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 one in eight women say they've secretly voted differently than their partners. We have such a great show for you today. Vice presidential nominee Minnesota Governor Tim Walls stops by to tell us what it's like in the home stretch. Then we'll talk to Yale professor Timothy Snyder about how the media is playing into the
fascist handbook. Lastly, we will have a bonus conversation with the economists Stephen Mazie about the courts. But first the news.
So, Mollie, I was scrolling through Twitter last night. I heard Donald Trump's talking to Tucker Carlson, which always fills my heart with sadness, and then I heard what they said, and it horrified me.
Is it weird for you to see Liz Cheney? That'd be Dick cheney repulsive little daughter running against you with Kamala Harris.
Well, I think it hurts Kamala a lot. Actually, Look, she's a deranged person. But the reason she couldn't send me is that she always wanted to go to war with people I don't want to go to war. She wanted to go. She wanted to stay in Syria. I took him out. She wanted to stay in Iraq.
I took him out.
I mean, if we're up to her, we'd be in fifty different countries.
She's a radical war hawk.
Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrel shooting at her. Okay, let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained in her face. You know, there were all warhawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building, saying, oh, gee, you will, let's send Let's send ten thousand troops right into the mouth of the enemy. But she's a stupid person. And I used to have I have meetings with a lot of people, and she always wanted to go to war with people.
So the point of that is that it certainly sounded to me like Donald Trump was musing about having the guns pointed at Liz Cheney's face and threatening her life. Now, Trump's defenders, which is everyone on Twitter and all of the conservative media, were furious because they said it was clipped and that the full context, which we actually played for you earlier, shows that in fact, he was not threatening Liz Cheney. He was talking about how much he
hates wore. I don't know. I mean, I feel like you should just stay away from talking about killing people by a firing squad either way. And the fact that you know, again like so much Trump's plaining, he didn't really mean to say that, he said it this way. Also, I want to add that Trump has a group of really angry fans, many of whom have a lot of weapons. So when he muses about shooting people, it's not good. It's not good. That is this is my hottest take.
He should not do that. It's not good. It's really scary. It feels like an invitation to something bad.
Sure does, So what's shift gears too? Instead of bad? Too? Stupid as all hell. Trump loves filing lawsuits famously. He files more of them than almost anyone in public life. What do you see here, Molly?
This is a little bit the same. Trump gets angry when his quotes are taken out of context. If he can take offense for something that he will, And he and his people are suing CBS for ten billion dollars in damages. It seems like a lot for alleged partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference. Now, Trump says everything that he doesn't like his voter interference, right, like the Russian investigation election interference, because that's sort of
his thing. So he said that CBS, you know, they sort of edited a question in sixty minutes that Harris had a sort of snappier answer to. I don't even really get the drama here, but his people got very angry about this. He is suing in the North District of Texas, and he's alleging that there were two different versions of Harris's response to a question about the Israel
Helmas War. He's suing in this North District of Texas because he knows he'll get a judge that is favorable for his rulings because Trump has Trump judges who do what he wants. The judges in Texas have done a lot for Trump. So you know, maybe this works, maybe it doesn't, but I don't think judge shopping is not how any of this is supposed to go.
So we have some early voting data. You want to explain it to the listeners, Molly.
I want to like caution on early voting data. All you can tell from it, and it depends on the states. Some states you can't even tell this, but a lot of states you can only tell the partisan breakup. And for example, some states like Nevada, if you have a driver's license and you're newly registered, now we have automatic voter registration with driver's licenses, a lot of times those kids get registered as independents. That doesn't necessarily mean that
they're independent. It just means they don't have a partisan affiliation yet and maybe never well, so I would say it's too early to know anything. But one of the trends that we're seeing reported by NBC Newses Decision Desk is this that they analyzed this state voter data as of October thirtieth, and there are signs of an influx of new female Democratic voters in Pennsylvania. And this is the part that's not as good new male Republican voters
in Arizona. So these are voters who did not show up in twenty twenty, so they would not have been polled for right, because this is shifting electorate. Remember they're basing their turnout model these posters on previous general elections, not midterms, previous presidential elections. So a lot of times the twenty twenty electorate is what pollsters are using for this election, and these new voters would not necessarily have been pulled, so that may change the way the results
turn out. And they so, and we don't know about before, So we'll see what happens. This could be a very good sign for Democrats because Harris has to win Pennsylvania, but it could also be a good sign for Republicans because Trump needs to win Arizona. Now that said Harris, as long as she wins Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, she can lose either Arizona or Nevada. I think so. I don't think she has to win all the sun both states, but anyway, so we'll see what happens. But again we'll know soon.
There is another horrible, horrible story in the aftermath of Donald Trump helping set up to have ro fall. What are you seeing in this horrible story that I wish I could forget?
So? Pro Publica has been doing really great reporting on these women who have died in Texas because of the abortion ban. Remember the Texas abortion ban was enacted a year before the fall of row SB eight. State Bill eight was put into action in twenty twenty one because the Republicans in the state legislature were so hot to get it in there. And remember, it actually went to the Supreme Court on the shadow docket and they let
it stand. So there's just a lot more horror stories coming out of Texas because they've had a much longer abortion ban than other places. So this is another story of a woman. She's eighteen years old, pregnant, miscarrying, and she ends up dying of sepsis because she can't get treated and they finally admit her, and they wouldn't treat her because they thought that baby was still alive and they didn't want to go to jail, and it's just
really dark. There's a really important point in this, which is if you're a woman in a state with a band like this, you end up getting bopped around from different hospitals and people don't want to treat you and you really don't get the care that you need, and now we're seeing women die from it.
