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 the GOP has proposed a four point five trillion dollar tax giveaway, but only to.
The very very rich.
So that's something they're going to ransack foodstamps and medicare We have such a great show for you today, talking points memos. Josh Marshall stops by to talk about how Republicans are taking a sledgehammer to our democracy. Then we will talk to author Catherine Stewart on her new book Money Lies in God Inside the Movement to destroy American Democracy.
But first the news.
So, Mai, we're now in the philosophical stage of those schrodingers. Don't Yeah, yeah, actually, like you know, like, is it a actual or formal authority? Is he a White House advisor? Is this so all bullshit to teenagers name big have a right to run through the government without clearance?
Spoiler, they are so here it is.
Musk is not a Dog's employee and has no formal or actual authority, White House says, except for when he goes into government agencies and fires all the people there. Elon Musk is not the administrator of DOGE, nor is he an employee of the department that's overseeing massive cuts to the federal workforce for no reason. Per a Monday night White House Court filing.
Why it matters.
It matters because they are taking a chainsaw to the federal government and all of the programs they keep us safe. Trump describes Musk as the leader of the operation when he announced the department in November, and now he is changing his mind so that he can avoid accountability and transparency. You'll be shot to know. They just want to end fraud by committing something that looks quite a lot like fraud. Soa they're making the case that Elon is the same
as Anita Done. Anita Done gave out candy and advice straight face through that way, Biden, Right, she gave a candy and advice to Biden. Elon Musk is in all of our computers. Tell me if these two things are the same, I do not think they are. And when Anita Done starts knocking on the door of the Social Security Office to try and get into the computers, then I will consider them to be the same.
Expect fuckery and copious amounts.
I'll think it's the same when Anita Done is tweeting data where they can't even read data tables properly onto fucking Twitter and saying, look at all these dead people were collecting social Security when they clearly did not do the math right.
I'm telling you the good news is that Anita Done and Elon Musk seem to know about the same amount about.
Coding good stuff.
Speaking of seeing numbers and them being not good numbers. There's a lot of measles outbreaks in Texas.
Biggest measles outbreak in Texas. It's very contagious. I know you'll be shocked to hear. Luckily, the head of HHS is a guy called RFK Junior, very into vaccines.
Wait, just kidding.
Look, measles is stupid disease and you don't have to get it because there's very good vaccine. I was vaccinated myself actually had to be vaccinated again because when I was vaccinated, I was in that little window where the vaccine wasn't working. But these are why we have vaccines. Now we're going to see lots of people get sick, some will maybe even die because people don't remember what it was like before we had vaccines. So luckily we got RFK Junior on the case.
Oh yeah, that's what I was thinking.
Luckily, So we now have a top Social Security official exiting after they had a little uh tussle with Musk stoge.
Yes, you'll be shocked to know that Elon Musk is basically just going to different departments with his merry band of early twenty year olds who are completely vetted and have had security checks.
Oh wait, they haven't.
Maybe some of them had had a little bit of vetting, but I would not assume anything. These guys are going to different government agencies, the acting commissioner. When someone says no, you can't do that, they basically end up leaving because you can't say that to the richest man in the world.
The acting commission of Social Security.
By the way, there's the acting So they haven't even put someone in the job yet, and already that person has gone. She left her job this weekend after a clash. By the way, this has happened in like every agency,
the clash with billionaire Elon Musk's US Doage service. He wants sensitive government records, probably to go after Trump's enemies, which he did tweet this weekend, he sort of implied that perhaps he would go after Adam Shiff, you know, at retweeting a tweet from someone else that said, this is what the.
Irs is for going after my enemy is.
Look, man, this is not how any of this is supposed to work, and we should not be surprised.
My Recently we were introduced to a new character on the show. Welco Minch McConnell I have a new one for you. Based Steve Bannon.
Isn't based right wing now.
Now, based comes from this guy a little bee as a rapper, and he's queer. You can't take based away from him.
