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 Miami Mayor Francisco Suarez has dropped
Speaker 1: out of the GOP primary. We have such a fun
Speaker 1: show for you today and BR's full disclosures. Robin Farzad
Speaker 1: joins us to make sense of our very complicated economy.
Speaker 1: Then we'll talk to Martin Pingelli, the Guardian's Washington breaking
Speaker 1: news correspondent, about the latest fuckery with Leonard Leo and
Speaker 1: his potential legal woes. But first we have former Senator
Speaker 1: and host of the Al Franken podcast, the one, the
Speaker 1: Only Al Franken.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Fast Politics. Al Franken.
Speaker 3: Hey, Mollie, how are you doing.
Speaker 2: Excited to be interviewing you.
Speaker 1: So we talked about this Republican debate where now I
Speaker 1: feel like in the post first Republican debate cycle.
Speaker 3: Way William Well, we were wrong a little bit, especially
Speaker 3: you and Mark thought to say, this is terribly and
Speaker 3: I thought he was for DeSantis actually okay, and he
Speaker 3: got a Genie bump. Ramaswami got an actual bump and
Speaker 3: well bump, but it was like the three of us
Speaker 3: were going, you know, really killed it was Nicki Haley
Speaker 3: And it's like it's like Republicans watching if there was
Speaker 3: a real democratic debate with a Field and they're going,
Speaker 3: they'd go, like, you know that mansion.
Speaker 4: He really killed it because at least he talks.
Speaker 5: Since and so you know, so Haley got a little
Speaker 5: teeny little thing, but it was Ramaswami and Desandas that actually, well,
Speaker 5: the Santa's got a little teeny bump, which for him
Speaker 5: is a bump.
Speaker 1: I mean, Desanta's people are out there spinning DeSantis left
Speaker 1: and right. And remember you can't forget how many people
Speaker 1: in the mainstream media and the right wing media are
Speaker 1: working on Desanta's campaign.
Speaker 3: Well, that hasn't stopped him from sliding and sliding and sliding.
Speaker 3: And I just thought he got his message out as
Speaker 3: well as he's ever done it and didn't make weird
Speaker 3: faces or anything. He just I thought he did his
Speaker 3: job buying, and he spoke to the base, the people
Speaker 3: who were there and the people voting Republican primaries. I
Speaker 3: thought he did well by himself. For the That's the
Speaker 3: best I've seen and wasn't good, but it was all
Speaker 3: the best I seen him.
Speaker 1: But again it's a question of like Jeb bushamentum right,
Speaker 1: Like you can't make people vote for someone who has
Speaker 1: none of the attributes that people vote for when they
Speaker 1: vote for a candidate.
Speaker 3: Well, which worries me about Ramaswami. And we see whether
Speaker 3: Trump it at any point. At any point Republicans go like,
Speaker 3: can we nominate a guy and by I don't know,
Speaker 3: maybe convicted of several things. By by I can mention
Speaker 3: I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Well, so I wrote this today my my Fanny Fair column,
Speaker 1: not to plug something else. But hey, man, we all
Speaker 1: do it about how the vake. He shows that the
Speaker 1: GOP base is really primed for another charismatic Charlotte And
Speaker 1: and it might not be Vivike. It probably won't be Viveke,
Speaker 1: but it could be you know, someone much much worse.
Speaker 3: Who in the party would emerge as a charismatic Charlottean.
Speaker 1: Then it's hard to think of a Republican senator who
Speaker 1: is charismatic.
Speaker 2: I can think of a lot who are charlotte owns.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you want to say, Ted Cruz, I can feel
Speaker 1: it at the tip of your top.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I just want to see how the
Speaker 3: trials go, and I want I'm very eager for then.
Speaker 3: I guess this one in Atlanta is starting very soon.
Speaker 1: So yes, the Atlanta I mean again, this man has
Speaker 1: numerous trials, also numerous trial dates, but also his millions
Speaker 1: and millions of dollars to spend on his legal fees.
Speaker 1: And we are at this car crash of politics versus legal.
Speaker 1: So there's a cow goes here that is sort of
Speaker 1: I think, a little bit unknown, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, no, no, this is nothing like this has
Speaker 3: ever happened before. But if you look at the Republican Party,
Speaker 3: now this is all goes back to the paranoid style
Speaker 3: of American politics.
Speaker 1: Yes, Richard Hofstadter, who has invoked many times on this podcast.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you go back to Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan
Speaker 3: and Gingrich and I wrote about Rush Limbaugh and Fox
Speaker 3: News and feet Party and you think about and it
Speaker 3: all ends up with Trump and a lot of it
Speaker 3: has to do with fake news and alternative facts. And
Speaker 3: remember alternative facts. That was Conway.
Speaker 2: We call her Georgie's ex wife.
Speaker 3: Well, okay, I don't want to go into someone's marriage.
Speaker 3: So the point is is that we're at a very
Speaker 3: very off boy. And these shootings also go back that
Speaker 3: the racism great replacement theory or the Tucker Carlson pushed,
Speaker 3: and the shootings of black people in Buffalo and Juus
Speaker 3: and Pittsburgh going.
Speaker 1: Can we pause for a minute and talk about the
Speaker 1: assault rifle ban because you were involved in that, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, I was there right after Sandy Hook, and I
Speaker 3: couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe we couldn't get that passed.
Speaker 3: There's no reason for these things. There's no reason for
Speaker 3: these things. You do anything that you can do with us,
Speaker 3: he can't do anything you can do with us. All well,
Speaker 3: but there's no reason for this machine that kills people.
Speaker 3: And remember, we had an assault weapons ban in ninety four.
Speaker 3: We passed it and it lasted ten years, and then
Speaker 3: Congress wouldn't renew it, and Bush said he would made
Speaker 3: some kind of Pablomese thing, which is he would decided
Speaker 3: if it had passed, but you know, it wasn't passing.
Speaker 3: And then ever since then, they started making the these
Speaker 3: weapons more and more and more efficient. So Sandy Hook,
Speaker 3: it was these kids. It was like twenty kids and
Speaker 3: like five adults and it was the saddest fucking thing
Speaker 3: I've ever seen. I met families, and I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 3: I hadn't been there all that while I had been
Speaker 3: there actually a couple of years, but I couldn't believe
Speaker 3: that we couldn't get anything. We couldn't get background checks.
Speaker 3: After Valdi, there was something passed, But there's no reason
Speaker 3: for these. And I talked to some of my Republican
Speaker 3: former colleagues every once in a while and try to say,
Speaker 3: there's no reasons, no reason for it. Well, a lot
Speaker 3: of guys I use them for hunting. Why you don't
Speaker 3: need these for hunting? You don't People hunted fine before
Speaker 3: before these existed. And you know this is this is
Speaker 3: this is all sick. It's all sick.
Speaker 2: And I think also more importantly than that, I don't
Speaker 2: know why.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, I'm on the nose.
