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 Michelle Obama says Donald Trump is in clear mental decline.
She's not wrong.
We have the greatest show ever for you today, the Lincoln Projects. Rick Wilson joins us to discuss early voting and why we should be optimistic. Then we'll talk to New Mexico's own Attorney General, Raoul Torres about his lawsuit against Meta.
But first the news.
So Bally, we're going to start off today by torturing the audience by making the listen to Joe Rogan. And I will not be shocked if this is our lowest traded episode ever for doing.
That to them.
Quid pro Oh, no, let's go.
This is Donald Trump who appeared on Joe Rogan. For people who do not know, I'll say so.
There was a congressman years before I ran, and I was very close to him, and I need did a license on something, and he was very important in getting a license. But it was a little bit controversial it the license this particular thing that was being licensed. But I was close to this guy and helped him and everything else, and I went to him. I said, I'd like to have your help, and he said, let me take a look at it.
I said, oh, that's not too good.
But I really hope you did have anyway, he tapped me along for a long period of time and ultimately didn't do it. And I said, you are a stiff. You could have done this thing so easy, et cetera. But it was controversial. He was in cump me.
So I don't know, I mean, whatever the fuck that means. Look, donald Trump quit pro quote, he got impeached.
For it once.
I don't know he wanted a congressman to do that. By the way, whoever that congressman is, I mean, luckily Donald Trump can't remember what.
The speculation is.
It's former Congressman Trolie Ragul, who was known as one of the most corrupt congressmen.
It is time there, well within the range of possibility. But at least Charlie wasn't corrupt enough to do what Donald Trump wanted, and for that we must be grateful. There were a number of things that in those three hours with Joe Rogan where Donald Trump be clowned himself.
Let's get to the.
Tape of Donald Trump amusing about having been on.
Oprah oprah show, she was encouraging you.
Last week I did one of her last shows. I think maybe Thursday or there was a big deal being on Oprah's show, the last one, and I was like one of the last shows in that final week.
Oprah's last show was May twenty fifth, two thousand and eleven, not last week.
About Thursday or Friday, which also he taped this on a Saturday, so that would have been the day before or the day before that.
Yes, that was not Oprah's last show.
Interesting still though, Donald Trump again Joe Rogan tried to get Donald Trump to say that he wouldn't use the military against other Americans. He continued to decline. He drove it home that ultimately his whole goal is to, you know, deport huge quantities of people because illegal aliens are the problem this country has. Well you know what, Jesse, what there's some illegal aliens who are causing problems.
Will you discuss the calls are coming from inside the house, one might say that.
Or inside the Twitter, as the case may be.
There is a new report out about Elon Musk and his brother being illegal in this country for a period.
What did you see it to here?
Molly watching post which everyone is mad at right now, reports that Elon Musk briefly worked illegally in the nineteen nineties in the United States. He denied the report because he's Elon. He said he was on a J one visa, which transitioned into an H one B visa. But you know, Elon Musk is known for not being, you know, a totally straight shooter, so who the fuck knows. But the irony here is pretty rich.
Somalia, I know, I'm really pushing our listeners today. After playing Joe Rogan, I'm now going to read a David Sachs tweet.
David Sachs, for those of you who don't know, is.
A South African billionaire, not to be confused with Elon Musk, also very far right and has very little to recommend him except he's very.
Very rich host of a terrible podcast, we might add. Here's what Sachs had to say. The major broadcast networks ABC, CBS, NBC operate on free licenses of public spectrum in exchange for requirements to serve the public interest. They no longer do, and this is an obsolete model anyway. The spectrum should be auctioned off, with the proceeds used to pay down the national debt. Of course, the networks can bid on the spectrum, and they will win if broadcast networks are
still the most highly valued use. What's more likely to happen is that valuable spectrum will be reapportioned to the next generation of wireless applications, unleashing many more interesting options for consumers and business. The networks could continue to operate on cable like one hundred some other redundant chills.
Whatever, it doesn't matter.
These dumb fucking immigrants ruining our country.
You mus quote treated this and said, great idea.
So David Zax wants to make it so that cable companies can't broadcast because they hate free speech. It turns out these fucking guys hate free speech. Two aliens, I guess, neither illegal anymore, both billionaires Elon's made tons of money on government subsidies. Both of them would like to end free speech. Elect Donald Trump and deport millions and millions
of people. Are we surprised? Maybe not so. Jesse and I decided to do a little quick segment after Donald Trump's German American Madison Square Garden German influenced German American Bund influence Madison Square Garden rally a mirror eighty three years later. The characters are different, but the rhetoric remains very similar.