So Maali, one of the things we come to realize is a lot of the young voters in the selection were ten or eleven years old when the Access Hollywood tape first hit. So they were not aware that mister Trump talked of women in such a way of grabbing them by the pussy. But now TikTok is making them aware of this. What are you seeing here?
I hate this story because it's like how anyone could forget this is just beyond me. But basically, Republicans, young people, you know it was eight years ago. The guy's been running for president for almost a decade. Now TikTok is resurfacing this video and the audio of Trump musing about if you're a star, they let you do it, you can do anything. We all know this sort of really dark and grim monologue about sexually assaulting women.
What are you talking about? It's just locker room talk, And.
Now younger people know about it too because of TikTok. Congratulations to the Chinese government for allowing it to air. Tim Wallas is the governor of Minnesota and the vice presidential nominee Molly How are you, hi, Governor?
I'm standing tall, steel, tons of energy, went out running in Detroit this morning already and ready to bring this thing home.
What do you think about what Donald Trump said about Liz Cheney yesterday?
Look, it's horrific. Not surprising. He's done this, whether it's subtly or backhandedly, his whole time chaos division, you know, violent rhetoric. We saw it, of course, what he did to our fellow citizens in in Puerto Rico over the over the weekend. But look, more than anything, I think, and I hope voters hear this. We don't have to live this way we have And you saw it on
the National Mall with Kamala Harris. How a president talks, how a president talks about unifying us, How a president lays out plans to do list of things for the American public. How the grace and the dignity and the you know, the inclusiveness of that. So I think when Donald Trump says this, I think take him seriously, and I feel, you know, I feel the pain that comes
with for Liz Cheney because this is dangerous rhetoric. But it also inspires us that the alternative is so much brighter, the alternative is so much more hopeful, And those who are just tired of this drama, just tired of seeing him on TV and doing these kind of things, the antidote lies right in front of us. In the next one hundred hours or so, to get out the vote. And let's just put an end this.
I knew you when what's it like? You know, you are the governor of a big state, but now you are a phenomenon. What is it? Is it very different? What's it like?
No, it's a privilege. And what it's done, Molly, is it just reinforced to me what I already knew. We have so much more in common. The Vice President says that. But I'm telling you, I've had the privilege of traveling to every corner of the country to get out with folks, to listen to them, to hear their hopes and dreams, to hear their frustrations. And this campaign is just in
every corner. Our ground game is so good, the volunteers who are working on at the enthusiasm and the thing that I said, we talk about when we see our supporters, it is a sense of joy, It is a sense of hopefulness. And I feel like I'm the same guy. I got a few more miles on me, I know a few more people. But I think what I always believed is is that people just want the goodness of
this country. And I'm really pleased about this that I won't lie The teachers have been showing up in pretty big numbers because they said, you know, it's only taking us two hundred and fifty years to get a public school teacher on a ticket, so they've been excited. But it's a lot of just regular folks that look, this can be this way. You got two middle class kids, one from Oakland, one from real Nebraska trying to take a positive message. So thanks for asking. It's been great.
I think I'm the same guy, but I'm even more optimistic than I was before.
How are the kids as distressful being on the trail? I mean, what is that like?
Well, you are kind to ask. No, they are fantastic, and I appreciate justin the one thing I said was is especially like with Gus, this country's just wrapped their arms around Gus. I see people that they're like, I'm voting for Gus's dad, and you know, I still see them say that. And Hope has been a morale captain is what she calls. She took her to leave of absence to come with me. She's out on the trail.
She keeps me grounded. I think you know she's connected with the twenty somethings, the gen Z. She's been along with this team. You know, these campaigns are run by youth because they have the ability to stay up all night and sleep on the floor. But my kids have been great. Gus is living a senior in high school's lives. He's playing varsity volleyball, trying to get through another algebra cloud and that kind of thing. But they've been great. But the American public has just been so great on
how they embrace them. And of course Gwen is a phenomenon in herself out there just going everywhere across the country. I think she's really connecting.
Are you scared? Does it feel scary? I mean there's like a part of this country that is really wants this other vision. Is it scary? No?
And I said, for us, is that we know what our vision is. We know what the positive piece of this is. We feel confident in this and it's a privilege to be a part of this. Look, it's always going to be difficult, those who fought to protect this democracy,
those who fought to form it. We're at a critical stage and I tell people the anxiety and I would encourage people of these next four days that the surest care for this anxiety is to go into action, even if it's right, you know, knocking on a door, making a few phone calls, if you can drive people to the polls, if you're there to do anything, that's action. And I think for me and my family, we have been in constant motion. You know, since early August on
this we have been able to do things. And I have been in front of the American public that just inspires me. You know, we were in Asheville a couple of nights ago. We've been down there right before Helene, and you know, we waited and the community said, no, come back. They packed the Orange Peel, a music venue. We had bands playing. We had that community turn out in huge numbers. A resiliency of Asheville is just the embodiment of what this country is. And Donald Trump wants
to tell us his country broken. Donald Trump said, it's the garbage can of America. Donald Trump said, you know, we have to have him to make things great. Ashville doesn't need Donald Trump to make them great. They're great right now. What they need is federal government and others to continue to provide the resources necessary things that Donald Trump never did cut the funding, threatened to not give Blue States Resources. Kamala Harris has reinspired people that are
our politics can be good, hopeful, joyful and effective. And that for me, that keeps me going. So anybody out there's got any anxiety, just go down sign up for a Shifted calling. It'll reinspire you.
