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 an implan analysis report says Trump's
Speaker 1: policies could cost America twenty three billion in GDP if
Speaker 1: Taurus continue to stay away. We have such a great
Speaker 1: show for you today. The New Yorkers Evan Osno stops
Speaker 1: by to talk to us about the tech brolocar key
Speaker 1: and what can be done about their assault on democracy.
Speaker 1: Then we'll talk to Randy Weingarten, president of the American
Speaker 1: Federation of Teachers, who will spell out the cruel attacks
Speaker 1: against working people and Trump's big beautiful bill. But first
Speaker 1: the news, SAMII.
Speaker 2: We were doing an interview the listeners will hear in
Speaker 2: a week or two about bitcoin. And as you were
Speaker 2: doing that, the headlines started to rise that Trump media
Speaker 2: plans to buy two point five billion of bitcoin. And
Speaker 2: I look Robinhood and it was just soaring through the
Speaker 2: roof that bitcoin price. What are you see in here?
Speaker 1: So again Jesse's obsessed with bitcoin. Now, now this is
Speaker 1: Trump World one oh one, right, you know, buy sketchy things,
Speaker 1: make you know, say you're going to buy more stuff,
Speaker 1: Buy the dip. Remember Trump's tweet He's doing the same
Speaker 1: thing with tariffs that he's doing with bitcoin. I mean again, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm going to read you the statement. First of all,
Speaker 1: Trump Media and Technology Group said on Tuesday, it's raising
Speaker 1: two point five billion two by bitcoin. I want to
Speaker 1: emphasize the word said here, okay, because maybe but maybe
Speaker 1: they just said it. Okay, this is not a group
Speaker 1: of people for whom their word is something you can
Speaker 1: take to the bank. Now that said, I'm not even
Speaker 1: going to mention the name of the person who had
Speaker 1: a quote about this, because he's very litigious. But I
Speaker 1: am going to read the quote because it's very hilarious.
Speaker 1: We view bitcoin as an apex instrument of financial freedom,
Speaker 1: and now Trump Media will hold cryptocurrency as a crucial
Speaker 1: part of our assets. Trump Media CEO, whose name cannot
Speaker 1: be said because of his litigious nature. The investment will
Speaker 1: help defend our company against harassment and discrimination by financial institutions,
Speaker 1: which plague many American and US firms. Okay, first of
Speaker 1: all Americans and US firms. All right, okay, we're not
Speaker 1: going to parse that, but we are going to say
Speaker 1: that pretty interesting. Maybe they have two point five billion
Speaker 1: dollars to buy bitcoin. Maybe they don't. I would not
Speaker 1: take any one of these people at their words zoom in,
Speaker 1: because there's an axiom we're getting this is from axios.
Speaker 1: We're going to zoom in. Nunez says the strategy would
Speaker 1: provide opportunities for Trump media and areas like subscription payments
Speaker 1: and a utility token. Really, who could have seen that
Speaker 1: Trump World would get so excited about a very sketchy cryptocurrency, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, cryptos sort of redundant cryptocurrency is sketchy.
Speaker 1: But it's nice to see that Trump World has continued
Speaker 1: its march to do what is possibly not what it's
Speaker 1: saying it's doing. Who knows, who can say? Who can say?
Speaker 3: Speaking of lawsuits, yeah, well, basically each day, as I
Speaker 3: try to select some subjects that you may want to
Speaker 3: talk about, all I do is I just go, hmm,
Speaker 3: blizzard of lawsuits?
Speaker 2: Which what should we discuss? And so today's one is
Speaker 2: that NPR is suing the Trump administration over their funding
Speaker 2: cuts from President Trump's stupid executive order.
Speaker 1: Yes, so NPR National Public Radio doesn't even get that
Speaker 1: much money from the government. Probably could make up the shortfall,
Speaker 1: but I think it's really important to remember here you
Speaker 1: win in court. You win in court when you sue
Speaker 1: trump World, you win in court. You know why you
Speaker 1: win in court because what Trump World is doing is
Speaker 1: almost entirely illegal. There are occasionally times when they get
Speaker 1: away with it because it's a trumpy judge or because
Speaker 1: it ends up in front of Samuel Alito, but largely
Speaker 1: all of this is completely an utterly sketch. So you
Speaker 1: should sue. And that's what's happening here NPR and these
Speaker 1: are local affiliates. It's suing the Trump administration. I want
Speaker 1: to point out this is a guy record low approval rating.
Speaker 1: People don't like this. He is crushing norms left and right,
Speaker 1: and so the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is going to
Speaker 1: sue back, and good for them. Republicans have been targeting
Speaker 1: the portion of NPRS and PBS funding that is congressionally
Speaker 1: approved by the way it's approved by Congress, not by Trump.
Speaker 1: You know, this is another thing like Trump's executive orders
Speaker 1: tend to undermine the power of the purse right one
Speaker 1: of Congress is very few powers tend to be undermined
Speaker 1: by trump Ism. Now, publicans just go along with it
Speaker 1: because they don't care and because you know they'll do
Speaker 1: anything Trump wants. But it's worth realizing that a lot
Speaker 1: of this stuff is actually not within Trump's powers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that sounds right. So the Trump administration has canceled
Speaker 2: Harvard's remaining federal contracts. One of the things we used
Speaker 2: to discuss a lot in this podcast back when this
Speaker 2: guy Ron DeSantis was really making a lot of headlines
Speaker 2: was the concept of performative moronics. Yes, I can't think
Speaker 2: of anything that fits that title more than this.
Speaker 1: Ooh, performative moronics. That's a throwback to the first Trump administration.
