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.
We're on vacation, but that doesn't we don't have a great show for you today. Historia Julian Zellazar tells us about the lessons from history that we can take to what's happening in our politics today.
Welcome to Fast Politics.
Seek Thanks Molly.
It is a wild, wild ride for cryptocurrency. Can you You've written a book on it. You have quite a lot of knowledge this moment. Did you see this moment coming?
Absolutely not. I mean crypto had totally crashed in twenty twenty two, and some of the biggest companies in the industry had been revealed to be frauds, including Sam bankman Fried's FTX, but also like a ton of other big companies, and all of the cryptocurrency prices started creeping back, first because of a Bitcoin etf which crypto people believed correctly would open up the market to a new group of buyers who might have been too nervous to open an
account on coin base to buy bitcoin, but happy to do it through their Schwab account. And then the bitcoiner started talking up the possibility that Trump could become an advocate for the industry, and it didn't seem like a natural fit at first because Trump had called bitcoin a scam back in as recently as twenty twenty one, and he some of the lawsuits against the crypto industry that the industry is really up in arms about now were
started during the Trump administration. But a bunch of like the biggest richest bitcoin advocates got together and they raised twenty five million dollars for Trump, and in July they got him to come to Nashville to the Bitcoin Convention, which is like an annual it's wild. It's almost like a religious revival or like a multi level marketing meeting. People are just talking about how bitcoin's going to save
the world. And Trump came there and gave this speech about how if bitcoin's going to the moon, the US should lead the way and we should start a national Bitcoin reserve, and if I'm going to fire Gary Gensler, the SEC chair who the crypto industry hates, and I mean even the bitcoin guys were impressed by how much influence their donations were able to buy.
Yeah, I shouldn't laugh, but like the fact that they just figured out that they could just pay Trump and it would work. It's kind of incredible.
The guy who came up with the plan, his name's David Bailey. He runs Bitcoin magazine and these conventions, and he went on a podcast and talked about it, and he said he was amazed that ten people donating eight hundred and forty four thousand each could have a huge impact. He said, it's a lot of money, but also kind of nothing, and like he was almost like giddy that he'd gotten Trump on board. And Trump now you might say, Okay,
politicians say a lot of things to raise money. Is Trump actually going to does he really care about this?
A month or.
Two later, Trump started his own cryptocurrency and started promoting it during the campaign, which kind of annoyed a lot of his crypto supportives because they were like, Oh, you're supposed to be promoting our cryptocurrency, it's not starting a competing one. But they also liked it because they're like, a guy with this kind of conflict of interest is definitely going to follow through on his deregulatory promises.
Yeah, I mean, where are we now? Okay, So crypto, there was all this fraud. It went down. Now Trump has they see the writing, the regulatory writing on the wall, which is it will never be regulated, or at least not for the next four years. Explain to me why there's anything redeeming about crypto.
So there's all different kinds of cryptocurrencies, and like when it comes to Bitcoin, the biggest, most popular one, a nobody uses bitcoin for anything. It's all about the price going up. And the bitcoiners have even abandoned talking about it becoming a world currency that we'd use to buy coffee or whatever. That one just depends on if you really believe that, like this is a future and everyone's gonna buy bitcoin, then you better get in now before
they cost a million. That's sort of the pitch. There other cryptocurrencies. A lot of them are similar to stocks, and so they might be their value might depend on the success of a trading platform or something, so you can it's not like based on nothing. You can sort of evaluate whether you think that's a good idea. And then one of the biggest things going on in crypto
these days is gambling on meme coins like dogecoin. Like it all it is is like do you think this picture of a dog is funny, then buy the coin, or do you think other people will think it's funny by it now before they do it, And so like that, even if you, let's say you think that is kind of stupid, well, even if you think it's stupid, if you think people are going to keep playing these silly, mean coin games that will generate activity on crypto trading
platforms and might support the value of some of the cryptocurrencies, It's sort of like, even if the whole thing is kind of dumb, as long as other people are doing it, some of these are going to end up being valuable.
So basically this has no purpose except to go up like a stock.
