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 a new Gallup poll shows that Donald Trump's approval ratings have fallen ten points since his second term began six months ago. We have such a great show for you today. MSNBC's own Ali Batali stops by to talk about how Trump is trying to maneuver his way out of the Epstein mess. Spoiler, it's not working. Then we'll talk to director Ari Astor about his new
movie Eddington and the politics surrounding it. But first the news.
Bally yesterday we got one of those demonstrations of just how pathetic most of the GOP is as we watched Jerome Powell not have any of Donald Trump's bullshit. What did you see there?
This is such an incredibly stupid moment because it shows why it's stupid? Is this? It's because it shows how everyone else in the Republican party and leadership has just given up trying to be real people around our hand autocrat. So here's what happened. Trump is trying to blame Powell for the renovation of the FED, which Trump was the
person who initiated his first administration. And the reason he's doing this is because he wants to fire Powell this way, and in this stupid, stupid, stupid plan, he's trying to make it sound worse, to make it so that Powell will resign in disgrace or whatever he can do. So he is up there with Powell and he says, we're taking a look. It looks like about three point one billion. Trump says, and then Powell and like, by the way, this is how you should do it when you're interviewing Trump.
This is like a masterclass on how not to get run over by the guy. Instead of saying, oh okay, he says, Pal shakes his head. He goes, it went up a little bit or a lot, so the two point seven is now three point one. Trump continues, and Pale shakes his head, and then he says this is not true. And he says, you just added a third building, Pal says, and Trump says, it's a building that's being built and Pali says, no, that was built five years ago,
and it's just like this is. And then Trump said it's part of the overall work, right, So it's like you can be on Earth one, or you can be on Earth too. But if you stay on Earth one, when Trump says Earth too stuff, you just say, that's not true. This is what actually happened. And I know it's not polite, but he's the only way that American democracy is going to survive. So when Trump says we didn't cut food stamps, you say, well, why are all these kids in May not able to get you know,
snap benefits anymore. That's how this has to go, is you have to just say what really happened. And a good example is that the other day I was on a panel and somebody said that it made a false equivalency. They put two people together who were definitely not the same, and it was a little bit the equivalency really made the woman in the combination seem much less accomplished than she was. It was ultimately a bit sexist, and I said,
you know, these two people are not the same. And we, unfortunately were in a moment in American life where we just constantly have to say that, and even though it's not polite, and even though we were raised to not be like that, because you know, especially women of my generation, we really weren't supposed to push back like that, but unfortunately it's the only choice because we are just down a fucking rabbit hole that there's no way out of here.
Agreed. I don't know about your family, but my family took a lot of pictures were young, and yet somehow there seems to be more pictures of Donald Trump with Jeffrey Epstein that I have of most people in my family and I together. And then we also find out there's lots of pictures of RFK with Jeffrey Epstein, there's signed birthday books. It really just feels like, at breakneck speed.
Now we are finding out that when Jeffrey Epstein described Donald Trump as his best friend for a decade, there's a lot of photographic and other proof.
I mean, this is why this was so stupid for Trump to play into at the beginning, right because he knew he had been friends with him for a long time. He knew, I mean, we just we knew this to be true. So the fact that they're just keep coming up more and more photos of Trump and jeff app I mean, he clearly was worried about that. That's why he keeps bringing her off art.
So Donald's been doing a really great thing where he compares his different behaviors on subjects, and the behavior on this subject is so clearly different than other subjects.
Right, It's a really good example. I just don't get why he would. I mean, I guess, you know, the guy's very visceral and just does stuff just as the next thing in front of him. But it is a little bit chocking to me that this is the way he is doing it and that this is just going to keep going like this. But clearly something's going on.
You know. The TURNI phrase I said yet the other day was you know, you don't usually suspect that the Achilles heel is going to be whichever thing it is on the body when it gets to somebody. But we've clearly found it. So this is an interesting turning of events from Talking Points to Momo that La Grand jury's are refusing to indict Ice protesters.