Pennsylvania is the most stay and they have more volunteers. In Pennsylvania they have I think six volunteers for every door that needs to be knocked.
Yeah, it's awesome folks that are out there.
Do you feel like there's grounds well when you talk to people?
I mean yeah, yesterday morning I was in Bucks County and stopped by Temple at de Vali with you know, some of our South Asian are Hindu American folks. Huge excitement, huge optimism, you know. I think it's the timing of that was right, that's the victory of lightness over darkness, of knowledge over ignorance. And they were there together. So I feel it out there Bucks Counties, you know, kind
of ground zero. We all know about it. I'm just seeing the volunteers and it's the attitude of the volunteers. You can't fake this stuff. I've been doing this long enough that do you do rallies and things like that. Look, rallies don't necessarily win the election, but rallies are a place where people gather as community and express their joy and optimism. And these things are rocking. We're in ann Arbor, Michigan. I think there's about twenty thousand people. The other night,
beautiful fall night. The trees are lit up, they're golden. Maggie Rodgers is singing that community is out, arm in arm. This is the way it should be. And the contrast to that, to Madison Square Garden. Man, it couldn't have been greater.
When you got this job, you didn't know how to read a prompter. I spent a lot of time thinking about reading a prompter for obvious reasons, because when I'm on television, did you learn how to read the prompter? I mean, what did you find? You know? You were like thrown into the deep end a little bit. How do you do it? Well?
I'll tell you. It speaks volumes to this campaign. And how quickly this is, you know, unprecedented, how it had to stand up. I'm surrounded by the best professionals that you could imagine. They had me ready, they taught me, they were briefing me and they let me be me, which caused them some headaches at times. I will acknowledge that, but it also gave them some of what you know, this joy that I think part of this is is the partnership. The Vice President and I have a good partnership.
She's the thing I wish more people would know is she is so dang funny. I gravitate towards funny people because I think it speaks volumes, and she is and I just keep finding things about them. But no, I think this is a testament to the team. It's a testament to how they stood up a campaign in the shortest time in American history. I think, on the grandest scale at the most critical time, and here we set on the doorstep of now executing this campaign. I want
to make that clear to everyone. We're going to win this thing. We've got the we've got everything ready, but we need to get the ball across finish line. Here. We got to get over the goal line. We got to finish this thing, and that means the boat. So I'm ready to go. I've learned a lot. I think I've gotten better at that prompter, but we can all learn.
You have all of these kids that you have mentored and Fox knew is Wroten's story yesterday about how a kid was struggling with drugs and alcohol and you told them to play ball, and they misrepresented the story because the kid was actually saying that ball had saved his life, the sport had saved his life, and you had And I'm wondering if you can just talk about with these kids who aren't seem really committed to you.
Yeah, this has been the I think the most gratifying part of this whole thing. These kids were very organic and came out. I know Dan who you're talking about, and I had lost touch with him, and he just reignited. This was before I was in on this. For whatever reason. Earlier in the year we reconnected and he told me for the first time. He came and got a meeting with me and said in there and he said, well, I just need to tell you this. I think you
saved my life. When he came here. He was going to drop out of school and I brought him back. It wasn't about the ball, it was about not leaving school. It was about coming back. He turned out to be a fantastic football player. But that's not why I brought him back. I brought him back for him. He needed to be around those positive influences of other kids. He needed to not leave school. And he's successful now, you know, he's dealt with all of us deal doing these things.
And I just, I mean, I did not see this story, but I don't understand why Box News. You know, they're always rooting for failure. This is a good story that transcends politics. Just a really good story that the kid was there, and I'm just glad there. And that's what we do. Someone told me, you know, the mister Rogers thing. We always try and find the helpers, and I hope my job was to be a helper and so excited about that piece of it.
And these kids did campaign for you and helped you run when you ran for com gross right.
Yeah, some of them did. This kid. I think they're probably douking about didn't see the story, but it sounds like the one probably did. Some of them did. They helped me run the first time they came back. These were talented people. My first campaign was four young women, reaching college graduates who were from man Cato. They knew more about politics than I did. By far. They understood others work. They had worked on campaigns I had, and
they just came back and help. They wanted to make a difference.
Thank you, thank you, Thank you, Governor.
You're the best, Molly, thanks for having me. Let's win this thing.
