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 Governor Pritzker says that Donald Trump essentially just declared war on the city of Chicago. We have such a great show for you today. Notice the zone. Evan McMorris, Santorro stops by to talk Trump going to
war on an American city. Then we'll talk to doctor Peter Hotez and Michael E. Mann about their new book Science under Siege, how to fight the five most powerful forces that throughout in our world. But first we have the news.
Ollie.
We used to do a podcast together called The New Abnormal, and things are feeling really fucking abnormal.
I just wanted to take a minute here to talk about this moment we're in because I think it's really really important. The Administration has hit a boat in international waters outside of the coast of Venezuela. They say the boat is drug dealers. We don't know yet. It may be, it may not be. It tends to be that. The rules are that unless you're in war, you're not allowed to kill boatloads of people, whether or not they are
drug dealers. So this is a real abandonment of due process, which is one of the things that makes America great and keeps us all safe. Then we have Donald Trump this morning musing about going into Chicago because he wants to go to war with the city. Are using a lot of excuses, but the reality is that's what they're doing. It is at all points a real assault on our democracy,
an assault on the way we've known. I mean, I have never lived in a time in this country where a political party is so out of balance, where Republicans are not running checks and balances on their own guy, where the president is completely unfettered and feels he can do whatever he wants and behaves basically like a monarch.
And it's just really scary. And so I understand that when we're looking at the news and we're talking about what's happening and want listeners to understand that we do see how this is not how any of this is supposed to work. That we have three branches of government. The Congress is supposed to run a check on the executive. The executive is supposed to be checked by both Congress
and the courts. And what's happening right now with the Supreme Court and the tank for Trump, and an executive branch that seems hell bent on the unitary executive theory a kind of right. There have been conservative scholars who have created a framework for Donald Trump to be a monarch, and that is what we're looking at right now. And the Supreme Court is stacked with people who are absolutely committed to letting Donald Trump rule this country in a
way we have never seen. The Founders were scared of a monarch. The conservative legal system is now in a place to create one, and they have been working towards this, and so every Supreme Court decision really matters. If Trump loses on tariffs, that's a very good thing, even though the people challenging him are other Republicans. And we just have to hope and that there will be that there will be a few Republicans who will stand up to Trump, that there will be some people on the Supreme Court
who realize how slippery this slope we're on is. Look, we're in that squishy middle between what was normal American democracy for so many years and what is this sort of middle ground that gets us to authoritarianism. And I really do hope that there are enough brave people to stand up.
Yeah, I do too.
The good news is is it We always worried that if we got to these moments, that the people wouldn't even see it. And I think that that was my great fear when Trump was reelected. But according to some polling that you and I were just looking at, the people are really seeing this shit for what it is and they're not happy.
Yeah, And I think, look the tennis The reason the Tennis Association said, like, don't show the booing, and the reason that Donald Trump is so set to rig the midterms is because they understand. They get it. They know what they're doing isn't popular. And you know, sixty five percent of Americans seeing that Trump is making things more expensive, they get it. They know we're really seeing a moment
where the American people know what's happening. The elites, on the other hand, the business leaders who are going to the White House and telling mister Trump what a genius he is in order to get tariff cut ats, they may not get it.
Breaking land speed records, saying thank you in two minutes a million times.
Yeah, no, I mean, look, it's not potocracy. They have to please the autocat but they really don't. And the fact that they're all doing this, and by the way, you know, I just want to pause for a second. If those billionaires had all said no, that they weren't going to go to the White House, you know what would have happened. Yeah, he would have caved on the tariffs. Yeah, yeah, he would have caved on all the tariffs. I mean, he's not going to go to war with every tech bro.
You know, if these wealthy people would get together and all be brave together, they'll be fine. One by one they can get ticked off, but if everyone gets together and is actually brave together, they would be fine. But that's not what's happening.
No, speaking of new levels of depravity, many people are very alarmed with just Dance Vance's comments on Rand Paul tweet that blasted our policy of bombing a drug quote unquote drug vessel. Since we don't know, there's been an interesting reaction to this. Molly, what are you see in here?
Yeah? This is so very very jd Vance. One of the things jd Vance does is he does trump Ism harder than Trump. It's interesting because it's like, you know, Trump loves a convert and that's what this is, right, a convert who is doing trump Ism harder than Trump. So basically here's what happens. Rand Paul and the very few Republicans who have not become huge cowards are weirdly
the Libertarians. And again, I think it's important to remember my friend Mondair Jones had a really good tweet about this, because I think this is a really important part of this story, which is that Rand Paul really does not occupy the moral high ground like this is what monde
Are tweeted. Difficult to describe how dark this period in American politics must be for even Rand Paul, who single handedly blocked federal anti lynching legislation for years, to have to get on this app and incredulously ask the Vice President whether he ever read to kill a mocking bird. Okay, so I really do think it's important to realize that, like, none of these people are heroes, but Rand Paul does
in fact understand due process. First of all, and again, nobody knows if it's a drug vessel, so maybe it is, maybe it isn't as the highest and best use of our military slamming this sentiment as despicable and thoughtless, but it's also a breach of international protocol, like if another country blew up a ship in our waters, say they went and blew up a ship in the Gulf of America.
You'll remember that one. By the way, if all the members of the press had said we're going to go with the Associated Press when the Associated Press was banned from the White House, then Trump would have had to have let them back in. I mean, this is what has happened, is like every point people have gone along to get along, and they fucked themselves and everyone else.
