November 25, 2024 • 44 mins
The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson joins us to discuss the impending disaster of the next Trump administration. Zucked author Roger McNamee examines the dystopian goals of tech billionaires.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds, and Donald Trump's transition team has refused
to sign the normal ethics forms. We have such a
great show for you today the Lincoln Project Zone. Rick
Wilson talks to us about the impending disaster of the
(00:23):
next Trump administration. Then we will talk to Zucked author
and my friend Roger mcnamie about how tech is going
to eat us all. But first the news.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
So, Molly, I for one really enjoy you think about
our jobs that we get to work from home. Unfortunately,
our friends who are federal employees are not going to
enjoy that anymore. What are you seeing here?
Speaker 1 (00:43):
I have a lot of very naughty things to say
about Elin and Vivek and their very stupid fake government entity,
But I actually don't think this is that bad. But
they have called for government employees, federal employees to return
to five days a week in the office work weeks.
I mean, these guys are going to do some bad stuff, Okay,
(01:04):
some real bad stuff, some real bad stuff, and we
know that because they're tweeting about it, saying things like
we're going to have to tighten our belts and suffer
in order to balance the budget and get us all
a tax cut. But this, I think is not so bad.
But they do want federal employees in the office five
days a week. But hidden under that headline, I think,
(01:27):
and I think the real part of this that we
should talk about is that they did write an op
out in the Wall Street Journal this week. The two
of them and Wright is doing some heavy lifting, because
I have a feeling that neither of them wrote it.
And you'll remember the Wall Street Journal opinion section is
kind of very, very very right way. President Trump has
asked the two of us to lead a newly formed
(01:48):
Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, because we love the
memes to get the federal government down to size. The
entrenched and evergrowing bureaucracy represents an existent threat to our republic.
I'm not sure how that works, and politicians have abetted
it for too long. That's why we are doing it differently.
We are entrepreneurs, not politicians, entrepreneurs who got rich on
(02:11):
government subsidies, but who's counting. We will serve as outside volunteers,
not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory councils.
We won't just write reports or cut ribbons, will cut costs.
You want to bet me a million dollars they just
write reports and cut ribbons.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I'm not taking that bet.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
All right? Are they going to write a lot of reports?
Some beliegue or staffer who's also a quote unquote volunteer
is going to write a lot of reports.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
But Malli, they're going to have a podcast too, Oh,
I would hope. So Pete Hegsath one of Trump's many,
many amazing Best People nominees. He has some questionable views
about women in the military. And I'm going to shock
you here. They're not really rooted in fact. What are
you seeing here?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
So Pete Hegsas has said about women in the military.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
He said, the standards have been Lord, I'm straight up
saying we should not have women in combat roles.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
So Pete Hagsas said that. And you'll remember he is
a weekend television host. Not that there's anything wrong with
the weekend cable news on Fox again Donald Trump is
You'll remember he does love a television host because he
feels they are the most serious of people to serve
(03:25):
in administrations. Whatever Anyway, The point here is Pete Hagsas
said that women have a lower standard. There is volumeous
evidence to show that that isn't true. And when he
goes for his congressional hearing, if he gets that far,
he will sit across from Tammy Duckworth, the senator from
Illinois who lost both her legs in battle. So we
(03:47):
shall see how he can make that case against women
in the military to a woman who has given everything. Jesse,
Let's talk about Donald trump favorite boogeyman.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
I've noticed something with his nominations. There's two things in common.
A lot of sexual abuse allegations and a lot of
people who have weird stories with doctors. Yes, what are
you seeing here?
Speaker 1 (04:11):
They really really really hate woke, right, whatever woke is,
and they're really obsessed with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Let's
just talk about the second. They hate diversity, equity and inclusion. Okay,
they hate a thing that is probably like diversity. They
hate diversity. Imagine hating diversity. They hate equity, imagine hating equity,
(04:35):
They hate inclusion including something anyway, So they hate DEI
and Donald Trump has said that on day one, day one,
he is going to end Dei and a key figure
in Trump's anti Dei agenda is the son of immigrants,
Steven Miller, who grew up in Santa Monica, and he
(04:56):
is white and Jewish, not entirely the same thing. He
is Jewish, just like I'm Jewish. And he feels that
people who are black have had too many advantages, and
so he is hoping to rollback workplace protections for Black
Americans to a degree not seen since the end of Reconstruction,
(05:16):
which ushered in Jim Crow. Jim Crow, which was in
some ways used as a framework for someone who many
people in Donald Trump's cabinet have compared Donald Trump to
Adolf Hitler. We will see what happens here. It's super
upsetting to watch people get their rights taken away. But
(05:37):
the American voters did this, so good luck to everyone.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Somali. We should also talk about what the signals of
this cabinet and this administration or saidek, what do you see?
Speaker 1 (05:47):
They are sending signals, and the signals are that me
too is no longer. This is a really interesting piece
by Jill Philipovich about how it is the Donald Trump's
sexual cabinet. Trump's second term is shaping up to platform
even more men who have been incredibly abusive sexual assault
and harassment. You've got Matt Gates who's now out, who
(06:09):
has now dropped out and is now spending his time
doing cameos, which we're not advertising his cameos, We're just
saying that's true. You've got Pete Hagsith. You've got the
sexual abuse issues, the lawsuit that has focused on the WWE,
which is co owned by Linda McMahon, and she was
(06:29):
actually named in one of these lawsuits. Here, there and everywhere.
RFK Junior has numerous allegations of all sorts of stuff
that's not okay. Look, they're normalizing what Trump considers to
be normal, and none of us should be surprised by
any of this.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Strong a grief.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Project and
the host of the Enemy's List.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Rick Wilson, Mollie john Fast, Welcome to Thanksgiving Week.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
It's Sunday, so we must be podcasting. I want to
air the petty grievances. Nextgiving makes me know it's time
to air the petty grievances.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Wish those grievances out and get to it all right.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
So my pettiest grievance is that I wrote this whole
I think very smart essay. If I do say so myself,
which I do.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Which I retreated or re exed or whatever the right it's.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Called yes, yes to all the bots and elon about
how I was wrong about some fundamental premises about the
twenty twenty for election. Right, I thought, oh, this will
be followed by a plethora of other people going on
about how they were wrong about the twenty twenty four election.
You know what I found. I was greeted with no
(07:43):
one else.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
You know what. Let me just say this. There is
a degree of post election duchiness that manifests itself across
four or five different axes and domains. Number one is
the sorest winner syndrome, with every mob out there, Right.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
They won, but they're still not happy.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Right, this election is all about free speech? Shut up liberal. Yeah,
that's a big set. I have a fraction of progressives
who are like, if only we had declared we would
seize the means of production, we would have won.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
But they are not nearly as of notch as. Oh god, no,
tell me the other groups you think.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
There's also some practical types who are like, oh, if
only we'd done more of this or that mechanical thing,
and it's always the mechanical thing their group does best. Right,
only we've gone out for more turnout among dog owners.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Okay, right, right, But.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
The entire the entire post election.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Wait, we're not going to mention the never trumpers here.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
I love We're getting it, We're getting to it, We're
getting to it. But the whole dream that is dead.
That Look, I will say this, I'll take some creditae.
I'm an early adopter of abandoning the full Republican thing
because it was never coming back. I said it in
twenty eighteen. It was never coming back. But there were
a lot of people who were hopeful that, you know,
we would be able to motivate a larger number, and
(09:02):
we got about we got a little more than we
did last time, but it wasn't enough to offset all
the new people he's brought into the Republican Party, most
of whom you know, are are not shall we say,
folks deeply read in Burke Kirk, Buckley, et cetera, and
are instead like I want to kill all them pedophiles
and send them Mexicans back. That's their Republican Party. So
(09:25):
the idea that we could somehow and that's two degree
groups like ours, like Sarah Longwells, like other folks. It's
a dead issue now, and you got to get over
wanting to have the Republican Party back now. And again,
I've been a very early adopter on that for a
very long time, Like not long after the first my
first book came out. I was like, Oh, it's not
going to work. We're not getting that party back. But
people who wanted that party back it's gone now.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
I want to also point out, and again I actually
thought that the Liz Cheney thing was smart, but actually
it turns out that it may have hurt her with
the base. Did you see this data for Pride Progress polling.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
I haven't seen it.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
No, So Data for Progress is not without its foibles
and without it's you know, it is left leaning. And
what might want to get to.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
This if by leaning you mean so far it's practically perpendicular,
but yes, go on, whatever it is.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
It's left leaning, and that makes you a little bit upset.
But among Pennsylvania and Michigan, independence, messages about Harris's economic
platform perform better than messages touting her support from former
Republican congress women.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Well, of course, this is like saying would you like
the would you like the cuttlefish or the vanilla paste?
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Which one do you want? Because I don't want either
of those vanilla paste.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
It's a self park joke. It's a self park centipede joke.
