Angelo Carusone, Jonathan V Last & Josh Kaul

his super important race. But first we have the editor of The Bulwark, Jonathan Ving Last. Welcome Jonathan Last to Fast Politics. Molly, it's good to be with you. I am so excited to have you. Jonathan Last. I call him j V. L. From The Bulwark, my editor at The Bulwark, one of my favorite editors ever to work was total genius, one of my favorite writers to ever work with. I miss you. I miss you. You made me the writer I am today. And I also one of the many things I love about you is that

you come from conservative world. You come from the Weekly Standard, which is now largely Bulwark, though some dispatch right yeah, well, because now primarily people who had no connection to the Weekly Standard. It originally grew. Yeah, it originally grew from it. So you're looking at the Republican Party right now. Paul Pelosi attacked in his house eighty two years old. Ted Cruz says, perhaps there's more to this story. I mean,

what the funk man? I think it's pretty easy to understand. Actually, so what Republican had the correct response to this? Mike Pence. Mike Pence rushed out with the full on thoughts and prayers, total condemnation. We are standing with Nancy Pelosi and her family at this awful time. Mike Pence is the anti coup Republican who, despite the fact that he was Donald Trump's right hand and like literally was willing to do everything except the coup. He was with everything else except

the coup. And because he wasn't, he's persona on grata and the Republican Party basically, and you are anti coup and you are pro like basic humanity and decency, and that makes you not a good fit with Republican voters. The reason I say I think this is easy to understand is because think about it this way. Wind the

clock back ten years and something like this happens. If Steve King ten years ago, this had happened, and then Steve King had gone out and said something awful and ugly about the Pelosi's, it would have been bad for him. There are other Republicans would have slapped him down. They would have gone through the motions and said what they

should have, and voters would have cared about. Republicans would have said the right things, done the thoughts and prayers thing, because voters expected it of them and would have punished them if they hadn't. And we're past that point now. None of these Republicans who have tried it out. Carry Lake is out there tiptoeing with the gay lover trist gone wrong thing. She has an election in like a week. She's not gonna lose any votes because of that. And

in fact, I would say the opposite. If you are a Republican and good standing who is facing voters in a week, you do not want to be seen as being in the Mike Pence position of like thoughts and prayers or these people. Violence has no part And what's changed his Republican voters. Republican voters now positively and affirmatively

want this sort of thing. This tracks with the entirety of what the Republican policy positions are right, Republicans don't care about like, there aren't things they want to do with the government. They just want to hurt the people they hate. Right, This is like the Ranta Santa's Secret sauce. He will take refugees fleeing communist violence in Venezuela out of Texas and drop them off and Martha's vineyard, and

everybody loves it. Right. He will hurt the economy in Florida by going after Disney and her tax barriers, but everybody loves it because he's hurting the people they hate. And this is now the only real good that Republican voters crave from their people. It's funny because it's like, I think so much about this idea that small dollar donations would saw remember this all idea, yea, yeah, that small dollar donations will democratize democracy and they will then

cause will have everyone will be John F. Kennedy. And instead what happened is small dollar donations are like Marjorie Taylor Green is the queen of small dollar donations. So, I mean, we see things devolving into this kind of

free for all, and I'm curious. I mean, I guess I sort of understand what happened, right, Like news got decentralized, there was enough fake news people got kind of I was reading something about the villages, and that's a great example of like people who were cut off from a lot of older people were cut off from local news, they got their news on Facebook, and they got radicalized. I mean, is it just that simple or do you think there's more to this story? It's hard to say.

Part of it maybe permission structures. Right, everybody, we are

all angels and devils. We all have our good impulses and our bad impulses, and the Internet is essentially it's a mob, right, And part of the things which just goes back hundreds of years the crowd psychology, people and mobs behave differently than they do individually and with as the permission structures have sort of told people, hey, that thing you used to keep inside because he knew it was wrong and you're sort of embarrassed in a shame

to do it. As permission structures have changed and are more and more people doing, and people are like, oh, okay, well I guess we just don't have and this is the norms, right, This is all through the Trump years people like me were made fun of her, saying, oh, with your norms and your values, like, well, I don't know, Like people are terrible, which is the children, right? I mean, children are absolute savages, and parents spend a lot of

time and energy and money trying to socialize them. You want to bury all the impulses and like, oh you want you want Sally's toy. No, you can't hit her over the head with a stick and take it. That's not okay. It's spoken like someone with a lot of children, as I say, as someone who has a lot of children anyway, So yes, go on. So I think that

that's a part of what's going on. There's like a weird decadence to all of this too, like the people acting like we are standing at the end of the world with everything falling apart, like we're in the ten minutes before the Mad Max movie starts, and I don't know, you look around, like things look pretty good to me.

