Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discuss the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds. And Representative Tim Burchett says we're not
Speaker 1: going to fix it in reference to school shootings, but
Speaker 1: of course he homeschools his kid. We have a fascinating
Speaker 1: show today. Crooked Media editor in chief Brian Boittler stops
Speaker 1: by to talk about the dangers of Trump's violent rhetoric.
Speaker 1: Then we'll talk to the economic hardship reporting projects Alyssa Court,
Speaker 1: who will tell us about her new book Bootstrapped, Liberating
Speaker 1: Ourselves from the American Dream. But first we have the
Speaker 1: Washington Post columnist, the one, the only, Dana Milbank. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to you Fast Politics, Dana Milbank. Molly, it's always
Speaker 1: a great pleasure. Thank you. Well, I'm interrupting you from
Speaker 1: watching a certain committee hearing. That's the kind of hearing
Speaker 1: that I watch and I want to throw stuff at
Speaker 1: the wall. Tell us what committee hearing you were just
Speaker 1: watching on c SPAN. There is just so many good
Speaker 1: committee hearings going on all the time. I was like
Speaker 1: toggling back and forth among six of them this morning
Speaker 1: and now this afternoon, We're going to hear from a
Speaker 1: subcommittee of James Comer's House Oversight Committee, and they are
Speaker 1: talking about how the progressivism, basically the wokeness of the
Speaker 1: military is preventing readiness of our troops. I love it
Speaker 1: as a topic of a hearing, but the fact that
Speaker 1: they're doing on the same day that over in the Senate,
Speaker 1: Tommy Tuberville actually is compromising the readiness of our military
Speaker 1: by refusing to approve any of the military promotions. So
Speaker 1: everybody's actually stuck in place and is in fact not ready. Yeah,
Speaker 1: You've hit on many subjects I want to talk about,
Speaker 1: but the first is James Comer. I feel like he's
Speaker 1: new this season of Our Republican House. Fockay he is.
Speaker 1: They brought him up from Triple A. But I'm not
Speaker 1: sure he can hit these pitches. No, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: So he's a fascinating care because, like a Louie Gomer,
Speaker 1: you look at that guy and you go, like, this
Speaker 1: guy's an idiot, right, He's got crazy eyes. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's got crazy eyes. He sometimes loses a tooth story
Speaker 1: a conversation, which, by the way, you know, I've had
Speaker 1: many dental struggles, so I'm hardly casting aspersions here or
Speaker 1: asparagus casting aspersions on his asparagus. I knew that's where
Speaker 1: you were, not exactly. This is a real deep cut
Speaker 1: for people. But Coomer looks normal, but then when you
Speaker 1: get him going, he sounds yeah. The best I can
Speaker 1: tell on Comer is he probably is or was normal,
Speaker 1: and then he became chairman of this committee. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not terribly unlike the McCarthy thing. It's like, you
Speaker 1: have a choice. You can be normal or you can
Speaker 1: have a job, right, and if you want to keep
Speaker 1: your job, you gotta at least sound crazy. And of
Speaker 1: course if you if you sound crazy long enough, well off,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just cognitive dissonance. You've just become crazy.
Speaker 1: You have to believe it, right, because he can't keep
Speaker 1: saying it. This's got a long history of people in
Speaker 1: this position, going back to Dan Burt shooting Warnermelons, and
Speaker 1: darryl Issa was in this job, and Drey Gowdy the
Speaker 1: Aghazi came out of this committee. He just doesn't seem
Speaker 1: ready for prime time. You know, Like just a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks ago he was going after Bo Biden, who
Speaker 1: of course isn't alive to defend himself. He keeps contradicting
Speaker 1: himself on the Hunter Biden stuff. Yeah, he just doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like he's ready for prime time. And when he
Speaker 1: goes on Fox News, he seems to operate as if
Speaker 1: nobody's going to hear what he said outside the Fox
Speaker 1: News echo chamber. And he's constantly getting in trouble for
Speaker 1: those things because he's saying things that are not backed
Speaker 1: up by reality. One of the incredible things that I
Speaker 1: think about is on the Sunday Shows, Jake Tapper interviewed him.
Speaker 1: He was so hot to defend Trump that he couldn't
Speaker 1: figure out what he was defending Trump from. So Tapper said, well,
Speaker 1: do you think business crimes are not really crimes? And
Speaker 1: he was like, no, election crimes aren't really right, you
Speaker 1: know what's like? And Capo was like, but the New
Speaker 1: York state crime would be a business. Oh, yes. You know.
Speaker 1: I feel like we haven't spent enough of this news
Speaker 1: cycle talking about Republicans falling all over themselves to defend
Speaker 1: Donald Trump when Donald Trump has still yet to be
Speaker 1: actually indicted. Whatever you may think of Donald Trump, and
Speaker 1: I know you're a big fan, right, a big fan
Speaker 1: he's brilliant at this sort of thing. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: I wrote about it before he had a serious run
Speaker 1: for the presidency. He would flirt with it each time,
Speaker 1: and I noted he would do it often or at
Speaker 1: least more than once when the Apprentice was up for renewal.
Speaker 1: Then he'd starts teasing a presidential run, right, and at
Speaker 1: one of these times, I don't know whether twenty ten
Speaker 1: or something like that, I got a I wish I
Speaker 1: had kept it. I got a clip out of the
Speaker 1: article i'd written observing that from Donald Trump, in which
Speaker 1: he circled that sentence and said, good point. He was.
Speaker 1: He was happy to be copulating NBC or whatever it was.
Speaker 1: But now he's doing the same thing to the House Republicans.
Speaker 1: He had no idea that, you know, whether or not
Speaker 1: he was going to be arrested, but he just went
Speaker 1: out and said it because you know, what, does he care?
Speaker 1: And you know, the fools, they fell for it completely,
Speaker 1: uh it. You know, So it doesn't matter if he's
Speaker 1: indicted now, or if he's not indicted, or if he's
Speaker 1: indicted in Georgia or if he's indicted in New York.
Speaker 1: He's back on top. Yeah, he's all everybody's talking about.
Speaker 1: He's stealing all the oxygen in the room. They are
Speaker 1: tripping over themselves to interfere in the American justice system, right,
Speaker 1: weaponize the federal government, and even you know, in some
Speaker 1: of the most absurd cases, they're even actually defending his
Speaker 1: behavior with with Stormy Daniels, well the climbs or just
Speaker 1: the tortry thing that started it. You know, do you
Speaker 1: really want to really want to be defending him on Yeah? That,
Speaker 1: Like Tucker Carlson said, come on, everybody pays hush money, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, who among us? Let me? The moment I
Speaker 1: thought was the sort of most magnificent moment of this
Speaker 1: whole experience was when Republicans were furious with de Santis
Speaker 1: for not defending Trump. Yeah. I mean that shows you
Speaker 1: know how it was so brilliant. It looked like Pence
Speaker 1: was successfully getting or at least trying to get some
Speaker 1: distance on Trump. It looked like De santists was cutting
Speaker 1: him down quite nicely. And now everybody's back on their
Speaker 1: heels either defending him or be quiet because he's the
Speaker 1: only game in town again, and that's why many people
Speaker 1: go through this. Yo, Trump's finished now, he's he's really done.