What I'm saying here is that is one of those
logical constructs that isn't really the point. You can have
things simultaneously in politics. You could appeal to more moderate
conservative voters while having a strong economic policy. And so
the vast majority of her ad load, of her communications load,
(11:11):
was not about Liz Cheney or Republicans. The vast majority,
I would say, probably back of the envelope, somewhere around
a five percent of it was about a better deal
for Americans, fair deal for Americans, you know, the child
tax credit, all the things that she was rightly I
thought emphasizing in her campaign. There are a lot of
progressives right now who are done to desperately try to say, well,
(11:35):
what we really didn't get was enough progressive progressivism in
a progressive country. But in case anybody missed the fucking notes,
this is not a progressive country. Look it wasn't even
as progressive as I modeled.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Okay, explain this again.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
This country is very much center right, right, Maybe I
have to go with the data, and the data tells
me very clearly that the country was not moved with
sufficient numbers by the core messaging that people had hoped.
It wasn't moved any degree. You know, we had we
had a bunch of states that voted for pro choice
amendments and still elected Donald Trump. That looked like the
(12:11):
killer app and everybody's pulling mine and everybody else's and
it wasn't. It wasn't. The economic pain argument was one
that was that was more easily dismissed by folks on
the left and the center. We were like, okay, yeah,
the economy's fine, it's getting better. It was bad for
a while, it's back, but it wasn't in the minds
of the voters that came out. And remember, he activated
less likely voters at a level that no one could
(12:34):
have anticipated.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
No, no, I know. And he did the same thing
he did in twenty sixteen and in twenty twenty, and
we kept under astrmating him. But I just want to
point out economic populism technically should be the base of
the Democratic Party.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
Well, here's the problem the Democratic Party to and for
a ton of reasons, not not related to the campaign,
but to the culture and to the disinformation matrix that's
out there and to Fox everything else. What the country
hears when they hear democratic economic policy, they hear one message,
which is smart guys will tell you how to live.
Welcome to communism. That's what they hear from Fox every day.
(13:09):
It's not true, it's not true, but it's what they
hear over and over and over and over again. Donald
Trump says, I'm going to fuck people who you hate,
and I'm going to throw the Mexicans out, and I'm
gonna screw the Chinese over. None of it's true. None
of it will work. It will be an economic disaster
and a moral disaster. But we have to admit to
ourselves that the country is not what we think it
(13:30):
is or want it to be. A lot of the time,
this country is not as good as we hoped it
was on a lot of fronts. And I hate saying that.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Again. Here's my hottest take. I don't agree. First of all,
I think a lot of people just felt that he
spoke to them and they liked him, and they didn't
necessarily think like, for example, they did not necessarily believe
that he was going to do I mean, this was
a thing we saw again and again. They didn't believe
he was going to do the bad stuff for some reason,
(14:00):
and they just didn't think.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
I have not seen a lot of polling that says
that they didn't believe he would not do the bad stuff.
I have seen a lot of polling that says they
want him to do mass deportations and that they want
him to do a jillion percent tariffs against the jinas,
the China's not the vaginas.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, yeah, I got it.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
But I have seen them express this desire for the
things he was selling. And I'm trying to not give
America like an extra break here by saying, oh, well,
obviously they didn't think. They thought he was joking, he
didn't really mean mass deportations. I find that to be
a dangerous area for us to go into, to not
(14:41):
take him seriously and literally. That's the old joke, you know,
you don't take Trump seriously or.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Literally, right. I mean, it doesn't matter what they wanted,
because they're going to get Project twenty twenty.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Five and they're going to get it good and hard. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Yeah, so let's talk about what that looks like. We got,
we got my body and he's now body. Let me
tell you he's really not my buddy Russ Vaught.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
Oh yeah, the great Russ Vought running OMBA.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
And for those of you playing at home, give.
Speaker 5 (15:11):
Us the TLDR on that guy running the Office of
Management the budget is he's the guy who will be
able to look down at great with great granularity, into
the various departments and say, oh, you have a program.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Here that might somehow hypothetically relate to climate change. By
it's gone. If you don't think Russ Vought and Vivic
and Elon will be swap and spit every day and
taking long showers together to plot out how to best
fuck the American people. That is the guy who's going
to push the actual buttons to.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Do it right. I think it's important to mention that
the vac Russ Vaught is like, is a heritage guy,
is a He's a Republican donor guy. He is like
going to really run this admin. The Veke and Elon
have a fake job. Now, whether or not they can
(16:02):
do anything with that fake job. We don't know, but
the the Department of DOGE is largely a meme.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
It is largely a meme. But if they have a
relationship with a guy like Russvott, who already has plans.
By the way, he will also be pointing those idiots
in the direction of targets that he's already identified in
Project twenty twenty five. So he's going to say, oh, well,
we've gone through the budget line items of every department,
and here in the Department of Commerce is a DEI program,
(16:30):
or here in the EPA is a climate program, or
here in Health and Human Services is something that LGBTQ
folks benefit from. He's going to already tell them, and
then they'll make it. Then Elon will go, why are
we paying for lesbian loot players and the HI just
budget or whatever fantasy bullshit he makes up, right, And
so then you know, it's sort of a fiendish circle.
(16:51):
Vaught and his types will identify the targets they've already
set up for execution. Elon and Vivek will make it
a giant public screen match.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
And do you know who serves as their congressional attache.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
I do not.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
I can't believe I get to be the one to
tell you this, like, I do not know this. Taylor
Green is going toal subcommittee.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Now I will say this, Molly, that actually kind of
makes me feel better.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Right. Well, that's what AOC said too. She was like,
you know, she's never done the reading once in her life.
So good luck to all of you.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Look, I have to say the President can do a lot, okay,
but the Department of the Office of the Management of
the Budget still operates under a number of different areas
of congressional control. And those areas of congressional control are
set down in law and set down in the Constitution.
They appropriate that money, Okay, that is how it's done. Okay,
(17:52):
they authorize and appropriate that money. That is how it's done.
So one of the things that's going to happen here
really quickly is going to discover that every government program
is spread out among all fifty seven states or eighty
one of Floria. Trump numbers fifty seven states and territories
in this great country. Right. So when they say, oh, well,
I'll give you a good example. Elon wants to get
(18:14):
rid of the rocket that competes with His rocket doesn't
really compete very well, but Boeing has this rocket, right,
So he's going to say, oh, well, we've got to
get rid of the Boeing whatever SLS, whatever it's called, right,
and we want to kill that program. The Margie Taylor
Green's going to discover that in her district they make
some sort of fucking part for that and it employs
eighteen people and they're paid one hundred and twenty five
(18:35):
thousand dollars a year each, And that happens across the nation.
They're going to run into the critical reality wall of
government spending, which is that government spending happens everywhere. They're
going to also run into the wall that you could
cut every discretionary program out there. You could cut the
EPA and h justin commerce and everything else down to
the bone. Okay, cut it to the bone. You could
(18:55):
cut the Pentagon budget in half, and you know what,
you still have gigantic debt service and four big social
programs that they're not going to get rid of. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,
and the sub category there disability, which has been the
one that's exploding. And guess what if you draw a
map down Appalachia and the Deep South, that's where disability
(19:18):
is happening.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Well also, you know disability. We just went through COVID.
I mean, I feel like what I'm always struck by
by how insane this next admin is going to be
is they've learned lessons from COVID, but they've learned all
the wrong lessons, right right, So they were like, a
million people died and it's because we had vaccine mandates.
Right No, no, no, no, that's not why a million
(19:42):
people died. I mean, and it's just like every you know,
it's like watching a slow motion car wreck. But I
actually haven't thought I want you to talk about for
a minute because I think this is the thing that
is so weird to me. These people, Vivek and Elon
are obsessed with technology, right right, These people are RFK Junior.
(20:04):
They all hate science. Make it make sense, Well.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
They hate a science that somehow identifies in the world
that there are social factors that exist. So they hated
the fact that there were mask mandates because there was
an argument. Correct, I still believe that it would diminish
in some way, even at the margins, the spread of COVID,
But they felt like that was the government telling them
what to do. Now, They're fine telling one what to
(20:28):
do with her vagina, but they're not fine with the
government saying you should inoculate your or you should vaccinate
your kids from measles, mumps, rebellodip theoria, teennis, and polio.
Part of it's like this strange San Francisco Bay Silicon
Valley WU inflected thing. They believe in engineering more than
they believe in science, because science can tell you things
about the bigger societal picture than just engineering can.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, I guess that's the only answer. But it just
seems to me like if you love technology, you should
at least have a nodding as to science.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
You know, look, you ought to, it would be great.