Speaker 2: I think I think that was more of our Biden
Speaker 2: era analysis a lot of the time, if I'm being honest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is really stupid, but it's also I
Speaker 1: want to point out, just shows how little runway they
Speaker 1: have here. So Trump administration will eliminate the remaining one
Speaker 1: hundred million in federal contracts with Harvard University. They are saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: so what are they going to do. They're going to
Speaker 1: cut a lot of use federal contracts. First of all,
Speaker 1: they're not going to be able to do it. Number one,
Speaker 1: they are not going to be able to legally This
Speaker 1: is so fucking dicey. The other thing is like, let's
Speaker 1: just think this through. Okay, So this is stuff like
Speaker 1: training feople. This is stuff like science stuff right, like
Speaker 1: during cancer or stuff happening in the labs. What are
Speaker 1: you gonna do. You're gonna move that lab work to
Speaker 1: the Heritage Foundation. They don't have any labs at the
Speaker 1: Heritage Foundation. You know you have these world class scientists. No, no,
Speaker 1: we don't want the world class scientists. We're gonna we're
Speaker 1: gonna go and throw away all this research and we're
Speaker 1: gonna start doing research. You know what at Hillsdale College.
Speaker 1: There's no medical school at Hillsdale College. Okay, that's not
Speaker 1: how it works. What Charlie Kirk is gonna take over.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have Turning Point USA labs, right, you have
Speaker 1: PhD mds like Charlie Kirk doing this is the stupidest
Speaker 1: fucking thing ever. To reiterate how stupid this is. This
Speaker 1: is one of these things where we are literally we're
Speaker 1: just throwing away scientific advances somebody, not somebody. A lot
Speaker 1: of us are going to get cancer, right, and little
Speaker 1: more than a third of all Americans will get cancer
Speaker 1: or some form of cancer, and we will have doctors
Speaker 1: who say to us, you know, we have some great
Speaker 1: studies on this, but we're still, you know, maybe four
Speaker 1: or five years behind. We're four or five years from
Speaker 1: getting to a place where we can cure this. Four
Speaker 1: or five years. That's the Trump administration, that's the second
Speaker 1: Trump administration. There will be people who die because we
Speaker 1: have lost four or five years of scientific advancements because
Speaker 1: of COVID and Donald Trump and RFK Junior and people
Speaker 1: who don't who just literally want to throw the baby
Speaker 1: out with the bathwater. So it is so painful for
Speaker 1: me as someone who is not a scientist. It's such
Speaker 1: a tragedy. It's like we are burning the library at Alexandria.
Speaker 1: We are cutting our noses off despite our faces. We're
Speaker 1: doing our on purpose. It's not even an accident, right,
Speaker 1: we are literally it is fall of the Roman Empire,
Speaker 1: and we're doing it to ourselves. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of reasons how we got here, and I just hope
Speaker 1: that like Canada and Europe and China and all those
Speaker 1: other countries are going to pick up these scientists and
Speaker 1: keep the work going because you know, we are in
Speaker 1: a climate rasis, We are in a really perilous moment
Speaker 1: in all different ways. Microplastics, cancer, you know, clusters. I mean,
Speaker 1: just we are as sort of free apocalyptic America and
Speaker 1: a lot of this end. If you don't think there
Speaker 1: are more pandemics coming, I don't know what to tell you.
Speaker 1: It's a very dark moment in American life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, speaking of darkness in America, there's a cloud over
Speaker 2: the Pentagon. It's shaped kind of like a buggy beer
Speaker 2: that's been frozen.
Speaker 1: No, I'm kidding. Yeah, definitely, definitely, we love it.
Speaker 2: So there's this fellow Pete hegg Sith the controversy with him.
Speaker 2: You could pretty much set your watch to it at
Speaker 2: this point that there will be an article about some
Speaker 2: nefarious thing happening, some serious fuckery happening in under his purview.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let's talk about this. Look, you put a
Speaker 1: guy like Pete Hegseth in this job, and I know
Speaker 1: you're going to be shocked to hear, but my man
Speaker 1: does not know how to do nearly anything, and that
Speaker 1: in itself not necessarily. No, it's bad. So he's running
Speaker 1: the dog. I was going to say it wasn't bad,
Speaker 1: but it is really bad. He's running the DODA. Trump
Speaker 1: has had many scandals now that are completely disqualifying, right,
Speaker 1: heg Seth has had just scandal after scandal, like the
Speaker 1: wife on the signal Chat. Remember when they added this
Speaker 1: signal chat, there was a bunch of stuff with the wife,
Speaker 1: with the brother, anti nepotism stuff. I mean, just like
Speaker 1: continual problems with this guy. So now he's fired three people,
Speaker 1: and again Trump advisors lose confidence in Pentagon leak investigation.
Speaker 1: Hegseth used to justify firing of three top aides. So
Speaker 1: that sounds as if Trump advisors think Pete hegg Seth
Speaker 1: weekend Fox News host former, he's not doing it anymore
Speaker 1: right now, though he may be back soon. I wonder
Speaker 1: if he gets fired from his job, if he ends
Speaker 1: up going back to the weekend, or if they like
Speaker 1: bump him up to the weekday.
Speaker 2: Here's my guess. He takes Judge box of wines place
Speaker 2: on the five.
Speaker 4: Ooh.
Speaker 1: From head of the DoD to panelists on the five,
Speaker 1: jess A guitarl Off.
Speaker 2: Put my bet from my crypto ortings on polymarket right now.