One of the things I think about a lot is in union culture, the word solidarity is the most important word. And this is a time that we need solidarity between the press and solidarity against this regime.
Yeah so again, rand Paul jd Vance said he doesn't care. Then jd Vance and Crassenstein got into it, which is, by the way, if anyone remembers from season one of this disaster, the Crassenstein's are these Twitter guys who are very involved in all sorts of problems.
They were thrown off Twitter famously for doing inauthentic behavior and using body coast arms Yeah yeah, to praise their own tweets. Yeah yeah, real, real cool.
Stuff, and also maybe other stuff. None of it's good. So but they're very liberal, or they're sort of liberal, or they're whatever. Anyway, they push back to it, and Jadvans is like, killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military. Brian Krassenstein says killing civilians of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime.
Now I would add that it's not actually a war, so it's actually a lot worse because if you declare war, there are different rules. But if you do not declare war, you're just doing even sort of worse stuff. Jdevans writes back, I don't give a shit what you call it. So this is why Trump loves a convert.
Yeah, so I get really really depressed at the subject. A lot of people are like, oh, it's the find out, but this is a little too much find out for me personally. Trump's Dow law will limit payments to hospitals that treat low income patients, and the changes to Medicaid are going to be extremely harmful to rural hospitals.
And this could be a lot of.
People who are going to die from this because the hospital is going to be too far away when hospitals, because we're already seeing this in the South that a bunch of hospitals that were destroyed in the flooding are making it so it's very hard for people to get care in time.
It's really really awful.
Yeah, So they're going to limit payments to hospitals that treat low incompatience. This is Trump voters, basically, critics Warren. The change to Medicaid will be particularly harmful to rural hospitals struggling stay afloat. Now, they did this voodoo thing with the numbers where they cut one hundred and fifty billion dollars to rural hospitals. And then you had RFK Junior last week talking to Bernie Sanders and he said, we've done fifty billion dollars, so we've saved rural hospitals.
But what they've done is they've restored a little bit of the money, so they're still out one hundred billion dollars. This is going to be the thing that is going to close rural hospitals and a lot of these towns the only employer is the hospital or it's the largest employer, so you'll have a rural hospital you'll have. The Mississippi Hospital Association says expects Mississippi to get at least so it was going to get five hundred million over the
next five years. I mean, this is just going to close all these hospitals and all these people are going to die.
Yeah.
So, speaking of things that aren't good, Trump didn't notify Congress about a high Stake seal mission, and it seems that that breach is a protocol with Congress, and this could be a sticking point for mister Trump, according to The New York Times.
Yeah, I mean, look, it's like Republicans will probably go along with it because they don't care. And I think like one of the things I think about, like during the RFK hearing, a lot of these Republicans gave RFK a hard time. But they could really put the sand in the gears. They could stop the government from working, They could do all sorts of things to get RFK out. They could say that RFK must resign. And they didn't do any of that. They just you know, said that
they didn't have his full confidence. I mean, like, until Republicans do any kind of oversight, we're just going to be in free fall here. But the seal story is interesting because it's from Trump's first administration. So it means that even when they were pretending to follow the law, they weren't, which I think is probably pretty important and relevant. Also, they killed all these fishermen, They shot and killed everyone aboard the vessel. They turned out to be unarmed civilians.
We didn't learn about it for six years, probably not a great sign. And the whole idea was that we're doing it because of why because we're going to war with North Korea. No, because they wanted to do some listening device. I mean, I don't know. We're just seeing so much carnage from this administration, even carnage we didn't even know about.
So.
Evan mc morris Santorro is a reporter at Notice. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Evan, so good to be here again. As always, thinks are not going great.
Well, I you know, it's it's a comparative issue, Like I mean, I would say that August there was a lot more fun because I was on vacation at some points and things were quiet. And now we're in September and so it just sort of is generally worse because things are very busy and crazy.
But on the other hand, we're into some.
Actual you know, legislating and lawmaking and fighting and campaigning all sorts of stuff. So it's worse because it's busier and things are actually happening, but also, you know, things are happening, so that can be good, you know.
I mean, I think it's sort of like how you decide to look at it.
Because Donald Trump is saying that he's going to declare war with the city of Chicago. So Trump had this meme that was like, I love the smell of deportation in the morning, right, mean, to trigger the libs. I think one of the big fallacies of the last decade and dealing with Trump is that two things can be true. He wants to trigger the libs and he also wants to end on norms and institution.
I mean, it's exactly right. I mean, you know, exactly right. I mean the old quote, right was take him seriously but not literally.
Right.
That was the original thing that you know, came now when he first ran and this idea that he's the people who are at his rallies are having a good time termed of playing along. Selena's and Helena Zita yeah, go on, the reality of the situation is that now you should take him serious and literally.
I mean, this is a guy who.
Created something called the Department of War and is now talking about war.
So like it on Chicago, but of the sort of bad stuff. Over the weekend, there was him deciding he's going to declare war on Chicago, fresh off of his administration losing you know, declaring war on Los Angeles basically in last season, and then that war was the courts were like, no, no, you can't actually do that because we have this thing called the Pasa Coma Tatis Act, right, and then he was like, oh, okay, I lost in court, so I planned to invade Chicago.