Oh all right, based, yes, based Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon, as you may know him as someone who tends to.
Be pretty far right. Well, that guy he's.
Got some things to say about Elon Musk and his efforts to really reduce the size of the federal government and gain more power in the US. Look, this is
one thing you have to remember about Steve Bannon. He is smart and he knows that the people who are getting hurt by Elon Musk's war on the federal government are trumps of voters, right like you know, the people who benefit from a lot of these social programs are red state people, people who don't make a lot of money, who have a social safety net, who need the social safety net, Medicare, Medicaid, the kind of Obamacare, the kind
of social programs that keep people from being in the street. Okay, So Elon is described by Steve Bannon as Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. Now again, nobody is illegal, right, This whole idea that we're calling people illegal, right, their immigration status may be illegal. It's a civil crime being in this country, not legally, it's not criminal. He wants to impose his freak experiments and play act as god without any respect for the country's history traditional values.
Ironic considering the source.
Yes, we have crossed the rubicon here and we are now into a very weird world. A staunch populist. He is a populist. This is a very populous view. Has used his War Room podcast to rail against the elite in society. I think the richest man in the world probably qualifies as an elite. We will break these guys, ban And said during a recent episode of the podcast centered on Musk metas CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the other
leading tech mobiles. Yeah, it's hard to pick a side here, but I guess I will reluctantly side with Steve Bannon here.
Yeah, strung agree. So here's a fight that is getting messy. Transport Secretary Sean Duffy is trying to blame Mayor Pete for all the fuckery with the airlines that is going down.
Yes, Mayor Pete, who is actually not the Secretary of Transportation anymore. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy tried to ship the Blaye in for a string of recent air disasters to his Democratic predecessor. Duffy, confirmed lead the Department of the Senate last month, revealed on Monday that the Trump and the station had fired less than four hundred of the FAA's forty five thousand employees. He also claimed they were serving probationary periods. Again, who the fuck knows, right, Like,
we don't know if that's true. We don't know if they're lying, we don't know if they're just wrong. Nobody knows anything here.
Probationary period just means also in the government jobs, that you've been working there under three hundred and sixty five days. That means there's new hires like there's turn in any staffing.
Listen, man, I wouldn't trust anything anyone is saying. Here is my top one.
By the way, one of my favorite things I saw on the internet this weekend was Elon is like we must make air travels. Say that's a nonpartisan thing. And then a data guy showed that there was like a spike in Google searches for like trains. Like I just think that Elon Musk has squandered any credibility he once had.
Well, especially since he says he's going to put the SpaceX egedeers in charge of it. It seems it's another skip for him to get government money.
Yeah, well that's where we are. Josh Marshall is the editor of Talking Points Memo. Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Josh Marshall, thanks for having me.
I'm so happy to have you here, and I wanted you to come on this podcast because of the just deluge of stupid that is killing our democracy. Though I do think, I mean, I still think it's like sixty forty, but I think we make it through this thing.
But man, it's not great.
You'll remember this is by design, right, It's meant to be a shit storm of fuckery in the hopes that will miss a lot of the stuff. And in fact, I would like to start by just talking about this phrase that I saw on the internet, which is, if Harris were president right now, the price of eggs, which is like about one thousand dollars an egg. I'm exaggerating but not really would be a president c ending event for her discuss.
It would be the big story kind of like, you know, you slipped by after Biden inflation and now eggs are fifty bucks a piece. You know, you go into the supermarket and it's like you have a one food pandemic, right, because remember at the beginning of the pandemic when you had like, you know, the shelves were empty of like
toilet paper and stuff like this. And you go to like I go to like the little supermarket near my near our apartment, and everything is you know, you've got a million different kinds of yogurt and all this kind of stuff, and you get to the eggs and it's like you're in like the Soviet Union in nineteen seventy nine, right, like what back. It's yeah, it's bad, it's bad, but it would be but you're right, it's and it is true that you got so many other things.
I think sension people.
Are like whatever, I'll get back to eggs in a future presidency.