Yes, yes, yes, good luck. Are you concerned about Project twenty twenty five and how awful Trump's second term could be? Well, so are we, which is why we teamed up with iHeart to make a limited series with the experts on what a disaster Project twenty twenty five would be for America's future. Right now, we have just released the final
episode of this five episode series. They're all available by looking up Molly Jong Fast Project twenty twenty five on YouTube, and if you are more of a podcast person and not say a YouTuber, you can hit play and put your phone in the lock screen and it will play back just like the podcast. All five episodes are online now. We need to educate Americans on what Trump's second term would or could do to this country, so please watch
it and spread the word. Timothy Schnyder is a Richard S. Levigne Professor of History at Yale University and the author of On Freedom welcome back, Timothy Schneider. I think of you as like something happened and I knew there was only one person that I could talk to who would know exactly how to explain it. And you, I'm sure you've been in such demands since then. And I'm talking about the Washington Post obeying in advance.
Yeah, will you answer the question by asking it? I mean, obeying advance is the concept we need. It's that term which I put in on Tyranneus Chapter one comes from German. Comes from German for a reason, right, it's for AlSi ossam. It means running in German. It literally means like running
in advance in order to be obedient. The reason why it's important is that it's a lesson that the Germans of the Austrians learned looking backward, which was, if we hadn't conceded in advance, Hitler would not have come to power in the first place. If we hadn't given our power away before we had to, we would have never ended up where we ended up.
Yeah, I want you to like explain to us how you got here. Because you're a historian. You've come to this moment in American life through the past, and I'm hoping you could just give us a minute or two on that.
Well.
I come to this American moment as a historian, which means that I know that lots of bad things are possible, and also lots of good.
Things are possible.
I know that every moment is pregnant with all kinds of things, imagined and unimagined, and some of them are very bad and some are very good. In any moment in history, there are things that are possible that people don't realize. And so that's like, that's any history. And can say that I come to the US as not an americanist. I come to the US as somebody who spends a lot of mental and physical time in Ukraine
and other parts of Eastern Europe. I come to somebody who's thought a lot of written about, and written a lot about contemporary Russia. And one of my guiding lights is that Russia is not a foreign country. Russia is a place where we could go if we follow the
same kinds of lines. And then I come to these US problems from the thirties and forties, which I've written about in other books, and I try to be lively to the notion that the thing that you can head things off, right, And I think historians ought to be talking about these things, not least because we can offer we can offer things, but also because it's not like everybody else is doing such a great job.
Yeah. I mean, the thing that I'm struck by is we're in this moment right where we don't know what's going to happen in five days. But the scariest scenario to me is Russia, because there was a moment when Russia was pregnant with possibility. I mean, what didn't have the long history that America did, but it could have been something other than what it became.
Yeah, and it became It became a fake democracy surrounded where the president was surrounded by oligarchs who eventually took over, and then there was a weeding out of oligarchs and you end up with Putin. It became a ritualized system where everybody goes to the ballot box even though they know it doesn't make a difference. It came a place
where there's only really one source of media. And you know, since that happened to Russia, we have basically moved in that direction on all of those fronts and That's why, like I think, Russia is not our opposite. Russia is this thing that we might become.
I agree with you.
One of the things that I'm always truck by with Trump is that he just says what he wants to do.
I mean, from the Greeks forward, the argument has been put forth correctly that oligarchs in one country are going to have more in common with ali garks in other countries than they are going to have in common with their people. Trump and Musk are both obvious about this, like they and Putin are in some kind of you know, they're in some kind of boy scout troop where they climb up their own private and they have conversations which
are about their own private fantasies. The thing is that their own private fantasies involve things like invading countries, destroying our minds social media, and creating an oligarchy. And naturally, though Trump is going to care more about what they think than he cares about what the rest of us think. And you're right, we just have to listen to him say it.
It seems really clear to me that they've managed to get their supporters to embrace a lot of the anti democratic things that might have been harder to sell in previous generations.
Yeah, it really helps that you brought Russian to the conversation, because what one thing Russia has done, which Vance and Trump are working on, is making people believe the government can't do anything. So fins believe, of course government can't do anything for you. Of course government is just there for the olive arcs, and we're just two or three steps away from that with Vance and Trump, you know, basically telling us that, especially Vance and government is totally impotent.
It can't really do anything. And once you accept that, it's not like politics goes away. Altics just becomes purely horizontal. It's just a matter of us and them. And then you get used to the idea that you're going to be rallied against use Trump's term the enemy, the enemy with it. So that's where it goes, right, And the whole time, you think you're your own agent, you think you're being free, whereas in fact you're just being piloted along in this process.
Yeah, and sort of when Putin came on the scene, he basically picked the winners and losers in the economy. He made billionaires, and he bankrupted the federal government. Ultimately, it wasn't a federal you know, the state government. That is I think the fantasy of Donald Trump.
Yeah, and this is I'm coming out to Filler angle. This is one of the big things which I think no one is talking about because folks on the left don't want to talk about business, and folks don't quite grab this. But Putin was horrible for Russian business. He was moable for the Russian economy. Small and medium sized businesses can't make it in an extra legal, oligarchical type situation. It's only going to be, as you say, the winners
that are picked. So, you know, unless your cousin is Jared Kushner, you're going to have hard time in a Trump economy because they're going to fire everybody who normally
gives you the permits. You're going to be dealing with forty thousand civil servants who were loyalists and have been instructed only to help certain people, and things are going to stop working and so and this is something like those all those Republican admirers of Orbon and all those public admirers of Putin should remember those are poor countries,
and they are poor countries. They're poor countries that should be rich countries, but they're poor because of the leadership structure, and that shouldn't be out of leadership structure.
