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 Maga is melting down.
Speaker 2: Over a woke Marxist American pope from Chicago. We have
Speaker 2: such a great show for you today. The Lincoln Project's
Speaker 2: own Stuart Steven stops by to talk about how it's
Speaker 2: going in Trump's America not very well. Then we'll talk
Speaker 2: to congressional candidate Dajia Fox about her run for Congress
Speaker 2: and why we need gen Z energy in Congress. Plus,
Speaker 2: we have a special bonus from our YouTube channel where
Speaker 2: we talk to investigative journalist Carol Kyle Dwalder about how
Speaker 2: AI is taking over all our lives. But first the news.
Speaker 3: So, Molly, I'm going to shock you here. The guy
Speaker 3: who wrote the book on deals, he only makes the
Speaker 3: best deals. He's hedging again because he's not very good
Speaker 3: at deals. That's the thing that happens all the time.
Speaker 3: It's really not shocking at all.
Speaker 2: You know, It's funny because it's like we've been covering
Speaker 2: this fucking guy for almost a decade of our lives,
Speaker 2: and during that time we've all gotten a lot older.
Speaker 2: My youth. I've seen my youth squandered by covering Donald Trumps.
Speaker 2: So here's the deal. We're in a trade war with China.
Speaker 2: The problem is we cannot onshore manufacturing by making things
Speaker 2: more expensive. We need to onshore manufacturing by building manufacturing
Speaker 2: plants in America. I mean, the whole thing is just
Speaker 2: completely dumb and poorly thought out, like so many things
Speaker 2: in Trump world. Now Trump is starting to see you'll
Speaker 2: remember Peter Navarro ninety deals in ninety days. So we
Speaker 2: have one deal so far, and it's with Britain, which
Speaker 2: is like our seventh or eighth biggest trading partner, which
Speaker 2: is very nice, but it is also a country where
Speaker 2: we actually buy more from them than they from us.
Speaker 2: So whatever. Anyway, the point of this whole thing is
Speaker 2: that he's starting to feel the walls close in, and
Speaker 2: as the walls close in, he realizes that, in fact,
Speaker 2: he really does need to deal with China. Ergo, he
Speaker 2: is suggesting cutting the tariffs already, which is, by the way,
Speaker 2: a sign of weakness. And I don't know if you
Speaker 2: know this about Xijingping, but I think he's going to
Speaker 2: end up winning the trade war. I think like signs
Speaker 2: of weakness before negotiating. Makes me think that one hundred
Speaker 2: and forty five percent levy, which is going to go
Speaker 2: to eighty percent, will ultimately go down to a lot less.
Speaker 2: So we're in a trade war and we're already losing
Speaker 2: and it hasn't even really started. This is a pretty
Speaker 2: good sign that Trump is rethinking the what's going on
Speaker 2: and good except the only thing is that, as we've
Speaker 2: seen from port traffic, there's going to be a shock
Speaker 2: here and it's going to be inflationary, and just coming
Speaker 2: back from it is probably going to put us in
Speaker 2: a recession. So stagflation for everyone.
Speaker 3: Great. So, Molly, we have a reoccurring character on this show,
Speaker 3: particularly our old show. We'd have to talk about this
Speaker 3: one all the time. We've named we've nicknamed her Judge
Speaker 3: Box of Wine now that.
Speaker 2: Is from season one.
Speaker 3: Yes, the wine, you know, can be spelled two different ways.
Speaker 3: We're gonna go out record and say it's w h
Speaker 3: I an E because we don't want to cast any
Speaker 3: aspersions on our Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes, as a sober alcoholic, it's a self diagnosed disease.
Speaker 2: And far be it from me to diagnose almost every
Speaker 2: person in this administration with a drinking problem. We would
Speaker 2: never do that. It's not every person, it's just a
Speaker 2: few prominent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there's just just a few who display strong,
Speaker 3: strong signs. Anyway, So miss Piro to say that the
Speaker 3: people who have worked with her in the past have
Speaker 3: bad things to say about her whole leadership style is
Speaker 3: a rastic, drastic understatement. But mister Trump's like, now she
Speaker 3: should be the interim DC attorney.
Speaker 2: Yeah, judge, box of wine going to US attorney in
Speaker 2: Washington is great for any number of reasons. One the
Speaker 2: Ed Martin pushback worked, Okay, all that had to happen
Speaker 2: was vulnerable North Carolina Republican Tom Tillis had to say,
Speaker 2: I'm not sure about this. And by the way, RFK
Speaker 2: is right now fucking up every kind of thing he
Speaker 2: possibly can with the health stuff. It's a complete and
Speaker 2: utter disaster. And so I want to point out how
Speaker 2: easy it would have been just to torpedo that nomination
Speaker 2: had Republicans just had a tiny bit of a spine. Instead,
Speaker 2: we have children dying of measles. Okay, So just want
Speaker 2: to point this out when we look at this story,
Speaker 2: which is these incredibly cowardly Republicans could have punted on
Speaker 2: the RFK junior nomination and children who have died of
Speaker 2: measles would be alive today. Okay, So I want you
Speaker 2: to put that in your PA. That's you know that
Speaker 2: there are a number of Republican senators, maybe all of them,
Speaker 2: with the exception of Cindy Hyde Smith who know and
Speaker 2: Tommy Tuberville, who know better than having RFK in that job.
Speaker 2: And they did it anyway because they didn't want a headache,
Speaker 2: and because they took this job because they're lazy and
Speaker 2: not good in anything. So the point of this story
Speaker 2: is we're going to have Judge box of Wine as
Speaker 2: the interim US Attorney in Washington. It's going to be
Speaker 2: destructive and fucked up, but also, as with so many
Speaker 2: things in the Trump administration, inadvertently hilarious. So we will
Speaker 2: try to grab the humor from this situation. Well, you know,
Speaker 2: we will laugh to keep from crying. We will delight
Speaker 2: in the stupidity, but we will also know that this
Speaker 2: is not how any of this is supposed to happen,
Speaker 2: and that this is degrading our great democracy. You know,
Speaker 2: he puts in these very loud and competent people and
Speaker 2: thank God for that.
Speaker 3: Speaking of incompetence, we are seeing one of the most
Speaker 3: major blowbacks this administration has seen so far, with Trump
Speaker 3: picking Casey means for Surgeon General. Casey means for those
Speaker 3: who don't know, is an RFK Junior. Lackey, particularly known
Speaker 3: for as Laura Lumer, leaked this week publishing a newsletter
Speaker 3: on how she manifested her husband.
Speaker 2: Yes, who among us has not manifested their spouse? I
Speaker 2: manifest all the time For Matt Greenfield, We've gone down
Speaker 2: the fucking rabbit hole here of serious fucking craziness. You
Speaker 2: open the door to RFK Junior, you put him in
Speaker 2: charge of your healthcare, and you're going to have things
Speaker 2: like this. So she's a best selling author. Everybody likes that.
Speaker 2: She's a wellness influencer. Who doesn't like that she has
Speaker 2: written a book called This Surprising Connection between Metabolism and
Speaker 2: Lemonless Health. Oh, we're definitely all going to die. So
Speaker 2: work with our wonderful Secretary of Health and Human Services,
Speaker 2: Robert F. Kennedy Junior, to ensure successful implification of ore.
Speaker 2: We are so incredibly fucked. The good news is that
Speaker 2: they don't like pharmaceuticals. They don't like food industry, they
Speaker 2: don't like vaccines. They think the FDA is corrupt. We
Speaker 2: are so incredibly fucked up.
Speaker 3: I think there is good news though, that this is
Speaker 3: really seeming like this is putting up the hackles of
Speaker 3: a lot of people. Even rfk's old running mate is
Speaker 3: really disappointed about this pick.
Speaker 2: Yes, but also I want to point out my favorite
Speaker 2: part of this whole story is involved in this is
Speaker 2: ronan On Johnson. Of course he's involved because he's a
Speaker 2: fucking incredible lunatic. We should not be suppressed. Stuart Steve
Speaker 2: There's a legendary campaign manager and the author of the
Speaker 2: conspiracy to end America five ways my old party is
Speaker 2: to driving our democracy to autocracy. Welcome to fast Politics,
Speaker 2: Stewart Stevens.
Speaker 4: Thanks for asking me to the party.
Speaker 2: So another day in Trump's America.
Speaker 4: This is doing great.
Speaker 2: It's going great. It's like every time we make this
Speaker 2: guy president, it's a fucking disaster.