Speaker 1: And you know, I admit it had looked that way
Speaker 1: for a little while, but just because every time in
Speaker 1: the past he's come roaring back. I mean I was
Speaker 1: down at, you know, for his full start of a
Speaker 1: presidential announcement in Marlago, and it really felt like the
Speaker 1: guy was done. But he's Donald Trump. He'll destroy everything
Speaker 1: around him, but he's going come crawling out of that
Speaker 1: mushroom cloud. Yeah. I mean, that is the thing that
Speaker 1: I'm so struck by, is it feels like, you know,
Speaker 1: if he were a normal candidate, I mean, if he
Speaker 1: cared about the Republican Party more than he cared about
Speaker 1: his own bottom line, then perhaps, but that has never
Speaker 1: been the case. Why would we expect it to start
Speaker 1: now the whole notion for any anybody else and forget
Speaker 1: about politics. But in the world, by and large, getting
Speaker 1: indicted is a bad thing. Like you put that into
Speaker 1: the negative in the negatives fall when you're listing positives
Speaker 1: and negatives, all things being equal, you'd rather not be indicted.
Speaker 1: But this is the thing that I think is sort
Speaker 1: of mind blowing, is that there has been, up until
Speaker 1: Donald Trump, a certain honor among thieves and by thieves,
Speaker 1: I mean politicians that I mean, there was a certain
Speaker 1: you know, if you lost, you would admit it. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't lie, you know what I mean, Like you might
Speaker 1: lie about whether or not you at a mistress, but
Speaker 1: you wouldn't lie about whether or not you'd lost the election. Right,
Speaker 1: Things that you would lie about, things that weren't demonstrably
Speaker 1: false that you know, you could proto shade it or
Speaker 1: people might not know the truth. But no, this is
Speaker 1: a you know, I mean, there's there's the absence of shame,
Speaker 1: but there's also the absence of fact. You know, as
Speaker 1: we've discussed before, Trump didn't invent that it had gotten
Speaker 1: a whole lot more brazen, going back to death panels, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was something about that war in Iraq, and then
Speaker 1: of course, you know, the Birther thing, it had gotten
Speaker 1: increasingly brazen. But now it's you know, it's it's sort
Speaker 1: of stuff that can be disproven in real time. And
Speaker 1: the whole notion is that the people doing the disproofing,
Speaker 1: that people who are actually pointing out that it's false
Speaker 1: are the ones who have an agenda. So that was
Speaker 1: the genius here, right, I mean, it's like calling black
Speaker 1: people racist right, yeah, no, right, it's it's the proverbial
Speaker 1: jiu jitsu, and I mean the ruinous consequences of course.
Speaker 1: So you now have the chairman of the House Administration Committee,
Speaker 1: the House Oversight and the House Judiciary Committee casting doubt
Speaker 1: on the justice system in America. Just as they made
Speaker 1: people believe that the elections are are rigged, they're making
Speaker 1: people believe that the justice system is rigged. In fact,
Speaker 1: one of the many hearings I was listening to this
Speaker 1: morning another effort just by the House Administration Committee to
Speaker 1: say that our elections are all screwed up. This time
Speaker 1: they're going after a Republican county of Luzerne County in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: But doesn't matter, you know, just so doubts and say
Speaker 1: the systems that you believed in are failing you, and
Speaker 1: everybody's lying to you. Right. This sort of works until
Speaker 1: it doesn't. Right, Well, I'm still waiting for that point.
Speaker 1: Many points it seemed Trump had jumped the shark. It
Speaker 1: keeps succeeding in the end. So you know, I agree,
Speaker 1: theoretically there is a point at which even the thirty
Speaker 1: percent or whatever of America, that sort of die hard
Speaker 1: maga will say Okay, that's too much. I can't I
Speaker 1: can't follow you there. But I haven't seen it yet, right.
Speaker 1: I continue to believe that they're in a situation where
Speaker 1: the only person who went who can win the primary
Speaker 1: is Trump and the only person who can guaranteed to
Speaker 1: lose the general as Trump. It certainly seems that way
Speaker 1: to me, and you know, as the guy who had
Speaker 1: to you know, physically eat a column. Wait which column
Speaker 1: was that? Well, in twenty sixteen, I said Republicans are
Speaker 1: better than this. They're not going to nominate Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's what you get for thinking they were
Speaker 1: better than that. Yeah. I had a local chef, Victor Albisu.
Speaker 1: He came into the post. I got the food critic,
Speaker 1: Tom Seatso we had an entire spread of newspaper. They
Speaker 1: made newspaper filtered coffee, they made newspaper filet of fish, tacos.
Speaker 1: It was, and Trump wine to wash it all down.
Speaker 1: It was a great culinary experience. That's amazing. But yeah, so,
Speaker 1: but what were you saying. I'm not going to make
Speaker 1: the mistake again of saying Trump can't win or Trump
Speaker 1: can win, because who the hell knows. What I do
Speaker 1: know is anybody out there is I doubt true. Last week,
Speaker 1: anybody's still saying it, But anybody's saying it that Trump
Speaker 1: can't be back on top again and that he couldn't
Speaker 1: win the presidency again. They're just making it up because
Speaker 1: we've seen it can happen. You know, in the long run,
Speaker 1: the politics he's practicing our ruinous to his party and
Speaker 1: to the country more importantly. But in the short term,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't doubt that it can still work.
Speaker 1: I mean, do you think, like the thing I always
Speaker 1: think about is this idea that like you can't make
Speaker 1: a Faustian bargain and then like have people just go
Speaker 1: back to normal. There has to be some kind of reckoning.
Speaker 1: Where is the reckoning? We keep thinking, well, all right,
Speaker 1: they saw what all these you know nutters meant that
Speaker 1: the Republicans didn't win the Senate. They very narrowly won
Speaker 1: the House, went with George Santos. Yeah, right, with George Santos.
Speaker 1: And you know, originally they were expecting a sixty seat
Speaker 1: majority and wind up with five and said, you'd think
Speaker 1: the reckoning would come after losing the twenty twenty election.
Speaker 1: Losing I think it's eight of nine president of the
Speaker 1: last presidential election popular vote. You'd think it would come
Speaker 1: after the January sixth insurrection. There's a reckoning for like
Speaker 1: a week, and then everybody just forgets that which is reckoning,
Speaker 1: and we're right back in the same place. So I
Speaker 1: don't necessarily believe that there is a reckoning for this.