Speaker 1: Yes, Jessin to Tarlaf, Pete hagg Seth coming to you
Speaker 1: is certainly possible. I would never bet against you, Jesse,
Speaker 1: but I think either way, there's something rotten in the
Speaker 1: state of Denmark. Right, We've got Trump advisors losing confidence,
Speaker 1: by the way, and I want to point out these
Speaker 1: guys love to leak. One of the hallmarks of Trump
Speaker 1: one point zero was just continual leaking. Right, you had
Speaker 1: everyone in the world leaking to everyone. So Trump advisors
Speaker 1: losing confidence makes me think that they think that the
Speaker 1: legal wire tap may not have been true. Again, there's
Speaker 1: a lot to parson this thing, but I think that
Speaker 1: there's a real question about when does when does Trump
Speaker 1: world start losing confidence? In Pete hexp. So Trump's big
Speaker 1: thing is he doesn't like firing people this time because
Speaker 1: like Rachel Mattow had that whole wall people he had fired,
Speaker 1: so clearly some things do in fact breakthrough. So he
Speaker 1: just moves everyone around. So remember Mike Walls was a
Speaker 1: National security advisor. Now he's his body man and also
Speaker 1: cook at mar A Lago. I'm kidding, obviously, and that's
Speaker 1: what we're seeing here. So he Seth will probably be
Speaker 1: running hod Or on the five. Eventually we'll see what happens. Obviously,
Speaker 1: never a great Evan Osnos is a writer at The
Speaker 1: New Yorker and the author of Behals and Have Yachts.
Speaker 1: Welcome to past politics, Evan.
Speaker 4: Osnos, Thank you, Molly junk Fast.
Speaker 1: We're you know, very excited to have you.
Speaker 4: I'm very excited to be here.
Speaker 1: Have books coming out in June. Yes, yours is a memoir. No,
Speaker 1: I'm just.
Speaker 4: Kidding a loop. Should we do that? Do you want
Speaker 4: to swop on?
Speaker 1: I'll talk about your book and memoir? So, uh, the
Speaker 1: book is called The Have and the Have Yachts? Have
Speaker 1: I butchered the title? Or now?
Speaker 4: No, you you got it exactly right. And it's uh,
Speaker 4: it is with my debt to both Hemingway, who wrote
Speaker 4: to Have and Have Not, and then the other guy
Speaker 4: who got there first. So it is an idea that
Speaker 4: is that resigns in our consciousness. But I think it
Speaker 4: is a unique artifact of our time, the haves and aviats.
Speaker 1: It's so wild to me to watch this cycle of
Speaker 1: backlash to backlash to backlash, right like financial inequality, push back,
Speaker 1: some degree of making right or a little bit of
Speaker 1: a change, and then a reelection of Trump. Explain what
Speaker 1: the fuck is going on?
Speaker 4: Well, you hit on the exact issue that interests me,
Speaker 4: which is that Americans have an almost uniquely complex and
Speaker 4: ambivalent relationship to big money to wealth. I mean it
Speaker 4: is we are both at some moments cynical about it
Speaker 4: and then fundamentally still aspirational. And I mean this is
Speaker 4: not like an abstract idea. There was a Harris poll
Speaker 4: last year that showed that sixty percent of Americans believe
Speaker 4: that billionaires are making the country less fair, and sixty
Speaker 4: percent of Americans want to become billionaires themselves. It is
Speaker 4: very often it's the same people who have this oscillation
Speaker 4: of instincts, and I think you see that in our
Speaker 4: politics where we are tugged back and forth. But I
Speaker 4: think what it obscures, frankly, and this is really the
Speaker 4: core of what interested me, was that we are living
Speaker 4: through utterly unprecedented times when it comes to the sheer
Speaker 4: scale and speed with which these fortunes have accumulated. If
Speaker 4: I can just give you one stat it is that
Speaker 4: as recently as ten years ago, there was nobody on
Speaker 4: the planet who had one hundred billion dollars. The idea
Speaker 4: of a cent to billionaire was a non thing. There
Speaker 4: are now at least fifteen people who do and to
Speaker 4: give you, I mean take Elon Musk as an example.
Speaker 4: I mean, at the beginning of Trump's first term, he
Speaker 4: had about ten billion dollars. Today, as everybody knows, he
Speaker 4: has four hundred billion dollars. And if you talk to
Speaker 4: people who are scholars of not just scholars of the
Speaker 4: recent period, archaeologists who look at inequality back to the
Speaker 4: Neolithic period, they will tell you that it is very
Speaker 4: hard to find in a period that is anything like
Speaker 4: what we're living through now. As somebody said to me,
Speaker 4: the people who built the pyramids, we're living in a
Speaker 4: less unequal society.
Speaker 1: So I want to get to the fall of the
Speaker 1: Roman Empire because it's my fall of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of joking that goes around that this
Speaker 1: is a similar moment in America. You know that American
Speaker 1: history that we history rhymes and we are in a
Speaker 1: moment where the center cannot hold right, that there's just
Speaker 1: too much inequality that we have, you know, And again
Speaker 1: maybe it's this idea of the printing press. You know,
Speaker 1: the technology has catapulted us into a kind of dark ages,
Speaker 1: you know, a kind of brought time period. But but
Speaker 1: do you I mean, is that your take on this,
Speaker 1: I mean, what do you think, what do you think
Speaker 1: about the instability?
Speaker 4: Well, I think that the Roman analogy is more than
Speaker 4: casually important, Like it is more than just that we
Speaker 4: sometimes throw up our hands and say God, it feels
Speaker 4: like the fall a Rum. The great scholar of Rome,
Speaker 4: the late scholar Ramsay McMullin at Yale, was once asked
Speaker 4: he'd written acres on the subject of the fall of Rome,
Speaker 4: and he said, well, if you really ask me to
Speaker 4: boil this down, he says, the fall of Rum took
Speaker 4: five hundred years, but it can be distilled into three words.
Speaker 4: Fewer had more. The growth of radical inequality in both
Speaker 4: political and economic power is such a large and encompassing
Speaker 4: fact of our lives that it's almost like climate change
Speaker 4: in the sense that you can go through the day
Speaker 4: without thinking about it, remembering periodically, oh, yeah, this is happening,
Speaker 4: and it probably will change the world I live in,
Speaker 4: But you can lose sight of it. And there are
Speaker 4: these moments, these little dramatic indications, these moments when it
Speaker 4: comes into our lives. And I think that the Musk
Speaker 4: Trump joint venture is one of those times when we
Speaker 4: have been suddenly aware of what the windfall in economics
Speaker 4: has meant for our politics and our political culture.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk started out as pretty popular talk us through
Speaker 1: his devolution.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think he would be the first person to
Speaker 4: in some ways acknowledge that he was caught unaware by
Speaker 4: the collapse of his relationship with most of the public.