Speaker 4: You know he's going to get to It's just it's
Speaker 4: a bit of personally. If I stay away from Newark, it's.
Speaker 2: Not we laugh to keep from crying. But talk to me,
Speaker 2: they'll be around.
Speaker 4: Anybody that has measles. Look, you know, I think it's
Speaker 4: the sort of most disheartening thing about all this Trump
Speaker 4: stuff is it's not just the Republican Party that collapsed
Speaker 4: in Bennett's snee back in sixteen. The way we've seen
Speaker 4: these other institutions, like so much of the legal because
Speaker 4: some of the legal community do it, some of the
Speaker 4: great universities like one up the street from U Columbia.
Speaker 4: And I think it's just a little parable or lesson
Speaker 4: in how fragile this thing we call democracy is and
Speaker 4: how much it's based upon goodwill. Now there's the flip
Speaker 4: side of that is you do have people fighting back.
Speaker 4: I think that the twenty four election was greatly misunderstood.
Speaker 4: You know, it was an election that any non incumbent
Speaker 4: had a great chance to win. The approval rating of
Speaker 4: Biden was at forty No candidates ever gotten two points
Speaker 4: higher than incumbent party's president. The right Track was at
Speaker 4: twenty seven, which is just a saggering number. No incumbent
Speaker 4: parties ever won when it was below forty five, which
Speaker 4: is why we see Nikki Haley. She was doing a
Speaker 4: lot better than Trump. And I think that that's been
Speaker 4: confused with the idea that there was some reordering of
Speaker 4: our politics. No, there wasn't that there was some great
Speaker 4: breakthrough the Republican Party and that it was an endorsement
Speaker 4: of Trump is And I think that you know what
Speaker 4: we're seeing is they knew and campaign that's Project twenty
Speaker 4: twenty five was poised, and then now they're making people
Speaker 4: drink it and they gotten any better. So I look
Speaker 4: at the Democratic Party like this incredibly valuable company that's
Speaker 4: just under bad management. It's like they were Apple and
Speaker 4: they fired Steve Jobs and Rovin Scully, but the value
Speaker 4: is still there, and you know, hopefully they'll be able
Speaker 4: to get it together.
Speaker 2: So let's let's go down that rabbit hole for a minute. First,
Speaker 2: let's talk about kind of what Trump is trying to enact.
Speaker 2: I feel like we're not getting a lot of intel
Speaker 2: on this. People aren't talking about it because nobody gives
Speaker 2: a shit about Congress because they made themselves so incredibly
Speaker 2: irrelevant by rubbers camping everything that Trump wants to do.
Speaker 2: But they are trying to pass a budget and it
Speaker 2: is a fucking disaster, and they believe they're going to
Speaker 2: pass it in fifteen days or something, and FYI, they
Speaker 2: have not agreed on anything. The only way to pay
Speaker 2: for these tax cuts is to basically close every rural
Speaker 2: hospital and nursing home and politically just commit supuku discuss.
Speaker 4: It's a great way to put it. Yeah, you can't
Speaker 4: get there unless you were committed to deep cuts in
Speaker 4: the military. They're not. That's the dirty little secret of
Speaker 4: the budget. This is why we have a deficit. People
Speaker 4: like the stuff that they get from the government. And
Speaker 4: you know, I think the greatest irony here and this
Speaker 4: is then true for a long time, but it sort
Speaker 4: of gets highlighted in these moments. The states that most
Speaker 4: depend upon the federal government are these poor red states
Speaker 4: like my home state of Mississippi. About forty percent of
Speaker 4: Mississippi state budget forty percent comes from the federal government,
Speaker 4: which I really don't understand why we don't call it socialism,
Speaker 4: and you make these cuts and these are the people
Speaker 4: that are going to be hurt. I mean, I was
Speaker 4: looking at a map that talking about closing some social
Speaker 4: security offices in Misissippi. Well they aren't closing them. They're
Speaker 4: not talking about it now. They are because of the
Speaker 4: date when one closed first of May. I was doing
Speaker 4: like a little Google Maps thing you know, you're going
Speaker 4: to have to drive a lot of people one hundred
Speaker 4: plus miles to get their such security office will at
Speaker 4: the same time, they're cutting the backstaff that would answer
Speaker 4: the phone and do all these helplines. And that's not
Speaker 4: going to affect anybody who's not dependent upon Social Security.
Speaker 4: And that's just it. Scott Galloway made this point, I thought,
Speaker 4: really precisely as he is a way of doing this
Speaker 4: is the fundamental definition of a cryptocracy. You know, you
Speaker 4: have a group of people around Trump who are making
Speaker 4: a lot of money and who are using the government
Speaker 4: to make themselves richer while others are going to be poorer.
Speaker 4: And that's it. I mean, there really is a blueprint.
Speaker 4: If we sat down, as sort of a social science experiment,
Speaker 4: said how do you make them America poorer? Well, we've
Speaker 4: lost thrillions of dollars of wealth since Trump took office.
Speaker 4: These terror servants saying, how do you make America less healthy?
Speaker 4: Will you put some lunatic like RFK in charge of
Speaker 4: national health? How would you make America less competitive in
Speaker 4: the world and have a darker than brighter future. You
Speaker 4: would cut research, You would make our educational institutions, which
Speaker 4: really are the great driver or certainly one of them
Speaker 4: of wealth in America. Why is there so much money
Speaker 4: in Boston? Why why is Massachusetts so rich? And you
Speaker 4: know what, it was a great driver in California. And
Speaker 4: you're going to cut these research budgets. It's really what
Speaker 4: would you do if you're trying to make the world
Speaker 4: more unstable and more dangerous? You would cut the greatest,
Speaker 4: most successful alliance in history, NATO. And you know, Republicans
Speaker 4: have just gone along with it. I don't think it's
Speaker 4: complicated or hard to understand, because I think it's just
Speaker 4: sheer cowardice and we should just accept that cowardice is
Speaker 4: probably a norm that all of us who are human
Speaker 4: reset too, and we should be surprised by courage.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Another person who said it was a cryptocracy was
Speaker 2: Ken Griffin. He is the biggest Republican donor, not a
Speaker 2: Trump donor, but the biggest Republican donor there is. Said
Speaker 2: it's a cryptocracy. So clearly things are not going great,
Speaker 2: right because for things, you know the fact that you
Speaker 2: have people like this saying what the fuck are you
Speaker 2: doing is probably a bad sign. I mean, and honestly, again,
Speaker 2: I think you and I can agree, thank god, right,
Speaker 2: because if it were going great, we'd be they'd be
Speaker 2: just disappearing grad students left and right, and we'd be
Speaker 2: really on our way to orbone it's hungary, whereas right
Speaker 2: now we're sort of in a weird period where my
Speaker 2: man is doing anti democratic things but also destroying the economy.
Speaker 2: So let's talk through. I thought the incredible hail Mary
Speaker 2: passed yesterday, Donald Trump said he would like to tax
Speaker 2: people who make over five million dollars. This is the
Speaker 2: only reason he got elected, as far as I can tell,
Speaker 2: was to protect these people's money.
Speaker 4: Yeah. You know, I've never seen a poll in all
Speaker 4: my life, and we used to put this on polls
Speaker 4: where taxing people who make over even a million dollars
Speaker 4: didn't test to the good and the higher you put
Speaker 4: that number, I mean, if you ask people, should billionaires
Speaker 4: pay more in taxes, it's like a ninety five to five,
Speaker 4: you know, I mean everybody, of course they take that,
Speaker 4: of course. And I think this is Trump, in this
Speaker 4: jumbled mess of a mind, in this jumble collection of
Speaker 4: weirdos and freaks that he has around him. You know,
Speaker 4: it's always the last person in the room. Somebody sticks
Speaker 4: a poll in front of him and says, look, you're
Speaker 4: the first president well except the previous Trump administration that
Speaker 4: is less popular one hundred days after you took office
Speaker 4: than you were an election day, which is really interesting
Speaker 4: to think about. You know, it's a very American thing
Speaker 4: to say after I didn't vote for this person, but
Speaker 4: I'll give them a chance. So you know, at this point,
Speaker 4: Biden was near sixty, Obama was in the mid sixties.
Speaker 4: Even Bush in after the two and four election was
Speaker 4: higher than the he was an election day. Trump is lower.
Speaker 4: So what does that mean? That means people who voted
Speaker 4: for Trump are having a lot of doubts about it.
Speaker 4: And that's that's difficult to do this quickly. It's always
Speaker 4: difficult to get any of us to admit that we
Speaker 4: made a mistake. So you've got this problem. You have
Speaker 4: these congressional candidates out there who are beginning to panic.