I got to focus on other stuff now.
Right, you can't because of the plane crashes. And again, the one in Canada was in Canada, so hard to blame Sean Duffy.
D in America though, yeah, and I mean Toronto.
It's not Guam, right, or Madagascar or something like that.
Mom was actually part of America. Just going to teach you a lesson. Despite that, you're fact that you're smarter than I am.
You know where I get that from my wife's family. They're immigrants and they have this thing whenever something's far, they're like, yeah, I might as well be in Guam.
And where did you guys get that?
It came up with their own little phrasing based on being immigrants and not kind of like what are the what are the idioms here? We're going to do this Guam thing and now they've like they've foisted it onto me. So yeah, humiliated, might as well be Guam.
Yes, might as well be Guam or American Samoa also in America. Let's just talk this through inflation. Yes, eggs Russia. Correct. Now this weekend, I'm reminded of Harris. I'm going to just bring this up again. So Harris was when I interviewed her. Her people were so proud of what she had done at the Munich Security Conference. They were like, you need to know about how she did at the Munich Security Conference. And I'm like, I really don't, and they're like, no, no, you have no idea. Her speech
was so good. Everyone was so excited. They welcomed her on the world stage. Okay, JD Van's Munich Security Conference discuss.
Yeah, well, you know that's the you know, he thinks they think he did great. He went there and basically said, you guys are the problem and in this kind of it's the fifth column in your hearts. The serious thing is the combination of that and this this stuff they are doing with Ukraine right now. The Europeans see this as a turning point crisis that they need to you know, they're not talking about leaving NATO, but they need an
alternative security plan besides NATO. So it's you know that that is the continuity of the sort of the North Atlantic Alliance has been talked about forever. It reached a real turning point right now, that stuff is real. They were shocked by that, by that speech. In some ways, I'm shocked they were as shocked as they as they were, but yeah, they were shocked.
That was my take too. I was shocked.
They were like I was like, if you guys not been paying attention this whole time? They love Russia, Like, here's this speech that's basically like, stop punishing the far right for having been involved, involved for running the Holocaust? Right, they're good people and besides, that's us. That was pretty much the net net of it, And like, how dare you try to prevent this from happening? We are very offended, right, I mean that isn't that basically this.
Speech basically Yeah, there's the part of the speech that got played in the headlines. And I went back and read the speech. And one of the interesting things there.
Isside those speeches.
When you read those speeches, by the way, like as a writer, what they do to the English language is a shanda.
Okay, go on, yeah, no it is pretty bad.
But the thing I was struck by is he made a very big point of you know, there was this election in Romania. I don't know, a few months ago, and the idea was that Russia did a bunch of stuff on TikTok, and the Romanian authorities basically decided that the election had been sabotaged by this kind of Russian interference. They canceled the results of the election, and we're going to do it again. And that was pretty shocking to
a lot of people. I think that kind of foreign intervention is a big deal, but there's got to be a pretty high bar for that, right just saying Okay, we're going to do that over. But he made a very big point of that, basically wrapping that together with his line about free speech, and he makes this point, if you can't respect the results of the elections, you're just you're much worse than Russia. And I was thinking, like, dude,
are we in a time warp pier? Like really, this is a thing that MAGA does that even people who are not at all friendly to MAGA and are very attuned to their reality distortion field. I remember just being shocked kind of like, yeah, you got a point on that Romania thing, But do you remember when you tried to like literally overthrow the government because Trump lost?
Like what was that.
Four years ago, Are you kidding, dude? So, yeah, it was pretty out there, and certainly to the Europeans, it was really shocking. I think they were holding on to this sense that a lot of that stuff is for domestic consumption within the United States. It's going to suck to be in America, but that's not really going to change things fundamentally with our relationship. And they realized, I think in the last few days, that that's not the case, that they're really serious about this stuff.
