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 Donald Trump has reversed his stance
Speaker 1: on TikTok shortly after a major donor talk to him.
Speaker 1: We have such a great show for you today. The
Speaker 1: New York Times Nick Coruscinity tells us about Republicans' latest.
Speaker 2: Moves to PURBs the voter rolls.
Speaker 1: Then we'll talk to Frank McCort about his new book,
Speaker 1: Our Biggest Fight, Reclaiming liberty, humanity and dignity.
Speaker 2: In the Digital Age. But first we have the host
Speaker 2: of the.
Speaker 1: Mary Trump Show, the One, the Only Mary Trump. Welcome
Speaker 1: back Too Fast Politics, Mary Trump.
Speaker 3: And Molly, how's it going.
Speaker 1: I was going to do a whole introduction about how
Speaker 1: much I like you, but I felt I would spare
Speaker 1: you because I feel like, despite having the last name Trump,
Speaker 1: you are not a person for whom a five minutes
Speaker 1: soliloquy about how much you like them is an ad.
Speaker 4: Oh, I know, it makes me wildly not uncomfortable.
Speaker 2: In fact, I thought I would save you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you know, as a NEPO baby myself, you're
Speaker 1: obviously not a Nepo baby, have a more complicated relationship
Speaker 1: with your I like to call them qualifiers because it's
Speaker 1: a little homage to alan On but with your famous
Speaker 1: qualifier uncle. But I have a famous qualifier mother. And
Speaker 1: so when you know my sort of qualifier does something embarrassing,
Speaker 1: I feel quite a lot of embarrassment. Now, obviously you
Speaker 1: are quite far removed, and you have done everything beyond
Speaker 1: everything you could do to try and stop the freight
Speaker 1: train that is your uncle. But I want to ask you,
Speaker 1: as you see Lara Trump take over the RNC, not
Speaker 1: even Don Junior's wife, but Eric's wife discuss I.
Speaker 4: Must die, Yes, I will.
Speaker 5: I just want to start by thing that it's different,
Speaker 5: like I don't take Donald's horrible behavior personally, like that
Speaker 5: doesn't embarrass me.
Speaker 4: What horrifies me and hurts me.
Speaker 5: And wounds me still to this day, is how many
Speaker 5: people are okay with it and enable him to do worse.
Speaker 5: You know, it's not his mocking President Biden's stutter, which
Speaker 5: just as a human being is it, you know, offends
Speaker 5: me to the core.
Speaker 4: It's all of the people in the audience who laughed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, I mean I get it.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, it's just like, that's that's what we need
Speaker 5: to worry about, and here we are. The Republican National
Speaker 5: Committee is now, as somebody wrote on Twitter, I think
Speaker 5: a subsidiary of the moment's shop known as the drub organization,
Speaker 5: which is infuriating in a totally different way. On the
Speaker 5: one hand, it's just a dangerous indicator of the dark
Speaker 5: slide we're on towards some fanata republic, which is the
Speaker 5: old kind of republic. Thought old is qualified to rug,
Speaker 5: But it's just that. Also, another reminder is that there
Speaker 5: will always be somebody or some entity, whether it's the
Speaker 5: RNC throwing the reins over him or Trubb posting bond
Speaker 5: for him, there will always be somebody to bail him out,
Speaker 5: which is why we need to figure out a better
Speaker 5: way to box him in, because clearly.
Speaker 3: Money's not going to do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's such an interesting thing because when you're talking
Speaker 1: about that, and I'd love to talk for another minute
Speaker 1: about that, the story about how Trump did make fun
Speaker 1: of Biden for the stutter and the crowd loved it,
Speaker 1: and that was a sort of seminal moment in like
Speaker 1: the scraping of the bottom in which we are living.
Speaker 1: So I do think like that is really important thing
Speaker 1: to just sort of pause and think about for a minute.
Speaker 1: But the RNC giving itself up to Trump, I actually
Speaker 1: think that ultimately this is one of these careful of
Speaker 1: what you wish for things, right, Like the rn C
Speaker 1: Rona had a relationship with a lot of the big donors.
Speaker 1: Big donors didn't want to give to the R and
Speaker 1: C because very wealthy people Obviously being wealthy is not
Speaker 1: what makes them understand it. But sophisticated investors, I think,
Speaker 1: know that that money is going to Trump's legal fees
Speaker 1: and not too down ballid candidates, and so for them,
Speaker 1: I think they were hesitant to give money to Trump.
Speaker 1: And what I was explained to me was that earlier on,
Speaker 1: when Nicki Haley was still in it, a lot of
Speaker 1: large dollar donors gave to Nicki Haley because they felt
Speaker 1: that she represented a sort of more normal Republican party
Speaker 1: tax cuts without the fascism, right, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, that's what they all want.
Speaker 1: But now she's out and the RNC needs money, and
Speaker 1: so Trump decided to put Lara in there. But Lara
Speaker 1: has a big problem, which is even though she's very
Speaker 1: attractive and they use her face. Now, I'm sure you
Speaker 1: saw that on the r and see fundraising emails.
Speaker 2: There are large dollar donors.
Speaker 1: Who are probably pretty pissed off that Trump fired all
Speaker 1: their people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, at sixty encounting, I thought.
Speaker 5: I thought putting her her face on the blood red
Speaker 5: banner was vickery Man very well done.
Speaker 6: Was it?
Speaker 5: I agree that they agree with you that it is
Speaker 5: like the dog catching the car. Yeah, okay, Now, well,
Speaker 5: now we're going to bankrupt the RNC. Even though Republicans
Speaker 5: don't seem ever to remember this, Donald does nothing but
Speaker 5: bankrupt things and waste money and throw money away. You know,
Speaker 5: the fact that there's a real possibility he did not
Speaker 5: have the eighty eight million dollars to come up to
Speaker 5: this bond is insane.
Speaker 4: So this is that.
Speaker 1: Well, and then and FYI, there's still more money that
Speaker 1: Trump needs to come up with a lot more money.
Speaker 5: Half a billillion dollars more money, and probably more than that,
Speaker 5: because he just defamed eating Carold again over the weekend.
Speaker 5: So I know it's right if he's going to be
Speaker 5: able to find other people to pay his wan of trouble,
Speaker 5: there's no incentive for him to stop defrauding, defaming, et cetera.
Speaker 5: And this whole RNC takeover is just another mechanism through
Speaker 5: which he plans to use other people's money to get
Speaker 5: himself out of trouble, because that's one of the very
Speaker 5: few things he's good at, is burning through other people's money.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 5: The truth of the matter is that Lara Trump is
Speaker 5: just as qualified to the organization as Donald. So they're
Speaker 5: in serious, serious trouble. And at this point, I think
Speaker 5: the only hope for the party, not that I'd care,
Speaker 5: but the future of the Republican Party is if Nickie
Speaker 5: Hailey not to endorse Donald and try to draw a line,
Speaker 5: you know, otherwise it's it's his party now and forever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, now, I think that's right.
Speaker 1: And I also think that if you wanted to have
Speaker 1: a republic Party that was normal at some point, and
Speaker 1: again I don't, so you know, I'm with fuck I'm.
Speaker 2: Happy to have see them all go the way of
Speaker 2: the wigs.
