
Speaker 3: wake the fuck up. I know, listen, and I get
Speaker 3: it that language and words matter. I'm a writer, you're
Speaker 3: a writer. We believe that those things are true. But
Speaker 3: a lot of people have hesitated to call him a
Speaker 3: fascist and to say what he's doing is fascistic. But folks,
Speaker 3: he's a fascist. I'm shocked, if I may, if I
Speaker 3: may modify a James Carville quote, it's the fascism stupid, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: It boggles my mind that anyone can look at the
Speaker 3: words that the Republican nominee, because he's the Republican nominee.
Speaker 3: The words the Republican nominee is saying every day on
Speaker 3: the campaign trail and on truth, social and wherever that
Speaker 3: else else he pops up those words every single day
Speaker 3: means something to seventy million Americans. And he as chaotic
Speaker 3: as Trump is, you know. Tom Nichols writes, the failure
Speaker 3: mode of calling Trump a fascist is he doesn't have
Speaker 3: an organized, coherent movement. I think though, I think he does.
Speaker 3: I think he does. In the modern TikTok social media
Speaker 3: era and Twitter era, you don't need all the coherent
Speaker 3: organization you had in the past. You just need momentum
Speaker 3: and energy and direct and Trump does provide that to
Speaker 3: the Republican base. Look, we've seen this in poll after poll.
Speaker 3: I've got some surveys coming out next week. Scared the
Speaker 3: shit out of me because the Republicans now are basically like, no,
Speaker 3: the other side cheets, therefore we can kill them.
Speaker 1: And that is I think a really important way in
Speaker 1: which Trump has really done something is sort of won.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say one, but he's really you know,
Speaker 1: is that they've just continually, every time they're accused of anything,
Speaker 1: they say, no, it's the other side. So you really
Speaker 1: do have people in this Republican base who believe that
Speaker 1: the twenty twenty election was stolen and that really everything
Speaker 1: Trump does is actually done by Joe Biden.
Speaker 3: It is the combination of projection.
Speaker 1: And mainstream media news breakdown because there's no widely agreed
Speaker 1: upon truth. Everybody isn't sitting down to watch the evening
Speaker 1: news together.
Speaker 3: The combination of inversion and projection is what they do
Speaker 3: with everything.
Speaker 1: Right, say more about that, Oh.
Speaker 3: No, Donald Trump isn't a corrupt, weird scumbag. Joe Biden's
Speaker 3: the corrupt weird scum bag. They flag it over and
Speaker 3: over again. They will always invert the accusation and project
Speaker 3: it back every single time. It's the simplest way to
Speaker 3: predict their behavior, and every revelation about Trump is greeted
Speaker 3: by a high low. On the high side, they do
Speaker 3: that inversion and say, oh, well, it's Biden's just as bad,
Speaker 3: the corrupt Biden crime family, and the low version of
Speaker 3: it is to the Naga, Bass and the masses. Is
Speaker 3: this unbelievably exaggerated over the top. You know, it's not
Speaker 3: just that Biden's corrupt. He called Trump crypt but Biden
Speaker 3: eats live Baby's in a basement with Hillary Clinton and
Speaker 3: a pizza restaurant. The crazy is so underneath all this,
Speaker 3: The idea that Biden is a pedophile, is an international criminal,
Speaker 3: has this sweeping global crime ring. All of it projects
Speaker 3: right back. If you invert it the way they describe
Speaker 3: Hunter Biden as this global criminal mastermind, it's Jared.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's it, Jared, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: Jared is certainly making a lot of money from Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 3: Does Hunter Biden have two billion dollars from the Saudi's
Speaker 3: from the Bonesaw crew? No, he does not. But the
Speaker 3: idea is always to turn the accusation around, yell twice
Speaker 3: as loud about your opponent. And this is ancient rules
Speaker 3: of politics. And it's also because Trump grew up in
Speaker 3: the sway of Roy Cone and Roger Stone and this
Speaker 3: school of politics that was going out of fashion until
Speaker 3: social media came along, where you could bullshit your people.
Speaker 1: All the time because there was no truth.
Speaker 3: Because there was no truth that everything's relative, everything's flexible,
Speaker 3: everything's mutable. And now I look at a lot of
Speaker 3: the alarm bells that are going off, and of course
Speaker 3: they're going to flip it around. Oh no, the Democrats
Speaker 3: are the fascists. They're the ones who are organizing and
Speaker 3: to put me in jail and put Americans. And I
Speaker 3: said this way back in the day before I was
Speaker 3: an ex Republican, people like Barack Obama is a Kenyan
Speaker 3: Muslim sleeper agent who will destroy America and bring full communism.
Speaker 3: And toward the end of it, I said to somebody,
Speaker 3: you know, if Barack Obama was a Kenyan Muslims communist
Speaker 3: sleeper agent, he was terrible at his job because because
Speaker 3: it basically governed as a liberal Republican for the most
Speaker 3: of his administration and was in retrospect. And no, at
Speaker 3: the time, folks, yes, I called him every fucking bad name.
Speaker 1: In the I didn't want to be And you know.
Speaker 3: Listen, I played the whole fucking game to the hilt. Okay,
Speaker 3: but you didn't know things could get worse, but there
Speaker 3: was no way to anticipate at that moment that there
Speaker 3: are a non zero number of Republicans who look back
Speaker 3: and go, I would trade it. I would trade that
Speaker 3: shit in right now. I doubt have another four years
Speaker 3: of Obama if it meant not having Trump, the idea
Speaker 3: of Trump and trump Ism. People don't want to say
Speaker 3: the effort. They don't want to call it fascist. They
Speaker 3: don't want to call it madness. They don't want to
Speaker 3: call it dangerous. They don't want to call it illiberal
Speaker 3: or autocratic or dictatorial. But that's what it is. I
Speaker 3: ran a series of ads back in the two thousands
Speaker 3: at a big state wide ballot initiative. The ballot initiation
Speaker 3: we were running against was like the Protection for Doctors
Speaker 3: and Families Act or something. It was some trial bar stuff, right,
Speaker 3: and I called it like the Deadly Doctor Act. That's
Speaker 3: not what they say on the ballot, but that's what
Speaker 3: it is.
Speaker 1: It's so the evil stuff makes me depressed.