Because the mainstream media is so small now and because there's so little reporting out there. I don't think people understand how mad just normal people are. This is not an endorsement in any way, shape or form, because I actually think it's really we're heading down really slippery slope. But clearly Ice is behaving in an illegal way. And then the eye idea is that somehow you're supposed to
prosecute people who are behaving illegally towards ICE. And I just think you can see where this is going, right. People don't want to work in a legal framework if the other party isn't. That sort of part of the problem with trump Ism, too, right, is that these ICE people being illegally in this country was a civil violation until like six months ago. So the idea that now these people are being shipped to like death camps, I mean Sea cott is, you know, or Alligator Alcatraz disappearing
in the middle of the night. This is not legal. So then the idea is that you have to somehow punish the people who have cooked this all up. You have to punish the people who are protesting them. It doesn't seem in my mind that this is going to work for them. Agreed, You're not going to be able to get this to keep going like this.
So the White House put out this really ridiculous order the other day called ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets, and it basically says that the cities and states need to remove homeless people from the streets.
Yeah, I mean this is this push and there's actually I mean, this is all of this stuff where Trump isn't pushes everyone to the right. So they say, we see it with Newsome also signed something. You know, you have a Supreme Court that clearly is so in the tank for Trump and Republicans. They don't care about civil liberties for people who are poor right homeless, as clearly that's where this is going. I do think it's interesting that Trump is clearly trying to distract and trying to
ratchet things up. He wants to now send these people, to send them to substance abuse programs. Sure. I mean, as someone who's sober and who really does very much believe that you have to get people sober, and I don't believe in harm reduction. I actually think harm reduction can be really bad. It just seems to me that this is like not really what he wants to do, like that he doesn't really want to get people in
rehab that he doesn't want to. You know, it's hard enough to do these things when you actually want to do them. It's harder when you don't really want to do them. Ali Vittally is the host of MSNBC is way too early. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Ali Vitale.
World to be back here in Alijelfast.
It's so fun to have you on my podcast because I feel like world's collide, you know.
Yeah, when MJ becomes the podcast, it's great.
It's all it's all one mushy banana Republic. Can you explain to us what where we are? The House has gone home like about a week early, because why wouldn't they? And I mean really, it's because Mike Johnson has no idea how his members are going to vote.
Right, It's because the Epstein bus that they drove and created is about to now run them over. And it manifested in Congress I think in a really fascinating way because it ground the entire house to a halt. Now, the dirty little secret here is that as much as they got out of town early, it's not like they had this massive list of two dues that they didn't
get done. But really what happened is more of a commentary on the balancing act that the Speaker has to do here between his members who know that they've talked to their constituents for years about Epstein and the White House, who also talked to their constituents about Epstein for years now do not want to get held to release these documents, and that was the balancing act on display for the speaker and ultimately why he had to send his versus home early.
That's right, and I would love to get into something a little bit nerdy as opposed to what we do, which is get into stuff which is very nerdy. So there's we are sort of barreling towards a government shutdown, which is the kind of backdrop of all of this. Republicans have passed this BBB, then they passed a recision package where they took they did funding for pep far but also took money away from PBS because it's important if you're going to do one good thing to do
lots of other bad stuff while you're in there. And a lot of the PBS that's being punished, which I feel like is such a Trump thing, is like the PBS that's being punished is not the big PBS, right, I mean, they're going to lose little funding, but they'll survive. It's more going to be the tribal radio stations in Oklahoma. So talk to us about how I just want because I'm setting it up for what I want to talk
about next. Can you explain to us why this recision package was asked and a little bit about how unusual it is. Yeah.
So I actually did an explainer video of this on Instagram of like what it means to do recisions because it's one of those Washington words that's a buzzword that I think people's eyes glaze over, and it's like meant to exclude people from understanding the process. And so basically what they did here through a recisions package is, yes, they have done these before. It usually happens at the end of a fiscal year when you're about to redo the budget or do a continuing resolution that just kind
of keeps funding levels the same. Typically people look and they say, oh, well, there's eighty million dollars left over that this one agency didn't use, so we'll claw that back. That'll go back into the pot. What was weird about this recisions package and why it matters so much going forward is because recisions is a partisan mechanism. You can do it with just one party, as Republicans did to take back funds that both parties agreed to fund and
appropriate in the first place. And so the reason that Recisions at this juncture is so important is because they did it in parts and fashion. Republicans for the first time ever midstream of a fiscal year clawed back funds that Congress had already appropriated. But they did it during budget season, mere weeks before both parties are supposed to come back together and bipartisanly negotiate another fiscal year package.