But they let me give you another part of what's
happening here. There is a belief among this broligarchy, David
Sachs and Bill Ackman and Elon Musk and Vivek and
all these other people in a lot of ways that
they will be the holders of all wisdom and approaches
to how things are.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Done right because they're smarter than everyone else, because somehow
they got government subsidies for doing their businesses.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Yes, correct, I would be happy for the doge to
pass the world that says, no one involved who donates
to a political figure, they receive government funding I like,
of any kind, and they're no company of anybody who's
involved or invested in they receive government funding. And you
know what, I promise you that's not going to happen
because Elon Musk's entire fortune has been made on the
back of the US taxpayer.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Real talk exactly. And now it's true. Now the money
he's going to.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Cut, yeah, correct, except for himself. I promise you now,
a single dime of SpaceX or Tesla fund that has
any government impact will Those will be the most meritorious
spending items in the entire budget.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (22:07):
No.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
The whole idea that you're going to bring some outside
billionaire who's never done government into cut costs is very stupid.
But this is all going to get very stupid, very fast.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
At the end of the Cold War, we have this
thing called the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, because we
had like seven hundred or nine hundred military bases in
this country. At the end of the Cold War, we
realized and we don't need all this anymore. Right, You
had people from the most progressive fuck the military, burn
the military to the ground liberal types to hardcore conservatives.
(22:41):
Every one of them was like, oh no, Fort John
Jones in my district, even though it hasn't hasn't been
used since the War of eighteen fucking twelve, is essential
to national defense. All of it is like, you're going
to see the blowback that's going to happen on the
doge from Congress itself, including from some of its most
concernive members. They're gonna be like, wait, what They're great, true,
(23:04):
true wake up call. It's going to be glorious. Rick
Wilson as always happy to be with you and happy
to be right.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Well, not totally right, but sure. Roger mcnamie is the
author of Zucht Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. Welcome
to past politics, Roger.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
It is a great pleasure moment.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Thank you for having me. Oh, we're so excited to
have you. We are in such a strange moment in
American life.
Speaker 4 (23:35):
But you saw those coming, well, Molly, I have some advantages.
I first went to Silicon Valley in nineteen eighty two,
back when seriously it was a completely different world, you know.
I followed the siren call of Steve Jobs to both
create technology that would empower people, increase productivity, and frankly,
make the world a better place. From nineteen eighty two
(23:56):
until the financial crisis, it was really exciting. Silicon Valley
produced a lot of things. But beginning, you know, two
thousand and nine twenty ten, the tech industry discovered that
post financial crisis, that they no longer had to make
products that were good for people or that empowered them.
(24:16):
That they could use data and the free capital that
was available because interest rates were essentially zero for a
long time, they could get unprecedented amounts of capital and
use technology to exploit human weakness. And so the whole
industry went from being the most exciting, dynamic, positive contribute
(24:37):
to our economy to becoming the greatest threat to democracy,
public health, and civil liberties that the country has seen
in a very very long tut And all of that
became clear to me in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Was it the election that made you.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
Know, oh, interesting, No, it was way before the election.
So keep in mind, I'd been involved as an investor
in technology companies, and I'd been a mentor to Mark
Zuckerberg at Facebook and to Cheryl Samberg. I brought them
together so that was all in from two thousand and
six to two thousand and nine.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Some was said Tobate that you mentor before we discovered
that they're evil. Sorry you try.
Speaker 4 (25:18):
That was certainly true for me. Yeah, when I knew
them well, I both respected them both and I liked
them both. And there were signs that they had shall
we say, big dreams. But that's not an uncommon thing
with entrepreneurs. It's just in two thousand and six, if
you had really bad intention, the technology itself didn't allow
(25:39):
you to hurt people at large scale. That really didn't
happen until cell phones had enough bandwidth to do videos.
So at that point there were no limitations on what
you could do with technology. And the key thing in
early twenty sixteen, I started to see disinformation, really hate
speech targeted Hillary Clinton. It was virallly spreading through Facebook,
(26:00):
and I went, oh, that doesn't look good. And then
there were some civil rights things that happened, and then
Breggs it in the United Kingdom in June twenty sixteen.
The outcome was such a huge shock. Literally it was
an eight point swing from what the polls had suggested
the day before the referendum, and it occurred to me
that Facebook was probably the only reasonable explanation for how.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
That had happened.
Speaker 4 (26:23):
And then in the summer of twenty sixteen, we discovered
that Paul Maniford is shall we say, affiliated with Russian oligarchs.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
You'll remember that from season one. Trump as does continue exactly.
Speaker 4 (26:37):
But all of that really scared me. So I wrote
up a thing which was originally going to be an
op ed, but I'd never written an op ed before,
and so it took me a long time to do it.
Before I published it, I sent it to Mark Zuckerberg
and Schaw Sandberg to warn them. So this is nine
days before the presidential election twenty sixteen. Saint guys, I
am really terrified because Facebook, this company had been deeply involved,
(27:00):
is being used by bad actors to undermine democracy and
civil rights. And as your former mentor, what I'm saying
to you is, I don't think you want your company
to be associated with undermining democracy and civil rights that,
even if you aren't morally interested in it. Right, it's
a bad business strategy, and long story, sure everybody knows
what happens.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
They were like, no, it's a good business strategy.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
No, no, no, no, Actually it was more cynical than that.
There's a term of art at Silicon Valley when somebody
is really nice to and smiley at you, but doing
the opposite of what you want to do. It's called
grin fucking. And that's what they did to me. And
they couldn't have been more polite, and they could not
have been less interested in acting. And so I became
(27:43):
an activist. I went to Congress, I went to state
attorneys general, I talked to governors. You know, I did
work with believe it or not, I worked with the
Trump administration and the Trust people, all trying to get
them to recognize that uncontrolled Silicon Valley representatives to everything
that we value in America, democracy, public health, civil liberties,
(28:06):
you know, just the whole function of our society. And
it wasn't because they were banned people. It was because
they perceived that what their mission was, you know, in
the case of Mark Zuckerberg connecting the whole world on
a communications network that he managed, that that was so
important that it justified any harm that might result from it.
And you know, my view was that, let's face it,
(28:30):
we've been through things like this with automobiles, with tobacco,
with aircraft, with lead and paint. Right, there are been
zillions of examples of the government is actually government acting
to ensure safety, to ensure protection of civil rights, and
to preserve competition. So I argued for those three things,
(28:51):
and you know a lot of people listened. We had
lots of conversations, and nothing happened. So twenty twenty comes along,
and in twenty twenty, Phase Book's role was different that
in twenty sixteen. You know, the Russians want to advertise
and Facebook goes, well, they're a good customer, and they
offered their services both to Trump and to Clinton. Clinton
(29:12):
said no, and the Facebook guys threw themselves into helping
Trump win, and together with Cambridge Analytica, they matched thirty
million Facebook user IDs to voter files, which allowed them,
from a targeting point of view, to have a level
of accuracy in targeting that it never occurred.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
At politics previously.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
And they used to just suppress the votes of black people,
suburban women, and young voters in target states. How did
they get that information? Was that because Russia hacked the
Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. We
don't know, because nobody ever really investigated, but they had
(29:54):
perfect targeting and they suppressed those votes and Trump won
in twenty twenty. It was different because in the lead
up to twenty twenty we had COVID, and during COVID, QAnon,
which were the guys who were around Pizza gain were
they were like super active, and Facebook could have kept
all those people at the fringes. But their business model
(30:17):
is different than that. Their business model is about getting
people's attention, and the way you do that is with
fear and outrage. Not because everybody reacts to that, but
because probably half the population reacts to that more than
anything else, and half the population is enough, and so
they even after the FBI warned them in May of
(30:39):
twenty nineteen, Facebook continued to allow QAnon to prosper. And
then when COVID broke out, Facebook had already been at
place where they have these things called facebo, people who
have a shared interest get together, and one of the
core ones was is groups for new mothers, and people
who were anti vaxers infiltrated these new mothers groups, and
(31:05):
the anti vaxers were essentially indoctrinating new mothers to be
anti vax The q and on guys saw this, and
they aimed at the anti vaxers and subsumed them. The
Trump campaign saw this and went, wow, these are our people,
and so they went and MAGA essentially merged with q Andon.
(31:26):
That's why Trump spent the summer of twenty twenty putting
out all those tweets about q and on stuff and
so Facebook. You know, if they had been more worried
about democracy and profits, they would have stopped this, but
they did just the opposite. And of course then Trump
began to stop the steal. And all of that was
organized in Facebook groups right up to the right up
(31:48):
to the insurrection. And I had written my book two
years earlier, and I talked about the fact that Facebook groups,
because there's no police, a lot of bad things happen
in them, and if you don't controlled them in some way,
eventually we were going to have an insurrection. And son
of a Gun it actually happened at Genuar of twenty
twenty one, and we had a whistleblower, Francis Hoguand who
(32:12):
brought out all the paperwork and said, all the people
on Facebook knew all about this. And you know you're
sitting there going, okay, wow, that's really bad. Well, in
twenty twenty four, it took one step even worse than that,
which is that people in Silicon Valley stop pretending to
be neutral. You know, obviously the most extreme example is Musk,
but they all were pretty tightly aligned with Trump. And
(32:35):
you know, the problem is that Silicon Valley controls the
most important communication systems we have in the country, in fact,
in the whole world. And so we go into this
thing in a year at which fifty four percent of
American adults cannot read above a sixth grade level. So,
you know, public education, which has been crushed for forty years,
(32:57):
has put us on this point where a lot of
people vulnerable to manipulation, and these technology products, which are
designed for manipulation are aligned with the forces that are
against democracy. And that's how we wound up where we
are today. So it didn't matter how good a campaign
the vice president ran. The people on the other side
(33:18):
never heard any of it.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
So I want you to the anti vax QAnon stuff
is really interesting to me, and had not I absolutely
did not, for whatever reason, totally thread the needle on that.