Speaker 1: I don't think they don't. I think being a maga
Speaker 1: Republican means never having to say you're sorry. I think
Speaker 1: eventually they decide they're sick of losing. The problem for them,
Speaker 1: and again this is not a problem for me, because
Speaker 1: I think they did this themselves, is that ultimately they
Speaker 1: are being ruled by their base. So once the sort
Speaker 1: of the powers that be in the Republican Party decide
Speaker 1: they are sick of losing, they're going to have to
Speaker 1: say goodbye to the base that has delivered them, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, there's no way to not alienate the base.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's all of this is about not alienating
Speaker 1: that sort of despicable group that no Republican had ever dare.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know that they had quietly tried to
Speaker 1: appeal quiet lead to the sort of deplorables, and then
Speaker 1: you know, the very very small group of real people
Speaker 1: that are beyond the pale. And I do think that
Speaker 1: now they would have to reject that group by saying
Speaker 1: they don't believe in these kind of very base things, right,
Speaker 1: And how would you do that? Who would you? You know?
Speaker 1: Because of course we saw through the Fox News texts
Speaker 1: coming out from the dominion suit that that's their base. Right.
Speaker 1: They're out there worrying that if they don't tow the
Speaker 1: extremist line, if they don't perpetuate the big lie, that
Speaker 1: they're going to lose their people to news Max or
Speaker 1: somebody else, and they will, right, How does an elected
Speaker 1: official and McCarthy a comer disown that base without the
Speaker 1: implosion of the party. There's nothing left if they were
Speaker 1: to do that. So that's why I don't know. I
Speaker 1: don't see how that reckoning comes about other than constant drubbings,
Speaker 1: which will happen eventually, just not just not necessarily next year. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's ultimately their big problem. But
Speaker 1: oh wow, they did it to themselves. I mean, and
Speaker 1: they really did do it to themselves, I mean, just
Speaker 1: in a spectacular fashion. So they're sort of in it.
Speaker 1: And I think that this is what we're seeing in
Speaker 1: this Republican House is a kind of you know, Trumpism
Speaker 1: is a sort of you have a leader who has
Speaker 1: a cult of personality, but you have no governing principles
Speaker 1: except chaos. I mean, that's what we're seeing in the House.
Speaker 1: Hey us, Yes, I was watching and Appropriations hearing where
Speaker 1: they're talking about cybersecurity. Suddenly we're talking about diversity, equity, inclusion,
Speaker 1: and Hunter Biden. That's suddenly the topic. Here. They are
Speaker 1: having another committee, I think it's the Energy and Commerce
Speaker 1: Committee is having another hearing on censorship at Twitter. This
Speaker 1: is after the Oversight Committee had a disaster of a
Speaker 1: hearing on it. It's after Jim Jordan's Weaponization committee, and
Speaker 1: now they're actually having some of the same witnesses back
Speaker 1: again to chew over it again at Energy and Commerce.
Speaker 1: It's you know, it's sort of it's like a fever
Speaker 1: dream of Hunter Biden, woo politics, equity, diversity, and inclusion.
Speaker 1: It's just an endless repeat here. And then you know,
Speaker 1: in the background, you have very serious things like oh,
Speaker 1: guys were about to default on the federal debt, and
Speaker 1: you literally had the House Republican Caucus leaders out one time,
Speaker 1: and then on a split screen. You had the House
Speaker 1: Freedom Caucus this morning, and they're saying entirely different things
Speaker 1: about what needs to happen with the debt limit. I
Speaker 1: guess the only thing that you can agree on is
Speaker 1: that Hunter Biden's laptop just keep saying it right exactly.
Speaker 1: One last question for you. It seems like this Dominion
Speaker 1: suit from what I'm seeing, you know now they want
Speaker 1: these Fox personalities to testify. I mean, I don't know
Speaker 1: if you saw the polling last week that Fox watchers
Speaker 1: are aware of of what's happening. I mean, it does
Speaker 1: seem like Dominion is a company with nothing left to lose.
Speaker 1: Their whole brand has been savage. You see it at
Speaker 1: the local level at election board meetings and then local testimonies.
Speaker 1: That's why you file a defamation suit, because it's been
Speaker 1: ruinous to your character. I mean, I think a lot
Speaker 1: of smart people say it's it's really hard to prevail
Speaker 1: in these kinds of lawsuits. But give them credit for
Speaker 1: doing an enormous public service because maybe it is filtering
Speaker 1: to Fox fears of some extent, but the rest of
Speaker 1: the world is seeing what a connart this whole thing is.
Speaker 1: That's just the knowingly feeding your audience lies over and
Speaker 1: over again, even though you know it's wrong, even though
Speaker 1: that people in the news division of your own organization
Speaker 1: are fighting you. Yeah, it's crazy. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: I hope you'll come back. It was a delight Thank you, Mollie.
Speaker 1: Brian Boittler is the editor in chief of Crooked Media.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Fast Politics, Brian, thank you for having me up.
Speaker 1: We're delighted. Our first topic of conversation must be a
Speaker 1: meat ball ron. Here we are in a situation where
Speaker 1: we have this Republican that all the kind of smart
Speaker 1: Republicans have decided is their candidate right. He may lack charisma,
Speaker 1: but they don't care. And then we have the probably
Speaker 1: likely Republican candidate who is going to eat him. Is
Speaker 1: that fair? I think so. I mean, I think that
Speaker 1: you see in a lot of the recent coverage of
Speaker 1: this sort of shadow campaign, the problems that the santiss
Speaker 1: is going to have, which are really familiar because all
Speaker 1: of the twenty sixteen primary candidates who tried to take
Speaker 1: on Trump had the same problem, and that Donald Trump
Speaker 1: doesn't have this particular problem, and you know, it's one
Speaker 1: of the only admirable things about Donald Trump's, at least
Speaker 1: to me, it's not in how he does it, but
Speaker 1: that he's willing to do it. Is that when he
Speaker 1: identifies an opponent, even if it's a Republican opponent, and
Speaker 1: he wants to beat him, he just screams to the
Speaker 1: eye heavens, but that person is beyond redemp just terrible
Speaker 1: in all kinds of ways. Right when he puts out
Speaker 1: statements about the Santists, they're withering. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: when the Santists punches at Donald Trump, you'll get the
Speaker 1: New York Post talking about how the gloves are finally
Speaker 1: coming off. But when you read the actual comments, it's
Speaker 1: so tame and oblique, and he's just unwilling to confront
Speaker 1: Donald Trump directly or say anything really very critical about him.
Speaker 1: And it's hard to see how that's gonna lead him
Speaker 1: to the nomination. Unlast, like Donald Trump gets in prisoned
Speaker 1: or something. I even think Donald Trump running from prison
Speaker 1: could probably still beat Roun de Santis. I don't want
Speaker 1: to say this again because the last time I said this,
Speaker 1: I got in trouble with actual members of the Dacaucus family.
Speaker 1: And look, there are a lot of great things about
Speaker 1: Decacus but he was not a brilliant political strategist, and
Speaker 1: he also had a very sort of slightly run to santasy. Look,
Speaker 1: there's a line from the tank image of Dacocus to
Speaker 1: John Kerry saying reporting for duty and saluting at the
Speaker 1: two thousand and four convention to meet ball Ron pretend
Speaker 1: to flying in a plane and acting like he's top
Speaker 1: gun Maverick. It's all one piece, right, and it's really corny.
