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, and Ejene Carroll vows to do something
Speaker 1: good with Trump's eighty three point three million dollars. We
Speaker 1: have such a great show today. The Financial Times, John
Speaker 1: Burne Murdoch talks to us about the unexpected reason society
Speaker 1: maybe declining.
Speaker 2: He's so interesting. He's one of my favorite guests. Then
Speaker 2: we'll talk to The New York Times.
Speaker 1: Nick Confesssori about his amazing investigation into the Right Wings
Speaker 1: mission to destroy DEI. But first we have the host
Speaker 1: of the Enemy's List, the one, the only, the Lincoln
Speaker 1: Projects Own, Rick Wilson.
Speaker 2: Welcome.
Speaker 1: It is Monday and the only way to start your
Speaker 1: week is with one Rick Wilson.
Speaker 2: Welcome.
Speaker 3: Rick Wilson, Good morning, Molly.
Speaker 4: How are you do you know?
Speaker 2: I don't owe anyone eighty three million dollars?
Speaker 5: You know, I don't know he won eighty three million
Speaker 5: dollars either, and I find that that is a number.
Speaker 4: I would like to keep it that way.
Speaker 1: So all weekend you and I have spent gloating, I
Speaker 1: think quietly gloating about this incredible verdict where now Donald
Speaker 1: Trump is for the first time ever, I feel like
Speaker 1: held responsible for a sexual misconduct.
Speaker 2: Right, She's not the only accuser there have but been numerous.
Speaker 5: It has now been adjudicated twice that he lied and
Speaker 5: therefore defamed her. There was enough evidence to say that
Speaker 5: he is a guy who has committed sexual assault. I mean,
Speaker 5: call me crazy, but I don't know about you, but
Speaker 5: I wouldn't want that on my resume.
Speaker 1: But you know, yeah, I mean he did brag about
Speaker 1: that in the Access Hollywood team.
Speaker 2: It's not that he's that hesitant about it.
Speaker 5: Oh No, Look, he is not some blushing guy who's
Speaker 5: ashamed that he's rape. Right, that great piece you wrote
Speaker 5: about the women of Egene and your mom's generation who
Speaker 5: have been through so much.
Speaker 4: Of this shit.
Speaker 5: Who in that weird gap between sexual liberation and today,
Speaker 5: there's been a lot of ugly shit in the way
Speaker 5: or along the way.
Speaker 1: They did not grow up sexually liberated. They grew up
Speaker 1: sexually terrified. Yeah, and I think about my mom telling
Speaker 1: me these stories about men doing things to her that
Speaker 1: where she was like I just I just smiled, and
Speaker 1: you know, was like, I mean the kind of treatment
Speaker 1: she had in grad school.
Speaker 4: Right, I believe it.
Speaker 1: It was hard for me to believe, but I knew
Speaker 1: it was true because it matches with all of these.
Speaker 2: Other women's experience in the nineteen fifties and sixties.
Speaker 5: And the thing about it is, and I keep going
Speaker 5: back to this, he came into court treating it like
Speaker 5: it was just one other Trump bullshit rally. He came
Speaker 5: into court thinking, I'm just going to show my ass enough.
Speaker 5: I'm going to do my Trump performance art enough, and
Speaker 5: that'll change the facts on the ground here. That'll shame,
Speaker 5: change what I did to her. That'll unring the bell
Speaker 5: on the same charges a jury of New Yorkers had
Speaker 5: previously determined that he had done. That's the thing to
Speaker 5: me that I love what happened here because you know,
Speaker 5: it showed for once. You know, you can't like pretend
Speaker 5: that you're on the pages of Breitbert or truth Social
Speaker 5: and hope that it hope that it alters an outcome
Speaker 5: where your behavior, that the kind of behavior that you've
Speaker 5: been charged with of being abusive to women is plaguing
Speaker 5: out in front of the jury's faces. You know, it
Speaker 5: just blows me away.
Speaker 1: The fundamental problem here is that candidate Trump thought he
Speaker 1: could use his legal challenges ninety one counts criminally and
Speaker 1: his civil cases fundraising, but also is rally right, maybe
Speaker 1: you would give these speeches and it would help him.
Speaker 1: But the problem for him, and you saw this in
Speaker 1: the trial this week, was you know, here he is
Speaker 1: braging about what a billionaire he is. Good for candidate Trump,
Speaker 1: not so good for defendant Trump.
Speaker 5: This weekend we went through and as you know, my
Speaker 5: fiancee is exceptional what math for all the reasons a
Speaker 5: week we know because of her work, she's exceptional a math.
Speaker 5: We were doing some back of the envelope calculations, and
Speaker 5: given how leveraged he is financially, given how deep in
Speaker 5: the weeds he is financially, with everything being mortgaged to
Speaker 5: the hilt, he's going to have to sell something, and
Speaker 5: probably pretty fast.
Speaker 1: Remember Trump has another financial problem, which is this civil trial,
Speaker 1: which could be one hundred million plus maybe two hundred million,
Speaker 1: I think at maybe two thirty where he is going
Speaker 1: to have to sell things quickly. But I think the
Speaker 1: thing that I want to just take a minute to
Speaker 1: talk about here, which we haven't talked so much about,
Speaker 1: is this number is because of defamation. This number is
Speaker 1: so high because he could not stop defaming her.
Speaker 5: He couldn't shut up long enough to go into court,
Speaker 5: he couldn't hire a law firm that he didn't want
Speaker 5: to fuck. And look, let's just be really blunt. This
Speaker 5: hobble woman is now in my mind like single white female.
Speaker 5: She's this imitator of Malania's look and all this other
Speaker 5: weird shit.
Speaker 2: But if you look at the videos, in the photos,
Speaker 2: almost all of his aides look like young Milania.
Speaker 4: Of course he.
Speaker 5: Has a type, he is a thing. But the fact
Speaker 5: that you would put your financial future at risk because
Speaker 5: you want to hit it with your lawyer instead of
Speaker 5: hiring some junkyard dog Sonovich lawyer out there. But of course,
Speaker 5: I mean, I know he can't afford that anymore. There
Speaker 5: risks he puts himself in over and over and over
Speaker 5: again because of his dumb, childlike ego. It just blows
Speaker 5: me away. And look, we know now what it means
Speaker 5: to vote for Trump. It means you're going to vote
Speaker 5: for somebody who is an adjudicated sexual assaulter, somebody who
Speaker 5: raped Egen Carol in a goddamn dressing room, who juris
Speaker 5: have examined every scrap of evidence that there is out
Speaker 5: there twice now and said, you know, Donald, you did this,
Speaker 5: and we know you did it?
Speaker 1: Is you and I bows no from writing about Trump
Speaker 1: World and living in Trump World and basically from twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen to twenty twenty our whole world with Trump World.
Speaker 1: Trump is big into defamation.
Speaker 4: He's speaking to claiming he'll sue for defamation.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: I would like to point out that in my case,
Speaker 5: it is five hundred and seven days as of today
Speaker 5: since Trump went on a rant saying he was going
Speaker 5: to sue me in the Linked project for defamation. How'd
Speaker 5: that work out for you, Donny? Because he hasn't done
Speaker 5: a damn thing.