So can you explain that to us a little bit?
Speaker 3 (33:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (33:40):
Sure, So here's The way to think about it, if
you look at the post mortems on the twenty twenty
four election, people talked about Fox News and they talk about,
you know, the various right wing podcasters, right, and the
Democrats that had nothing to match that. The thing that
they're missing is that Fox News Joe Rogan their audiences
(34:01):
are what five million, maybe ten million at tops.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
I mean those Joe Rogan clips got to sixty nine
million people.
Speaker 4 (34:10):
Oh no, I believe that. Sorry, I believe that. But
how did they get there? They got there because Instagram, Facebook, TikTok,
YouTube right, which is owned by Google, and Twitter elevated them.
Are these platforms that were aligned with Trump's positions, right,
(34:30):
And the thing that I think really matters is that
you roughly eighty million people voted for Trump. How many
people are in maggot, I don't know. It's it eighty is,
at sixties, at one hundred, it doesn't matter. You can't
sustain a collective dilution right right, at the scale of
sixty to one hundred million people with things that only
(34:51):
have an audience of five million. So the role that
these things play is gigantic. So if you go back
to anti vas the problem with Facebook, and Facebook really
is worse than the other guys on this issue, but
they all contribute to it, is that Facebook's whole business
model is taking ideas from the fringe, things that historically
(35:13):
before Internet platforms existed, were just people, you know, flat
earthers and all that, where people are just screaming into
a void and nobody listening. Facebook business strategy was to
mainstream all those ideas, and in the context of anti
vax and in the context of MAGA, in the context
to stop the steal, and in the context of the
(35:34):
twenty twenty four election. What that meant was that you
could literally create an alternate reality with roughly half the
voters all completely involved and uncouched by reality. And you know,
there's an Adam Surwer thing in The Atlantic this week
(35:54):
where he's talking about the fact that there's going to
be some buyer's remorse because the alternate reality is so
unhinged that a lot of the people have voted for
Trump don't believe he's actually going to do the things
he's already doing.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
I want to get into that because that was something
I absolutely saw, was that I really noticed this when
you would when you would talk to voters, or when
you would look at the data, is that a lot
of these voters, You would say, well, Trump is going
to do this, and they would say, no, he's not
going to do it. At the RNC, they had signs
that said mass deportation. Now, when you talk to voters
(36:31):
you would say, you know, for example, like the large
number of Latino voters at the border in the Rio
Grande Valley who voted for Trump, they would say, well, yeah,
but it's not he's not going to do it, or
it's not going to do it that way, or it's
not going to happen to us. There was a real
inability to sort of suspension of disbelief. I always thought
(36:52):
it was because Trump wasn't able to do the kind
of stuff he had wanted to the first time around.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (36:58):
What I do know, though, is that a vote for
Trump wasn't necessarily a vote for what he was advocating,
but it was always a vote against Biden and the irony.
The irony is that somehow the Democrats were unable to
get credit for the Inflation Reduction Act and the various
(37:18):
things that they did post COVID that essentially allowed the
US economy to prosper in a way that no other
economy in the world did, and for Americans to be
protected in a way that the citizens of other countries
were not, and they got no credit for that. Now,
that may have been a flaw in the way the
campaign was run, but it is customary in America for
(37:42):
presidential elections to be referendum on whoever's in office, and
prices are demonstrably higher than they were in twenty twenty.
Biden got nailed with that, notwithstanding the fact that personal
incomes are way up, employment is maxed out, and a
lot of the services on which people depend have been
(38:04):
financed in a way that helps it awful lot of people.
And all of that's going to go away under Trump. Right,
all of that's I mean, his strategy when he came
in the first time was to undo everything that Obama did,
and I assume his strategy will be underdo everything.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
I assume this will not be better.
Speaker 4 (38:21):
Yes, right, Meanwhile, they will claim credit, they will claim
credit for all the things that Biden did, right, because
you saw those polls that showed that sentiment about the
economy isn't actually about the economy, it's about is your
side winning or not right, So Republicans the minute the
election was done, Republicans suddenly think the economy looks great.
(38:42):
All of that is I mean, it's really disturbing because
history suggests when you get a change life, when people
come into power whose goal is to destroy, it's a
lot easier direct things than this to build. It's not
certain that we can recover quickly. You know, for example,
(39:02):
we may not be able to recover as quickly from
the second Trump term as we did from the first,
And recovering from the first one was obviously we had
some very fortunate things that happened, and Biden did some
brilliant things, but Democrats didn't get re elected for doing.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
All of that.
Speaker 4 (39:18):
And you know, after this next one, you know, we
may be looking at today and going, you know what
those were before times that those were the times we
really love, That's when we were happy, and you know,
we may be dealing with less of everything from here.
I just don't know.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right, and I also
think I think two things. One I think that's right,
and two I don't think that there's any world in
which I mean, yeah, I think that's right. Because the
problem was inequality, and so the people elected a nefarious
(39:55):
billionaire with the hopes that he would somehow fix it.
I want you to give me like a two minute
prescription on how you solve this incredibly enormous problem.
Speaker 4 (40:07):
We have to change our relationship to technology. We have
an irrational trust in technology and a belief that anything
new is better than what came before it. Neither of
those things is true today. People should be not just
skeptical but afraid of crypto. They should not just be
(40:30):
skeptical but afraid of generative artificial intelligence. These are not
products designed to make your life better. These are products
designing to extract value from you and leave you worse
off to the benefit of the people who are in control.
And we need to change our relationship, and we need
to do it now. So you and I are both
(40:52):
on Blue Scott. Challenge with Blue Skot is that it's
not obvious to me that there is a technology solution
to the problems we face today. And because it's highly centralized,
the incentives from Blue Sky are no different than they
were for Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
So they could get sold.
Speaker 4 (41:11):
Or they could monetize in a way that is extractive,
and what we need to do quickly is to work
with the team and find a way to make it
a subscription model or some model that isn't dependent on
our data because the incentives are totally screwed up.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
Have you talked to them?
Speaker 3 (41:29):
I have not.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
I don't know them, and I would love to meet
them because what they have done is truly amazing. But
the core thing is we can't be looking for silver
bullets here. I think this is going to require all
of us remembering that community comes first.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
We have to care about other people.
Speaker 4 (41:47):
You know that Reagan's admonition that we're all the Marlborough
man that was wrong, That was dangerous. That's what led
us to where we are now. Not because Regan was
a bad guy, but just because that was a dumb
idea that at the end of the day, we need
each other and we need to respect each other and
to be supportive, to acknowledge that there are folks whose
(42:09):
very nature makes them potential victims of what's going on.
Now we have to defend them.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
All.
Speaker 4 (42:15):
That means trans people, that means women, that means people
of color, that means immigrants, that means everybody, and we
have to recognize we're all in this together in that
trying to claim that somebody is the problem that's wrong.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Thank you, Roger, that was great, Thank you.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
God pleasure, no moment. Rick Wilson, Molly, Jong Fast.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
We have the one thing that we still have.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
We do. We want the one thing that we that
we absolutely are required by state and federal law of
performing at each podcast outing yes, And.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
This one is particularly amazing because it involves something we
told everyone was going to happen.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
Yep, we sure did. We told y'all that when Donald
Trump even started to propose tariffs, that companies would start
raising their prices on regular people in anticipation. Oh my gosh, Molly,
what's happening right now?
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Walmart lows may raise prices if Trump's tariff plans take
into effect. CFOs say, you will be shocked to know that.
In an interview with CNBC, Walmart CFO said he never
wants to raise prices. I mean, who does. But he's
going to have to raise prices, you know why, because
(43:34):
tariffs are wildly inflationary, and.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
Their taxes on the American.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
People, on the consumer.
Speaker 3 (43:40):
It's so striking to me. We have this insistence by
Trump and almost no one else, even his own people
are very careful not to say this. The taxes they
will be raised. Those are China taxes. They're on China, right,
but they're not. But they're not. They're on Americans again.