Right, there's like a crypto for everything. For my book number go up. I spent like a couple of years trying to answer this question, and I looked all around the world to see, like, what are people using this for? And is there anything beyond gambling on the price going up? Because I think in the long run it's got to do something useful or people are going to get sick of it. I did find some things that people were
using it for, but they were bad drugs. Right, That's like the classic one which really got bitcoin started people buying drugs on the dark web, which now is not like one of the main things with big but in the early years that really got it going. And actually the bitcoinner's got Trump to promise to pardon Ross Olbright, who ran silk Road, the original darknet drug market, because
they love what he did for bitcoin. But for example, if you ever have gotten like a wrong number text message, you'll find out that the person on the other end is trying to become your friend, and then they try
to scam you. They'll have you send them crypto. And for those kinds of people, crypto's great because the scammers are actually located generally in Southeast Asia, and so crypto and now allows them to receive money instantly from you with no refunds, without having to disclose their identity to some kind of bank, so it's super charged. This scam called pig butchering, which are like these online romance scams,
so for them very useful. I also saw which I think is sort of a preview of what we might expect, like a if crypto's allowed to run wild. In twenty twenty one, this cryptocurrency took off in the Philippines and it was called Axie Infinity, and it was basically like a Pokemon type game, but you had to buy your monsters with cryptocurrency, and if you won battles, you would earn other cryptocurrencies that were called smooth Love potions, kind
of a silly name. And this, like it got so popular that like people were quitting their jobs to play this game, like millions of people were playing it, and for a time you could make really good money at it. But it was just like an unsustainable bubble that inevitably popped and led to devastation. I talked to went over there and talked with people who'd like sold their car to buy more monsters to battle and then lost it all when it popped.
So it's like drugs a little bit, okay, sure, a little bit.
And then they're the apes, right, people are buying the apes again. Can you explain that?
No one can explain that. So people are paying tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars for board apes, which are it's like an ugly cartoon of a monkey, and it lives on the blockchain. So like in crypto land during the last bubble, the price of these went really high and like all sorts of celebrities were buying them or maybe being given them. Right, Yeah, but you had Jimmy Fallon, Paris, Hilton, Tom Brady were all showing
off the board apes. This bitcoin boom, now with Trump selection, has even helped those. I was shocked I had bought actually just for research. Don't think I'm an ape person, but I bought a mutant ape in order to get into an exclusive eight party and who among us? It cost twenty thousand dollars.
Wow.
So this meant that, like I could brag about being the owner of this kind of melty looking ape cartoon, and the prices of those went down as low as five grand, which I still thought was quite a lot to pay for a picture a really bad cartoon, but they've since tripled. That's sort of like the whole paradox of this recent crypto rally. The celebrities are not buying
board apes anymore. Nobody's even really talking about it. There's just been this big speculative boom that like crypto is going to be deregulated, that's going to bring in lots of new customers. And you know, if you get in now, it's smart because everything's gonna boom under Trump. That's sort of the pitch I think.
Huh, all right, so besides the fact that it's stupid it makes no sense, it's also really bad for the environment, right, explain that to us.
So this is only really true of bitcoin. But the I mean, what makes crypto cool is that, if anything does, is that it's a way for people to transact with each other without any sort of central counterparty, Like you don't need a bank, you don't need PayPal. It's like a decentralized system that it is controlled by the by
the users. And Bitcoin was set up in this innovative but very convoluted way that the computers that are running the bitcoin network basically compete to solve these random math problems in order to win new bitcoins that are generated periodically. This process is called mining, and whoever has the most powerful computers is more likely to solve the puzzle and win these new coins. And this has gotten to be such a big activity that people are running whole data
centers full of bitcoin miners. And at one point, I think it was calculated that bitcoin mining was using as much energy as like the country of Argentina or something like that, and it doesn't have to be that way. Most other cryptocurrencies do not use this mining system and have come up with other ways to run their networks. But the bitcoiners will never switch because they believe it's of what makes bitcoins so secure and special.
But it's not secure. It's just a total scam, right, I mean, am I missing something here? It feels like the Emperor has no clothes.