You want.
I think so much about Project twenty twenty five, and in it is this idea that the president will control the FED.
Yeah, I mean that's one of that's one of the top five ways that Project twenty twenty five would.
Destroy the American equiomy.
But it touches on that the checks and balances right, of which we have ever fewer, but one of them is that the FED is pretty much still independent. If you make the FED just like a gas pedal that the president can push on, that'll be convenient for him, but it'll be a nightmare for everybody else.
Yeah, it's a quick way to make the country in oligarchy, right, because if he says lower interest rates because I have an election coming, I mean, it is the quickest way to a banana republic.
I mean, it's in a race with others because because if you also say I'm going to love to go after my political opponents, or I'm not going to use the irs to go after billionaires, or we're not going to enforce laws on banks, right, it's going to be a race, because, as we saw in two thousand and eight, there can be a banking crisis. We're very close to that time. Because the regulation is so flimsy. The stock market itself can lose credibility if too many favorites are played,
Foreign investors can can go away. So there are a whole bunch of ways that twenty twenty five is actually inconsistent with the kind of market economy that we're used to, and is consistent with like what you say, a banana republic market economy where the few winners are our cousins and buddies and basically everybody else is losing.
It's funny because it's like, we're having this conversation just a few days from the twenty twenty four election. You know, we don't know what's going to happen, but it certainly feels right now, and since this entire election cycle is based on vibes, it certainly feels like women are going to come out and hopefully save us all from the
end of American democracy this cycle. And again, we don't know, we may not, we may all be you know, head in hands in a week, but you can't have a two party system when one party no longer believes in democratic norms.
I'm trying to get the women part into that.
I mean, I think women voters that the thought is that there's such a gender discrepancy already. You know, it's ten points that it seems likely that women voters are secretly voting for Harris.
Yes, I mean the thing you can't have is a party which thinks that voting is a ritual and it's or it's really limited to cert kinds of people, which is where their party is headed. Right Like, I'm from Ohio.
I was just in Ohio.
They've gerrymandered the hell out of the state so it's basically a one party state. And now they're trying to have a cons social referendum to undoer to undo the jerry vandering, which is being dealt with in all kinds of like fantastically ORWELLI in ways that I wish the oppressould write more about. You can get to a one party state this way, right like, step by step by step by step, because one party it never says like, oh we're against democracy or against voting. You just kind
of chop chop, chop chop, chop. It's a shame we only have two parties. So that puts a Democrat in this really uncomfortable position that they have to simultaneously say, hey, we're the future, but also hey we're the ones protecting the system. That's uncomfortable. They've got to do both, whereas the Republicans can be like, hey, there's no future, and by the way, we're wrecking the system.
Right, Yeah, I mean eventually what happens. Like the thing that makes me feel a little opt you got me on an optimistic day, is so my sense is that Nikki Haley is trying to keep her powder drive for a race in twenty eight I could see a world where the party loses and Republicans decide that Nikki Haley could theoretically be the heir apparent. I have a lot of trouble imagining Nicki Haley ending American democracy, though, you know, in four years, who knows. But there is a world
or is there a world? This is a question, And is there a historical precedent for this where things just sort of go back to sort of more normal, less precarious democracy.
Yeah, I want to say that.
I mean, I agree with you that there are a lot of good things at work, and they're like, even though we're early a couple days away, there's still a lot of good things that people can do. And if people want to feel anxious, they should just go out and do those good things, because those things not only make a difference, but they make you feel a lot better. In terms of coming back, I mean, it would help if he got thumped, because the thing is that, I mean,
what happens he's going to claim. You want, if Kamalis wins by twenty million votes, he's still going to say that he won.
We can we can.
Factor that in.
There's almost certainly gonna be some kind of violence around election day, we can factor that in. You know, some crimes are predictable. But in terms of coming back, it's kind of important that it would be better if he lost in a clear way. It doesn't losing the clear way, there's going to be all there's going to be a mess between now in January and then a mess in the Republican Party indefinitely.
But yes, you come back.
I mean Germany came back in a very in a very impressive way. Japan came back in both of those cases, especially in Germany, there's some kind of recognition that things went wrong. And that's where I'm not sure Americans are so good is it recognizing prior mistakes?
Say more about that, because the German personality is so different, I think, or the cultural personality a foray into autocracy is not the same as death cams. You know, part of how they came back was that things had just been so they just got beaten.
Right, Yeah, And that's that's one of the reasons why you want to stop this process before it goes too far. Because fascism by nature can only be can only be defeated by some kind of higher force, Like it defines itself as will and force, and so it has to run into something. So you want to get to you want to stop it before you get to the point where you have to be that thing that it runs into, because that's terrible.
That's a terrible solution.
But what I meant was more like a lot of folks are committed to views in our country which are not true, like the system doesn't work, or that Trump one in twenty twenty. It's hard to do reconciliation without truth, and so I think it's going to be you know, it kind of requires eight or twelve good years, I think for people to ask all of this if he doesn't lose decisively.
Yeah. I watched that Price presidential debate, the JD. Van's debate in horror because I thought there is a person who sells trump Ism in a way where you don't totally know it's Trump.