People voted for this, and they're going to get it
(44:01):
good and hard. I think they're going to have a
moment of shock, frankly, that the Great Donald Trump is
raising their taxes, even if it's not going to go
on their ten ninety nine every year, it's going on
their taxes. They're paying more money because they are going
to end up having the places they shop most driving
the prices up in advance because they know what's coming.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
Yep, yeah, yeah, Thank you.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
Rick Wilson as always happy to be with you. I'll
talk to you soon.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds, and Donald Trump's transition team has refused
to sign the normal ethics forms. We have such a
great show for you today the Lincoln Project Zone. Rick
Wilson talks to us about the impending disaster of the
(00:23):
next Trump administration. Then we will talk to Zucked author
and my friend Roger mcnamie about how tech is going
to eat us all. But first the news.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
So, Molly, I for one really enjoy you think about
our jobs that we get to work from home. Unfortunately,
our friends who are federal employees are not going to
enjoy that anymore. What are you seeing here?
Speaker 1 (00:43):
I have a lot of very naughty things to say
about Elin and Vivek and their very stupid fake government entity,
But I actually don't think this is that bad. But
they have called for government employees, federal employees to return
to five days a week in the office work weeks.
I mean, these guys are going to do some bad stuff, Okay,
(01:04):
some real bad stuff, some real bad stuff, and we
know that because they're tweeting about it, saying things like
we're going to have to tighten our belts and suffer
in order to balance the budget and get us all
a tax cut. But this, I think is not so bad.
But they do want federal employees in the office five
days a week. But hidden under that headline, I think,
(01:27):
and I think the real part of this that we
should talk about is that they did write an op
out in the Wall Street Journal this week. The two
of them and Wright is doing some heavy lifting, because
I have a feeling that neither of them wrote it.
And you'll remember the Wall Street Journal opinion section is
kind of very, very very right way. President Trump has
asked the two of us to lead a newly formed
(01:48):
Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, because we love the
memes to get the federal government down to size. The
entrenched and evergrowing bureaucracy represents an existent threat to our republic.
I'm not sure how that works, and politicians have abetted
it for too long. That's why we are doing it differently.
We are entrepreneurs, not politicians, entrepreneurs who got rich on
(02:11):
government subsidies, but who's counting. We will serve as outside volunteers,
not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory councils.
We won't just write reports or cut ribbons, will cut costs.
You want to bet me a million dollars they just
write reports and cut ribbons.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
I'm not taking that bet.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
All right? Are they going to write a lot of reports?
Some beliegue or staffer who's also a quote unquote volunteer
is going to write a lot of reports.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
But Malli, they're going to have a podcast too, Oh,
I would hope. So Pete Hegsath one of Trump's many,
many amazing Best People nominees. He has some questionable views
about women in the military. And I'm going to shock
you here. They're not really rooted in fact. What are
you seeing here?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
So Pete Hegsas has said about women in the military.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
He said, the standards have been Lord, I'm straight up
saying we should not have women in combat roles.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
So Pete Hagsas said that. And you'll remember he is
a weekend television host. Not that there's anything wrong with
the weekend cable news on Fox again Donald Trump is
You'll remember he does love a television host because he
feels they are the most serious of people to serve
(03:25):
in administrations. Whatever Anyway, The point here is Pete Hagsas
said that women have a lower standard. There is volumeous
evidence to show that that isn't true. And when he
goes for his congressional hearing, if he gets that far,
he will sit across from Tammy Duckworth, the senator from
Illinois who lost both her legs in battle. So we
(03:47):
shall see how he can make that case against women
in the military to a woman who has given everything. Jesse,
Let's talk about Donald trump favorite boogeyman.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
I've noticed something with his nominations. There's two things in common.
A lot of sexual abuse allegations and a lot of
people who have weird stories with doctors. Yes, what are
you seeing here?
Speaker 1 (04:11):
They really really really hate woke, right, whatever woke is,
and they're really obsessed with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Let's
just talk about the second. They hate diversity, equity and inclusion. Okay,
they hate a thing that is probably like diversity. They
hate diversity. Imagine hating diversity. They hate equity, imagine hating equity,
(04:35):
They hate inclusion including something anyway, So they hate DEI
and Donald Trump has said that on day one, day one,
he is going to end Dei and a key figure
in Trump's anti Dei agenda is the son of immigrants,
Steven Miller, who grew up in Santa Monica, and he
(04:56):
is white and Jewish, not entirely the same thing. He
is Jewish, just like I'm Jewish. And he feels that
people who are black have had too many advantages, and
so he is hoping to rollback workplace protections for Black
Americans to a degree not seen since the end of Reconstruction,
(05:16):
which ushered in Jim Crow. Jim Crow, which was in
some ways used as a framework for someone who many
people in Donald Trump's cabinet have compared Donald Trump to
Adolf Hitler. We will see what happens here. It's super
upsetting to watch people get their rights taken away. But
(05:37):
the American voters did this, so good luck to everyone.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Somali. We should also talk about what the signals of
this cabinet and this administration or saidek, what do you see?
Speaker 1 (05:47):
They are sending signals, and the signals are that me
too is no longer. This is a really interesting piece
by Jill Philipovich about how it is the Donald Trump's
sexual cabinet. Trump's second term is shaping up to platform
even more men who have been incredibly abusive sexual assault
and harassment. You've got Matt Gates who's now out, who
(06:09):
has now dropped out and is now spending his time
doing cameos, which we're not advertising his cameos, We're just
saying that's true. You've got Pete Hagsith. You've got the
sexual abuse issues, the lawsuit that has focused on the WWE,
which is co owned by Linda McMahon, and she was
(06:29):
actually named in one of these lawsuits. Here, there and everywhere.
RFK Junior has numerous allegations of all sorts of stuff
that's not okay. Look, they're normalizing what Trump considers to
be normal, and none of us should be surprised by
any of this.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Strong a grief.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Project and
the host of the Enemy's List.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Rick Wilson, Mollie john Fast, Welcome to Thanksgiving Week.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
It's Sunday, so we must be podcasting. I want to
air the petty grievances. Nextgiving makes me know it's time
to air the petty grievances.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Wish those grievances out and get to it all right.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
So my pettiest grievance is that I wrote this whole
I think very smart essay. If I do say so myself,
which I do.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Which I retreated or re exed or whatever the right it's.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Called yes, yes to all the bots and elon about
how I was wrong about some fundamental premises about the
twenty twenty for election. Right, I thought, oh, this will
be followed by a plethora of other people going on
about how they were wrong about the twenty twenty four election.
You know what I found. I was greeted with no
(07:43):
one else.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
You know what. Let me just say this. There is
a degree of post election duchiness that manifests itself across
four or five different axes and domains. Number one is
the sorest winner syndrome, with every mob out there, Right.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
They won, but they're still not happy.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Right, this election is all about free speech? Shut up liberal. Yeah,
that's a big set. I have a fraction of progressives
who are like, if only we had declared we would
seize the means of production, we would have won.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
But they are not nearly as of notch as. Oh god, no,
tell me the other groups you think.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
There's also some practical types who are like, oh, if
only we'd done more of this or that mechanical thing,
and it's always the mechanical thing their group does best. Right,
only we've gone out for more turnout among dog owners.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Okay, right, right, But.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
The entire the entire post election.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Wait, we're not going to mention the never trumpers here.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
I love We're getting it, We're getting to it, We're
getting to it. But the whole dream that is dead.
That Look, I will say this, I'll take some creditae.
I'm an early adopter of abandoning the full Republican thing
because it was never coming back. I said it in
twenty eighteen. It was never coming back. But there were
a lot of people who were hopeful that, you know,
we would be able to motivate a larger number, and
(09:02):
we got about we got a little more than we
did last time, but it wasn't enough to offset all
the new people he's brought into the Republican Party, most
of whom you know, are are not shall we say,
folks deeply read in Burke Kirk, Buckley, et cetera, and
are instead like I want to kill all them pedophiles
and send them Mexicans back. That's their Republican Party. So
(09:25):
the idea that we could somehow and that's two degree
groups like ours, like Sarah Longwells, like other folks. It's
a dead issue now, and you got to get over
wanting to have the Republican Party back now. And again,
I've been a very early adopter on that for a
very long time, Like not long after the first my
first book came out. I was like, Oh, it's not
going to work. We're not getting that party back. But
people who wanted that party back it's gone now.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
I want to also point out, and again I actually
thought that the Liz Cheney thing was smart, but actually
it turns out that it may have hurt her with
the base. Did you see this data for Pride Progress polling.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
I haven't seen it.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
No, So Data for Progress is not without its foibles
and without it's you know, it is left leaning. And
what might want to get to.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
This if by leaning you mean so far it's practically perpendicular,
but yes, go on, whatever it is.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
It's left leaning, and that makes you a little bit upset.
But among Pennsylvania and Michigan, independence, messages about Harris's economic
platform perform better than messages touting her support from former
Republican congress women.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Well, of course, this is like saying would you like
the would you like the cuttlefish or the vanilla paste?
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Which one do you want? Because I don't want either
of those vanilla paste.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
It's a self park joke. It's a self park centipede joke.