In fact, the judge actually went even farther than saying, you can't do this because we have Passekama tatis. You know, the judge didn't even say and you should know. The judge says, you do know that we have it, and you willfully ignored it. I mean, it was a very strong attack on this president's attempt to use federal troops as law enforcement.
Right.
But this whole argument that's going on, it's this idea, this is you know, it's this base play that the idea is he's just going to keep trying to push the out. But now again we get into that weird moment with Trump where says I'm going to do it. I'm not saying when I'm going to do it. I'm just saying I am going to do it. I'm not saying what it's going to be able to say I'm
going to do it. You know, there's some reports about him engaging with a Navy base up there to base ice operations out of We have seen a lot of moments where the courts have come in and sort of like pushed this administration out of the way, and they have like tried to ignore them but kind of listen to them and continue to push forward and can push forward.
And once again, this is one of the circumstances in which the US Supreme Court is going to have to eventually weigh in and make a decision on this one way or another right because of course, the ruling in Los Angeles, thanks to a previous Supreme Court ruling, you know, in part, only applies to Los Angeles. So Trump can try to do what he did in Los Angeles in another city and you have to then go ahead and sue him again in that city. So legally it's very messy.
But as you say, there's no indication here that this administration is at all, it isn't slowing down in this present.
In fact, they're ramping it up, Wisha. You know, with Los Angeles it was like.
We were there to protect these law enforcement officers who were enforcing this stuff.
With DC, it was okay in DC, lookers, a crime is out of control. We're coming here to get rid of the crime.
With Chicago, it's like Chicago is an enemy of us. We have to go to war with their election defessionals.
Because we don't like their governor because he's richer than Trump is, I mean really and a liberal. I mean there's a lot of and Obama's from there. I mean, there's not what my favorite part of the whole story is the administration says we are going into Chicago because of immigration, and Donald Trump says We're going into Chicago because of crime.
Right.
And also, I mean, look, I think that you know, this is one of those things where we live in a separate Americas when it comes to narratives, right, and if you live in one America, you are looking at a city that went through a really rough time in the pandemic and then with this huge migrant surge like a lot of Americans and these did and is releasing
its crime drop a great deal. If you're living in a different America, you have watched this city elect an extremely left wing mayor, and the belief is that this is a say that is completely out of control crime wise and has to be you know, taken by force and ramped to the ground. The question, of course comes, where is the middle of that right and where do those moderate voters or those independent voters, how do they
look at this stuff? And you know, last time you and I talked, we talked a bit about how, like some of these podcasts, bros like Tim Dillon, etc. Had started to say, Hey, this looks a lot like the kind of stuff that the real weirdos like Alex Jones, you know, have been saying for years be scared of. And now as it ramps up, we'll see if they
go along with it or don't. I mean, it's it's a very interesting moment for him politically, but it really is, I would imagine, pretty terrifying if you are a person.
Who lives in Chicago, because you don't know what you're gonna do.
Well, I think it's important to like, none of this is okay, Like no other president would do this. It's not okay. It's against the Constitution and against the law,
which is why he keeps losing a court. So even if the political calculus, like we're looking at the political calculus, which is certainly important, the larger like American democracy story, which is that this is unprecedented, and so we have opened the door if Donald Trump, if his presidency ends, which we assume it will at some point, we are
now in uncharted territories. Right. That's then the question of like when you see stuff like this, I know it's out of fashion to say like, oh my god, because part of the reason he does it is to say, oh my god. But it is truly like uncharted territory.
Well, I think oh my god is a very important aspect of it. I Mean, the thing is, I think what you're talking about is also politics too.
You know.
I interviewed Catherine Cortez Mastow, the senator out of Nevada, the other day, and we're talking about a lot of stuff that's going on right this this is a month about spending bills and a month you know about you know, all the sort of leveraging the power of the purse, et cetera. And Cortes Masto is a person who wants to be She's a Democrat who wants to find a middle path, you know, a way where we can get
back to compromise and sort of traditional order. The kind of democrat a lot of left wing democrats.
Don't like a lot. This is what she's trying to do. And the thing is she said this amazing thing to me.
Where she was like the weirdest thing for me about this, you know, she says is there are all these Republicans in this entire branch of government and they're not doing anything about it. This, I mean, our system is designed with a check and balance system. The most amazing thing is Trump, who has all this power, actually has an equal check in the legislative branch. Right, and so the idea of two branches of government sort of being taken.
This is the part that's very, very crazy. Right.
We've had presidents before who have a lot of delusions of grandeur, and we're to try a bunch of stuff that they are not legally allowed to do.
Other branches come in and smack them down.
Right now, you have a situation where this president wants to do stuff, the legislative branch appears to so far have zero interest in stopping or doing anything about it, which leads it up to this judicial branch. And you know, we've been seeing sort of the limits of the power of that, and also we've been seeing both the legislative branch and the executive branch pushing against those limits really really hard, because they are.
Kind of united.
And that is the part that is kind of a political question, because it's that legislative branch, of course, that voters are going to be asked to weigh in on next year. And so while Trump is operating in the sort of capacity of where I am the second term president, I can nothing can happen to me. I can do whatever I want. He is dragging along hundreds of people for whom they will have to answer for this. And that's why, to me, the question always is what will
happen when that answering has to happen. Will people go along with it? We will they be upset? We don't totally know yet, but it is an oh my god moment. Of course, it's a oh my god moment. But it also put them over the same.