Speaker 1: And people think think that people like that are dorks
Speaker 1: and don't like them, right, And I mean I think
Speaker 1: also like there's a real disconnect here between what Americans
Speaker 1: have since in my incredibly long lifetime, because I'm incredibly old,
Speaker 1: I have always elected charismatic leaders, often to their detriment, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, look, how many times do I remember people
Speaker 1: being like, you can't elect this guy. With the exception
Speaker 1: of WA's dad, I think largely Republicans, Democrats, everyone has
Speaker 1: elected people they find charismatic. I think that's right. I
Speaker 1: mean I think that at least in my also too
Speaker 1: long of a lifetime, every presidential election has been won
Speaker 1: by the more charismatic of the two candidas. And I
Speaker 1: feel like every time I end up in a conversation
Speaker 1: about this, some part of the Rick gets upset because
Speaker 1: they liked the losing candidate, and in their mind there
Speaker 1: was some element. You know, it's not like Hillary Clinton
Speaker 1: lacks all charm in certain context, She's very charming. She
Speaker 1: doesn't attract cameras the way Donald Trump does, obviously, right,
Speaker 1: And I think it's the same thing was true between
Speaker 1: Gore and Bush, and the same thing was true between
Speaker 1: the first Bush and Clinton. And if it weren't for
Speaker 1: the fact that Donald Trump had gotten hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of Americans killed and sank the economy in his last
Speaker 1: year in office, I think Joe Biden would have had
Speaker 1: a hard time beating him for the same reason. Even
Speaker 1: though Joe Biden has a sort of like I grew
Speaker 1: up in the nineteen fifties, like oh shucks, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: beat up the bullies persona, he doesn't command the cameras
Speaker 1: the way Trump does, and I think absent those sort
Speaker 1: of extraordinary circumstances, he might have lost two. And you know,
Speaker 1: it's not like he won by a huge landslide either.
Speaker 1: I mean, the only reason this is relevant is that
Speaker 1: it looks like they're heading towards a rematch. But I
Speaker 1: think with Biden there was a sense that they found
Speaker 1: the kind least, you know, they found a Democrat who
Speaker 1: could be palatable to a wide range of Republicans. Right. So,
Speaker 1: I've been on television panels where people were conservatives have
Speaker 1: said Joe Biden is a socialist, but they get laughed
Speaker 1: off the panel because the guy is like the most
Speaker 1: centrist guy on the entire phase of the earth. So
Speaker 1: I mean, and you know, he's a white guy. I
Speaker 1: mean he reads like old white guy, which you know,
Speaker 1: I think to a certain I mean, there was a
Speaker 1: certain sense. And again who knows if this is real
Speaker 1: or if this was imagined. In the mind of many
Speaker 1: of Democrats, including myself, was this sense that like America
Speaker 1: was not ready to elect a woman, they really, you know,
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, they needed an old white guy, and
Speaker 1: we found them an old white guy. Biden has a
Speaker 1: couple of assets, and you alluded to one of them,
Speaker 1: I think, I mean, on top of being an old
Speaker 1: white guy. The Santis said something really strange the other day,
Speaker 1: or wrote something really strange where he said, geographically, I'm
Speaker 1: from Tallahassee, but spirit I come from the Midwalk, come
Speaker 1: from the Ohio, Pennsylvania partment, you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: states that I need to win, Yeah, exactly. And the
Speaker 1: and the and the thing is that Joe Biden actually
Speaker 1: does right, like that's his actual heritage. And then the
Speaker 1: other thing he's got going for him is this is
Speaker 1: Biden I'm talking about again, is that something like fifty
Speaker 1: five to sixty percent of the country just absolutely despised
Speaker 1: Donald trum like they are. I mean, that faction has
Speaker 1: been there since about twenty fifteen, and everything about his
Speaker 1: presidency just intensified that distastet antimpathy. And it's really hard
Speaker 1: for somebody who has to work with a maximum of
Speaker 1: forty or forty five percent of the electorate to win
Speaker 1: an election. Naturally, even with the electoral college, it can
Speaker 1: be done. And that's why it's a it's still a
Speaker 1: scary situation. But he's so toxic for so many reasons
Speaker 1: that even Joe Biden, you know, with some of the
Speaker 1: challenges he will have going into reelection, he'll be an
Speaker 1: incumbent running against somebody who's widely, widely loathed in the country,
Speaker 1: and that's our hope. Yeah, exactly. But it is a
Speaker 1: totally fascinating phenomenon So first, let's talk about this. And
Speaker 1: I wrote about this this I'm going to get jailed
Speaker 1: and perp walked news cycle that has yet to materialize, right,
Speaker 1: I mean it's crazy. Look, I know there were machinations
Speaker 1: from Alvin Bragg's office, and he did go on television
Speaker 1: and say but ultimately that was it, right, I mean largely,
Speaker 1: And even like two hours after Trump went on the
Speaker 1: ironically named truth social his spokesman was like, he's not
Speaker 1: really going on anything. Yeah, I mean, I still don't
Speaker 1: know what happened, and I'm not sure we ever will.
Speaker 1: There are definitely ways that Donald Trump could have gotten
Speaker 1: wind of a looming indictment, even if he got the
Speaker 1: date wrong, right. Like, one thing that they did that
Speaker 1: was suspicious to me is they immediately started hinting the
Speaker 1: quote unquote news that he was going to be indicted
Speaker 1: to an illegal leak from the grand jury, And just
Speaker 1: knowing the way that faction operates is that when they
Speaker 1: say something like that, they're projecting. And so there could
Speaker 1: be a grand juror who got word to them that
Speaker 1: an indictment is indeed coming. It could have been communication
Speaker 1: between the prosecutor's office and Trump's legal team to tell
Speaker 1: him to be prepared for this in the coming several
Speaker 1: days or something like that, and then in the game
Speaker 1: of operator Trump turned it into Tuesday, I'm going to
Speaker 1: get arrested. It hasn't happened, and maybe it won't, and
Speaker 1: if it doesn't, we're going to be left to wonder
Speaker 1: unless Alvin Bragg speaks up and explains himself whether Trump
Speaker 1: successfully intimidated his way out of an indictment, because ever
Speaker 1: since he said that, he's been essentially trying to incite
Speaker 1: the same kind of violence we saw in January six,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, against Alvin Bragg and the Manhattan Prosecutor's office.
Speaker 1: So there have been death threats and you know, a
Speaker 1: fake anthrax scare or some sort of poison powder scare,
Speaker 1: or they've had to erect security fencing around it. Trump
Speaker 1: has threatened blood in the streets if he's indicted, and
Speaker 1: he then held a rally in Waco, Texas, which is
Speaker 1: sort of like waving red flag in front of the
Speaker 1: bull of militia type Trump supporters who would happily take
Speaker 1: up arms to defend him if they could. There's this
Speaker 1: ridiculous aspect to it, like there always is with Trump
Speaker 1: just camp and just bullshit, and we can kind of
Speaker 1: laugh about it and misspellings in his truth social pseudo tweets,
Speaker 1: and then there's this like undercurrent of real menace. And
Speaker 1: it's a little bit dispiriting that I think that we're
Speaker 1: treating it as all kind of like, let's roll our
Speaker 1: eyes at Donald Trump for being a clown again, instead
Speaker 1: of sort of preparing for the kind of public resistance
Speaker 1: push that you see happening like in Israel right now.