So Democrats are now left in the position of saying, all right, we negotiated in bipartisan fashion, as we always do, in good faith, to keep the government open, to fund various government programs, and then y'all did an end run that took out everything that we wanted and negotiated for in that process to begin with. So what is the incentive then for Democrats to come back to the table in September and say, okay, we're going to negotiate in
good faith, like everything's fine. And oh, by the way, the omb chief for US Vote, who was one of the key people pushing that first recisions package in the interim period, has said, I actually think that Congress's bipartisan funding processes should be way less by partisan and so that just gives Democrats even more of a reason to, if not question, then outright completely doubt that they should be at the negotiating table for this, which just meant
that the odds of a government shutdown went way up.
And Russvought, architect of Project twenty twenty five, wrote a bunch of it, and also is this sort of in Trump one point zero experimented with impoundment. Impoundment is the thing that the Nixon White House did. It's very sketchy. It's basically Congress puts money towards something and the president says, no, we're not going to do it.
So the way that I explained this too, again like in my little Instagram explainer, is like, imagine you, me, and ten of our friends go on vacation. We all put money, We decide to put money in the pot to go to dinner every night, and then one person of us convinces all of us that that money that we said should go to dinner every night actually is just going to get clawed right on back. And some of us are mad and some of us are happy,
but it's getting clawed back regardless. And so you're in this position then where everyone is still on the vacation, but that money back in the pot is now living somewhere else that doesn't go to dinner, but all of us still have to eat. So where does that then leave you? And the mechanism is based in law. This is not something that the administration is just doing, but it's a law that is not often used and not in this way. And that's what turns this on its head.
And I think we see a lot of times in the Trump administration them using zombie laws to do crazy stuff. Like I've written about this a lot, like the commstock at had wasn't meant for methapristone, or it was in the eighteen hundreds, right, the Passikoma taitus was that alien enemies wasn't meant for that. Like just a lot of times these laws that were never repealed because no one
ever thought they'd use them. Now you had this sort of the better Society crew put together a new way of using these laws.
But this also strikes me. I remember when states like Arizona or Michigan in the aftermath of Dobbs repealed laws from their books that are from the eighteen hundreds that limited abortion. And I remember some casual political viewers saying to me, well, what's the point. We're not there anymore. It's not like they're going to use them. Here we are now, and you realize why Democratic groups did the work of making sure that they were closing loopholes that
could otherwise be exploited, because I think you're right. And you know, when you start talking about procedures for doing things that are literally Latin, you know they're old, but then that must become a tatis act about like how federal troops can be moved into states. I mean, lawmakers were then immediately coming on my show and saying, but this is even more reason for us to have to
reform the process. And so what we've seen with Trump time and again, and I think about the Electoral count Act, the reform Act that they did about three years ago between the Senate and the House in bipartisan fashions they.
Had to do because yeah, because it was a loophole.
Yes, exploit the process of what a vice president can and can't do, as well as some other things at the state level, like we've seen Trump continuously try to press through these loopholes and force the other institutions of government to legislate around them to patch them up. And this is the problem with a Congress that has been completely remade in Trump's image and is held as a majority just by one party, is that there is no impetus then or motivation to close the loopholes.
Right, if anything, they want to open loopholes. I want to pull this to something else, which is that after nine to eleven, we put in place all of these emergency powers the Bush administration, and look, everyone was very freaked out, and there was a feeling it was very These emergency powers were actually quite popular. That's how he
was able to put them in place. And they and as someone who lived in New York during nine to eleven, I know why because people are really scared and they were willing to give up their civil liberties because they were scared and they wanted to be safe, and they felt that was the only way to make the government safe. But what happened is a lot of those emergency powers
are still in the box. So it's twenty years later and the government has way more power than it did in two thousand and one August of two thousand and one, So it does strike me that there really is if American democracy continues, on which we hope it will, and we have midterms that there will really be a kind of there's going to have to eventually be some kind of reckoning here or were completely screwed.
