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 Elon Musk's own AI labels him one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X Kurt Anderson stops by to talk about the fantasy land that we're in now. Then we'll talk to Randy Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. He's going to give us her reaction to Donald Trump's attack on America's
education system. We don't have news today because it's just too much snakes and we needed to take a tiny break. We will be back on Monday with lots of news and lots of fuckory, and sometimes we just have to take a tiny break. So we love you guys, and we know how hard this is, and we hope that you'll spend the weekend watching movies and eating cookies and trying to regroup because January is coming. Kurt Anderson is the author of Evil Geniuses and the co creator of Commandsy. Kurt,
thank you so much for joining me today. You know, there was only one person who I wanted to talk to about the fantasy land that we now live in and that was Kurt Anderson. So true.
Hi, Mollie, it's so good to be here.
I'm sorry Court Anderson for asking you to record so early in the morning, but I'm going to Washington, so I had to get you when I could get you.
Well, you know, it was of all the weeks and all the special day periods, this one seemed up my alley. So thank you for seeing. I'm a chronicler of madness.
Yeah, as an author of a book called Fantasy Lane, and the fact that we are now across the rubicon into what is going to be four years of at best fantasy Land and at worst dystopia Land, which would just technically be dystopia.
Well, and my other book that's kind of a companion to it, of course, is called Evil Geniuses. So you got your Fantasy Land and you got your Evil Geniuses in.
The What's so interesting to me about round two of this is that we have all of this sort of earnestness of Round one, where we were like, these are institutions, this cannot happen, is gone, and now we have gone full into this sort of nihilism that is the nineteen nineties.
Absolutely, I don't know if it's the nineteen nineties. What I realized actually thinking about this the last boy for hours is that it's the forty seven ad to an extreme degree. I mean, people in the past, I think it said, oh, Trump is like Nero. Trump is like Caligula, the Caligula thing, where these appointments of Tulca Gabbard and Matt Gates and Pete tag Seth, it's just so beyond.
I mean, the first national security people he announced were just you know, second tier conservative Republicans, quasi ormy, okay, like let's soften everybody up. And lots of friends of mine said, oh, this is kind of reassuring. This is not bad, right.
Democracy will not end with Marco Rubio appointment.
Let's not forget Robert F. Kennedy junior my freshman year in college. Drug dealer, a coped dealer. But Trump has been successful because he's not like a conventional politician. From the beginning, he's anti establishment to the max. Well, this is not anti establishment in the way that I don't know John Fetterman is or Bernie Sanders is or those
kinds of people. It is mocking all expertise and experience and judgment and seriousness and virtue and making a travesty of it and saying it doesn't matter, and saying you're all full of shit, you people who actually have careers and know things, and if any things, this is I mean, if anybody's ever seen the various movies John Herger, other actors playing Calicula, he was this this corrupt, unstable, cruel,
extravagant sexual freak and love spectacle. And he was mister Gladiator and probably nuts and you had to worship him, and at least allegedly at least joked about making his horse a senator. It was he going to be as good as senator as you, and made the senators Roman senators grovel literally grovel, didn't kiss his feet. So here we are.
Man.
You got a literary, metaphorical thing. It's it.
Well, you know what I was so struck by is that in twenty sixteen, right Republicans refused to stand up to Trump. They felt they didn't need to, or they didn't want to, or you know, it wasn't worth. The calculus was like, I don't want death threats, I don't want to be booed at the airport. I just want to, like tow the line and not to make my life difficult.
And even like Mitch McConnell, could have ended this whole thing by saying to Republicans that they could vote to convict Dan Trump would have been ineligible to run for president again, and that would have been done complete. But instead, here we are. There are four seats that Democrats would need to swing to tank any of these nominations. Trump really, I think, has made many overtures that he would like to make these reciss appointments. I'm not sure if he'll
be able to, but maybe he will. You know, if I've learned anything, it's underestimate Trump at your own peril.
Right, No, absolutely, And you know, and we look for these gloomers of hope. Well it's John Foon instead of somebody worse as the Senate majority leader. So maybe he's more of an institutionalist than a normal fellow. Maybe he'll do the right thing. We'll see, Yeah, betting on the Republicans electeds in Washington doing the right thing obviously ausing bet, yes, has not.
