Hi, I'm Mollie John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean we don't have an amazing show.
For you today.
Garage Graft stops bys you talk about his new book UFO, the inside story of the US government Search for Alien Life here and out there. But first we have founder of Run for Something, Amanda Litman. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Amanda Litman.
Thank you for having me, Mollie.
I am happy to have you. I have so many things I want to talk to you about. I know, run for Something really really well. I'm gonna let you give a like two second for the very very very few.
People who don't know what run for Something is. Tell them so.
Run for Something recruits and supports young, diverse progresses running for state and local office all across the country. We work with millennials and gen z who have to take back power. They're running for a state legislature and they're running for school board. We've helped elect more than one thousand people, mostly women and people of color, in nearly every state, and we're building the biggest pipeline in democratic context.
Let's talk about what this biggest pipeline in democratic politics looks like.
Give us a few examples.
Love that question. So we have just about one hundred and fifty thousand people who raise their hands to say, I'm thinking about running for office. What do I do next? They are moms and teachers and scientists and veterans. They are thinking about running for school board in Florida and mayorships in Indiana and state legislature in Texas and all
kinds of positions in between. And the thing I really love about them is there actually is like no uniting commonality between them beyond the fact that they really give a shit and they're going to run for office to take action on that.
Okay, so tell me like one candidate who's coming through this cycle.
So I'll just tell you a little bit.
It's some when we work with in twenty twenty three, who I am a sas FID. So in Pennsylvania, there's a county called Dauphin County, which is like around Harrisburg, and they had this year their county Commission up for office. We were working to make sure we were going to
recruit a pro democracy leader for that office. Because the county commissioner oversees the elections, they do things like determining how easier hard is able to cure their ballots, how people can get their votes counted, that kind of thing. So we said a bunch of text messages, we did a bunch of phone calls. We able to play. Found this guy, Justin Douglas. Justin Douglas is a pastor. He's like a CrossFit athlete. He does like some work on the side to try and make some money. He had
been a community neither. Yeah, like, yeah, just try to make a living. We talked about running for office, and at first he was a little resisting. He was like, maybe I'll find someone else, but ultimately decided to get in the race himself. He knocked tens of thousands of doors, raised a pretty re meaningful amount of money. He's a
married dad of three. He'd been doing a bunch of advocacy for the homeless, and one of the biggest issues he wanted to talk about in this read was prison reform, because the county commission oversees the prison system in there, and there had been a number of prisoners who had died in the jail system that he wanted to bring attention to. He did things like leave lit on people's doors that said the mayor in Jaws one is still the mayor in Jaws two Local.
Or a amazing.
Amazing So he ends up winning this election by you know, as of last caat was maybe one hundred and forty seven votes at a fifty three thousand cast. He helps flip control of the County Commission two Democrats for the first time since World War One, so over one hundred years. He is now going to oversee, along with the criminal justice system, along with the county budget. The election in twenty twenty four in a critical county in Pennsylvania, Right, and we're going to.
Have safe, free and fair elections where there's no funny business.
That's right.
Tell me another one also.
In Pennsylvania, and it's an amazing candidates running for school board, in particular in Central York, PA, there was a county school board that had been doing a ton of book bands over the last year. They at one point gotten into some trouble for engaging with a lawyer that the Southern Property Law Center had called a hate group. And we're working with hate groups. They kept trying to ban books. They you going to put together lists that were obviously
resourced from Moms for Liberty. Amelia McMillan and Benjamin Walker was who have the Run for Something candidates there, knockdoors,
made calls. Amelia held a retathon to get people reading banned books and to help raise money for her campaign, and they were able to flip the school board in Central York, keeping Moms for Liberty out of power, and they were part of the hundreds of folks who beat run Moms for Liberty candidates across the country and sharing that they just ate shits so hard, which not going to dissuade them from doing the work in twenty twenty four and beyond, but gives us that, you know, when
we run, Lee can win. So we just got to get on the ballot in the first place.
I feel like those school board elections, there were so much many victories in twenty three. I mean, I know they weren't polls, so they couldn't be talked about on television, but there were so many of these victories where like the school boards, you had these crazy Moms for Liberty people.
By the way, now Moms for threesomes.