Speaker 1: But if you were a conservative who wanted lower taxes
Speaker 1: but not authoritarianism, you would tell Nikki Haley to keep
Speaker 1: her powder dry and to wait this one out and
Speaker 1: to come back in twenty twenty five when the bloodbath
Speaker 1: is over. And try to rebuild from the ashes, and
Speaker 1: maybe that's how that plays out, or maybe Trump wins
Speaker 1: and we're all in Gitmo together with Jimmy Kimmel.
Speaker 5: Yes, Jimmy Kimble and you and I and others have
Speaker 5: seventy nine days to actually, so it's not.
Speaker 1: That you know, thanks thank you, Mary, thank you first,
Speaker 1: that's seventy nine days.
Speaker 2: A life can happen in seventy nine days.
Speaker 1: Side of residence. A good point. That's what's so weird
Speaker 1: about this moment in American life is like every sort
Speaker 1: of rational instinct I have says that Trump is absolute.
Speaker 1: Just look, Trump is running for president, so he doesn't
Speaker 1: go to jail.
Speaker 2: I mean I didn't even say that. That was.
Speaker 1: Republican one of the Republicans running against him, you know,
Speaker 1: and the primary who said, you know, he's running so
Speaker 1: he doesn't go to jail. So I mean, he's running
Speaker 1: so he doesn't go to jail. And Republicans are still
Speaker 1: scared of him because of Twitter, right, I mean that's
Speaker 1: what this is, or because they're worried that they'll get primary.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's all this is.
Speaker 5: It's absolutely mind blowing that in eight years, you know,
Speaker 5: he is completely this weak, pathetic and now quite old
Speaker 5: man has remade his entire party into his image. And
Speaker 5: where do you go from there? Because if things go
Speaker 5: the way they should go and he loses, and the
Speaker 5: fact that we've had to worry about it is such
Speaker 5: a rustic indictment of our system. But we'll have to
Speaker 5: deal with that at another time. If he loses, who
Speaker 5: will ever trust this party again?
Speaker 4: This party has.
Speaker 5: No room to pivot to anything else, which I agree
Speaker 5: with you is a very good thing. Let it burn
Speaker 5: to the ground. We need something entirely out. We need
Speaker 5: two parties. One is a progressive liberal party and the
Speaker 5: other one the central central left party.
Speaker 7: That's what we did in this country.
Speaker 2: Listen, I'll take it man. Yeah, man, you know you've.
Speaker 5: Never tried that, and we've tried to such a right
Speaker 5: and fascist, So let's try sent your left and progressive please.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that sort of seems like where we are. So
Speaker 2: Lara's going to run the RNC.
Speaker 1: Republicans are going to try to make the case that
Speaker 1: Trump is totally fine and that Biden is the one
Speaker 1: with the problems. On Monday, Trump called in to squawk
Speaker 1: Box was it Squawkbox? CNBC? His guy, his Roy Cohen
Speaker 1: and CNBC. By the way, I feel so bad for
Speaker 1: all the serious people who work at CNBC who like
Speaker 1: have to live in like mortal embarrassment of that Joe guy.
Speaker 2: But anyway, called in spent.
Speaker 1: Like two hours an hour, I mean the amount of
Speaker 1: time Oh yeah, and said and was all to it,
Speaker 1: like just rambling, had thoughts about oil. You know, a
Speaker 1: lot of like hot takes from the nineteen eighties. What
Speaker 1: the last time Trump read a newspaper and it was bad?
Speaker 2: I mean, how do you square that?
Speaker 5: It seems pretty simple to me. The Corkbork media has,
Speaker 5: for whatever reason decided.
Speaker 1: I'm going to just tell you CNN's take on it.
Speaker 1: Trump's free wheelling CNBC interview gives glare willing the campaign
Speaker 1: to come. Yeah, that was at the post of CNN.
Speaker 2: CNN and free whilling.
Speaker 5: But this is the thing, It's like, why didn't and
Speaker 5: Donald to be democracy?
Speaker 2: True? True says it's bad. Biden says it's good.
Speaker 5: It's like one of them incited in its direction to
Speaker 5: overthrow one the other one.
Speaker 4: I got.
Speaker 5: So this is this is what we're deal like with
Speaker 5: a corporate media that when they do find something. Donald
Speaker 5: has daughter said Nitties where they put it on page
Speaker 5: twenty five. Otherwise it's all just baked in. He is
Speaker 5: a rapist, So what do we need to talk about
Speaker 5: that for any I mean, come on, we know that
Speaker 5: he is. I cannot believe we're still having this conversation
Speaker 5: since twenty fifteen. But it's they normalize all of it.
Speaker 5: So that and between that and the delays in the judiciary,
Speaker 5: which topic for you know, an other time, because that
Speaker 5: is that is actually more dangerous and I think in
Speaker 5: the long term more dangerous by delating. Thank you Merrek Garland.
Speaker 5: The January sixth trial and the DIA pument stuff. What's
Speaker 5: the message people who don't pay that much attention get
Speaker 5: and are maybe inclined to want the status quo not
Speaker 5: to rock any bootes. The message is it can't be
Speaker 5: that important. If it's taking so long, what's the big deal.
Speaker 1: Then I'm just going to interject a little bit of
Speaker 1: Donald This is from the interview. I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: a pioneer. Trump said of the indictments and the judgments
Speaker 1: against him. What's happening is we have to be very careful.
Speaker 2: By the way.
Speaker 1: I love the idea that this guy is literally just
Speaker 1: running because of the legal challenges, right, Like he's trying
Speaker 1: to make a case that somehow defending Trump and candidate
Speaker 1: Trump are the same person.
Speaker 2: What's happening is we have to be very careful.
Speaker 1: You know, we have a very fragile country, right, This
Speaker 1: is he's talking about his legal cases. Here people are
Speaker 1: rejecting it and they are watching. Wow.
Speaker 5: Okay, so we got projection, and we've got paranoida. We've
Speaker 5: got a description of the interior of his brain.
Speaker 4: Yes, so that's just fine.
Speaker 5: And meanwhile, who is doing anything to tell them otherwise?
Speaker 2: There's no grown up in the Republican Party.
Speaker 5: There's no growd up in the arts. He think about
Speaker 5: what's happening with his cases, which is nothing. He's saying
Speaker 5: everything needs to be delayed because of the immunity case
Speaker 5: in front of the Supreme Court, which is its infinite wisdom.
Speaker 5: Doesn't seem to think it's an emergency. And meanwhile, two
Speaker 5: out of those three fredual cases is on hold because
Speaker 5: of that. He wants the third one on hold, the
Speaker 5: one in New York for election fraud, right, And I
Speaker 5: was just thinking about that this morning. It's like, Okay,
Speaker 5: he's asking for immunity. He's not asking the Supreme Court
Speaker 5: to say that he committed no crime. So can't we
Speaker 5: in the meantime find out if he committed a crime
Speaker 5: and then either way, like if he against community, it
Speaker 5: won't matter, but at least we'll know, Like, it doesn't interfere.
Speaker 5: You have to interfere with a jew indicating the facts
Speaker 5: and evidence, does it?
Speaker 4: It's making me crazy?