Yeah, but those are the stakes, right right. I think about Congress and the ways that this building was I think, in many ways just built on the etiquette of governing in small d democratic fashion, which meant bipartisan compromise and the common idea that if everyone was walking away from the table unhappy, but with something that was normal. And
Trump's Washington and other Washington's have exploited this too. That's not to say that Republicans are the first people to take advantage of having both houses of power in Congress and the White House. Certainly that's how we got the
Affordable Care Act and other mass pieces of legislation. It's just the motivation points are different, and Trump's is the first administration willing to not just exploit the loopholes, go full force on having majorities in the places that you need them, but then also bowl over all of the cultural and etiquette norms that typically govern Washington. And that's why it feels like it's so out of control. And without checks because that's no longer part of the permission
structure here. If anything, no, it's knocked down. And if you were to embrace by partisanship, you know someone like Tom Tillis, for example, who's like, hey, I just got some questions, whether it's about the accept nomination or about the recisions package or whatever. Like you're ostracized from the party and ultimately have to make the choice not to run for reelection. Right, So like, yeah, it's a full
party apparatus that now just supports administration. That is a feature, not a bug of it is to test all of the limits in culture, in media in Washington, and policymaking and funding in all of these different arenas.
It does feel like all the guardrails that we had in the first Trump administration have been systematically just focused on and attacked and decimated. So, for example, while we have the CBS stuff, which I think is really important, So people listen to this podcasts on Saturday morning, thank you for listening, Love, And on Thursday we saw that the Trump FCC approved this guy dance murder that is conveniently right after the cancelation of Colbert.
It was an interesting week of timing. I mean, that's fnal approval on that big merger. Right that has long been talked about as the motivation for CBS settling a lawsuit with Trump that hadn't gone to trial. I mean, the First Amendment right to edit an interview where the meaning wasn't fundamentally changed anyway, is so central, and every news organization does this in print or on television, and so again, like the dubious nature of that lawsuit to
begin with is central here. But the fact that this merger went through a week after Colbert, I do think the part of this sort of runs counter is the way that we've seen Colbert, but also The Daily Show and now south Park be unflinching in their criticism not just of the President but of this deal that their parent company has done. Is a bright spot, I think.
And as someone who sort of came into a love of news through a love of satirical news, I so appreciate what this little bastion of our industry is doing here because it's reminding people that there is a moral code. And for someone like South Park, for Matt Start and Trey Parker, who just got a one point five billion dollar deal for more episodes and to come in with the season premiere that they came in with, My jaw
was on the floor the entire time. The way that as a longtime tilth Park watcher, they are now depicting the president of the United States in the way that they depicted the former president of the Rok Saddam Hussein laying in bed with is the jarring and so flooring and such a commentary on the times. But they are equal opportunity critics.
Oh yeah, there are.
He's special because they're going after him, is not. They're missing the point.
No, yeah, no, they hated Bush too. I mean what's so interesting, though, is you have so much of trump Ism. Is this very kind of one dimensional protect the leader. He doesn't like to be made fun of. He really doesn't like it, right he remember there was I think when they start off with the with the portrait in the Capitol of Colorado. He hated a portrait and he made them change it because he didn't like it, because
he didn't like the way he was depicted. So there's so many of these like very kind of kitchy, almost Mussolini esque kind of tropes that are from other times. And to watch this be exploited. I mean, I was watching it and I was like, oh my god, Trump's going to send them to Seacott.
I don't think I went quite that far, but I knew but it was going to be some kind of a conniption. And I'm frankly surprised you haven't seen more of a reaction. But if they've got fifty forty nine more of those public service announcements like they aired at the end of that program, I'm like, yeah, I don't. I mean, I don't even know what we could be in for.
It's interesting to me because so much of what happened in this twenty four election and even in the twenty sixteen election that worked for Trump was he got in the culture, and the culture was downstream into politics, right, So we got in that. You got the Milk Boys and the you know, Joe Rogan and people who were leading the culture. And his obsession with cable news was always his obsession with like, you get in the culture, you can get the zepstream, you can win office. Yeah.