And again, no dispersions, And I think everyone should have the kind of sex they want to have in the world, but I just don't want them also banning books. But I think it's really interesting. There were so much of this, like we're going to go to the school boards, We're going to make sure that you can't ever let your kids read any books that have anyone who's gay in them. And there really was a kind of groundswell of normal people running for school boards, and you guys were involved in that.
You know, Moms for Liberty had a thirty to thirty two percent win rate in November. Run for something school board cans it's one at seventy two percent. Wow, I feel like people don't think like, oh, like Republican parties investing so much in school board they're guaranteed victory. Wech
hear so much about what they're doing. People want schools to be boring, they want them to be confident, They want them to think about your pay and facilities funding, and when we give them candidates to vote for, when we support candidates who can make that case, like, people don't support book bans, they want normalcy. So really, why I'm so excited about the work we're going to do on school boards in twenty twenty four and hopefully beyond because it has never been more important, and Moms for
Liberty is not going anywhere. They've opened a like six thousand square foot education activism headquarters in Sarasota. They are ready to invest millions more in this. They are all in, and I do think it's worth noting that part of the reason they're going all in on this is because they know this is the kind of thing that gets people who might otherwise not be excited about the presidential actually in twenty twenty four, really excited to show up at the polls.
Yeah, I mean, book banning is their choice right, is their right to choice when it comes to abortion. They really love book banning. Probably not a great sign for that party. Let's talk about like sort of down ballot stuff you're seeing in other states.
One of the things that we're seeing.
In the South is a kind of and especially there are some green shoots in the South of democracy.
I was wondering if you could talk about that.
Yes, we have some incredible folks running and that we've been working with in places like Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, even Alabama, Oklahoma, course down in Florida. Now as places see the really feel the consequences of Republican leadership like they're going too far, I think it's really worth noting like these are places where the top of the ticket is not going to compete.
In many places there isn't a statewide election, so local candidates get a chance to really define what they believe in and what they stand for as a Democrat in that community. They get to knockdoors, they get to talk to voters in a really cool way, and they get to be really concrete in particularly when we're talking about abortion.
These local candidates can really speak specifically, tangibly, practically about what it means to elect a Democrat, and not just any Democrat, but this Democrat who people their voters know and trust and can deliver results for them.
This is like one of the things you often say, and I'm going to ask you to say it again, about why it's so important that you run people for every seat. Will you explain to us why it's so important that you run people for every seat. I'm sorry to be boring, but.
No, it's not boring at all. It is incredibly important to run candidates for as many offices as we possibly can one because if we don't intentionally do candidate recruitment, seventy percent of local races go uncontested any given year. That means only one candidate from either party is on the ballot. In many places, when elections go uncontested, the governing body will just cancel the election, which means people don't have a chance to build that muscle of voting.
So that's a problem number one. Number two on the policy side, these local positions. You know, we think that most governing comes from DC, but that's not actually the lived experience for most people. The quality of roads you drive on, how affordable housing is, how accessible childcare is, whether restaurants can be open or closed, whether your schools are fully funded, whether you have access to abortion, how your jail system is run. All of that is happening
in the state and local level. So it really doesn't matter his unus positions on the politics side. And this is the thing where I think it's it's easy to forget no one. These candidates are the bench of future leadership. So if you want better presidential candidates and better governors, you need to lact better school board members and state legislators. But two these are the people who are the most compelling messengers to their neighbors because they understand what their
folks are facing. They are knocking doors, they're talking to voters, and especially for younger voters, and we keep hearing this in focus groups and in polling. Local candidates can excite them in a way that the top of the ticket can't. You have done some buddies have that some research here,
and we did this in twenty twenty as well. Simply fielding a state legislative candidate in a district that didn't previously have one increases democratic turnout in that district by anywhere from half a percent to two and a half percent, which could be the margin of victory for Biden in
twenty twenty four. So, if you're thinking about what is the best way to help the entire party, the entire country to get good policy and make good politics and save democracy, it may be counterintually, but I think actually pretty intigularly is to support local candidate's running for office.