I've been fruitful.
Freight ear well, see I did get pleasure and not just shutting freud, but like, okay, when the various senators, especially Republican senators as well as Republican House members, came out about Matt Gates just saying, are you fucking kidding me? This guy is this ex trafficker? This guy can't be
you know. So there is more at this Roseveldt date, and with these extreme egregious human nominations, some at least rhetorical emission of the truth of the horror of this idiocracy animal house unqualified madness that he's proposing.
Idiocracy is a really good word for what we're about to embark on if we talk about the Senate and the House too, But it's not quite the same. The Senate built on the idea that these people, at least the thing that they are these moral pillars.
Right.
The thing about the Senate is it's a lot of work to get there and quite a bit of work to stay there. It would be easier just to go into investment banking. So these people have kept these jobs because on some level or not, maybe hypocritically whatever, but they think they care about American government. So here we are now in a moment where it doesn't matter, right, these people have to pretend that this is normal or something else.
Well, yes, that is the thing. And of course the Senate has always been. It was in the Constitution, was as the framers were framing it, talked about the center versus the house as being this place that would you know, cool the tea cup of the house, where it was all nutty and crazy, all and hot all the time. That was this the thing. And of course the US Senate and therefore senators are all about this. We are
the dignified people in Washington. We look down on the House, and so occasionally, like now and in the last eight years, that dignity has called to be more than just how they act and look and dress. And yeah, Mitt Romney, you look, you'll identify your central casting. But like dudes, now's the time to really hump, try to do the right thing and not let this go into this decadent imperial rome thing that he's he's really trying to take
us to. No, we'll see. You know, you only need Susan Collins again, betting on Susan Colly as well, or Rakowski. You need you say four, I guess you need four people to say no, I'm not doing this.
Cornyan, maybe Langford, maybe Mitch McConnell. Maybe I mean, well.
Mis McConnell is retiring in two years and is gone, Like yeah, okay, it's time to atone a little bit guy.
And don't sleep on Tom Taylus because Tom Taylus is in a rapidly purple in state. But again, like this is such wish casting. Like even in twenty sixteen, like if we just step back from minut in twenty sixteen, you had some Republicans who were actually less insane and they were chased out of the party. And again, insane is relative, but they had more of a sort of sense of what all, you know what. The previous generation had a certain like traditionalism. So I'm talking about Jeff
Blake or you know. But again, it's hard for me to imagine that it's hard to imagine that this ends up being Okay.
No, I hear you, And I again, I'm not going to be the you know, my habitual temperamental fifty one percentist, which I've all that is the thing, like okay, barely optimist. Okay, it doesn't necessarily work, and I you know, you don't want to be Charlie Brown and is having the ball kicked out, having a your.
But you also want you can't give up, and you can't give into despair.
No exactly. Again, my hopeful view perhaps is that, yeah, the Jeff flakes at all have been kicked out. I mean think did not entirely capitulate for a year, right, I mean it wasn't just immediately on in January twenty seventeen. Okay, whatever the guy says, I'll do, I'll suck whatever is required. So we'll see it is eight years later and they do know him no longer like wow, this guy won, I got whoh oh, So that they are aware, and some of them are leaving soon, some of all of
them in six years. So he is not yet going to be called a lame duck, that is to say, Donald Trump. And you can come back and say, well, he may try to serve another term, let's leave that aside. He's gonna be a lame duck. He's gonna be out of there in four years, and in certainly in two years, people are going to start calling him lame duck. And here we are less than two weeks after the election, and the clown train is already going toward the cliff who We're barely there. So if this is a preface
foreshadowing of what the administration going to be like. There's no reason to think it isn't this is not going to go well, and all these things that we thought, I mean, the story of thing phenomenon is, oh, this is going to kill him. Oh he said this about McCain. All's Oh this pen never does it never does. But we'll see if enough of them have enough courage to do this very very simple and obvious. I think in these three or four worst appointments, for instance, just for starters.
Right, I mean I would also add, you know, for the people who are listening, who are like me, do not despair. Right. The federal government is an enormous entity. It has never been known for changing quickly.