Yeah, exactly now they are in Saudi Arabia. I mean, it's funny because it's like, I really do feel in hindsight that there were so many places where the Biden administration struggled. Now, obviously I'm not president. If I were president, I would probably struggle to times more, But there were certain places, like, for example, the one I'm thinking of that strikes me as sort of where they did the worst was foreign policy, and where they did the best
was passing amazing domestic legislation. And I think that it would be hard to argue with that right Inflation Reduction Act, huge blockbuster legislation, brings manufacturing back to America. Foreign policy, you had Afghanistan, which you know, obviously Trump got us in there. Trump made a deal to get us out. The way the getting out was was not good, I think we can all agree. And then the Middle East, which has just been the clusterfuck to end all clusterfucks.
And then the war in Ukraine, which continues to raid. So there are three really big, major things that were real problems for the Biden administration. The Trump administration has made them catastrophes discuss.
I have a slightly different take on Biden's foreign policy with Okay, good the situation in Israel and Gaza, I agree, both from a substantive point of view and a and a domestic political point of view, you know, kind of all downsides. I think with Ukraine, Biden did very well at sort of you know, summoning this international coalition. I see that the Ukraine thing they did pretty much got
all of that right now. Having said that, in general, people don't want there to be a lot of wars, so saying I'm managing that war fantastically, you only get so far with that. But certainly, all together those were
a weight on Biden. But to your point, I mean, Trump has made those two much much worse in pretty short order, and he's you know, what he's trying to do now in Ukraine looks a lot like what so the Union and Nazi Germany did with Poland, where the great powers get together and say, all right, you take this part. I'll take this part right. You know, we'll go back to being frenemies. We'll each get our chunk and we'll move on. That's kind of what they're what they're talking about.
One of the things that is amazing that Trump has said is that he wants some of Ukraine's minerals. That's not how any of this fucking works. That's like the Greenland thing too, right, We're gonna take Greenland, will be welcomed as liberators. I mean, my favorite was Ted Cruz telling us exactly what was going on when he said everything is for sale, and I was like, you are for sale.
Your colleagues are for sale.
You know, I'm sure like Exon will take you at Firsteak dinner tonight, but technically Greenland still not for sale.
Yes, And you kind of see that this is an earlier kind of great power way of running the world. You've got a handful of great powers and they kind of they fight, sometimes they divvy other people up and stuff like that, you know, and it's also just Trump sees everything in transactional terms, and that is you know, that is people say, well, there's no kind of governing ideology. There actually is, which is kind of you dominate and
you take things. And the idea that the whole point of sort of multi at all security arrangements, which has been the US's sort of guiding framework for the last eighty years. It's interesting to think about because what that does is it is basically saying that this is something that will survive over time because everybody's getting something out of it. There's a shared in shared security. Everybody is
getting something out of it. But really Trump's way of thinking about things is I get everything and you answer to me. And that is inherently not that stable an arrangement, but it is one that makes sense if you are the strong man. Right that Trump's way of thinking of things doesn't necessarily outlast him, right. But the whole point of these alliances is that it's something that can perpetuate itself beyond one individual leader. And they're sort of you know,
hunger for dominance and stuff like that. As bad as the things that are going on inside the United States are. With Trump, it's always been his effect on the international system that has worried me more and most because to a certain ext end, at least in theory, we can get together and say, all right, that thing we did, we're just going to undo it right inside the United States. But once things get out of hand internationally, you can't
do that. The US isn't that strong, so, you know, and you get into a more high fear rather than high trust international environment, and things can, things can slip out of control very quickly, and things get dangerous, the key point being we cannot easily undo them in the way that, again, at least in theory, we can undo things that we do stupidly at home.
We hope, we hope.
I mean, I'm not saying I guess. My point is is that sure, it might not happen, because we might still be in the same stalemate that we've been in for the last twenty years, might keep going. But the political community, the American political community, if it so chose, could undo a lot of things that happen in the United States because it's our territory, we're in control of it. We don't control the entire world. We are a big player in it, we do not control everything that's different.
That is a good point.
One of the things that we have going on right now is that Elon Musk is trying desperately to get into Social Security so that he.