So interesting and so important So Nevada, there have been a number of polls that show that Democrats have a weakness with a voting base that they have long counted on Latino voters and also African American voters, voters of color more generally. Do you think that there is an opportunity and there's been some you know, there's like a media narrative which says like Democrats have taken these voters
for granted in a certain kind of way. Are you seeing And I think the most important thing, and certainly when you look at the South is to have people of color running things. I know that for women there's more of a barrier to entry. Can you talk a little bit about that and talk about recruitment efforts and
talk about this because I think it's so. You know, I look at the senators from Mississippi, and I know that Mississippi is a majority minority state, and I look at their two senators and those are not representative of the people of Mississippi.
Yeah, we have seen that recruiting candidates of color is incredibly meaningful, especially in places where it's really reflective. We saw this Virginia and the state legislature. The new speaker of the Virginia State House, which Democrats just flipped, will be the first black House speaker in the history of Virginia.
That's incredibly meaningful.
And by the way, insane that it's twenty twenty three and we're having this conversation.
In particular Virginia, the state legislature it will now be about twenty three percent Black leaders. Virginia's Black community is about twenty one percent. We are finally starting off reflective leadership. This is because of the work that organizations like Yes New Virginia Majority have been doing. But I'll run for something that's been working in Virginia since twenty seventeen, and our slates of candidates each year have been more and
more reflective of those communities. You know, it makes a lot of sense if you see a candidate who can speak authentically to the issues you're feeling, who can communicate not just like on the topics, but in a way that makes sense, like isn't forcing, it, isn't full of shit, like really you know, just like gets it, just gets it. That makes a difference in how excited you might feel and for what it's worth. Depending on how local they are, you might know them, you might be part of the
same circles. The more locally offices you get, the number of voters you need to reach is much smaller, which means it's more likely that like you go to the same grocery store, you go to the same place of faith, you go to the same gym, your kids are on the same like you know, intramural soccer team, shared experiences, and like shared race or class or gender. Is not
just about representation, and that's certainly important. It's about shared lived priorities and the way that it affects governing and a communication style so important.
And I think that's such a good point. I mean, the.
Whole goal is to have people who would live in the place represent the place.
YEH want people who can really reflect the community they're trying to serve and are of that community. Like one for Something always says, we're not trying to get diversity for diversity's sake. We're trying to get diversity that reflects the diversity of the United States. That's important. And a leader in you know, a school board member in Miami might have a different kind of background than a municipal
officer in Ohio. That's okay too. And that's what I think the Democratic Party so great is that it's a really big tent that can include a lot of different kinds of people. That's what makes it really harsh.
So when it comes to Virginia like that was a huge victory for Democrats. I think I was personally quite anxious about Virginia and the sort of narrative we got was that Youngkin was this new kind of Republican, very good at appealing to moderates. But that's not really what happened on the ground, is it.
No, not at all. As it turns out, people were really uninterested in whether a Republican party was selling, in particular when it comes to an abortion ban, which they tried so hard to pretend that wasn't what they were all. Virginia Democrats did a really good job of making it clear that if you elected a Republican state legislature, you were going to get a full ban on abortion. We
also saw this in school board races. We worked with Madison Irving, who's a football coach like a county outside Richmond, who was running against a Mom's for Liberty like type candidate who wanted to abolish the public school system basically, and he said he just wanted to talk to folks about teaching your pay. You want to talk to about facilities funding, and every person he met was like, ooof thank god, I just want to not have to think about this so much.
Yeah, I mean that.
I think ultimately one of the biggest problems with this incredible Republican fascism thing that they're into autocracy, whatever makes you feel the most comfortable is this idea people.
Don't really want. I mean, they want their government to work, right, I mean, is that what you're seeing on the ground.
Absolutely, they want their government to work, and they want their leaders not to be like fucking weirdos.
That's my favorite line.
We under estimate how weird some of the Republican candidates have become like embarcas. It's one of the only ways you can win a Republican primary right now, or can we even identify as a Republican? And I do have some amount of empathy for people who are Republican voters and feel out of sorts with their party. They feel a little politically homeless. And also you get what you built.
Oh no, plants are quite my actions. When you run good folks who can point out the lunacy on the other side and can really like tell the story, it makes a difference.
Yeah, for sure, so now this is like a big election coming up.
What are you looking at, what is your dream?