Time, right, And we can see the polling, which is not great though he's always doesen't polls so well. Though he's underwater on issues which he used to never be underwater on. I'm thinking about things like immigration and the economy. And then you seeing these polls that showed that like sixty three percent of Americans believe Trump is making things more expensive. That's crazy. I mean, that's even Trump's people are saying that he's making things more expensive.
Well, this is a central issue with this Trump second term, which is that when they were elected, the big conversation was, oh wow, these these Trumps. This maga is so much more disciplined and politically organized than the previous one, and they really know what they're doing and they're not gonna be all scattershot and all over the map.
And the reality is some.
Of these really big, hard problems that like Biden couldn't figure a way out of, for example, rising prices, et cetera, this administration is both exacerbating with its policies and also.
Can't figure out a way out of. Politically, we are really seeing.
As time goes on a kind of flopping around in the bottom of the boat when it comes to this administration, that was not seen in the opening months, right, that went back when they oh, my god, these guys are magic.
They can do anything.
No one can stop to look at the you know, they broadly rewrite all of US policy with the stroke of a pen, all this kind of stuff. But now we are seeing a thing in which, you know, these judges are smacking them down. These prices are changing. And as we have learned many times before, right, this immigration policy that they're doing is not exactly what they promised.
You know, they promised a lot of different stuff.
The President did say a number of occasions, we're gonna get twenty million people out of this country.
They're going to go, they have to go.
I mean, obviously this is that would suggest the maxi importation scheme. But we also know that when they when they tried to do some of this harsher stuff in the first administration, it caused a public blowback. And I think that this is the thing now where they have yet to manage the politics of America being more compassionate about this than maybe they think that they are, and maybe more cognitive of how it actually works me a
commedy than they think that they are. And so now you're seeing a situation now where they're kind of they have not yet solved that political problem either. To my eye, you were looking at an administration that looks like a lot of other ones when it comes to this period of time, which is that the sort of end of the part where it's only about Trump is sort of starting to end. You know, when all we're talking about is the last election, and now we're going to start
talking about the next election. And that is when people start to worry about where they're standing and who they're standing next to. And I don't know that Trump has completely made it that everybody wants to stand next to him right now, like a lot of incoming presidents, don't you know.
Right Well, also they're booing him, by the way, that was genius said that. I'm not sure whose order it was. Don't show the boo wang when Trump.
Oh yes, the UST So the US right put out a memo telling people at the US broadcasts at the US Open not to show any disruption or booing of the president at the US Open.
I say, an effect in action, right.
That's a interesting way of looking at it.
Okay, don't videotape my enormous house. I don't want anyone to see it, Okay, Like, please don't do any coverage of my private jet ride. I mean it's just like so, of course every video on my social media feed is people booing Trump at that tennis match.
And you don't think it's more mixed than that Mali of maybe that.
I don't want to know what they're more, all right, So the first one is that it's sort of mixed, but there's not a lot of people there, but there are now more and more and more. The other thing is like these people had to wait for hours and hours for the mags, because if you're going to do a thing with Trump, they make sure you don't have a gun. I mean, any president and I have had to wait for mags. So they are now mad too because they've had to wait much longer.
Yeah, I mean some of them missed the event or missed the beginning of the banker. They were stuck outside trying to get in, like you could.
Get boot for that. That's a nonpartisan thing, but I do think that obviously these are people who are worried about his approval rating. And they're worried about what's going on. I want to get to this study because Jesse is obsessed with this study. Producer, Jesse desperately wants you to talk about this study. To talk about this study.
Well, look, it's the.
Kind of thing that I really nerd out about Molly, which would as you know, and I'm sure by now people who listen to your show. No, I am a pretty big nerve it comes this stuff and like, yeah,
I was talking to strategies not long ago. This is a great month to talk about this study actually about sort of this thing that happens in political language where the party that people like it seems like, why can't they say anything in a normal way, Why can't they talk in a way where they look what's going on?
Why is it that they sound so ridiculous? Well, this there's a study in Comparative Politics, this you know, this this journal that does this kind of nerdy stuff, and they analyze twenty five years of speeches by Danish members
of parliament and government ministers. Okay, so they got one hundred and like more than a million speeches, right, and they found this thing that happened that when people were getting elected while they're on their way to getting elected, people understood what they were talking about.
They spoken this very.
Clean and easy to understand way. People knew what they were saying, and once they got elected, they all of a sudden started using these like rarer words and longer sences. They started talking about all this less politically relevant stuff like about you know, regulation, you know, there's you know, there's everything back of that.
You know that Biden administration would kind of tell you that, look, the economy is really good.
Look at this graph for example, right, And it was like, why are you This is insane?
Why are you saying this? Everybody thinks it's horrible. Why are you pointing at this chart?
Well, it turned out this is like a thing alast according to the study, right, that that happens across politics. And the most amazing part of it, right is it doesn't matter what party you were in or what political ideology you came from, But everybody sort of went into this thing where they got elected and they sort of got entered this hive mind of being indecipherable, and then as soon as they would leave, they started sounding normal again.
Right.
So the authors started trying to figure out how this worked and they found that it is like adding professional staff in to help these lawmakers not do this just makes it significantly worse. Right, professional staff in Denmark tended to be oriented towards legal precision, nuance and policy accuracy, not policy not public understanding. They push minister's rhetoric towards bureaucratic ease.
What they need help with is making complex things simple.