Can find fraud.
By the way, his definition of fraud is things he doesn't agree with.
Basically, Yeah, yeah, I keep waiting at some point.
Someone is going to social programs. Can you show us one example of your fraud? I mean, it shows the power of his owning Twitter, right, he can just spin up these alternative realities.
Yeah.
In the Oval office, he said, yeah, you know, we found fraud, and Trump goes, yeah, Elon, what'd you find? And Elon says what he says, we found a person. I think it's meant to be Samantha Power. He doesn't say who, who worked for USAID, who now has thirty million dollars, So, which means that how did that happen?
How does he know that? Right? Number one?
And almost like, you know, maybe she came from money, maybe her husband had money. Maybe she wrote a book that was hugely successful. I mean, and by the way, you know much money Elon has.
Yeah, his money has racked up in recent years. You know, I think on Twitter he did explicitly mention Samantha power. I mean, in a lot of these cases, you know, the go to thing is like, how did he know she has so much money? He must they must have looked at her IRS records. In most cases, it turns out that even the premise isn't even true. I mean, maybe she is worth thirty million dollars, she could have gotten it in various ways, but in a lot of
cases even that thing is just false. He has accused people of the USA idea taking kickbacks and it is all made up.
He said something the effect of like I'm going to get stuff wrong.
I think was the what he said.
Okay, yeah, thanks for telling us. In politicals, philosophy and political science, going back a long long time, there is a consistent theme that certain people can become too powerful to exist within the political community, too powerful than the state. You can't have that right because then everybody else ceases
to be free because they become that powerful. We have been in a what Elon Musk has put together with mix of what he's worth, you know, four hundred billion dollars or something he controls one of the key communications platforms in the entire world. He now has some sort of you know situationship running the running the federal government. No one else can be free as long as someone like that exists with all that power in an untrammeled way.
It's a really serious situation that I don't know what the solution is, but he's a threat to everybody else's freedom because he is so powerful.
I think the solution is just to give him more power.
But also the other thing is that some of the people who are advising him, like Pizza Jack, these are not people for whom there has been any security clearance.
Like the way his circle.
I mean basically what we saw this weekend with his you know, he may have had this thirteenth kid with someone who he met on Twitter, is there is a sense in which, like Elon, he is very accessible. Two And this was like Trump too, He's very accessible to people who want him and who may or may not have the best interests of American security or America at all.
Yeah, I think the common thing there is with Trump, if you have someone who is severely emotionally stunted and deeply narcissistic, people who like, Hey, Elon, I love you so much, anybody who wants to be a fanboy, the kind of the doors open. And in some ways that's
how Trump. Obviously Trump had a lot of bad ideas and motivations before he got into politics, but in a lot of ways that's how he went down the sort of the white supremacist alt right rabbit hole is that those are the people who were kind of who were fluffing him on Twitter. And if you fluff him, you're on the right track, right, And so he kind of gravitates sorts and you see something similar with Musk. It's the same set of tendencies.
Correct. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Josh Marshall, thanks for having me.
Catherine Stewart is the author of Money, Lies and God Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. Catherine, Welcome to Fast Politics.
Great to be here. Thanks for speaking with me today.
So let's talk about this book. You've been on this podcast before. Talk to me about how you got here, what this book is about, and also the larger implications because it very much is about what matters right now.
Yeah. I titled the book Money Lies in God because first, money is a huge part of the story. I mean that huge concentrations of wealth have destabilized the political system to say the least. I mean we see this playing out before our eyes. Second, lies or conscious disinformation, is a really huge feature for this movement. And number three God, because the most important ideological framework for the largest part
of this movement is Christian nationalism. So first, in Money, Life and God, I pay very close attention to the money people, a group that I call the funders. For years, religious right leaders in the US have preached that unregulated capitalism as God's model. They're restructuring our economy in significant ways that impoverish the poor, haulow out the middle class, and funnel and increasing share of our national wealth to
the very few at the very top. I also shine a light on a group, frankly of intellectuals that I call the thinkers, many of whom are affiliated with the movement called the New Right.