What are you excited about, and most importantly, what do you need money for?
Okay, so we are excited about a couple of things. The one, we are likely to work with over eight hundred candidates this year in nearly every state. We've already endorsed more than one hundred for twenty twenty four. They're going to be running for state legislatures and city councils and especially school boards as we looked in the next year, and we want to make sure that we can support all of them in all the ways that they need.
We're also doing active recruitment filing builins have already passed in some states. The work for twenty twenty four started years ago, but we are still doing recruitment up through the and the filing the lines in some places as late as June or July. Third thing, we're doing a ton of is As I mentioned school board work. We want to make sure we have the infrastructure we need to recruit candidates for school board races, only half of
which happened in November. School Board elections are year round. We want to make sure we're everywhere that we need to be to stop Nocheberty. Final thing we're doing is ensuring that our candidates can really knock doors and talk to voters in a way that will gin up turn out to the top of the ticket. So being really intentional about why we're helping people. All of that takes money. And you know, Molly, I've been on the show before, We've talked about it before. It has been a really
rough year for fundraising. I think everyone on the Democratic side, at least, you know, the organizations that do this work, has seen the same kind of contraction. And I think it is really scary going into what is honestly the biggest election you're yet knowing that for a lot of folks they're gonna have to cut back on their program when it's never a matter more because donors have not stepped up in a wait that allows us to comfortably do this work. That's really scary for me. It's really
scary for a lot of my peers. It's really scary for our democracy. I think folks are waiting for it to feel real, Like it's hard to imagine that we're doing Trump versus Biden redux, but we are and those are the stakes. And if you have been waiting to give to any political cause, to run for something or anything else, like.
Do it now, do it now.
You should have done it six months ago, but do it now because people are divining their twenty twenty four budgets today if they're not already, and we need to know we can count on you so important.
Thank you so much, Amanda. I hope you'll come back anytime.
Scared Graf is author of You Have the Inside Story of the US Government, Served for life here and out there, and is a contributor at Wired magazine. Welcome Too Fast Politics, Garrett.
Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.
Garrett. Why UFOs discuss.
I got interested in UFOs because in national security circles in Washington I started to hear serious people talking seriously about this subject. And for me, there was one particular moment that launched me on this book project, which was John Brennan, as you know, the former CIA director of former White Household and security advisor, gave an interview in December twenty twenty where he said, there are things out
there that we don't know what they are. They puzzle us and some might think that this phenomenon could constitute a new form of life. And it was a really remarkable statement to me, because you know, at that point, this is twenty twenty. John Brennan had just wrapped up the better part of a decade atop the US intelligence community, and I figured, there can't be that many things that
puzzle John Brennan. Like when he wakes up in the morning, if he has a question, there's a sixty billion dollar a year apparatus whose job it is to go out and find the answers to his questions. And so if he was leaving office and he was still puzzled about UFOs what the government now calls UAPs unidentified anomalist phenomenon, then that was probably a subject worthy of diving into for a book.
So UFO is they're real?
Well, something is real. I mean UFOs all it stands for is unidentified flying objects, and so there are definitely unidentified flying objects. What we don't know is whether any of them are extraterrestrial in origin, which is what normally people mean when they ask, you know, our UFOs real,
they mean sort of our aliens visiting us. Part of what this book tried to do was pulled together the twin threads of the US military's hunt to understand UFOs here on Earth, and the evolving astronomy and science around our understanding of the universe, and the possibility of what's known as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence out across the
rest of the universe. And what I think you're left with at the end, or at least what I was left with when when I finished the book, is that the math is very much on the side of the aliens. That our understanding of the scope and scale and breadth of the universe in really just the last twenty years
has revolutionized astronomy that we now understand. You know, as late as the nineteen nineties, we didn't know that there was a single planet outside of our own Solar System, and we now understand that effectively every star across the universe has has planets, and that many of those will fall into what's known as the Goldilock zone, the sort of range and temperature where water could exist, where atmospheres could exist, where oxygen could exist, and that across the
universe there are probably on the order of about one sex tillion habitable planets, which is to say a billion trillion habitable planets, and that you know, statistically most likely our universe teams not only with life, but also probably intelligent life as well. The question is whether any of it is close enough to us that we would notice, or whether they would notice us, or one of the most interesting questions to me ends up being would they
care if they found us at all? Because we have this like wonderfully human centric view that aliens would bother trying to come across the vastness of interstellar space to visit us, make friends with us, invade us, harvest our organs for energy, you know, what have you, Whereas it's quite likely that an intelligent civilization would view us with all of the interest that we view an ant hill as we walk by on the sidewalk.