Right, So you're the idea of your big professional class that's not helping you, right, Right. Then the thing is who does the best from this, right is basically all of these populists that can sort of come in and use this out what seems I got to our language,
it's actually very normal language. And I think this is a really important thing to think about in this month that we are in because one of the things that's about to happen are Democrats and Republicans, but specifically Democrats are going to be pushed very hard by their base to fight over these spending bills. Right, this idea of like shut the government down, don't shut the government down. Right.
And I've done a lot of reporting about this.
Actually, I have reporting coming out or are reporting on regularly coming out about this in the notice newsletter about everybody's been getting together since March when the Democrats caved and caved so embarrassingly to Trump about what are they supposed to do in September with this spending bill now and across the entire ideology they have decided what they need to do is they need to say we're going to draw aligne that says we want you to restore
health care cuts and if you don't, we're going to push you. You know, we're going to in our heels and maybe the government shuts down over that.
Right.
The idea is trying to pull this conversation back from all this sort of weird bureaucratic stuff and some of the people can put their hands on So we'll see if it actually happens. But as you kind of like not to be synick about it, but I just just
sort of see it not happen. Like think back to his study and think about the fact that like it is like one of the most difficult things for politicians to do, which is actually to do this thing that they that they need to do right now, which is take a very complicated thing like a must pass spending bill. The one piece of leverage of Democrats have in this trifecta and use it to score strong political points. It's very,
very hard for them to do it. It's been studied in Denmark, you know, and as you watch it, as you watch this happen, I want you think back of this study and think back to the fact of just like how like anathema it is to how their brains operate. This's one of those INDIVI It just really made me very excited when I first read this.
Yeah, no, I mean I think it's a good point. And in fact, I was texting with a member this weekend and I was saying, why does Jeffries speak in such a deeply hard to relate to way when he is like, clearly pretty smart guy, And they were like the consultant class capture.
I mean, look at the mom Donni thing in New York. I mean, Jeffres is a great example. I mean this mom Donnie guy is like makes you cheaper and making sure to afford rent and also like I don't like this sleep, you know, I don't like this stuff. We don't on in isreal or right, And we have seen the Democratic Party continually find it as they try to find some way to say both nothing and everything about these kinds of topics that they are losing raft and faith from their base.
I want a party that's as hard on Donald Trump as it is on Mondami. I mean, what the fuck are we doing here? He won, he won the primary. I don't get it. And by the way, the argument when you talk to people about it, because it's all any Welsey and your people talk about, is that he's an anti Semite. And I say, why is he an anti Semite? And then the closest they can get is he's Muslim, which does not make you an anti Semite, It just makes you in a different religion.
I mean, we talk about Jerry Nadler, right, I mean, you know, he's pretty strong.
I'm dying supporder.
I think this is one of the situations that you're talking about right now, which is exactly why, despite the fact that Trump is in this difficult position where he is saying this stuff that is not particularly helpful to the Republican Party, right, Declaring war in Chicago is not particularly helpful when it comes to.
Talking to you know, the moderate or independent voter.
Right, he's talking about, you know, prices are going up, not particularly helpful.
If you're a Republicans. But it's this other stuff.
I see moments like this that you're talking about with the opposition party that really doesn't know what it believes when it comes to Maybe it's most exciting in terms of like public interest, new voice in a long time, with its you know, huge support that brushes away you know, all these Democrats that room figures a party that can't figure out what to do with this. This is why people, you know, continue to wonder, people like me who watch this stuff. You know, I'm not going to round here
and say, hey, Democrats are going to do great. Democrats are in a great position here because Democrats don't kind of like really know what position they're in, Like you.
Don't know who you're really talking to alf the time? Is that sure?
But I think what this is, I think this is sort of what this whole moment is really about. Is that the fact is Trump is come giving them all their rope that they need. But the question is do Democrats know which way to tug on it if they want it? You know, is it okay to touch with get It's like, is it is this rope like you're ethically sourced enough or is it is rope to like
go or like what do we get? Like the whole thing is just kind of like this party is still in this incredible amount of internal tumult despite the fact that like their they're leading, enemy is in charge and the clearing war on you know, Blue Cities, and it's a very it's a very strange moment to see. I mean, you know, you're abundant. It's your job is to tell us why that's happening. I can tell you that it is happening, and I don't understand what to say about it to you perfectly are.
And now we're at a time.
Thank you evan okay.
Doctor Peter Hotez is the dean of Baylor College of Medicines National School of Tropical Medicine.
Michael E.
Mann is the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, and they both are the authors of Science under Siege. How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces that threat in Our World. Don't your hots tell me why you guys are here today.
We're here, Mollie with my great colleague and friend Michael Mann. First of all, it's great to see you again. It's it's it's been too long. And you know, I learned so much from you being on MSNBC and others and
CNN and talking during the pandemic. But I'm here with Michael Mann, who's Distinguished Climate Scientists at the University of Pennsylvanian professor, because we've written a new book and it's called Science under Siege, And what it does is we came up with this idea and when we started noticing that there was interesting overlap between the attacks on climate science with the attacks on biomedical science and realize that while if you think of them, each of the two
circles of the Venn diagram, they're not entirely overlapping, but there's significant overlap, and unfortunately, some of it's coming from the same sources. And the anti science world has gone beyond vaccines and climates even climate science to create an entire ecosystem. And it doesn't just attack the science. It's attacking the scientists and portraying us as public enemies or
cartoon villains, and so it's become very dark. And the reason that you'll hear today that we're so passionate about this topic and why it's so important it's starting to affect human life. People are dying, literally dying because of anti science activism, antiscience aggression, and that's why we have to talk about it.