Speaker 2: It is the problem that they don't want to come
Speaker 2: to the table at all, and.
Speaker 3: They have a base it's for this, and Americans are
Speaker 3: for background checks. Americas are for all of this. But
Speaker 3: if you talk to somebody from Oklahoma, a Republican senator,
Speaker 3: any one of these states, they're just check out shit.
Speaker 1: So this leads us to how Trump really seized power.
Speaker 1: Right is a lot of these Republican senators are rational.
Speaker 1: They just don't want to be primaried or get death threats.
Speaker 3: Trump had his base, and Trump could destroy Jeff Flake
Speaker 3: and did and did, and so they all chickened out. Leavivich,
Speaker 3: who was on my podcast with you, yeah right road,
Speaker 3: thank you for your servitude, which is all about how
Speaker 3: every Republican politician they wanted to survive in Washington. Just
Speaker 3: I was there obviously when he got elected, and the
Speaker 3: next day or when we got back, they were amazed.
Speaker 3: The Republican senators were amazed. All but Jeff Sessions.
Speaker 2: Why well, he had.
Speaker 3: Been the first indoors I know, but why were the
Speaker 3: others amazed?
Speaker 2: No, why was Jeff Sessions not amazed?
Speaker 3: He's Jeff Sessions. See, he's brilliant. He's the only one
Speaker 3: who saw it. Wait, really, well, I didn't talk to
Speaker 3: each one of them, but riding the subway, I would
Speaker 3: just be talking to one of them and they'd be
Speaker 3: shaking their head.
Speaker 2: I can't believe, I mean, but that is just incredible.
Speaker 3: That was the end of this I mean, or the
Speaker 3: beginning of this period where it's just frightening and getting
Speaker 3: worse and worse and worse. We were holding our breath
Speaker 3: until next November that it can't happen again. And if
Speaker 3: it does, we're just it's a different it's fascism.
Speaker 2: Right, No, no, I mean the stakes are impossibly high.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Sanda democracy with passion, and it's not the
Speaker 3: Third Reich, but it's it's hungry or it's or some
Speaker 3: Well Russia is pretty bad, but it'll be bad. And yeah,
Speaker 3: he'll go after his enemies and it'll be bad. And
Speaker 3: he's not going to be picking madness.
Speaker 2: Right, No, no, right, that's a very good point.
Speaker 3: He's gonna start where he ended off with these toadies.
Speaker 1: But can Steven Miller take every position in the Trump
Speaker 1: white House?
Speaker 3: He can be cheap of staff and yeah, because you
Speaker 3: know how hard Trump works. That's right, he's a good delegator. Right, Well,
Speaker 3: no he isn't. I take that back. But that's all
Speaker 3: we talk about, right, that's all Democrats talk about in
Speaker 3: a like Americans. What we're going to talk about, like
Speaker 3: how frightening a moment this is Unfortunately it's not a moment.
Speaker 3: It's a good year and whatever.
Speaker 1: It's really like about eight years. We've just been on
Speaker 1: this fucking roller coaster. Since twenty fifteen we've been, or
Speaker 1: really twenty sixteen, because in twenty fifteen we didn't a
Speaker 1: lot of us didn't see any of this coming.
Speaker 3: We didn't know right.
Speaker 1: But now we're in this sort of absolute fucking nightmare
Speaker 1: of like, you know, will this guy get re elected
Speaker 1: and completely destroy the country again.
Speaker 3: It's social media, it's a dark web. But it's the
Speaker 3: other versions of Fox which are worse. And Peter Agburn,
Speaker 3: who is the producer of my podcast and engineer, was
Speaker 3: in South Carolina for quite a while. His father is
Speaker 3: ill and his family just watches Fox, and oh my lord.
Speaker 1: What's interesting to me about Fox is they have developed
Speaker 1: a line of propaganda, which is they say everything about
Speaker 1: Biden that the normal news used to say about Trump.
Speaker 1: So they say by is an authoritarian, Biden is a dictator,
Speaker 1: Biden is like they're just trying to hit Biden with everything.
Speaker 3: Not only that he is senile, They show pictures anytime
Speaker 3: they can show him falling down, they will and basically
Speaker 3: say that he's not able to run. The gunman. I
Speaker 3: just Frank four has just written a book they called
Speaker 3: the last politician about Biden's first two years. And this
Speaker 3: guy is on top of his government, right, this guy
Speaker 3: has those forty years and sent you know, has that experience,
Speaker 3: eight years as vice president, and he actually knows what
Speaker 3: he's doing. And it's so ironic, of course that that
Speaker 3: Trump never cared. There's a scene in the book where
Speaker 3: you know, he's checking on a flight from Europe to
Speaker 3: bring baby formula. This is Bien making sure that that
Speaker 3: flight g it. So the opposite, of course is true
Speaker 3: about in terms of his confidence and stuff compared to Trump.
Speaker 3: Of course they're going to go he's authoritarian. That's why
Speaker 3: he's prosecuting Trump and all that stuff. It's all lies.
Speaker 3: It's just that's what they do. Lies in the line, liars.
Speaker 1: Tell them that's bigging up. We're really we're plug heavy today,
Speaker 1: but I respect it. So we have a number of
Speaker 1: books on our reading list here. But I did want
Speaker 1: to ask you as we are now in this kind
Speaker 1: of strange run up to you know, the House is
Speaker 1: coming back, the Senate is coming back. McCarthy, he's got
Speaker 1: this four or five CE majarity. My man, he is
Speaker 1: going now to have this big It looks like there's
Speaker 1: a setup in the House about whether they're going to
Speaker 1: try and impeach Biden, which a lot of mag Republicans want,
Speaker 1: or they don't quite have a reason but they feel
Speaker 1: fair is fair, or they're going to shut down the government.
Speaker 2: Seems like a great idea.
Speaker 3: The people pay the price for the American people when
Speaker 3: you shut down the government, of course, right, I think
Speaker 3: that would be a bad idea for them, impeaching Biden.
Speaker 3: It would be interesting to see what the charges are,
Speaker 3: I guess, and if they can do it, I mean,
Speaker 3: can you hold everybody? And you hold everybody and they're
Speaker 3: bound to lose the House if they do that. I
Speaker 3: think I think they're bout to lose the House anyway.
Speaker 3: It's going to be interesting because in the Senate it
Speaker 3: looks like it's going to be a real tough road
Speaker 3: for Democrats. But a lot just we don't know what
Speaker 3: happens between now and then.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: I just would like for one second to talk about
Speaker 1: how since Roe has been overturned, every election Democrats have
Speaker 1: wildly overperformed. Again, I am not trying to make anyone
Speaker 1: able to sleep at night, because that's not what we do.
Speaker 2: But I do want to point that out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, certainly on every vote on the issue. And
Speaker 3: then you know, the Wisconsin vote really was serve on
Speaker 3: the issue the Supreme Court.