Speaker 4: I mean he was until not long ago. If you
Speaker 4: lined up a group of college students, you would very
Speaker 4: often hear them say he is somebody who gives us
Speaker 4: inspiration about what this country can be. And his level
Speaker 4: of seclusion from actually the public, from real live experience,
Speaker 4: as indicated by things like him saying that as many
Speaker 4: of us have heard that the greatest flaw of Western
Speaker 4: civilization is empathy, or describing social Security as a Ponzi scheme.
Speaker 4: There are really a tell about how far his life
Speaker 4: had become really divorced, in a kind of lunar way
Speaker 4: from the lives of most other human beings. And I
Speaker 4: think this is a theme that runs through my book
Speaker 4: because over and over again I would find myself in
Speaker 4: places that I know quite well. I mean like Greenwich, Connecticut,
Speaker 4: which is where I grew up, is a place that
Speaker 4: has historically been kind of in some sense connected to
Speaker 4: but also disconnected from the rest of the country by
Speaker 4: the forces of wealth. But in recent years, and Musk
Speaker 4: is just the most dramatic illustration of this, that the
Speaker 4: building of walls, both literally around people's estates but also
Speaker 4: psychologically and emotionally and culturally has become so profound that
Speaker 4: we are now living in an arrangement that is much
Speaker 4: closer to what it was like in This is not
Speaker 4: an extravagant analogy, but like medieval Europe, there's a reason
Speaker 4: why people build castles. They built castles to defend themselves
Speaker 4: and their property against others. And Elon Musk is a living,
Speaker 4: breathing demonstration of what happens when you think that you
Speaker 4: understand how other people live and you don't.
Speaker 1: So interesting because I think that's completely right. And I
Speaker 1: also wonder how much Elon Musk is is a function
Speaker 1: of not having anyone around you who has ever told
Speaker 1: you the truth.
Speaker 4: Oh, completely right. I mean, this is the great risk
Speaker 4: for authoritarians, either in private business or in public office,
Speaker 4: is that you become so insulated and comfortable. It's like
Speaker 4: this kind of amniotic fluid of agreement around you that
Speaker 4: nobody who disagrees with you, stays very long, and as
Speaker 4: a result you make actually sometimes terrible mistakes. This is
Speaker 4: what's known as authoritarian backlash, and it's where you misjudge
Speaker 4: the public mood. You know, if you're the Shaw of Iran,
Speaker 4: you host a giant party to celebrate your leadership a
Speaker 4: few months before the revolution rises up and removes you.
Speaker 4: And that's the pattern. And I think it's because there's
Speaker 4: nobody around who can say it. I'll give you one
Speaker 4: other fascinating example. I wrote a profile that's in this
Speaker 4: book of Mark Zuckerberg when he was in the period
Speaker 4: of kind of coming to terms with his vast new powers,
Speaker 4: and he had gone you'll remember Molly on this like
Speaker 4: kind of weird tour of the United States where he
Speaker 4: was going out and wanting to meet people and people,
Speaker 4: and it was kind of it got mocked because, as
Speaker 4: people put at the time, they said, this really looks
Speaker 4: like a man who has landed or a person who
Speaker 4: has landed on this planet and is like, bring your
Speaker 4: humans to me. I will see them, and I will
Speaker 4: meet them, and we will eat their things. And then
Speaker 4: and somebody who had worked for him told me, look,
Speaker 4: the reality was when he was on this tour. We
Speaker 4: could all see that this was really not going to work,
Speaker 4: and it looked, it looked kind of ridiculous, but there
Speaker 4: was nobody around him who could and would tell him that, right, right,
Speaker 4: right right, authoritarian backlash.
Speaker 1: So is it a question to keep going with this theory?
Speaker 1: Putin's war with Ukraine is that? Is that the same?
Speaker 4: Very much so. Putin is the paradigmatic example of what
Speaker 4: the scholars call a sultanistic oligarch, which is a wonderful
Speaker 4: term actually, and a sultanistic oligarch is somebody who is
Speaker 4: essentially agreed upon by the other elites or the other
Speaker 4: oligarchs in a society to let one among them rule,
Speaker 4: and it's because they all benefit from that. But the
Speaker 4: danger of becoming a sultanistic oligarch is that kind of
Speaker 4: seclusion and that kind of absence of any sort of
Speaker 4: critical thinking and judgment around you. And so everybody begins
Speaker 4: to say to you, well, it seems like invading Ukraine
Speaker 4: is a brilliant strategic move, sir. And you know, we
Speaker 4: all saw those images of the of the boardroom where
Speaker 4: the oligarchs and the and the leaders of the intelligence
Speaker 4: community in Moscow were being briefed on this plan and
Speaker 4: there was up warrious applause, and that is a it's
Speaker 4: you know, it's a lesson that I think goes beyond
Speaker 4: just talking about our president or the Russian president or
Speaker 4: it is really like a deep lesson in the problem
Speaker 4: of becoming too far ahead, too far isolated, and becoming
Speaker 4: too sure. To quote Kendrick Lamar, that you deserve it all.
Speaker 4: It's a risk it'll blow up on you.
Speaker 1: It'll blow and that's what we're saying. So what we
Speaker 1: saw with Elon I just want to get back to
Speaker 1: Elon for a minute, because he is the most pertinent
Speaker 1: right now in our American political world, is that his
Speaker 1: polling went down. His the numbers at Tesla's prophets were
Speaker 1: down seventy one percent. Who even knew that could happen?