I mean I considered using an Emperor has no clothes quote as like the epitaph for my book. So I
don't think you're that far off. I mean I wouldn't say, Like, you know, there's a lot of smart people who are like trying to do stuff in crypto, and like maybe they'll come up with something cool, But so far, what I think they've done is come up with this sort of alternative financial system that is very useful for criminals, that makes it really easy to scam people, and that is not solving a lot of problems for ordinary people.
So why does it exist?
Well, selling made up coins for real money is like a really good way to make money.
Yeah, I guess that makes sense.
And it's like a really powerful story. Right, Like we all know somebody or have heard about somebody who got rich off bitcoin. It's impossible not to feel a little bit of like fomo. And then when someone comes to you and pitches some new cryptocurrency and says, hey, this could be like the next Bitcoin. This could make you rich. It sounds kind of plausible because it does happen to me. It's amazing how far this mentality has taken this industry.
I like this.
There's a quote I really like that a bitcoin guy said at my first bitcoin conference in Miami in twenty twenty one, and he said, bitcoin is number go up technology. It's a very powerful piece of technology. As the price goes higher, more people become aware of it and buy it in anticipation of the price continuing to climb. And like, I'm in the audience laughing, thinking like, wait, I thought you guys were going to be talking about something real.
It sounds like a Pozi scheme. And yet actually the thing that he's saying for has been working. Like people do think, oh my god, I better get in on this while I still can. Well, my friend made some money, couldn't I? Or or even a hedge fund manager is like other guy's returns were like one hundred percent because he got a lot of crypto. Maybe I don't really believe in it, but I don't want to miss out.
It's so crazy. Talk me through what you think is going to happen. There was fear of regulation. There's not going to be regulation now. Obviously that means what more municipalities. I mean, like, I know Miami took bitcoin, that there was some bitcoin people paying their taxes in bitcoin. I mean, I've read that there are a group of conservatives who think that the bitcoin can destabilize the dollar. I mean, sort of talk me through their grand plans.
So for the bitcoiners, what they really want is for the US government to start buying bitcoin. And Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wisconsin, who you know used to have laser eyes on her Twitter profile, has been a big bitcoiner. She proposed this bill that would have the government spend one hundred billion real dollars to buy bitcoin.
Why well, if.
It goes up a lot, we'll make some money on it. Trump has sort of endorsed this plan, not specifically, but this general idea. And he even said, hey, maybe we'll pay off the national debt. Just hand him a little bitcoin check.
Does he know that bitcoin isn't like you can't put it on a check.
You know, caught him some slack. He's pretty old.
You know.
This To be clear, it doesn't make any sense you would. I mean, the government would need to invest. Even if you think bitcoin is going to double or something. The government would need to buy a lot more bitcoin to make a dent and to help our finances. I mean, what this is is basically I don't want to cut some bailouts. Not quite the right word because bitcoin has gone up so much anyway, But it's like a giveaway
to the bitcoiners. It's like the government coming in and pushing that price up more, which will benefit the existing holders, and the bitcoiners say, oh, well, it's going to be great. Once we do it, the other countries will be jealous and they'll do it too, and it'll the price will go up even more and then will profit. It's basically like this number go up technology pitch that I heard years ago. Now you have this whole other side of
the crypto industry that's not so into bitcoin. They want to sell you all these like random coins, and basically what they want is just more ability to sell more random coins to more people. Like I would compare it to like draft Kings or fan duel, you know, and how so many states have legalized sports gambling, and like just more people are doing it is advertise more on TV.
And right now under Gary Gensler, the current SEC chair, the SEC has sued lots of people who are promoting crypto gambling and said that you're violating the existing rules about marketing investments. And the new chair, who Trump wants to nominate, Paul Atkins, has signaled that he disagrees with that approach. And I would imagine a lot of these lawsuits would be dropped, so that will just make more and more financial institutions feel comfortable with offering crypto to
their customers. And I would expect to see We already see it quite a lot, Like I go on Venmo and it's trying to sell me crypto. But I think we'd see even more of that, even more weird coins. Did you see Haley Welch's coin the other day? Oh?
Yeah, the hawk Tua?
Yeah yeah, but.