I'm wondering, Michael, if you would talk about how you know, I had always am married to an academic, and we had always had this thesis that when the climate change got bad enough, people would be like, oh my god, this is what's happening. But in fact, it's almost as if the opposite has happened. So I'd love you to talk about that climate piece of it.
Yeah, thanks, Molly. First of all, it's great to finally meet and to be with you here, and of course to be with my good friend Peter. And as he mentioned, you know, this sort of came together because we both found ourselves under attack. Me some time ago. Really the climate wars began decades ago, and so as I watched similar attacks that had very much, you know, the same feel.
It was some of some of the same actors who are involved, the some of the same tactics, the same funders, the same sort of right wing uh you know, dark money organizations and conservative politicians. As I watched that on fold, I reached out to Peter, it's like, you know, what's happened to you, guys, is what's happened to us, and we should really compare notes, and we became good friends. We decided that it was really time to write a book that would draw upon our own respective experiences and
the commonality. I mean, it's the same bad actors who are behind this. They're using a playbook that was written decades ago.
I thought that if things got bad enough with climate that people would notice, just like if things got bad enough with COVID and people would be like, oh my god, this vaccine saved my life. But that's not what happened at all. And I'm wondering if you could talk us through this sort of parallel there.
Yeah, so it's a great point, And you know, it's I sort of talk about this in terms of the Cuyahoga River moment, because back in the nineteen seventies, when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, it was a galvanizing moment. There were a relatively small you know, there were three television news networks. We all were dealing with the same facts.
We might differ in our opinions, but we could draw upon a similar universe of facts, and so there was the possibility that an event like that could galvanize public attention, it could bring people together across the partisan divide, and that's what happened. And you know, back then you actually had Richard Nixon who helped create the EPA. Right, the very EPA that the Trump administration is trying to dismantle or is dismantling, was actually created by a Republican president.
And what's happened is the Republican Party has become so intimately connected to a small number of plutocrats. And we talk a lot about those plutocrats in this book and the influence that they wheel. You know that they are essentially a wholly owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry and these other conservative interest groups. And if they stray from that, of course, as we know, they get primaried
out of their congressional seat, what have you. And so there's this purity test that has been you know, used now for more than a decade to create the version of the Republican Party that we're dealing with today, to create the administration we're dealing with today, where no amount of facts, no amount of public opinion doesn't matter. They have their agenda. They feel like you know, they are immune to criticism, is what we're watching right now, and
there's nothing to hold them back. And it doesn't matter how bad it gets for the rest of us, as long as it gets better for them, as long as a small number of plutocrats and oligarchs do better make more money, they don't care what happens to the rest of us. And right now, the institutions that are supposed to exist to help make them answerable to the rest of us, as you know, Molly, they're failing.
Yeah, and you know, and for me, the watershed moment was, and we've spoken about this before, Molly, during the delta wave of COVID in the last half of twenty twenty one, after mRNA vaccines were widely available. The estimates are two hundred thousand Americans perish died because they refused COVID vaccines, because they were victims of this organized, fi well financed,
politically motivated health disinformation campaign. And that's for me, the real moment, when you know, these are not small numbers of people dying. Two hundred thousand Americans died because they were targeted victims of this anti science empire and that's why we need to speak out about it.
Yeah, that's exactly right, deadly right, And the climate crisis is deadly. Fossil fuel pollution is deadly. Twenty five percent of all debts, by some estimates, are related to fossil fuel emissions or the climate change and the extreme weather events that result from it. So yeah, we're literally watching people die now because we're failing to listen to what science has to say.
So the thirty, the big picture of the book is, you know, we always think of two of the most existential threats to humankind are our pandemics and illness and climate change, the climate crisis, and now we say it's actually there's a third leg to that tripod, and that is the massive anti science campaign and health and science disinformation empire that now prevents us from addressing it, and which will only ensure that this will continue to accelerate.
And of course we're seeing this play out right now.
So doctor who does maybe you talk about the measles for a minute, about what's happening with the measles right now?
Yeah, And it was you know, it was predicted. So we've this year, we've had a massive measles epidemic that started in West Texas and then moved up into the Panhandle and across the borders into New Mexico and then ultimately Oklahoma and Kansas and possibly Colorado. So a four or five state measles epidemic that landed one hundred kids in the hospital and two needless deaths among otherwise healthy school age kids whose parents made that decision not to vaccinate.
And you might say, well, why did it start there? And the answer is this started in the same place where COVID vaccinations were really low, in the rural conservative areas of the country that are tuning into Fox News every night and Joe Rogan podcast and all of this, and so it was a spillover effect of the decline in COVID vaccinations occurred in the same part of the country.
I also wonder I read really good reporting about this in pro Pablica that these the family, the mother of one of the children who died, was making a case that it's not that dead lay because her other kids survived. And I wondered, if you could just talk about that. That seems like the kind of thinking we're up against.
You know, this is part of the anti vaccine playbook is to downplay the severity of the illness, just like they downplayed the severity of COVID. They said it was a it was a cold and lied about the populations that are at risk and the importance of long COVID. Same thing with measles. I mean, and this is where RFK Junior or a Health and Human Services secretary, really showed his true colors. So when he should have been out there encouraging people in the endemic areas to vaccinate,
what was he saying. He was saying the hospitalizations weren't because the kids were sick, it was because they were being quarantined or isolated.