So we are too unimportant for aliens to want to abduct us.
That's about where I end up at the end of.
This feels depressing.
Part of what the astronomers have really begun to figure out is that, you know, we are a remarkably young solar system in a pretty ordinary corner of a pretty ordinary galaxy, in a pretty old universe, and one of the most interesting and profound things that I came across in the course of this book, was really realizing that, like, we might have missed the intelligent life that we've only been around, you know, as humans a few ten thousand years.
And you know, we're about four and a half billion year old in our solar system across a fourteen billion year old universe, and so you could have seen billion year civilizations, I mean, things far more advanced than anything that we could possibly imagine, that have risen and fallen multiple times, long before our Solar system even began to gather out of dust in the universe.
What sorry, I mean, what I shouldn't say that.
But so the senses there are aliens, they're not that interested in us because we're too new.
We're too new, and it's not clear that anyone would have noticed our existence. I mean, when you begin to talk about the vastness of interstellar space, we just haven't been to detective for that long. Carl Sagan the famous twentieth century astronomer. He was one of the leading proponents of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, while also being one of the leading skeptics that UFOs were alien visitors here on Earth, and his argument wasn't that aliens don't visit Earth.
His argument was statistically aliens probably only visit Earth every couple hundred thousand years, and that they treat Earth effectively as we would treat a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike a stopover on the way from one interesting place to another. It's not that you know, aliens never come here, It's that the thing that you saw out your window last Thursday night was unlikely to be the day out of the last two hundred thousand years that an alien randomly stopped by.
Okay, so where does this leave us now?
So it leaves with the idea UAPs UFOs are real. There's something that we don't understand flying around out there, moving through our airspace and our atmosphere. It's probably not aliens, but that doesn't mean that it's not something really interesting. And to me, UFOs probably end up being four different things, which are when I talk about this, you know, I'm drawing a boundary of course around like the UFOs that really puzzle the government, because a huge percentage of UFOs
and UAPs are things that are easily explainable. You know, the planet Venus, you know Starlink, satellite launches actually now account for a huge percentage of UFO sightings. But of the things that puzzle the government, some chunk of it is advanced adversary technology being tested against us. These are Chinese drone, Russian drones, Iranian drones, things like that, and we know that the Pentagon has actually uncovered some of
these in trying to study UFOs. One of the things that the Pentagon has come out and said in recent years is that through studying UAP sightings, it uncovered the existence of a here to four unknown Chinese trans medium drone, which is to say, a Chinese drone that came out of the water and transitioned to flight. The second category is what you ended up with in the Chinese spy balloon flap in February, which is there's just a bunch of weird clutter up in the sky that we don't
pay attention to on a daily basis. Turns out, if you set the Norad radars a little bit differently, they begin to detect a lot of what is probably mostly trash and junk in the sky. And you know, we panicked in February and sent up the world's most advanced fighter jet to shoot these things down with quarter million
dollar missiles. And you know what we got, we literally wan of was a weather balloon from the Northern Illinois Balloon Brigade Meteorology Club that just sort of no one had known was up there because who.
Cares to travel?
Right Right, then you get into sort of the weirder categories, and I think some chunk of UAPs we're going to figure out with advancing science in terms of atmospheric, meteorological and astronomical science that we don't yet understand, things like ball like plasma, Saint Elmo's fire, things that were pretty new to the understanding of. And then there's a fourth category that to me is probably the weirdest possible stuff.