Speaker 1: When there's like a frontal direct threat to rule of
Speaker 1: law in other countries, there's an immediate backlash. And I
Speaker 1: think that we're so sensitized to Trump behaving this way
Speaker 1: that we no longer interpreted as a literal direct threat
Speaker 1: to our ability as a people to hold correct public
Speaker 1: officials accountable for anything. It's a problem. The one thing
Speaker 1: I will push back on here, and I think you're
Speaker 1: certainly right, is that Trump is a real threat democracy.
Speaker 1: Is that I truly believe Ron de Santis is a
Speaker 1: bigger threat to democracy. I mean, look, the Republican Party
Speaker 1: is not a party of democracy anymore. We had somebody
Speaker 1: on the podcast recently who talked about going to a
Speaker 1: federalist society event where the federalist society is not completely
Speaker 1: sold on democracy anymore. You know, you're seeing this again
Speaker 1: and again. Republican electeds. They want they want public schools gone,
Speaker 1: they want they want government gone. This world that we've
Speaker 1: been in all this time of democracy and government, they've
Speaker 1: kind of turned against it. So in my mind, the
Speaker 1: only good news here is that they're going to nominate Trump,
Speaker 1: because I think that DeSantis is a much scarier candidate.
Speaker 1: I go back and for I mean, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: I agree or know who'd be worse. De Santis is
Speaker 1: competent in a way that Trump is absolutely not. Well,
Speaker 1: so what is true is that Donald Trump, I don't think,
Speaker 1: is any more philosophically supportive of or opposed to democracy
Speaker 1: than he is anything else. Right, whatever the principle is,
Speaker 1: as soon as it stands in the way of his
Speaker 1: power and his wealth, it's got to go. And for
Speaker 1: the last seven years that principle has been democratic forces
Speaker 1: that don't want him to be in charge, or that
Speaker 1: if he is in charge, you're going to push back
Speaker 1: on the kinds of things he wants to do. Round
Speaker 1: de Santis, if you read his first book, he is
Speaker 1: philosophically opposed to democracy the way a lot of right
Speaker 1: wing libertarians are, in that he thinks that when people
Speaker 1: have the power to elect representatives, and those representatives have
Speaker 1: the power through bare majorities, to pass laws and to govern,
Speaker 1: that there's gonna be too much distribution of wealth down
Speaker 1: the income scale, and that's a huge injustice, and so
Speaker 1: we need to have less democracy to prevent that from happening.
Speaker 1: And you can see in the way he governs Florida
Speaker 1: that when he has power and consolidated power with the
Speaker 1: loyal legislature, he can backslide democracy really fast. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: isn't that worse. On the one hand, if you if
Speaker 1: you just look at like what Trump and DeSantis did
Speaker 1: around elections or whatever. Donald Trump are in this sort
Speaker 1: of clown judicial farce trying to get an election overturned.
Speaker 1: Ron status actually put citizens who live in Florida in
Speaker 1: jail for voting. When the law was uncleared, they were
Speaker 1: totally were allowed to vote, and he set up a
Speaker 1: whole unit to go hunt them down and turn them
Speaker 1: into scapegoats. I don't think Trump ever did that. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, Trump did jail and separate families at
Speaker 1: the border, even though in the borders I could, yeah,
Speaker 1: but de Santis would have done that too. I mean,
Speaker 1: bad to immigrants is the brand. I think DeSantis is
Speaker 1: scarier to the extent that he's scary. It's that he's
Speaker 1: just less easily distracted. He speaks the language of official Republicanism,
Speaker 1: so they will do what he wants. And you could
Speaker 1: imagine him if he were to come into power with
Speaker 1: a trifect of being worse than Trump. But Trump just
Speaker 1: makes people ruler. He makes people nasty in a way
Speaker 1: that has these sort of unintended and hard to define consequences,
Speaker 1: Like American society is a meaner place now than it
Speaker 1: was in twenty fifteen. And I don't know if DeSantis
Speaker 1: has the power to galvanize people in that way, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, he's maybe not as popular, I would say.
Speaker 1: The one thing that really strikes me. You know, I've
Speaker 1: had Sarah Longwell on this podcast, and she made the
Speaker 1: argument that by reelecting Trump, that that act is so
Speaker 1: incredibly i want to say, perverse, and such an affront
Speaker 1: to democracy that by doing that, you have actually lessened
Speaker 1: the power of the American government, and you have you
Speaker 1: stuck your finger in the eye of the American system,
Speaker 1: and I think that that percentage of the base that
Speaker 1: has taken over the party doesn't necessarily think about the
Speaker 1: consequences of democracy. They just like their guy. So here
Speaker 1: is the word enervating. I think that if Donald Trump
Speaker 1: would win again, particularly if he were to win again
Speaker 1: without a popular vote majority, there would not be a
Speaker 1: second resistance movement like we saw take shape in early
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen or late twenty sixteen twenty seventeen, just because
Speaker 1: I think that once the shock of it wore off,
Speaker 1: the fact that this we would be living through a repeat,
Speaker 1: that people could do everything right in the face of
Speaker 1: a threat to civic life in America, like Donald Trump
Speaker 1: beat him twice in the popular vote, only for him
Speaker 1: to get elected twice. I guess he beat him three
Speaker 1: times in the popular vote, but still he got elected twice.
Speaker 1: That people would feel like rallying in the streets and
Speaker 1: striking and using whatever power they have as a collected
Speaker 1: mass just wasn't worth it. It didn't wouldn't do anything,
Speaker 1: And I'd sort of worry about what like reconstituted Republican
Speaker 1: majority could get away with in a climate where people
Speaker 1: who have been exhausting themselves for the last seven years
Speaker 1: trying to push back on authoritarian authoritarianism in the US
Speaker 1: just kind of said enough, like we tried, and the
Speaker 1: system is just set up for us to fail. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think so. I think people will be furious. Oh,
Speaker 1: I agree, they'd be furious. I just don't know that
Speaker 1: if we'd see like a mass repeat of you know,
Speaker 1: when everyone was sort of taken by surprise, I mean,
Speaker 1: who knows. And hopefully we'll never get there. But I
Speaker 1: do think, I mean, we are all hostage to this
Speaker 1: Republican Party's base, which is It's funny because it's like
Speaker 1: from someone who came from such a liberal family, and
Speaker 1: you know, I had this communist grandfather who would always say, like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's the Koch brothers who are cooking the
Speaker 1: books and cooking the elections, and they're you know, the
Speaker 1: Bushes and the Koch brothers, and they are out of
Speaker 1: power in a certain way. It's true. Look, I'd love
Speaker 1: to be wrong that there's a chance that Trump becomes
Speaker 1: president again. If I'm not wrong about that, I'd love
Speaker 1: to be wrong that he would not be met with
Speaker 1: such fierce pushback as he was when he won the
Speaker 1: first time. As you said, hopefully we'll never live to
Speaker 1: see either of those things. But I do worry. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that there's a lot of people out there
Speaker 1: watching Trump not get charged with crimes he committed around
Speaker 1: the election stealing classified documents. He got away with shaking
Speaker 1: down Ukraine, he got away with cooperating with Russia in
Speaker 1: the twenty sixteen election. And the one thing he didn't
Speaker 1: get away with was stealing the election. But he tried,
Speaker 1: and he's not being charged for that either. And so
Speaker 1: it's just like what good is showing up in the
Speaker 1: street and like making our opposition to what he's up
Speaker 1: to heard, when at the end of the day, it
Speaker 1: doesn't actually work. Thank you, Brian, all right, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for having me. Alyssa Court is the executive
Speaker 1: director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author
Speaker 1: of Bootstraft, Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream Welcome Too
Speaker 1: Fast Politics, Alyssa Court. Oh, thank you very much. Molly.