Speaker 1: Right, So he likes to say he's going to sue
Speaker 1: for deformation, but he also likes to defame. And this
Speaker 1: number is so high because they made a calculation that
Speaker 1: was this was how it would be. The reputational harm, right,
Speaker 1: like the harm of like hundreds of death threats in
Speaker 1: her email, having to have security, the fear she has,
Speaker 1: I mean she sleeps with a loaded gun. These are
Speaker 1: the thing that you cannot necessarily put a cash value on.
Speaker 2: This New York City jury did that yep. By the way,
Speaker 2: this New York City.
Speaker 1: Jury which had to stay anonymous for their own safety.
Speaker 5: Right as the judge is saying to them, I recommend
Speaker 5: you never reveal your name in public. That's not because
Speaker 5: he thinks that they should be discreet, y'all. That's because
Speaker 5: he thinks they're going to get murdered by Trumpers. And look,
Speaker 5: I got swatted two weeks ago. Nikki Haley got swatted
Speaker 5: last night. These people believe that anybody that opposes Trump
Speaker 5: is an enemy who should be killed. And she's going
Speaker 5: to always have to live with that. I hate that
Speaker 5: for her, and it's terrible.
Speaker 1: I want to like pull back and talk about defications
Speaker 1: a one more minute, because you'll notice that again you
Speaker 1: are the creator of the everything Trump touches dies Maxim
Speaker 1: and I want to pull back and talk about one
Speaker 1: Rudy Juliani who.
Speaker 5: Has an monthly income now of twenty three hundred and
Speaker 5: eight dollars and seven hundred and sixty one dollars in
Speaker 5: this checking account according to his that's his bankruptcy filing.
Speaker 2: So Rudy Julian was quote unquote you worked for him.
Speaker 1: He was a mathter mayor. He had a bright New
Speaker 1: York City future. Now he owes Ruby Freeman and Shay
Speaker 1: Moss about a gazillion.
Speaker 2: Dollars, so let's talk about that. They are election workers.
Speaker 5: This is a man who, when we were like warming
Speaker 5: up for the two thousand and eight campaign, was worth
Speaker 5: on paper around two hundred million dollars because of the
Speaker 5: value of Giuliani partners and all this other stuff. He
Speaker 5: needed both ego and money at the beginning of the
Speaker 5: Trump era, and so he supported Trump starting in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 5: The last time we talked was the end of twenty sixteen.
Speaker 5: I told him he will screw you, he will fuck
Speaker 5: you over, this will go badly. Don't do this, don't
Speaker 5: do this, don't do this. You can come back from
Speaker 5: where you're at right now. You can rebuild. And I
Speaker 5: was told go fuck yourself. Basically more polite than that, honestly,
Speaker 5: but it was pretty much go fuck yourself.
Speaker 4: And that was the last time we talked.
Speaker 5: I stuck to the guy shipped constantly for years, constantly,
Speaker 5: you know, I worked for him for a long long time.
Speaker 5: I was one of the few people that would say, hey,
Speaker 5: fuck off, stop doing stupid shit, and once in a
Speaker 5: while he would listen to me, and now he is
Speaker 5: a guy who is just about to be homeless.
Speaker 4: Process that for a second in Florida.
Speaker 5: He's not going to lose his condo, because bankruptcy protects
Speaker 5: your primary residence. Right, He's going to lose everything else
Speaker 5: he has. He's going to lose every other penny that
Speaker 5: ever comes into his wallet for the rest of his
Speaker 5: life is going to disappear.
Speaker 1: Ruby Freeman and Shay mass and Ruby Freeman, let us
Speaker 1: just pause her minute. She is the election worker, and
Speaker 1: she and her mother both worked in elections. They were
Speaker 1: defamed by Rudy. Their lives were made terrifying and terrible.
Speaker 1: It was the same thing as Egene right. Yeah, And ultimately, again,
Speaker 1: what I think is the most interesting thing about this
Speaker 1: whole situation is that Rudy could not stop defaming them
Speaker 1: and continued to defame them.
Speaker 4: And here's the thing.
Speaker 5: The irony of Trump always talks about defaming people, always
Speaker 5: talks about always the famous people, always talks about suing
Speaker 5: people for defamation. When it has happened now to him
Speaker 5: and to Rudy, it took a really gigantic impact financially
Speaker 5: because he's actually shut the hell up over the weekend
Speaker 5: he has not been doing it over the weekend. And
Speaker 5: as much as I find him as I find that
Speaker 5: amusing to taught him, I think he finally understood he
Speaker 5: doesn't have the cash to do this. He doesn't have
Speaker 5: the ability to raise the cash to pay this right now.
Speaker 5: He's in a very tight spot, and I'm here for it.
Speaker 5: He bought every bit of this on himself. Hey, nobody
Speaker 5: else's fault but him.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about what I think is pretty interesting here.
Speaker 1: We are Republicans now have this problem. They have a
Speaker 1: candidate quality problem.
Speaker 5: You know, candidate qual used to be the rule of
Speaker 5: everything we did in the party. And you know who
Speaker 5: the king of that was, Mitch McConnell. You know why
Speaker 5: he was the king of that because after we had
Speaker 5: the Palin experience and twenty ten and then we got
Speaker 5: wiped out in twenty twelve because.
Speaker 2: Al and experience the Palin experience.
Speaker 5: Although I will say this, you look at the people
Speaker 5: now in the Republican Party and it makes the Palins
Speaker 5: look like Downton Abbey.
Speaker 2: It's true.
Speaker 5: But long story short, we have this thing with candidate
Speaker 5: quality that McConnell after twenty twelve and said we will
Speaker 5: never do that shit again. We will recruit great candidates.
Speaker 5: We will add was a rule that people in the
Speaker 5: party really said, this is a pretty smart idea. Let's
Speaker 5: do this, let's do it this way. Well, how'd that
Speaker 5: work out for us? Because now what we have is
Speaker 5: a commitment to mostly the worst possible candidate. Trump is
Speaker 5: one of the worst possible candidates you could imagine. He
Speaker 5: is a broken and corrupt and degenerate weirdo. And every
Speaker 5: thing that the party is defined by is obedience to
Speaker 5: the corrupt, broken, degenerate weirdo. Now, I'm not saying that
Speaker 5: there aren't people that like that, because there clearly are.
Speaker 5: In twenty twenty, at the Lincoln Project, we developed this
Speaker 5: thing called the Banned Line. The story of how it
Speaker 5: got that name is not the point right now. But
Speaker 5: back then, but depending on the state you were in,
Speaker 5: it was between three and eight percent of Republican voters
Speaker 5: could be persuaded away from Trump. Well, since Dobbs and
Speaker 5: one to six and some other things, that number has
Speaker 5: grown to be between seven and eleven percent. I'm going
Speaker 5: to make an argument that things like e Gen Carroll
Speaker 5: and this verdict are going to make it an even
Speaker 5: larger number. Especially among women voters. And you know what
Speaker 5: couldn't happen to a shittier human being than Donald Trump.
Speaker 5: He deserves it, and that number is going to expand.
Speaker 5: And I think you're going to see women in this country,
Speaker 5: even the people in the Democratic side, the progressive side, aren't.
Speaker 4: Like, oh, look everything Biden does.