Speaker 3: Trump has told you what he will do ban it
Speaker 3: in that interview with Tim Miller on the Circus, told
Speaker 3: you what he will do. They're not just trolling. They're
Speaker 3: not just playing around. They mean it.
Speaker 1: Republicans are running on this idea that the left is
Speaker 1: anti Semitic, and you're going to hear this a lot.
Speaker 1: The left hates the Jews, because you know, there is
Speaker 1: a Palestinian congresswoman that is really the whole thing, right,
Speaker 1: the left hates the Jews.
Speaker 3: They're really working to hang the DSA around the neck
Speaker 3: of the Democratic Party, which just saying if I were
Speaker 3: at King Jefferies, I would just say to the four
Speaker 3: members of the DSA and in the House representation, I
Speaker 3: would just say to them very clearly, DSA membership has
Speaker 3: qualifies you from many committee seats.
Speaker 1: There's so much pushing back on progressives. And as Joe
Speaker 1: Scarborough said, and he was totally right, progressives have been
Speaker 1: and this was yesterday, Progressives have been so incredibly patient
Speaker 1: and have not hijacked the party in the way that
Speaker 1: there was anxiety from the center that they would. And
Speaker 1: they have taken these progressive wins in infrastructure and unions
Speaker 1: and they have really behaved in a way that has
Speaker 1: been really I think honorable. And you know, Bernie Sanders
Speaker 1: got to run the budget. I mean they were rewarded
Speaker 1: for it, but I just want to point out that
Speaker 1: there really is anti Semitism on the right that is
Speaker 1: like overt.
Speaker 3: Yes, and it rhymes with melan huh.
Speaker 1: Well, there's mel On husk. You know. I was reading
Speaker 1: the Steve Bannon thing where he was saying, we got
Speaker 1: to drive the money lenders out of the temple. Let
Speaker 1: me tell you who the money lenders are, because I
Speaker 1: come from a family of them. Like that is not
Speaker 1: even coded. That is, you know, they want to get
Speaker 1: rid of the Jews, and I think it's important that
Speaker 1: we really are out there about this.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 3: I do think that there is a philosophy that Steve
Speaker 3: Bannon has imparted inside the Republican movement and party that
Speaker 3: there are no enemies to my right. And that's why
Speaker 3: Rhonda Santa S's Nazis campaigning are protesting in Florida and
Speaker 3: he doesn't say anything because he knows some of those
Speaker 3: people are his voters. And that doesn't make Rhonda Santis
Speaker 3: an actual Nazis, right, It doesn't help right. It means
Speaker 3: that he will tolerate actual Nazis. I prefer my Nazis
Speaker 3: in the old fashioned way, driven before massive US forces
Speaker 3: into humiliation and defeat. But the anti Semitism on the
Speaker 3: right is so prevalent and so virulent. Yes, is there
Speaker 3: a horseshoe? There is? Are there people who believe that
Speaker 3: Hamas is legitimate?
Speaker 1: Are there people making tiktoks about how Osama bin Laden
Speaker 1: had some good ideas? I mean it's crazy, that is
Speaker 1: completely cresty, but that should be disabout immediately.
Speaker 3: As my creative director Michelle Kenny said yesterday, I hope
Speaker 3: those TikTok kids don't find out about mind calm. You know,
Speaker 3: it's just like.
Speaker 1: Rick Welson, ladies and gentlemen. Hopefully I can convince him
Speaker 1: to come back.
Speaker 3: I will be back with bells on and nothing else.
Speaker 1: Naughty Santa.
Speaker 2: Dave Weigel is a political reporter for Someophore.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Fast Politics, Dave.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: I'm so excited to have you here because you are
Speaker 1: writing such excellent stuff for Semaphore, and you're out and
Speaker 1: I always think of you as someone who writes excellently
Speaker 1: but also is everywhere.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 5: I appreciate that, although I'm just at home now so
Speaker 5: I'm trying not to feel guilty about it.
Speaker 1: But you go to a lot of places, true, and
Speaker 1: so you really do see firsthand. You know, in this
Speaker 1: era when people don't really a lot of times people
Speaker 1: don't go to a lot of places, you really go everywhere.
Speaker 1: And so I want to ask you the piece you
Speaker 1: wrote this week about woke, give our listeners sort of
Speaker 1: the TLDR on this because it's so right.
Speaker 5: Well, I don't think I was the first reporter to
Speaker 5: say no and observe that this was happening. You like
Speaker 5: to be first, but castmember back to the beginning of
Speaker 5: the year. Ron DeSantis in twenty twenty two had achieved
Speaker 5: a lot of conservative goals and taken on Disney over
Speaker 5: Florida's parental rights law, which the poke which opponent all
Speaker 5: I don't say a law. Ronda Santis's achievements and these
Speaker 5: are re celebrating by the National Conservatives. Of conservatives were
Speaker 5: against the I'm going to put it so, he's the
Speaker 5: word woke. That's a childish we're kind of get us
Speaker 5: the liberal cultural elite from college professors and people who
Speaker 5: run big corporations to n Cuba and how it handles
Speaker 5: trans athletes, all this, and he was taking all of
Speaker 5: this on but also rhetorically his speeches were about wokeness
Speaker 5: and if you saw him campaign for Republican candidates in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty two. He had a riff that he carried
Speaker 5: into his present of campaign where we'll fight the woke
Speaker 5: in the universities, will fight the woke, in the businesses,
Speaker 5: will fight the woke, and the legislature, which is referencing
Speaker 5: Churchill World War Two. This did not sound silly until
Speaker 5: until Tom Trump said it sounded silly, and that's when
Speaker 5: things started to change. You're following out to say where
Speaker 5: you're Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to pause and go back here because
Speaker 1: I want to be specific about what woke means. So
Speaker 1: in this case, it was things like bud Light having
Speaker 1: an LGBTQ spokesman, and I think, you know, it would
Speaker 1: be like a sort of a company having a greater
Speaker 1: interest in preserve you know, it could be anything from
Speaker 1: books to the environment to you know. It was the
Speaker 1: idea behind it was corporations doing good, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: even if they weren't necessarily doing good. This all started
Speaker 1: with the trend of corporations doing good.
Speaker 5: This includes if a company announces that it's going to
Speaker 5: pursue environmentally sound investments, or it's going to do diverse
Speaker 5: hiring those are both under attack by DeSantis too, and
Speaker 5: the overall argument articulated by him more than any other politician.