They ain't perfect, but like the world is moving, unemployment to three point five percent, people are unhappy that there's inflation, and there's been an uptick and non violent crime but a downtick in violent crime. I don't know, And I think that that's what decadence is. Decadence is having the freedom to cosplay like things are terrible precisely because things aren't terrible. So I want to like drill down on that for a second, because I think that's a really

important point. And also the other thing that I feel like we don't talk about it at all and I wonder about it, is like, how much of this is just like we went through this really stressful pandemic where I mean, I don't know, I spent three months thinking that we were all going to maybe not three months, but I certainly spent a month or two thinking like, oh wow, this is it for us, and washing off my Amazon boxes and completely convinced that this was the end of it. And I just wonder how much of

this is caused by that. I think it might be exascerbated by it, but I don't think it's caused by it. Can I tell you a story? Can we do story time for sixty seconds? So at my old magazine Weekly Standard, we would go out on these cruises. Right, rich people would pay to come and go sailing with us for seven days. I don't know what sort of sick human being want to do that, but they did. And our

big responsibility was hosting at dinner table at nights. And I don't know if you've ever been on a cruise, but on cruise you have two nights of the week where they are formal nights, and all the old rich people get dressed up in like spangly ball gowns and tuxes and stuff. It's two thousand and it's two thousand twelve. It's we're gonna run up to the two thousand twelve elections.

And we are on a cruise in the Caribbean, and it is formal night, and I'm sitting around a table with a bunch of these people, the youngest of whom has got to be seventy eight. And they're all phenomenally wealthy because they've come on this thing. And I'll never forget what dinner was. Dinner was lobster thermidor, and they're all eating lobster thermidor on this beautiful ship in the middle of the Caribbean. And they were telling me how things were worse in America than they had ever been

in the country's history. I started trying to push back a little bit on this, and I was like, Okay, So hold on, So I mean, are we talking seriously or literally? Like, and they're like, literally, I said, we're worse than we were during the seventies. Absolutely, things are worse than they were doing the seven worse than they were doing the Great Depression, Absolutely worse than they were doing the thirties, worse than worse than the Civil Warrior.

And I saw that. I'm like, you're fucking eating lobster thermidor in a tuxedo in the middle of the Caribbean, Like, how could you possibly think this is real? And this is I think this decondence has been floating around a lot, and I don't know how to fight it because the ultimate, the ultimate answer is what we have as a human problem, and human problems are intractable and people are garbage. Well that's a bit much. I mean, I mean, I agree,

and I certainly agree. This is a problem of affluence, right, this is a problem of like we have everything we need and probably too much, and so that is like, certainly I get that, but I also do think, like I don't know, maybe I'm a cock eyed to optimist. I hate to think of myself that way, but like I do think that ultimately people are right. I do think you're right about the mob mentality stuff, and that

is really grim. But I also do think that people are weirdly good and when you get and you see it, when you get people in front of each other, or even just like the clapping during the pandemic, Like, I do think there's an innate goodness in all of us, even the people we don't agree with. Sometimes maybe the

irony here is you're much more religious than I am. Yeah, and part of the religion things that people are like colled to be better than themselves, right, And part of this is probably like the devolution of Christianity in America from being a religion to a sliver of identity politics, which is like a real thing. That's a problem. I don't want to romanticize the past. We had all of these fights in the seventies. We had them in the sixties too. In the sixties we had our candidates being

assassinated and our civil rights leaders. Yeah, and the seventies right, exactly, I don't want to romanticize that stuff. But also, like the Cold War, there was a vague politics stops the water's edge, and it wasn't totally true but it was true enough, and the end of the Cold War really changed things in American ways that people didn't fully understand it first, and ways which were quite good and helpful

in some ways. Do you remember this. There's a lot of as things were kind unraveling in a lot of people said, what we really need is a big crisis, because America had a big crisis, then we'd all pull together. Right, we got our real crisis, and in fact, actually it

fractured us. So that's the question to me, what changed between nine eleven and COVID, right, Because the initial response from nine eleven and a response that lasted honestly like a good year and a half, was a real like togetherness, we're all in this together, and again, not everywhere, not always, not perfectly, but in general, and the in general response to COVID was not that. Yeah, I think that's right.

I mean, I still feel like I mean, I just feel like if we could just get a few Republican politicians to say like it's too much, and you could get the critical mass to say like this is too much, we got to take down the temperature. And I mean, I know it's not going to happen because they want

to win their primaries. But it does seem like we got here in a very stupid way, right, I mean, I worry the history teachers us that you always get there in the stupidest possible way, right, I mean a World War One, it's never the legion of Doom sitting around with the perfect master plan that nobody could possibly foil. The beer Hall Putsch was not some great stroke of genius. I think it's often it's often the you get there because you're in the dumbest possible timeline. And I don't know.