Like always, he's just repeating his father's best traits.
So my hottest take is that. And I don't know if this was a plan or not, but Stephen Miller had a line that came directly from the KKK And actually I looked it up afterwards and it's the name make America America again is actually the name of a KKK pamphlet. It's called America for Americans KKK on the cover and has a clansman. So Stephen Miller is Jewish, so there were the clan were not fans of the Jews.
But he did in fact say that he wanted that America was for Americans only, America for Americans and Americans only, which is also derivative of the German slogan only for German which Germans, which was used during World War Two against people like Steven Miller.
Make it make sense him.
Being influenced by pamphlets like that is not a shocking revelation.
We're in a moment here where so.
Joe Rogan affiliated comedian Tony Hinchcliff, He's one of his buddies, was the opener, and he did a lot of what one might call humor if one didn't know what humor was, where he said such things as.
Well, he said that you don't even need to hear it. It's some fucking guy that no one's ever heard of.
Or I guess you've heard that. If you're into comedy, you've heard of Tony Hinchcliff.
Okay, well I've never heard of him.
But if you're into Joe Rogan, you've heard of Tony Hinchcliff. So that fucking guy said that Puerto Rico is an island of garbage.
So this led to Bad Buddy endorsing Kamala Harris, which I know a lot of our listeners will not be familiar with the reggaeton artists Bad Buddy, but Bad Bunny is.
He's pretty famous.
He's well, what's more interesting is he is always in the top ten of biggest musicians worldwide. And the other thing is is he is very beloved for being altruistic in Puerto Rico.
And like many people said, like the Taylor swift. They very big.
This for a culture of people that maybe some of our listeners are not around. This is a very huge cultural moment because he really is seen as a virtuous person.
And also after that, Jlo and Ricky Martin immediately endorsed Harris too. I want to just for a second read the statistics of Puerto Ricans by state in this country. Four hundred and fifty k. That's almost half a million Puerto Ricans in the state of Pennsylvania. North Carolina has one hundred thousand Puerto Ricans, Wisconsin sixty five thousand, Michigan fifty thousand, Florida one point one million, and New York one million Puerto Ricans.
Not an insignificant number of people.
Yeah, and they are trying to pretend, oh, it was just a joke. But Trump Junior, one of the policy guys, a the Trump kip, he of course, retweeted it like it was awesome.
Yeah, Donald Trump Junior, you may remember him from being an abject more on. But there was also another line too, where one of them said, Latinos love making babies.
It was a lot of vitriol. Also, someone said.
One of those speakers said that Hillary Clinton was the sixth son of a bitch and the whole fucking party a bunch of degenerate low lives to.
Haters and lowlives every one of them.
So a lot of pretty awful rhetoric. And of course USA today, Trump sticks to economy, immigration and closing pitch in Addison Square.
Message always be seene washing, so not.
Surprising, but he is upsetting. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going.
Thanks for listening.
Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Project and the host of The Enemies List.
Welcome back, Rick Wilson.
Hey Bali junk Fast Back as always for more hygiens and frivolity.
Nine days, nine days, so it'll be eight when people are listening to this. So where are you? Where am I? Where are any of us today?
Look, we are at this moment very close to a scenario. I know people are going to yell at me for saying this, but I'm beginning to think we're going to have a bigger win than not legitimately beginning to believe that the overarching chaos around Trump has reduced a lot of the viability that he had. I don't think he's improved a situation at all, and I'm here for that.
So explain to me what is making you think that.
Again, as we talked about last time, I am watching these early voting numbers, and the more of these early voting waves that are showing up in the reporting from early votes, the more women we see turning out to vote early, the more expansive the lead becomes. I mean, we're at a point now where Donald Trump is going to have to pull off a massive, massive election day male vote that has thus far not been out there
at the scale he's going to need. And those low propensity voters that he relies on, those ones and twos he relies on, we're not in that world right now. They're not the ones and twos are not driving so far from what we're able to see in the in the turnout equation.
How do you see that? Can you explain it a little more?
I think that there's a part of the universe of Trump that they are trying to bullshit Democrats into panicking. It's working, by the way.
You know me, I'm always panicking.
You do like a good fret as they say, yes.
Yes, yes is word ju is. I mean, this is what we do. This is our eighties.