Speaker 2: Yes, agreed?
Speaker 1: And I think also what we're seeing here is that
Speaker 1: this whole lie that the Guardrails held No, they didn't
Speaker 1: fuck be hold right, like the guy did an insurrection,
Speaker 1: and all the people down the scale, right, the violent people,
Speaker 1: the people who smeared the feces on the wall of
Speaker 1: the halls of Congress, those people, right, the guy who
Speaker 1: put his feet on the desk of Fancy Pelosi, those people.
Speaker 1: A lot of those people are either in jail or
Speaker 1: paying huge fines. You know who's not in jail or
Speaker 1: paying huge fines?
Speaker 5: Let me guess, did you get me hints? Anybody responsible
Speaker 5: for planning the garden. It's not in jail up to
Speaker 5: an including Doldrop.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 1: But the one good thing I think, and I'm curious
Speaker 1: what you think about this is a number of people
Speaker 1: think that because these sort of lower downs were taken
Speaker 1: in that there's this sense in which these people are
Speaker 1: less likely to do violence. Okay, but I mean it's
Speaker 1: a pretty pathetic bright spot.
Speaker 2: But it's all we have.
Speaker 5: I don't even know if it is a bright spot.
Speaker 5: First of all, on the guard rails didn't hold. And
Speaker 5: by the way, we don't know how the insurrection ended
Speaker 5: yet because it's it's not over.
Speaker 4: They'll part in all of them on day one of
Speaker 4: his staship.
Speaker 5: So it gets a race from history as it practically
Speaker 5: has been.
Speaker 4: Anyway, I don't know.
Speaker 5: I mean, there are all sorts of things that have
Speaker 5: been shown not to be to durance, and he had
Speaker 5: the opportunity, because of the failures of the system, to
Speaker 5: activate even more people, to get them even more angry
Speaker 5: and feel more agreed that I don't think.
Speaker 7: So.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's like the same reason people smoke. I'm
Speaker 5: not going to be the one that gets sick. People
Speaker 5: have ways of convincing themselves that their cause is so
Speaker 5: righteous or you know, the pleasure they get out of
Speaker 5: the activity is so worth it that the consequences don't
Speaker 5: even enter into their consciousness. So we're talking about a
Speaker 5: situation in which if he loses, and especially if the
Speaker 5: the electoral colleges margin is very narrow in Biden state, Bor,
Speaker 5: do we really think people are going to say, well,
Speaker 5: you know, the four years ago people get with now
Speaker 5: they're going to be so trigger intentional and trigger or
Speaker 5: activated or whatever the word you want to use. I
Speaker 5: don't actually think that the rational consideration of consequences is going.
Speaker 3: To come into play for anybody.
Speaker 2: And that's really scary. Mary Trump. I hope my job back.
Speaker 1: I also think you're probably right now that I'm listening
Speaker 1: to you, I think you're probably right. Nick Corruscinity is
Speaker 1: a reporter of The New York Times covering voting and democracy.
Speaker 2: Welcome too Fast.
Speaker 7: Politics, Nick, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: It feels like you've been doing the voter beat a
Speaker 1: little bit. We want to talk to you about Trump's
Speaker 1: allies ramp up campaign targeting voter rolls.
Speaker 2: That's unscary. What does that mean?
Speaker 6: So what this is is kind of like a continuation
Speaker 6: and escalation of what's become a kind of common tact
Speaker 6: among a lot of right wing activists and volunteers and
Speaker 6: some leaders to try and.
Speaker 7: In their minds, clean the voter roles.
Speaker 6: But what they're actually doing is combing through voter roles
Speaker 6: using their own kind of software that they've developed, and
Speaker 6: trying to identify voters that they think are erroneously on
Speaker 6: the roles and challenge them to get them kicked off
Speaker 6: the roles. Now, they're doing this through a bunch of
Speaker 6: different methods, and a few that we've uncumbered are are
Speaker 6: pretty aggressive and might even have like either created a
Speaker 6: loophole or an actual conflict between state law and federal
Speaker 6: law kind of protecting voters from being removed from any
Speaker 6: kind of voting roles, either quickly or without due process.
Speaker 2: I want you to just.
Speaker 1: Talk us through where this is happening and what it
Speaker 1: looked like for my dad, who is actually quite smart,
Speaker 1: but who might not be completely read in on this.
Speaker 6: Sure, so this is happening state by state, and because
Speaker 6: our electoral system in every state, I can't say that
Speaker 6: for sure, because, as I was just about to say,
Speaker 6: the United States electoral systems so decentralized. It runs their
Speaker 6: own elections, and in some states they just punt it
Speaker 6: down to counties, and in some states they even punted
Speaker 6: down to municipalities. So in Michigan, for example, there is
Speaker 6: state law, but they're really run by sixteen hundred you know,
Speaker 6: local election offices at the municipal level. So it's really
Speaker 6: hard to get a national grasp of how wide this
Speaker 6: challenge effort is and you know, kind of exactly how
Speaker 6: aggressive they're going all over the country. Now, we've identified
Speaker 6: some areas. We kind of focused on battleground states because
Speaker 6: that's where you know, this can maybe have a bigger
Speaker 6: impact than twenty twenty four. In almost every battleground state
Speaker 6: there are activists seeking to challenge voters and get them
Speaker 6: removed from the roles, often before the twenty twenty four election.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's a really good point.
Speaker 1: Trump world knows that this is not a game of
Speaker 1: the popular vote.
Speaker 2: This is a game of the swing states.
Speaker 1: But what this would look like is you go in
Speaker 1: to vote and you're you're not on the rolls anymore.
Speaker 7: That would be the kind of worst case scenario that
Speaker 7: could happen.
Speaker 6: And you know, we've iified a few voters who were
Speaker 6: removed from the roles and were kind of unaware of
Speaker 6: it until they were either notified by like activists on
Speaker 6: the other side, or you know, journalists found problems presented
Speaker 6: them to election officials and they had.
Speaker 7: To redo what it done.
Speaker 6: But the worst case scenario would be, yes, that you
Speaker 6: show up to vote and your registration has either been
Speaker 6: canceled or is in a challenged phase where you would
Speaker 6: need to present more than sick, just like a simple
Speaker 6: identification to prove that you are indeed registered to vote,
Speaker 6: live in that jurisdiction and things like that.
Speaker 1: What would be the argument that Trump's people are using
Speaker 1: to de register them?
Speaker 7: Basically so it does vary state to state.
Speaker 6: And these are you know, a very loose network of activists,
Speaker 6: some you know with kind of more direct ties to
Speaker 6: say that the Trump orbit, like Cleida Mitchell, you know
Speaker 6: who was a lawyer in him in twenty twenty to
Speaker 6: return the results?
Speaker 2: Where is Cleita working?
Speaker 6: Clida has a very loose national umbrella organization and challenge
Speaker 6: just has been you know, one of her main pushes.
Speaker 6: She argues that, you know, voter roles are dirty and
Speaker 6: they need to be cleaned up, and no one is
Speaker 6: being disenfranchised if anything, allowing roles to stay quote unquote
Speaker 6: dirty is diluting the votes of legal voters. A common
Speaker 6: argument you hear on the on the conservative side.