Yeah, it's been so central. And so I actually to bring this conversation into straight connection with the story that we have only been talking about here in Washington, which is Jeffrey Epstein. Like I would put the Epstein story if I were to put it in a column under like the entertainment culture aspect. Right, it's a legal story, but like it's not a politics story. It has political tangents, but like it is a culture story. It is a
story about a country that mistrusts institutions. And my first assignment in politics was covering the first Trump campaign. Right, his central grievance was as an outsider who wanted to bring transparency and wipe out the swamp. And he was that crusader for the everyman. And I think that the awareness that the Epstein saga has brought to the larger political population is like the guy who was masquerading as
an everyman is not. And also he's protecting all of the other non everyman who are part of this Epstein episode. And so I think that's why this has stuck around for so long, because it was like the central current that Trump ran on from the very beginning was grievance against the machine, the establishment, the institutions. And now it's always been clear, but like it's extra clear. I think even to Maga that you cannot be an outsider still
and be president of the United States. You probably weren't even an outsider when you were just a very wealthy reality TV real estate guy, but like now it's much more out in the open.
And I wonder if the cardinal sin of Epstein is obviously the many many victims. And I thought Lawrence did a really great episode on where they read about that, where you just heard it and you're like, oh my god, because this sort of fundamentals of these fourteen year old girls aging out at eighteen like that is just horrific.
But I wondered if the thing that his basis so stuck on is the idea that this really shows without a doubt that he was in a world with Bill Clinton, with Jeffrey you know, with all of these academics, with all these people who he said he was not in the world with, you know, like it's not just the exposure of possible stuff with children, which is horrendous, but
it's really this idea. There's so many pictures of them at parties at clubs that you know, it's like here I am, I'm going to bring it down, and also here I am in a photo.
Yeah, and proximity is not criminal right, right, no question, and Bill Clinton has put out a statement about it. I mean we've seen multiple iterations, right, and that's true for Trump too, writ right, it is embarrassing and it does come at a societal and cost of respect. And for Trump that respect is such a central currency. It was a large the motivation that he had for running for office and then bringing the Republican Party to heal and then trying to bend culture to his will.
Right.
So like it's always been a very central thought process and lends. But I think you're right that we're not talking about the embarrassment cost. And it ties back to what you were talking about when we were discussing that South Park, Right. If he doesn't like the portrayal, portrait
or figurative otherwise, that's a problem for him. And so I think that's the bow that ties all of these seemingly disparate threads together, and it connects back to the Maga base that you know, we were talking this morning on Morning Joe about the idea that this is a base that has stayed together under the banner of Trump.
It has really been a cult of personality for nine years, and he himself has been the unifier, but it's about to splinter because it's no longer going to be on ballots, and MAGA is going to have to find a new standard bearer. And already there's a dozen people who are vying for that, quietly, privately and out of the line light.
Yeah, Ali, vitally so smart. I feel smarter after this conversation. I know you're always talking to you. Ari Astor is the director of bo Is Afraid, Midsummer and the new movie Eddington. Welcome to Fast Politics.
All right, thanks for having me.
You have like kind of the dream career. I think so much about how culture influences politics, how much movies matter, and why the rights has been for so long so obsessed with movies and the culture and getting a handle on them. You have this incredible career, and I want you to explain how you got it.
I would say I tend to follow my impulses and do what I feel is interesting to me. And I've sort of made a point of not being strategic, which I might need to be that's quite soon. But I have found that when I do think strategically right, like, well, you know, when I start thinking about, you know, whatever, what the market wants what people want, I just lose all energy. I can't summon the energy to even get going.
So ultimately, I just need to be kind of possessed by something and I need to have like a problem I need to kind of solve for myself. And sometimes that's just like an image that I can't banish from my mind or and sometimes it's an idea that I need to kind of work through, find my way, you know, kind of move through the guts of something and come out of it.
Eddington is this movie that is political and artistic and all of the things. How did you get involved in this? Like was it COVID just sort of get us to how you got involved in this? You had this idea, Well.