Speaker 2: But even Ohio like that was a ten.
Speaker 3: Point Kansas and then in Kentucky and in Montana. It
Speaker 3: used to be a single issue, remember the other way
Speaker 3: right Democrats didn't care about it so much because it
Speaker 3: was precedent, and all these nominees for Supreme Court said, oh,
Speaker 3: not only is the president's double president, and so we
Speaker 3: went out worry about it until it happened. But now, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's obviously a single issue and a single issue for
Speaker 3: men and women. So the single issue of it has
Speaker 3: completely flipped. It should hurt them, hopefully will help us
Speaker 3: keep the Senate.
Speaker 2: Oh, frankn thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 3: Always, thank you for joining me. When you join me
Speaker 3: and I join you.
Speaker 1: Robin Farzaide is the host of Full Disclosure on NPR.
Speaker 4: Welcome, I'm back, Thank you, Molly.
Speaker 2: Smoltics.
Speaker 4: How are you you? How are you? Swell?
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: There's a recent indicator that shows that unemployment is as
Speaker 1: low as it's ever been, and yet a fairly large
Speaker 1: percentage of the American public believes unemployment is high, make
Speaker 1: it make sense.
Speaker 4: I'd love to cite the misery index if it was
Speaker 4: out there, some version of unemployment and inflation, because you're
Speaker 4: still feeling inflation. I feel that both the print you
Speaker 4: get from the gas station and maybe if you're at
Speaker 4: the grocery aisle and you remember what something might have
Speaker 4: cost three four years ago. Even though the headline number
Speaker 4: might be down and we might be approaching the low
Speaker 4: single digits, from what you know the Federal Reserve is observing,
Speaker 4: it doesn't feel as fantastic as it is out there.
Speaker 4: Markets are not far from an all time high, inflation
Speaker 4: is subduing, unemployment is at decades low, but that seems
Speaker 4: to be cold comfort for small businesses because they can't
Speaker 4: seem to hire anybody. Airlines and airports are clogged up,
Speaker 4: their labor bottlenecks everywhere, and it doesn't feel as amazing
Speaker 4: as the numbers I think would bear out.
Speaker 2: So that's what I want to ask you.
Speaker 1: This is like one of the I feel like under
Speaker 1: reported stories because it's so hard to understand. We have
Speaker 1: multiple positive indicators and yet many people miserable. So the
Speaker 1: theory that a lot of people have is that this
Speaker 1: is just hyperpartisanship, right, that the right hates the market
Speaker 1: because Biden is president and the left is happy. I mean,
Speaker 1: is it hyperpartisanship? Is that the way to explain what's happening?
Speaker 1: Or is it more complicated?
Speaker 4: I think in fairness, if you think about Trump on
Speaker 4: the eve of the pandemic, President Trump, the numbers were great,
Speaker 4: and some people were openly saying, if he could just
Speaker 4: ride this into November, it should be a lot easier
Speaker 4: for the incumbent, especially considering the incumbent advantages. Of course,
Speaker 4: no one imagined COVID and the mishandling of COVID and
Speaker 4: everything else that would happen to that. I mean again,
Speaker 4: back in March of twenty twenty, I think we saw
Speaker 4: unemployment spike to the mid teens in the matter of
Speaker 4: two weeks. We saw NBC News footage of breadlines of
Speaker 4: cars around the block looking again donations. It was very
Speaker 4: short lived and things snap back. I mean, we have
Speaker 4: had variants and outbreaks and slowdowns and trip ups along
Speaker 4: the way, but that feeling of freefall was largely arrested
Speaker 4: and he came out of that. But Trump wasn't the
Speaker 4: beneficiary of that still. I mean, I think that people
Speaker 4: felt awful, the masking, the kids, the remote work, and
Speaker 4: there's certainly a feeling right now. If you fast forward
Speaker 4: three plus years after that, it doesn't feel like things
Speaker 4: are back to normal. We don't know the kind of
Speaker 4: the work from home normal. We don't know what the
Speaker 4: inflationary normal is. We don't know what the unemployment normal is.
Speaker 4: We have interest rates which are at multi decade highs,
Speaker 4: mortgage rates I think at a twenty two year high.
Speaker 4: A lot of people locked out of the housing market
Speaker 4: that may have been on their best behavior, like I
Speaker 4: did a lever up, I didn't go crazy on crypto
Speaker 4: and NFT, And what's my vindication? What's my motivation right now?
Speaker 4: And that's really yeah, gotta be frustrating for the Federal
Speaker 4: Reserve because you take up rates. When you look at
Speaker 4: my hometown in Miami, you look at other areas, you
Speaker 4: look at Westchester County, whole prices are still super hot.
Speaker 4: And this is really vexing for the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 1: So tell our listeners exactly what happened in Wyoming.
Speaker 2: The big meeting last week.
Speaker 4: Not big headline stuff. They're still monitoring inflation. There's news
Speaker 4: coming out of that that we might be a lot
Speaker 4: closer to the end of the interest rate hiking cycle,
Speaker 4: which has been pretty perilous. If you think about taking
Speaker 4: rates up more than five points in about a year
Speaker 4: and a half, that was so whiplashing that it brought
Speaker 4: out actually some of the biggest bank failures in US history.
Speaker 4: We talk about this normal environment before, with unemployment and inflation,
Speaker 4: you wouldn't think it would be get the banking crisis
Speaker 4: that we had in the spring.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about that banking crisis, because there was a
Speaker 1: lot of anxiety. It was a tech center banking crisis,
Speaker 1: I would like to point out started with Silicon Valley Bank,
Speaker 1: spread out to some larger banks, but I think all
Speaker 1: regional banks. But it was really there was a lot
Speaker 1: of anxiety that could have spread out even further.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean already the original sin is if we
Speaker 4: had the too big to fail banks from two thousand
Speaker 4: and eight and two thousand and nine, I mean the
Speaker 4: likes of Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase, which were
Speaker 4: too big to fail and then became colossally too big
Speaker 4: to fail. They were the beneficiaries of all the different failures.
Speaker 4: If you think about Washington mutual if you think about
Speaker 4: Bear Stearns, and that was happening kind of in mini
Speaker 4: replay again as people were taking their money out of
Speaker 4: smaller banks and kind of this self fulfilling prophecy and
Speaker 4: plowing it into JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo and
Speaker 4: these other two big to fail banks, and suddenly you
Speaker 4: have all these other banks out there having to come
Speaker 4: out and say, look, we're fine, we're good for the money.
Speaker 4: But you could have a virtual bank run. You could
Speaker 4: have Twitter do what Twitter does, and suddenly it's self
Speaker 4: fulfilling prophecy. And I think, Molly, I think somebody should
Speaker 4: explore at some point to what it extent. And I
Speaker 4: know this will be controversial. PPP excess had to do
Speaker 4: with those bank failures because you had these enormous balances
Speaker 4: and no one had to be mindful of the two
Speaker 4: hundred and fifty thousand dollars insurance limit until it became
Speaker 4: an issue. And as I said, we all have smartphones
Speaker 4: and you can move money in an easier, frictionless fashion.