Speaker 5: I mean, other writers write about this, but really was Look,
Speaker 5: we have let post twenty twenty, especially this left wing
Speaker 5: culture get far out of hand. There are people in
Speaker 5: our institutions trying to undermine the economy, our children's minds, gender, everything.
Speaker 5: We must defeat them, and we to destroy them. I
Speaker 5: would also say those principles are not gone from this primary.
Speaker 5: They're still part of the of the conversation. Rhetorically. DeSantis
Speaker 5: after June and Trump kind of made fun of how
Speaker 5: much people were talking about this. Does not talk about
Speaker 5: what this as much he did. I mean, the campaign
Speaker 5: will dispute this a little bit, but if you as
Speaker 5: his speeches, that riff has gone. He's changed up the
Speaker 5: way he talks. There's not as much of a competition
Speaker 5: for this in races this year, local races, school board races.
Speaker 5: It just this stuff did not move votes like people
Speaker 5: thought it would. I talked to Mom's for Liberty for
Speaker 5: the story. Moms are very blunt and honest about this.
Speaker 5: They believe that the cause of getting progressive ideas about
Speaker 5: gender and race out of school is a popular one
Speaker 5: and it goes pretty well, but it was not a
Speaker 5: driving issue for voters this year. What kind of overwhelmed
Speaker 5: it was a sense of getting things back to normal.
Speaker 5: Let's make sure the school's standards are good. Let's make
Speaker 5: sure people are bagged in school, and our test scores
Speaker 5: are not following like they did after the pandemic. It
Speaker 5: turned out a lot of angst that was powering some
Speaker 5: Republican victories that seem to be about wopness was just
Speaker 5: about twenty twenty hangover. The other way I mentioned is
Speaker 5: that winning means you can't keep planning. When Tim Scott
Speaker 5: was running for president talking about, you know, getting CRT
Speaker 5: out of schools, he was running in Iowa and in
Speaker 5: South Carolina in places that had banned cr critical race theory,
Speaker 5: you know, the idea that all systems can be broken
Speaker 5: down and analyzed based on whether they are oppressing minorities,
Speaker 5: that had been banned for two years.
Speaker 1: It had also never been taught in the first place.
Speaker 1: I mean, Republicans had managed to ban a lot of
Speaker 1: things that weren't necessarily issues, which does speak to my
Speaker 1: thesis that it is much easier to fight things that
Speaker 1: don't exist.
Speaker 5: That's right, but giving them a little bit of offer.
Speaker 5: Here are there academics and are there people who are
Speaker 5: members of teachers unions who say we're going to teach
Speaker 5: kids about race younger than we used to. Sure, The
Speaker 5: point is that Republicans in stage they controlled already said
Speaker 5: you're not going to do that. We're going to punch that.
Speaker 5: You also had, and you talked about it. This backlash
Speaker 5: because once those were in place, you've had this litany
Speaker 5: of stories where books that no one really has a
Speaker 5: problem with but mentioned race are getting carried out as
Speaker 5: schools by one parent with a problem saying I don't
Speaker 5: like that my kid is seeing this book that has
Speaker 5: one sex scene. I don't like that my kids seeing
Speaker 5: this book that's too focused on slavery. The story sort
Speaker 5: of changed. Also, the thing I've been for a victory.
Speaker 5: This is a Supreme Court conservatives side against affirmative action.
Speaker 5: Over the summer, a lot of conservative states and activists
Speaker 5: use that to continue attacking these corporate institutions, mostly and education,
Speaker 5: and they're just they're just winning. So it's harder to
Speaker 5: run for president and say, look, the biggest issue is
Speaker 5: this wokeness that is creepy over the country because it's
Speaker 5: not anymore. And just some of the conservatives I talked
Speaker 5: to with the story say yes, that winning change things,
Speaker 5: and there is less democratic focus on the things we
Speaker 5: considered woke. You need Saraba or Mary saying this like
Speaker 5: you need a dialectic where woke and this needs to
Speaker 5: be on the march for anti woke this to be
Speaker 5: really potent and it wasn't.
Speaker 4: I mean just it was kind of being rolled back
Speaker 4: in some ways.
Speaker 5: There are fewer Democrats talking about and seeing fewer you know,
Speaker 5: celebrities post black squares to say their solidarity for some
Speaker 5: protests or another. The conversation culture changed a bit, and
Speaker 5: it changed as a political focus in these Republican campaigns.
Speaker 5: It changed as something that could move votes in down
Speaker 5: balla campaigns. That's what happened. I only the story says
Speaker 5: this is over. I don't worry about to move on.
Speaker 4: There's new issues. It just time right down on this.
Speaker 5: And I think if you start to Clock differently, say
Speaker 5: how much your Democrats you are talking about police reform
Speaker 5: and criminal just reform. Why met Clock wrote out too
Speaker 5: that was in vogue for years. It is now something
Speaker 5: Democrats are worried about like things change, but in a
Speaker 5: campaign it can take a while for people to adjust
Speaker 5: and say, oh, the topics we were focusing all of
Speaker 5: our attention on are not really relevant anymore to people.
Speaker 1: Right. I think that's a really good point. Part of
Speaker 1: it is that they got over their skis right.
Speaker 5: Some of that I said, I was mentioning with some
Speaker 5: of these restrictions in schools where people said, Okay, I'm
Speaker 5: tired of hearing a felloment, but like what is in
Speaker 5: the school library?
Speaker 4: Who cares?
Speaker 5: I would like like my kid to get an education.
Speaker 5: I'm not either fit in the school board that's obsessed
Speaker 5: with what the books are or what the gender policy is.
Speaker 5: And this has been interesting because polling on I'll explay
Speaker 5: PHWO notification. So some schools handled differently a kid showing
Speaker 5: up and saying, I identify as a different gender or
Speaker 5: a different name than.
Speaker 4: I do at home, Please don't tell my parents.
Speaker 5: Some schools especially considered as school board ara districts. In
Speaker 5: school districts, I should say in concerted in Red States
Speaker 5: laws of in paths to say all right if a
Speaker 5: kid says that the parent needs be informed. In some
Speaker 5: places say no, that's the kid's right not to be informed,
Speaker 5: they could be abused at home, and there were fights
Speaker 5: about this all over the country. New Jersey didn't have
Speaker 5: law of school board racist, but it had legislative races.