Speaker 4: I mean, they know what happened in twenty ten to Democrats,
Speaker 4: they know what happened in nineteen ninety four, and they're
Speaker 4: looking at this and seeing this could be a blood bat.
Speaker 4: You know, we can move thirty to forty seats. What
Speaker 4: is it that we're supposed to campaign own, how is
Speaker 4: anyone's life better that's been accomplished here? So he says, oh, look,
Speaker 4: you know, I'm going to go out and say this,
Speaker 4: maybe it'll help. At the heart of it is that
Speaker 4: there's no governing philosophy to the Republican Party anymore. Knowing
Speaker 4: can and good faith articulate this is a theory of
Speaker 4: government and say what you will. He used to be
Speaker 4: able to do that. You could say, well that those
Speaker 4: are the worst ideas I've ever heard in my life. Right,
Speaker 4: A lot of people said that, you know, but you
Speaker 4: can have a debate between some conservative and Elizabeth Warren
Speaker 4: and it could be an interesting debate and she could
Speaker 4: defend one another. But there's not now there's not a
Speaker 4: center right party in America. And I think that that
Speaker 4: lack of any sort of coherent theory of government, a
Speaker 4: purpose of government, is at the root of all this,
Speaker 4: because if you don't believe in anything, if you don't
Speaker 4: have any idea that government should work this way, it's
Speaker 4: just a series of these chaotic missteps, and it's just
Speaker 4: you end up with this mess that we have now,
Speaker 4: a government that is failing it its basic purposes.
Speaker 2: So you don't think Trump is going to increase taxes
Speaker 2: for people who make over five million dollars a year.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's such a great thing for him to say,
Speaker 2: because it's like, yeah, but of course he's not going
Speaker 2: to do it. No. Look, so then we get to
Speaker 2: the question of is it malpractice that Democrats aren't pulling
Speaker 2: better when they're running against someone who is literally doing
Speaker 2: all the most unpopular things. So I'm going to ask you.
Speaker 2: I know you're a Republican. Jesse and I both pretty lefty.
Speaker 2: I'm right, I'm less lefty than Jesse is because I
Speaker 2: come from a lot of privilege, but I'm still lefty.
Speaker 2: I want you to sort of explain to us why
Speaker 2: you think democrats can't like it's clear there's a populism.
Speaker 2: It is not so different than what Democrats want to do,
Speaker 2: and yet somehow it's not working.
Speaker 4: So discuss Yeah, you know, I've been thinking about this
Speaker 4: a lot, and I think it's a really interesting question.
Speaker 4: Argument can be made, a case can be made that
Speaker 4: the Democrats are still trapped in this mindset that we
Speaker 4: have news cycles. When we had news cycles, you could
Speaker 4: at least attempt to push a message that was unified.
Speaker 4: I mean, all these campaigns we said around, we'd let's
Speaker 4: have an education week now, right. I never really could
Speaker 4: do it, but we could at least pretend that we
Speaker 4: could do it. I mean, I can't remember. In two thousand,
Speaker 4: when I was working on the Bush campaign, then the
Speaker 4: New York Times went online at midnight East Coast time.
Speaker 4: You could sit there, so that was eleven o'clock in Austin.
Speaker 4: You could sit there and you could look at your watch,
Speaker 4: and by eleven fifteen you would be getting calls from
Speaker 4: reporters that were basically using the New York Times as
Speaker 4: assignment editors for what they were going to work on.
Speaker 4: So we don't have that anymore. That's been shattered. They're
Speaker 4: no gatekeepers all of that. So what does that mean
Speaker 4: to me? I think it means you shouldn't If you're
Speaker 4: asking yourself, is that the right thing to do to
Speaker 4: go out was like a Bernie an AOC campaign Or
Speaker 4: should you be talking about just gas prices? That's the
Speaker 4: wrong question, because you should be doing everything, because different
Speaker 4: things are going to be heard by different people, because
Speaker 4: our entire media is so fragmented. Smart you should just
Speaker 4: flood the zone with all of these messages and I
Speaker 4: think the one thing, if there's one lesson out of
Speaker 4: the last year in politics, it's the power of passion.
Speaker 4: And you know, there still is this really unfortunate assumption
Speaker 4: inside a lot of consulting community. I think it's worse
Speaker 4: on the Democratic side because consulting community on the Republican
Speaker 4: side has kind of been reduced to just following Trump.
Speaker 4: You can focus group your way out of this, you
Speaker 4: can test it your way out of this. And the
Speaker 4: super Pac Future Forward that was started to support Biden
Speaker 4: and then went to Harris is a perfect example. I mean,
Speaker 4: I think they're really smart. I think they made some
Speaker 4: good ads, but they had almost a billion dollars to
Speaker 4: spend and they were testing everything. They had this system,
Speaker 4: We're going to test every ad three times. So it's
Speaker 4: like it was just so clear that these transgender attacks
Speaker 4: were hurting Democrats across the board because it was a
Speaker 4: perfect example to sort of use as a hyperbole of
Speaker 4: Wochism or whatever, and it was the easiest thing in
Speaker 4: the world to push back on. This was a policy
Speaker 4: that was adopted under Trump by his handpicked head of
Speaker 4: prison and as far as anybody can figure out, only
Speaker 4: happened once, right, So you know, we made an ass
Speaker 4: and take very long the Lincoln Project to put back
Speaker 4: on it. Gave it to the folks at Future four
Speaker 4: because super pacn coordinated. They said that we love this.
Speaker 4: Like a week later it wasn't running. I was like, hey, guys,
Speaker 4: what's going on? They got well, he didn't test well,
Speaker 4: and you know, I just want to say to him,
Speaker 4: do you think Willie Horton tested well? Like people were like,
Speaker 4: you know, I really liked that bit about the guy
Speaker 4: that shot somebody in the face. No, people are never
Speaker 4: going to say that, but it does work. And you
Speaker 4: can use a kind of social science experiment. Every Democratic
Speaker 4: Senate candidate who was attacked with this who responded on
Speaker 4: camera pushing back on it one and everyone who was
Speaker 4: attacking didn't lost. So that's a lesson in this.
Speaker 2: That's how you get to a Reuben Diego Trump voter. Right.
Speaker 2: What I think is so sort of lightning in a
Speaker 2: bottle about what Trump did was that he went everywhere
Speaker 2: he promised every time he did that politics is downstream
Speaker 2: of culture. He became part of the culture. He influenced
Speaker 2: the politics, and it just worked. It worked so well
Speaker 2: that people came out, they filled out for him, They
Speaker 2: voted for him, and then they left the bottom of
Speaker 2: the ticket blank in a lot of states. So that
Speaker 2: is really the thesis, right A Brightbarn.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Look, I think this has been true and really
Speaker 4: obvious since the Clinton Bush election. You know, I can
Speaker 4: remember as a Republican when Clinton went on our senior
Speaker 4: hall played the saxophone and we said, well, this race
Speaker 4: is over. No one wants to president in the United States.
Speaker 4: Who's going to put on sunglasses and play a saxophone
Speaker 4: on a late night showed.
Speaker 2: Oh you guys thought you'd win on that.
Speaker 4: And well you were smarter. By the end of the campaign,
Speaker 4: Bush would have played a banjo in his underwear someplace,
Speaker 4: you know, because they realized it was working. So I
Speaker 4: think this has been apparent to people. And you know,
Speaker 4: in two thousand at the Lincoln Project, when we started
Speaker 4: a podcast, we had a lot of friends and support
Speaker 4: us going like, Gus, what are you doing starting a podcast?
Speaker 4: We started a streaming show because we saw this that
Speaker 4: you had to communicate in these different ways, and now
Speaker 4: you have twenty four people go it was the podcast
Speaker 4: literally wasn't the caest election, but you know, it just
Speaker 4: shows the difference that has occurred here. But look, the
Speaker 4: thing that frustrates me most about the Democratic Party is
Speaker 4: a lack of swagger, a lack of affirmative assertion. We're
Speaker 4: right there wrong And I hate this stuff. I read
Speaker 4: like we're going to go out and have these listening
Speaker 4: tours and try to figure out what we did wrong.