Speaker 5: They're going to look at the at the fact that
Speaker 5: you're making a choice now, not between Joe Biden and
Speaker 5: Donald Trump, or not between Joe Biden a republic but
Speaker 5: Joe Biden and a guy who's been now adjudicated twice
Speaker 5: to have committed sexual assault. Even Republican women, even trumpy
Speaker 5: oriented women, I think, are going to say, you know,
Speaker 5: I don't think this is for me, and we're going
Speaker 5: to try to help them do that, because I think
Speaker 5: it is an argument that can be made to a
Speaker 5: lot of these folks who ordinarily, you know, maybe they
Speaker 5: wouldn't maybe they wouldn't ever consider mooning for Joe Biden,
Speaker 5: but they may now consider that they're not going to
Speaker 5: vote for the hold Trump.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's funny because it's like I was talking to
Speaker 1: George Conway last week about this before the judgment came down.
Speaker 1: We're talking and he said, you know, it could be
Speaker 1: as much as one hundred million dollars and I thought.
Speaker 2: There's no way going bro.
Speaker 1: I thought, it's nice that you're so invest in this,
Speaker 1: and I appreciate that you got heard of Robbie Kaplan.
Speaker 2: Who is this incredible lawyer.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is like a really I think interesting
Speaker 1: important point, like Robbie CapMan was not some unknown parking lawyer.
Speaker 1: Huge Egene hired because she looked.
Speaker 5: Like right he who didn't look at Robbie Kapen to
Speaker 5: go ooh, man can be I want this one to
Speaker 5: take my case.
Speaker 4: She said, I'm going to find a son of a
Speaker 4: bitch right well.
Speaker 1: And also I'm going to find the woman who argued
Speaker 1: the defense of marriage, you know, who ended the terrible
Speaker 1: anti LGBTQ rules about marriage in this country in.
Speaker 2: Front of the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: So this is a woman who has really been a
Speaker 1: champion for what is right for a long time. You know,
Speaker 1: I thought for sure George was being a little bit
Speaker 1: overly optimistic when he said one hundred million.
Speaker 2: And there was something about when that VERDA came down
Speaker 2: where I.
Speaker 1: Couldn't believe the feelings I had about it, even though
Speaker 1: this has nothing to do with me. There was a
Speaker 1: feeling that Donald tru a woman of a certain age,
Speaker 1: a woman Donald Trump's own age, right, Donald Trump married
Speaker 1: to someone who is in her fifties, but a woman
Speaker 1: Donald Trump's own age appear of his had brought him down.
Speaker 4: Yeah. No, listen.
Speaker 5: The first thing I thought the minute I saw the
Speaker 5: case come down, and all I thought was she's my
Speaker 5: mom's age. And I think, like a lot of other Americans,
Speaker 5: the first thing I thought was, how would I feel
Speaker 5: if that was my mother who had had to live
Speaker 5: with this shit for forty years and then have this
Speaker 5: guy come out and talk the shit about her that
Speaker 5: he does. I mean, would how would I feel? And
Speaker 5: I was That was my contemplation of it. And look,
Speaker 5: I met Egeene. I guess once or twice. We had
Speaker 5: her on the podcast years ago, you and I did
Speaker 5: when we had the other podcast, but I didn't. I
Speaker 5: wasn't emotionally invested in her. But I loved watching the
Speaker 5: moment where somebody who yes, she has she has great attorneys,
Speaker 5: she has some means to be able to be in
Speaker 5: the fight against him.
Speaker 2: But she's not wealthy.
Speaker 5: No, no, but no, Yeah, that's what I'm saying, is
Speaker 5: she's not wealthy, didn't she wasn't able to throw millions
Speaker 5: of dollars into this case.
Speaker 4: But her story was an unlock.
Speaker 5: I think for a lot of people in this country,
Speaker 5: and I think for a lot, I hope, I hope.
Speaker 5: Maybe I'm wrong. Look, I could be wrong, but I
Speaker 5: hope for a lot of other other victims of his
Speaker 5: kind of abusiveness will come out and talk about it.
Speaker 5: I hope that he will. I hope that he right
Speaker 5: now is grinding his teeth because Donald Trump is acutely aware,
Speaker 5: probably to the penny, how much money he really has,
Speaker 5: and it's not the same amount that he wants you
Speaker 5: to think.
Speaker 2: Rick Wilson, I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 1: John Burton Murdoch is a data journalist at the Financial Times.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Fast Politics, my most haunting guest, John Murdoch.
Speaker 3: Thanks you for having me.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry to tell you I am still not over.
Speaker 1: At the last interview we did, which was maybe a
Speaker 1: month ago, where we talked about American life expectancy.
Speaker 2: We're talking about something else.
Speaker 1: Today, but then we're going to go back into the
Speaker 1: American life expectancy conversation because as an American with a life.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it exactly got me upset as
Speaker 1: much as it is just a fascinating window into all
Speaker 1: of the many things we're doing wrong over here.
Speaker 4: Yeah at work.
Speaker 3: I'm happy to be your sort of non American voice
Speaker 3: on all of that stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But so let's first talk about this piece you wrote,
Speaker 1: which is called is the West Talking Itself into Decline?
Speaker 1: Really interesting? Explain to us a sort of pisis behind this?
Speaker 3: Sure, So this one sort of came out of a
Speaker 3: few thoughts I've been having recently and a few pieces
Speaker 3: I've been reading. And essentially the way to come at
Speaker 3: this is to think about the human progress over the
Speaker 3: last two three hundred years. Specifically, the key point is
Speaker 3: the Industrial Revolution. So for a very long time, economic historians,
Speaker 3: kind of anyone who's interested in human progress has been
Speaker 3: trying to think what caused the Industrial Revolution to happen,
Speaker 3: when it did and where it did. So, this huge
Speaker 3: event that led to rapid growth not just in economic
Speaker 3: output but in life expectancy and life satisfaction, all of
Speaker 3: those things, What caused it to happen when and where
Speaker 3: it did? The American economic historian Robert Allen has this
Speaker 3: theory that Britain's successes in commerce at the time meant
Speaker 3: that British workers had especially high wages, and the fact
Speaker 3: that the UK had a lot of pole meant that
Speaker 3: you also had cheap energy. So this combination of high
Speaker 3: wages and cheap energy meant that it really made a
Speaker 3: lot of sense to get into using machinery things where
Speaker 3: you need few people and where cheap energy was helpful.
Speaker 3: So that's the standard theory that that's why this happened
Speaker 3: went and where it did. But where this gets interesting
Speaker 3: is there's another theory from an American Israeli called Joel Mockier,
Speaker 3: and his theory is that it wasn't necessarily as much
Speaker 3: about things like the costs of labor and energy. It
Speaker 3: was about culture, and it was about how people in
Speaker 3: Britain at that time were thinking about the world and
Speaker 3: their place in it, and what it kind of meant
Speaker 3: to be human and what we could do as humans
Speaker 3: to change our outcomes. This sounds all very sort of
Speaker 3: handwayving fuzzy, but I think it's really useful to think
Speaker 3: about how revolutionary that was at that time. So this
Speaker 3: was a period where societies were super religious and the
Speaker 3: main theory was that the quality of your life and
Speaker 3: the world around you was essentially came from God. Everything
Speaker 3: was provided by God. If you wanted to have a
Speaker 3: good life, then you had to rely. You would hope
Speaker 3: that God would pray to God that that happened. And
Speaker 3: if you wanted your future, your next year, your next
Speaker 3: decade to be better, it would again depend on some
Speaker 3: of what was providing to you. You didn't have a
Speaker 3: huge amount of So when when people like Fromtis Bacon,
Speaker 3: the British Promossiper, came along and started to say, what
Speaker 3: if we actually have some input here, What if we
Speaker 3: can and do things to change our outcome and to
Speaker 3: make the world a better place. What if we can
Speaker 3: try and come up with ways and use things like
Speaker 3: science and experimentation to find better ways of doing things.