You know.
My one bright spot here, believe it or not, is that these three appointments are so crazy because he is signaling that nothing here is going to be normal. Give me this thought experiment for a minute. Okay, if Trump had nominated Marco Rubio and then more normal Republicans but then quietly bullied them into doing insane things, it would have been much much harder to make the case that
this stuff was insane. Like RFK junior taking over ATSs, Like, this is a person who does not believe in vaccines. Now he's taking over government science, right, Like this is going to be a thing that is very clearly what it is and not you know, like I go back to Justice Roberts. Right, Roberts cuts away at things in order to undermine them. Right, he says, you know, he undermines Citizens United, he undermines Roe v. Wade, he undermines
you know, ultimately ends up. You can give as much money as you want to candidates, you know, so we have billion dollar presidential campaigns, and also we have Roe v. Wade eventually gets overturned. So that kind of stuff is much harder to explain to the American people than stuff like this guy doesn't believe in vaccines and now he's running government science.
No, one hundred percent. And of course that is because several reasons, I mean, less consequentially is he likes the show he Donald Trump, So this is going to control the world. They're going to let's do it walls. There's that, but it's also really it is like Caligula saying to the center is no, literally, lick my feet, get down there,
lick my feet. It's so much about that. And like Bobby Kennedy, who I have known for you know, fifty years and followed and written about for ten about his descent into conspiracy theory and vaccines are evil all that, I'll move on from him. But he has said many times, as he was being the anti vaccine guy the last twenty five years, that people like the Fauci's, the leading pediatricians, the leading vaccinologists, immunologists in America, should be behind bar
and he said that's not hyperble, I mean it. They should be in throw away the keys, talking like Trump, you know, long before Trump was around as a president. And then last year, of course he says COVID nineteen was targeted to attack black people and Caucasians and that ALEXH. Konazzi, Jews and Chinese are are immute. This guy really making
in charge of this shit anyway. The other thing I realized this week is the just brilliant, enduring truth of the maybe the two most famous lines as well that came out as he was running for president before he was president. But one is, of course, when you're a star, they let you do it. Well, he's showing that again.
I'm a star, they let me do it. I can appoint Tulca Gabbert and Matt Gates and Pete Hegzeth and Bobby Kennedy to these jobs, these important crucial jobs in the American government, for which they are obviously and plainly not qualified, And I can stay in the middle of fifth I don't shoot somebody, and I wouldn't get loser the voters. It's well, he says, So these are the explanatory things, and he is never I mean again and again we say yep, uh huh, yep. This is a new, next level version of that.
No exactly, and I think that is ultimately how we got here, right. I've been thinking a lot about like what I got wrong, you know, when I was like, she's gonna win with a mandate. One of the things that I think I got so wrong was this idea like Trump, he spends one hundred and eighty percent of his time doing pr right, so he's outward facing, he's doing interviews. Again, he's saying insane stuff, but it doesn't
necessarily matter. And then Democrats elect a guy who does almost no interviews for whom boringness is the defense, and then he is unable to get coverage for all of the really I think great accomplishments of his administration. It just was sort of a snowball, like if you're going to run against Trump and again, hopefully Trump decides that his second term is the end of it and that he does not try to run for a third term,
which you could certainly see him trying to do. I hate that I just said that, but you know that I'm really I mean, I hate that, but I do think Democrats right now have to start messaging members of Congress, senators need to get on. You know. Part of the only thing left that standing between us and total autocracy is these Democrats who don't have control of the federal government, but do have the ability to go on.
Joe Rogan, Yes, exactly. Well, and the thing about, as you starkily put it, and it's true about Biden and the Democratic generally, the Democratic machines, for whatever sort of reasons, ineffectiveness at getting out look at what we've done. Look how great this is, as opposed to him being the news and doing whatever it takes to be you know, the story every day. It is the problem or one of the problems of how we've been and how especially.