Is.
Part of what has saved us is that Donald Trump has been so profoundly you know, just can't stop blurting out the stuff he wants to do. Right. He's not dishonest enough to be able to make it sound like it's just you know, normal day in America. And I think that has actually ultimately hurt him, at least with the mainstream media.
It may have hurt him with the middle but it helps him on the fringes. I mean, in twenty sixteen anyway, there are a lot of people who never voted before who voted because a Trump was saying those things, And so I think it probably cuts both ways. With Vants, I would agree in a general way, I think people generally underestimate Advance. I think Vance is directly hooked into the techno fascist world in a way that.
Is not Trump.
Vance is going to live for a while. Trump is not, and I think the people who are betting on a kind of techno fascist future, they're behind Vance rather than behind Trump. Trump is just kind of means to an end as far as they're concerned.
I think of Elon Muss is so much like Henry Ford. Is there some kind of precedent for this.
It's broadly the case that new communications technology cheese break up prior social orders and open up opportunities. Right, So there were a lot of crazy people around the printing press as well, although now we love books and radio and amplification gave opportunities to fascists which hadn't hear before.
So in that sense, yes, but this is more powerful because it's harder to shut out, and it presents itself in many different guises, and in my view, the way that it makes you a fascist has less to do with the content and more to do with the medium itself. The way that social media works in us, this kind of call and response and the fear and approval. I think it works at a kind of lower neurological level than other stuff did, So in that sense, I think it's new.
So do you think there is like the answer right, there's clearly some amount of radicalization that is connected to social media or to a sort of media that does not have any kind of fact checking, right that where things are were sort of in the truthiness era. Do you think that's specific to the genre or do you think that that is like, is there something to do to stop it? Is a government regulation? Is it? I mean?
What is it?
Yeah?
I mean in the new book and on Freedom, I write about this a lot. It's I think, you know, we have to a be courageous enough to admit that we believe in truth, at least as a suit B. We have to think of factuality as something positive that you have to create to remember, it doesn't grow from the ground. There's no such thing as a free market, and this sort of thing you have to actually plan
and you have to create it. You have to have a political infrastructure which is favorable to factuality, which means certain kinds of scives in schools and newspapers and so on. And it's okay to spend some money on that because we can't do democracy without facts and so like, there's all this positive stuff before you get to the thing which you said, which is that, of course these are monopolies, right, they should be broken up. That's what the Sherman Act
is for. And even conservative economists like friedrypron Hayek would would advocate this. They have to be broken up, they have to be regulated, and there are all kinds of creative ways to do that. I mean, we should be applying our intelligence to the question of how to make social media work better for the freedom of the average American rather than standing back and marveling out of this
high technology because it's not high technology. It's basically like beating pans together, just an incredibly high speed.
So interesting. I want you to explain why it's so important to fight back, you know, at the personal level, but also at the corporate level, Like can you just because why what Bezos did is so dangerous?
Yeah, the corporations in Nazi Germany got it wrong, that's an established fact, and they ended up where they did not want to be, some of them as criminals, but almost all of them at Hitler's mercy. And we know from the history of the decades since then that in coup attempts and things like this, the attitude of the corporations turns out to be very important. Approaching decisive, and so can't say we don't have responsibility because those people,
in fact do we know historically have responsibility. What they do matters as far as individuals right now, it's pretty simple. The little things that we all are doing, like the canvassing, the phone banking, the keyboarding, meeting with people in real life, giving money, those things not only matter, but also they make us feel better. Right Like, it's okay to be afraid that Trump is going to win because bad things will happen if he wins, but it's not really okay to be anxious.
The US.
Anxiety is by making sure you're with somebody else and you're actually doing something, because then you will feel better and that'll be true no matter what happens.
Yeah, so important. Thank you, Thank you for joining us. So interesting.
Really glad we could do it.
Stephen Mazie is a Supreme Court reporter at The Economist. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Steven, Thank you, Mollie. Great to be here.
I'm hoping that you can explain to us. You cover the Supreme Court for The Economist with very smart and you're very even, so I want you to explain to us what the Supreme Court just did. And what it means. Start with Virginia, then go to Pennsylvania.
Okay, so what is happening in Virginia is this. There was a voter purge that was instigated, that was ordered by the governor exactly ninety days before the election, which might have been symbolic because there's a federal law that says within ninety days of an election there can be
no systematic voter purges. And the justification was that these were purportedly non citizens, sixteen hundred voters who had, according to the State of Virginia, had declared that they were not citizens and therefore should not be able to vote in this election. And of course non citizens cannot vote in American elections. It is a crime for them to do so. But there are at least a few dozen, if not more, of those sixteen hundred people who, it
has been proven, made a mistake. They didn't check a box saying that they were citizens, or maybe they checked a box saying they were non citizens. One of the people who was found to be mistakenly taken off the roles by this voter purge said, you know, it sucks getting old, but I just, you know, missed it and
so the argument from the Department of Justice. So what happened after the voter purge is that the Arn't of Justice stepped in and said, this is illegal under this federal law from nineteen ninety three, you can't, you know, systematically purge voters from the roles so close to an election. And a district court agreed and said, yeah, this is
not okay. You can have an individualized removal of particular non citizens if you can prove that each one is a non citizen, but you can't just kind of blanket take off all these people and potentially catch eligible voters in that dragnet. So that's what the district court said, and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals then heard an appeal from Youngkin. The result was the same. The state was ordered to put all sixteen hundred voters back on
the rolls. And then there was an appeal on the shadow docket, which is the emergency, quick acting lightning docket of the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court stepped in and said, we're going to side with Virginia here. We're going to reinstate the voter purge for those sixteen hundred people.