What I'm saying here is that is one of those
logical constructs that isn't really the point. You can have
things simultaneously in politics. You could appeal to more moderate
conservative voters while having a strong economic policy. And so
the vast majority of her ad load, of her communications load,
(11:11):
was not about Liz Cheney or Republicans. The vast majority,
I would say, probably back of the envelope, somewhere around
a five percent of it was about a better deal
for Americans, fair deal for Americans, you know, the child
tax credit, all the things that she was rightly I
thought emphasizing in her campaign. There are a lot of
progressives right now who are done to desperately try to say, well,
(11:35):
what we really didn't get was enough progressive progressivism in
a progressive country. But in case anybody missed the fucking notes,
this is not a progressive country. Look it wasn't even
as progressive as I modeled.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Okay, explain this again.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
This country is very much center right, right, Maybe I
have to go with the data, and the data tells
me very clearly that the country was not moved with
sufficient numbers by the core messaging that people had hoped.
It wasn't moved any degree. You know, we had we
had a bunch of states that voted for pro choice
amendments and still elected Donald Trump. That looked like the
(12:11):
killer app and everybody's pulling mine and everybody else's and
it wasn't. It wasn't. The economic pain argument was one
that was that was more easily dismissed by folks on
the left and the center. We were like, okay, yeah,
the economy's fine, it's getting better. It was bad for
a while, it's back, but it wasn't in the minds
of the voters that came out. And remember, he activated
less likely voters at a level that no one could
(12:34):
have anticipated.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
No, no, I know. And he did the same thing
he did in twenty sixteen and in twenty twenty, and
we kept under astrmating him. But I just want to
point out economic populism technically should be the base of
the Democratic Party.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
Well, here's the problem the Democratic Party to and for
a ton of reasons, not not related to the campaign,
but to the culture and to the disinformation matrix that's
out there and to Fox everything else. What the country
hears when they hear democratic economic policy, they hear one message,
which is smart guys will tell you how to live.
Welcome to communism. That's what they hear from Fox every day.
(13:09):
It's not true, it's not true, but it's what they
hear over and over and over and over again. Donald
Trump says, I'm going to fuck people who you hate,
and I'm going to throw the Mexicans out, and I'm
gonna screw the Chinese over. None of it's true. None
of it will work. It will be an economic disaster
and a moral disaster. But we have to admit to
ourselves that the country is not what we think it
(13:30):
is or want it to be. A lot of the time,
this country is not as good as we hoped it
was on a lot of fronts. And I hate saying that.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Again. Here's my hottest take. I don't agree. First of all,
I think a lot of people just felt that he
spoke to them and they liked him, and they didn't
necessarily think like, for example, they did not necessarily believe
that he was going to do I mean, this was
a thing we saw again and again. They didn't believe
he was going to do the bad stuff for some reason,
(14:00):
and they just didn't think.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
I have not seen a lot of polling that says
that they didn't believe he would not do the bad stuff.
I have seen a lot of polling that says they
want him to do mass deportations and that they want
him to do a jillion percent tariffs against the jinas,
the China's not the vaginas.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, yeah, I got it.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
But I have seen them express this desire for the
things he was selling. And I'm trying to not give
America like an extra break here by saying, oh, well,
obviously they didn't think. They thought he was joking, he
didn't really mean mass deportations. I find that to be
a dangerous area for us to go into, to not
(14:41):
take him seriously and literally. That's the old joke, you know,
you don't take Trump seriously or.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Literally, right. I mean, it doesn't matter what they wanted,
because they're going to get Project twenty twenty.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Five and they're going to get it good and hard. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Yeah, so let's talk about what that looks like. We got,
we got my body and he's now body. Let me
tell you he's really not my buddy Russ Vaught.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
Oh yeah, the great Russ Vought running OMBA.
Speaker 3 (15:09):
And for those of you playing at home, give.
Speaker 5 (15:11):
Us the TLDR on that guy running the Office of
Management the budget is he's the guy who will be
able to look down at great with great granularity, into
the various departments and say, oh, you have a program.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Here that might somehow hypothetically relate to climate change. By
it's gone. If you don't think Russ Vought and Vivic
and Elon will be swap and spit every day and
taking long showers together to plot out how to best
fuck the American people. That is the guy who's going
to push the actual buttons to.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Do it right. I think it's important to mention that
the vac Russ Vaught is like, is a heritage guy,
is a He's a Republican donor guy. He is like
going to really run this admin. The Veke and Elon
have a fake job. Now, whether or not they can
(16:02):
do anything with that fake job. We don't know, but
the the Department of DOGE is largely a meme.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
It is largely a meme. But if they have a
relationship with a guy like Russvott, who already has plans.
By the way, he will also be pointing those idiots
in the direction of targets that he's already identified in
Project twenty twenty five. So he's going to say, oh, well,
we've gone through the budget line items of every department,
and here in the Department of Commerce is a DEI program,
(16:30):
or here in the EPA is a climate program, or
here in Health and Human Services is something that LGBTQ
folks benefit from. He's going to already tell them, and
then they'll make it. Then Elon will go, why are
we paying for lesbian loot players and the HI just
budget or whatever fantasy bullshit he makes up, right, And
so then you know, it's sort of a fiendish circle.
(16:51):
Vaught and his types will identify the targets they've already
set up for execution. Elon and Vivek will make it
a giant public screen match.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
And do you know who serves as their congressional attache.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
I do not.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
I can't believe I get to be the one to
tell you this, like, I do not know this. Taylor
Green is going toal subcommittee.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Now I will say this, Molly, that actually kind of
makes me feel better.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Right. Well, that's what AOC said too. She was like,
you know, she's never done the reading once in her life.
So good luck to all of you.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Look, I have to say the President can do a lot, okay,
but the Department of the Office of the Management of
the Budget still operates under a number of different areas
of congressional control. And those areas of congressional control are
set down in law and set down in the Constitution.
They appropriate that money, Okay, that is how it's done. Okay,
(17:52):
they authorize and appropriate that money. That is how it's done.
So one of the things that's going to happen here
really quickly is going to discover that every government program
is spread out among all fifty seven states or eighty
one of Floria. Trump numbers fifty seven states and territories
in this great country. Right. So when they say, oh, well,
I'll give you a good example. Elon wants to get
(18:14):
rid of the rocket that competes with His rocket doesn't
really compete very well, but Boeing has this rocket, right,
So he's going to say, oh, well, we've got to
get rid of the Boeing whatever SLS, whatever it's called, right,
and we want to kill that program. The Margie Taylor
Green's going to discover that in her district they make
some sort of fucking part for that and it employs
eighteen people and they're paid one hundred and twenty five
(18:35):
thousand dollars a year each, And that happens across the nation.
They're going to run into the critical reality wall of
government spending, which is that government spending happens everywhere. They're
going to also run into the wall that you could
cut every discretionary program out there. You could cut the
EPA and h justin commerce and everything else down to
the bone. Okay, cut it to the bone. You could
(18:55):
cut the Pentagon budget in half, and you know what,
you still have gigantic debt service and four big social
programs that they're not going to get rid of. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,
and the sub category there disability, which has been the
one that's exploding. And guess what if you draw a
map down Appalachia and the Deep South, that's where disability
(19:18):
is happening.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Well also, you know disability. We just went through COVID.
I mean, I feel like what I'm always struck by
by how insane this next admin is going to be
is they've learned lessons from COVID, but they've learned all
the wrong lessons, right right, So they were like, a
million people died and it's because we had vaccine mandates.
Right No, no, no, no, that's not why a million
(19:42):
people died. I mean, and it's just like every you know,
it's like watching a slow motion car wreck. But I
actually haven't thought I want you to talk about for
a minute because I think this is the thing that
is so weird to me. These people, Vivek and Elon
are obsessed with technology, right right, These people are RFK Junior.
(20:04):
They all hate science. Make it make sense, Well.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
They hate a science that somehow identifies in the world
that there are social factors that exist. So they hated
the fact that there were mask mandates because there was
an argument. Correct, I still believe that it would diminish
in some way, even at the margins, the spread of COVID,
But they felt like that was the government telling them
what to do. Now, They're fine telling one what to
(20:28):
do with her vagina, but they're not fine with the
government saying you should inoculate your or you should vaccinate
your kids from measles, mumps, rebellodip theoria, teennis, and polio.
Part of it's like this strange San Francisco Bay Silicon
Valley WU inflected thing. They believe in engineering more than
they believe in science, because science can tell you things
about the bigger societal picture than just engineering can.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
Yeah, I guess that's the only answer. But it just
seems to me like if you love technology, you should
at least have a nodding as to science.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
You know, look, you ought to, it would be great.
But they let me give you another part of what's
happening here. There is a belief among this broligarchy, David
Sachs and Bill Ackman and Elon Musk and Vivek and
all these other people in a lot of ways that
they will be the holders of all wisdom and approaches
to how things are.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Done right because they're smarter than everyone else, because somehow
they got government subsidies for doing their businesses.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Yes, correct, I would be happy for the doge to
pass the world that says, no one involved who donates
to a political figure, they receive government funding I like,
of any kind, and they're no company of anybody who's
involved or invested in they receive government funding. And you
know what, I promise you that's not going to happen
because Elon Musk's entire fortune has been made on the
back of the US taxpayer.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Real talk exactly. And now it's true. Now the money
he's going to.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Cut, yeah, correct, except for himself. I promise you now,
a single dime of SpaceX or Tesla fund that has
any government impact will Those will be the most meritorious
spending items in the entire budget.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (22:07):
No.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
The whole idea that you're going to bring some outside
billionaire who's never done government into cut costs is very stupid.