What is their connection to the Five pillars or the five mountains, whatever.
That thing is?
Oh, the seven mountains seven mountains. Yes, I would have to say that the seven Mountains dominionism is to a feature of the God. Part of the title Christian nationalism, I think is the driving the largest ideological part of this movement. It's a way of sort of organizing the rank and file and getting them on board. Religion in
America has never been static. It's always changing, and even as some of the more moderate and liberal forms of religion are sort of fading away, the harder and harder forms of religion are on the rise, including movements like neo charismatic, independent movements and Pentecostalism, which are themselves very diverse, but are also very easily given over to sort of hard right politics. Many of these movements see spiritual battles playing out in our politics today and they tell their
congregants that they have a role to play. And among some of the independent charismatic movements, there's something called Seven Mountains dominionism, which has sort of become increasingly widespread within
the larger movement. It sort of started more in a sector of the neo charismatic movement called the New Apostolic Reformation, but it's sort of spread throughout and it's the idea that only Christians of a certain variety should dine dominate all the key features of government and society, you know,
the government, education, media, and entertainment. The sort of seven the law, you know, seven key features of government, and this idea of seven mountains dominionism is actually spreading into areas of the Christian broader, Christian nationalist movement and Christian rights that have never been remotely sort of charismatic or pentecostal. They don't speak in tongues, but this idea of the
seven mountains is very appealing to them. So the kind of language and style of what I call a spirit warrior type of religion is really spreading throughout the movement. And you can see this when you go to right wing sort of religious conferences and strategy gatherings. In the book, I focus on a group of intellectuals that I call the Thinkers, many of which are affiliated with the New Right. Technically, many of them are quite what you'd call Christian nationalists.
Some seem frankly very nehilistic. Many draw inspiration from a Nazi political theory cal Schmidt, who came up with this sort of idea that we're facing a permanent emergency and we need to smash the institutions of government in order to save us from the absolute apocalypse of democracy. You know, they really abhor equality, They abhor pluralism, and they abhor
the idea of rational governance. And we're seeing representatives of this movement actually you know, smash our institutions as we speak. They call it destroying the administrative state, and what they really mean by this is deconstructing the vital functions of government. And what they're really after is franklyly delusional. They often talk about a return to some imagined, glorious past that really only exists in their fantasies.
Well, this is the Project Twined twenty five agenda, right, This idea that you will dismantle the administrative state. I think of it as sort of the undoing of the FDR progress, like a kind of dismantling of all of the modern social program.
Absolutely, you know, Project twenty twenty five is the ideological backbone of the movement and the new administration. Trump's promises on the campaign trail that he would not implement Project twenty twenty five they were total lies. I mean that anybody believed him given his track record is absurd. It represents a real fusion of Christian naturalist ideology with New Right ideology. But right now, the most important working elements that we're seeing play out are on the side of
the new Right. It's the part of the program that's having the biggest impact now in its first phase, is really the deconstruction of what they call the deconstruction of the administrative state. You know, it's political performance at the expense of actual governance. They're not making anything better, they're just tearing stuff down. And unfortunately, the bill for this kind of destruction is going to come do over time. In the meantime, there's going to be a whole lot
of suffering. So why does somebody like russ Vote, who is the head of the Office of Management and Budget in the new Trump administration and is a self described Christian nationalist, a key architect of Project twenty twenty five, why does he want to destroy the administrative apparatus that holds in place everything from air traffic control to national parks, to VA suicide hotlines to research grants. I mean again,
it's it's the hatred of expertise. It's deeply usional. Expertise and rational governance are what stand in the way of autocrats. And they don't believe democracy. They've been telling us for a long time that they don't believe in democracy. They prefer an autocrat. Sometimes he's referred to as a it's always a he, a red Caesar.
Right, all right.