I look at it, and if you wanted me to be optimistic, if you wanted to to really you said, hey, do give me thirty seconds of optimism. What I would say is what we often have done in America is we do not solve our cultural conflicts. We just build over them. We pave over them with something new, and that new thing will eventually give rise to its own cultural conflicts. But the old things for the past don't

ever get solved. They just get buried and we move on, and we don't often know what it is going to be that moves us on. You can't see the pandemic because nobody expects an inquisition, But you also can't see the Berlin Wall falling, right, I mean, the good things that happen are going to happen, and most of the

time you can't predict them either. So maybe, just in one of these sloths where we're in the trough and we're waiting for the way to kick us back up and to wind up in a good place, maybe we are one pet boota judge away from rediscovering our shared many. If you wanted to really make me be optimistic, I would say that that is because we're at the tail end of a generational turnover. Right, we still have baby

boom presidents. We're like our our eighth baby boom presidents somehow, and when we finally have generational turnover in American leadership, that that will usher in a transformation in which where we just build over this stuff and started new And maybe that will happen. Or maybe the future is carry lake. Well, I mean, I think there's a world in which the

future is something bad caused by carry light. Yeah. I think that's probably more like I think we have intractable systematic problems, like in how voters are arranged throughout the country and how we allocate power through the electoral College in the Senate. WHI you're going to cause all sorts of trouble, but you asked me to be optimistic. That was as good as I can do it for. Yet, well, I think it's a good point. And like the truth is.

I mean, I was watching Obama speak last week and I was thinking to myself, like he was he's such a gifted politician, and you really forget, or at least I forgot how gifted he was right, Like he was able to sort of go in there in a way that most politicians can't. And I had to wonder, like if somebody else like that could come along and unify us again. Yeah, I mean we get them. We get them every once in a generation. I worry we just

had two of them. I mean Trump is a once in a generation politician, just in the opposite direction, right, And these problem is these things don't grow on trees. I mean, the only thing I would say is Trump is a charismatic entertainer. Like I say this as someone who myself is can has been known to be a charismatic entertainer. I'm not sure that is a once in a lifetime thing. I mean, I think Republicans were savvy. I don't want to say smart sa v in picking

up a charismatic celebrity as their candidate. He was a charismatic celebrity. I mean he could have been replaced by another less nefarious charismatic celebrity. So I just wonder how I mean, look at Ted Cruise. Ted Cruiz is trying to be Donald Trump now, but it won't work because he's Ted Cruz and not even Heidi likes Ted Cruz. But I do think, like I'm not sure that being

charismatic and famous together makes you once in a lifetime. Maybe. Frankly, I think Rhonda Santis is also Ted Cruz right exactly, And that's why I've come around the idea. This is not my original thought, but the Carry Lake is actually the air to Trump is um would be somebody like Carrie or Tucker and not somebody like Rhonda Santis or Nikki Haley. Yeah, no, for sure. I mean I think Carry Lake is really charismatic and she has that kind of charisma. JVL, will you please come back literally any

time you want. This is the only way I get to spend time with Oh, thank you, We'll have me out a bulwork there anytime you want. Angelo. Kira Sony is the CEO of Media Matters. Welcome to Fast Politics. Angelo, Thanks for having me. We wanted to have you because you're amazing and you're the editor of Media Matters, but also because we're in this really important inflection point in the ownage. That's a special word I just made up of Twitter, who owned now Twitter? And what the funk

is going on? Oh boy, well, Elon muscoes it now, which is really just to use sort of a thing that Tucker said a lot about Joe Biden, but he's basically at this point just a hologram for sort of red pill right wing ideology. I mean, he really is just affect similiar of it that is depressing and a bummer, and he's erratic and obviously has an agenda, and one of those agendas is basically eliminating a lot of Twitter's

brand safety, communities, safeguards, moderation policies. So we're in a little bit of a of a of a scrum here. But I'm not as down about this as I am about most other things, to be honest, so good I want to put that at the top because I'm yeah, I love to hear you're not as down about this as other things. To explain why I mean we should be down about like, I don't want to diminish the threat.

I think that this is significant in terms of the potential, the potential for this to be extremely destructive and to have a profound impact on people, but also the larger information landscape. And I think the consequences are significant, but they haven't materialized yet because we we still have time.