But this is all going to get very stupid, very fast.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
At the end of the Cold War, we have this
thing called the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, because we
had like seven hundred or nine hundred military bases in
this country. At the end of the Cold War, we
realized and we don't need all this anymore. Right, You
had people from the most progressive fuck the military, burn
the military to the ground liberal types to hardcore conservatives.
(22:41):
Every one of them was like, oh no, Fort John
Jones in my district, even though it hasn't hasn't been
used since the War of eighteen fucking twelve, is essential
to national defense. All of it is like, you're going
to see the blowback that's going to happen on the
doge from Congress itself, including from some of its most
concernive members. They're gonna be like, wait, what They're great, true,
(23:04):
true wake up call. It's going to be glorious. Rick
Wilson as always happy to be with you and happy
to be right.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Well, not totally right, but sure. Roger mcnamie is the
author of Zucht Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. Welcome
to past politics, Roger.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
It is a great pleasure moment.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Thank you for having me. Oh, we're so excited to
have you. We are in such a strange moment in
American life.
Speaker 4 (23:35):
But you saw those coming, well, Molly, I have some advantages.
I first went to Silicon Valley in nineteen eighty two,
back when seriously it was a completely different world, you know.
I followed the siren call of Steve Jobs to both
create technology that would empower people, increase productivity, and frankly,
make the world a better place. From nineteen eighty two
(23:56):
until the financial crisis, it was really exciting. Silicon Valley
produced a lot of things. But beginning, you know, two
thousand and nine twenty ten, the tech industry discovered that
post financial crisis, that they no longer had to make
products that were good for people or that empowered them.
(24:16):
That they could use data and the free capital that
was available because interest rates were essentially zero for a
long time, they could get unprecedented amounts of capital and
use technology to exploit human weakness. And so the whole
industry went from being the most exciting, dynamic, positive contribute
(24:37):
to our economy to becoming the greatest threat to democracy,
public health, and civil liberties that the country has seen
in a very very long tut And all of that
became clear to me in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Was it the election that made you.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
Know, oh, interesting, No, it was way before the election.
So keep in mind, I'd been involved as an investor
in technology companies, and I'd been a mentor to Mark
Zuckerberg at Facebook and to Cheryl Samberg. I brought them
together so that was all in from two thousand and
six to two thousand and nine.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Some was said Tobate that you mentor before we discovered
that they're evil. Sorry you try.
Speaker 4 (25:18):
That was certainly true for me. Yeah, when I knew
them well, I both respected them both and I liked
them both. And there were signs that they had shall
we say, big dreams. But that's not an uncommon thing
with entrepreneurs. It's just in two thousand and six, if
you had really bad intention, the technology itself didn't allow
(25:39):
you to hurt people at large scale. That really didn't
happen until cell phones had enough bandwidth to do videos.
So at that point there were no limitations on what
you could do with technology. And the key thing in
early twenty sixteen, I started to see disinformation, really hate
speech targeted Hillary Clinton. It was virallly spreading through Facebook,
(26:00):
and I went, oh, that doesn't look good. And then
there were some civil rights things that happened, and then
Breggs it in the United Kingdom in June twenty sixteen.
The outcome was such a huge shock. Literally it was
an eight point swing from what the polls had suggested
the day before the referendum, and it occurred to me
that Facebook was probably the only reasonable explanation for how.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
That had happened.
Speaker 4 (26:23):
And then in the summer of twenty sixteen, we discovered
that Paul Maniford is shall we say, affiliated with Russian oligarchs.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
You'll remember that from season one. Trump as does continue exactly.
Speaker 4 (26:37):
But all of that really scared me. So I wrote
up a thing which was originally going to be an
op ed, but I'd never written an op ed before,
and so it took me a long time to do it.
Before I published it, I sent it to Mark Zuckerberg
and Schaw Sandberg to warn them. So this is nine
days before the presidential election twenty sixteen. Saint guys, I
am really terrified because Facebook, this company had been deeply involved,
(27:00):
is being used by bad actors to undermine democracy and
civil rights. And as your former mentor, what I'm saying
to you is, I don't think you want your company
to be associated with undermining democracy and civil rights that,
even if you aren't morally interested in it. Right, it's
a bad business strategy, and long story, sure everybody knows
what happens.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
They were like, no, it's a good business strategy.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
No, no, no, no, Actually it was more cynical than that.
There's a term of art at Silicon Valley when somebody
is really nice to and smiley at you, but doing
the opposite of what you want to do. It's called
grin fucking. And that's what they did to me. And
they couldn't have been more polite, and they could not
have been less interested in acting. And so I became
(27:43):
an activist. I went to Congress, I went to state
attorneys general, I talked to governors. You know, I did
work with believe it or not, I worked with the
Trump administration and the Trust people, all trying to get
them to recognize that uncontrolled Silicon Valley representatives to everything
that we value in America, democracy, public health, civil liberties,
(28:06):
you know, just the whole function of our society. And
it wasn't because they were banned people. It was because
they perceived that what their mission was, you know, in
the case of Mark Zuckerberg connecting the whole world on
a communications network that he managed, that that was so
important that it justified any harm that might result from it.
And you know, my view was that, let's face it,
(28:30):
we've been through things like this with automobiles, with tobacco,
with aircraft, with lead and paint. Right, there are been
zillions of examples of the government is actually government acting
to ensure safety, to ensure protection of civil rights, and
to preserve competition. So I argued for those three things,
(28:51):
and you know a lot of people listened. We had
lots of conversations, and nothing happened. So twenty twenty comes along,
and in twenty twenty, Phase Book's role was different that
in twenty sixteen. You know, the Russians want to advertise
and Facebook goes, well, they're a good customer, and they
offered their services both to Trump and to Clinton. Clinton
(29:12):
said no, and the Facebook guys threw themselves into helping
Trump win, and together with Cambridge Analytica, they matched thirty
million Facebook user IDs to voter files, which allowed them,
from a targeting point of view, to have a level
of accuracy in targeting that it never occurred.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
At politics previously.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
And they used to just suppress the votes of black people,
suburban women, and young voters in target states. How did
they get that information? Was that because Russia hacked the
Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. We
don't know, because nobody ever really investigated, but they had
(29:54):
perfect targeting and they suppressed those votes and Trump won
in twenty twenty. It was different because in the lead
up to twenty twenty we had COVID, and during COVID, QAnon,
which were the guys who were around Pizza gain were
they were like super active, and Facebook could have kept
all those people at the fringes. But their business model
(30:17):
is different than that. Their business model is about getting
people's attention, and the way you do that is with
fear and outrage. Not because everybody reacts to that, but
because probably half the population reacts to that more than
anything else, and half the population is enough, and so
they even after the FBI warned them in May of
(30:39):
twenty nineteen, Facebook continued to allow QAnon to prosper. And
then when COVID broke out, Facebook had already been at
place where they have these things called facebo, people who
have a shared interest get together, and one of the
core ones was is groups for new mothers, and people
who were anti vaxers infiltrated these new mothers groups, and
(31:05):
the anti vaxers were essentially indoctrinating new mothers to be
anti vax The q and on guys saw this, and
they aimed at the anti vaxers and subsumed them. The
Trump campaign saw this and went, wow, these are our people,
and so they went and MAGA essentially merged with q Andon.
(31:26):
That's why Trump spent the summer of twenty twenty putting
out all those tweets about q and on stuff and
so Facebook. You know, if they had been more worried
about democracy and profits, they would have stopped this, but
they did just the opposite. And of course then Trump
began to stop the steal. And all of that was
organized in Facebook groups right up to the right up
(31:48):
to the insurrection. And I had written my book two
years earlier, and I talked about the fact that Facebook groups,
because there's no police, a lot of bad things happen
in them, and if you don't controlled them in some way,
eventually we were going to have an insurrection. And son
of a Gun it actually happened at Genuar of twenty
twenty one, and we had a whistleblower, Francis Hoguand who
(32:12):
brought out all the paperwork and said, all the people
on Facebook knew all about this. And you know you're
sitting there going, okay, wow, that's really bad. Well, in
twenty twenty four, it took one step even worse than that,
which is that people in Silicon Valley stop pretending to
be neutral. You know, obviously the most extreme example is Musk,
but they all were pretty tightly aligned with Trump. And
(32:35):
you know, the problem is that Silicon Valley controls the
most important communication systems we have in the country, in fact,
in the whole world. And so we go into this
thing in a year at which fifty four percent of
American adults cannot read above a sixth grade level. So,
you know, public education, which has been crushed for forty years,
(32:57):
has put us on this point where a lot of
people vulnerable to manipulation, and these technology products, which are
designed for manipulation are aligned with the forces that are
against democracy. And that's how we wound up where we
are today. So it didn't matter how good a campaign
the vice president ran. The people on the other side
(33:18):
never heard any of it.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
So I want you to the anti vax QAnon stuff
is really interesting to me, and had not I absolutely
did not, for whatever reason, totally thread the needle on that.