Speaker 5: Republicans really ford a lot into this, and they had
Speaker 5: polling that said most people disagree. They would they do
Speaker 5: think if a kid shows up to school with a
Speaker 5: different identity, the parts should know, But that didn't translate
Speaker 5: them voting for Republicans. And this is this is like
Speaker 5: the complication of politics. There could be twenty issues and
Speaker 5: if one issue really burns people up, but it's not
Speaker 5: the priority for ninety five percent of the electorate, you
Speaker 5: can't get much further with it. And that's sort of
Speaker 5: what we learned from these elections. It was kind of
Speaker 5: bubble bubbling op all year, how is this going to go?
Speaker 5: And then we had elections and we know how let's go.
Speaker 5: We have not the election yet, but we have a
Speaker 5: slow decline of Ron DeSantis. That's another test where this
Speaker 5: is going.
Speaker 4: Donald Trump is.
Speaker 5: Doing quite well embracing so some of these ideas. He
Speaker 5: was the progenitor of some of this, I mean he
Speaker 5: was he was attacking critical or his theory at the
Speaker 5: end of his presidency on Chris Ruffo's guidies, because Christopher
Speaker 5: went on Fox, he started talking about it, and Trump acted.
Speaker 5: So it was not an issue to de Santis could
Speaker 5: diverse distinguish himself from Trump on that much. It's just
Speaker 5: that it did clearly reliction. Voters didn't care about it
Speaker 5: the way they cared about every of the other thing
Speaker 5: they associate with Trump.
Speaker 1: So let me ask you about that. So you're in
Speaker 1: it with this Republican primary contest and you're seeing this,
Speaker 1: and you're you're on the ground and you've been covering
Speaker 1: all of this. Does it seem like there's a section
Speaker 1: of Republican voters that like the people who like Nikki Haley,
Speaker 1: which again it's a very fragmented, you know, never Trump
Speaker 1: or non trumpy Republican party that probably will still go
Speaker 1: to Trump that crew. Are they drawn to Nicki Haley?
Speaker 1: And again, this is you're going to have to sort
Speaker 1: of take what you know and go with it. But
Speaker 1: do you think that they're drawn to Nicki Haley because
Speaker 1: she's not crazy and because she harkens back to a
Speaker 1: sort of more normal, less insane Republican party, or do
Speaker 1: you think that it's some other kind of calculus.
Speaker 4: There's a few things.
Speaker 5: So she has run a normal campaign that a Republican
Speaker 5: could have run in twenty twelve or twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3: She got it early on.
Speaker 5: I think one thing that's underrated is by getting in
Speaker 5: very early and by taking media questions before the race
Speaker 5: started about Trump and basically screwing up curly. I mean,
Speaker 5: she if you go back to read her the political
Speaker 5: profile Tim Alberder wrote about her, she's all over the
Speaker 5: place on what she thinks about Trump, and twenty one
Speaker 5: she's all over.
Speaker 4: The place on whether she'll write a Trump does.
Speaker 5: But you do those things early, and there is a
Speaker 5: half life and people stop caring after a while. I mean,
Speaker 5: this is Melissa Warren doesn't win. But her Native American
Speaker 5: DNA test thing is a great example of this, Like
Speaker 5: do you like drap the poison? You process it, and
Speaker 5: then by the time that people are voting, they moved
Speaker 5: on from it. First of all, that happened to her,
Speaker 5: so she made some mistakes. She made her blunders and
Speaker 5: calculations early, and she's also been very cautious in how
Speaker 5: she takes on the media, takes on issues. Shee'e been
Speaker 5: a little bit looser lately if you saw this with
Speaker 5: her opposition to anonymity on social media. But she's just
Speaker 5: run this campaign that is is very conservative. It is
Speaker 5: we're going to cut off ties with China. She's four
Speaker 5: and I just mentioned some of the Wokens stuff. She's four,
Speaker 5: restricting talking about gender and sex and schools. You can
Speaker 5: look at what she's talked about. She's not in the
Speaker 5: detailed platform, but she's run as a normal Republican and
Speaker 5: her affect is not as culture war focused as desantisis.
Speaker 5: So what you've seen from like the donor perspective, which
Speaker 5: really mattered this week. Tim Scott gets out donors are
Speaker 5: looking at this field, big donors, people who you know,
Speaker 5: can put a million dollars in keep her pack them more.
Speaker 5: And what they liked about Scott and what they like
Speaker 5: about Haley says somewhat different politicians is it's just the effect.
Speaker 4: It's just the effect.
Speaker 5: They do not are not as harsh when they talk
Speaker 5: about cultural issues.
Speaker 4: They don't seem crule about it.
Speaker 5: They're not totally seen as obsessed with banning abortion. Haley's not.
Speaker 5: Haley's just dodged as completely. Another example here where She's
Speaker 5: took your decision early on to say I'm going to
Speaker 5: dodge this question. My position is that I'm dodging the
Speaker 5: question if you keep asking me about fifteen week bands.
Speaker 5: I'm going to dodge it until you stop asking me,
Speaker 5: which is what happened. Whereas Dasantis made a different bet.
Speaker 5: I'm the true conservative who had a big win in Florida,
Speaker 5: so I can get back. I can create that around
Speaker 5: the country. Donors are documents and also donors not geniuses.
Speaker 5: We've learned this cycle, as we learned every cycle. They
Speaker 5: read the same polls as everybody else, They see the
Speaker 5: same TV show as everybody else. We saw this with
Speaker 5: Thomas Petrophy, this wealthy donor who just for the whole year.
Speaker 5: If its Benjie blaying out going to run for a
Speaker 5: reason that made no sense. They look at what they
Speaker 5: see from Haley and how she talks about these issues.
Speaker 5: They look at what they see from Dysantis, and they
Speaker 5: look at the polling Haley because the way she's pitched herself.
Speaker 5: I think also just our personal characteristics. The people who
Speaker 5: say it'd be interesting to have a young woman as
Speaker 5: president instead of the old band just polls better than DeSantis,
Speaker 5: and that has helped her a lot. And again, if DeSantis'
Speaker 5: cultural focus was really popular and driving up polls and
Speaker 5: it was helping with Republicans, they might think this differently.
Speaker 4: It just didn't.