I mean, maybe maybe it will change it, Maybe that will change now because of the results of the selection that you understand. You have to be a friend. My brilliant wife, Van Kramer, when Biden actually became president four years ago, wrote a brilliant long memo to a good friend of ours who had been in the Obama administration in a very very high, you know, deputy cabinet position, saying, here's what they have to do. Trump knows how to make a show. We're not saying just you know, do
crazy stuff, but like, here's some ways. You know, she was in television, no show business, and he said, yeah, this is brilliant, this is great. They're never going to do anything like this because they're basically still living in the nineteen nineties as though it's normal town.
Right.
That's one of the things that they have to figure out and get right, and maybe maybe now they will. The other thing you mentioned mandate is your mistakenness about that Kama Harris will be elected with the mandate. And you know, as I say about so many things, it was pretty to think. So the hyperbole of describing Trump's win lass to be ratchet out. He got it out of control. Yes, it's Donald Trump being lenched again. Oh
my god. Sure. But in terms of historical margins of victory, which is his is now in the popular vote, or as we would call it any other country, the vote, it's one and a half percent and drop it. We'll see when the final million and a half votes in California how that goes. But where is that in the rank of all presidents who've ever won the popular vote, of whom they're fifty five, number fifty. That's where it is,
number fifty to fifty five. Even in the electoral college margin, where of course Republicans including him are get this kick you know, this bonus still low. It's still in the lowest quarter of those ever. So it ate a landslide. It's bad, and he's bad and all that. I'm not no, but it's not a mandate. It's just important not to get that into our heads that, oh the Americans oken in this is it? No, it's two percent? You know, No.
I agree, And that's a really good point, and I really appreciate you saying that, probably the most important point we have going for us part Anderson, if we don't get sent to Gitmo, will you please come back on my podcast.
Well, whenever I have enough of a head of steam and things and do nothing doins me more than getting up at five point thirty in the morning, coming on.
You're sorry, by the way, let the record show we started at eight o'clock.
Well Pacific time, though, even though I'm in New York.
Yeah, yes, you're right, you're at five am Pacific.
I'm always delighted. And no, it's good for me because then I can have a whole work day now and instead of having coffee, I talk to you.
Yes, all right, it's you and Lawrence are not early morning people. But let the record show I have pen up since six am. I really appreciate you. Thank you, Kurt Anderson. Please come back soon.
My pleasure.
Randy Winingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Welcome back to Fast Politics, Randy Winmarten.
How are you holding up, my dear Mollie.
I am in a.
Period of quiet reflection or because it's me, loud reflection where I'm trying to figure out what I got wrong and try to figure out how to make sense of the stuff that I got wrong, learn from what you know my blind spots were, and just take as much information as possible.
What about you, I'm doing the same thing. I mean, I was hoping against hope that Harris would win, but in diving into all of what happened, this was my fear. I want to make sure that we learned the right lessons out of it, as opposed to the finger pointing and the recriminations that one is seen. And I do feel like there's a lot of lessons learned that would actually be helpful not only in saving and then strengthening our democracy, but also in listening to what people were
actually saying about their lives. And I think it is both a clarion call for not only both political parties, but for the civic leadership, the business leadership in the country and in the world about what work and families really need. And obviously I don't feel great about the results and about the chaos and everything that's about to happen to people and people's rights, but I do think
that there is more and more and more. I am starting to see a through line that actually can be explained by a couple of the economic charts that I have seen in the last few days, including two of them.
One was the Steve Ratner chart that he did in warning Joe you may have been on at the time. And the other is a chart that I think I saw from EPI or from Robert Rechent, not quite sure what the sources anymore. That chart basically said that the people who earned the least in this country voted for Donald Trump. And then the second chart, which I thought was equally both heartbreaking but also as instructive, is that people no longer make more more than their parents made.
The promise of America, you know, has always been an economic one, much more than almost anything else. You know, It's been about freedom, but it's really been that. You know, you think America is going to be a country that has such great economic engines that every succeeding generation is going to do better than the one before it. And
that promise has been broken. And I think that that frankly, the first party that actually is going to be able to both get fairness and growth, right, you know, economic fairness and economic growth.
Right. There's a race between that success and whether or not, you know, we will have authoritarianism.
I hear what you're saying, and it's super interesting. The thing I might, yes and you is I just want to, like bap up to the beginning of your answer, which was, I agree that.
It's such an early moment, like less than two weeks from this election.