Speaker 1: At a company, right they sold well? I saw reporting
Speaker 1: that they sold seven thousand cars in Europe. I mean, okay,
Speaker 1: do you think that these kind of come to Jesus
Speaker 1: moments where you see that the emperor really has no clothes?
Speaker 1: Do you think they influence the zeitgeist or do you
Speaker 1: think they're just sort of I mean, what, you know,
Speaker 1: the question we all have all the time is what
Speaker 1: breaks through.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think there's no question that this leaves a
Speaker 4: scar on the public mood. It's not just on Elon
Speaker 4: Musk individually. I think this is really important because when
Speaker 4: you try to understand essentially, like where does this lead Molly,
Speaker 4: which is you know, the question we're all trying to
Speaker 4: figure out, which is what happens when you have the
Speaker 4: Musk era, Where does that go? Where does that take
Speaker 4: a country? We actually have a useful, almost hauntingly useful model,
Speaker 4: which is the end of the nineteenth century the beginning
Speaker 4: of the twentieth century in this country, which is that
Speaker 4: you know, that was a time when you had these tycoons,
Speaker 4: the robber barons as they were called during the Gilded Age,
Speaker 4: who were very in many ways Musk Like. I mean,
Speaker 4: you know Jay Gould, who was the Wall Street Titan.
Speaker 4: Twain used to say, look, Americans have always have always
Speaker 4: revered money, but Jay Gould made them meal down and
Speaker 4: worship it. And in many ways, Musk is the modern
Speaker 4: incarnation of that. And what we saw in that period
Speaker 4: in the late nineteenth century was that there were these
Speaker 4: acts of just cartoonish extravagance, cartoonish sort of self indulgence,
Speaker 4: the equivalent of having the many things that Musk has
Speaker 4: accumulated for himself, most significantly perhaps his family arrangement, which
Speaker 4: looks sultanistic in so many ways that in the at
Speaker 4: the end of the nineteenth century, you had people hosting parties,
Speaker 4: for instance, in New York City in a ballroom in Manhattan,
Speaker 4: where they brought horses into the court into the ballroom
Speaker 4: and they ate on horseback and drank champagne out of
Speaker 4: the saddle bags. And the country, regular Americans, we're hearing
Speaker 4: about this, reading about it in the newspapers, and it
Speaker 4: was accumulating to the point of a breaking point where
Speaker 4: people would say, we we just we can't go on
Speaker 4: like this, And that's what you had that It's really
Speaker 4: what gave way to the birth of the progressive era
Speaker 4: and then ultimately to the New Deal, was this recognition
Speaker 4: on the part of the public and ultimately on some
Speaker 4: of the elites, people like Teddy Roosevelt and then later
Speaker 4: Franklin Roosevelt, that this just you can't go on this
Speaker 4: way or the country won't hold. I think that Musk
Speaker 4: is pretty proficient at reading ultimately his role in the culture,
Speaker 4: and he'll figure out a way to kind of, you know,
Speaker 4: get himself back in I don't have any doubt about
Speaker 4: that he'll find a way to rebuild some cultural cachet
Speaker 4: which is now so very much in remission. But ultimately,
Speaker 4: I think that the bigger impact is really on that
Speaker 4: constant oscillation that we started with between fascination and revulsion
Speaker 4: with giant wealth. And he has almost single handedly pushed
Speaker 4: the United States away from capitalism.
Speaker 1: Ooh, that's interesting. Imagine being so rich that you turn
Speaker 1: Americans off of capitalism.
Speaker 4: That's the pattern. That's history. It tells us, it happens,
Speaker 4: and it takes ultimately other people to say to the
Speaker 4: elon Musks of the world, if you carry on this way,
Speaker 4: this system which has been ultimately so rewarding for them,
Speaker 4: is going to be is going to lose.
Speaker 1: Its public basis of support. Are you surprised that the
Speaker 1: oligarchs of this moment aren't more philanthropic. You think about
Speaker 1: Bill Gates with this comment that he made about Mosque,
Speaker 1: where he said, this is a register in the world
Speaker 1: taking away from the poorest children in the world. Talk
Speaker 1: to me about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's been quite noticeable in the philanthropy community. You
Speaker 4: hear about this generational Really there's been a kind of
Speaker 4: generational split, which is that the early generation of mega
Speaker 4: wealth of the latter half of the twentieth century and
Speaker 4: early twenty first century, principally Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, or
Speaker 4: the iconic figures that they made.
Speaker 1: Larger the Waltons.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they and they did large. They made a point
Speaker 4: in a sense to make to put themselves in the
Speaker 4: tradition of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who believed
Speaker 4: you had to give some of your fortune or in
Speaker 4: Gates and Buffett's case, the lion's share of your fortune
Speaker 4: back to the public through philanthropy. And there has been
Speaker 4: this real shift though since then. Really it's sort of
Speaker 4: started in the last ten years or so where and
Speaker 4: this is not me making up making an abstraction. The
Speaker 4: data is quite clear on this that the amount of
Speaker 4: money that people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are
Speaker 4: giving to philanthropy is just simply much less than their predecessors,
Speaker 4: like Buffetting Gates were. And what's the reason for this
Speaker 4: is that there is a theory that's become popular in
Speaker 4: Silicon Valley, which is that essentially your greatest act of philanthropy,
Speaker 4: putting that in quotes is your business.
Speaker 1: You know, it's as much high on your own supply gone.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's you know, Musk's view is, as he
Speaker 4: said at one point, the greatest gift I can give
Speaker 4: to humanity is tesla, to which others might say, but
Speaker 4: you know what about a Musk foundation? And I've watched
Speaker 4: it happen just over the last ten years. This is
Speaker 4: a real shift.