Speaker 5: And also a lot of these wealthy donors don't don't
Speaker 5: care about that, like, that's not why they're there are
Speaker 5: some there are some wealthy dontors who give the certainizations
Speaker 5: who care about social issues. Most of them do not.
Speaker 5: Most of them are more interested in their bottom line
Speaker 5: tax breaks, yeah, than they are in why are you
Speaker 5: going to prevent the color purpol or whatever from being
Speaker 5: for me?
Speaker 4: He taught the school.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are certainly crazy religious salads who give money,
Speaker 1: but many of them give that money to the Supreme Court, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, whereas a lot of these people just want
Speaker 1: tax breaks.
Speaker 4: Yes, they'll say as much.
Speaker 5: What they really want is a sort of Trump fiscal
Speaker 5: policy without the unpopularity and awkwardness of Trump. They don't
Speaker 5: like his tariffs, and when it gets down to some
Speaker 5: of the specifics, when she talks about cutting off ties
Speaker 5: with China, all that, but the sense how you get it,
Speaker 5: they don't take that as seriously than Trump saying he'll
Speaker 5: needy immediately institute tariffs mean.
Speaker 1: Well, because Trump did. Didn't Trump immediately do tariffs like
Speaker 1: one of the few things he actually did do was
Speaker 1: in the Larry Cudlow School of Economics, was triffs he did.
Speaker 5: And this I'm trying not to sound too cynical, it's
Speaker 5: a little cynical. Hailey does not have the same reputation
Speaker 5: for I will make a promise on the campaign trail
Speaker 5: to voters and then rigidly enforce it even if it's unpopular.
Speaker 5: That's just not how she operates. She is a bring
Speaker 5: your business to my state, We're going to make allowances
Speaker 5: for you, or going to avoid this fight. We're going
Speaker 5: to try to I'm going to try to steal a
Speaker 5: popular cibe An issue. That's there's a very lower level
Speaker 5: fight this week.
Speaker 4: They kid didn't get some of attention. I did see
Speaker 4: the Times rate for some of this. But DeSantis and the.
Speaker 5: Desanta superPAC have attacked Hailey for just some stuff that
Speaker 5: she has said that was credulous about the twenty twenty
Speaker 5: racial reckoning right, so her reaction to the George Floyd murder.
Speaker 5: DeSantis criticized that just the way she associated herself with it,
Speaker 5: and like, what would you have to do with this?
Speaker 4: It's never back.
Speaker 5: Sorry, the DeSantis wire room, the campaign, this is a
Speaker 5: Twitter so to himself is attacking her for when Bubba Wallace,
Speaker 5: he a NASCAR driver, said there was a news near
Speaker 5: his car his garage, she immediately she immediately criticized it.
Speaker 5: And this is another This is a sense of how
Speaker 5: online the des antic paint that I had literally forgotten
Speaker 5: about that, but their attitude was this woman can't be
Speaker 5: trusted because she takes like the popular liberal media position for.
Speaker 3: Him to time.
Speaker 5: And if you're a big donor, you don't care, and
Speaker 5: that's great, and you want them to like win in
Speaker 5: come taxes, you don't care.
Speaker 1: You want them not to be insane.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Part of it is Desanti's world took the sort of
Speaker 1: least smart parts of trump Ism. I mean, if you're
Speaker 1: a big donor, game this out for me, and you've
Speaker 1: watched Desanti's fight with Disney, you don't want that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't want that. And I'm not even a Republican.
Speaker 1: I mean, isn't that sort of poison?
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I'm just trying to see it from the way that
Speaker 5: these Republican operators see it, and like, what is their
Speaker 5: optimal situation here? It's really much more like a Republican
Speaker 5: governor who just stopped picking fights all the time. It
Speaker 5: is like a Mike de Wine, you know, io, who
Speaker 5: is keeping their taxes low and deregulating but not trying
Speaker 5: to if a culture war comes, it's up through the legislature.
Speaker 4: It's not there him.
Speaker 5: And yeah, so for Desanti, sufforders, the ones who were
Speaker 5: in the rank and file conservative talker's advocates, they hate
Speaker 5: this donor class. I mean they really, they really resent
Speaker 5: and I haven't seen it turnby turned around really, But
Speaker 5: the fact that a lot of wealthy people who can
Speaker 5: give to Republican campaigns are now saying they're into her,
Speaker 5: I expect them to start using that as a as
Speaker 5: a weapon against her. Why would you reject Ron DeSantis
Speaker 5: who has delivered even when the big businesses like Disney
Speaker 5: were attacking him over somebody who seems like this big
Speaker 5: business corporate America is fine with her. Fair question, But
Speaker 5: this is this is where we get to. Has the
Speaker 5: base moved on, doesn't care, doesn't care about that, and
Speaker 5: that kind of thing, and every conversation, it feels like
Speaker 5: you need to have a disclaimer that we're talking about
Speaker 5: candidates who are losing down Trump by thirty points in
Speaker 5: Iowa twenty.
Speaker 4: Five a couple points.
Speaker 5: So all of this is happening, is what do we
Speaker 5: do about are the candidate who might get a chance
Speaker 5: to go one a while with Trump for a couple primaries.
Speaker 4: This is the conversation they're having.
Speaker 5: But to the extentsantisis has lost his claim on the
Speaker 5: Trump alternative lane, which was their argument all year that
Speaker 5: it's a two man race.
Speaker 4: It's going to be two man race.
Speaker 5: And I was talking to DeSantis supporters in Iowa today
Speaker 5: the idea that Nikki Haley could come second Iowa. They're saying,
Speaker 5: this is ridiculous, that's a distraction, She has no chance,
Speaker 5: no organization. This is like offensive that you guys are
Speaker 5: the people think there are willing to split the vote
Speaker 5: when Ronda Santis should be the Trump challenger. But to
Speaker 5: the extent they are losing their grip on that role
Speaker 5: in the primary. It's all the stuff I've talked about,
Speaker 5: just that Haley has picked different fights that have not
Speaker 5: worn as poorly with voters and certainly are more interesting
Speaker 5: to the big donors or at the moment and has
Speaker 5: head into the thanksgiving and the advice at the moment,
Speaker 5: helping her get on air on pay TV eds more
Speaker 5: than him, more than Rhym the Santas Dave.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 5: Oh yes, thank you very much. This is a big,
Speaker 5: complicated one, so happy we could talk about it.