I do, I do it.
But I'm telling you we're not right now in the same world that we were in. I still go back to this, these early numbers, as Stuart steven says, he goes, you know, all the polling is based on modeling of prior elections.
That is true, right for sure.
But early voting numbers are empirical. They are not backward looking models. They are not speculative. They are empirical. I look at the way that the early vote is turning so far, and I am fine with it. Would I like everything to be perfect all the time? Sure? Would I like her to be twelve points ahead? Absolutely? Do I need her to be twelve points ahead? I do not.
And Republicans are early voting, which they didn't. You know, it's a sort of different elector and showing up right now to early voting.
Yeah, I mean the twenty twenty election, because of COVID was a truly distorted early voting model. We will never have that model again, you know, God.
Willing right, hopefully.
Yeah, but as we look at where we're standing today again, I'd much rather be in our shoes than theirs. I'd much rather be a campaign that has all the resources it needs to.
Spend billion dollars.
Yeah, and right now that is not the Trump campaign. I'd might s rather have a campaign that has a field program run by trained professionals rather than Elon Musk.
And also that long haired guy, the walk Away guy.
Oh yes, Brandon Struka.
Yeah, that guy seems great.
Oh yeah, he's a deeply experienced campaign pro. I mean, everybody wakes up in the morning and goes, hey, you know who we need in this campaign is Brandon Straka.
And what about Charlie Kirk? Can we have a minute for Charlie Kirk, the guy whose entire career is based on the fact that he didn't get into college.
Charlie Kirk and the Turning Point USA program, what they've done is they've become a conduit for a bunch of dark money from a bunch of Republican billionaires. Blah blah blah. You heard the story. And Charlie Kirk, as we all know, He is not a bright man, right, He's not even a moderately smart man. He is profoundly and relentlessly stupid. And because of that relentless stupidity, you know this group that he's built, which basically, by the way, let's all
understand what Turning Point really is. Charlie Kirk could not get laid in a tie whorehouse with just full of hundreds, so he built this organization because he wanted to pussy.
Oh Jesus Christ, I even correct.
I'd love to you. You are wrong.
He didn't get into college, so he got so mad that he started a conservative organization to try to protect mediocre white guys who can't go to get into college.
I'm not sure this is about sex.
No, it's it's listen, everything's about sex.
The alternate theory is, you remember when he went to the hospital, he's always surrounded by teenage boys just saying, oh my.
God, the two of you.
I mean, there's a lot of evidence.
I'm not saying. The original name of Turning Point USA was how Swatt.
No, I don't want to go to jail for either of you. Listen to me, You're going to go two point five million early votes cast so far in seven sweating states, nine hundred and fifty two thousand more women voted than men.
What's being challenged here right now is a fundamental reality, okay, and that reality is the impiriculator from the early turnout is very very favorable to Kamala Harris. Okay, very very very favorable. You've got I think in the polling you've seen a high overscoring of Republicans. In the turnout you're seeing, I think something that's going to be much more reflective of election day. There used to be this conception that early voters were a different creature than election day voters.
I don't think that's the case anymore. I don't think that works the same way anymore on election day. In my view, if women haven't come out to vote early, they're going to flood the zone on election day. And it is going I am beginning to God, I'm going to jinx myself saying this, I am beginning to feel like that of the three scenarios, right, of the three scenarios, narrow Harris win, narrow Trump win, Harris blowout, there is no Trump blowout scenario right now in the numbers.
Okay, and there never has been right. He can't. He's not a blowout. He is a ceiling.
If it happens, it is not based on any kind of math that we're seeing. If I'm wrong about it, I'm not going to feel bad for being wrong, because it will be something such a it would be such a weird externality that no one can spot. And look, I am a reasonably smart.
Dog, many people are saying, and I have and I.
Have a lot of but I have a lot of people who are smarter than me by an order of magnitude. About the math and the numbers and the polling. They are pretty sanguine right now that the blowout number may be increasing in probability. That doesn't mean it's a That doesn't mean it's going to happen. That doesn't mean it's it's the highest likelihood of happening. But there are a lot of models right now that show the margins for Harris opening up because of the voter data we're looking
at coming out of early voting and ballot requests. It's a sign of two things. A sign she has a field program for one that's doing the work okay. And there's a sign that the averages you're seeing on five point thirty eight and real clear and.
Are have been juiced by GEOP pollsters.