So what I would say is, in my mind, it's not time for recrimination, but more like time for sort of taking stock of where we are and you know where we're going, and I think that is super important. And also just like there are so many lessons to be learned, like Harris lost, right, but she did in fact deliver senate candidate. It's down ballot in almost every single one of these swing states, with the exception of
maybe Pennsylvania, though it's now gone to recount. My question is sort of like I understand the hand ringing, but I wonder how much And again you've been doing this longer than I have, but I just wonder how much of it was a Trump brand being uniquely powerful, because remember they haven't been able to recreate this in any which way, versus is a Democratic brand being uniquely not powerful.
I fanger you all the time, Molly.
So I read a lot of what you do and think a lot about what you say, but I found your article in terms of kind of like reflecting on this uniquely incisive because I think you.
Recognized in there the unique brand that Donald Trump brings. I mean, there's a lot of you know, I may say a few things that are really really really really really controversial because it kind of puts some of the normal thinking, you know, turns it on its head. But
I do. So let me just start by saying Donald Trump got his experience not only as a real estate developer in New York, which is a tough town in which to be successful, even if you start with a silver spoon in your mouth, which he did, and he early on was able to do things like withstand discrimination complaints and other kinds of things, you know, and he was often the talk of the town in New York
regardless of all of that stuff. But what he did which was uniquely different than probably any other candidate, but Ronald Reagan. He's an actor, and he learned how to use those skills that he developed on the Apprentice. And one may agree or disagree with him, but he became one of the most effective communicators in our generation, maybe in a century. And at the same time he's learned how to master or he's worked with the tech industry in such a way that they have developed new forms
of communication in some ways. Kennedy and television, Hitler and radio. He's learned how to do this.
Yeah, here's what I want to ask you. You are very much in his crosshairs. He is going war with public education. You are the head of the teachers union, you are an icon of public education.
How does this work?
I giggle a little bit because public education has been in the crosshairs of the established marketeers and top down ideologues or trickle down ideologues forever, but.
Not from the members of the Republican Party and not from the people on the ground, which is part of the reason why they have to create culture wars. I go back to I invoke what Chris Ruffo said a while ago at Hillsdale College. I know that, you know, people don't know that name, but he made sure we knew what their strategy was, which was their strategy was and is to create universal distrust in public schools so that they can essentially balkanized and basically end the public
schooling as we know it. And they've done that to try to create vouchers, which was now defeated in three essentially red states. So I think that the answer to
this is understanding the landscape is really important. But at the end of the day, the real question is going to be this, If you really represent the public that elected you, then you will care about strengthening public schools, and you'll care about creating as many opportunities for people to join labor unions and to actually engage in collective bargaining and to actually lift wages as possible. If you really care about the people of America, that's what you're
going to do. And so that's going to be where we lean into how do we help kids have the opportunities that you know, we every single day say they so richly deserve. How do we help working families have
the opportunities to get ahead? And so I think what you've seen in the last two years is that when we've called that question and when we've actually not only did the advocacy for it, but we've been on the ground giving out books as other people banned them, We've been on the ground really trying to create these ladders of opportunity or pathways from classroom to career, like in advanced manufacturing. That's what people really want, that's what they
want for their families. We're going to try to do more and more of that, and hopefully it's not going to be a big choice. It's not going to be a big contrast. Maybe this is what they're going to do, but if not, that's what we're going to do. And you know, I suspect just like we saw in Kentucky and Nebraska and Colorado when people voted not to defund their public schools. I suspect when we saw across the country.
I mean, if you look at all the down ballot races across the country, seventy to eighty percent of the pro public education candidate in Minnesona won their races. Twenty one or twenty three out of the twenty five levees in Florida for public schools, one North Dakota refuse to
give up their property tax to defund their state. So the real issue becomes, how do we every day not make this election to election, but how do we every day work with the coalition of people who really do want a better life for themselves than their kids, And how do we do that and how does that force then become a force in elections that doesn't get scared or anxious by you know, a commercial that's intended to scare or create anxiety, but where they're really working for
that latter of opportunity for themselves and others. And that's what I'm going to do, and that's what my members are going to do, and that's what our leaders are going to do.