Speaker 1: That sounds like a lie though, because we know that
Speaker 1: there aren't illegal and legal voters.
Speaker 2: If you're registered to vote, you are allegal voter.
Speaker 6: What I feel like needs to be said every time,
Speaker 6: but you know, sometimes we operate as if it's just
Speaker 6: an understood thing is that voter of fraud in the
Speaker 6: United States is exceedingly exceedingly rare. Yes, you know, maybe
Speaker 6: dozens or like, you know, in the low hundreds number
Speaker 6: of fraud or fraudulent registration or anything like that every cycle.
Speaker 6: So it's a little bit that happens, but nothing that
Speaker 6: ever comes close to any kind of margin, especially you
Speaker 6: know what far President Trump says, like in the hundreds
Speaker 6: of thousands or tens of thousands. That's right, never happens.
Speaker 6: Bulshit never happened in American history, and you know kind
Speaker 6: of can't given all of the systems we have in
Speaker 6: place to check for that. What allow of these acts
Speaker 6: are doing is seizing on either state laws or procedures
Speaker 6: and trying to go a little bit further than say,
Speaker 6: the average voteral clean up process would go. So for example,
Speaker 6: in Michigan, activists found a law from nineteen fifty four
Speaker 6: that has been kind of rarely used and referenced. And
Speaker 6: what with this law says is that any elector in
Speaker 6: the state can challenge another elector singular with a like
Speaker 6: affid davit or official attestation that they know that that
Speaker 6: elector doesn't live here anymore, and that starts a process
Speaker 6: that you know, sends out a card to the voter
Speaker 6: to check and if they don't respond within thirty days,
Speaker 6: they get removed from the roles.
Speaker 1: So this is like using the Comstock Act to stop
Speaker 1: people from getting the abortion pill in the mail, right Like,
Speaker 1: it wasn't originally made for this, it's just Republicans have
Speaker 1: tried to figure out a way to use it.
Speaker 6: I think it's a little different than the Comsak Act
Speaker 6: because that is certainly like kind of two different areas.
Speaker 6: This is a law from nineteen fifty four that is
Speaker 6: indeed designed to kind of help keep voter rolls clean,
Speaker 6: but it was never designed to be a mass challenge tool,
Speaker 6: which is, you know, kind of what has happened in
Speaker 6: the post twenty twenty election is these activists aren't challenging
Speaker 6: a couple voters here or there. They're challenging hundreds or
Speaker 6: thousands or in Georgia tens of thousands. This was never
Speaker 6: designed for that. Also, it was designed to kind of
Speaker 6: help stop like a lot of mail going to the
Speaker 6: wrong place, and you know, in the fifties when that
Speaker 6: was a popular way of campaigning, it was designed to
Speaker 6: kind of each the burden of campaigning on residents. So
Speaker 6: it certainly wasn't lying to have this mass removal effect
Speaker 6: that also, you know, it was passing fifty four. But
Speaker 6: it is kind of in direct conflict with the NVRA,
Speaker 6: which is a national law that says, you know, if
Speaker 6: a voter is challenged in there, you know, to be
Speaker 6: removed from the roles, you need two federal election cycles
Speaker 6: to go through before they're officially removed. So this sets
Speaker 6: up a conflict where election officials are told by these activists,
Speaker 6: you'd have to remove these people in thirty days.
Speaker 7: You have to follow the law. It's the law.
Speaker 6: If not, you know, we'll raise official complaints. But then
Speaker 6: they're also you know, remembering training that will wait the
Speaker 6: national you know, the NBRA says no, it's two federal
Speaker 6: election cycles. So it's that level of detail that I
Speaker 6: think we're seeing is evidence of this expansion and this
Speaker 6: kind of accelerated effort to try and challenge voters and
Speaker 6: remove them from the roles in these in these key
Speaker 6: battleground states.
Speaker 1: So are there people on the like on the left
Speaker 1: making sure this doesn't happen or is it just going
Speaker 1: along unchecked?
Speaker 6: Well, I think a lot of election officials are starting
Speaker 6: to catch up to this. You know, when you look
Speaker 6: at different states, there's different levels of preparedness. So Michigan
Speaker 6: is kind of perceiving this first big wave right now
Speaker 6: that you know wasn't as prevalent, say in the mid terms,
Speaker 6: Whereas in Georgia in the Senate runoff elections in twenty
Speaker 6: twenty one, you know, kind of immediately following the point
Speaker 6: twenty election that their election day was January sixth, there
Speaker 6: was three hundred and sixty thousand challenges to voters just
Speaker 6: in that small runoff window.
Speaker 7: Wow. In Georgia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because they thought that would help them when you
Speaker 1: don't have to editorialize, I well continue.
Speaker 6: There's actually email evidence showing that they did. Inde'd think
Speaker 6: if you did these challenges and clean these roles, it
Speaker 6: would have helped at least Trump make up his deficit
Speaker 6: in the trial between fair Fight and True The vote
Speaker 6: that email was brought into evidence. But so Georgia County
Speaker 6: election officials are very very very well versed in the
Speaker 6: challenge law and the challenge preparations, so they're you know,
Speaker 6: doing their best to make sure no one is erroneously removed.
Speaker 6: As for like organizations on the left, who are you know,
Speaker 6: seeking to either rate these wrongs or anything.
Speaker 7: There's certainly some.
Speaker 6: I'm sure I haven't been necessarily focused on them in
Speaker 6: my reporting, but there's voting rights groups in every state.
Speaker 6: There's you know, fair fight in Georgia, the CLU that
Speaker 6: you know are looking to prevent this spot. I'm not
Speaker 6: as aware as to their operations or measures at the
Speaker 6: state level.
Speaker 2: So crazy.
Speaker 1: Speaking of voting, there is a Democratic primary in New
Speaker 1: Jersey for the Senate, and you have a really important
Speaker 1: piece about this and basically, and again, as a beneficiary
Speaker 1: of nepotism myself, I always.
Speaker 2: Am hesitant to call it bad.
Speaker 1: No, I'm just kidding, it's bad talk to me about
Speaker 1: these ballots.
Speaker 6: So what's unique in New Jersey is in the primary
Speaker 6: system they have a thing called the line. And what
Speaker 6: that is is it's a specific column or row on
Speaker 6: a physical ballot in each county where a candidate is
Speaker 6: given preferential treatment. So if you in the line and
Speaker 6: say Hudson County for the Democrats, you appear with all
Speaker 6: the other Democrats from county freeholder to senator, all in
Speaker 6: one line. That gives the impression that these are the
Speaker 6: official Democratic candidates. And then other candidates can be all
Speaker 6: over the place. Some are put in what's known as
Speaker 6: ballot Siberia, which is, you know, four to ten columns
Speaker 6: over and you wouldn't even know if unless we're looking
Speaker 6: for them. So it's this system that creates an appearance
Speaker 6: of an official endorsement that if you're a Democratic voter,
Speaker 6: these are the people you should look for, and that's
Speaker 6: on the physical ballot. Now, how the line is one
Speaker 6: varies from county to county, but often in a lot
Speaker 6: of situations, the county party chair carries immense influence over
Speaker 6: the line endorsement. In some it's just the county chair
Speaker 6: and a few others. In some it's this committee and
Speaker 6: others their endorsement helps guide the precinct delegates who are
Speaker 6: going to vote for this, and then in others it
Speaker 6: truly is an open convention. What's really unique about this
Speaker 6: already unique system in New Jersey is that this year
Speaker 6: Danny Murphy, the first lady, is running for a Senate
Speaker 6: and seeking the line in different counties, while her husband,
Speaker 6: Governor Murphy, is still the sitting governor and will be
Speaker 6: next year, so he's in charge of the next two
Speaker 6: budgets for New Jersey. Now, each of these county chairs
Speaker 6: in their personal lives has some business tied to the
Speaker 6: state summer lobbyists, some are lawyers, some have state government
Speaker 6: positions and are drawing state government paychecks. So regardless of
Speaker 6: necessarily you know how they're going to step back and
Speaker 6: view the race between Ammy Murphy and Andy kim is,
Speaker 6: the other most prominent candidate running, They're going to have
Speaker 6: their own financial interest in the back of their head.