Speaker 1: I want to call you Malls. You can call me
Speaker 1: whatever you want. A list, okay, our long time friends.
Speaker 1: So I want to talk to you first, tell us
Speaker 1: what the name of it. I don't want to Butcher
Speaker 1: the name. This is my first goal, do no evil
Speaker 1: to the English language. So explain to us what your
Speaker 1: organization is called and what it does. Okay, so it's
Speaker 1: called the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. And for a while
Speaker 1: I was like, we need to call this, you know,
Speaker 1: the Opportunity Writing World or something, you know, incredibly optimistic
Speaker 1: neoliberal name. But I actually think it's good that it's
Speaker 1: truth in advertising Economic Hardship Reporting Project. It's exactly what
Speaker 1: we do. It's a media nonprofit. More than a third
Speaker 1: of our contributors are financially struggling, and it was created
Speaker 1: by Barbara raw Reich. The late Great Barbara Erreich just
Speaker 1: explained us a little bit. The idea was to like
Speaker 1: get reporting from about economic hardship from people who are
Speaker 1: actually experiencing economic hardship. Am I right, Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: some of it is about that by people who work,
Speaker 1: does you know, domestic workers and adjuncts and factory workers
Speaker 1: and experienced homelessness. Right, So that's by me thirty seven
Speaker 1: percent or so of our contributors, and then the rest
Speaker 1: are sort of midlisters, I say, like people who would
Speaker 1: otherwise probably be unable to afford to write long form
Speaker 1: journalism about inequality. But other than that, they're you know,
Speaker 1: they've got us sort of middle class journalism, independent journalism
Speaker 1: practice going, right. That's like the majority of the people
Speaker 1: who write for us, And they also take photos and
Speaker 1: they make films and de illustration. So I want to
Speaker 1: ask you a little bit about Barbara Aaron Right, if
Speaker 1: you just want to say like a minute or two
Speaker 1: about Barbara Aaron Right. She just died. She was pretty
Speaker 1: much one of the great writers on this topic. Would
Speaker 1: you just like give us like a two second for
Speaker 1: those of us who are not completely writ in on
Speaker 1: the history of Barbara Arnwright, a little bit about her legacy. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: Barbara Aaron Reich wrote twenty one books. She was one
Speaker 1: of the first people to write about did wives and whiches.
Speaker 1: She wrote about cancer culture and the way that women's
Speaker 1: illness is commercialized, and she wrote about poverty and labor
Speaker 1: and that's what she's most famous for. But she was
Speaker 1: really a wild, wonderful mind and reporter and social critic,
Speaker 1: and I was very close to her. So I was
Speaker 1: very sad when she died. And we had worked together
Speaker 1: very closely for almost a decade on this project. Which
Speaker 1: is sort of like, if you think of it, like
Speaker 1: the Marshall Project does for the penal system, the prison system,
Speaker 1: what this Hardship Project does for poverty. I think that's fair, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: completely or inequality, because yeah, in a quantity. The reason
Speaker 1: I make that distinction is I think we need to
Speaker 1: talk about financial struggle like up and down the gradient.
Speaker 1: I mean, not all the way up, but not all
Speaker 1: the up existed for a reason, right, I mean there
Speaker 1: are people who are financially struggling who are making forty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars in American cities, right right, right, right, No,
Speaker 1: I think that's a really good point. So now I
Speaker 1: want to talk to you about the book which is
Speaker 1: called Bootstrapped, Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. A little
Speaker 1: bit counterintuitive, right yeah, because I see the American Dream.
Speaker 1: First of all, I see it is something is different
Speaker 1: than what is now understood to be the American Dream.
Speaker 1: When it was coined in nineteen thirty one, it meant
Speaker 1: something more capacious, it meant something more collective the original
Speaker 1: definition of it, and it's become over time. And I
Speaker 1: do this with many different terms that have to do
Speaker 1: with being self made or self actualized in this country,
Speaker 1: it's become bastardized. Its meaning has been in since lost,
Speaker 1: and it's just all about financial success and gain and
Speaker 1: doing it all on our own. So I'm trying to
Speaker 1: take that back, take the collective meaning of things like
Speaker 1: the American dream back. So explained to me a little
Speaker 1: bit about what the lie of the American dream is, right, Well,
Speaker 1: the American dream is you're going to be able to
Speaker 1: make it just out of hard work on your own,
Speaker 1: no matter what strata, and you're born to and all
Speaker 1: you have to do is you know, nowadays it's hustle
Speaker 1: or rise and grind and your thrive and prosper. And
Speaker 1: it's wrong on so many levels. It's wrong in terms of,
Speaker 1: you know, what people know about mobility and what it
Speaker 1: takes to survive in terms of medical care and you know,
Speaker 1: getting educated. And also it's wrong in terms of the
Speaker 1: fact that we have to do it alone because everything,
Speaker 1: as I write in the book, is everyone and everything
Speaker 1: is dependent on something and someone else. And that's one
Speaker 1: of the great ways that the American dream has been distorted.
Speaker 1: That's somehow we're supposed to do this either on our
Speaker 1: own or just with our little families without help. I mean,
Speaker 1: in some ways it's not unlike and again this has
Speaker 1: been widely made fun of, but it's true. I want
Speaker 1: to bring it up because I think it's really, really true.
Speaker 1: You know, Hillary Clinton talking about how it's hard to
Speaker 1: raise a child alone. Yeah, it takes a village. I
Speaker 1: was trying with this book, honestly, to find language that
Speaker 1: was less corny, right, you know, I mean I think
Speaker 1: the village. You're like, oh gosh, it's also appropriative. It
Speaker 1: been aged well as a phrase, but I think the
Speaker 1: meaning of it aged well. I mean, I think the
Speaker 1: meaning it's more truth than ever. It takes a village,
Speaker 1: you know, in the pandemic, we saw that on a
Speaker 1: grand scale, right, yeah, I mean that was my thinking
Speaker 1: is like the lie of this is this idea that
Speaker 1: a lot of people are self made, when in fact
Speaker 1: they come from wealthy families, or not wealthy families, but
Speaker 1: families that were very upper middle class and would basically wealthy.