Speaker 4: It wasn't like it's a wonderful life where you have
Speaker 4: to go in and a cost the bank manager, right right, right,
Speaker 4: And so those problems are still there. We recently had
Speaker 4: some credit agencies downgrade regional banks, and I think that
Speaker 4: this is this is a difficult thing. I think low
Speaker 4: interest rates help helps all sorts of borrowers, all manner
Speaker 4: of financial institutions. But when you take up rates the
Speaker 4: way the FED has had to do over the past
Speaker 4: year and a half, invariably there's going to be significant
Speaker 4: collateral damage.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to talk to you about that for
Speaker 1: a minute, because so many things happened this year that
Speaker 1: were caused by deregulation. So againp loans we can talk about.
Speaker 2: I'm happy to talk about them.
Speaker 1: Clearly, that was one of the large or scams perpetrated
Speaker 1: on the American people.
Speaker 2: But again we had to do it, and there were
Speaker 2: good parts of it.
Speaker 1: You know, the child tax credit was really good, lifted
Speaker 1: all these people out of poverty. It has now gone,
Speaker 1: of course, But I want to pause for a minute
Speaker 1: and instead talk about, like, because this is a particular
Speaker 1: annoyance of mind, deregulation, because we did really see this
Speaker 1: year a couple of things that happened as a sort
Speaker 1: of crescendo to deregulation. Like I'm not going to speak
Speaker 1: to causality because who knows, but you know, it's certainly
Speaker 1: like the trained aroundment in Ohio. And we've had others
Speaker 1: since then. And then really this bank run was because
Speaker 1: these mid sized banks do not have the same kind
Speaker 1: of stress tests that the larger banks do.
Speaker 4: I would not have imagined that, by the way, shame
Speaker 4: on me, and I covered this industry, and when that
Speaker 4: stuff happened, I said, you would think that mega regional
Speaker 4: banks and even smaller regional banks would be susceptible to
Speaker 4: this idea of stress testing their uninsured deposits. Again, uninsured
Speaker 4: deposits being an embarrassment of riches. You have some depositors
Speaker 4: with so much money that they just get complacent and
Speaker 4: leave several millions of dollars in an account insured for
Speaker 4: JO hundred and fifty. Isn't that kind of a deminimous
Speaker 4: check by the Feds. But I found out that there
Speaker 4: was lobbying to kind of pull back. There were banks,
Speaker 4: if you look at them four years ago, they were saying,
Speaker 4: we can't make capital formation, We can't be the lubricants
Speaker 4: of the economy if you're breathing down our next every quarter.
Speaker 4: And they got some modicum of relief, and it became
Speaker 4: did anybody officially call that a Minsky moment? Where you know,
Speaker 4: stability sows the seeds of its own instability, like complacently explain.
Speaker 1: The larger Minski for those who are keeping track at home.
Speaker 4: As I always understood that times of stability and complacency
Speaker 4: are going to sow their own crises things that happen.
Speaker 4: You don't have to have crises being long in the
Speaker 4: making and the rot being out there that people if
Speaker 4: interest rates are too low, if the calm is for
Speaker 4: too long, people are gonna try something like the bear
Speaker 4: Stearns traders did back in two thousand and seven and
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight and set fire to the entire system.
Speaker 4: And it's funny to me that an embarrassment of riches.
Speaker 4: The reason that if you told me to start this year,
Speaker 4: if we're sitting around on New Year's Eve and you're saying,
Speaker 4: farz Ad, we're gonna have two or three of the
Speaker 4: biggest bank failures in history, I would have said it
Speaker 4: would have been, well a commercial property meltdown, because so
Speaker 4: many of these buildings are distressed and people are not
Speaker 4: going back to work. I have zero idea that it
Speaker 4: was because too much money in accounts and then people
Speaker 4: getting worried that they're not insured enough and hence the
Speaker 4: self fulfilling propsy. So why why we're regulators in front
Speaker 4: of that? And again on the other side, I don't
Speaker 4: mean to get it inside baseball, is the bankers themselves.
Speaker 4: We're putting money in at not as you know, treasuries
Speaker 4: that could be marked down. There should be an ultra
Speaker 4: liquid short term treasury. So this stuff was like finance
Speaker 4: one oh one. So who's in control here?
Speaker 1: Right? And I think I mean again, it's hard to
Speaker 1: get One of the things we've seen historically is that
Speaker 1: regulators have a hard time getting ahead of crisises. But
Speaker 1: in this case, we've had crisises like this fairly recently,
Speaker 1: like the you know, during the Obama administration, for example.
Speaker 1: And you really have to wonder how much of this deregulation,
Speaker 1: which was.
Speaker 2: The central tenant of trump.
Speaker 1: Ism, was due to I mean, remember Trump would get
Speaker 1: up there every day and say and work for every regulation,
Speaker 1: We're going to deregulate fifty five things.
Speaker 4: Right, But you know, in the mid nineties, the Clinton's
Speaker 4: were deregularly, I mean lar Bob Rubin and others, and
Speaker 4: that that's so the seeds of subprime. Everybody loves low
Speaker 4: borrowing costs, low interest rates. That's something that will bring
Speaker 4: all wings of all parties. That'll bring AOC and MTG
Speaker 4: together for once. Right, we love we love capital formation.
Speaker 4: The problem is that the regulation, as I've said before,
Speaker 4: we all end up picking up the tab, whether it's
Speaker 4: bank failures, insurance amounts tacked on increasing inflation. I think
Speaker 4: that I don't mean to go back to PPP more
Speaker 4: than I have to, but I think that that is
Speaker 4: something that we're all paying for through higher inflation. As
Speaker 4: there was such a double triple injection of money into
Speaker 4: the economy with fiscal stimulus and monetary stimulus, that it's
Speaker 4: so much harder to kill that inflation down the road.
Speaker 1: Right, But now I want to just sort of pause
Speaker 1: and back up for a second, because a lot of us,
Speaker 1: I want to say, like people who worry, not just
Speaker 1: exclusively Jews, but my husband and I worry a lot
Speaker 1: enough to power a small country.
Speaker 4: We're called the clot up in class.
Speaker 1: Well except we can't take arpin. But yes, so I
Speaker 1: want to talk about this. There was a real serious
Speaker 1: worry that we were going to step back into the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies and stagflation. I would love you to talk
Speaker 1: our listeners through what is stagflation and why is it
Speaker 1: not happening now?