Speaker 6: So we saw very quickly as soon as Tammy Murphy announced,
Speaker 6: all of these powerful county chairs fall in line and
Speaker 6: immediately endoor service. Within I think a week, most of
Speaker 6: the major population centers fell, and that bothered a lot
Speaker 6: of Democratic base bullers in New Jersey who saw it
Speaker 6: as either a coronation or an anointing, or kind of
Speaker 6: moving beyond the simple, open primary process that you know
Speaker 6: they claim to support. So as evidence, I think of
Speaker 6: how angry some of these voters are at the open conventions.
Speaker 6: Andy Kim, who was considered an underdog to Tammy Murphy,
Speaker 6: has been winning most of these open conventions, including one
Speaker 6: in Mommut which kind of set the pace for exactly
Speaker 6: how this primary is starting to play out. So it's
Speaker 6: this weird system in New Jersey that's always had a
Speaker 6: little bit to a lot of insider powers, smoke filled
Speaker 6: back rooms, back dealing, that this year was so much
Speaker 6: more at the forefront simply due to the dynamics of
Speaker 6: the first lady running while the sitting governor is still
Speaker 6: in office and will be in office next year.
Speaker 2: That is crazy.
Speaker 1: And really the ballot staff is really unusual, Like there
Speaker 1: are forty nine other states and nobody else has.
Speaker 7: That as far as I know, That's.
Speaker 2: What Andy told us. Yeah, it could be wrong.
Speaker 6: It would shock me because I mean, granted, I'm from
Speaker 6: New Jersey and a proud, proud and loud New Jersey
Speaker 6: and but I've you know, written a couple articles about
Speaker 6: this over the past five years and have never heard
Speaker 6: anyone else say, oh, this is how we do it.
Speaker 3: You know it.
Speaker 6: Certainly maybe they did years ago it certainly has, you know,
Speaker 6: those relics of political machines, and New Jersey is one
Speaker 6: of the few states where, like political machines really do
Speaker 6: still matter. About six or seven years ago, George north
Speaker 6: Cross was at the height of his power as this
Speaker 6: unelected but powerful insurance broker from South Jersey who really
Speaker 6: commanded the entire South Jersey delegation and could you know,
Speaker 6: force ben governors to as will both Murphy and former
Speaker 6: Governor Chris Christy. Now there's you know, the hundred in
Speaker 6: county politically machine, that's the most popular county populist, so
Speaker 6: they move or as most Democratic voters, so they can
Speaker 6: move a lot. So New Jersey still is very much
Speaker 6: a political machine state, whereas in other states we've seen
Speaker 6: machines completely crumble and fall.
Speaker 7: Just you know, looking at AOC's.
Speaker 6: Election that was actually a long time, which it feels
Speaker 6: it's like a few years ago.
Speaker 2: I want to get to a PC. He wrote.
Speaker 1: Pretty recently, racial turnout gap has widened with a Weekend
Speaker 1: Voting Rights Act. So in twenty thirteen, the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: Justice Roberts Weekend that some of these protections were no
Speaker 1: longer necessary and surprise, surprise, what happened.
Speaker 7: Well, what's kind of always been presumed is that when
Speaker 7: you've removed the kind of the most critical part of
Speaker 7: the Voting Rights Act, that it would have negative impact
Speaker 7: on communities of color and turn out among voters of color.
Speaker 7: But up until this Brennan study that you know, was
Speaker 7: completed a few weeks ago, those attempts at kind of
Speaker 7: quantifying this possible change was left to either exit polling,
Speaker 7: or opinion surveys or the census, all of which are
Speaker 7: like a little bit more imperfect than what Brennan decided
Speaker 7: to do, which was take about a billion voter files
Speaker 7: from multiple elections since twenty thirteen and assess exactly what
Speaker 7: has happened in all the counties and states that were
Speaker 7: covered by this part of the Voting Rights Act that
Speaker 7: was changed in twenty thirteen. And what they found was that,
Speaker 7: you know, it was a five percent difference that had
Speaker 7: the Shelby decision not happened, the racial gap in these
Speaker 7: counties and states would have been five percent lower than
Speaker 7: it is right now. And five percent is a significant
Speaker 7: margin in modern elections. I mean, so many as swing
Speaker 7: states you know, are within two to three in some
Speaker 7: of these counties that were. You know, under section five
Speaker 7: are massive counties.
Speaker 6: Harris County, you know, in Texas is bigger than I
Speaker 6: think twenty three states in terms of population.
Speaker 7: That's home to Houston.
Speaker 6: What they found was, you know, kind of a statistical
Speaker 6: proof that the Shelby County decision did indeed exacerbate the
Speaker 6: racial turnout gap, and that it beyond other like qualifiers
Speaker 6: that people have often sought. So it persists across class, income,
Speaker 6: education lines, even in poorer communities. While turnout was down
Speaker 6: amongst poorer computer communities, across the line, there was still
Speaker 6: a greater racial gap. You know, poorer white voters still
Speaker 6: voted at a greater turnout than poorer voters of color.
Speaker 6: At the very wealthy, wealthier white voters still voted at
Speaker 6: a higher rate than voters of color. And they found
Speaker 6: this racial turnout gap growing nationwide over the past ten
Speaker 6: years since the twenty twelve election, but it grew at
Speaker 6: a faster rate in these former Shelby counties.
Speaker 1: It's not surprising, but it's still upsetting. Do you think
Speaker 1: that enough attention is being paid to this voter role?
Speaker 6: Staff, It's tough for me to say, you know, where
Speaker 6: people should be focusing their attention. I do think election
Speaker 6: officials are becoming, you know, more familiar with the challenges,
Speaker 6: with the rules and regulations that are guiding what should
Speaker 6: be done to keep voters on the rolls or not.
Speaker 6: I do think probably the biggest challenge to this challenge program,
Speaker 6: like repeating myself, is that these election officials are still
Speaker 6: overworked and underfunded. In the I forget if it was
Speaker 6: the budget or another recent funding bill or whatever a
Speaker 6: fiscal cliff we decided to near or shut down over
Speaker 6: there was money, you know, that was supposed to be
Speaker 6: given to run the twenty twenty four election, and that
Speaker 6: kept getting whittled down to nowhere near what the request was.