So can you explain that to us a little bit?
Speaker 3 (33:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (33:40):
Sure, So here's The way to think about it, if
you look at the post mortems on the twenty twenty
four election, people talked about Fox News and they talk about,
you know, the various right wing podcasters, right, and the
Democrats that had nothing to match that. The thing that
they're missing is that Fox News Joe Rogan their audiences
(34:01):
are what five million, maybe ten million at tops.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
I mean those Joe Rogan clips got to sixty nine
million people.
Speaker 4 (34:10):
Oh no, I believe that. Sorry, I believe that. But
how did they get there? They got there because Instagram, Facebook, TikTok,
YouTube right, which is owned by Google, and Twitter elevated them.
Are these platforms that were aligned with Trump's positions, right,
(34:30):
And the thing that I think really matters is that
you roughly eighty million people voted for Trump. How many
people are in maggot, I don't know. It's it eighty is,
at sixties, at one hundred, it doesn't matter. You can't
sustain a collective dilution right right, at the scale of
sixty to one hundred million people with things that only
(34:51):
have an audience of five million. So the role that
these things play is gigantic. So if you go back
to anti vas the problem with Facebook, and Facebook really
is worse than the other guys on this issue, but
they all contribute to it, is that Facebook's whole business
model is taking ideas from the fringe, things that historically
(35:13):
before Internet platforms existed, were just people, you know, flat
earthers and all that, where people are just screaming into
a void and nobody listening. Facebook business strategy was to
mainstream all those ideas, and in the context of anti
vax and in the context of MAGA, in the context
to stop the steal, and in the context of the
(35:34):
twenty twenty four election. What that meant was that you
could literally create an alternate reality with roughly half the
voters all completely involved and uncouched by reality. And you know,
there's an Adam Surwer thing in The Atlantic this week
(35:54):
where he's talking about the fact that there's going to
be some buyer's remorse because the alternate reality is so
unhinged that a lot of the people have voted for
Trump don't believe he's actually going to do the things
he's already doing.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
I want to get into that because that was something
I absolutely saw, was that I really noticed this when
you would when you would talk to voters, or when
you would look at the data, is that a lot
of these voters, You would say, well, Trump is going
to do this, and they would say, no, he's not
going to do it. At the RNC, they had signs
that said mass deportation. Now, when you talk to voters
(36:31):
you would say, you know, for example, like the large
number of Latino voters at the border in the Rio
Grande Valley who voted for Trump, they would say, well, yeah,
but it's not he's not going to do it, or
it's not going to do it that way, or it's
not going to happen to us. There was a real
inability to sort of suspension of disbelief. I always thought
(36:52):
it was because Trump wasn't able to do the kind
of stuff he had wanted to the first time around.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (36:58):
What I do know, though, is that a vote for
Trump wasn't necessarily a vote for what he was advocating,
but it was always a vote against Biden and the irony.
The irony is that somehow the Democrats were unable to
get credit for the Inflation Reduction Act and the various
(37:18):
things that they did post COVID that essentially allowed the
US economy to prosper in a way that no other
economy in the world did, and for Americans to be
protected in a way that the citizens of other countries
were not, and they got no credit for that. Now,
that may have been a flaw in the way the
campaign was run, but it is customary in America for
(37:42):
presidential elections to be referendum on whoever's in office, and
prices are demonstrably higher than they were in twenty twenty.
Biden got nailed with that, notwithstanding the fact that personal
incomes are way up, employment is maxed out, and a
lot of the services on which people depend have been
(38:04):
financed in a way that helps it awful lot of people.
And all of that's going to go away under Trump. Right,
all of that's I mean, his strategy when he came
in the first time was to undo everything that Obama did,
and I assume his strategy will be underdo everything.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
I assume this will not be better.
Speaker 4 (38:21):
Yes, right, Meanwhile, they will claim credit, they will claim
credit for all the things that Biden did, right, because
you saw those polls that showed that sentiment about the
economy isn't actually about the economy, it's about is your
side winning or not right, So Republicans the minute the
election was done, Republicans suddenly think the economy looks great.
(38:42):
All of that is I mean, it's really disturbing because
history suggests when you get a change life, when people
come into power whose goal is to destroy, it's a
lot easier direct things than this to build. It's not
certain that we can recover quickly. You know, for example,
(39:02):
we may not be able to recover as quickly from
the second Trump term as we did from the first,
And recovering from the first one was obviously we had
some very fortunate things that happened, and Biden did some
brilliant things, but Democrats didn't get re elected for doing.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
All of that.
Speaker 4 (39:18):
And you know, after this next one, you know, we
may be looking at today and going, you know what
those were before times that those were the times we
really love, That's when we were happy, and you know,
we may be dealing with less of everything from here.
I just don't know.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right, and I also
think I think two things. One I think that's right,
and two I don't think that there's any world in
which I mean, yeah, I think that's right. Because the
problem was inequality, and so the people elected a nefarious
(39:55):
billionaire with the hopes that he would somehow fix it.
I want you to give me like a two minute
prescription on how you solve this incredibly enormous problem.
Speaker 4 (40:07):
We have to change our relationship to technology. We have
an irrational trust in technology and a belief that anything
new is better than what came before it. Neither of
those things is true today. People should be not just
skeptical but afraid of crypto. They should not just be
(40:30):
skeptical but afraid of generative artificial intelligence. These are not
products designed to make your life better. These are products
designing to extract value from you and leave you worse
off to the benefit of the people who are in control.
And we need to change our relationship, and we need
to do it now. So you and I are both
(40:52):
on Blue Scott. Challenge with Blue Skot is that it's
not obvious to me that there is a technology solution
to the problems we face today. And because it's highly centralized,
the incentives from Blue Sky are no different than they
were for Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
So they could get sold.
Speaker 4 (41:11):
Or they could monetize in a way that is extractive,
and what we need to do quickly is to work
with the team and find a way to make it
a subscription model or some model that isn't dependent on
our data because the incentives are totally screwed up.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
Have you talked to them?
Speaker 3 (41:29):
I have not.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
I don't know them, and I would love to meet
them because what they have done is truly amazing. But
the core thing is we can't be looking for silver
bullets here. I think this is going to require all
of us remembering that community comes first.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
We have to care about other people.
Speaker 4 (41:47):
You know that Reagan's admonition that we're all the Marlborough
man that was wrong, That was dangerous. That's what led
us to where we are now. Not because Regan was
a bad guy, but just because that was a dumb
idea that at the end of the day, we need
each other and we need to respect each other and
to be supportive, to acknowledge that there are folks whose
(42:09):
very nature makes them potential victims of what's going on.
Now we have to defend them.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
All.
Speaker 4 (42:15):
That means trans people, that means women, that means people
of color, that means immigrants, that means everybody, and we
have to recognize we're all in this together in that
trying to claim that somebody is the problem that's wrong.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
Thank you, Roger, that was great, Thank you.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
God pleasure, no moment. Rick Wilson, Molly, Jong Fast.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
We have the one thing that we still have.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
We do. We want the one thing that we that
we absolutely are required by state and federal law of
performing at each podcast outing yes, And.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
This one is particularly amazing because it involves something we
told everyone was going to happen.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
Yep, we sure did. We told y'all that when Donald
Trump even started to propose tariffs, that companies would start
raising their prices on regular people in anticipation. Oh my gosh, Molly,
what's happening right now?
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Walmart lows may raise prices if Trump's tariff plans take
into effect. CFOs say, you will be shocked to know that.
In an interview with CNBC, Walmart CFO said he never
wants to raise prices. I mean, who does. But he's
going to have to raise prices, you know why, because
(43:34):
tariffs are wildly inflationary, and.
Speaker 3 (43:36):
Their taxes on the American.
Speaker 1 (43:38):
People, on the consumer.
Speaker 3 (43:40):
It's so striking to me. We have this insistence by
Trump and almost no one else, even his own people
are very careful not to say this. The taxes they
will be raised. Those are China taxes. They're on China, right,
but they're not. But they're not. They're on Americans again.
People voted for this, and they're going to get it
(44:01):
good and hard. I think they're going to have a
moment of shock, frankly, that the Great Donald Trump is
raising their taxes, even if it's not going to go
on their ten ninety nine every year, it's going on
their taxes. They're paying more money because they are going
to end up having the places they shop most driving
the prices up in advance because they know what's coming.
Speaker 1 (44:21):
Yep, yeah, yeah, Thank you.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
Rick Wilson as always happy to be with you. I'll
talk to you soon.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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