Speaker 4: Well, I could just sing the song to the sitcom
Speaker 4: Good Times, and that will remind you perfect not getting
Speaker 4: ass not getting assle that rare laying offs. I mean,
Speaker 4: the worst of all possible outcomes is when you have
Speaker 4: a declining economy and joblessness and high inflation. I mean,
Speaker 4: you know, Jimmy Carter and his cardigan er, Gerald Ford,
Speaker 4: let's whip inflation. I don't even remember what the vintage
Speaker 4: of that was. And the FED is in snake bit
Speaker 4: territory because what am I going to do? Do I
Speaker 4: kill inflation first, or do I prioritize stimulus because they're
Speaker 4: inversely proportional. If I pomp money into the economy, it's
Speaker 4: going to add to this double digit inflation, and so
Speaker 4: it's it's the most intractable problem for the FED. We
Speaker 4: had a taste of that this time around, I think,
Speaker 4: with inflation reaching highs unseen since the early eighties. But
Speaker 4: at the same time, unemployment was breaking well below four percent,
Speaker 4: so it wasn't like we were at you know, high
Speaker 4: single digit unemployment and high single digit inflation.
Speaker 2: We did not.
Speaker 1: Fall into stagnation because our employment was so good.
Speaker 4: I think it feels like that for a lot of people.
Speaker 4: I think there is some cold comfort for you know,
Speaker 4: you've discussed in your columns the catch up for wage
Speaker 4: workers and service workers and people for finally got some
Speaker 4: vindication that fifteen was the new ten or the new
Speaker 4: seven to fifty, and increasingly you can't even hire people
Speaker 4: for fifteen dollars. But the rest of people out there,
Speaker 4: they're saying, well, I might not be unemployed, but inflation
Speaker 4: has eaten so much into my buying power when I
Speaker 4: travel or take my kids out for panera or something
Speaker 4: like that, that it feels like I'm in a stagflationary environment.
Speaker 4: Think how awful it is if you do lose your job.
Speaker 4: And we did have a ton of tech layoffs last year,
Speaker 4: but by and large people have been able to readjust
Speaker 4: and find jobs. So this would have been a lot worse.
Speaker 4: This difficulty for the FED. I mean, if you had
Speaker 4: to pick your battle, but one dragon versus the other,
Speaker 4: unemployment versus inflation, that.
Speaker 3: Would have been scary.
Speaker 4: Fortunately, we have not seen that yet in fact, I
Speaker 4: would say the FED would gladly trade some bit of
Speaker 4: higher unemployment, even though it won't say it on the record,
Speaker 4: for inflation to get back down to two percent.
Speaker 2: Right and raising the raids again.
Speaker 1: This is this dance of raising the rates and trying
Speaker 1: to keep from tipping into recession.
Speaker 4: It's such a delicate, delicate game. I wish, and I
Speaker 4: know Jerome Powell wishes he had more precise levers to pull,
Speaker 4: like things that could specifically address housing without killing off
Speaker 4: small banks or small and medium sized businesses that are
Speaker 4: credit worthy that can't get loans right now because of
Speaker 4: the banking swoon itself in the Spring was a form
Speaker 4: of tightening onto itself. These banks became chastened and at
Speaker 4: the same time that they saw the FED take up rates.
Speaker 4: So it's still an imperfect tool. When the FED takes
Speaker 4: rates down to zero, you invariably get these crazy asset
Speaker 4: bubbles that come out of it, which might create their
Speaker 4: own various Minsky moments. And I look back, Molly on
Speaker 4: the last twenty five years. We've just had a rolling
Speaker 4: set of emergency interest rate policies and asset bubbles. And
Speaker 4: the cosmic question to me is, what is normal. What
Speaker 4: is the baseline? What is the equilibrium carrying capacity of
Speaker 4: the United States economy without extraordinary FED intervention? And that,
Speaker 4: alongside other trauma, keeps me up at night.
Speaker 1: I want to talk for another minute about inflation. One
Speaker 1: of the things that I think really is a cause
Speaker 1: of inflation, and we just don't talk about enough. Is
Speaker 1: this pumping money into the economy, this printing money, this
Speaker 1: juicing the public markets, which is modern monetary policy, right.
Speaker 4: Right, And yeah, there used to be taboos. We used
Speaker 4: to have something called moral hazard where the FED doesn't
Speaker 4: want to seem like it's backstopping speculators and investors. But
Speaker 4: so much of that was shattered after the Wall Street bailouts.
Speaker 4: In the case of PPP, one of the dangerous precedents
Speaker 4: here is that we don't have business interruption insurance. If
Speaker 4: there's another pandemic that comes across the Atlantic and takes
Speaker 4: unemployment up to fifteen percent of a week, again, the
Speaker 4: only option we had was for Congress to step in
Speaker 4: and effectively nationalize insurance, and that wasn't solved. I mean
Speaker 4: that was just kicked down the road, and clearly with
Speaker 4: the effects of inflation, I think it was a a really.
Speaker 4: I mean, in the fog of war, you have to
Speaker 4: make emergency decisions, but we're still paying for it.
Speaker 1: I want to talk to you about insurance because you've
Speaker 1: just hit on one of Jesse and I's favorite anxieties,
Speaker 1: climate change is here. Insurance companies seem to be the
Speaker 1: only people who are not in denial. We got gas companies,
Speaker 1: oil companies. They are not going to meet their climate
Speaker 1: goals quote unquote meet. I mean, sure, whatever, if you're
Speaker 1: just gonna lie, let's just lie.
Speaker 2: But I want to ask you about insurance companies.
Speaker 1: We are seeing in Florida the insurance market just creater.
Speaker 1: This looks like it could be a huge economic crisis.
Speaker 4: Very few people realized there was a smallish hurricane I
Speaker 4: think in two thousand and five or two thousand and six,
Speaker 4: was it Wilma that then kind of led to the
Speaker 4: moment of insurers pulling out, and that may have finally
Speaker 4: caused the housing crisis ground zero in my hometown, you know,
Speaker 4: in South Florida in the aughts. But what's happening right
Speaker 4: now is just orders of magnitude larger than any bubble
Speaker 4: you ever had. In Miami with millionaires and finance people
Speaker 4: and Citadel and tech bros going down there. And you
Speaker 4: can look at the Wall Street Journal every day and
Speaker 4: look at a record mansion in Coral Gables or Miami Beach,
Speaker 4: a demo job or an area of high flood risk,
Speaker 4: and properties keep going up, and it seems to be
Speaker 4: like the greater full theory, like I'm just going to
Speaker 4: build this and flip it to the next guy. Climate
Speaker 4: change be damned. We've done several episodes where we talk
Speaker 4: to developers and real estate people, and I was shocked
Speaker 4: when I learned that, you know, Argentines and Venezuelans and
Speaker 4: say Brazilians of money have a certain predilection for new
Speaker 4: high rises that have elevated garages at the bottom where
Speaker 4: if something happens, you can you know, the building manager
Speaker 4: will call you in South America and say, look, I'll
Speaker 4: just take the car up the garage and then we'll padlock,
Speaker 4: you know, all the shutters and the thing, and it's
Speaker 4: not your problem. What happens street level with flooding is
Speaker 4: is for for hoyp. Beloy, and the chief motivation there
Speaker 4: is to just protect your money from South American inflation
Speaker 4: or creeping expropriation. And you have a lot of people,
Speaker 4: a lot of consumers like that right now, that are
Speaker 4: coming into places and just devouring the housing market. And
Speaker 4: I wonder, at what point what gives if you can't
Speaker 4: buy homeowners insurance? Can you you know, does the bank
Speaker 4: get involved, like you're not credit worthy? We're not going
Speaker 4: to issue a mortgage if you don't have it. So
Speaker 4: this this is fascinating to me. But I've been trying
Speaker 4: to cop off.