And this is the problem with this tech bro worldview too, is that there is some higher level thinking that is the sort of where this comes from. Right, they're implementing the ideas of these very right ways tech you know, tech oligarchs, and they are and the idea here is a sort of monarchy, right. And we saw this talked about by what's his.
Name, Mobius Mobog whose.
Real name is Curtis Jarvin.
Curtis Jarvin, Yeah, talk about that.
Curtis Jarvin is affiliated with the Claremont Institute. It's one of the very influential think tanks that is influencing leaders of the New Right. He identified this idea of a kind of the cathedral or you know, representatives of the quote unquote administrative state. We're talking about civil servants and experts who are just doing their job. He calls us a sort of like as though it's a demonic borg.
I mean, this is a cadre of people who have projected their own anxieties and frustrations and fears over the culture and the idea of equality. Onto this supposedly demonic borg. They've convinced themselves that they need to slay the beast. So they basically just treat government as a synonym for oppressive bureaucracy, and their ideology is valorizing pure, unreasoned exercises
of what they see as masculine power. You know, it's when you really dig into the writings of some of these folks, it's astonishing the degree to which they hate women. It simply does leaves or a professional, accountable government that a modern democracy needs. But here's something important about those tech bros. I think the important thing to realize is that the deeper motivations of them is not always reasonable
or irrational. Sometimes in our culture we valorize these people who are extremely rich, and we think they're smarter than everyone. But I think that this process is actually making them less reasonable in many instances. Like they're driving motivation is fear,
because here's the thing. These folks live in extreme wealth bubbles or islands, but they can actually kind of here over the walls the cries of critics who are saying, you actually don't deserve all the money that you have for monopolistic features that are impoverishing so many sectors of society,
and they're really upset by them. They're really afraid that the rank and file are going to come after them one day with proverbial pitchforks, and so they want to validate their power and yanke the power from the rest of us.
I mean, the idea is deeply un American.
It is interesting because we do see there is this hunger for populism, probably because of wealth and equality, likely because the middle class has been under attack. And unfortunately the populism that Trump is offering is not really populism, it's faux populism. So we see all these people who voted because they're feeling that they are not being taken care of, that they're not happy with the status quo, which I completely understand, but now they are getting something
that is going to be much worse for them. One of the things that keeps me up at night, which I think is perhaps not something you've been asked to talk about, but I'm hoping you will, is the consequences, the sort of unforeseen consequences. Right, you have all these Americans who voted for someone to burn down the system because they thought it was the system that wasn't taking care of them. Now, I wonder if you could talk
about the worry here. You don't have to predict the future, but what happens when these people don't get what they think they want or get what they think they're going to get, you know, just sort of talk me through where you think this is going.
Yeah, you know, I think a lot of the rank and file, when you meet them, a lot of them aren't bad people. They love their ways, they care about their neighborhoods. They many of them really truly believe they're doing what's best for us society. But they have been colossally misinformed. They've been the target of disinformation operation. In my book Money Lies in God, I you know, Lies in Theres precisely refers to the disinformation operations and propaganda
operations that they've been subject to. You know, in one chapter, I go to well, I've been to a few stops on the Reawaken America tour. Reawaken America is a pro MAGA traveling road show put on by Mike Lynn and his allies and usually one of the trump Son speaks and they hold them in mega churches around the country.
Each one draws thousands. But in those spaces there are a lot of podcasters and you know, people with YouTube channels, et cetera, and they're creating all of this content that's getting funneled into people's phones and their computers, and every imaginable conspiracy. JFK is still alive. He's been hidden somewhere. And Trump is a really great guy. He's a white hat battling the black hats. And they, you know, the GLO globalist borg is going to control every dime you own.