Speaker 1: They came from families where parents were able, where grandparents
Speaker 1: were able to give them money to start their businesses.
Speaker 1: I mean, so many of these stories are like with
Speaker 1: a mere ten thousand dollars loan, and I was able
Speaker 1: to you know, and if you think about things like
Speaker 1: that statistic where you see that the average black family
Speaker 1: has so much less money on hand than the average
Speaker 1: white family, I mean you see the sort of vestiges
Speaker 1: of slavery in the To me continuing, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: fewer than half of the American adults, like something like
Speaker 1: forty seven percent say they have enough emergency funds to
Speaker 1: cover three months of expenses. And that this was in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty. And the mobility numbers the same as study
Speaker 1: is that you know, you had a ninety two percent
Speaker 1: chance if you're born in the forties of sort of
Speaker 1: meeting or exceeding your parents earnings and stature, and if
Speaker 1: you're born in the eighties, you had a fifty percent chance.
Speaker 1: So just sheer mobility, you know, across it's gone down.
Speaker 1: I would love you to just talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about that more because I think that's the largest complaint
Speaker 1: that we see that I certainly see, is this idea
Speaker 1: that you can't move in this world anymore. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, intergenerational mobility is so much greater now in
Speaker 1: countries that we would have expected there to be more
Speaker 1: limited mobilic We think of America again, This is part
Speaker 1: of the American dream as a place where you can
Speaker 1: change where you're born, but that doesn't turn out to
Speaker 1: be the k in many instances. And I mean part
Speaker 1: of what I tried to do in this book is
Speaker 1: also talk to people for whom that was true, because
Speaker 1: I think it's really important for me. It's like real people, right,
Speaker 1: like what's going on, what do they want to be
Speaker 1: and what has held them back? And tell us like
Speaker 1: what their budget is, you know, what's their day like.
Speaker 1: And that to me was it's always helpful to kind
Speaker 1: of wrap your arms around what ordinary people's experiences. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's really interesting. So tell me a little
Speaker 1: bit about that. Yeah, I mean I talk to someone
Speaker 1: who had to use a Go fund Me campaign to
Speaker 1: raise money for he had renal failure. He was in dialysis, right,
Speaker 1: And that's a very common story people needing to make
Speaker 1: to raise money for their their medical bills. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's one of the largest sectors of Go fund Me.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like a go fund me has become
Speaker 1: a social service provider, right, which is totally nuts. This
Speaker 1: guy did this and so he could kind of pay
Speaker 1: for ubers and stuff to get ambulance to get to
Speaker 1: the facility and also to like not only do his
Speaker 1: medical care, but fix his car and pay for help
Speaker 1: pay for the small apartment he and his mother's share,
Speaker 1: and he's on disability. I also talked to another person
Speaker 1: who had go fund me to raise money for school
Speaker 1: lunches because extremely poor kids were able to get school
Speaker 1: lunches without this thing called lunch shaming. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you've heard about this, where they stamp something on
Speaker 1: the kid's hands if their bills are unpaid. But in
Speaker 1: this community, these were working class people, so they may
Speaker 1: just the parents may just a little too much for
Speaker 1: the school lunches to be fully subsidized. And so this
Speaker 1: lunch shaming was happening, and this woman is in Montana
Speaker 1: had to create a whole go fund me to pay
Speaker 1: for school lunches in her in her district. But you know,
Speaker 1: I hope it isn't just depressing this book Bootstrapped. It's
Speaker 1: it's also filled with stories about people do overcome, but
Speaker 1: they almost always overcome through working with others, Like it's
Speaker 1: not just going to be this boot strapping myth that
Speaker 1: that's getting them by, So that that's sort of the point.
Speaker 1: What would you say, if you were to say that
Speaker 1: the sort of secret is here, of like, if you
Speaker 1: were to tell us what the lie was, the lie
Speaker 1: of the American Dream, what is it? Well, some of
Speaker 1: it is in the very origins of the people who
Speaker 1: wrote some of the great texts of the American Dream.
Speaker 1: And I'm thinking you're Horatio Alger. Yeah, you've heard the
Speaker 1: phrase Horatio Alger story, right, Yeah, explain to us what
Speaker 1: that is and who that is and how he's relevant. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Horatio Alger story. I mean, look, Trump talked about
Speaker 1: his father having a Ratio Alger story, like no, but
Speaker 1: Michael Moore said, the Ratio Alger story was like the
Speaker 1: drug of our country. You know, people use it casually
Speaker 1: all the time. But when I read the books, I
Speaker 1: saw that the lie there was. First all, the Horatio
Speaker 1: Alger story was always about they were novels. They were
Speaker 1: really really bad novels. You wrote over a hundred of them,
Speaker 1: wildly popular, and they always have this like handsome, very
Speaker 1: young man, like teenager selling peddling ties or hats or
Speaker 1: like kind of like a stock boy. And then he
Speaker 1: always meets of a rich old man. And that is
Speaker 1: the Horatio Alger story. And this rich old man helps him.
Speaker 1: So basically it's a totally homosocial classic story, like it's
Speaker 1: something out of the Victoria novel, except it would be
Speaker 1: a marriage, right, or like a rich guy marries because
Speaker 1: they can't be honest about the way power works, like
Speaker 1: an old man who's probably whatever quite taken with these teenagers, right,
Speaker 1: these real teenagers. Instead, it becomes a story of hard work,
Speaker 1: pluck and luck was the phrase they used. And so
Speaker 1: it's like the Horash Algier story itself was a lie.
Speaker 1: And then Horatio Alger was a pedophile, and so you know,
Speaker 1: this Horatio Alger prize was something that Clarence Thomas was into.
Speaker 1: The Ratio Alger society re again was into it, I mean,
Speaker 1: and I was like, do they know that Harrash Alger
Speaker 1: is a man who has chased out of the church
Speaker 1: because a minister for a sailing to boys. Wow? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the lesson here is if a rich guy is
Speaker 1: coming to help you, he might have another motive. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Is that fair? That's a fair assumption. Yeah. So your
Speaker 1: thesis is that we need to move more towards community
Speaker 1: and less towards a strange rich guy who gives you
Speaker 1: money and then might want something in return, Yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: a strangers guy who gives you money or takes up
Speaker 1: your time. We've seen in the last ten years in particular,
Speaker 1: where that leads us. How do we as a culture
Speaker 1: start to get healthier. It's funny. A lot of books, right, Molly,
Speaker 1: have like chapter at the end where you're like, this
Speaker 1: is my solutions chapters. Right. I fell in love with
Speaker 1: these solutions and they became the sort of meat of
Speaker 1: the book. And some of them are kind of personal,
Speaker 1: like things we can do within ourselves and in our lives.