Speaker 3: So it was really quite revolutionary thinking, and so Joe
Speaker 3: and Morkir's theory is that maybe actually this was the key.
Speaker 3: It was the fact that in British society at that
Speaker 3: time you had a group of people who were starting
Speaker 3: to think more about what can we do to make
Speaker 3: the world better? What can we do to make ourselves
Speaker 3: richer and to make ourselves healthier and to live longer.
Speaker 3: And it was that sort of culture of thinking about
Speaker 3: progress and betterment which led British society at that time,
Speaker 3: British entrepreneurs to actually start running these things into practice,
Speaker 3: and that's about the Industrial Revolution. So that's the sort
Speaker 3: of the big picture of where this, where this whole
Speaker 3: peace styro came from. And what I wanted to do
Speaker 3: in this piece Don't was to throw this forward and say, okay, well,
Speaker 3: if if if we know, or at least if we
Speaker 3: if we think that a culture that is focused on
Speaker 3: progress and improvement and experimentation can produce real tangible outcomes,
Speaker 3: can lead to more economic growth, can lead to longer
Speaker 3: life expectancy and large populations, then what does that mean
Speaker 3: for today? And so to answer that question, I replicated
Speaker 3: this this approach from some academics really some which was
Speaker 3: to look at the language that people use over time.
Speaker 3: So Google has this amazing database of millions and millions
Speaker 3: of books that have been published going back one hundreds
Speaker 3: of years, so all the way back from sort of
Speaker 3: the year fifteen hundred, sixteen hundred through to the present day.
Speaker 3: And what we can do with that is we can
Speaker 3: look at the type of language that has been used
Speaker 3: over top. What we see is that in the English
Speaker 3: speaking world, but also we can expand out to the
Speaker 3: broader west. So if we look at French books and
Speaker 3: German books as well, what we see is that in
Speaker 3: those early years that's sort of sixteen seven hundreds and
Speaker 3: the lead up to the Industrial Revolution, you really see
Speaker 3: this shift to a culture of progress. So the language
Speaker 3: being used in books, you started getting a lot of
Speaker 3: words about the future and progress and betterment and growth
Speaker 3: and that kind of thing before the economy and life
Speaker 3: expecting to see everything took up. So it really supports
Speaker 3: the idea that language and culture do matter. But the
Speaker 3: really interesting thing that I've then seen in the last
Speaker 3: say one hundred years, or particularly the last fifty sixty years,
Speaker 3: is that that has actually now reversed. So in Britain,
Speaker 3: in the US, in France and Germany and so on.
Speaker 3: The language that we use in whether you know it's
Speaker 3: measured in books, but this is really the language we
Speaker 3: use as a culture. We've stopped talking as much about
Speaker 3: progress in the future and advancing things, and we've started
Speaker 3: talking more about warrants and risks and threats, and so
Speaker 3: this for me was super super interesting in terms of
Speaker 3: how we think about the world at the moment, at
Speaker 3: our place here to what the future might hold. Because
Speaker 3: we have two things here. One, we have a decent
Speaker 3: bit of evidence to show that the way we talk
Speaker 3: about the future and progress of the culture actually has
Speaker 3: a beneficial impact on us today and the future. And
Speaker 3: two we've stopped doing that, And so that, for me
Speaker 3: is just a super interesting thing to think about, both
Speaker 3: in terms of how we've got to this point over
Speaker 3: the last few decades of talking less about things getting
Speaker 3: better and talking more about things getting worse, And then two,
Speaker 3: how can we change that going forward?
Speaker 1: The sense is that the more we talk about things
Speaker 1: getting worse, the more things actually do get worse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, look, I mean it's obviously it's complex the way
Speaker 3: these things, these things work, and that causality can work
Speaker 3: both ways. Obviously, you know, if the world becomes worse,
Speaker 3: we're going to talk more about the world becoming worse.
Speaker 3: But the interesting thing to think about here is how
Speaker 3: much of what we talk about is about, for example,
Speaker 3: the world getting scarier, and how much is the world
Speaker 3: actually getting more dangerous? Because those two things for me
Speaker 3: are quite different. Something can be dangerous, but because you
Speaker 3: don't talk about it in that way, you might not
Speaker 3: be scared by it. And similarly, something can be feel
Speaker 3: scary where it actually is it. So I think it's
Speaker 3: useful to think about again the language here. And we
Speaker 3: have all sorts of data, for example, on how news
Speaker 3: headlines have got much much more negative over the last Blackade.
Speaker 2: This is sort of the Fox News phenomenon.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's spokes news, but I think we see
Speaker 3: this kind of right across the political spectrum to a degree.
Speaker 3: You know, it's not necessarily always scare mongering, but if
Speaker 3: we're talking more about things getting worse or things that
Speaker 3: we're worried about, then that does show up across the board.
Speaker 3: And yet at the same time, we know that omity
Speaker 3: has pretty much never been lower. We know that all
Speaker 3: sorts of these things of life expectancy is generally, certainly for.
Speaker 2: Most except in America.
Speaker 3: It's this question of why are the way we talk
Speaker 3: about the world has become so much more negative? And
Speaker 3: what can we do to change that if we want to?
Speaker 1: Is the regression thing? Is it tied to conservatism?
Speaker 3: That's quite hard to pick out. I think from the
Speaker 3: data I've seen, it's pretty much across the board. So
Speaker 3: this is, as I say, it can manifest in different ways.
Speaker 3: So with someone like within news organization like bots News,
Speaker 3: this might be talking about, for example, like vieas around
Speaker 3: crime all the time, or maybe talking negatively about things
Speaker 3: like immigration.
Speaker 4: But then we.
Speaker 3: Also see this from more liberal and progressive outlets talking
Speaker 3: much much more about things like inequality or poverty, even
Speaker 3: when poverty has fallen and inequality by most measures have
Speaker 3: not risen over some time. So it's not saying that
Speaker 3: the people using this language are deliberately trying to talk negatively,
Speaker 3: but we do to see, depending on how you measure it. Basically,
Speaker 3: this has happened right across the political spectrum.
Speaker 1: And what's happening here is that this is breeding more nihilism,
Speaker 1: right like, this catastrophizing creates a more nihilistic culture where
Speaker 1: people are less are less interested in. I mean, again,
Speaker 1: we don't really know, but there certainly is a theory
Speaker 1: of the case that's that.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, exactly. The things that have made society better
Speaker 3: over the years have involved a bit of risk taking.
Speaker 3: They've involved someone coming out and saying, you know what,
Speaker 3: this might not work, but I'm going to try it,
Speaker 3: and that attitude. That mindset tends to be squashed by
Speaker 3: things like worry and stress and fear. So that's the
Speaker 3: theory here that as people start to worry more, and
Speaker 3: especially as you say, when it gets to the level
Speaker 3: of nihilism of just thinking well, you know, we're all screwed,
Speaker 3: then that is that can be really paralyzing. And so
Speaker 3: so the key thing here is well, how can we
Speaker 3: how can we change that? You know, climate change is
Speaker 3: a good example where if if you are if you
Speaker 3: want to help make the world more resilient and help
Speaker 3: reduce our impact on the planet, then if you're currently
Speaker 3: thinking well, you know, we're all screwed, it's all over
Speaker 3: by our kids are going to have no will to
Speaker 3: work into then that does not empower you to make shape.