It came out of living in the world and feeling that I was in hell and wanting to try to get my hand around it. And so you know, it's it's a movie about what this moment feels like to me, what America feels like. I'm trying to pull back as far as I can and describe the structure of reality at the moment, which seems to be that you know, nobody can agree on anything or on what is happening, and where you know, everybody is more or less kind of unreachable to each other, even if you share the
same like politics, we're all kind of fortressed off. And I wrote the movie in a state of fear and anxiety and dread, and that dread has only increased since writing it and since making it. And then at the same time, I, you know, I'm a genre filmmaker, and I wanted to make something fun and exciting and surprising.
And so, you know, which I feel like is a the media was, and it's a theme I deal with not so much in my art but in my life. Feeling Dad is a particularly dark moment in American life. COVID was also a dark moment in American life. It was dark, but it was I don't know for me. I'd had a grandfather who had lived through the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic. I sort of felt that there was even if it was something I had not ever lived through.
You know, I find a lot of comfort to history through the fact that, like, none of this is unprecedented, but this is harder, this moment now.
Well, because this is in many ways unprecedented. We've never been here in this country. A lot of things are coalescing right now that are new, and it feels like we are living through the collapse of something and I'm
not seeing any real countervailing force against that. So it's just kind of happening at the moment, and I feel that something else is coming, and you know, big tech and finance are ushering these things in, and they also seem to be the ones who are warning us, and I think they think that that abdicates them from like, you know, responsibility, where they're saying like, look, we're telling you this could be disastrous, like you know, so just sty and it's like, well, so we should do it.
But we're gonna do it anyway. It could be disastrous, but you understand we're gonna do whatever corrupt thing it is anyway because vibes.
Which is human nature, you know, which is like, you know, if we can, we will, And we've been telling stories about this for I was gonna say decades, but really centuries, you know, I mean the Genie model. If we can, we will, and here we are and we are.
Yeah, it's amazing and so dark. Do you think because I think this, that COVID got us to this moment?
No, I think COVID was an inflection point. I think we were already on this path because we were already living in the Internet, we were living on our phones, we were all kind of like in our algorithms. You know,
we're already siloed off. It feels like the moment at which we became kind of stranded there, you know, because our public lives became on hold, and suddenly feels like whatever link we were like holding on to that, you know, kind of tethered us to that old world before all of this, it feels like that was severed during COVID, Like lockdown is over, but we're still living in the
process of whatever began there. And I think that's why it's hard to talk about it is because we haven't metabolized it.
Yeah, So in this movie you explore a lot of the ideas of what like politics look like during COVID, right, the politics of lockdowns, the politics of all of that. Did it give you more clarity about sort of COVID?
Did you feel you got like, I just wrote this book about my childhood and my parents and all sorts of shit like that, and in it, for whatever reason, I did actually feel I sort of understood things better when I was finished with it, which I kind of bristle it because I always feel like if it's art, it shouldn't work for you emotionally, like things shouldn't be two things, they should only be one thing, and that you shouldn't But for whatever reason, for me, it gave
me a lot of clarity. Did you find you got clarity from writing this making this movie and also did it change the way you think of that period?
Well? I think part of why I began the project was because I did want to grapple with it, and I did want to understand it, and I think, you know, and because I was really afraid. I am really afraid of what is happening, and I think best way to deal with that fear is to try to understand it.
But no, if you know, I mean, but also the movie is also just trying to describe what that at the sphere is and what it feels like, and so in some ways, you know, the film is there's something maybe like bordering on the diagnostic, but there's no like,
I don't know what the remedy is, right. If anything, I wanted to dramatize this cacophony that we're in and we're all yelling over each other at each other, and we're trying to make we have points to make, but at the same time we're being kind of pummeled twenty four to seven by messaging, and we're being filled with stuff. It sometimes becomes hard to see anything that's become ambient.
And if anything, I wanted to, you know, kind of dramatize that kind of incoherent miasma and then give a sense of something that is maybe you know, hovering above it, that is operating independently of all these stories, and that is ultimately changing all of these people without them quite being able to gauge the magnitude of that change that's happening right now.