Speaker 4: I don't know. I mean, if you do that stuff,
Speaker 4: I wouldn't talk about it. And they're talking about it
Speaker 4: because they think that they have to do a certain pendance. Bosses,
Speaker 4: our donors are mad. But look, we're going to go
Speaker 4: through this. You have to. I mean, nobody ever wins
Speaker 4: the super Bowl if you walk out and think maybe
Speaker 4: we have a chance. I mean you have to believe
Speaker 4: in a start that you're going to win and that
Speaker 4: you're right. And they need to use a language here
Speaker 4: that is accusatory and broad sweeping. Trump is a crook.
Speaker 4: It is the most corrupt administration by far in history.
Speaker 4: Trump is portraying the greatest generation of what he's doing
Speaker 4: in Ukraine and the way he's trying to demand basically
Speaker 4: a protection racket with Ukraine. I mean, it's disgusting. You
Speaker 4: need to say these things. Don't be afraid of going
Speaker 4: too far, and I think that element is inside the
Speaker 4: Democratic Party, and I think it really is not so
Speaker 4: much ideological. I mean, Fetterman's not bad at it, and
Speaker 4: he's sort of a different place than Bernie and AOC
Speaker 4: on all of these issues. So it's not a time
Speaker 4: for timidity. It's a time for boldness, and it's a
Speaker 4: time to if you really believe that democracy is a threat,
Speaker 4: which you should to act like it to respond. It's
Speaker 4: still this confusion that the Democratic Party has, which is
Speaker 4: understandable and there's something admirable about this in a way
Speaker 4: that their role is to be a governing party. No,
Speaker 4: I mean Johnathan last wrote about this brilliantly thought their
Speaker 4: role should be to be a dissident movement, and that's
Speaker 4: what they should be looking at. How did dissident movements operate?
Speaker 4: And they should be trying to stop all of this.
Speaker 4: They shouldn't be worried that they're going to be seen
Speaker 4: as uncompromising or they're not getting anything doing. You know,
Speaker 4: they should do what used to be Buckley said of conservatism,
Speaker 4: that stand in the wake of history and say no,
Speaker 4: that's what they should be doing, and doing it loudly.
Speaker 2: Stuart Stevens. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,
Speaker 2: thank you.
Speaker 3: Molly.
Speaker 2: Dija Fox is a congressional candidate in Arizona seventh District.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Fast Politics. Oh my god, I'm so excited, Dija.
Speaker 5: Hello, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: We just did the math and we have known each
Speaker 2: other very rufually. I mean, we don't know each other well,
Speaker 2: but for eight years. I'm going to embarrass you and
Speaker 2: tell the story of when I met you. Can I
Speaker 2: do that for a minute, go for it. So we
Speaker 2: were at an event and Women's magazine honoring you. You
Speaker 2: have incredible story of your upbringing and how you grew up,
Speaker 2: and again you can tell I'm sure I'm making mistakes
Speaker 2: here because it was like almost a decade ago, but
Speaker 2: you grew up very modest circumstances, sometimes doing your homework
Speaker 2: in your car where you were living.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, we didn't have Wi Fi at my home,
Speaker 5: so I would often have to take you know, go
Speaker 5: to the library and sometimes even sit outside to use that.
Speaker 2: But you did end up getting a scholarship to.
Speaker 5: Barnard, actually to Columbia. But yes, Tywambia moving to New
Speaker 5: York on a full ride. At Columbia in twenty eighteen
Speaker 5: and became the first of my family to go to college.
Speaker 5: It could not have been more of a one to
Speaker 5: eighty from where I was at. Right. I wrote my
Speaker 5: college essays on my phone while working at the gas
Speaker 5: station after school, and I've since graduated and moved back
Speaker 5: to Arizona, where I'm now running for office.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about what it looks like in Arizona right now.
Speaker 2: Arizona is such an interesting state. The really one of
Speaker 2: the very few states where you had Trump Reuben Diego voters.
Speaker 2: What does it take to win in Arizona and what
Speaker 2: does Arizona look like? And also, you're running in a primary,
Speaker 2: I want you to talk us through what your race
Speaker 2: looks like.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, Arizona is an interesting place, right and
Speaker 5: it's one of the things I love most about it
Speaker 5: is that people here think really critically. But also, you know,
Speaker 5: we have a real group of independence out here. And
Speaker 5: so you're right to say that this last election showed
Speaker 5: us some interesting numbers, right that Trump ended up winning
Speaker 5: out here in Arizona. But we also saw Reuben Diego,
Speaker 5: a Democrat, pull through in the Senate. And you know
Speaker 5: what I think is maybe most interesting of all is
Speaker 5: that we saw our abortion initiative, our citizens ballot initiative
Speaker 5: pass and with a historic number of signatures to qualify,
Speaker 5: they gathered something like eight hundred thousand, and so I
Speaker 5: think it's safe to say that here in Arizona, people
Speaker 5: are with us on the issues. And when we look
Speaker 5: at a race like mine, I'm running for congress in
Speaker 5: Congressional Districts seven here in Arizona that includes parts of
Speaker 5: South and West Tucson, my hometown, two neighborhoods up in Phoenix,
Speaker 5: and hundreds of miles of the US Mexico border. And
Speaker 5: my district is one of the safer and bluer congressional
Speaker 5: districts in Arizona. And so what's really on the line
Speaker 5: in this race and in this primary is an opportunity
Speaker 5: to one make history by electing one of the youngest members,
Speaker 5: the youngest member, and the first woman of my generation.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: And then you know, the other piece that I'll point
Speaker 5: out here is that in this primary I'm running against
Speaker 5: two other folks, and I think what makes me stand
Speaker 5: out is I'm the break from the status quo. I'm
Speaker 5: not a career politician. I got my start as an
Speaker 5: activist a decade ago, and so I know power from
Speaker 5: the other side of the diis.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: And I think in this moment where Trump has really
Speaker 5: thrown us into a sense of lawlessness, right where it
Speaker 5: feels like rules suddenly don't matter, we need someone with
Speaker 5: an advocacy lens right, with an activist's experience, to be
Speaker 5: an obstructionist to his agenda and to make people at
Speaker 5: home feel like somebody is fighting for them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would love you to talk about that, because
Speaker 2: as a member of Congress, you have power, but you
Speaker 2: also don't have that much power. So how do you
Speaker 2: feel like you could use this congressional seat to really
Speaker 2: push against this?
Speaker 5: I mean, I think first things first, Right, just by
Speaker 5: the nature of me being in this seat, the dynamics
Speaker 5: of power in Washington would look different. As it stands,
Speaker 5: something like one in five Americans are of my generation
Speaker 5: Gen Z, and yet we have a single representative in Congress,
Speaker 5: Like that is a true representation problem, right, And by
Speaker 5: the nature of having someone not just a young person
Speaker 5: for whom the climate crisis is not theoretical, right, for
Speaker 5: whom I am a part of the first generation of
Speaker 5: women to have less rights than our mothers, right, Like,
Speaker 5: I bring a different perspective to this work by the
Speaker 5: nature of my age. The other thing I'll say, as
Speaker 5: it relates to age and how I would do this
Speaker 5: job differently, is that Donald Trump has been running for
Speaker 5: president since I was fifteen years old. The entirety of
Speaker 5: my sort of political consciousness has been affected by this
Speaker 5: man and the circus he is running up in DC.
Speaker 5: And so when we ask how would I do things differently,
Speaker 5: I think you're right to say that under a Trump trifecta,
Speaker 5: it feels like even people holding some of the offices
Speaker 5: with the most power seem to have their hands tied
Speaker 5: on what they can do. My commitment is that I
Speaker 5: would learn the ins and outs of Capitol Hill, right,
Speaker 5: things like parliamentary maneuvers, to be a true obstructionist to
Speaker 5: his agenda, especially when it comes to tax cuts for
Speaker 5: the billionaires and most wealthy among us.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: And then the next thing I'll say, and I think
Speaker 5: this can't be understated, is that we need more effective messengers.
Speaker 2: Right. I was actually about to bring that up.
Speaker 5: Yeah, go on, I mean I have interviewed these electeds, right,
Speaker 5: I've gone up to DC with my mini mic and
Speaker 5: questions in hand, even you know, most recently at the
Speaker 5: joint address the State of the Union, if you will,
Speaker 5: and I left disappointed these folks are not keeping up
Speaker 5: in our own party with the changing media landscape. Right,
Speaker 5: something like thirty nine of adults under thirty get their
Speaker 5: news on TikTok, And so if we're going to stay
Speaker 5: competitive with the right, we need to build a more
Speaker 5: effective media ecosystem and have the kind of representation and electeds,
Speaker 5: especially in these safe blue seats, who can meet the moment,
Speaker 5: who can translate a message into digital spaces, and our
Speaker 5: campaign is doing that already. We have over four million
Speaker 5: organic views in the last month on Instagram and TikTok
Speaker 5: and a special election primary in Arizona, right, Like, imagine
Speaker 5: what we could do with the power of that seat.