Speaker 2: Margaret Sullivan is a columnist for the Guardian and author
Speaker 2: of Newsroom Confidential, which is coming to paperback next week.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Fast Politics, my friend, my mentor, Margaret Sullivan.
Speaker 6: Thank you, Molly. I love being on your pod.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm excited because your paperback comes out in two weeks, guest.
Speaker 6: It's the paperback of my memoir Newsroom Contest Bill, which
Speaker 6: was published last year, and now it's going to be
Speaker 6: out in paperback. So it could be a gift for
Speaker 6: like a young journalist or a young woman or a
Speaker 6: young man or someone old.
Speaker 1: Excellent. So we're in this weird primary season where it
Speaker 1: looks like the incumbent, of course, will run again that's
Speaker 1: Joe Biden, and then Donald Trump will yet again win
Speaker 1: a Republican primary contest. And so we have come back
Speaker 1: to this idea of how do normal political journalists, who
Speaker 1: are used to trying to jack nuance and to sort
Speaker 1: of hide their own bias, right, because everybody has a bias,
Speaker 1: how do they cover something that is so clearly out
Speaker 1: of the mainstream.
Speaker 6: So I'm a little tiny bit encouraged right now because
Speaker 6: I see and I'm rarely encouraged about the way covers politics.
Speaker 6: But Trump's plans should he be elected are so extreme
Speaker 6: that news organizations are adjusting a little bit. And you know,
Speaker 6: you still see bad things, like when he went off
Speaker 6: on that tear about all the things that he would
Speaker 6: It was his Veteran's Day speech, and the news organizations
Speaker 6: that covered it well talked about how he used the
Speaker 6: word vermin, you know, which is fraught with these this
Speaker 6: is the language of Hitler and others. I have to
Speaker 6: dunk on the New York Times a little bit here,
Speaker 6: because the headline they wrote was something like Trump takes
Speaker 6: a very different and his veterans thinkage, whereas others were
Speaker 6: saying he was echoing Hitler and Mussolini. But I do think,
Speaker 6: you know, I'm seeing some positive things there. And also
Speaker 6: I have to say that both the Times and the
Speaker 6: Washington Post and there are probably others have done really
Speaker 6: important reporting in recent weeks about how what Trump's allies
Speaker 6: and he are planning should he be re elected, and
Speaker 6: it should scare the heck out of everybody. We will
Speaker 6: not have a democracy. I mean, it's like the guardrails
Speaker 6: are all going to come down. Anything that restrained him
Speaker 6: in his first term, as wacky and bad as that was,
Speaker 6: those things are going to be dismantled, and really we're
Speaker 6: not going to have the country that we have had.
Speaker 6: And I just think it's so important for the press,
Speaker 6: for journalists to get this across to people, because I
Speaker 6: think that a lot of regular people who don't follow
Speaker 6: the news that carefully are like, well, Trump, you know,
Speaker 6: it's the same old stuppoh that his style is a
Speaker 6: little off putting, but you know he's a businessman or something.
Speaker 6: That is what's going on here, and then they get
Speaker 6: so much attention. We already know Joe Biden is old.
Speaker 6: Yes he's really too old. But he's been a good president.
Speaker 6: Some would say a great president, some would.
Speaker 1: Say the best president of their lifetime. Immanat has passed
Speaker 1: these massive legislations. I mean again, but yes, but we're
Speaker 1: not talking about him. We're talking about Trump.
Speaker 6: Right, But I mean the fact that these news organizations
Speaker 6: and politics journalists can you know, beat us over the
Speaker 6: head with the fact that Joe Biden is eighty years old,
Speaker 6: Like his birthday is still the same as it was
Speaker 6: last week and the week before. We already know that
Speaker 6: he's old. What people don't really know is what Trump
Speaker 6: would do if re elected. And that's that needs to
Speaker 6: be pound at home, and that is you know, as
Speaker 6: you said, Molly, it's outside the bounds of how journalists
Speaker 6: feel comfortable because they absolutely do not want to be
Speaker 6: called liberal. They don't want to be called bias, they
Speaker 6: don't want to be called in the tank for Joe Biden,
Speaker 6: and so they're very hesitant to say the stuff in
Speaker 6: a really clear way, but they must.
Speaker 1: There's an anxiety, and there's also I feel like there's
Speaker 1: a real predisposition to wanting to seem you know, straight
Speaker 1: down the middle. Oh absolutely, And I think that is
Speaker 1: why we end up with those headlines. There was another
Speaker 1: headline from the New York Times that also had a
Speaker 1: similar way of sort of casually mentioning a sort of
Speaker 1: like norm breaking action as a sort of Pacadillo. The
Speaker 1: writers of the pieces don't write the headlines. That's right.
Speaker 6: I think that's a big part of it. I think
Speaker 6: that if you actually read those pieces, they very carefully,
Speaker 6: you tell you what has happened, but the headlines, and
Speaker 6: you're right. In most places, in certainly these big places,
Speaker 6: there's a there are editors who write, who write the headlines.
Speaker 6: And also, you know, headlines have to be short, and
Speaker 6: headlines have to be you know, able to in some
Speaker 6: cases fit into a print column or not. But yeah,
Speaker 6: the headlines are extremely important because we know that most
Speaker 6: people don't get beyond the headlines. So you can have
Speaker 6: a most nuanced, groundbreaking story, it's not going to matter
Speaker 6: if the headline makes it all seem completely normal, as
Speaker 6: if this was an election in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I think that's a really important point.
Speaker 1: Now we don't know, or maybe you know, but I
Speaker 1: don't know how headlines are decided at the New York
Speaker 1: Times right now. Probably the gas is it should be
Speaker 1: at least a few editors are also seeing those headlines.
Speaker 6: There are editors whose job it is basically to write
Speaker 6: the sty to read the story, copy edit it, and
Speaker 6: write a headline on it, and then if it's an
Speaker 6: important story, it will absolutely be seen by senior editors.
Speaker 6: And you know what I would like to see happen
Speaker 6: is for really top editors and JOCN and others, the
Speaker 6: head of the AP, Julie Pace to really get their
Speaker 6: staffs together, including editors who write headlines and tweets and
Speaker 6: display type, and say to them we need to get
Speaker 6: across this very important situation in clear terms and brainstorm
Speaker 6: with their staffs about how to do that. But I
Speaker 6: don't think that happens because we're all running scared about
Speaker 6: being called a liberal.