Didn't that already get thought of? Is already a scam? The hawk Tua.
It did immediately crash, but who's counter Yeah, it didn't go that far because I mean, let's she's not like that famous, right, and it's not clear like the legality of that kind of activity is kind of unclear. If it was all sort of legalized and given this stamp of regulatory approval, maybe you wou'd see more famous people doing stupid coins.
Yeah, well, there you go, Zeke, thank you for coming on and talking about this. I cannot believe that it is even stupider than I thought it was going to be.
Thanks Molly.
Julian Zelzar is a historian and the author of many books, including the upcoming paperback edition of Defense of Partisanship.
Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Julian, thank you. It's great to be with you. As always.
I'm so excited to have you a because we're buddies, and be because I'm very excited about this book. So talk to me about kind of why you decided to write this. You're an academic, you write also many many books because you're very prolific, unlike the rest of us. How did you get here?
Well, you know, you know, partisanship is always something that's disparaged. People complain about it every day. You can always turn on the news and hear people talk out the need for more bipartisanship. And I've just seen enough history and studied enough history to see parties have actually been really important in American politics. And just because partisanship has gotten really ugly in the last decade, especially as a result of the GOP, it doesn't mean partisanship isn't a good
thing for American politics. And I just basically wanted to make the case about why and what that could look like going forward.
I think you should give us an example of good partisanship and bad partisanship.
Sure. Well. One example of partisanship that was quite important was when Democrats were in the minority during President George W. Bush's term between two thousand and four and two thousand and six. They were really angry with what was happening. There's a lot of frustration with the war in Iraq and a lot of domestic policy, including Hurricane Katrina, and
Democrats organized as a minority party. They were very disciplined, they were responsible, they worked within the normal processes of government, and they basically formed an opposition that resulted in their taking over Congress in two thousand and six. One other example different is after nineteen sixty four election, Lyndon Johnson was president, Democrats had huge majorities, and they use that moment to pass a lot of very important legislation. The
great society that's still with us today. Bad partisanship. I think a lot of public and politics in the last few years of the Tea Party in twenty eleven, in twenty twelve, and a lot of what we saw under the first Trump term was partisanship without any guardrails. Say whatever you want, use basic processes of government like raising the debt ceiling to threaten the nation. That's bad partisanship. You have to have guardrails. In a sense of responsibility.
Tell me what this sort of political moment looks like if you were to think of a time that's like right now.
Well, I mean, I think we have very divisive times in American history. It's just part of our past. I mean, I've studied the nineteen sixties and there were deep divisions in the country. They didn't align along party lines so neatly, but they were really bitter. People really kind of disliked what the other side was saying on an issue like Vietnam. Obviously, in the nineteenth century had deep divisions over slavery. In the eighteen fifties, and we're in a moment like that
right now. But I think one of the differences is one of the major political parties, Republicans, are engaging in the partisan battles that come out of these divisions without any rules. And I tell my students often it's like you have two sides playing chess. One side is trying to win, has strategy and legitimately trying to be victorious, and the other just takes the board and throws it
on the floor and says I win. And I think that is a really difficult moment, because in fact, we need strong and responsible parties right now to fight out and resolve the differences that the country he has over so many issues right now.
I feel like there are are moments in history where America has sort of come to the brink and come back from it. What would you say?
This is sort of the closest to I don't think we're in civil war territory, and I guess they differ from some people.
That's good, we don't want to be that's good. I'm happy to hear it.
But that's a low bar. I mean, it's really a low bar.
And what really.
Worries me is that we're at a moment when just the government isn't able to do very basic things. I mean, now we keep going through these moments when there's almost government shutdowns, and there are government shutdowns, but we're talking about sending the country into default. It's like so extreme right now that we can't even get to the bigger issues. We're just trying to keep everything afloat. That's not a civil war. And I do think the differences are serious
in this country. I don't agree with some commentators who think we exaggerate. I think there's differences over questions. There's problems. Yeah, we need our political system to be able to handle those better and respond to those. But it's like I don't have exact comparisons, but some of it reminds me of the nineteen sixties.