Speaker 6: And so even with have A funds and the other
Speaker 6: federal money that's came to elections, it's just simply not enough.
Speaker 6: And there's been you know, new laws that he about
Speaker 6: other forms of funding elections outside funding of elections. So
Speaker 6: these local officials are really kind of, you know, between
Speaker 6: a rock and a hard place. And so when you
Speaker 6: layer in all of this extra work of sifting through
Speaker 6: these challenges making sure you're both protecting everyone's right to
Speaker 6: vote while at the same time not you know, erroneously
Speaker 6: keeping someone who shouldn't be on the rolls on the rolls.
Speaker 6: It's a massive effort. And so while they're having to
Speaker 6: do this, they're still having to make sure polling locations
Speaker 6: are open in the right place, make sure that they're
Speaker 6: doing the right testing of the machines, making sure that
Speaker 6: like voting locations have the right power to power the machines,
Speaker 6: like we saw that in the Georgia primary in twenty twenty. So,
Speaker 6: you know, there's so much that goes into this, and
Speaker 6: there's so much of these election fishals that to do,
Speaker 6: and often they're volunteers or they're part time, and so
Speaker 6: to layer on all of these challenges I think is
Speaker 6: something that there hasn't been the proper kind of relief,
Speaker 6: either adding help to them or financial help to them.
Speaker 6: That I think is kind of where the biggest gap
Speaker 6: is at the moment.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 7: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Frank McCord is the founder of Project Liberty and author
Speaker 1: of Our Biggest Fight, Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity.
Speaker 2: And Dignity in the Digital Age. Welcome to Fast Politics, Frank.
Speaker 3: Well Wall, it's great to be with you. Looking forward
Speaker 3: to the conversation.
Speaker 1: Explain to us, how you got to this idea.
Speaker 3: Like you and millions of others, I see and feel
Speaker 3: what's wrong, and it's something's wrong right, something's big as
Speaker 3: a myths, and so I get curious about that and
Speaker 3: started to dig into it. And that's where I, you know,
Speaker 3: came to the conclusion that all these things that you know,
Speaker 3: we find creepy and all the harms that we see
Speaker 3: being done or many of them, can be linked back
Speaker 3: to how technology is currently being used, and how the
Speaker 3: Internet has been almost hijacked right by a few big companies.
Speaker 3: And I, you know, I say that should mention that
Speaker 3: I'm a fifth generation builder and my family's been building
Speaker 3: the infrastructure for over one hundred and thirty years and
Speaker 3: a great great grandfather started building roads when Henry Ford
Speaker 3: started building cars. So it's kind of hardwired. We look
Speaker 3: at problems and you know, try to figure out what's
Speaker 3: strong and go fix it. I brought that mentality, let's say,
Speaker 3: to this problem. But I'll tell you one anecdote that
Speaker 3: really stuck with me. And this was after I had
Speaker 3: started a public policy school with Georgetown University in Washington,
Speaker 3: d C. And you know, that was at twenty thirteen
Speaker 3: and we knew that big data was important, and we
Speaker 3: put a massive data institute inside of the Court School,
Speaker 3: and a faculty member there who was doing great research
Speaker 3: it told me the following story. She had a theory
Speaker 3: that you could predict when a large scale human migration
Speaker 3: was going to occur by seeing what words got amplified
Speaker 3: on social media. And she developed this theory based on
Speaker 3: what she was able to pull together on your publicly
Speaker 3: available social media. Our government was quite interested in that
Speaker 3: project and gave her two hundred thousand dollars to refine
Speaker 3: her model, because if there was in fact a predictor
Speaker 3: of large scale migration, that would be massively helpful to
Speaker 3: humanitarian organizations a society more broadly. So, yeah, she got
Speaker 3: a couple hundred thousand to do the project, and new
Speaker 3: Twyter had the information she needed and went to them
Speaker 3: to get the data and they said, yep, we have it,
Speaker 3: but it will cost you one hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And she said, I can't give you a hundred thousand
Speaker 3: dollars because I could get the data, I won't be
Speaker 3: able to do the project because I don't have the budget.
Speaker 3: And they said, well, you can't have it then, So
Speaker 3: that really said a lot to me. Moly, because you
Speaker 3: have the most vulnerable people in the world who created
Speaker 3: the data. Right. It was their conversations that this academic
Speaker 3: who was not going to commercialize this, just wanted to
Speaker 3: improve the lot of society, help these four souls. And
Speaker 3: they have Twitter, who's sitting on this data and saying
Speaker 3: it's it's mine, you can't have it unless you pay me.
Speaker 3: And I just felt the entire Internet was upside down.
Speaker 3: It's our data. We should own it and control it.
Speaker 3: If we want to use it for a good purpose,
Speaker 3: we should be able to do that, and we shouldn't
Speaker 3: be help hostage by big platforms. And by the way,
Speaker 3: they are making massive amounts of money.
Speaker 2: So run our data.
Speaker 3: Yeah, from our data, So let's share on that as well.
Speaker 3: The value.
Speaker 1: It's such an interesting solve. I'm hoping you could sort
Speaker 1: of talk us through. The idea is actually quite complicated,
Speaker 1: or at least it's complicated to someone like me who
Speaker 1: knows many things very superficially. But I'm hoping you could
Speaker 1: sort of explain to us this idea because if it
Speaker 1: were to exist, it would be a decentralized internet, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, it would be decentralized to the extent that we'd
Speaker 3: be in control, right, and we'd don't to control our data,
Speaker 3: and we'd have visibility and how it's baking used, and
Speaker 3: we'd be able to share the value. But you know,
Speaker 3: the Internet was built as a decentralized technology. That's why
Speaker 3: it was built. You know, it was built too so
Speaker 3: that we had a decentralized form of communication and the
Speaker 3: effect of attack way back from the Soviet Union. And
Speaker 3: then it evolved into the World Wide Web, and that,
Speaker 3: by the way, was thirty five years ago today. Tim
Speaker 3: burgers Ley released Stage GTP into the world and the
Speaker 3: World Wide Web was created. And you know, I've talked
Speaker 3: to him extensively about this, and his intention was that
Speaker 3: it be a decentralized, human centric, empowering Internet, one that
Speaker 3: would be the proverbial tide that less solve boats, right,
Speaker 3: something where we could share information and get smarter as
Speaker 3: a society, and not something that it became fifteen years later,
Speaker 3: and especially over the last ten years, which has been
Speaker 3: highly centralized, autocratic, surveillance based, app based internet. The apps
Speaker 3: have taken ownership of they'd hijack the Internet. So you
Speaker 3: know what I say in my book, our biggest fight
Speaker 3: which comes out today is that we're back where we
Speaker 3: were when in a way, when Thomas Paine in seventeen
Speaker 3: seventy five wrote Common Sense, that powerful call to arms,
Speaker 3: you know, the pamphlet that he wrote before the United
Speaker 3: States became the United States, and he said to his
Speaker 3: fellow settlers at the time, you have a choice. You
Speaker 3: could continue to be a subject of a monarch and
Speaker 3: not have any rights to speak of or be able
Speaker 3: to own anything, or you could choose to be a citizen,
Speaker 3: and with that comes all kinds of rights, including you know,
Speaker 3: you're born with you know what became known as unalienable rights,
Speaker 3: the rights that you're bo the same rights the king has.