Everyone is very scared to talk about politics, like there are very few people who are brave right now for whatever reason. Why are you one of them? And why am I one of them?
Look, I don't know if I'm brave. I just know that huge things are happening right now. It's a very scary time. I don't understand where we are. I don't know where we're going, but I have a feeling about where we're headed. And I didn't know how I could make any other movie at this moment, and look, it is a period piece, it's looking back. But I started
writing it in twenty twenty. When I first started writing it, it was right up to the minute, and then I realized, like, we're living in a time where everything moves way too fast, nothing lasts, everything is replaced immediately by something new. And I knew that if I tried to like get my hands around anything contemporary, I would kind of need to just like lock in, especially if I'm trying to something that it's not like invented, and a lot of this
movie invented. The stories are, but I knew that I was just gonna have to choose like a week, and it felt like it felt like that particular week where I started writing, something was in the air that I that was very distinct. I hadn't felt it before. It was familiar, but everything was fraught in a new way.
It felt like things had reached like a boiling point and the only thing that could happen next if things were allowed to kind of stay at this like fever pitch, and if people were going to continue to be agitated in this way, was things were going to lead to violence. And I didn't know if it was going to happen tomorrow. I didn't know if it was going to happen, you know, within years. But it just felt like, okay, this is if nobody like decelerates this like we're in real danger here.
And so that's when I started writing it. And it was helpful to be able to say, Okay, it's this week, it's it's late May early June twenty twenty. And for that week, I started a bunch of burner accounts on Twitter, and I got myself into a bunch of different algorithms, and I found that I could not get myself out of any of them, which was scary.
What does that mean? Exactly? Like, once you started getting a certain kind of information, you couldn't try to get different information.
I could maybe get some different information, I couldn't stop perceiving a certain kind of information, you know. And I would get myself into several different you know, one that would be you know, very kind of very left. Then I would go down like a more kind of traditional conservative rabbit hole. Then I'd go down like a Nazi rabbit hole, and I couldn't get myself out of any
of them. And another really important part of making this was, I guess writing it was going out to New Mexico, which is where I'm from, which is where the film film is set, driving around the state and meeting a lot of people, going to different counties, talking to sheriffs, going to different small towns and talking to mayors, police chiefs, public officials, going to pueblos, and just getting a really broad but also human picture of the state, which the
state is an interesting microcosm for America because it's a blue state, but all of it, but most of its small towns, are red. And it was just important to get away from myself in that sense. I wasn't just playing with army men, and so I wasn't just dealing with the algorithms, but I was also dealing with the effects that those algorithms were having on all these people, because all these people are really living on the internet, especially in the small towns.
I was going to ask you about New Mexico because I also have a real relationship with the state, and we had we actually had someone on from the government the New Mexican elected there who right before the election, and he said he thought, for shir Harris was going to lose that he saw a lot of New Mexicans who just were going for Trump, and Jesse and I both were like old shit. Really, I wondered if you could talk about, like, New Mexico is such an interesting
state because it's a blue state. It has a lot of guns, right, a lot of guns, like a lot of guns, a lot of murder. It has a lot of red stuff. It has also a lot of weirdness, Like it's just a genuinely weird, you know, I think in a wonderful, spiritual, strange way. You know, it's got the lightning, it's got the aliens, it's got it all.
But it's also very small. And the fact that you're saying people are so online in these small towns is kind of I mean, I guess it makes sense, but it just is surprising to me because there's just not a ton of infrastructure to get online.
Well, we're all very online. It's very difficult to extricate yourself from the system. I also found that it was very useful to meet a lot of these people because at the time of writing the film and directing it and shooting it, you know, Biden was president. The governor of New Mexico is a Democrat and is a figure
of controversy. Yeah, And I found that I was talking to a lot of people on the right who you know, did not hold the same convictions as me, but they were passionate, and they were really upset, and they felt ignored and they felt condescended to and I found them just on a human level. I found them, you know, quite compelling and interesting, and I liked a lot of them.