But what about like, for example, the Department of Education, Like that is a hot.
I'm laughing because I'm going to surprise you and my answer, which is this, in nineteen seventy seven, my predecessor, as you know, Al Schanker, was not my immediate processor, although I knew him pretty well he was. But Al Schanker in nineteen seventy seven and the AFT in nineteen seventy seven actually oppose the creation of the Department of Education.
We actually believed that the Department of Education should stay in h EW because we thought we needed to actually deal with whole children and whole families and not pull education out, but really do it all together. And so the issue for us is not the symbolism of all of this stuff. The issue and obviously we care about the people who work at the Department of Education, We care about the families that work there. We don't want people fired But the issue really is what happens to.
What they do?
Like what they do is they actually send to states a lot of money. Ten percent of school district's budgets, particularly for poor kids and kids with disabilities, come from funds that they meet out. The real you is, let's stop talking about form over. You know who's going to get things done? Like, so, what happens to the money
that basically more red states get than blue states. What happens to that money the poor kids in Tennessee are in Mississippiate, Like, what happens to that money that kids with disabilities get? So I haven't seen a plan yet.
I think it's very unlikely that you're going to see a plan.
Yeah, exactly.
So they're going to try to get everybody up and outrage land about the symbolism about whether they're going to close the Department of Education versus not. The craziness here.
Is, look how many people are vuying for the job.
Of being the head of the Department of Education. And the other craziness is I saw Donald Trump's ten point plan.
In that ten point plan, there's a whole lot of stuff, Like half of it were words that I have said, like project based instruction, and how do we have career based learning, and how do we have internships? And how do we do all this stuff? Only the public schools can really actually do that. And then he says, well, we're going to close the Department of Education and move everything to the States. But if a school doesn't do what I wanted to do, I'm going to close it down.
That sounds like actually more control, not less control. So we have to separate out their rhetoric which is intended to create chaos and fear from Okay, are you really going to take money away from kids with disabilities? A whole lot of Republican parents have kids with disabilities.
Are you going to take that money away or not? If Donald Trump tries to take money away from parents or from kids with disabilities, I'm going to be out there fighting against that. If Donald Trump tries to take money away from kids in Mississippi or New York City that need that power professional in a classroom to help that kids learn to read, I'm going to fight against that. So what are they really saying.
What are they really saying?
We don't know what they're really saying.
They don't want public education to thrive because they want people to be in religious schools and also in educating people as dangerous, right, I mean, is that really what it is?
I would actually ask it as a question, why do they fear education? I understand we've seen this for forty or fifty years. It stopped for a little while because of all the stuff that was going on in terms of yeah, sure, but let me tell you a little secret. Since I've been around for a long time, it used to be like places like New York, Cardinal O'Connor. Cardinal O'Connor and the Catholic Diocese worked pretty well with the public schools. And I was around enough that we actually
work together. We honored religious education. But we need to actually fund our job, America's job, states jobs. We have an obligation to fund a public school system that is available for everyone. Now, if people want religious education, you know, my grandmother used to say, zygozint, let them have religious education. Let them do that. They want to do it, constitutionally, they should have your right to do it. But they can't take money from the public system that goes to
everybody for a separate system. And that's really a question here. And what's happened is you see it in a bunch of people. What with these voucher cases that are going on right now, these voucher moves and state legislators.
Most of the money is going to kids and families who will already send their kids to private schools. And most of the money is going to rich parents and rich people who already send their kids to private schools. So instead of this being about all kids, what we're saying is that's where the money in these Baucher states are going to, and it has actually hurt the rest
of the kids. And our job, my job is to make sure there's a public school system that every single parent wants to send their kids to, every kid is engaged in and thrives, and teachers want to be.
Yeah, exactly. Randy Winegarden, thank you, thank you, thank you. It sounds like we're going to have a long for yours.
Yes, but thank you for your podcast and thank you for communicating with people, because I think you are one of the few people on the progressive side that really understands that this kind of sense of a podcast where you have people on and you talk to people and people then listen to it. That's what Joe Rogan does all the time. So I just really also wanted to say that this communication vehicle how we communicate with people, that is also part of what we have to learn.
Right now, that's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.