Speaker 3: And you're a human being of worth, and you have freedom,
Speaker 3: you have liberty, you have choice, autonomy, agency, and you
Speaker 3: can own things and create value. And that happily we
Speaker 3: chowse citizenship and we created this country. And I would
Speaker 3: argue that we, as you say, we can make this
Speaker 3: complicated if we want through it. I actually think it's
Speaker 3: pretty simple. Now we're at another juncture. We have a choice.
Speaker 3: We can be dragged into a future, buy machines and
Speaker 3: be subjects again and lose our citizenship, or we could
Speaker 3: create technology that actually allows us and celebrates the fact
Speaker 3: that we are now digital citizens. We're being treated like subjects,
Speaker 3: we're losing our rights, and we're not treated at all
Speaker 3: like human beings on the current Internet. And so I
Speaker 3: asked the question, why, pretel, would we give up all
Speaker 3: of our rights for the ability to use the Internet.
Speaker 3: It makes no sense.
Speaker 1: Right, at one time it was not thought of as
Speaker 1: giving up all of our rights, but now in hindsight,
Speaker 1: that was what we were all doing. So what I
Speaker 1: think is cool about this idea is that you are
Speaker 1: doing this as an act of philanthropy. Right, you were
Speaker 1: not making money on this idea. You're really trying to
Speaker 1: sort of go in and make something that is really wrong.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: If Congress wanted to, they could do this right now, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, when that solved many of our technological problems.
Speaker 1: If they said, like, no, we're going to have this
Speaker 1: decentralized internet. Everyone needs to be a real person, no
Speaker 1: more bot forms.
Speaker 2: Like if you have.
Speaker 1: To have a birth certificate or a driver's license or
Speaker 1: a passport, you have to have a digital identity. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a world where that happens.
Speaker 3: Right, there's a world where that happens, but it's obviously
Speaker 3: not going to happen in the world we live in
Speaker 3: because our politics is also become highly polarized and dysfunctional
Speaker 3: because of the same technology that I'm referring to that
Speaker 3: is designed to polarize us and separate us. It's not
Speaker 3: designed to help us reach consensus. They reaching consensus is
Speaker 3: no fund for an algorithm that's designed to keep you
Speaker 3: online endlessly and in a triggered state constantly, you know,
Speaker 3: responding to something someone says. So let's go back to
Speaker 3: your premise. Though DS and P is an open source protocol,
Speaker 3: then our labs team developed that would allow people to
Speaker 3: own and control their data, as you say, have a
Speaker 3: digital entity, and let all of us benefit from the
Speaker 3: network effect of the Internet. Open source, it's been gifted
Speaker 3: to humanity. People need to build on this molly for
Speaker 3: it to be a real thing, and so there will
Speaker 3: be lots of commercial endeavors that people will engage in
Speaker 3: our rotam will probably engage some things that they build
Speaker 3: on this protocol because without it, there's not going to
Speaker 3: be a real alternative to the current Internet. So, but
Speaker 3: the point is it needs to be built on by
Speaker 3: millions of people. This is not you know, one person,
Speaker 3: one family, one company project. It's never going to happen.
Speaker 3: This is a collective action and we need to demand
Speaker 3: it better.
Speaker 7: A better intet.
Speaker 3: Now, if the government wanted to say, hey, everybody needs
Speaker 3: to adopt a protocol like DSNP, then that would help
Speaker 3: move things along. We don't need the government to mandate
Speaker 3: it is the point.
Speaker 1: Right, But if they did, it would be solved tomorrow.
Speaker 3: It would be accelerated, sure, and then suddenly you'd be
Speaker 3: in a situation where we adopted other standards. Right, We
Speaker 3: adopted other protocols, and what we didn't know when we
Speaker 3: were adopting them is that we were giving power to
Speaker 3: a few big platforms to own us. And I don't
Speaker 3: want to be owned by someone else, whether it's the
Speaker 3: Chinese government because of you know, TikTok, or whether it's
Speaker 3: the you know, a few big American platforms. We need
Speaker 3: to put human beings in charge of themselves on the
Speaker 3: Internet for the first time.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: We need to stop being an IP address, a device,
Speaker 3: or stop just being viewed as data, as a as
Speaker 3: a product. We're human beings. It's a privilege to use
Speaker 3: the Internet, and we should be required to be a
Speaker 3: person or at least verified as such to be on
Speaker 3: the Internet. That doesn't mean we have to give up
Speaker 3: our privacy or anything like that. We should be able
Speaker 3: to live on the Internet like we lived prior to that,
Speaker 3: where if you're dealing with a community that you know
Speaker 3: and trust, well, you share a lot of details about yourself. Well,
Speaker 3: if you're dealing with strangers, you don't share anything about yourself.
Speaker 3: You or I don't share things about ourselves when we
Speaker 3: walk down a city street to a stranger, at least
Speaker 3: most people don't. But then when you get to know people,
Speaker 3: you share more. And then we have close friends and
Speaker 3: significant others and family members, you share a lot. Well,
Speaker 3: the Internet should operate in a similar way where we
Speaker 3: have control over what's shared about us, with whom and
Speaker 3: on what terms.
Speaker 1: So right now we're in the middle of a news
Speaker 1: cycle about TikTok where it looked for a minute like
Speaker 1: TikTok was going to be either forced as a sale
Speaker 1: or banded, and there was like an incredible amount of movement,
Speaker 1: and now it looks like that's not happening because Kelly
Speaker 1: and Conway is a lobbyist for TikTok and Trump. Some
Speaker 1: people got to Trump, And so I'm just curious, is
Speaker 1: that the problem with tech regulation?
Speaker 2: This is like an obsession of mine.
Speaker 1: For example, you know, they're always congressional here things about
Speaker 1: tech regulation. We're constantly seeing that, but we're not actually
Speaker 1: seeing any regulation come out of any of this. I mean,
Speaker 1: we have seen so much like carnage from technology. A
Speaker 1: lot of great stuff too, but a lot of carnage.
Speaker 1: It seems like our Congress and our politicians just seem
Speaker 1: completely uninterested in providing any kind of regulation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, when you said, you know, this carnage and there's
Speaker 3: a lot of harm, but this good stuff being done too,
Speaker 3: I actually share myself kind of saying that from time
Speaker 3: to time, and I hear others saying that, like it's
Speaker 3: almost like we're defense mechanism or this obligation to say, well, well,
Speaker 3: there's some good stuff too. And I've come to the conclusion,
Speaker 3: if we get our construction company right, or some municipality
Speaker 3: or or somebody built a plumbing system, a water system
Speaker 3: for a city of a million people, and we turned
Speaker 3: on the water, or people turned on the water in
Speaker 3: their homes and six hundred thousand people got clean, healthy,
Speaker 3: nutritional water, and four hundred thousand people got toxic poison
Speaker 3: water that was causing illnesses and even some people to die.