Yeah, I mean it's interesting because in some ways the nineteen sixties was so much more scary and violent, but in some ways it was also you know, it just was a different America. When you are, like, when you're thinking about what democrats should be doing, because if you think sort of historically, what do you think that democrats are sort of if they could take a page from being an opposition party.
Yeah, I mean this is the moment not to run away from partisanship and to just embrace the Republican Party. I think concessions ahead of time and really trying to move away from what the party is about is a huge mistake. This is the time when effective opposition or organizes. That means the leaders of the party Congressman Jefferies, Senator Schumer need to really lean on every member of their caucus to stay in line to vote the same way.
That means using financial pressure, that means using political pressure on members of their party. They need to really distinguish themselves from what Republicans are doing and not be scared to call out what they're seeing from the GOP. That's the only way to kind of take a party from a weak place and put it in a stronger place in two years to start. And they also can't be
scared of standing up to the GOP. They don't have to start voting for every item that comes their way, and they can be fine really say no, as Republicans have been. But again I go back to Democrats of earlier periods like the Bush years, and they did that very effectively, and it was quite important to reversing the direction of policies. I think Democrats need to kind of have a spine on some of this and if they want to be effective that they have to focus on their party and not the GOP.
I want you to talk us through kind of the ways in which, like I always think about, you know, the damage that Trump can do, and he's done a lot of damage already. That isn't necessarily it's more of the sort of the the how much these kind of institutions are no longer respected right that you know, those kind of that kind of damage is hard to ever sort of undo, right, or at least because you have one party that thinks a lot of things, you know,
they just doesn't trust the system. Have there been times when there was one party that didn't trust the system where that came back or.
No, Well, yeah, I mean look at the Democrats. Actually, it's kind of funny or interesting that in the nineteen seventies a lot of Democrats had totally lost distrust in the political system. They were the ones railing against the FBI, they were the ones railing against the presidency. They felt as if, you know, they were the disenchanted group that the institutions of government didn't work and had essentially betrayed
the country. And look where they are now. They've become the party that respects institutions that basically even seen their flaws, say they're important. So you can see parties really changed dramatically. I talk about this a lot these days, as the Democrats are the ones defending the FBI as opposed to the Republicans. But it takes a lot of work. And the difference is Democrats are a party ultimately, even in the bad times of the seventies, they always believed in government.
They never abandoned the basic government's a good thing. Republicans are an anti government party. That's their philosophy. So I think they can be comfortable for a lot longer in the space they are now. They don't need to have their voters trust institutions. They don't need their voters to want government to work, because their argument rooted in the nineteen eighties and Ronald Reagan is the government's the problem.
So if that's true, their rebound could be never or it could take a lot longer until you see them change course.
Yeah, that's not great.
No, I'm not being a voice of optimism here, although again the optimism is that we do have these institutions that can be a way to channel, certainly for Democrats, some of the frustration they're feeling, and really effective tool to taking on a very aggressive president, which is what we're going to see in the next four years.
Can you give me like an aggressive So Trump is a very aggressive president. Who else historically has been a very aggressive president?
Well, I mean the most obvious who comes to mind is Richard Nixon, and he really was. I think in some ways we forget sometimes in part because of the focus now on Trump, but Nixon used the presidency he is the irs, to go after his opponents. He authorized you know, break ins, an espionage. He threatened the press, not simply rhetorically, but actually threatened them in ways that are reminiscent of today. And I think Nixon, who later remakes himself as this statesperson at the time, was an
incredibly you know, dangerous figure. There's a reason Watergate was so traumatic. There's a reason Congress really pressured him to resign. And I do think we've we have gone through a moment like this. Again that doesn't give comfort. It means this stuff can get very serious and very dangerous. And that's why now oversight, vigilance and opposition is going to be very important assuming that president like Trump goes through with the things he's saying he's going to do, and
he's already started to do them. So I think the bet is he's going to do what he says.
So I wrote a piece about a lot of these zombie laws, these laws that One of the things that I think has been really interesting is that during the break between Trump one point zero and Trump two point zero, Trump his people sort of went through and found laws that were still in the books but often like comstock, had not been used much, and they were able to you know, Alien Enemies Act, right, and that has in the Alien Enemies Act there is a sort of special cutout for journalists.