And that's why I say I was down about it, is that the bottom line is that people always talk about Elon must like as if he's sitting like Scrooge McDuck with like a pot two billion dollars on cash on hand, and that's actually not true. When he originally put the deal together for Twitter back in the spring, he had to put up forty of his TESTA stock

as collateral for the loan. He already has fifty percent of his test of stock put up as collateral for other loans, so he doesn't actually have it's so crazy to say this, but it doesn't have that much cash. Like he has obviously super rich and he's got a lot of value, but he this is all borrowed money. Now, he got a bunch of investors, and that's a piece of it. Presumably they want some of their money back. The bottom line here is that he doesn't have as much debt as he did back in May, but he

still has a lot of debt. And so if he's happy to incinerate hundreds of millions of dollars in operating costs every single year to own the libs, fine, But at some point he will run out of borrowed money to do that, and he will have to pay this money back. This is like money he has borrowed. So banks have to like want their money back, and they will definitely. They're not like other maybe ideological investors. They want their cash back. So I guess the point is

that there's a real pressure point here. He hasn't insulated himself yet from being immune to most pressure points, like say Fox News has or talk radio. So that's why I'm not as down yet, is because I actually think there's a real window to prevent and mitigate some of the worst arms. So interesting and so important. Let's just I want to psychle back to Fox News here, because

you said that Fox News is insulated from that. Can you explain a little bit of what you mean, Yeah, I mean one of the things that happened shortly after Glen Beck got fired started a little bit bit before them, but they really went into overdrive at that point. Basically, Roger Rails and Murdoch decided that they don't want to be beholden to advertiser. That the idea that advertisers could come in and sort of put limits onto what they

can and cannot do was not great. Because Fox News has an ideological agenda, right, so they want to make a bunch of money. They need to, but they also have an objective. So what they decided to do is that, well, let's figure out a way to guarantee our income. And so they started to leverage their cable subscriptions right the carriage phase. That's it. And so Fox is the second most expensive channel and everybody's cable bill. It is incredibly overpriced,

just like one American News was overpriced. Cable companies were paying them twelve cents a subscriber, which is probably like six times what they're actually worth. Fox News basically is like maybe more than two and a half times over price. They should probably be about a dollar or subscriber and that's very generous. They're about two fifty right now, and

they're going up to three dollars. What that means is that Fox News is the only TV channel, one of the only I think it's the only one that can actually have zero commercials and still be profitable. And in fact, just to illustrate this, Fox News could have zero advertisers, zero and they would still have a nine percent profit margin. That's how much they rely on these cable carriage fees. And it's a lot harder to interfere with those because they have a pretty refined operation. And so but yeah,

that's what they did. They sort of made them they gave themselves guaranteed income. And if you notice, Musk was sort of toying with this. I don't know how reliable the reporting is, but like some of it was floating out about how he's going to make all the blue checks pay in twenty bucks a month, right, And the first thing I thought, I was like, gosh, there he goes.

He's trying to do what Fox did with cable carriers and to make sure that they get that guaranteed income so that he's not stuck relying on creating a product that's commercially viable. It's kind of amazing that all these capitalists really suddenly hate the market once the market begins to say that you can't be sort of a little bit of a Nazi. I want to get back for

a second, because I think this is super interesting. When cable dies, that will ultimately kill Fox News though, right, this is going to depress you, and I'm so sorry to tell you this. Fox is basically the only cable company channel news channel that is actually thinking about the future. And so if you notice, Tucker Carlson does a lot of documentaries and stuff for Fox Nation. Fox Nation is sort of it's a direct streaming service that you pay

money for Fox per month. They're not meaning their full benchmarks on subscribers yet, but they're expanding out. So, for example, there's a lot of Christian nationalism content on Fox Nation. There's a lot of really intense stuff there. And part of why it's I mentioned Tucker is that he's the only Fox host who has really been able to demonstrate high conversion rates. So his people signed up. They give away subscriptions to anyone in the military for a year.

So in a weird way, Fox Nation is kind of like Jesus. They give away subscription to people in the military, I mean Jesus, uh huh. And so they're kind of like porn sites in a way, where like if you sign up and you get like a free trial and then like you kind of forget about it, and then

they still charge you per month. Part of their strategy is, like you give away these free subscriptions, a bunch of people will just like forget that they have like this five dollar a month bill on their card after the free subscrip subscription expires and maybe they'll cancel. But yeah, Fox, My point is Fox is really the only one thinking about the future, and that's actually kind of scary because the way they're doing it is their long term five

plus years. Their plan is to really convert as many people between now and then to their streaming service, and the way that they're doing that is two ways. One, they're going really intense in in this latest round of cable negotiations, so they're trying to get a seventies cents subscription increase, which is like that is unheard of. Nothing has ever been close to that ever. I mean, it's

just incredible. And so that's to basically grab as much cash as they can in this last round of negotiations, to your point, and then in terms of content, if you notice, Fox is kind of getting more intense, And part of the reason they're getting more intense is not just because they reflect they are reflecting the reality of the landscape, but it's that those are the people that sign up. And so Fox is going to burn brighter and hotter over the next two years because they need

to in order to get conversions. And if you notice, see an n plus got busted and they're gone, and I think they're vulnerable down the road, and obviously MSNBC is not really thinking about that at all in a meaningful way. And so to answer your question shortly, yeah, Fox is the only one that's kind of preparing for that cliff that you referenced. Oh Jesus fucking Christ. You know, every time I come on the show, I always tell you stuff that it's like this is bad and it's