Speaker 1: I mean. The most incredible part of this is that
Speaker 1: The New York Times had a lot of reporting on
Speaker 1: the Musk Foundation where they were getting in trouble for
Speaker 1: not giving away what they are required by law to
Speaker 1: give away.
Speaker 4: Totally true, I mean, and I felt the most interesting
Speaker 4: revealing detailing the Times reporting on Musk's philanthropies. One of
Speaker 4: the recipients of his philanthropic foundation in the early years
Speaker 4: was actually to a school that was located in his
Speaker 4: own house, in which five of the fourteen students were
Speaker 4: his own children.
Speaker 1: Yes, many people are saying doing things for your kids
Speaker 1: is not actually philanthropy, or when you are the richest
Speaker 1: man in the world, we're laughing about this, but really
Speaker 1: we are laughing to keep from crying because it's so dark.
Speaker 1: I wonder if you could talk about are there any
Speaker 1: I have to talk about this, because otherwise I'll go insane.
Speaker 1: There anything you're seeing when you in this store of
Speaker 1: the haves and the have yat about some kind of
Speaker 1: positive move towards So let's talk about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that, because there are some
Speaker 4: good news things that should be recognized and cultivated and celebrated,
Speaker 4: which is that there are some people who have really
Speaker 4: gone through a bit of a process over the last
Speaker 4: ten or fifteen years with the rise of Trump in
Speaker 4: our politics, that has made them say that they recognize
Speaker 4: that the country is, on some level on an unsustainable
Speaker 4: cour There is this organization called the Patriotic Millionaires, which
Speaker 4: I write about in this new piece in the New Yorker,
Speaker 4: in which these are folks who have thrived in the
Speaker 4: current disposition of power, the meaning that the tax code
Speaker 4: that benefits them they have benefited from. But they are
Speaker 4: in fact some of the people who are standing up
Speaker 4: and saying, really, this is about taxes and wages. It's
Speaker 4: not complicated. They say, look, if you if wages had
Speaker 4: kept up with gains in productivity, if wages had kept
Speaker 4: up with the growth in the economy, wages today would
Speaker 4: be much higher than they were before. And you know,
Speaker 4: there's one guy in particular who I'm thinking of named
Speaker 4: John Driscoll, who was the CEO of a big healthcare
Speaker 4: company who realized that, look, there is no way in
Speaker 4: which I can expect to have a successful business if
Speaker 4: the people who work for me are sleeping in their
Speaker 4: cars at night. And so, and what's the encouraging thing
Speaker 4: here too, is Molly that this is like any kind
Speaker 4: of culture. Culture moves, and sometimes it moves even faster
Speaker 4: than we expect. And so right now it feels as
Speaker 4: if we're in the season of plunder. We're in the
Speaker 4: season of the oligarchs who are exploiting this president to
Speaker 4: benefit themselves as much as they can. But it also
Speaker 4: can move fast, and we've seen it once before. We
Speaker 4: saw it in nineteen thirteen when you had the rise
Speaker 4: of elites in this country who recognized that to protect
Speaker 4: the country's future, you had to reign in excesses and abuses.
Speaker 4: And we're beginning to see some of that. And I
Speaker 4: think that the size of the I'll just mention one
Speaker 4: other thing, which is that the size of the protests
Speaker 4: that Bernie Sanders has been getting this summer. Are really
Speaker 4: remarkable because I interviewed a bunch of people at protests
Speaker 4: at the Bernie Sanders rallies, and to a person, they
Speaker 4: had never been to one before. These are not diehard
Speaker 4: Bernie bros. These are people in some cases, in a
Speaker 4: few cases actually people who are quite sympathetic to Republican
Speaker 4: arguments who said, I didn't vote for this, I didn't
Speaker 4: vote for what Trump is doing and what we know
Speaker 4: from history. If there's one thing that listeners can take
Speaker 4: away who are trying to figure out, what do we
Speaker 4: do as a people now to protect this country, the
Speaker 4: answer is it is sustained public pressure. Sustained public pressure
Speaker 4: that it matters to use your voice and to get
Speaker 4: up and say no, this is not right, this is
Speaker 4: not fair, and this is not sustainable.
Speaker 1: Randy Weiningarden is the president of the American Federation of
Speaker 1: Teachers and the author of the upcoming book Why Fascist
Speaker 1: Spear Teachers. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Randy Winingarten. So
Speaker 1: we're in this insane moment in American life. The houses out,
Speaker 1: the senators out there is the big beautiful bill. It
Speaker 1: both grows the deficit and cuts, food stamps for children.
Speaker 1: Trump administration is at war with poor kids in every
Speaker 1: which way. You are the head of the American Teachers Federation,
Speaker 1: you are in it. Talk to us.
Speaker 5: So you know, a budget is your priorities. And what
Speaker 5: you can see in that big, ugly bill is that
Speaker 5: it is big, but it is pretty ugly. Is the
Speaker 5: Trump administration's priorities, which is to keep the tax cuts
Speaker 5: that they did in twenty seventeen, including most particularly, to
Speaker 5: prefer the millionaires and the billionaires in this country and
Speaker 5: let them keep all the wealth that they grew over
Speaker 5: all this time, and to as actually give everybody else
Speaker 5: trinkets or a trickle down effect. So they've given everybody
Speaker 5: something little except for people who make under fifty thousand
Speaker 5: dollars who may actually have to pay more taxes. And
Speaker 5: that's the second point I want to do. So one,
Speaker 5: they really really prefer the billionaires and the millionaires. But
Speaker 5: the second thing they do is really really really cruel
Speaker 5: because they're taking out, especially everything that created innovation in
Speaker 5: the country, everything that helped in terms of climate control.