Speaker 5: And at a time where Democrats have an approval rating
Speaker 5: in the twenties, we should be looking to say, who
Speaker 5: are our new voices, what does new leadership look like,
Speaker 5: and who can we send into these these safer and
Speaker 5: bluer seats to make people at home feel fought for
Speaker 5: so we don't lose them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I also think that some of the problem that
Speaker 2: we're seeing is just that there's just not enough explaining
Speaker 2: that goes on, and you can't necessarily explain the stuff
Speaker 2: if you are using traditional platforms. So I'm thinking about
Speaker 2: AOC as ranking member of Oversight. One of the really
Speaker 2: big enforced errors I think that Democrats did was they
Speaker 2: refuse to make AOC ranking on Oversight, and the thinking
Speaker 2: was it wasn't her turn because Jerry Connolly had been
Speaker 2: on oversight for a long time and a lot of
Speaker 2: people felt they owed him discussed.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean that resonates with me. That kind of
Speaker 5: thinking out in DC is exactly what I'm going up
Speaker 5: against right now in my primary. Right this idea that
Speaker 5: we need to wait our turn, that the Republican Party
Speaker 5: is going to go back to normal if we just
Speaker 5: give it some time, which young people like me know
Speaker 5: is not true. Right, that politics has forever changed in
Speaker 5: this country, and we needeople who are willing to meet
Speaker 5: that moment, who are willing to be the messengers who
Speaker 5: are going to do that explaining to help people understand
Speaker 5: what is happening in DC and not just the awful
Speaker 5: things that are being done on the right in real
Speaker 5: time and at a frequency that is impossible to keep
Speaker 5: up with but on our side, right, how are we
Speaker 5: fighting for them? And I think one of the I
Speaker 5: liked this phrase used unforced errors, right, sort of. One
Speaker 5: of the things I think Democrats are leaving on the
Speaker 5: table is they're failing to even explain what they're doing well. Right,
Speaker 5: But you know, you're right to say that our party
Speaker 5: has a deficit of leadership in this moment, and we
Speaker 5: see it in moments where folks like AOC are denied
Speaker 5: leadership positions despite coming in at the top when asked.
Speaker 5: You know, there was a CNN poll I believe that
Speaker 5: asked who in the Democratic Party which elected best represents
Speaker 5: our core values? And AOC rose to the top right.
Speaker 5: And so instead of listening to the people right and
Speaker 5: mirroring that in our leadership structures, DC has constantly and
Speaker 5: consistently tried the top down approach that they know better
Speaker 5: than people, right, And we're seeing that been in elections
Speaker 5: like mine, where there's pushback on having a true primary.
Speaker 5: Right would rather have selections than elections because it feels safer,
Speaker 5: more predictable people who are really entrenched in this establishment.
Speaker 5: But for folks like me, right, I am at the
Speaker 5: doors listening to constituents and online right reading the TikTok comments,
Speaker 5: taking a pulse for where our party and where young people,
Speaker 5: in particular the future of our party are at. And
Speaker 5: we know that we need newer and younger voices if
Speaker 5: we're going to have a party for my generation to inherit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm wondering if you could explain to us
Speaker 2: one of the things that I think that traditional Democrats
Speaker 2: don't feel comfortable with is doing the kind of media
Speaker 2: that they probably need to explain to us what that
Speaker 2: looks like and how they should do it.
Speaker 5: The media landscape has changed so much, even in the
Speaker 5: last ten years. I had my first viral video in
Speaker 5: twenty seventeen going toe to toe with my former senator,
Speaker 5: a Republican, Jeff Flake, over his attempts to defund planned parenthood. Right,
Speaker 5: I shouldn't fit his town hall, which Republicans do not
Speaker 5: seem to be hosting anymore.
Speaker 2: When they used to do town hall right in the.
Speaker 5: Era in which Republicans had town halls and like would
Speaker 5: go and be face to face with their constituents, a
Speaker 5: bygone era of democracy. I fear, and I asked him
Speaker 5: why he is a middle aged white man was making
Speaker 5: decisions about me and my body, right, And he says
Speaker 5: this thing about how he supports policies that support the
Speaker 5: American Dream, and I ask him why he would deny
Speaker 5: me the American Dream. And millions of people overnight on
Speaker 5: Twitter and Facebook saw that video, and I share that
Speaker 5: story to say that in the last what is that
Speaker 5: eight years since we've known each other, the landscape on
Speaker 5: which we are meeting people, in which they are developing
Speaker 5: their political understanding has shifted. And for someone like me, right,
Speaker 5: who has been ear to the ground, following each platform
Speaker 5: as it develops and really working in digital strategy, right
Speaker 5: for candidates even like Kamala Harris, I've been able to
Speaker 5: keep up with that shift. But for a lot of
Speaker 5: these legacy folks, establishment Dems on our side, they're failing
Speaker 5: to see the movement of attention and political understanding. There's
Speaker 5: a bit of even an elitism, if you will, around
Speaker 5: who builds political understanding right that there's no way that
Speaker 5: someone like me, with hundreds of thousands of followers on
Speaker 5: TikTok and Instagram, there's no way that I could be
Speaker 5: the one building people's political understandings over something like you know,
Speaker 5: a more traditional CNN or MSNBC, which is behind a
Speaker 5: paywall for most people of my generation and inaccessible, and
Speaker 5: so you know, I think it will take candidates like
Speaker 5: me who are taking a new media approach right, who
Speaker 5: are hopping on the podcasts and doing the substack live
Speaker 5: streams and consistently pumping out viral content with organic views
Speaker 5: all across the country and in district to change their minds.
Speaker 5: We still have to prove concept to some of these
Speaker 5: more traditional folks. But I think what is scarier is
Speaker 5: that we may not have time that if we don't
Speaker 5: start being competitive in these digital spaces. We already saw
Speaker 5: an indicator of this in twenty twenty four, but the
Speaker 5: other side already has a head start. And if we
Speaker 5: don't start closing the gap now by electing people who
Speaker 5: are strong messagers in new media and digital spaces, if
Speaker 5: we don't start investing in the creators who have strong
Speaker 5: podcasts and interview series and live streams right by giving
Speaker 5: them access to our electeds and letting them ask real questions,
Speaker 5: and if we don't start investing in that media ecosystem overall,
Speaker 5: like we are going to be in a really bad
Speaker 5: spot in twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 2: You know, it's funny because I actually don't think it
Speaker 2: necessarily matters what the questions you ask people are. Has
Speaker 2: someone who has been doing interviewing for a long time.
Speaker 2: I actually think people just say what they want to
Speaker 2: say and you want to sort of direct them. But
Speaker 2: there are certain people who will tell you more on
Speaker 2: a staff than other people. And I think one of
Speaker 2: the things that I have been really struggling with is
Speaker 2: this sort of mckinseying of democratic speak, so where you
Speaker 2: interview someone but they really refuse to tell you anything
Speaker 2: that is particularly relevant. And look, sometimes that's been used
Speaker 2: to great effect, but at this point, I think it's
Speaker 2: losing more elections than it's winning for Democrats.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I couldn't agree with you.
Speaker 4: More.
Speaker 5: People's bs radar is up right and what they expect
Speaker 5: not only from politicians but from celebrities right influencers. Even
Speaker 5: because of the nature of social media, where anyone can
Speaker 5: leave a comment for the entire world to see, or
Speaker 5: send a DM in real time to anyone they want
Speaker 5: anywhere in the world. Right, there is a new expectation
Speaker 5: of transparency and accountability in our culture because of the
Speaker 5: structures of these social media platforms and the ways they
Speaker 5: have affected our social relationships. And one thing I'm really
Speaker 5: proud of on our campaign is the level of transparency
Speaker 5: we're bringing to this process. I once again will stress
Speaker 5: that this is a special election primary in the middle
Speaker 5: of summer in Arizona, with like one hundred days in it.
Speaker 5: There is absolutely no expectation from like an establishment point
Speaker 5: of view of bringing new people into this process. This
Speaker 5: is the kind of election where they're like, focus on
Speaker 5: the high efficacy voters and leave everybody else behind. And
Speaker 5: that is absolutely not what we are doing over here.