gonna get worse. I feel like I'm like this like sad loan optimists, and I'm not even that optimistic. But one of the things that I think Mania Matters has done really, really well is that they've like held Fox accountable like it used to be if Tucker or Laura said something insane, the only there people would now. But now because of this sort of chronicling of Fox, people on the left and the right now, I mean, don't you think that's sort of amazing? Is And I would

say to me, the biggest thing, obviously it's happen. The shadow was sticking it to some of them. I would say. The other thing too, that was worse is the Fox cycle. Box used to pick up a story and then they would pluck it out of nowhere. Then they would hammered away for days. Then they would start to attack other news media for not covering that story, and then of course the rest of the news media would begin to cover this controversy or this story. And it was so predictable,

was the Fox cycle. What happened over and over and over again. And it sounds so weird now to think about it, to your point, because there's been so much exposure of it, But a decade ago when I first started there, and that was such a routine thing. And to point out that like other news channels, other newspapers were beginning to cover something that Fox had manufactured in hight was like people like, that's not true, that's weird.

You know, that's not that big a deal. And we had to really make the point to show over and over and over again how much of the rest of the news me it was sort of allowing Fox to browbeat them into covering their nonsense and breaking that Fox cycle happens in part, but in large part because of the exposure that you talked about, and sort of just that grinding every day and sort of illustrating the harms and the impact. And I do think, I do think

it matters. And they really hate us, which is nice. They just hate us, and I appreciate that to an extent because it's a weird thing. But there it's one of the few things that the right wing actually fears is when we go after them, and that's because we're really just holding up a mirror. But for some reason

it tends to really really get them going. So I appreciate you saying that, because day to day the work kind of gets a little feels like it kind of stuck in looks and sometimes I don't know, it just feels like it's very ground, feels everything feels very grand. What do you think happens now with Allen. I mean, where does he go from here? I think the next two weeks are really important. And here's why. So right now,

advertisers can actually make a difference. They really can. This is like because Twitter is unlike any other medium, on Facebook, on even Fox News Talk radio. They rely and most of their money actually comes from like these direct response advertisers, which is like call this number, click this link, by this product, by this pill, by this ear cleaner, whould think is one of the grossest commercials, But yeah, that's

how they make the money. Twitter doesn't do that. Twitter actually relies almost entirely on really big brands Coca Cola, HBO, Apple, And what that means is that there's not a there's not a fallback for them. They can't dismiss the concerns of these big brand advertisers. And big brand advertisers don't need Twitter. Actually, they don't need Twitter to sell a product or to get attention. It really is not an

important part of their at budgets. So why I say the next two weeks matters is this if a couple of these really big advertisers come out and say, hey, if you roll back a bunch of these communities safeguards. If you roll back these policies, if you've got the content moderation team, if you kind of turn it into the right wing hellscape that you're saying you're going to do,

we're out. Musk can't service his debt for that long if that happens, and the banks are going to be pretty pissed you if they have the prospect of him defaulting on their debts. So like, the thing is is that he does have some limit here. He does need revenue, and that's important to consider. So I think that that's to me why I say the next two week matters. I know that Musk is aggressively trying to convince these advertisers that he's not going to turn the place into

a horrible landscape. They're a little bit of fear of right wing blowback for anyone coming out against it. I would say I've talked to a bunch of them so far. I think it's a matter of days before some come out publicly. Just this morning, I p G, which is one of the four largest media buyers, and the major clients like Ams and others. I mean, they really represent

big companies. They gave an advisory to all their clients to tell them to pause their ads on Twitter just to wait and see sort of approach, like the community gets the idea that this is a problem, and this started back in May, like this advertiser education. I don't want to just say it popped up over and nowhere, like this is why I think the advocacy matters and what people do matters. Like we talked about this back in May. We were doing this work back in May,

a lot of other groups were. It really did make a difference in sort of laying groundwork for advertisers and

big companies to think about it. So it just depends if he's able to convince these big companies to hold their powder over the next two weeks, then he'll be able to make a bunch of changes to the platform and just kind of hope he can sneak by and muddy the waters to make it seem like it's political, Like if this stuff happens after the election, they can frame it as like a partisan blowback, and companies do not ever want to be seen as partisan, at least

the big ones, so they will actually wait, they'll be like Robert Mueller, They'll hold on. Oh, I don't want to see in parts like they will, like Hedge hero of the Resistance, Robert Muller, exactly what they're gonna They're gonna just hold off and say oh and then by steen we're talking six months, eight months, and before long, these things have a short shelf life. Everybody forgets there's a new normal. So the next two weeks matter. So what do I think happens. I think there's a window

that we can win. I was thinking about this because, like I don't know, if you know, I was involved in that craziness when elon Hillary tweeted that story from the l A Times, and then Ellen immediately posted this like there might be more to this story, with a link to the Santa Monica Observer, known for his work with the Hillary Gotton body double story. She deleted that tweet, which I think is meaningful because the pressure is significant.