Speaker 5: They're using education funding as a piggy bank for the rich,
Speaker 5: a new tax shelter for vouchers, and then they take
Speaker 5: a hatchet to student loans, to nutrition aid, and to
Speaker 5: healthcare for the middle class and the poor. And now
Speaker 5: they're lying about it like Johnson is saying, oh, no,
Speaker 5: this is just about waste and abuse, when it essentially
Speaker 5: we'll take fourteen million people off of healthcare and make
Speaker 5: it impossible for families under the poverty line to feed
Speaker 5: their kids. So if you hear my anger, and then
Speaker 5: they sneak in things like stopping the courts from enforcing
Speaker 5: their orders.
Speaker 1: As that was amazing. Let's go back to Mike Johnson
Speaker 1: for a minute, because one of the things that Mike
Speaker 1: Johnson actually said was that he said it was that
Speaker 1: work requirements were actually they have a moral component. These
Speaker 1: will be work requirements for snap benefits. They will mean
Speaker 1: that if you have a child over seven years old,
Speaker 1: if you are not working, you cannot qualify for nutrition assistance.
Speaker 5: Talk us through what that looks like. So level of
Speaker 5: cruelty to their own voters is shocking to me. It's
Speaker 5: essentially trying to find ways already the people who voted
Speaker 5: for Trump, essentially aside from the people who have always
Speaker 5: been for him. Let's say the net delta difference between
Speaker 5: that decided the selection was the couch and the people
Speaker 5: who made up their mind in the last few days.
Speaker 5: They voted for a better life for themselves. Most of
Speaker 5: not all of those folks are working really hard and
Speaker 5: are trying to make ends meet. So when you say
Speaker 5: to somebody who has a seven year old kid that
Speaker 5: you're not going to feed them anymore because their parents
Speaker 5: are not working, or their one parent is not working
Speaker 5: exactly at the job you want them to work at.
Speaker 5: Maybe they're working off the books because they can't make it. Yes,
Speaker 5: that's wrong. Maybe there are a thousand other reasons, like
Speaker 5: they're taking care of their elderly parents and they can't
Speaker 5: be at work and take care of their elderly parents
Speaker 5: at the same time. To actually do that and starve
Speaker 5: children like that, it's cruel, it's inhuman.
Speaker 1: So what are we going to do.
Speaker 5: We're going to now take our AI surveillance and start
Speaker 5: using it for every single family in America to make
Speaker 5: that decision. How dare Mike Johnson decide what is moral
Speaker 5: and what isn't moral from the state that actually is
Speaker 5: now saying that no termination of pregnancy through abortion is
Speaker 5: legal or not? Yes, sorry, I am just It's like, really,
Speaker 5: how is all of a sudden we are our country
Speaker 5: that used to believe in freedom of religion. Now it's
Speaker 5: getting closer and closer to a handsmade tail kind of
Speaker 5: oation here. How dare you tell somebody that they can't
Speaker 5: get snap benefits for their kids, that a kid who
Speaker 5: is older than seven is no longer dependent. It's my
Speaker 5: boggling to me how cruel it is.
Speaker 1: It is very cool. One of the things that the
Speaker 1: Republicans are trying to do is push back against medicaid expansion, right,
Speaker 1: and Medicaid expansion is humongous and largely has benefited red
Speaker 1: states right. In fact, I mean Snap too. You know,
Speaker 1: if they are able to get these cuts through, they
Speaker 1: will mean that at least twenty five percent of children
Speaker 1: will be affected in states like Louisiana and West Virginia,
Speaker 1: very red states. But with the issue with the Medicaid expansion,
Speaker 1: your grandma's in a nursing home, she's coming to go
Speaker 1: live with you, right, or she's going on the street. Right.
Speaker 1: They're going to be closing nursing homes. They're going to
Speaker 1: be closing rural hospitals. The Medicaid expansion question it is
Speaker 1: wildly unpopular. I mean, the polling shows that like eighty
Speaker 1: four percent of Americans want either the same or more Medicaid.
Speaker 5: So I think part of the problem and this is
Speaker 5: actually a real problem for the Democratic Party and one
Speaker 5: that the Democrats have not solved. Frankly, it's a problem
Speaker 5: for truth, which is, yes, the Medicaid cuts in this
Speaker 5: bill are terribly unpopular, but people actually have to see
Speaker 5: them to believe them. Unfortunately, in America right now, disinformation
Speaker 5: and misinformation reign supreme, and where people get their information
Speaker 5: and what information people get has really become really problematic
Speaker 5: because people are getting a steady diet of propaganda and
Speaker 5: misinformation and disinformation. You can make a decision, for example,
Speaker 5: about whether you want trickle down or not, whether you
Speaker 5: want tax cuts for the wealthy or not, or whether
Speaker 5: you want a social service net.
Speaker 1: That is a.
Speaker 5: Legitimate question that you can raise in the United States
Speaker 5: and America in terms of economic policy. But if you
Speaker 5: don't actually know the truth, if you don't actually know
Speaker 5: what's in the bill, if somebody can get away and say,
Speaker 5: oh no, this is really not a Medicaid cut when
Speaker 5: it in fact is, that's part of the problem. And
Speaker 5: what the Democrats have not been able to do is
Speaker 5: they do not have the information. You know, assume for
Speaker 5: a second they are telling the truth. People don't know it,
Speaker 5: people don't hear it. So yes, the Medicaid cuts are
Speaker 5: really unpopular. Frankly, all of the snap overhaul nutrition overhaul
Speaker 5: will be really unpopular too. Think about we're going to
Speaker 5: go back to lunch shaming in schools about who can
Speaker 5: get a lunch and who can't get a lunch. We
Speaker 5: were supposed to solve that housing crisis. We're supposed to
Speaker 5: try to get the minimum wage raised to a living wage,
Speaker 5: and now what's happening is we're seeing even more cutbacks
Speaker 5: to the safety net and it's going to hurt for
Speaker 5: and work in class folk.