Speaker 5: We are doing what you said earlier, which is explaining
Speaker 5: the process.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: We took people along as we gathered signatures. We showed
Speaker 5: them the process of literally submitting those signatures to the
Speaker 5: Secretary of State's office, and then showed them the receipts
Speaker 5: of how many we had, right, like the actual receipt
Speaker 5: from his office. We've taken them behind the scenes on
Speaker 5: things like fundraising. You know, there is probably hundreds of
Speaker 5: thousands of more people that know now what rolodexing and
Speaker 5: call time are because of our videos, and so, you know,
Speaker 5: I think pulling back a little bit of that rather
Speaker 5: one of the benefits of our campaign, and the way
Speaker 5: we are doing things differently by the nature of being
Speaker 5: a candidate who is transparent and available online, is that
Speaker 5: we are making this process more transparent as we go.
Speaker 5: And I think the effects of that are still yet
Speaker 5: to be seen, but we know that it's one of
Speaker 5: the issues that democrats and our democracy at large are facing.
Speaker 5: Right There is an issue of transparency, of people feeling
Speaker 5: like they're included in the process. And the other thing
Speaker 5: that is still left to be seen but will will
Speaker 5: know shortly, is how it will affect other young people
Speaker 5: who are considering a run for office. I get, I'm
Speaker 5: not kidding you, hundreds of dms of young people who
Speaker 5: are interested in running for office because of the content
Speaker 5: they are seeing on my platform around this election, right,
Speaker 5: who want to know more about the process, who are
Speaker 5: frustrated and fed up, and who want to take action.
Speaker 5: And I think it can't be understated that after losing
Speaker 5: so many young people in this last election to apathy
Speaker 5: or to the other side, that we need leaders who
Speaker 5: are inspiring young people to get involved, right, who make
Speaker 5: it feel possible, not more folks who you know, through
Speaker 5: the means of legacy and establishment, make this feel even
Speaker 5: further away and affirm what people already believe, which is
Speaker 5: that this political process isn't for them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you for joining.
Speaker 5: Us, thank you for having me, and thank you for
Speaker 5: your thoughtful questions. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Speaker 5: It's hard work and it's good work. And I hope
Speaker 5: that people will join in to support our work and
Speaker 5: our campaign because we really have a shot to make
Speaker 5: history over here in Arizona. But we only got a
Speaker 5: few weeks left.
Speaker 2: Who are you running a hand?
Speaker 5: There are two other folks in this Democratic primary of note.
Speaker 5: One is a former state legislator and the other came
Speaker 5: off the board of supervisors and is the former congressman's daughter.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, yeah. And is she young?
Speaker 5: No, she's in her fifties. And I think what you
Speaker 5: need to know about the difference between me and them
Speaker 5: is that when it comes to experience, mine is in
Speaker 5: an act advocacy realm right, you know. The experience that
Speaker 5: I bring is advocacy.
Speaker 2: Carol Cadwalder is an investigative journalist and the author of
Speaker 2: The Family Tree. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 6: So nice to be here, great fan, great fans.
Speaker 2: Well, it's very mutual so your atjourney started with the
Speaker 2: journey of Braxit.
Speaker 6: Which journey are we talking? Well?
Speaker 2: I feel like I want you to give us your
Speaker 2: for those who are not as dialed in as Jesse
Speaker 2: and I are.
Speaker 6: The hell is this British chick of what you're doing
Speaker 6: on your podcast?
Speaker 2: Is that all right? Yeah? You can do this with Yeah.
Speaker 6: So basically who am I? I am an investigative journalist.
Speaker 6: I was until three weeks ago a Guardian journalist, but
Speaker 6: I have been expelled now from mainstream media. I've been
Speaker 6: clinging on but anyway, they the Guardians, sold my bit
Speaker 6: of the organization and so anyway, long story, but I'm out.
Speaker 6: But I'm enjoying my liberty and freedom I have to
Speaker 6: tell you, which enables me to be quite punchy. Which
Speaker 6: is I mean, I've been pretty punchy, but I feel
Speaker 6: that I don't know something about age is becoming more so.
Speaker 6: But to answer the question, I essentially my beat became
Speaker 6: in twenty sixteen. My beat really became this thing which
Speaker 6: was the intersection of technology and politics, and of course
Speaker 6: that means technology and democracy. And I was kind of
Speaker 6: just terrified. I'd been reporting on tech for quite a
Speaker 6: long time. By that stage, but very much from as generalist,
Speaker 6: like I'm a feature writer, that's my background. It's very
Speaker 6: much about like explaining to the world how this stuff worked,
Speaker 6: rather than doing the sort of like my new who
Speaker 6: is a great new product. Anyway, in that sort of
Speaker 6: I sort of became terrified about what I discovered in
Speaker 6: the twenty sixteen. It was really actually the thing which
Speaker 6: really sent me down the rabbit hole was the election
Speaker 6: of Trump. And then that I started pulling on a
Speaker 6: string and I discovered this really shady data company called
Speaker 6: Cambridge Analytica.
Speaker 2: And little by little I pulled that.
Speaker 6: String and sort of discovered this huge scandal, the Facebook
Speaker 6: Cambridge Analytica scandal, which was this massive data breach in
Speaker 6: which eighty seven million people's Facebook profiles were harvested and
Speaker 6: then used essentially to help elect Trump and the same
Speaker 6: company and the same people. It was very much there
Speaker 6: was this totally kind of twin operation you could see
Speaker 6: between Brexit and Trump and just it was the same people,
Speaker 6: it was the same companies, it was the same data.
Speaker 6: We had the same kinds of bad actors, the same
Speaker 6: foreign interference, and so that sort of question of how
Speaker 6: these tech plans platforms essentially facilitated a complete revolution in
Speaker 6: the way that we do campaigning and politic completely opaque,
Speaker 6: completely unaccountable and uh and have you know, caused a
Speaker 6: convulsion in what we think of as democracy. And I
Speaker 6: would argue doesn't really, you know, it's a very big
Speaker 6: question about whether that still exists in that in this
Speaker 6: online world. Was that did that work?
Speaker 2: It did work? But it's pretty heavy. I mean it's
Speaker 2: very it's quite heavy.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's quite heavy. I mean it it's this this,
Speaker 6: I mean, it's it's amazing. Actually, weirdly, as I have
Speaker 6: this thing of that, I actually weirdly feel more cheerful
Speaker 6: right now than I did for really long periods of
Speaker 6: this time. And it's because the threat is now visible,
Speaker 6: right that the at least done us all a favor
Speaker 6: in like oh okay, Silicon Valley, these tech companies, what
Speaker 6: they're doing. What the aar like, the centralized power, the
Speaker 6: totally unaccountable power. We now get it in a way. Yes,
Speaker 6: we're sparing on the journey. I feel like we're now
Speaker 6: starting on the journey of at least getting it.
Speaker 2: So you had an incredible TED talk that where you
Speaker 2: talked about techno authoritarianism, right, that's what it really is,
Speaker 2: getting your data, using it to control you meet, you know,
Speaker 2: sort of the worst of authoritarianism and the worst of
Speaker 2: data mining coming together. You know, that's the Elon Musk
Speaker 2: part and the Heritage Foundation part coming together to rule
Speaker 2: the world. Talk us through kind of how you got
Speaker 2: to this thesis.
Speaker 6: I don't think it's a thesis. I think it is reality.
Speaker 2: I mean, no, no, but it is reality. But it's yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: To sum it up, sort of, you know, to sum
Speaker 2: it up is that we live in a surveillance society.
Speaker 6: Right. Every single thing, our entire econ, the entire online
Speaker 6: economy is predicated on knowing what we're up to online
Speaker 6: and tracking that and monetizing that, and that underpins these
Speaker 6: you know, trillion dollar tech companies. That's their model, that's
Speaker 6: what they're based on. They're based on knowing who we are,
Speaker 6: and they know who we are by gathering this data
Speaker 6: about us, and you can everybody was sort of like
Speaker 6: had different. Oh I don't care anyway, Like I don't
Speaker 6: care about my privacy. It doesn't manter to me. Oh,
Speaker 6: I've got nothing to hide like That was the sort
Speaker 6: of mentality which built Silicon Valley, but now Silicon Valley
Speaker 6: is it's you know, we've seen this merger take place
Speaker 6: between Silicon Valley and the most powerful superpower in the world,
Speaker 6: and those two things have now come together. And so
Speaker 6: that power that all see being all knowing power coming
Speaker 6: together with a superpower with nuclear weapons, which is reshaping
Speaker 6: the world order. This is if you're not terrified, it
Speaker 6: is because you are not paying attention. And I actually
Speaker 6: I feel really bad saying that because I am based
Speaker 6: here in London and I am one degree removed from
Speaker 6: what is happening in America. But it's only one degree removed.