That's what I'm saying. And again, I'm not an optimist. I'm not trying to be like, I'm not gonna pretend that this is gonna be a cake walk or perfect. But You're right, there are folk worms in life, and this is a folk worm. And that is an illustration of the folk ram, which is that he was willing to take that even though his impulse has instincts he is a creature of the sort of the right wing

fever swamps. He's talked about this on Twitter. It's very clear and what he produces there are limits, though, and the blowback on that was so significant that he realized he couldn't sustain it. Obviously didn't comment on it whatever, but people noticed. People saw that he took it down, and he understood that was going to alienate parts of his audience and that he is building a power based on the right, and the right is a bit of a volatile place, like you sort of have to be

pretty consistent in order to keep that engagement. And I agree with you. I think it is significant and it does know that there is a real pressure point here. It doesn't require hysterics or historyonics. It just requires a corporation to act in their best interests with a little bit of nudging from consumers to show that there's brand harm. And yeah, I'm not, like I said, I'm not. I think this is a winnable fight. I really do. I

think Twitter will still kind of suck. I actually think in three months from now, if we're successful and this is successful. The most annoying part about all of this, it will just be annoying. People are going to pay so much attention to the stuff he says and does, and hopefully that goes away like that is really one of the most awful byproducts of this is that he can super charge things. And but if that's what we

have to deal with, is just another nuisance. But for the most part, we don't have to deal with like a hardcore radicalization engine that he's turned Twitter into. I could deal with that. I think we could probably get there. I just think that it's really about what happens over truly the next two weeks after that the deal is done, it's locked, it's set, and so that's what I got. Stay tuned, and hopefully it won't be super depressing in two weeks and we'll just be irritated by Elon Musk.

But if not, I don't know. I kind of like Twitter too, so I do use it as an outlet, like it's been a part of my day to day and I really also personally would not like to lose that because I saw this tweet about how like somebody said something like they're not attractive enough for Instagram or like cool enough for TikTok, and that's I was like, oh god, that's exactly how I feel. I can't do something else. Well, there's still time. Thank you so much.

This is so interesting. Josh Call is the Attorney General of the state of Wisconsin. Welcome to Vast Politics. Josh Call, Thanks for having for me. We're very excited to have you. You You are the Wisconsin Attorney General running for re election. You've been attorney general since two thousand nineteen, which is like a century in whatever this is terms. Talk to me about what your race looks like and what is

happening in Wisconsin right now. Yeah. Well, first, you're you're right that a lot has happened in the last four years. You know, we had unprecedented Republican obstructionism here even before the governor and I took office. Republicans met in a lame duck session to take authority away from our offices. We had an attempt to overturn the presidential election after and then, of course we've been dealing with this once

in a century pandemic. Despite that, I'm proud to be able to say that on issue after issue that we talked about when I ran for office four years ago. We have delivered for Wisconsin. Night's now I'm up for re election. I won my point six five percentage points in eighteen and in Wisconsin we have a lot of really close races. Four of our last six presidentials were decided by less than one percentage point, and we expect

to have another close race again this year. There are enormous differences on the issues between my Republican opponent and me, and we expect the race to be close. We're gonna keep working hard and I'm confident, but like I said, it's going to be close. The professional name for your opponent is whack of do Can you explain to us some of his positions? We have some really big differences of some critical issues. Now, let me start with public safety.

I believe that we should be investing in our communities, investing in programs that can make our communities safer, and that includes local law enforcement and community policing, mental health programs, drug treatment programs, violence prevention programs, mental health programs. I also think we need some common sense gun safety measures. We don't have universal background checks in Wisconsin, for example. My opponent has no plan for funding public safety. He's

also not supported any common sense gun safety measures. What he does have a plan for is empowering d a's to prosecute abortion cases in neighboring counties. We have a ban on the books in Wisconsin that goes back to eighteen forty nine, and there's no exceptions under that ban for cases involving rape or incest, or even to protect the health of the mother unless it's necessary to save the life of the mother. And so we've already started

to have some really terrible consequences from that. One woman had a partial miscarriage and because the doctor didn't believe that her life was at risk, was not able to intervene for ten days until she finally got the health care that she needed. My opponent apparently doesn't think that the current state of the law goes far enough, and so he wants to empower das to become roving abortion ban enforcers in our state. How would that work, Well, it's not clear. There's no other type of case he's

proposed this for. It's just for abortion cases. But it would mean that a d A could take information from a law enforcement officer and in a different county potentially bring a prosecution, which this law already is a waste of resources if people are enforcing it. I've been clear that we're not going to shift our resources from investigating and prosecating the most serious crimes in the state, which is what we do, to shift them to abortion cases.