Speaker 2: And does a government step in.
Speaker 4: Well with flood insurance?
Speaker 1: It does right, right, So if they're going to if
Speaker 1: they stepped in with flood insurance, you could see a
Speaker 1: world where they then step in. I mean, if we're
Speaker 1: just going to protect wealthy people's investments.
Speaker 4: Here's a problem. Like if I take Miami in isolation,
Speaker 4: it used to be the province of people in Golden
Speaker 4: Beach and Sunny Aisles and the ones who lived on
Speaker 4: a one A who could afford you know, federal flood insurance,
Speaker 4: which is expensive, but it's sold by Uncle Sam. Now
Speaker 4: you could go well Inland on days when there's no
Speaker 4: rain and find water gurgling up because of King Tide.
Speaker 4: And it's everybody's problem, and small and medium sized businesses
Speaker 4: at homeowners cannot afford that kind of premium insurance, so
Speaker 4: at some point it has to force people out of
Speaker 4: the market. But that has not happened yet.
Speaker 2: Oh Jesus, oh so much more to worry about. Thank
Speaker 2: you for joining. I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Molly, I Will.
Speaker 1: Martin Panjelli is The Guardian's Washington breaking news correspondent.
Speaker 2: Welcome too fast Politics, Martin.
Speaker 6: Thank you for having me. It's a question.
Speaker 1: I'm so happy to have you here. We're actually real
Speaker 1: friends in real life, but you also cover everything. So
Speaker 1: besides being real friends in real life, you are also
Speaker 1: really have your finger on everything that's going on, and
Speaker 1: there's quite a lot going on. I think we should
Speaker 1: start with the Leonard Leo for the people who are
Speaker 1: not just completely read in on Leonard Leo, just give
Speaker 1: us the top lines.
Speaker 6: It's kind of app that I would do that. One
Speaker 6: of my main job at The Guardian is to cover
Speaker 6: everything quickly.
Speaker 2: Right, good, perfect, let's go kind of help.
Speaker 6: So, in terms of covering Lenard Leo quickly, Leonard Leo
Speaker 6: is the man behind the Federalist Society, the man behind
Speaker 6: Trump's Supreme Court list, right wing Catholic activist who is
Speaker 6: phenomenally successful in attracting money to his various courses. He
Speaker 6: throw a Lebyrinthine process. Earlier this year, it was reported
Speaker 6: that he had attracted a one point six billion dollar
Speaker 6: gift for the biggest ever such.
Speaker 2: Not from Harlan Crow.
Speaker 6: Not from Harlan Crow, but he is connected to Arlin Crow.
Speaker 6: He does pop up Harlan Crow circles. That was mcguy
Speaker 6: called State Bar. He pops up everywhere there is a
Speaker 6: Supreme Court ethics story.
Speaker 2: Is a good sign.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he pops up every time there's a Supreme Court
Speaker 6: nomination obviously for all the past three anyway, not including
Speaker 6: Kathandy Bran Jackson three, Trump one. So he's got his
Speaker 6: finger a lot of pies. And the thing that caused
Speaker 6: everyone's attention last week and I ended up writing about,
Speaker 6: but I very explicitly was right about it, because Politico
Speaker 6: did the reporting was that the DC Attorney General is
Speaker 6: looking into Leo's some of Leo's arrangements now in how
Speaker 6: the nonprofits speak to each other. And the report was very,
Speaker 6: very impressive, and the Guardian swooped and the Guardian did
Speaker 6: its thing, which is this is what's happening. Quickly. Here
Speaker 6: is the political report. It's an amazing report. I recommend
Speaker 6: reading it. Nobody's none of the big names have matched it.
Speaker 6: Yet it goes off into a world of registrations of
Speaker 6: nonprofits in things like strip malls in Texas, which is phenomenal.
Speaker 6: I just I was reading it and thinking about better
Speaker 6: call Saul and giggling.
Speaker 2: Let's stop and just pull back for a minute.
Speaker 3: Here.
Speaker 1: This is like when you have a super pack and
Speaker 1: the super pac is not allowed to speak to the candidate.
Speaker 2: It's these kind of rules, right.
Speaker 6: It's that kind of thing. It's that kind of world
Speaker 6: of what communicates with what, what gives what to what?
Speaker 6: In this case, there's been the question is it's one
Speaker 6: arm of the empire feeding money to another arm of
Speaker 6: the empire, which maybe it shouldn't or maybe it should.
Speaker 6: I don't, I don't know. I was getting lost in
Speaker 6: the thickets of it. I mean, with such a big
Speaker 6: empire and such such amounts of money switching around, and
Speaker 6: you know, a democratic is only general in DC who
Speaker 6: has reason to want to have a look and who
Speaker 6: has a background in the Justice Department, in tax law.
Speaker 6: That's where this is started to head.
Speaker 1: It definitely seems like and again I'm not a tax lawyer,
Speaker 1: nor do I play one on television, but it does
Speaker 1: seem a lot of this staff is taking nonprofit status
Speaker 1: for things that are clearly political.
Speaker 6: Yes, I mean, but that's a nonprofit world, doesn't it.
Speaker 6: I mean. One of Leo's defenses, which he's given to us,
Speaker 6: not to me, is reportable to one of my fellow reporters,
Speaker 6: Chris McGreal was. He basically says, you know, dark money
Speaker 6: is dark money. It's always been around. I'm batting my side,
Speaker 6: you bat yours, which is cynical sense, correct, right, I.
Speaker 1: Mean, technically this money is supposed to be helping like
Speaker 1: starving children.
Speaker 6: Depends on right.
Speaker 1: I mean technically nonprofit money is theoretically you're supposed to
Speaker 1: go to things that are a political or at least
Speaker 1: animal shelter, starving children, hospitals, things where there's not a
Speaker 1: political band. We've gone down rabbit hole where things have
Speaker 1: gotten further and further away from what they're meant to be.
Speaker 6: I suppose it's about advancing causes, and that's how you
Speaker 6: head down the rabbit hole. I did notice in some
Speaker 6: reading that I thought made laugh federalist society which she
Speaker 6: looks a slightly different to appear on propit. But it's
Speaker 6: the legal Activism does say on its website the Federalist
Speaker 6: Society does not take political positions. So that chimed with
Speaker 6: me because I work for The Guardian, So I work
Speaker 6: for a newspaper that takes political positions, which in America
Speaker 6: sometimes say they don't.