Speaker 6: You don't have to apologize for things not being as
Speaker 6: bad where you are than where we are. And I
Speaker 6: think we talked when we were talking offline before you
Speaker 6: were saying, you actually feel a little better. And I
Speaker 6: actually feel a little better too because some of the
Speaker 6: stuff we saw. And I had a similar experience with
Speaker 6: Project Toy twenty five, which is I was like, holy shit,
Speaker 6: this is going to gut the entire federal government, Like
Speaker 6: if they enact this, it is going to be the
Speaker 6: end of rural hospitals and we're all nursing homes and
Speaker 6: this and that, and I was like, and the you know,
Speaker 6: administrative state, I mean, the goal is to dismantle everything
Speaker 6: you get from the federal government. And now that it's happening,
Speaker 6: I'm like, oh, I'm not crazy, Like this was actually
Speaker 6: what it was. And I feel like you have that
Speaker 6: same thought. So I've been Britain's premier conspiracy theorist for
Speaker 6: a decade. I mean I sort of hold that title.
Speaker 6: I've been a cultural hate figure because I investigated Brexit,
Speaker 6: which you know, it was an it was a totally
Speaker 6: evidence based journalistic investigation. However, because it was into a
Speaker 6: political matter with such divisiveness in Britain, I got tird
Speaker 6: and smeared and feathered, trd and smothed and feathered. I
Speaker 6: was like hung out to dry and multiply harassed and
Speaker 6: all the rest of it. Because the way of undermining
Speaker 6: my reporting was to undermine me, and the way of
Speaker 6: undermining me was to go after me in this very personal,
Speaker 6: misogynistic way. And yeah, the conspiracy theory of around this
Speaker 6: stuffs has been you know, it's kind of interesting. I
Speaker 6: actually haven't had that for a little while. I mean,
Speaker 6: I'm sure it will come back to another footwear but
Speaker 6: it turned out it turned out it wasn't a conspiracy theory,
Speaker 6: it was a conspiracy.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and I mean I think that's like Brexit
Speaker 2: is a great example because it's over and it's clearly
Speaker 2: was a disaster. Right. They didn't want Polish plumbers coming
Speaker 2: into the country, so they sanctioned themselves and it's been
Speaker 2: a complete disaster, right.
Speaker 6: I wish I could say that's the thing is is
Speaker 6: that we haven't because of the sort of nobody has
Speaker 6: any consensus of reality anymore, because of the way that
Speaker 6: the tech platforms, the way that we consume information. So
Speaker 6: there is no consensus of reality in Britain that Brexit
Speaker 6: was a disaster to such to such a degree that
Speaker 6: our left, supposedly left wing labor government can't even talk
Speaker 6: about this. Right, that's still is of a boaten subject
Speaker 6: which they just don't want to go near. Because also
Speaker 6: in Britain, our media landscape is totally dominated by still
Speaker 6: powerful less powerful than it was, but it's still powerful
Speaker 6: right wing, corporate and sort of oligarchic media and they
Speaker 6: you know, they've made the political agenda for years, for decades,
Speaker 6: and they still have this sort of huge amount of
Speaker 6: power that way, So yeah, so sadly, sadly, although by
Speaker 6: every demonstrable, demonstrable and measurable index, yes, it has been
Speaker 6: a disaster, but we still can't get people to own that.
Speaker 2: That is so incredibly sharking way, But okay, I want
Speaker 2: you to talk about the data and what it looks
Speaker 2: like to you. So in twenty sixteen it was Facebook.
Speaker 2: I think of Mark Zackerberg as like significantly more evil
Speaker 2: than Elon Musk, despite the fact that Elon Musk reads
Speaker 2: us more evil than Mark Zuckerberok, because Elon Musk and
Speaker 2: again this is this idea, So Elon Musk is out
Speaker 2: about what he's doing, so talk to us about that.
Speaker 6: Why So I'm really curious, why do you think Zuckerbog's
Speaker 6: more evil? Go and give me we.
Speaker 2: All because he pretends to not be evil. Whereas Elon
Speaker 2: is like full on, you know, we want you know,
Speaker 2: for you know, it's like, why do these four people
Speaker 2: get food when we could just be giving tax cuts
Speaker 2: to huge corporations, Whereas I feel like Mark Zuckerberg is like,
Speaker 2: we're here to connect everyone. We are here for connection,
Speaker 2: and then it's like and the Rahingan genocide.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, ye know.
Speaker 6: Also as well, it's got. The thing about Zuckerberg is
Speaker 6: that there's a slight of hand with him in you know,
Speaker 6: they keep renaming shits, so it's refused to call it meta.
Speaker 6: I'm still calling it Facebook. They renamed it meta to
Speaker 6: sort of like wipe the stink off all the Facebook scandals.
Speaker 6: But I'm sorry that I'm not flying with And the
Speaker 6: slides of hand is that Facebook is Facebook, it's Instagram,
Speaker 6: it's WhatsApp, it's and those people always forget that.
Speaker 2: You always have.
Speaker 6: These youngsters saying, oh, I'm not on Facebook, I don't
Speaker 6: having things to do meta, and it's like, yeah, do us.
Speaker 6: Of course they use Instagram, so it's and then of course,
Speaker 6: you know and like I am I have of boten
Speaker 6: policy on you know too, And now i am I'm
Speaker 6: on WhatsApp and actually I've just joined Instagram. He in
Speaker 6: terms of the world's population and use of product his products, yeah,
Speaker 6: he does win. And that's there is actually global domination there.
Speaker 6: And you know, there is a really interesting case happening
Speaker 6: at the moment, which is they are looking to break
Speaker 6: up anti trust.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the anti trust thing.
Speaker 6: And of course it's not a coincidence that he's cozying
Speaker 6: up to Trump, right, I mean, it's he's got a
Speaker 6: lot to lose. He's got a lot to lose. I
Speaker 6: think the difference is is that back in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 6: the reason why that was such a moment and why
Speaker 6: he was so culpable is because it was Facebook, which
Speaker 6: was where politics, where campaigning was being conducted. That we
Speaker 6: had much more centralized sort of social media landscape at
Speaker 6: that time. Now it's much more scattered. There's so many
Speaker 6: other it's you know, there's there's the guy, yeah, the
Speaker 6: TikTok of it in the YouTube and all the rest
Speaker 6: of it. Like that's where a lot of the sort
Speaker 6: of money is being spent. Now, what's interesting about this Cambridgealytics.
Speaker 6: It's a good thing in a way. It's a model.
Speaker 6: It's a parable for what Musk has been doing inside
Speaker 6: the government, which is that you know, Cambra Reganalystic. It
Speaker 6: was hoovering up this Facebook data to then to then
Speaker 6: build algorithms to to really understand who these people were
Speaker 6: to then target them politically. So why is Musk hoovering
Speaker 6: up all of this data from inside government? What's he doing?
Speaker 4: It?
Speaker 6: The most valuable resource in the world for you know,
Speaker 6: the competition the game now is all AI. You want
Speaker 6: to build the best AI, you know, that's where the
Speaker 6: race is on. And to build the best AI, you
Speaker 6: need the best sources of data. And here he you know,
Speaker 6: has been inside the US government with absolutely kidd in
Speaker 6: a candy shop with you know, the entire population's highly
Speaker 6: highly sensitive different pieces of data, including financial and social
Speaker 6: security and all the rest of it. That's the thing
Speaker 6: I find the most terrifying in the sense like you
Speaker 6: capture that, you capture the future in a way.
Speaker 2: On Twitter already we're seeing like fake tweet by fake people.
Speaker 2: So what's the But just explain to me the goal here.
Speaker 2: Fake people create fake tweets that real people read and
Speaker 2: think that more people believe something than really do.
Speaker 6: I mean, just explain to me. It's basically it's because
Speaker 6: it's a very complex landscape. And it was really funny.
Speaker 6: There was this quite senior political journalist during the Brexit years.
Speaker 6: He was just he went was on some political program
Speaker 6: and he said, a Russian bot didn't tell my granny
Speaker 6: to vote for Brexits, and that was his why this
Speaker 6: is all a load of rubbish and it just like
Speaker 6: it the way that the different ways that there's sort
Speaker 6: of these mechanized forms work and now so much more
Speaker 6: sophisticated because of AI. Is a lot of what they're
Speaker 6: doing is manipulating reality. So the cast on Twitter would
Speaker 6: be those nameless people and things they would like, you know,
Speaker 6: they'd glom onto different hashtags. You get the hashtags to
Speaker 6: trend and then and then real people look to see
Speaker 6: what's happening. It's ways, you know, there's lots of different
Speaker 6: ways of manipulating people's sentiments and we don't realize it's invisible,
Speaker 6: but they do really impact things like the news agenda.