So this happened on Tuesday of this week and when they issued this order, When the Supreme Court issued this order saying no, you need to keep those sixteen hundred people off of the roles, there were three justices, notably the democratically appointed.
Justices, right on partisan lines.
Yeah, they said they dissented from that order, which means it was a six to three decision along partisan lines, with NOx explanation of why they rejected the reasoning of the poor Circuit Court of Appeals and of the District Court that originally said you need to restore these people to the voter roles. So it was we're not talking about a huge number of voters, but it's a it's
a highly partisan question in Virginia. And to have the justices divide along partisan lines without saying why, I think I said in the tweet that you were interested in that this was a little ominous to me.
So part of the reason that they gave also was that same day voter rage in Virginia.
Right, Yes, So if anyone has been taken off the roles and their citizen and they want to, you know, go on the day to the polls and show that they are citizens, they can do that. So there is a sort of backstop for those who have been unjustly taken off the roles. But you know, that's that's some work, and you have to bring your papers, and you have to be prepared to date officials.
And it's also partisan interference on the shadow docket four days before an election, tell me about Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania, all right, So this is sort of like that jiff of the boyfriend looking, you know, back toward the woman and and ignoring is his girlfriend. Pennsylvania is when he's looking away from. But that's where we should be looking. Because of course, this presidential election is not going to be decided by Virginia voters. It very well could be decided by Pennsylvania voters. There's a case at the Serbine Court right now on the shadow docket, which we could
have the results from any minute now. I think it will be probably today, although it could be a day or two from now. We're getting very close to Tuesday. So the Pennsylvania case affects potentially tens of thousands of ballots as opposed to sixteen hundred. And the question there is whether if you, as a Pennsylvania voter, mail in your ballot but you mess up. There are a series of envelopes that you have to put your ballot in
and sign some of them and put others inside others. Yeah, so if you forget this secrecy ballot as it's called, and your ballot is called the naked ballot, even though it's closed in another envelope, it's considered naked and it's
not eligible, it's not counted. So a few days ago, a week ago, the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court ruled that under state law, if you send back one of these naked ballots, and the estimate is about one percent of mail in ballots will be sort of messed up in this way, you can go to your polling site and file a provisional ballot in person on election day, and if it's confirmed that your mail in ballot wasn't counted because it's not valid, then your provisional ballot will be
counted and you'll get to vote. So that was it was a four to three decision by the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court, and I think it's it's a legitimate, difficult question of state law, whether you know, voters should have that opportunity under state law to make that change and vote in person. But what's happening now is that the RNC has petitioned, they has filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court saying, you need to correct this error
of the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court. They have misinterpreted what the Pennsylvania legislature has said. And this is unconstitutional even under the federal Constitution, because the Federal Constitution says that only Congress and the States can determine election rules. It
doesn't say that state courts can. This is a theory known as the independent state legislature theory that with very few exceptions, state legislatures get to call the shots irrespective of what any other state official or state court might say.
And so they're asking the Supreme Court to kind of declare what Pennsylvania state law actually is and to throw out whatever ballots come in that are naked and not give those people who tried to be absentee voters but failed because they forgot one envelope prevent them from voting in person on election day. Could this change the outcome of the election, Probably not, because we're talking ten thousands, But we've seen in the polls how close Pennsylvania is, right, all right, And in.
Fact Trump won by point seven two percent, Biden won by one point one seven.
Percent, which is a lot of voters, even though the seems small, right, This is concerning a that it's happening on the shadow docket where.
There's no accountability, right because we don't know who's seeing what on the shadow docket. Right.
Well, we know that all the justices are seeing all the briefs that come in from both sides. But what we're not guaranteed, as we saw in the Virginia voter purge case, is an explanation of when they make their decision why they made it. And I think that was a real error on the Court's part in not at least giving some indication of why they reinstated that voter purge.
And I think it would be horribly irresponsible if when they issue the decision the order in the Pennsylvania case, if they don't say something about why, especially if they're siding with the RNC and saying, yeah, these votes shouldn't count, because this could potentially flip the election. And everyone knows that. Even though Republicans are urging voters to vote by mail more this cycle than last cycle, Democrats tend to have
the advantage with mail in ballots. We're more likely to mess up their ballots by not including a secretcy envelope and are more likely to gain by having an opportunity to vote with a provisional ballot on election day. So the partisan valance here is pretty clear. There's not a good sort of principled reason why they're siding with the RNC,
if in fact that's what they do. Which I still have enough faith in the court and its decision making around elections that it's not going to make the extraordinary move of second guessing what the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has said. But if they do, they better explain why and explain why clearly and persuasively.
Yeah, yeah, talk me through what your worries are. Now.