Speaker 3: Would we be saying, oh, but the water system that
Speaker 3: that water system does some good stuff too, or would
Speaker 3: we be focusing on the damage that's done and be
Speaker 3: saying fix that. That's unacceptable. So I just want to
Speaker 3: put this in context that I think if they stop
Speaker 3: being apologetic, oh yeah, but they do some good things too,
Speaker 3: and just say enough is enough Number one, number two
Speaker 3: on your issue of policy and so forth. We now
Speaker 3: know and we learn more and more every day about
Speaker 3: the damage being done by the way the Internet is
Speaker 3: being used, and you know this surveillance technology, the harms democracy,
Speaker 3: our information ecosystem is being contaminated, trouble, civil discourse is
Speaker 3: police officers at school board meetings, and most importantly we
Speaker 3: see the harms to young people right, and they're very real.
Speaker 3: The first stop should be to go to these big
Speaker 3: tech platforms and say, look at there's damage being done.
Speaker 7: Fix it.
Speaker 3: Stop causing the damage, right, stop putting the water into
Speaker 3: the pipe, stop fix this. And that hasn't been done.
Speaker 3: And what we get is these apology tours and oh
Speaker 3: I didn't know that, go back and check and fix it.
Speaker 3: But then information comes out, and of course we now
Speaker 3: learned they knew it. You know that Mark Zuckerberg knew
Speaker 3: that the technology was designed to prey on young kids,
Speaker 3: and so on and so forth, and yet it's still
Speaker 3: not So then where do we turn. We turned to
Speaker 3: our elected officials and our political system, right like we
Speaker 3: did with tobaccos for instance, right, Well, we found out
Speaker 3: it was harmful and the tobacco companies didn't fix it.
Speaker 3: We went to our elected officials and said, please, we
Speaker 3: need new regulations because they're not fixing it themselves. And
Speaker 3: then those regulations came into place. There were warnings on cartoons,
Speaker 3: there was a tax put on it so that there
Speaker 3: was more expensive, so people would file us and people
Speaker 3: were it was an educational campaign, and there were regulations
Speaker 3: at laws, and you couldn't smoke under a certain so
Speaker 3: on and so for you couldn't sell to a certain
Speaker 3: and our political appbretes went into here. So now let's
Speaker 3: come back to technology. We go to our political apparatus
Speaker 3: and say, big tech, and is it in these social
Speaker 3: media platforms? Aren't fixing themselves, please fix the problem. And
Speaker 3: like you say, we see the theater, we see the hearings,
Speaker 3: but nothing happens. I've come to the conclusion that either
Speaker 3: our political elected officials are not understanding the technology and
Speaker 3: the harm it's doing, or they are taking money from
Speaker 3: these big platforms that are the wealthiest companies ever created
Speaker 3: and have lobbyists and advocates all over the place, or
Speaker 3: they're actually and this may be the most damaging evolve,
Speaker 3: they're using the very platforms that we're talking about here
Speaker 3: that are doing the damage and causing the polarization to
Speaker 3: raise money and take extreme views and get followers and
Speaker 3: clicks and donations. And so it's the ultimate irony here
Speaker 3: or sad irony, is that what I talk about in
Speaker 3: our biggest fight that we need to fix is very
Speaker 3: technology that is disabling our political apparatus as well and
Speaker 3: our ability to adopt good policies, which used to happen
Speaker 3: years ago, and it's not happening now because of the
Speaker 3: all powerful nature of this technology. So that's where I
Speaker 3: come to the Project Liberty and the need for us
Speaker 3: to actually take matters into our own hands, actually diagnose
Speaker 3: the engineering problem, fix it. And then have a call
Speaker 3: to action to demand that we have this alternative and
Speaker 3: incentivize builders to build on it and get citizens just
Speaker 3: people demanding the alternative. And I want to see people
Speaker 3: talking about this at their kitchen table, at the sidelines
Speaker 3: of the soccer kids soccer game, at their school board meetings,
Speaker 3: you know, after church and so on and so forth,
Speaker 3: so that we start to socialize this because we the
Speaker 3: people need to fix this, because the platforms themselves aren't
Speaker 3: fixing it in our elected officials.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, Thank you so much, Frank Well, I appreciate
Speaker 1: you saying that.
Speaker 3: I just ask that your listeners, you know, take a
Speaker 3: couple of hours and read our Biggest Fight and because
Speaker 3: it's it's hard and twenty minutes to get everything across,
Speaker 3: but you know, the book that I had the privilege
Speaker 3: of writing with Michael Casey, I think does a decent
Speaker 3: job of explaining the problem and the solution so we
Speaker 3: don't have to be helpless and hopeless. Here there is
Speaker 3: hope and there is a bright future. And we're definitely
Speaker 3: pro technology. It's not about being anti tech. We're definitely
Speaker 3: pro tech, but use it the right way. Or your
Speaker 3: listeners can go to our biggest fight dot com and
Speaker 3: learn much more about the project. Thank you, Thank you,
Speaker 3: Mollie a.
Speaker 2: Moment, pet Jesse Cannon, Molly Jung Fast, Robert hur takes
Speaker 2: the stand in Congress today, and oh and.
Speaker 1: He reveals himself to be the partisan hack we had
Speaker 1: suspected he was.
Speaker 2: There were a lot of moments to choose from.
Speaker 1: I say, just play the whole hearing at the DNC,
Speaker 1: but if you're pressed for time, definitely there were so
Speaker 1: many moments. The best and the worst was him. So
Speaker 1: Ted Lew asked Robert her her questions that were purportedly
Speaker 1: about Biden but really about Trump. That was a pretty
Speaker 1: amazing moment, just in a very typical Republican fashion. Before
Speaker 1: the report came out, her you know, sort of got
Speaker 1: ahead of it and said that at points Biden couldn't
Speaker 1: remember the day that bo died, which is actually just
Speaker 1: a lie because when you look at the transcript, he
Speaker 1: knew exactly what the day was, and then he was
Speaker 1: sort of trying to figure out it was twenty fifteen
Speaker 1: or twenty sixteen, But Madeline Dean said he did know
Speaker 1: the day, and her refuse to admit it went back
Speaker 1: to the transcript and then ultimately just punted.
Speaker 2: So I thought that was the moment.
Speaker 1: But there were a lot of incredible moments in that hearing.
Speaker 1: It's worth going over them, and it's really clear that
Speaker 1: like the mainstream media fucked up right. They ran hers
Speaker 1: comments just like they did when they used Bill Barr's
Speaker 1: comments about the Mueller investigation instead of using the actual
Speaker 1: Muther investigation.
Speaker 2: They took Republican's word for it. They let them shape
Speaker 2: the narrative.
Speaker 1: And we've seen this before, so we lived through weeks
Speaker 1: and weeks of Joe Biden didn't know when bo Biden.
Speaker 2: Died, when in fact, he knew exactly when Bo Biden died.
Speaker 1: And so for that partisan hack Robert HRR, who by
Speaker 1: the way, refused to answer a question when Eric Swowell
Speaker 1: asked him if he would take an appointment in Trump's
Speaker 1: White House, partisan hack, her is our moment of fuck ray.
Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
Speaker 1: every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds
Speaker 1: in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you
Speaker 1: enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend
Speaker 1: and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for a
Speaker 1: snag