Speaker 3: That makes you almost lean back. So is that question
Speaker 3: of how we can fix that.
Speaker 1: Climate change is such a good example because it's like,
Speaker 1: here we have a problem that is enormous and cataclysmic,
Speaker 1: but it's also you know, there are some things to
Speaker 1: be hopeful about, and it keeps shifting like the ozone layer,
Speaker 1: which growing up in the eighties and nineties was like
Speaker 1: the focus is sort of regenerating. So we're in a
Speaker 1: race against temperature. But there are reasons to be optimistic
Speaker 1: about something that was really presented to me as a
Speaker 1: young child as cataclysmic. So I do think there's real
Speaker 1: reason to not be nihilistic and to really take optimism
Speaker 1: where we can get it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, one hundred percent. I think the the azone example
Speaker 3: is a great one that made. Another one is acid rain.
Speaker 3: So like when I was in school, we talked about
Speaker 3: acid rain all the time, and then because of technology
Speaker 3: is getting much cleaner and some regulations coming in, acid
Speaker 3: rain is basically not say anymore. And it's the same
Speaker 3: in all sorts of things, like lots of measures of
Speaker 3: air pollution show that that's now at least not getting worse,
Speaker 3: even though it's perhaps not quite getting better yet. And
Speaker 3: all of the things that have allowed us does a species,
Speaker 3: to have less impact on society have come from new technologies,
Speaker 3: cleaner technologies, more efficient technologies, not from you know, people
Speaker 3: just deciding well, I'm going to eat less or I'm
Speaker 3: going to do less. And so basically to the extent
Speaker 3: that we are tackling climate change, it's coming from though
Speaker 3: that focus on growth and progress. A brilliant guest, you
Speaker 3: should get on your show. Is a a woman called
Speaker 3: hand of Richie who's just just got to book out
Speaker 3: on on all of this in terms of of climate change.
Speaker 3: But yeah, basically, if we care about a problem, we
Speaker 3: want to fix that problem, then the best way of
Speaker 3: doing that is to focus on progress and advancing and
Speaker 3: what we can do more and better.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One last thing about the thing we just talked about
Speaker 1: is the West talking itself into decline. The larger thesis
Speaker 1: here is that the more negative your news is, the
Speaker 1: more it creates a cycle of negativity that leads to
Speaker 1: inactivity that leads to less good outcomes.
Speaker 3: Exactly.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about this life expectancy thing because I
Speaker 1: just want you to go back and explain to us
Speaker 1: the reason why Americans are more likely to die at
Speaker 1: every age.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a big question, but it's a as you say,
Speaker 3: it's just an incredibly important thing for us to talk about.
Speaker 3: And basically, I think a huge part of this, a huge,
Speaker 3: absolutely enormous parts of this that I think people are
Speaker 3: starting to get their heads around, but it's still understated,
Speaker 3: is drugs. Is opioids out in particular. So I think
Speaker 3: when people think about life expectancy, they tend to imagine
Speaker 3: two things. One they think about older people, because if
Speaker 3: you know that life expectancy is in say the seventies
Speaker 3: or eighties, then you are the temptations to think, well,
Speaker 3: you know, why is someone dying age seventy five instead
Speaker 3: of seventy eight, for example. The second thing is that
Speaker 3: people think about the healthcare system, because again they're thinking, well,
Speaker 3: you know, we know that the American healthcare system is
Speaker 3: more expensive, a few people have access to it, and therefore,
Speaker 3: could that explain what's happening here? And I think, you know,
Speaker 3: neither of those things are wrong, but I think they
Speaker 3: both divert attention from where the bulk of this is
Speaker 3: really happening. So if we start with the age the
Speaker 3: age parts of this, when we look at what the
Speaker 3: chances of Americans dying in any given year, if you
Speaker 3: look at the chance of someone who is already seventy
Speaker 3: five years old dying before they reach the age of
Speaker 3: eighty or eighty five or ninety, that looks pretty much
Speaker 3: the same in America as it does in Canada and
Speaker 3: England and Wales and France, Germany all these other countries.
Speaker 3: So this is not really about older people dying slightly
Speaker 3: earlier in the US than elsewhere Whereas if you look
Speaker 3: at someone who is ten years old or five years old,
Speaker 3: and you look at the chance of them living to
Speaker 3: reach say thirty or forty, and you look at that
Speaker 3: in the US, missus elsewhere, there's an absolutely enormous gap.
Speaker 3: So about one in twenty five American five year olds
Speaker 3: will not live to reach forty years old. So imagine
Speaker 3: like a classroom, like a five year olds, a kindergarten class.
Speaker 3: One child in that class, on average in the US
Speaker 3: will not live to be forty and that's just absolutely astonishing.
Speaker 3: In all of these other rich countries, that's about one
Speaker 3: in one hundred, and you know that is tragic enough,
Speaker 3: but one in twenty five is astonishing. So the big difference,
Speaker 3: the big thing that causes US life expectancy to be lower,
Speaker 3: is far more people dying at age twenty or twenty
Speaker 3: five or thirty or thirty five. And even though those
Speaker 3: ages are really low, when you have huge amounts of
Speaker 3: people dying at those ages, it could pull down the
Speaker 3: whole number.
Speaker 1: Because when one child dies, there are parents affected and
Speaker 1: grandparents affected, and deaths of just spare and cultures effected.
Speaker 1: I mean, and I'm not even talking about like you
Speaker 1: lose a teenager and that's a loss for a community.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean absolutely, But so it's a big impact
Speaker 3: socially like that. But even just in terms of numbers,
Speaker 3: if someone dies at age twenty instead of instead of
Speaker 3: living to be eighty, that has a way bigger impact
Speaker 3: on life expectancy than like twenty people dying at seventy
Speaker 3: five instead of like seventy seven. So the big thing
Speaker 3: that pulls down us life expectancy is all of these
Speaker 3: people who die in their twenties and thirteen, and of
Speaker 3: course all of those people in their twenties and thirties.
Speaker 3: This comes on to the second part of this being
Speaker 3: actually less about the healthcare system than people think. These
Speaker 3: are not people who are dying because they're unable to
Speaker 3: get access to medical attention to healthcare. These are people
Speaker 3: who are dying because they've got a gunshot wound, or
Speaker 3: they've had a fence in an overdose, or perhaps they've
Speaker 3: been hit by a car. So there is very little
Speaker 3: at this point that the healthcare system can actually do
Speaker 3: for these people, even if they do get that far.
Speaker 3: These are usually people who have simply been being killed.
Speaker 3: But again, this is not to say that access to
Speaker 3: healthcare is not important. It's not to say that we
Speaker 3: shouldn't as a society and as interested people continue to
Speaker 3: try and support politicians who are going to increase healthcare coverage.
Speaker 3: But it's to say that when you really think about
Speaker 3: what is dramatically different between America and other countries in
Speaker 3: the West, it is people dying at young ages from
Speaker 3: external injuries, homicide, suicide, guns, cars, these kinds of things,
Speaker 3: and simply not being able to benefit from healthcare access
Speaker 3: even if they had it, because they've been killed already.