That wasn't true.
He was saying the measles vaccine is a leaky vaccine or doesn't stand well to immunizations, which declines it not true.
And he quoted false numbers that that seemed to come out of nowhere or and then this is, you know, something else that we talk about in the book, how with Kennedy's rhetoric that he's been, you know, pushing anti vaccine sentiments and for decades now he's changed a little bit and he's adopted some of the health, wellness and influencerer industry, So you know which buys up what they can in bulk and then they jack up the price
by repackaging it and selling it a telehealth visits. So what does Kennedy come out and say, Well, you can either get the measles mompster bella vaccine or you can get this useless cocktail of supplements of vitamin am be, deciniede and clorythrumycin and cot live royal. Where does that come from? It comes from the from the very corrupt
health and wellness and influencer industry. So it's interesting in that he's sort of changed the nature of his rhetoric in order to adapt become more acront as well.
And Mollie, I think if I can, if I may, what you're sort of getting at, right, is that this used to be the ultimate restoring force. Right that when you are directly impacted your loved ones, your uh you know, your home, uh. When you feel the impacts directly, then you go to the ballot the ballot box, and you and you defend your interest by voting for politicians who
will who will defend him. And it seems like that's failing right now, because people who have literally lost loved ones to you know, to the anti vaxx movement are in denial when leaders of their movement die from you know, COVID nineteen right, like, yeah.
Like the guy from Turning Point US, Yeah, exactly, or who's a diamond of diamond and silk.
Yeah, many of them. He was a presidential candidate and African American presidential.
Oh yeah, the harmon Kin nine nine nine nine, yeah, yeah, and he was here's the Here's the thing that's so distressing and and sort of morbidly ironic was that he was actually still tweeting anti vax rhetoric from beyond the crypt the account, his account was still promoting.
So in the same thing with climate, right the floods in the southeastern US from Hurricane Helene, you know, you had people who were literally you know, falling victim to conspiracy theories that people who are coming, you know, government officials who were coming to their defense were actually there to steal their stuff. And and and they're in denial of the impact that climate change is having on these extreme weather events. They're literally destroying their homes, whether it's floods,
whether it's wildfires, whether it's coastal storms. And so we've reached the point where we're witnessing the devastating consequences of pandemics in the climate crisis. And as Peter said, this third leg of the stool disinformation makes it impossible for us to have a good faith conversation about the linkage between you know, what the science says and what people are now dealing with.
Yeah, and so there's no autocorrection, there's no feedback loops. It just keeps on accelerating. And what they're doing is and we're seeing this with podcasters and the five groups of individual five groups that we talk about. Instead of having the auto correction, they instead double down and they reinvent what's causing the problem. And of course they have enormous bad and width and money and power.
Michael, one of the things I've been really deeply weirded out by is Elon Musk comes to Fame on a lunch on solar and evs and just explain to me how that happens, because that seems baffline.
No, it is, you know, and and and only we have to you know, turn to fiction to really, I mean, because it's sort of a classic Bond villain arc. Right, there's no other way to describe what we've seen with Elon Musk, where he was this hero of sort of
clean energy movement, and then something happened, something snapped. What happened It is like literally like you know the narratives you sometimes find in Bond films, where you know, something happened to him that turned him and and and and it became basically perhaps the most powerful agent for the promotion of anti science, even anti science that goes against his own interests, right, because you know, I mean Tesla and uh it was you know, the the the battery,
whatever his battery. You know, he was selling these mega batteries or whatever they were. He was sort of heavily invested in clean energy technology and and yet allowed, not not only allowed, made Twitter an outlet for the promotion of anti science, gave free reign to the bad actors. We talk about Petro states like Saudi Arabia and Russia that have carte blanche to promote their misinformation now on his medium.
Right, So, what what do you think to play here is just he's more racist than he is something else.
I mean it just so it's it's just it's mind boggling, right. I Mean, here's someone ordinarily I would admire. He's here in Texas like I am. He's created star bas you know, and I like to think of Texas as a state of innovation and science and technology, and he's you know, he's been out in front on that. And all of a sudden, you know, he's a tacking me for not debating Robert F. Kennedy Junior on the Joe Rogan Show. And I'm just shocked by it all, trying to understand it.
And and you, I think you helped me explain it, Molly, that you know, they were propping him up to run for president, needed people like me to debate him. But that's so that's how dark it's going in Interestingly, when you talk about Elon, he's one of the five p's
that we talk about in the book. We identify part five categories in the in the first one of the plutocrats and and and of course Elon Musk is the quintessential plutocrat involved in He satisfied several the definitions of several categories.
He's a plutocrat.
He's in some sense the press because with Twitter or x he has this, you know, more influence than any media outlet, his social media outlet, and he is a propagandist, right.
What's interesting is his his new AI program Groc. You know, people were going after me about this and then and Groc was became my best friend on X started defending me because you know, he was just saying, no, that's not what doctor Owad does is and but now that's changed too. He's I think he's doing some fine tone.
When Grock isn't going down a Nazi uh you know, rabbit hole, he sometimes actually.
So let's talk through what I mean. This is all so deep upsetting on science, climate and just my nightmare fuel. So what is the solve here?