Speaker 1: It is interesting, so part of this is that working
Speaker 1: the rafts works, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely, Who are we afraid of? And I would
Speaker 6: like to say that I am not afraid of this,
Speaker 6: but who are we as journalists afraid of. We're afraid
Speaker 6: of people on the right describing us as partisan, and
Speaker 6: for good reason, we don't like that, because we want
Speaker 6: to be seen as fair and nonpartisan. That's fine and understandable,
Speaker 6: but when you know you're saying working the refs, when
Speaker 6: the refs on the right come after us and say see,
Speaker 6: you're a hack, you move yourself over to the right.
Speaker 6: A little bit because you're like, well, maybe they've got
Speaker 6: a point, you know, or I just don't want that
Speaker 6: coming at me, so you kind of but you keep
Speaker 6: moving over to the right. And the problem is that
Speaker 6: you can never ever satisfy them because it's not really
Speaker 6: about the content. It's about this whole technique of working
Speaker 6: the ref yes.
Speaker 1: And it's so interesting because it's like, when we look
Speaker 1: back at twenty sixteen, Donald Trump got two billion dollars
Speaker 1: of free media, literally two billion dollars if you look
Speaker 1: at I mean this was calculated by like the New
Speaker 1: York Times or some one of these mainstream organizations that
Speaker 1: he had he had gotten so much free media, and
Speaker 1: it was true. I mean, you could see him everywhere.
Speaker 1: And part of it was because he was a totally
Speaker 1: new type of character in the politics sphere.
Speaker 6: He was a novelty and by his own description, he's
Speaker 6: a ratings machine. And you know, that's a really insane
Speaker 6: thing to say about yourself, but it's true that there
Speaker 6: is something bizarrely compelling about him, and it's hard to
Speaker 6: tear your eyes away that I'm not describing that as
Speaker 6: something good, but he's interesting, Biden to watch him give
Speaker 6: a speech or do a press conference. It's not that interesting,
Speaker 6: you know, and Trump is interesting, and that, unfortunately is
Speaker 6: a value of ours, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I mean that's sort of how we got here,
Speaker 1: is because people found him interesting and they covered him
Speaker 1: a lot. My guess is that people are going to
Speaker 1: wake up in January and be like, holy shit, Donald
Speaker 1: Trump is the Republican nominee. And I think that that
Speaker 1: is going to beget till November, until the election, and
Speaker 1: hopefully not further than that of Trump coverage where journalists
Speaker 1: are going to once again have to grapple with us, right. Yeah.
Speaker 6: The thing that worries me is that people are not
Speaker 6: all that tuned into the news. Like I was just
Speaker 6: reading someplace today about this just this one news consumer.
Speaker 6: I mean, I can't call her a news consumer, but
Speaker 6: this one person I guess who was saying something about
Speaker 6: she really likes Kennedy, Yes, because he's been so good
Speaker 6: on vaccine. Well, she's associating him with vaccines, but the
Speaker 6: fact is that he's anti vaccine, right no, no.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 6: And the other one was you know the people who
Speaker 6: think that because abortion rights were so limited and so
Speaker 6: removed and rescinded during Joe Biden's presidency that it must
Speaker 6: be his fault. I mean, people don't really read or
Speaker 6: pay attention, and so I don't really know. I don't
Speaker 6: think that tweaking the head you know, this is what
Speaker 6: bothers me. We talk about all this stuff. Oh, this
Speaker 6: headline in the New York Times. I really don't think
Speaker 6: that that kind of thing is going to influence people
Speaker 6: that much. I mean, it would be around the margins
Speaker 6: at best. But it doesn't mean they shouldn't do it right.
Speaker 6: They absolutely should.
Speaker 1: And if it's the.
Speaker 6: Times, they're so influential that, you know, other media organizations
Speaker 6: take their cues from the Times in some ways, so
Speaker 6: it's important in that way too. But you know, I
Speaker 6: always go on about, and I think righteously so, about
Speaker 6: the decline of local journalism. And one of the things
Speaker 6: that's happened is we don't have this common basis of reality.
Speaker 6: And yes, anymore, local journalism has has declined so much.
Speaker 6: You know, there was a time, and it wasn't that
Speaker 6: long ago that you know, everybody on the street got
Speaker 6: the local paper. So you might read about what you
Speaker 6: think about certain things, but at least you were dealing
Speaker 6: with a common basis of reality, and that has really dwindled,
Speaker 6: and that's a tragedy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, you had everybody watch the same newscast, right,
Speaker 1: everybody read the same newspaper, right.
Speaker 6: And I mean there's obviously a downside to that too,
Speaker 6: which is we didn't have this like diversity of voices,
Speaker 6: and we didn't have people of color or women to
Speaker 6: the extent we do now saying things and being prominent,
Speaker 6: and so that is something that's improved. But the downside
Speaker 6: is that people have really tuned out from the news,
Speaker 6: or they get their news in their own social media
Speaker 6: echo chambers or at cock or whatever it may be.
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny because one of the things that
Speaker 1: in this last election cycle that we spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time talking about was like, is there a liberal
Speaker 1: echo chamber right where liberals are sparing with our time?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 1: Certainly there is. But then there was this hilarious irony
Speaker 1: where it turned out all these conservatives had gone together
Speaker 1: and made themselves believe that some of these things that
Speaker 1: their candidates ran on were really important to voters, when
Speaker 1: they were in fact absolutely not important voters. And I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about things like book bands or trans athletes.
Speaker 6: I mean, oh, right exactly now. A lot of that
Speaker 6: stuff has backfired. We know that what we certainly know
Speaker 6: that the wild Boars thing has backfired. You know, I
Speaker 6: read this wonderful story about this. I can't remember exactly
Speaker 6: where it was, but these kids out, you know, somewhere
Speaker 6: in the Heartland, We're trying to put on Oklahoma, of
Speaker 6: all things, and the school board decided that because a
Speaker 6: trans kid had been cast in the play and other
Speaker 6: and like girls were playing boys roles, et cetera, they
Speaker 6: canceled the whole thing. And this very conservative community came
Speaker 6: forward and said that, you know, they got it put
Speaker 6: back together. And so I think that, you know, Americans
Speaker 6: at some level, a lot of us are kind of
Speaker 6: ultimately sort of sensible, and so I'm hoping that that
Speaker 6: will prevail if the information gets out there in a
Speaker 6: good way.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And the thing that the right has really seeded,
Speaker 1: which is so stupid of them, is freedom. Right. All
Speaker 1: of these restrictions are taking away your freedoms, right, the
Speaker 1: freedom to choose, the freedom to tell your kid what
Speaker 1: book to read. These are freedoms. And I just think
Speaker 1: that that is a really strange hill to die on
Speaker 1: for the Republican Party.