And your kids are going to go off to school at nine am, to the public school by two. They're going to come back a different gender. I mean, every single crazy conspiracy is there. And you know, you get people to believe a lot of little lies, you can get them to believe a big lie, you know, the big lie that the twenty twenty election is stolen, that Trump is perfect and never did anything wrong, that God's hand is on his side. That is many criminal convictions
are political witch hunt. So they will find a way to blame, you know, that tragedies. They're all in for Trump. They think he's fantastic. Look what other presidentever would blame an airline tragedy resulting in dozens of tragic deaths on quote unquote DEI. I mean, it really beggars belief. So they'll find a way to blame the Wope on everything.
So one of the things I'm doing, because I covered this first administration I use the term administration in scare quotes, is I am trying to separate the signal from the noise. So you've studied this, You've gone to these megachurches, you've seen you know, what's the signal? Like, what's the really important takeaway from this? What are the things that we should be watching that maybe they don't want us to be watching. And by day I mean that sort of technocrats, this crew.
They don't want us to recognize the fact that the policies of the Trump administration are going to benefit wealth at the tippy top, that they're going to destroy our democracy, the functions of our government, that they're going to impoverish, the consequences of the trade wars, the destabilization of our alliances that have ensured sort of post war prosperity for decades. They don't want us to look at those big picture things.
They want us to be thinking about this. Oh, there's a trans woman over there, and there's you know, someone who got a job they didn't deserve, and some you know college over there. Like they're really trying to get us distracted by all this culture war stuff, and they're not afraid to lie to do it. So, for instance, you know, there's a sector of the Christian Nationalist movement
that votes on abortion. They've become single issue voters because movement leaders know if you can get people to vote on a single issue, you can control the vote. So they started promoting the lie that babers are being aborted after birth. This does not happen. This is simply not happening at all.
Yeah it's not a real thing.
Yeah it's not a real thing. But they repeat it at every conference or every breakout session or every speaker who deals with abortion will repeat this lie. And it's just a massive distraction from the fact our rights are being stripped from us birth control. Some of the most popular and effective forms of birth control they consider abortion, and we're losing our rights on like a massive scale.
So that's just one example. In December is that America Fest, which is put every year by Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA and twenty thousand hardcore Mega members there, and almost every single speaker spoke about the issue of trans women playing on women's sports teams. Why is just like the issue of our time. Absolutely not to get bread and butter. It gets people upset. So people need to like cut through that, not walk into the traps that they're setting
for us, and focus on bigger picture. We need a broad based movement. We need to speak to the concerns of everyday people who want, you know, to live their lives with dignity, to have economic security, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, no, really good point.
In the coming weeks, we're going to hear some voices in the opposition calling for working across the political aisle. I think we should ignore them because the anti democratic movement is not interested in compromise. They're not remotely interesting compromise. I think concessions now are going to consolidate the powers of a lawless presidency. They want to entrench a new kleptocratic,
authoritarian form of government in the United States. They want to replace our democracy with authoritarianism and kleptocracy, a sort of authoritarian kleptocracy with Christian nationalist features.
Thank you Catherine, thank you, thank you. I hope you'll come back all right.
Likewise, thank you so much.
Mollie Nod, Jesse Cannon by John Fast So I'm going to shock you.
There seems to be this correlation between things Elon is shutting down and people investigating them.
Who would have thunk.
Nah, certainly not me. I would not have thought this.
The Food and Drug Administration reviewing Elon most bright and planted company, Neuralink. We're fired over the weekend as part of a broader burge of the federal workforce. If no one works in government, then these tech bros don't have to worry about any government regulation. I feel like that should be a meme, right. The cut includes twenty people in the FDA's Office of Neurological and Physical Medical Devices, probably several of whom worked on Neuralink. But you know,
I mean, really, it's probably just a coincidence. The loss of roughly twenty employees will hamper it the agency's ability to quickly and safely process medical device applications of all sorts. Wait, should we be processing medical device applications? I mean, technically yes, but maybe not. Maybe we should just let everything go so anyway, here we are not surprising but very fucked up, and that is why it is our moment of fucker.
Just keep thinking back to when Elon did that interview with Tucker and he said Trump better went or else, I'm going to go to jail, and things like this.
Probably nothing, Probably fine, it's nothing.
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