Speaker 3: So that is what makes US life expectancy so low,
Speaker 3: and that is why the US life expectancy has gone
Speaker 3: backwards so much in the last five to ten years.
Speaker 3: It's not that loads of seventy five year olds have
Speaker 3: started dying slightly early. It's that the number of twenty
Speaker 3: and thirty year olds dying in America has absolutely rocketed,
Speaker 3: especially due to vent it Up.
Speaker 1: Thank you, John, so interesting, really appreciate you.
Speaker 3: Thank to you.
Speaker 1: Nick Confissi is a political investigations reporter at The New
Speaker 1: York Times.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Fast Politics, Nick, good to be here. Melly
Speaker 2: very excited to have you. This piece is a banger. Okay.
Speaker 1: So the title the piece of America is under attack
Speaker 1: inside the ANTIDEI crusade. Can you talk us through how
Speaker 1: this gets written a little bit?
Speaker 4: Sure?
Speaker 6: I mean I came into this story partly through some
Speaker 6: reporting on Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. I did
Speaker 6: a story last summer about how he had become kind
Speaker 6: of the education governor, how he had built so much
Speaker 6: of his agenda as governor and then as a presidential
Speaker 6: candidate around this idea of battling woke forces, left wing
Speaker 6: forces and education K through twelve and college.
Speaker 2: I feel like education should go in quote.
Speaker 6: Well, listen, a governor has a lot of power over schools,
Speaker 6: certainly in Florida, and he did a lot to change
Speaker 6: what could be taught, how it could be taught, what
Speaker 6: teachers could do. He was very aggressive about it, and
Speaker 6: it was very popular to a certain extent in Florida,
Speaker 6: and it became his resume to be a top tier
Speaker 6: presidential candidate. And so I was trying to find out
Speaker 6: more about his work with outside education experts and activists
Speaker 6: on the right, Moms for Liberty people at Hilldale College,
Speaker 6: which is a conservative institution, and of course the Claremont Institute,
Speaker 6: because the Claremont people had really been front and center
Speaker 6: in his events. I mean, he had a gathering for
Speaker 6: donors last winter in Florida where he essentially like gave
Speaker 6: a stage to four people from the Claremont Institute, which
Speaker 6: is in California, and said, tell us how to beat
Speaker 6: woke in America, And they did a whole panel for donors.
Speaker 6: So I was looking for emails and documents that would
Speaker 6: shed a little bit of light on the role of
Speaker 6: these outside people in his policy making. And I got
Speaker 6: some things for the DeSantis piece, but it turned out
Speaker 6: that I was on to more of a trop with
Speaker 6: information about not just Florida, but a whole loose network
Speaker 6: of activists and advocates around the country that Claremont was
Speaker 6: kind of at the center of that were behind a
Speaker 6: lot of these efforts to ban quote unquote DEI in
Speaker 6: higher education.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I mean it's wild stuff.
Speaker 1: So I would love like a family tree here to
Speaker 1: sort of talk us through how these networks interact with
Speaker 1: each other.
Speaker 6: The Claremont Institute was founded by acolytes of the conservative
Speaker 6: thinker Leo Stress, and over the years they had been
Speaker 6: kind of iconoclastic and sort of in opposition to mainstream conservatism.
Speaker 6: They thought that mainstream Republican institutions, which they called conservatism
Speaker 6: and were kind of complicit with a liberal regime that
Speaker 6: was taking down the country. And when Trump came to power,
Speaker 6: they found a real dovetailing between the Trump movement and
Speaker 6: their own ideas in thinking about American politics and culture.
Speaker 6: And a big part of their beliefs is that higher
Speaker 6: education is kind of the test bed for the liberal regime.
Speaker 6: That's where the left, you know, controls people's thinking, breeds
Speaker 6: future liberals, turns the educated class and the leadership class
Speaker 6: into basically anti American people. And of course this kind
Speaker 6: of sentiment overlaps with a broader set of gripes and.
Speaker 4: Worries on the right.
Speaker 6: And there isn't any shortage of conservatives who think that
Speaker 6: colleges are terrible and everyone there is liberal and kids
Speaker 6: are learning crazy things. But what happened was that in
Speaker 6: the aftermath of Black Lives Matters and the crazy Summer
Speaker 6: of twenty twenty, they really felt on the defensive. A
Speaker 6: lot of conservatives felt on the defensive about the new
Speaker 6: movement for racial justice and some of its offshoots in academia,
Speaker 6: in schools.
Speaker 4: In workplaces.
Speaker 6: And so this group of Claremont said, okay, we have
Speaker 6: to take the fight, we have to fight back against this,
Speaker 6: and how are we going to do it. We're going
Speaker 6: to go after the colleges, the root of all evil.
Speaker 6: And they scrounged up contributes from different foundations. Some of
Speaker 6: them you may have heard of, some not. A lot
Speaker 6: of the normal big funder is on the rights, and
Speaker 6: smaller family foundations that aren't household names.
Speaker 1: There are one or two family foundations here right. It's
Speaker 1: amazing to me we see a lot of the Tau
Speaker 1: Family Foundation.
Speaker 6: That was one that was listening to the documents as
Speaker 6: a foundation that they had applied for funding from. The
Speaker 6: Serle Freedom Trust, which is now based on Wisconsin, was
Speaker 6: a group that they did get money for some projects on.
Speaker 6: And these are foundations in the control of families who
Speaker 6: tend to be on the right. And there was obviously,
Speaker 6: I'm sure as you know, in that period and even now,
Speaker 6: there was just a lot of worry and anger what
Speaker 6: was happening on college campuses. So I think they found
Speaker 6: a ready audience when they said, look, we actually have
Speaker 6: the solution here, and their strategy was simple, Let's do
Speaker 6: a bunch of reports in conjunction with state think tanks.
Speaker 6: Let's identify, basically through googling, by the way, let's identify
Speaker 6: everybody who has DEI in their title. Well, right up,
Speaker 6: a report that says DEI is terrible, and what equity
Speaker 6: actually means is this, and what diversity actually means. It's this,
Speaker 6: it's anti white, it's it's racialism, it's it's reverse racism.
Speaker 6: Here are all the people who do that stuff at this school.
Speaker 6: Here's the report. Hand it to lawmakers and push them
Speaker 6: to basically put those programs on the shopping block. And
Speaker 6: that's kind of where you get some of these wholesale
Speaker 6: bands on DEI offices. The most sweeping courser in Florida
Speaker 6: and Texas, they've actually said, look, you can't have offices
Speaker 6: in personnel devoted to these things anymore. At public universities.
Speaker 6: They've defunded them, and they believe that by doing this
Speaker 6: they can really reshape higher education to be wide. Well,
Speaker 6: that's a really good question. You know, in earlier years
Speaker 6: among mainstream conservatives, you saw a big push for what's
Speaker 6: called institutional neutrality. You probably heard of the Chicago Principles right,
Speaker 6: and this was an idea that the administrations of universities
Speaker 6: should put their finger on the scale of what beliefs
Speaker 6: are okay, what are like okay arguments and ideas. The
Speaker 6: administration should just create an atmosphere where scholars and students
Speaker 6: have intellectual freedom to explore the world and pursue knowledge.