Speaker 6: It does give Democrats a real opportunity if they were
Speaker 6: capable of taking it and tell them story, you know
Speaker 6: that your rights have actually been removed and they're going
Speaker 6: to be removed more. That's a powerful narrative. But you know,
Speaker 6: the weird thing, of course, is that Republicans are great
Speaker 6: at pounding home their message and they have Fox News
Speaker 6: and other places that help them with that, and the
Speaker 6: Democrats have not been good at it, but they need
Speaker 6: to get better quick.
Speaker 1: It is interesting to me that these Republicans are so
Speaker 1: profoundly good at messaging. I'm sure you saw this piece
Speaker 1: yesterday was a piece that Fox News is able to
Speaker 1: create and I can't now remember where I read it.
Speaker 1: Of course, that Fox News is able to create and
Speaker 1: drive the narrative about things that don't necessarily exist. And
Speaker 1: I think about it, for example, when people when mainstream
Speaker 1: centrists news organizations have me on their shows and ask
Speaker 1: me about the mess at the southern border, and that's
Speaker 1: something where that has Republicans have absolutely shaped that narrative.
Speaker 1: Like fundamentally we are we're a country that desperately needs
Speaker 1: immigrants where we're going to become Japan, right, we don't
Speaker 1: have enough people to keep this going. You know, we
Speaker 1: don't have enough people to pay into Social Security. We
Speaker 1: are a country that has no path to citizenship right now.
Speaker 1: I mean like immigration is an emergency. You know, different
Speaker 1: states are changing their laws so that they can have
Speaker 1: these migrant children come in and work in their factories
Speaker 1: without getting in trouble. And yet the narrative is the
Speaker 1: mess on the southern border.
Speaker 6: Right Well, remember how Fox went on and on endlessly
Speaker 6: about the supposed caravan to scare everyone into thinking that
Speaker 6: there are all these undocumented criminals and perhaps rapists and
Speaker 6: everything else that we're going to jump over fences. And
Speaker 6: it's not that there isn't a mess at the southern border.
Speaker 6: It's just that it's not the mess that's being described
Speaker 6: right exactly.
Speaker 1: And I think that right now Fox uses a little
Speaker 1: bit quiet, which is a little bit scary in my mind.
Speaker 1: And some of that is probably like post Tucker Carlson,
Speaker 1: but some of that as they're getting ready for an
Speaker 1: election cycle, well.
Speaker 6: Right, And I mean I do think they've been stung
Speaker 6: pretty badly by those lawsuits, the dominion lawsuits and the
Speaker 6: Smartmatic lawsuit and one down and one still to come,
Speaker 6: and the one still to come is the bigger one,
Speaker 6: so they may be a little more careful. And of
Speaker 6: course Tucker is gone from Fox, so you know things
Speaker 6: have changed a little bit. But I think fundamentally they
Speaker 6: still know what their job is and they will do it.
Speaker 1: So true, Margaret Sullivan, I appreciate you so much. We
Speaker 1: have to problem down that incredible line. They know what
Speaker 1: their job is and they will do it. There you go, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm glad I could give you a good line. No,
Speaker 1: no moment, Rick Wells.
Speaker 3: My moment of fucker this week is entitled what the
Speaker 3: fuck is wrong with you? Elon? How the Groypers and
Speaker 3: Nick Flints and the Altright dipshits. Red Pilled Elon Musk
Speaker 3: is a story that someday must be told. I wrote
Speaker 3: a piece about it yesterday on subject asking like who
Speaker 3: did this? I outlined what I figured out the process
Speaker 3: of it was, but I want to know, like, who's
Speaker 3: the actual red pill asshole that got to this guy?
Speaker 3: Because this thing is infecting more and more of these
Speaker 3: billionaire class people. And when you look at Peter Tiel
Speaker 3: and Elon Musk and Marc Andrees and all these other
Speaker 3: people who have enormous power and influence in money, and
Speaker 3: they are slipping into this warm bath of fascism and
Speaker 3: anti Semitism without blinking an eye. Now look, I know
Speaker 3: Elon's from South Africa and you can take the apartheid
Speaker 3: out of them.
Speaker 1: And his grandfather was a famous anti Semite who moved
Speaker 1: to South Africa for the promise of greater opportunities to
Speaker 1: be anti Semitic, great anti semitism, right, But yes, I
Speaker 1: agree he's gotten more.
Speaker 3: Really, my moment of fucker here is Linda Yakarino. Linda quit,
Speaker 3: Get the fuck out of there. If you value your
Speaker 3: immortal soul, or your dignity, or your reputation, or have
Speaker 3: any shred of self respect, just leap, just walk out
Speaker 3: the door. You're you got your money already up front, Lee,
Speaker 3: walk out, now, save yourself. She does not the fact
Speaker 3: that a the world's richest man on the world's most
Speaker 3: horrifying social media platform, continues to spew out horrifying anti
Speaker 3: semitism and no one in his fan base seems to
Speaker 3: mind should scare the shit out of people.
Speaker 1: It's my moment of fucker, Rick Wilson, Ladies and gentlemen,
Speaker 1: my moment of fuckery continues to be Linda Yacarino and
Speaker 1: this fucking complete shit show that is X. He's done it.
Speaker 1: He may have driven us all off for good.
Speaker 3: I posted more yesterday for the very first time on
Speaker 3: Threads than I posted in a day on X Right.
Speaker 1: Find the addicts. We've gone over to the more benevolent billionaire.
Speaker 3: We've got over to the slightly weirder but less obviously
Speaker 3: or billionaire.
Speaker 1: Find us there on Threads.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Rick Wilson, my pleasure. As always. We'll see
Speaker 3: you again next week here on.
Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
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Speaker 1: in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you
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Speaker 1: and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.