Speaker 1: It's funny because it's like we spend so much time
Speaker 1: handwriting about Democrats losing working people, but here are Republicans
Speaker 1: having won them, now trying to hurt them. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean, I give Josh Holly a lot of credit
Speaker 5: when he says, no, don't make these cuts, and you
Speaker 5: know these cuts are going to hurt people. But that's
Speaker 5: why I was astounded Johnson the Speaker wouldn't even be
Speaker 5: honest about what they did. Yeah, but that's because they're
Speaker 5: trying to hide it. And our goal, our job has
Speaker 5: to be tell the truth about what these cuts do
Speaker 5: and the impact they'll have.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about that. Eventually these cuts are going
Speaker 1: maybe they won't be brought as broadly, but there will
Speaker 1: be some level of cuts. And I wonder if Republicans
Speaker 1: are just in denial, like, eventually this will hurt the
Speaker 1: people that they just started winning, right.
Speaker 5: I think that they'll try to blame it on somebody else.
Speaker 5: I agree with you, these cuts are unpopular. They will
Speaker 5: hurt people, and the question is why are they doing it?
Speaker 5: And they're doing it. I mean, look, Republicans say they
Speaker 5: care about the debt, and they're raising the debt six
Speaker 5: trillion dollars. So they're doing these cuts because they care
Speaker 5: more about preserved having the huge maximalist wealth of the
Speaker 5: people who were the winners from the last tax cut.
Speaker 5: If you think about income inequality, it's you know, significantly
Speaker 5: higher today than it was in twenty seventeen. So they,
Speaker 5: you know, they care about that. That's who their constituency is,
Speaker 5: and that's what they care about. And I think they probably,
Speaker 5: I mean, they probably believe that they can sell anybody anything,
Speaker 5: so that people are not they can blame other people
Speaker 5: on it. And that's why our job is to actually
Speaker 5: tell the truth and say what's in it. And frankly,
Speaker 5: our job is also something else, which is we have
Speaker 5: to show a different future and a better future. So
Speaker 5: for example, I'm very much.
Speaker 6: Into let's actually have working class tax cut, Let's have
Speaker 6: cost of living insulation here, let's do what the patriotic
Speaker 6: millionaires have a really great proposal.
Speaker 5: Let's make that front street. Let's actually then also show
Speaker 5: like where's the money for career tech ed? Donald Trump,
Speaker 5: you say that you are you care about creating pathways
Speaker 5: for jobs for others. So where's the pathway for career
Speaker 5: tech ed? Why do you cut that money too? Why
Speaker 5: don't you actually increase that funding. Don't tell me that
Speaker 5: Harvard should get rid of their funds so you can
Speaker 5: put in trade schools. Why don't you fund career tech
Speaker 5: ed instead of cutting Harvard and instead of cutting the
Speaker 5: Department of Education. Where's the big push for workforce pathways
Speaker 5: in other ways? So we should actually be fighting for
Speaker 5: not just critiquing them, which we need to do, but
Speaker 5: we should be fighting for the things that working class
Speaker 5: folks need, which is good jobs, affordable housing, affordable health,
Speaker 5: health care, and decent retirement. And this is the stuff
Speaker 5: that Americans want.
Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you, thank you, Randy, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 5: Be welcome.
Speaker 3: No second, Jesse Cannon, Molly, I'm going to really shock
Speaker 3: you here.
Speaker 2: After someone's mother attended a one million dollar dinner for
Speaker 2: mister Trump, there was a pardon exchanged. Who would have
Speaker 2: thunk it.
Speaker 1: No, I can't believe it. I'm shocked. It's a great
Speaker 1: story from the New York Times. Ken Vogel unblocked me
Speaker 1: on Twitter. Ken Vogel, this is the Ken Vogel and
Speaker 1: block Molly john fest On x challenge. So this is
Speaker 1: a great story. This guy who worked for his mother.
Speaker 1: His mother had a sort of nursing homeie thing. His
Speaker 1: mother had been raising money for Trump for a long time.
Speaker 1: They had been appealing for pardons for a long time.
Speaker 1: But you know what put him over the top. You're
Speaker 1: going to be shocked, shocked to hear this. By the way,
Speaker 1: his mother was also involved in this Project Veritas thing
Speaker 1: where they tried to buy Ashley Biden's diary. Everything is
Speaker 1: so bad. American politics is so disgusting, right, they tried
Speaker 1: to buy Ashley Biden's diary in order to hurt Joe
Speaker 1: Biden by because this was publicizing her addiction, because she
Speaker 1: was an addict. I mean, this is like, imagine, this
Speaker 1: is so bad. This is like the world's darkest Cohen
Speaker 1: Brothers movie. So anyway, eventually they got this pardon. Because,
Speaker 1: by the way, there's also a great story of a
Speaker 1: two million dollar yacht, which I'm not going to get
Speaker 1: into right now. I do think it is funny though,
Speaker 1: that between twenty sixteen and twenty nineteen, this guy withheld
Speaker 1: more than ten million dollars from the paychecks of nurses, doctors,
Speaker 1: and others who worked at his facilities, under the pretext
Speaker 1: of using it for their Social Security, Medicare and federal
Speaker 1: income tax. But you know what he did instead of
Speaker 1: using it to pay there withholding taxes, he spent two
Speaker 1: million dollars on a yacht he paid for travel and purchases,
Speaker 1: and high end retailers including Broger of Goodman and Cardia
Speaker 1: charged with thirteen counts of tax crimes. But our tax
Speaker 1: crimes really crimes. If you support Donald Trump, many people
Speaker 1: are saying they are not, So what happens. The mother
Speaker 1: goes to a Trump fundraiser that is a million dollar
Speaker 1: a plated fundraiser, and then he cuts the Barden great stuff.
Speaker 1: That's what it is. That's it for this episode of
Speaker 1: Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday
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