Speaker 6: And the most common argument on the right was, look,
Speaker 6: can we go back to a state of more neutrality.
Speaker 6: Can we stop having the deid cancel a talk by
Speaker 6: a conservative because it made some people upset? We go
Speaker 6: back to a place where everybody gets to say what
Speaker 6: they want and study what they want and do scholarship
Speaker 6: and let the best ideas went out. That was the
Speaker 6: old idea. But the Claremont people belong to a different
Speaker 6: school of thought. Chris Ruffo, I think is also in
Speaker 6: the school of thought. They come out of the more
Speaker 6: traditional understanding of education. It's purpose, and in their minds,
Speaker 6: academic freedom as a means to an end. It's not
Speaker 6: worth much if it doesn't get you to the right
Speaker 6: kind of society. And I think what's interesting is that
Speaker 6: this vision of education where academic freedom really has to
Speaker 6: be subordinated to creating the right kind of country is
Speaker 6: actually something they happened in common with some people on
Speaker 6: the left right who say that, look, academic freedom is
Speaker 6: finding good, but it's not good if it hurts the
Speaker 6: wrong people, if it bothers the wrong people. With these
Speaker 6: ideas great an atmosphere that makes certain people feel unwelcome.
Speaker 6: And so they kind of have that in common. And
Speaker 6: then in the minimalism as an older tradition on the
Speaker 6: left end, the rate of let's have real academic freedom,
Speaker 6: a real exchange of ideas. But the Claremont people basically
Speaker 6: don't want to get back to a place of neutrality.
Speaker 6: They actually want to replace what they think of as
Speaker 6: the reigning ideology on campuses with their politics. And that's
Speaker 6: in the emails I got. They say, look, are you
Speaker 6: even find emails from the chairman of Claremont, Tom Klingenstein,
Speaker 6: complaining about the way that most conservatives opposed CRT And
Speaker 6: he was saying, we're not trying to get politics out
Speaker 6: of the university. We're trying to get all our politics
Speaker 6: into the university.
Speaker 1: Can you do like two seconds on Christopher Ruffo, just
Speaker 1: for people who are not as terminally in this as
Speaker 1: we are.
Speaker 6: Chris Ruver is a conservative activist in documentarian and journalists
Speaker 6: who was a Claremont scholar back in the day. It
Speaker 6: was kind of part of their crowd at the Manhattan Institute,
Speaker 6: and he's the guy who popularized critical race theory as
Speaker 6: the kind of catch all term for stuffed conservatives didn't
Speaker 6: like that liberals did about race and speech. That was
Speaker 6: a very successful campaign because he got politicians around the
Speaker 6: country to start outlying critical race theory, which you know,
Speaker 6: is a fairly abstruse academic framework that basically tries to
Speaker 6: look at how racism can be embedded in seemingly neutral laws, restitutions.
Speaker 6: And I think in the conservative imagination, critical race theory
Speaker 6: is kind of embedded in so many disciplines that it's
Speaker 6: almost like a fundamental part of higher education. I think
Speaker 6: that's kind of overdrawn. But as political branding, they're very
Speaker 6: successful and saying you cannot teach critical race theory, which
Speaker 6: is something most people don't actually learn college. But what's
Speaker 6: interesting in the story is around the time that Rufo
Speaker 6: is popularizing CRT as this kind of buggerboop, the Claremont
Speaker 6: people were strulling figure out what cash all term.
Speaker 4: That they wanted to eat.
Speaker 6: So they kept planning around with different things, and in
Speaker 6: the emails they talked about how what they really oppose
Speaker 6: is the regime of antidiscrimination, but you can't say that
Speaker 6: because as a sacred cow, people think it's bad to discriminate,
Speaker 6: and they aren't receptive to the bigger Claremont argument that
Speaker 6: anti discrimination rules create this whole downstream effective kind of
Speaker 6: rigid DEI trainings and things at schools, in the workplaces.
Speaker 6: And so they said, what else can we call it?
Speaker 6: And how can we stigmatize this stuff? And sometimes they
Speaker 6: called it critical social justice education and sometimes critical social
Speaker 6: justice And then within you know, eighteen months or two
Speaker 6: years of this project on building, they were like, no,
Speaker 6: let's call it DEDI, and they decided that was the
Speaker 6: most effective brand for kind of all this stuff that
Speaker 6: they like. And the reason I'm saying stuff, which is
Speaker 6: not a very journalistic word, Molly, is it's actually a
Speaker 6: pretty hard to put your finger in any of these
Speaker 6: conversations and arguments about exactly what we're talking about when
Speaker 6: we talk about DEI, because it encompasses this huge range
Speaker 6: of policies and practices that probably vary a lot in
Speaker 6: how reasonable people think they are, and so DEI has
Speaker 6: become this catch all term for everything from you know,
Speaker 6: a minority equipment program for first generation college students to
Speaker 6: affirmative action. But they decided at one point DEI was
Speaker 6: the way to go to kind of counterbrand and stigmatize
Speaker 6: these liberal ideas.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: It's so interesting in a way because it is like,
Speaker 1: you think about the idea of like, being anti discrimination
Speaker 1: sounds like something that would be very hard to in
Speaker 1: the modern world we live in be anti right, anti
Speaker 1: anti discrimination seems like, I mean, at least, you know,
Speaker 1: I live in a blue city in a blue state.
Speaker 2: But I mean, that seems insane to me.
Speaker 1: But the way they cooked it up is sort of
Speaker 1: I guess the thinking.
Speaker 2: Was that would be more palatable on the right.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: MOLL is interesting because they basically argue that once you
Speaker 6: have a set of laws that say you can't discriminate,
Speaker 6: and this is their argument, you inevitably get to the
Speaker 6: iban Kennedy version or the idea of anti racism that
Speaker 6: if you say you can't discriminate, then, in their view,
Speaker 6: inevitably you end up with processes and rules that say
Speaker 6: that if there is any difference in outcome among racial
Speaker 6: groups just because of racism, and therefore you've got to
Speaker 6: flatten out those differences and mandates different outcomes.
Speaker 4: And that's what they hit the most.
Speaker 6: Equity, right, this idea of equity that you have to
Speaker 6: produce similar outcomes somehow.
Speaker 1: But it's built on the supposition that the white guys
Speaker 1: who get the job are actually the most qualified, and
Speaker 1: not that the system is inherently benefficiary to them, but
Speaker 1: they are inherently the beneficiaries.
Speaker 6: I think it's even deeper than that. Their argument, and
Speaker 6: this is in the emails, is that discrepancies and outcome
Speaker 6: is just not a problem. Their argument, their belief is that,
Speaker 6: and this is in one of the emails, Blacks will
Speaker 6: be overrepresented in some spheres whites and others Asians and
Speaker 6: a stillators. Unquoting loosely from an email from Scott yen Or,
Speaker 6: who was the head of this project for Claremont, to
Speaker 6: Tom Clinstein, the Claremont chairman. They believe that these are
Speaker 6: not really areas of social concern, that these differences are
Speaker 6: normal and natural and we should worry about it, and
Speaker 6: that in trying to worry about it and fix it,
Speaker 6: we create a terrible society.
Speaker 1: When you saw these emails, were you Some of them
Speaker 1: are so blatantly disgusting. I mean, like the one where
Speaker 1: she complains about nanny's. It's hard to read these emails
Speaker 1: and not think that a lot of these people are racist.