And then a lot of the people I was meeting who were on the left were very satisfied with the status quo, were very dismissive sometimes like kind of smugly dismissive of any concerns that contradicted their talking points. And I found that they were giving me a lot of talking points as opposed talking to me as a person.
And that was really useful too, to see, like, you know, what if I make a film that is like that does not reflect this experience as well, Like I'm failing in a very serious way, because there is a reason that things are moving in this direction. And I felt the same you did. At the end of twenty twenty four. I was like, I see where this is going, and I think there are a lot of reasons for that. One of The biggest was Biden taking so long to
step down. But we've been stuck in the same system, with the same basic people for a long time, and Trump was always a response to that system, and to not respond to Trump with something new was always going to be a very big mistake. There's going to be a long post mortem on this one, but I.
Think you're right, and I mean again, it's the left's rejection of economic populism, right, I mean, left hand opportunity with Sanders in twenty sixteen to go along with with populism, and it decided it was too scary, and so that's how we got here. And Biden was a candidate that people thought people wouldn't vote against. That that was the
thinking I think. I mean, to watch a party struggle with wanting to have it both ways, to wanting to be for working people but also protect very wealthy people. I don't know that you can thread that needle. And in fact, what we see with trump Ism is Trump pretends to be for working people, but ultimately, I mean, the two fractions want totally different things.
Yeah, and so there's a futility there that I wanted to be in the movie, to be felt in the.
Movie What are you going to do next?
I'm trying to figure that out. But there are a lot of old projects that I've had in my back pocket that just feel less pertinent right now. It just feels like I feel like there's a tendency to retreat into the past when the present is like really unpleasant and when the future is something that's hard to even
look at or fathom. That manifests in like two big ways, which is either nostalgia for the past or an obsession with trauma to explain the present like, well, this happens, That's why I'm here, and then getting stuck in that loop. And I want to see if there's a way to not do that in my own work. And I think this was an attempt at that, and that's what I want to do, because I think the moment is I've
never lived through anything like this. I've never had this relationship to the future that I have now, which is that I don't really believe in it.
You don't believe it's going to happen, or you don't believe it's going to be good.
I don't believe it's going to be good.
Yeah, I think that too, And a big part of it.
Is because there are no countervailing ideas, Like there are no ideas for the future that feel like possibilities in contrast to the track we're on, the trajectory that we're on. And I think it's also because we're so like the system is so fixed, even as in some ways it's being you know, dismantled. Where there is power, it's too big. It's like it's just we're completely dwarfed and we're stuck in a system that that you know, was given to
us by that big power. I mean, even this right now, this conversation we're having, it's going to be on Spotify and it's going to be on It's going to be on a rhythm. And I think a big part of this is that the idea of collective action is like beyond reaching. It's not even a possibility. But how, you know, how could that change? I don't know.
Well, I'm sorry to get into asking you questions that were not answerable, but I'm really glad you tried to answer them.
Thanks thanks for having me and.
No full Jesse Cannon, my.
Junk fast, Tulsa Gabbert, a person who I can't believe anyone ever had faith in doing the right thing. Is pushing the debunked Russian propaganda that Obama came after. Glorious, mister Trump, I'm going to shock you here. It's really easy to show that what she's citing is objectively false.
Yeah, so this has been debunked already. I actually think it's like a weird democratic conspiracy theory to make the lamest case possible so that it's clearly not anything. Tulsea Gabbert says that Hillary Clinton was taking a daily regime of heavy tranquilizers while she was Secretary of State. I keep having conversations with people about whether or not the stupidness of this will unravel it before they end American democracy,
and it's like fifty to fifty right now. But there really is a lot of stupid crap going on here, and this is really a good example of it. My favorite part is that Gabber keeps quoting from different sources. She's not that organized. She has a lot of conspiracies about Clinton and tranquoisers also, and then Barack Obama doing treason. I want to say one last thing about Hillary Clinton. She is not president. She is not running for president
at this point. I think it's really fair to say she will never be president, and I don't think Obama is going to be president again either, So talk about fighting the last battle. That's it. That's all I have to say. And now let me bang my head on my desk.
You don't believe in harm reduction? Huh.
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 post, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.