Yeah, you know we wish you know, we we we really did wish we had a simple answer.
You know.
Maybe it's you know, as you pick up your puppy, you maybe it's turning over our planet to you know, to puppies, puppies, other sentient organisms too. I mean, because we've screwed it up so much. And you know it's our values, right, I mean the value system right now in the United States that incentivizes a candidate like Donald Trump.
You know, it's people voting against their interest in every possible sense, and the very notion of democracy, the functioning of democracy, demands that people vote in some way in their own interest. And when they don't, when they can be conned into voting diametrically, you know, in a way that's diametrically opposed to the interests, you get the situation that we have. What's the solution to it? I mean, there is no simple fix. Right, We've got to we've
got to reclaim our politics. Right and in the end, you know, people ask, well, you know, what can I do? Can I if I recycle? You know, if I don't drive as much? What are the behavior The most important behavior agent is to be part of a collective action that restores you know, that the votes in politicians who will do our bidding rather than the bidding of the
plutocrats who have installed them. And I still, I think we still have some faith, if you want to call it, that, that that there is some resolve left in the electorate that we will see consequences in this midterm election for the unprecedented assault on our democracy, on science and everything else that's playing out literally in real time. You know,
by the time we get off this call. There'll be some new development, some new awful headline, and we frame it in the end Peter and I I convinced Peter that this into this framing. I guess there's a token esque feel to this moment, and it's about, you know, there's this moment in the Lord of the Rings. The line is there's some good in the world and it's worth fighting for. Right and there's still some good in the world and it's worth fighting for even though no
White wizard will come to our defense. That's not going to happen. We fight on because we.
Have no choice. This is literally a battle to preserve.
The planet as we know it, humanity as we know it, and we must do everything we can to push back against the anti science, against the fascism, and all of these strains that have now come together to create this very dangerous pivotal moment in American politics and perhaps when it comes to the fate of the world writ large.
Yeah, and in the meantime, I think there are some more straightforward things that can make a difference. I mean, one of the five piece, you know, the five pleas are the plutocrats, the petrostates, the pros, the propagandas and the press and the press. Of course, we talk a lot about the Murdoch Press and Fox News and the damage of newscorps and and and detail that, but you know, we also have to talk about some of the mainstream newspapers.
Even the New York Times and the Washington Post did a lot of false equivalency and felt the need to voice very strong pseudoscience or anti science opinions and kind of create that form them, equivalent, platform them, and give this false equivalency. That did almost as much damage as as the Murdoch Press because it caused people that we really care about to think twice about what the scientists are saying. That should be something easy to walk back from.
But so far performative neutrality, and it's as much a threat as sort of the right wing noise machine.
Now.
I think another is, you know, as scienceists too, we need to be more out in the public domain. We quote a study that's done by a policy group in Washington, DC called Research America, and they do these surveys pretty routinely, and they ask the American people, can you name a living scientist? And it turns out the numbers are always about the same seventy five percent of Americans cannot name a living scientist.
And those our good friend Bill ni most likely right right, that's but so there's no so that's and that's partly a consequence of our research universities and academic health centers discouraging scientists from being out in the public domain because they want to all the flow of information.
They worry about the impact on the brand and we so that makes it easier for them to the bad actors to portray us as sort of shadowy figures wearing white coats, plotting the various things and.
And are called scientists. Be brave, you know, the stakes are too great for us to not be on the front lines now fighting back against misinformation and disinformation. As speakers of each chapter we have you know, there we end with a discussion of some of the very specific things that we can try to do to deal with this, uh, you know, this this existential challenge. But sort of in the final chapter we take a step back and look
at the big picture. In the big pictures, we we've got to reclaim our our politics, because if we don't, there's simply no way to fight back.
This tide of of of ideologically and UH.
And and and and and and financially motivated UH, anti science, misinformation and disinformation.
And we're starting now to see a globalize as well. So you know, you're seeing it with the alternative for Deutsche Lamparty in Germany. You're seeing bits and pieces show up in France, and even in low and middle income countries which have been pretty good about holding the line from anti vaccine sentiment. I do a lot of work in Latin American countries. Now that's starting to falter as well.
So what's going on in you know, you know the US is good at exporting its stuff, right, we export our movies, our music, and now we're exporting this stuff and it's that is really very troubling.
Itter Michael, thank you so much for joining us.
Oh, thank you, it was it was a pleasure.
It went by too quickly, really.
Absolutely night gave you, gave me a great name, fuel, We give you a great voice during the pandemic, Molly, and I'm always grateful for that and.
Thanks for all you do. Thank you for.
No mo.
Jesse Cannon Smiley.
I have this thing all the time that I forget about a lot of the politicians we deal since we have to keep track of, like, you know, seven hundred different people. Missouri Senator Eric Schmid is one I often forget about, and then when I'm reminded of him, it's usually very bad, As is the case here we're Sleep magazine or Sleep website, whatever we call it these days reports. He said, what is in them? It is a white person. America is a white homeland.
Yeah, this is this whole performative white supremacy which the right is obsessed with. Where who can be a bigger racist? I mean, the white homeland. It's like a line right out of Christian nationalism, the white homeland. It's also it's not true, right, the whole country was set up for people who came in, killed all the Native Americans, not all of them, but many of them. It's not a white homeland. It's not Denmark or something. But you know, this is what it takes to make it in Maga
right now, and that's where we are. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.