And this is an area where I think we just need to be really humble about how little of the universe around us and the world around us that we actually understand. You know, the world is probably just much weirder than we give it credit for. And this is going to be a category of basically physics that we don't yet understand. We like to think that we have mastered the world, mastered the understanding of the world, but Harvard Astronomy Chair Avi Lobe who's one of the big
proponents of SETI work these days. You know, he talks about how in January the world's oldest woman died. She was a French nun, she was one hundred and eighteen years old, and in her lifetime, humans learned everything that we know about relativity and quantum physics. So imagine what we will learn in another human lifetime of physics, you know, imagine what we might learn in five hundred years or a thousand years or ten thousand years of humanity lasts
that long. And that this could be like really really weird stuff. I mean, this could be interdimensional travel, parallel dimensions, time travel from the past, or future wormholes, I mean, science and phys that just would bend our mind. But I think that we have to be open to the possibility that there's going to be some really really weird answers to UFOs and UAPs, and it's stuff that we might not figure out in any of our lifetimes.
So in July there was a hearing and the House Oversight Hell the subcommittee hearing on UFOs, and they and sort of this supposition here was that the government knows more.
Than they are telling us. Is that true?
Yes, and no. The government certainly is covering up some large percentage of its own knowledge about UFOs and UAPs. Some of that is because some of these sightings are surely the government's own secret projects, our own secret planes, secret drones, secret spacecraft, and some chunk of it is adversary technology, as I mentioned. And so this is, you know, where the government gets really squirrel talking about what its sensor networks pick up and what it uncovers and detects
that we don't know about. Whether the government is covering up meaningful knowledge, I'm a lot more dubious. I've covered national security for twenty years. The challenge that I have with a lot of government conspiracy theories is that they presuppose a level of competence, forethought, and planning that you don't really see on display in the rest of the
work that the government does day to day. Yes, continue, Do I believe that the government could be covering up, you know, some unknown technologies that it's recovered, Yes, I do. Is it possible that there are people who work on that team who think that that technology is extraterrestrial? Maybe? Do I think that the government has concluded that at
any sort of official level, probably not. And you know, one of the things that you saw the sort of so called you faux whistleblower say in that summer house hearing is that the government has been engaged in a cover up of crashed alien spacecraft and bodies that stretches back ninety years and dates back to fascist Italy. Area fifty seven, Area fifty one. Yes, yep, Area fifty one. Sorry, unless you know something particular about Area fifty seven, it's even more secret.
Right, there are six more areas that no one knows about.
Yes, but you know, the idea that to me that the government is covering up the biggest possible secret. I mean, it's hard to imagine something that would be more profound than the idea that the US government is hiding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and that they've done it successfully for decades. Seems pretty far fetched to me, just on a pure logistical level, I mean, just talking about, you know, the ability of the government to keep secret for that long.
Will you explain to us that whistle blower and a little bit sort of a backstory.
Yeah, this is a career intelligence officer named David Grush who came out this spring with a variety of claims that the US government has a secret UFO crash retrieval program that has recovered alien spacecraft and alien bodies. What he said in the House hearing, he referred to as non human biologics was the phrase that he used. And he has spoken to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community.
He's testified in closed door and open hearings to Congress, he's given a variety of media interviews, and to me, much of what he says and claims is consistent with what we have seen in a variety of so called whistleblowers since the nineteen eighties that are what ufologists call foth tales, not folk tales, but foth tales, friend of a friend tales, which may is sort of second hand.
You know, I talked to a guy and he told me that he worked on this program, or I met someone who had seen these crafts, or you know, saw a guy in a bar and he said that he had, you know, worked on these alien bodies. And that what we have not seen come forward from Grush or really anyone else is what I would call hard documentary evidence that is able to be substantiated by outside sources. Or you know, secondary investigation, so you know that's that would
be you know, documents, memos, power points. Grush says that he has given in classified settings, you know, specific locations of where these programs are being run. But there is a Pentagon office that is newly charged with basically running down the truths about the Pentagon's own UFO knowledge. This is an office that's called Arrow and has been created by Congress because Congress is wondering whether it's getting the full truth about UFOs.
This guy got debunked.
I don't think we can say one way or another whether he's been debunked. I think that we don't yet have the evidence that would allow us to make a real judgment about whether his claims are true. And I think that, as I said, there are logistical and historical reasons to be doubtful about at least parts of his claims.
So interesting. Thank you, thank you, Garrett, my pleasure.
Thanks for Jenning.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend. And keep the conversation going. And again thanks for listening.