Speaker 1: Some of them are who we vote forward, who we're
Speaker 1: bringing in as political leaders, and some of them are
Speaker 1: like mutual aid and workers cooperatives and kind of I
Speaker 1: guess spinachy solutions, but they're real. You know, there are
Speaker 1: things that are happening now that are on the rise,
Speaker 1: something called participatory budgeting, where people in cities are now
Speaker 1: increasingly citizens increasingly talking about how their local city budgets
Speaker 1: are spent. And you can do this if you're in
Speaker 1: New York, if in your Seattle, you can join this thing.
Speaker 1: It's called PV. And you know, there's found a bunch
Speaker 1: of maybe five more of these kind of things, But
Speaker 1: the personal part of it was something that I had
Speaker 1: started trying to do, almost like a mantra, which is
Speaker 1: saying who helped me? Who made me who I am?
Speaker 1: What forces have gone into everything, even this book, you know,
Speaker 1: And but in my life, like what is helping me?
Speaker 1: Instead of being like grateful in this kind of hashtag
Speaker 1: grateful way that doesn't seem to really go anywhere. It
Speaker 1: can be kind of deeply individualistic too. I feel like
Speaker 1: attributing is more of an important thing to do in
Speaker 1: one's life, right. I think that's a really good point.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know, for me, I got sober when
Speaker 1: I was nineteen, and one of the things that I
Speaker 1: saw in my own life was that you really can't
Speaker 1: get sober with that our community, right, Like I got
Speaker 1: to burn a twelve star program, which I continue to
Speaker 1: be in today, an anonymous program, but we won't worry
Speaker 1: about that. I think that there really is a sense
Speaker 1: that a lot of the community that saves us is
Speaker 1: not part of the American ideology absolutely. I mean, there is,
Speaker 1: of course this alternative American story that does stress community.
Speaker 1: And I mean some of it's related to the church,
Speaker 1: but some of it's think and like barn raising and
Speaker 1: you know that kind of thing. But some of it
Speaker 1: is the history of mutual aid, which you know what
Speaker 1: mutual aids are, right, Can you talk about that for
Speaker 1: a minute. Sure, So mutual aids, especially during the pandemic,
Speaker 1: became really popular. If you live in a city, you
Speaker 1: may have seen, you know, or anywhere, you may have
Speaker 1: seen signs or like oh, come, you know, bringing groceries
Speaker 1: to your elderly neighbor, you know, and people would just
Speaker 1: do that, and just many sprouted up, like immediately after
Speaker 1: the lockdown started, and I looked into a few and
Speaker 1: hung out with some of the people who work in
Speaker 1: the global one in my neighborhood. And so that mutual aid, though,
Speaker 1: that structure where people help each other thought a charity
Speaker 1: because maybe it is a little like your twelve step program.
Speaker 1: Each person's helping each other, even though it may go
Speaker 1: one way. Mostly where the elderly neighbors are the ones
Speaker 1: mostly being helped supposedly, right, the person who's bringing that
Speaker 1: food in those medications or whatever can get that themselves
Speaker 1: too if they need it. So that rearranges charity, so
Speaker 1: it's not just like top down where you have some
Speaker 1: you know, noddle person benefactor rolling out soup. But you
Speaker 1: have people really on the ground helping each other. And
Speaker 1: it turned out what I looked into the mutual aids
Speaker 1: were popular in the nineteenth century, but it was all
Speaker 1: almost on the black community, and that was a history
Speaker 1: that I was like, verities to be a hidden figure
Speaker 1: about this, you know, if it had figures seriously, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is incredible. They're all over the South and even
Speaker 1: in California. I found that really interesting and inspiring and
Speaker 1: that this was an alternative American dream that again we
Speaker 1: fard to little about. Yeah, I'll say, I mean, that's
Speaker 1: really interesting. So, Alyssa, if you have one last sort
Speaker 1: of line, a sort of selling line for the book,
Speaker 1: tell us why people need to read this book? Well,
Speaker 1: can I give you two? Yeah, you can give me ten. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, Well you can't give me ten, but you
Speaker 1: can give me two. Well, one thing that I'm trying
Speaker 1: to teach people about is what I call the art
Speaker 1: of dependence, and that it dependence is something that can
Speaker 1: be a craft and a skill and an ability and
Speaker 1: something we should cherish and we shouldn't just be trying
Speaker 1: to be independent all the time and muscling through and
Speaker 1: siloed in our families. But that dependence is actually something
Speaker 1: to be honored and dependence pride, if you will. And
Speaker 1: that's kind of the through line of this book, like
Speaker 1: let's stop this Horatio Alger story which was allied to
Speaker 1: begin with, and you know, let's praise the ways that
Speaker 1: we need help from other people and the ways that
Speaker 1: we give help. So that's one thesis and then the
Speaker 1: others that we have to go into the past to
Speaker 1: get to the future. And what I mean by that
Speaker 1: is that we actually had, as I said, this alternative
Speaker 1: American dream that existed in different forms, that existed in
Speaker 1: these mutual aids and workers' co ops in the black
Speaker 1: community in the nineteenth century and some of the early twentieth,
Speaker 1: and then it existed in the Homestead Act in eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty two, which was the biggest land giveaway in American history.
Speaker 1: And that is that was a complete kind of moment
Speaker 1: of beneficence right from the state and people were getting
Speaker 1: things for free. Right. People have conveniently forgotten that the
Speaker 1: same the same people who are saying, oh, you please
Speaker 1: don't get college debt relief right, their families probably benefited
Speaker 1: from the Homestead act right the GI bill, we're returning
Speaker 1: veterans after World War Two would get housing and education. Like,
Speaker 1: I think we need to look to some of these
Speaker 1: earlier forms of what the American dream meant and reclaim them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so interesting, Thank you so much. Let's accord. Oh, you're
Speaker 1: so welcome all Molly Jung Fast Jesse Cannon. That Rick Scott,
Speaker 1: he's still fighting to be the thought leader of the
Speaker 1: Republican Party, which you would think would be an easy
Speaker 1: race to win, but he still fails at it. A
Speaker 1: lot of quotes around thought and leader. This is not
Speaker 1: a visual medium, but if there was, if you could
Speaker 1: see me quote treating like mad. Yes, let me just
Speaker 1: say Rick Scott wants the death penalty for school shooting
Speaker 1: because how better to prevent killing than with more killing? Yes,
Speaker 1: especially when most of the people who do these shootings
Speaker 1: have a suicide mission and they want to die during
Speaker 1: it really is going to help the turret right exactly. Again,
Speaker 1: Let's never deal with the AR fifteenth. Let's never deal
Speaker 1: with the gun that's used in all the mass shootings.
Speaker 1: Let's deal with everything else. Stupid, but what we should
Speaker 1: expect from a politician from the Great State of Florida.
Speaker 1: That's not true. There are some very smart politicians in Florida,
Speaker 1: like our friend Maxwell Frost, friend of the pod, but
Speaker 1: dear God, they are not sending their best that Republican Party.
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.