Speaker 6: Well, that one ely are talking about is from Heather McDonald,
Speaker 6: who is a fellow at the Manhattanst to Hear in
Speaker 6: New York. She was not formerly a part of the
Speaker 6: Claremont program or campaign, but she corresponded frequently with the
Speaker 6: personnel of Claremont who were most involved, and so we
Speaker 6: saw a lot of banter between them, and you know,
Speaker 6: I obviously was checked by that email as well, where
Speaker 6: she basically castigated working women who have nannies from what
Speaker 6: head of McDonald called the low IQ third world, and
Speaker 6: basically that they're bad mothers for outsourcing their childcare to
Speaker 6: those caregivers. And the and the email donald says that
Speaker 6: she was walking around her neighborhood in Manhattan and saw
Speaker 6: the nannies and this is what she thought, And a
Speaker 6: friend of mine was joking, that's what you thought, Like
Speaker 6: that was your first thought that there was this huge
Speaker 6: social problem of female lawyers outsourcing their child rearing to
Speaker 6: people with low IQ's and that was your first thought,
Speaker 6: but I guess it was to release one of her
Speaker 6: first thoughts. You also see this really pronounced hostility to
Speaker 6: gay people. And one thing that was a little surprising
Speaker 6: to me in the reporting, I kind of expected to
Speaker 6: find a lot of traffic and email about trans healthcare,
Speaker 6: trans issues, and maybe it was because I wasn't searching
Speaker 6: for the right documents from my document requests, but there
Speaker 6: was very little of that. There was a lot of
Speaker 6: talking about Gabe on gay Man in.
Speaker 2: Particular right and Peter Teal.
Speaker 6: They were gossiping about Peter Teal, who had a minor scandal.
Speaker 6: I guess you could call it. That's what they call it.
Speaker 1: Is that him husband falling out the window.
Speaker 6: I don't have the details right in front of it,
Speaker 6: but there was a boyfriend.
Speaker 4: I believe he committed suicide.
Speaker 1: Not the husband. So the husband was okay, but the
Speaker 1: boyfriend died.
Speaker 6: There was a confrontation between the Teal's husband and boyfriend,
Speaker 6: and the boyfriend committed suicide. I believe the story. Again,
Speaker 6: but you know, they were gossiping about that. But their
Speaker 6: gossip was, oh, it's so Taudry that he had an
Speaker 6: affair and that's just the way of gays to have
Speaker 6: these affairs because of quote testosterone unchecked by female modesty.
Speaker 6: I was like Adam Heather mat Donald. But you also
Speaker 6: see emails and discussion from Scott yan or Claremont. We're
Speaker 6: talking about essentially his belief that there can't be a
Speaker 6: healthy society until homosexuality is restigmatized, until gay people are
Speaker 6: back in the closet. I think we're living in an
Speaker 6: odd era at Molly, Like on the one end, gay
Speaker 6: marriage is legal on the other and it's under attack. Again.
Speaker 6: This kind of fairly new right is under attack and
Speaker 6: there is a backlash in many dimensions. I guess it
Speaker 6: was naive of me, but I was surprised to read that.
Speaker 6: I was a little surprised that pure dislike and the
Speaker 6: really throwback kind of attitude, but kind of more than that,
Speaker 6: this fear that public acceptance of homosexuality was going to
Speaker 6: lead to social ruin, that it was somehow undermining Western civilization.
Speaker 6: That's how they think about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they suck. Thank you so much for joining us, nag.
Speaker 3: It's great to be with you.
Speaker 4: No moment.
Speaker 1: Rick Wilson here we are you and I what is
Speaker 1: your moment of fuckery?
Speaker 5: My moment of fuckery this week is Donald Trump and
Speaker 5: Greg Abbot and this bullshit on the border where they
Speaker 5: have a one mile section of border that they've declared
Speaker 5: to be the Berlin Wall of Greg Abbot's version of
Speaker 5: Bertle and they're pretending this is some great national crisis.
Speaker 5: They won't pass an immigration bill because they want it
Speaker 5: for a political issue. They're not doing anything on the
Speaker 5: border right now with this National Guard group except for
Speaker 5: you know, trying to get you know, Fox stories over
Speaker 5: and over again of just how dangerous the border caravans are.
Speaker 5: And the final element of the fuckery is all these
Speaker 5: other Republican governors saying, well, I'm gonna send my National Guard,
Speaker 5: and DeSantis is sending his own like personal shock troop army.
Speaker 5: They formed a couple of years ago, the Florida Guard,
Speaker 5: as I call it, the run Stuffele. You know, they're
Speaker 5: gonna all send them down there and they're gonna they're
Speaker 5: gonna guard the border. What they're saying is be Trump
Speaker 5: Supreme Court who said we can't do this. We're going
Speaker 5: to ignore them on this one and keep throwing kids
Speaker 5: into barbed wire in an ice cold river. Good look, guys,
Speaker 5: good fucking luck.
Speaker 1: My moment of fuckery is this that this weekend, and
Speaker 1: you and I, since we're Internet people, you and I,
Speaker 1: you will know exactly what I'm talking.
Speaker 2: About this weekend.
Speaker 1: While Donald Trump finally Judge Kaplan found a number of
Speaker 1: which Donald Trump cans decided right, it's too expensive for defamation.
Speaker 1: All of Donald Trump's allies, all of those Internet people
Speaker 1: you know who may or may not even live in
Speaker 1: this country, those guys who run you know, go News one,
Speaker 1: two three and Maga World you know, and bright Bard
Speaker 1: and also would let us not forget. I don't even
Speaker 1: want to say their names because I don't want to
Speaker 1: elevate them. Those guys spent the weekend just trying to
Speaker 1: find trash on Egene Carroll, going through every Internet thing
Speaker 1: they could find, every doc.
Speaker 5: YEP, every article she's ever written, trying to find one
Speaker 5: moment where she wasn't exactly.
Speaker 2: Every time she said she liked sex.
Speaker 1: They've decided that that is now an excuse that a
Speaker 1: man can violate her. Here's the deal, guys, that's not
Speaker 1: how any of this.
Speaker 4: Works, not how any of this works until.
Speaker 1: They are able to control this country, which is their dream.
Speaker 1: We still have rules and laws against what you can
Speaker 1: do to people, even if they like sex, and for that,
Speaker 1: those misogynistic assholes are my moment of fucker.
Speaker 5: Mollie Can I had a small supplementary moment of fuckery. Yes,
Speaker 5: I think this is one that I think America really
Speaker 5: needs to be prepared for. This weekend was the first
Speaker 5: weekend of the release of Ben Shapiro's rap song Yes
Speaker 5: I Will tell you It's in the In the apocrypha
Speaker 5: locked in a Secrevatican library, is a prophecy that when
Speaker 5: Ben Shapiro's rap career begins, it is the end of
Speaker 5: the earth as we know it and the apocalypse is
Speaker 5: near it. I just want to say those words together
Speaker 5: one more time, Ben Shapiro's rap career.
Speaker 2: I thought it was satire when I saw it first.
Speaker 4: Apparently no. So anyway, thanks.
Speaker 2: For having me now you're the best, so good, Thank you,
Speaker 2: thank you.
Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
Speaker 1: every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds
Speaker 1: in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you
Speaker 1: enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend.
Speaker 1: And keep the conversation going. And again thanks for listening.