Speaker 2: So here's a question for you, because I definitely have
Speaker 2: you know, I come from internet circa nay, I come
Speaker 2: from the nineties, right, and and what has happened with
Speaker 2: me is I've just stopped trusting doing things I see online.
Speaker 2: So if I see a picture of Donald Trump as
Speaker 2: the pulp, I don't assume Donald Trump is the new
Speaker 2: pulp because I know that there's and you know, AI
Speaker 2: looks a little different. You can tell what it is.
Speaker 2: But is that isn't that what everyone is just going
Speaker 2: to not trust anything because there's no fact checking.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's and that's what we're seeing happening. I mean,
Speaker 6: that's where and this loss of trust which goes along
Speaker 6: with that is a loss of trust in everything, isn't
Speaker 6: It's a loss of trust in institutions, It's a lot
Speaker 6: of trust in news organizations with it, It's a lot
Speaker 6: of trust in you know, government bodies. This is across
Speaker 6: the board. And you know that's that in itself is terrifying,
Speaker 6: isn't it? And you know, this is where I sort
Speaker 6: of say, it's that we these terms which we started
Speaker 6: learning in twenty and sixteen, misinformation and disinformation, like that's
Speaker 6: gone like forget that now like this is you know,
Speaker 6: I sort of talk about sort of total information collapse
Speaker 6: like this now we are in total information chaos and
Speaker 6: that's you know, it's it's it's it's why it's so
Speaker 6: hard for any of us to like process and navigate
Speaker 6: what on earth is going on, because we just face
Speaker 6: this chaotic cacophony of voices and noise and you know,
Speaker 6: funny memes and cat video and but you know, weirdly, Molly,
Speaker 6: I actually do feel like there is something here which
Speaker 6: gives me. It's bizarre, how like more optimistic I am
Speaker 6: at the moment than I will meet because now that
Speaker 6: we can see the problem, and now we can see
Speaker 6: the crisis, we can actually now start thinking about solutions.
Speaker 6: That's the thing. And so it is this like out
Speaker 6: of crisis comes opportunities. So for me, and it's kind
Speaker 6: of what I've a particular skin in this game. But
Speaker 6: for me, what's now so important is that we have
Speaker 6: to build proper independent media that people trust. Right, And
Speaker 6: we've seen the way that these big corporates, you know
Speaker 6: in America bowing down to Trump. They you know, they
Speaker 6: can't stand up things They've got, you know, their theme
Speaker 6: park to worry about.
Speaker 7: Right, and their space stuffing Molly is to you, aren't
Speaker 7: they like this is the kind of this is where
Speaker 7: the you know, actually you've got to be out there,
Speaker 7: like being popular than Joe Rogan Molly.
Speaker 6: That is now your job.
Speaker 2: I have to tell you. The funniest part though, just
Speaker 2: on this information idea is I started putting on Instagram
Speaker 2: like tweets that I thought were important for people because
Speaker 2: I knew that there were a lot of people who
Speaker 2: couldn't stay on Twitter anymore and that there were things
Speaker 2: that were relevant and important that they might never see.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is the fundamental problem. So I started
Speaker 2: putting them on Instagram. And I was at White House
Speaker 2: Correspondence weekend like two weeks ago, and a number of
Speaker 2: like real television people like anchors and you know whatever
Speaker 2: intellect We're like, I find your Instagram very useful. But
Speaker 2: that's because like the problem is, we don't have a
Speaker 2: great aggregation entering anymore. Yes, so it is like we
Speaker 2: are like it's and unless you spend twelve hours a
Speaker 2: day online, which luckily I do, you don't have like
Speaker 2: a pastisee yeah, of everything that is happening. So you
Speaker 2: miss like, you know, you miss Elon Musk melting down
Speaker 2: about his you know, possible child with the possible influencer,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean. You miss all of that,
Speaker 2: and then you'll see something else and it won't make
Speaker 2: sense because you won't have the entire story.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's so funny because my first Instagram post was
Speaker 6: like a screenshot of my tweet. Okay, Yeah, it was
Speaker 6: very funny because a friend saw it and she was like,
Speaker 6: she was like no, she was like, no, you need
Speaker 6: to be like you need to be showing your eyebrows
Speaker 6: and like doing a selfie with like and I was like.
Speaker 2: No, anyway, is culture is downstream of politics. Politics culture discussed.
Speaker 6: So this was yeah. So I used this line in
Speaker 6: my Ted talk, which is Steve, I say, Steve Bannon's.
Speaker 2: Bannon, but it's really from bray Bar. It's from me.
Speaker 6: It's I think this thing which is that most people
Speaker 6: honestly don't care about politics, and but yet you know
Speaker 6: they're not watching the political news, they're not watching the
Speaker 6: political pundits. This isn't where the important stuff is being discussed,
Speaker 6: but where the thing which ahead of the you know,
Speaker 6: the election, the us that it's the podcast bros, like
Speaker 6: it's the YouTube bros. And at the moment those bros
Speaker 6: who are on browie platforms with algorithms built by bros
Speaker 6: to which prioritizes bro content, that is where the sort
Speaker 6: of conversation is. That's where the dial is shifting, and
Speaker 6: that is culture, and that for me is the sort
Speaker 6: of key thing about it. To go back to the
Speaker 6: tech of it, right, which is the YouTube algorithm, kind
Speaker 6: of terrifies me in that way. YouTube is the round
Speaker 6: zero of the manosphere, and misogyny is wrapped up in
Speaker 6: everything that we're seeing now. But I feel that like
Speaker 6: in order to reclaim that space, we need people like
Speaker 6: you out talking to and for as many people listening
Speaker 6: to you as possible. And yeah, we have to in
Speaker 6: order to reclaim the politics, we need to kind of
Speaker 6: first regain the culture. And part of the way that
Speaker 6: we have to reclaim the culture, the long view is
Speaker 6: we need to build better platforms which are not owned
Speaker 6: by these terrible Silicon Valley tech companies. That's a long yep.
Speaker 2: I'm so excited, thank you, thank you, thank you. This
Speaker 2: was amazing. I really appreciate you just exactly what I
Speaker 2: want to talk about. So thank you, thank you for having.
Speaker 6: Me on and I really forward to seeing you in
Speaker 6: London and talking about your.
Speaker 2: Book now perfectly, Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 3: PI judged fast. Who would have thought that the Supreme
Speaker 3: Court repealing the Voting Rights Act back in the day
Speaker 3: would not go so well and things would be bad.
Speaker 2: I would not have thought that. I actually would have
Speaker 2: thought that. I am not surprised if Federal court ruled
Speaker 2: Thursday that Alabama engaged in intentional discrimination when it refused
Speaker 2: to draw a congressional plan with a second black majority district.
Speaker 2: After courts, including the Supreme Court, repeatedly rejected maps with
Speaker 2: one such district when the finding the courts that it
Speaker 2: would consider whether to put by the way Alabama is
Speaker 2: this is they are fuck it. I mean, let's just
Speaker 2: look at the Alabama senators for a minute. Okay, Tommy Tuberville, Right,
Speaker 2: that guy he didn't even live in Alabama, Right, he
Speaker 2: lives somewhere else. Tommy Tubervel, Katie britt Right, Alabama is
Speaker 2: a super diverse state. These Republicans are just trying to
Speaker 2: hold onto power here. Of course, they're jerrymandering, they're trying
Speaker 2: to hold onto power. They're doing all of the tricks
Speaker 2: that we know so well, and it's just, you know,
Speaker 2: there we go. So the Voting Rights Act opened, you know,
Speaker 2: this is Roberts. Roberts is how we got here, right,
Speaker 2: cutting away at the Voting Rights Act, this is how
Speaker 2: we got here. So if Democrats win back the political zeitgeist,
Speaker 2: we're going to need desperately to enact anti corruption laws.
Speaker 2: We're going to need desperately to end partisan jerrymandering. It
Speaker 2: is the moment for them. That's it for this episode
Speaker 2: Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday
Speaker 2: to hear the best minds and politics make sense of
Speaker 2: all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send
Speaker 2: it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks
Speaker 2: for listening.