Speaker 1: I want to sort of move on from this and
Speaker 1: talk about the New York constant clip of legal problems
Speaker 1: that Donald Trump has. But let's just get us up
Speaker 1: to speed on where we are with Trump's most recent
Speaker 1: legal stuff.
Speaker 6: From my position sitting as a breaking news guy, his
Speaker 6: legal stuff is constantly breaking. I'm constantly scrambling to catch
Speaker 6: up with it. I'm instantly updating my totals of indictments
Speaker 6: to get it right and sorry, totals of charges and
Speaker 6: under indictment.
Speaker 2: So give us account right now.
Speaker 6: Account right now is ninety one.
Speaker 1: Ninety one counts, four indictments, one superseding.
Speaker 6: Four indictments, one superseding. I listened to your conversation with
Speaker 6: George Comways and made a mental note not to say
Speaker 6: four indictments.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean there, it's technically either for I mean whatever,
Speaker 1: at this level, I feel like you can the way.
Speaker 6: I've been iumerating it, and again I think this maybe
Speaker 6: is how breaking news reporters can serve a reader quite
Speaker 6: quite well, is to keep account of just precisely what
Speaker 6: is true. So he has four areas of criminal legal jeopardy.
Speaker 6: He's got deral elections subversion, state election subversion meaning Georgia.
Speaker 6: He's got retention of classified information. He's got the hush
Speaker 6: money payments to Stormy Downers, who I keep referring to
Speaker 6: as a porn star in copy and keep getting told
Speaker 6: I can't do that because with the Guardian, she's an
Speaker 6: adult filmmaker. What I find fascinating, obviously the procession of
Speaker 6: trials that's coming on those subject to legal ranking about
Speaker 6: when they will happen. I keep remembering. You also have
Speaker 6: to remember and mention the other stuff. So you have
Speaker 6: to you have to tell the readers that there are
Speaker 6: various cases going on about his business affairs, and there
Speaker 6: is the other defamation trial coming in the Eugene Carroll case,
Speaker 6: in which you can say he's been adjudicated a rapist.
Speaker 6: It's absolutely staggering, and it doesn't stop getting staggering every
Speaker 6: time you do it. I've already done it once this
Speaker 6: morning for the website before coming on here, you know,
Speaker 6: enumerating the whole thing, following the whole thing at the Guardian.
Speaker 6: The heavy repertorial lifting on Trump is done by Hugo Lowell,
Speaker 6: who I think has been.
Speaker 2: On Yes, and he's a close personal friend of mine.
Speaker 6: Yes, I wanted to. I wanted to introduce myself by
Speaker 6: saying I'm not as well informed as Hugo Lowell and
Speaker 6: not as funny and done.
Speaker 1: But that is not true. You are as funny as
Speaker 1: Ian Done you done? I actually had had dinner with
Speaker 1: when I was in the UK, and he's very funny.
Speaker 1: Now I kind of want to talk about UK politics,
Speaker 1: but I don't think we should. Oh, last week GB
Speaker 1: News asked me to come on GB News. Is this
Speaker 1: basically Rupert Murdock trying to get Fox News in the UK?
Speaker 2: Is that fair?
Speaker 6: It's the Fox News clone.
Speaker 1: Right, and it's created almost entirely to try to sell
Speaker 1: Brexit to the British people.
Speaker 2: The only famous anchor.
Speaker 1: They have is a man called Nigel Farage, who was
Speaker 1: most famous for Brexit and before that being a low
Speaker 1: level mp EP.
Speaker 6: Ironically he ran I think it's seven parliamentary campaigns for
Speaker 6: that winning. I'd have to double check that with that
Speaker 6: figure famous never winning, but also first fair for winning
Speaker 6: for getting Brexit. You know. I was also thinking before
Speaker 6: coming out about how many of my little biases can
Speaker 6: come out as report it again. I'm so quite a few.
Speaker 6: I'm allowed to have them. There are no words to
Speaker 6: describe how I personally never mind in my personal job,
Speaker 6: whether that's from regard and so it doesn't matter. There
Speaker 6: are no words to describe how much I loathe Brexit.
Speaker 6: That's coming from me who's a privileged guy who moved
Speaker 6: to New York eleven years ago now lives in DC.
Speaker 6: You know, left the scene, not part of the argument,
Speaker 6: but I just.
Speaker 1: So I need to now tell this story. I go
Speaker 1: on gb News when they ask me. My thinking is,
Speaker 1: as long as I don't promote it, I am on
Speaker 1: their airwaves, and I am you know, I might.
Speaker 2: Be the only sane person they ever see. So I go.
Speaker 1: On the other day and usually they put me with
Speaker 1: like more of a newsy cruise, so you know, we'll
Speaker 1: have our disagreements, but the questions won't be quite so slanted.
Speaker 2: On this time, I.
Speaker 1: Was on with like a very opinionated guy who and
Speaker 1: the package before. You know, they aired a little package
Speaker 1: before and it was jaw droppingly terrible. It was a
Speaker 1: package about how immigrants are coming from North Africa and
Speaker 1: they're making it so that women can't wear bathing suits.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was like just about the most racist
Speaker 1: thing I had ever seen. By the time they got
Speaker 1: to me, I was so enraged and it was just
Speaker 1: like the most blatant, disgusting I mean it was like
Speaker 1: literally being in the opinion section of the New York
Speaker 1: Post and they started talking about how much the Biden
Speaker 1: is demented and.
Speaker 2: Old and dah dah dah.
Speaker 1: And I said, you know, our inflation is three you know,
Speaker 1: three percent a little more. I mean, you know they're
Speaker 1: different inflationary statistics, but you know your your inflation rate
Speaker 1: is many multiples more than ours. I said, like, if
Speaker 1: he's so demented, why can't you guys have lower inflation?
Speaker 1: You know, why is our monetary policy kicking your ass?
Speaker 2: And he was so furious with May.
Speaker 1: And then we went down and I said, you know,
Speaker 1: is it because you've sanctioned yourselves by leaving Europe? And
Speaker 1: he just got more mad at me and I just
Speaker 1: got worse and worse as an interview went on, as.
Speaker 6: It were, you're doing the Lord's work. I went on
Speaker 6: there last summer when Liz Trust was heading for Downing Street.
Speaker 6: I've told everybody this, obviously proud of myself. I knew
Speaker 6: Liz Trust growing up. She's my friend Chris's older sister,
Speaker 6: and knew her and liked her and didn't know her
Speaker 6: that particularly while she was old than me. But I
Speaker 6: saw her here and there, saw her once we grew up,
Speaker 6: moved to London, saw her a party so on, had
Speaker 6: entertaining political arguments because she was a conservative and I'm not.