My worries are actually more about what's going to happen outside the courts than inside the courts. We saw in twenty twenty that the course did a pretty good job of taking garbage cases and throwing them in the garbage. Like sixty four out of sixty five Trump and Trump friend filed cases to try to overturn the election. We're tossed out or we're decided we're bad arguments, and I
think that will hold again this time. As I said, despite what happened in Virginia, I have some confidence that there will be only maybe two or so justices who side with the RNC and this Pennsylvania case. And I don't think they want to, given how low their popularity is, given how angry so many Americans are about what they've done over the past few years, abortion rights, you know,
being a chief reason for dismay. I don't think they're going to want to step into an election and you know, be the definitive thumb on the scale they were the way they were in two thousand with Bush versus Gore. That would be you know, if you think their popularity is low now and their credibility is low now, I don't think they could recover from that within a generation. If they end up being the deciding factor in this extremely contentious, extremely important presidential race.
Yeah, if it's close, we know what they're going to do. Well, we hope they don't do what we worry that they might do, what I worry that they might do. I'll just use eye sentences here.
I do think there's a scenario where I would be worried, which is, if it comes down to Pennsylvania, and if it comes down to like a few thousand votes, and if those few thousand votes are challenged on a not incredible theory of why they shouldn't count, then I think it's a close case. And in a close case, partisans are going to be partisan. That's what worries me. But the chances of all those empirical things happening at once, I think are still pretty low, even though the polls
look so close. You know, we could have Trump landslide on Tuesday. We could have a Harris landslide on Tuesday.
Yeah, we're not going to have a Trump land slide on Tuesday, but he could eke it out. I want you to sort of explain to our listeners what the next season of the Supreme Court looks like from what cases you're seeing them taking. Just a sort of like very kind of quick and dirty overview.
Oh sure, we don't have the same density of blockbusters, thankfully we've had the past few years. We don't have gun rights or on the docket. We don't have abortion rights on the docket, although abortion could and probably will come back, like the abortion rulings from last spring. We're both kind of kicking the can down the road. There are already new attempts to challenge abortion pills by the Red States as opposed to doctors who claim standing, and
that was shot down very easily by the court. So there will be more claims to standing to challenge abortion medication. I think emergency abortion will also probably come back. That was the case out of Idaho last year. But as to what's on the docket now, there are a few cases. One in particular that is a culture war, very important case that's going to be argued in early December, and I think people will turn their attention to it once the election gets resolved, whenever that is. And this is
a case involving healthcare for or trans youth Tennessee. The case involves a law in Tennessee that basically bans gender affirming healthcare for trans kids. And there are some like there's something like eighteen other states that have similar laws. Where you know, if you have a trans kid and you're in Iowa, where I come from, which used to be a blue state when I was growing up there, anyway, you have to drive to Minnesota to get healthcare for
your trans boy or trans girl. So the case out of Tennessee asks whether it's constitutional for states to ban healthcare in this particular way, and it does so not out of you know, is this upholding trans rights or not. It does so with sort of a neutral valance, which is under the protection clause of the fourteenth Amendment. Is it okay to ban the same kinds of healthcare provision for trans kids that cisgender kids get? No, no problem. So is it okay to ban parmone therapy for only
for trans kids but not for cisgender kids. And that's going to be, I think a really interesting case and I'll be watching especially just as Core such because he sort of broke type a few years ago in another case involving trans rights and said that if you're discriminated against in the workplace based on your gender identity, that's illegal under the Civil Rights Act because that's under discrimination
and you can analyze it that way. We'll see if he has a way of thinking differently about this healthcare case. But that's that's I think the biggest blockbuster out there. There are some interesting ones also about involving the EPA that have already been argued and rules that they issue in terms of waste water.
Yeah, so interesting. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for joining us so important. Keep your eyes on the Supreme Court.
I will and you're welcome all those times, and I'd be happy to come back. Thanks very much, Molly.
No second Jesse Cannon by jun Fast One jd Vance dropped by The Joe Rogan Show for a three and a half hour talk with mister Rogan. He told the story of what he supposedly did when he heard that Trump had been shot out in Butler, Pennsylvania. I actually said it to the Didn't Happen of the Year Awards, a Twitter award show where they discuss who made up the biggest lie on the app each year.
I don't know about that. Is that a thing?
Yeah, it's a very funny thing they do every year. The intries are absolutely hilarious because it's all people saying things that one didn't happen, like standing ovations and Walmarts for your baga hat. Yeah, so what are you seeing here?
He just had trouble articulating things, right? What else did he do?
He really like Joe Rogan did not give him hard questions. There'd be so many times he would just like drop the ball. But he claimed that he was at a Midi golf course and always thought was that Trump gotsche he did. He claims he didn't see him get back up, which uh huh, and uh that he went home and loaded all his guns and stood in the door like a quote unquote century.
Oh.
I don't know this fucking guy. I mean, I think one of the biggest lies is that jd. Vance is good at this. I don't think he's that good at this. He does all of these questions where he yells at journalists for asking him questions, and then he yells at them some more. The point is he's way more unfavorable than he is favorable. Jd. Vance. His unfavorability is about forty four point eight. He has been just wildly unpopular.
And I don't know. I mean, I guess they think he's very good at this because he does a lot of interviews, but there were certainly quite a lot of evidence to support the idea that he's really just not that great at this. 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.