But my opponent wants not only to do with that himself, but he wants to give d As this power. And I am leading the fight in court in Wisconsin to block enforcement of that nineteenth century ban. There's a pending case right now. My opponent has been clear that he would end that lawsuit. So the stakes on reproductive freedom in our race are are enormous. Yes, it sounds like it. We had actually the head of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. He said that the racism Wisconsin are very very tight

always that's right. Yeah, Like I said, I wanted my point six five percentage points last time, and we expect this one to be close again. The Wisconsin Freedom p a C an independent expenditure committee right with an affiliation. By the way, the Republican Attorneys Generals, they have really not covered themselves in glory since you know, they were big into fighting for Trump. You know, well, after right, that's exactly right to the people who are concerned about

the future of our democracy. You know, there are a lot of important elections this year, but a g S races in keith swing states, including mine, are absolutely critical. And you know that because you can look at what happened in there were a number of efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the election. And I defended the results in my state. My colleagues like Dana and Essel and Michigan defended the results in her state, and we won. We want to cross the board.

And because of that, Joe Biden was sworn into office because he was elected by the voters. But Ken Paxton, the Republican ae G in Texas, by the suit trying to throw out the results in several states, and a majority of the Republican AEGs in the country supported that that lawsuit. And you know, fortunately enough Republicans and key roles did the right thing as well as Democrats and key roles to protect the results of the election. But

those folks are being purged from the Republican Party. I mean, take Liz Cheney as an example. And you know, my my opponents supported the preposterous partisan biased post election investigation in our state led by Michael Gabelman. He appeared with him at a fundraiser recently. He also claimed that our election commissioners broke the law and should be removed from office. And you know, I mentioned before that we won all the cases in but one of the cases in our

state Supreme Court was decided four to three. And if we had had an a g who was falsely, you know, embracing conspiracy theories, are falsely claiming that our election commissioners broke the law, our results could have been thrown into chaos. And it's critical for our democracy that we win these key races, including my race, but also other critical races around the country. Yeah, we had Dana Nssel in the program to this AD though, I want to talk about

this independent Expenditure attack AD. So basically, your opponent is working really hard to paint you, just like Ron and On everyone's favorite conspiracy lunatic is working very hard to paint Mandela Barnes. They're working hard to paint you as soft on crime, right, And that was what this ad that was sort of the stick of it, right, Yeah, that's the gist. And and it's it's just preposterous. I mean,

I'm a former federal prosecut uter. I worked in Baltimore where I prosecuted murders, gang members, and drug traffickers, and the Department of Justice that I oversee investigates and prosecutes some of the most serious crimes in our state. And we've worked to get increased funding for for public safety

in Wisconsin. Not now. The ad that's out there is just filled with untruths um Just as one example, it talks about funding for our crime labs, which throughout my time in office, I've fought to get more resources for. We have gotten more resources for, not as much as I've requested, but some more resources. And yet it claims that we've cut funding, which is just false. The other thing that's important to note about the Republican Ages Association is that this is a special interest group and one

of the affiliates of THEIRS. Their see four arm encourage people to go to outside the White House on the day of the insurrection, but they're funded by groups that want ages who go weak when it comes to protecting

our environment or when it comes to protecting consumers. These are not folks who actually care about public safety and Wisconsin are special interests that want to have an a g who's going to respond to the concerns of special interests rather than the best interests of our state, right

And I mean that is such an important point. Would you just explain to us what Wisconsin looks like right now, what you're seeing on the ground when you talk to people, what I mean, like Democrats Republicans are hitting Democrats very hard on this idea that they are somehow tougher on crime that polls very well for them. Explained to us

why that's not really true. One of the things we've been working to do is to get accurate information out there that the truth of the matter is that we have had our public safety and our communities in Wisconsin underfunded for decades. And the reason that that has happened is because we have a hyper gerrymandered legislature that has been controlled by Republicans for more than a decade now that has consistently denied the funding to our communities that

they need. And those local governments that they're denying funding to, those are the that's the part government that funds local law enforcement, that funds other critical local services. So we've had decreasing revenue shared from our state to local governments at the same time that costs have gone up. We also have Republicans who have stood in the way of some common sense gun safety measures. I've also proposed strengthening our bail system, and Republicans and legislature have not really

taken any meaningful action on that. They've proposed a small change, but nothing that is going to be the kind of major strengthening of our system that we need. So partly it's getting that message out, but in terms of what we're seeing on the ground, people are energized across the partisan spectrum. I expect that we're going to have very

very high turnout. We had extremely high turnout in Wisconsin and I think we're going to see that again in two And what we've seen from polls that have come out is that the key is that we need people to come out to vote when you there's a recent poll that showed that if you look at people who say they're definitely going to vote, Republicans are in a better spot than if you can it are people who say that they are likely to vote or might vote.