Speaker 6: And then last summer, I kind of having not said
Speaker 6: anything in public about about this Trust, she started criticizing
Speaker 6: the area we come from in Leeds in the north
Speaker 6: and the school we went to criticizing it in contestable
Speaker 6: terms and also outright false terms about the seat in
Speaker 6: the school. So I had a crack in a Guardian
Speaker 6: op ed and in the fallout from that, and as
Speaker 6: she got closer to Downing Street, I went on GP
Speaker 6: News in a few other places to talk about it.
Speaker 6: And it was fine for me because they were just asking,
Speaker 6: they were trying to sort of needle me a bit
Speaker 6: about calling me a Guardian lefty and stuff, but I
Speaker 6: am it went okay. I try not to overstate and
Speaker 6: the thing I told them why people in round Hay
Speaker 6: and Leeds were upset with it too much. But I
Speaker 6: did get a note from Guardian in London saying it
Speaker 6: or really we don't do GPS. Do Fox News. I
Speaker 6: can do GP.
Speaker 4: I mean I do.
Speaker 1: Think like it is one of these questions of what
Speaker 1: is diminishing returns? Right?
Speaker 2: I mean, what is okay and what is not okay?
Speaker 6: Yeah, it sounds like you had a bunch stickier, but.
Speaker 1: It is like and I'd love to like pull out
Speaker 1: and just talk about Jessic, my friend Jessica who is
Speaker 1: the liberal on Fox News, and she really, Jessica Tarloff
Speaker 1: really does do God's work on there. You've seen many
Speaker 1: clips of her on The Five, which is a really
Speaker 1: highly rated show. Millions of people watching that show, or
Speaker 1: at least million of people watching that show, and she
Speaker 1: is actually demnking these claims, which opens the door of
Speaker 1: the question and again was pee budajiitch too, Like how
Speaker 1: much should these two media ecosystems interact and what is
Speaker 1: positive and what is negative.
Speaker 6: I think we should interact as much as possible. I
Speaker 6: do think that. I know there are dangers, I know
Speaker 6: there are pitfalls, but I really think liberals should talk
Speaker 6: to conservatives ad vice versa. It just stands to reason
Speaker 6: to me, you should be able to have a disagreement
Speaker 6: and stay civil. And even if you don't stay civil,
Speaker 6: it's good TV, right, I mean, look at that, it's
Speaker 6: just not talking the other side seems wrong to me.
Speaker 6: I blatant self promotional alarm going it is. I've had
Speaker 6: ten eleven years here, and as a side project, I
Speaker 6: started writing about rugby ten years ago. I'll keep this brief,
Speaker 6: but it has actually led me writing about rugby and
Speaker 6: writing about West Point Rugby at the Academy into a
Speaker 6: lot of places where Guardian reporters don't always go into
Speaker 6: small town America. Trump signed in the Rockery America in
Speaker 6: western Pennsylvania, say, or in California, in Orange County, where
Speaker 6: Reagan said good Republicans go to die when they're other places,
Speaker 6: small town Jersey, lots of places, lots of people who
Speaker 6: are not the people I would say every day. Is
Speaker 6: that a phrase I don't like, right?
Speaker 2: But it's really it is very important.
Speaker 1: And it's funny because it's like, I think about this
Speaker 1: luck because I have one kid who is involved, at
Speaker 1: least tandentially in the military, and he tells me what
Speaker 1: his friends, who a lot of his friends are the
Speaker 1: kids of the military, And he told me this amazing
Speaker 1: thing which I think I hadn't seen reported anywhere, which
Speaker 1: is that these military families, and I assume other people
Speaker 1: in the military too, are furious with Tommy Tubervel for
Speaker 1: what he's done, and that politicizing the military is one
Speaker 1: of the greatest crimes you can commit against the military,
Speaker 1: and so to Bervail has really become this huge villain
Speaker 1: in the world of the military. And when Ron DeSantis
Speaker 1: said he's supported Tuberville's kind of the way that Tuberville
Speaker 1: was shutting down the military, it made my kid, whose
Speaker 1: name I will not mention because he's already going to
Speaker 1: be screaming at me about this, made him not like
Speaker 1: DeSantis anymore, because here was a guy who was putting
Speaker 1: politics over military. So that was something I would never
Speaker 1: have known.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's adjacent to something I learned. I think it
Speaker 6: was Simour hersh who I read at some point said
Speaker 6: in the discussion. The thing you have to when you're
Speaker 6: reporting on the US military, you have to understand they
Speaker 6: don't do irony. They don't do it. It's like they
Speaker 6: mean it basically. And I learned that going into West
Speaker 6: Point seven eight years ago, quickly going out and talking
Speaker 6: to these guys from a team twenty years ago. They
Speaker 6: don't do irony. They mean it like someone from one
Speaker 6: group going to another gap saying the other way. It's
Speaker 6: it's incumbent on you to understand that. You don't have
Speaker 6: to accept everything. You don't have to repeat the line.
Speaker 6: But you're talking to people who believe a thing. So
Speaker 6: why do they believe that? What does that belief make
Speaker 6: them do? How can you discuss various things? You know,
Speaker 6: discussing with these West Point guys discussing the rights and
Speaker 6: wrongs of the Iraq war is on one level, guys
Speaker 6: who fought. They're talking to me, a guy literally literal
Speaker 6: bearded lefty from with the forum we've got. We're talking
Speaker 6: because of rugby, but then it goes wider than that.
Speaker 6: We have We've had some fascinating conversations over the time,
Speaker 6: and it's just all goes back to the original point
Speaker 6: here of do you talk to Fox? Do you talk
Speaker 6: to GP News? Do you talk to I'm not sure
Speaker 6: about news, Maximo.
Speaker 2: Am that's a bridge too far.
Speaker 6: But I'm trying to get the pr agent at the
Speaker 6: moment for the book to get me onto some into
Speaker 6: some right, into some conservative media. I think I should
Speaker 6: conservatives read books.
Speaker 2: Too, exactly. Thank you so much, Martin. I hope you'll
Speaker 2: come back.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 3: He can Molly jung Fast. Rudy Juliati, a guy who
Speaker 3: would you read nearly every article accounting of him, is
Speaker 3: drinking and smoking a cigar. I'm going to be shocked
Speaker 3: to tell you this.
Speaker 6: Yes, Jack Smith is investigating some of the things he
Speaker 6: does while he's very very.
Speaker 2: Drug I'm very unsurprised.
Speaker 1: Anyone who has seen Rudy's YouTube channel, which you and
Speaker 1: I both have, unfortunately, can attest to the fact that
Speaker 1: Rudy does a lot of things under the influence.
Speaker 2: And you heard it here ninety nine. But it is
Speaker 2: our moment of fook.
Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
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Speaker 1: in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you
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Speaker 1: and keep the conversation going. And again thanks for listening.