What else do you?
What else sort of keeps you up at night?
Legally, oh, I think there's a lot of legal things he can do or already seeing how he's using before he's even in office. Again, he's using essentially threats of regulatory action against the media to try to pressure the media into taming themselves and avoiding certain kinds of coverage. I think the ABC settlement was significant. This new lawsuit against the Iowa Paper. These are all legal. You can do it if you don't mind what you're doing, and I think we're going to see a lot of more
of that. The kind of regulatory power of the government over private media institutions and media that's increasingly connected to other kinds of business is pretty formidable. Within any agency, the executive has a lot of power too. This is less about intimidation, but to cut budgets, to basically freeze programs that Americans depend on to fill civil service jobs.
This could be one of the big moves to change the way jobs staffing happens so that you have more loyalist If he does that, that's it could be legal, but it doesn't mean it's any better. And then finally, rhetorically, it's legal for him to say lots of stuff. Other presidents just don't say it. But when a president goes untruth social or whatever TV and starts to call people out and really kind of put out in the world words of threat and intimidation, that is a scary thing.
And that's not making things up. That's truly something to be worried about. And it just creates an appmosphere where opponents are scared to say anything, people change their behavior, and finally, you can have huge and damaging effects on government programs. So I think there's lots of legal things as much as the illegal stuff that he can do, which is what causes his opponents concern.
The first Trump term, in the end, they didn't protect institutions the way they did during the post Nixon period. There were a few things though, that were done. For example, I'm thinking about the electoral vote counting stuff where they did sort of close the door on that. Do you think that was a failure and do you think some of that stuff is going to come back?
I mean, I don't have the failure I think they did. I think so the electoral count or format they did as much. Maybe they did as much as they could do, so it's it's less it's a failure, not in not trying, but that was it. But yeah, it's dangerous. I mean, I'm not as worried in the next few years because he won and I think he's obviously feeling good and then we'll see what happens in the next election. But yes,
the issue is not addressed. Where he showed how much you can stretch the existing systems of politics all remain vulnerabilities, and there's no indication that he or other Republicans in the future won't try to exploit them again. So yes, you know, you have really small windows in American politics to try to reform things. That's just the reality. No
one cares about reform. Usually people focus on bread and butter issues, and you have a few periods like the nineteen seventies after Watergate, the progressive era, which is the early twentieth century, where you have interest in reforming government itself and how it works to fix problems. I think that window now has passed, so it's going to be very hard to kind of go back to all these issues and improve them. So it could come back to bite the nation. We will see.
That does not sound so good, Julie, and I just am curious. The sixties, you know, there was a different kind of protesting. I mean, do you think there will be a protest movement again with trump Ism or do you think that it will look something different? And do you think and how much do you think, Like historically protests movements have moved the needle.
I mean, the thing about real moments of protests is you don't see them coming, and so I don't know I see him. There will be protests because I assume he will do things that stir anger and outrage. Protest movements can be effective, not all the time, but certainly, like the anti war movement with Vietnam, it didn't end the war, but it certainly made the opposition a much more popular and understood issue than would have happened had
that anti war movement never existed. The Civil rights movement as an example where the movement actually was responsible for helping get legislation through the Civil Rights of nineteen sixty four. So they can work, they don't always work. I do think back to earlier, it matters to have a very strong political party that those movements end up working for. Ultimately,
movements have limits to what they could do. It's when they connect to a party with strong leadership then they can be quite powerful, as we saw with civil rights in the mid nineteen sixties. Finally, I do think some
opposition's not going to be about movements. I think because of what you said earlier, this focus that the Trump team has on rules, on institutions, on processes is going to result in more of a tension within the opposition, on legal strategy, on partisan strategy, on the hill, kind of insider politics to take on what's going to be an insider Trump be in game. So I do think it won't just be movements this time around. I think that's going to be quite important in terms of how this unfolds.
Yeah, I think so too. It's really interesting and also dark moment in American politics.
Thank you, Julian, thanks for having me.
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