So we need to make sure that people know the stakes, they come out to vote, because in Wisconsin, the question is whether we keep the state moving forward or whether we let politicians with far right extreme agendas move the state backwards. The thing I think a lot about is like, so, say you lose this Attorney General's seed in two Trump could lose Wisconsin, but your opponent could just decide that

Trump won Wisconsin. I mean, right, you'll have enough power to make a case to do stuff with the votes. Is a correct or. If Republicans win the key racism Wisconsin, like the a GS race the governor's race, it could very well lead to chaos. You know, as I mentioned, we won one of the cases by a four to

three vote. Now if if instead of having an a G out there explaining that the results were free and fair and they reflected the will of the voters, you had an a G who was calling the results into question or suggesting that laws had been broken in the process. It's hard to say how the Supreme Court would come out, but it certainly wouldn't help promote stability and the rule of law. To have that, and and quite the opposite. You also could have an a G taking different positions

on critical voting rights cases than the ones that I've taken. So, you know, the election of Republicans in these key offices would create a serious risk that the system could be thrown into chaos. Four you know, and again I have stood for our democracy. My opponent has stood with Michael Gabelman, who ran this partisan, biased investigation into our elections. And it's a clear difference in this race. Yeah, clearly tell us what you need now, if people are listening, what

they can do to support you. The more that we can get our message out across the state of Wisconsin, the more successful we will be. You know, we're in a little bit different position than a senate race or a governor's race. Ags racist tend not to get quite as much attention, and so we haven't had the kind of saturation as media coverage or media buys like other states have. But any way that people can help us

get our message out helps our campaign. If they want to learn more about the campaign, they can go to Josh call dot org. That's my website. So I encourage people to get the word out as broadly as they can and help us get the word out about the stakes in this election. Races really are I mean, if you look at Texas at Ken Paxton, you really see that a G races are really very important. That's right. They play a critical role, and special interests know that.

That's why the group you were mentioning, which is funded by the Republican Ages Association, puts a lot of resources into these races because they know how important they are. But making sure that folks who want ages, who are going to fight for our rights and our freedoms and the best interests of the state, making sure that they know how critical these races are, that can make all the difference. Yeah, definitely, thank you so much, Josh, thanks

for having me. I appreciate it. Molly un Fast, Jesse Cannon, did you notice like Trump's almost been a little out of the news cycle because what we can talk about is this fucking more on Ellen. I hesitate to call Elan and more on. Okay, point take him, but I do know that he has sucked up all the oxygen and so likely he will be our president. It's either gonna be him or Kanye because what happens when you have a number of failures and you dominate the news

cycle is that you become president. That's what we've learned. Oh great, I can't wait for Kanye to New Armenia on his first day in office to avenge the Kardashians. Yeah, because it seems kind of likely to be at this point. Anyway, we're at the moment of funckery for those of you who are paying attention, and we are at this moment. So Ellen has bought Twitter, even despite the fact that

I told him he wasn't going to. And now he is trying to figure out how to service the forty four billion dollars in I mean, not all of it is in debt, but there's certainly a fair amount of debt. And so he is shopping the idea of figuring out ways to monetize this company, which has never been particularly good at monetizing. And one of the ideas he's shopping here is making people pay for Twitter. And either he's going to make people this is like my favorite Ellen idea.

It's either going to be eight dollars a month or it's going to be twenty dollars months, right, because those numbers are about the same. And instead of like the sort of obvious sit down with your people and and figure this all out, instead he's just been like tweeting

through it as one does. So he had a Twitter exchange with the author, Stephen King, who is a big Twitter user and a big Twitter aficionado, and who has both provided, like all of us on Twitter, provided free content but also got the free lift that Twitter provides. And Steve King says twenty dollars a month to keep my blue check. Fuck that they should pay me if

that gets instituted, I'm gone like Enron again. I just want to point out here Enron, Okay, I don't think you want to be like Enron, but had failed dead rep vocabulary energy right. Besides J. K Rowling, Stephen King is probably one of the richest authors ever. He can afford to pay twenty dollars months now. I'm not saying he should, but I'm just saying that I'm not sure we need to celebrate this as like a kind of there's so much like weird capitalist populism masquerading as capitalism

masquerading as populism. But ultimately, then Ellen response, we need to pay bills. Somehow. Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers, or in fact at all on advertisers, as it's looking more and more how about eight bucks. I mean again, these are things I feel like you should before you put twenty billion dollars of your own money or stock up.

You should work these flesh these things out. But anyway, so the two of them negotiating live on Twitter, showing that neither has a great sense for what normal life is like. I like Stephen King a lot. I don't like Elon Quit as much. They both are the characters of this moment in fucker Ay. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to your the best minds and 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.