Right, yeah, right, other polling aggregators are now going to diverge more and more from the data we're seeing come out of the early vote. Those models are not set to include the early voting data. They don't model that. They model polls only. They don't have and they model prior election data only. They don't have this data as part of their model. The bullshit markets poly market and clock Calshee and all that, it's all garbage. Ignore it,
ignore it, ignore it. But look, I don't think you're going to see as many split ticket voters as were previously modeled. The split ticket theories say that three times fast. I think it's kind of falling apart a little bit. You're seeing that there aren't going to be a lot of people who vote for Mark Robinson in North Carolina. It's going to drag him down. He's down forty four points among women at my last point, forty four points among women. How are you going to do that? Market?
I think he's going to lose by eighteen to twenty points, maybe a little more.
Is it bragging?
About maybe sleeping with your wife's sister that is not appealing to women voters, or is it something else.
I don't know. Calling yourself black Hitler might have had a part of it. Women don't really love Hitler either, but I think that's that's a part of it. Yeah, I had to introduced the words dookie, shoot to our.
Let the record show I am making a disgusted face. With as little movement as my face has, it's still able to be horrified by that.
So here's the other thing I think is happening here right now, and again, this is the toughest unicorn to hunt in the forest. I think right now we are seeing undecided voters right now. I'm going to make a quick prediction. If they're an undecided voter right now, about sixty five percent of them are going to split to Kamala Harris.
Okay, so Donald Trump.
It's the Hitler stupid.
As J Carver would say, Donald Trump did ten thousand hours with the Joe Rogan in which they discussed My favorite thing about that interview is that Joe Rogan did the same thing that John Hannity did, the same thing that any interviewer who wants Trump to be less disinh inhibited than he is. He said, you don't really want to jail Nancy Pelosi.
And Donald Trump said.
There are many people who have been very mean to me. No, he said, you know, Donald, you didn't really they didn't really steal the election from you. It was that's not real, is it? And of course Trump couldn't fucking help himself. And that is something that we know in some of this some of the stuff of these softer Republican voters, they're like, Okay, I'm sick of the I'm sick of the bullshit. He lost the election January sixth. They don't like it. But you know, Joe Rogan is supposed to
appeal to young men. Yeah, he's supposed to appeal to young men. And yes, young men may well vote for Donald Trump. That's okay. You know, eighteen to thirty men are gonna are going to probably give Trump a fifty five percent.
Split the nine of them. It's not a huge voting book.
But young women eighteen to thirty are going to give Harris like an eighty twenty split. And look an independent voters. We're starting to see independent voters in the early states. Okay, they have shifted toward Harris. Some states a little bit, some states a lot, some states demnimous, but they are shifting toward Harris. I mean, look, and I'll just give you one example. Independence in Arizona in twenty twenty eleven it was an eleven point difference between Biden and Trump.
Right now, Independence in Arizona are pulling at about what our number is about a seventeen point difference between between Harris and Trump. Really, if Independence end up popping over at those scales and those numbers are much smaller in other states, that's just one that I happened.
That's hug. Those are huge numbers, those.
Trend lines with independence, If they break with those proportions, we're gonna have a much more interesting race. I will tell you. I heard from a Florida polster on Friday night who said to me, he goes. A month ago, I would have told you Trump would blow the state out with ten points. Now I think he wins by three or four. Look, I don't think we have enough time for that trend line to hit zero for Trump. But look, no campaign is ever going to wake up
in the morning and go, hey, we're bullshitting you. We're losing. Trump is outstanding, okay at bullshitting people that he's winning, and his people are going to believe it.
And it's better for him to say he's winning, because he's going to say it was rigged.
Either way, that's correct.
He is here to tell you it was stolen, it was rigged, it was this, it was that. And nothing will change Donald Trump's insistence on playing the game. That will lead to violence, and that will lead to misery in this country in ways to quote Donald Trump that we've never seen before.
I mean, I think if we're going to take something to be worried about from this conversation, and everyone needs to vote, and everyone needs to canvas. And I saw Dan Nathan. I was on TV with Dan Nathan the other day, and he's going to Pennsylvania.
You know the.
Number of affluent New Yorkers who are in Pennsylvania. There's more of them in Pennsylvania than there are people in Pennsylvania at this point.
The number of people who have flooded the zone, including a lot of the young staff at Lincoln are over in Pennsylvania. Dock in doors this weekend because look, a lot of our work is done at this point. Our missiles are in the silos, they're ready to launch. We've got the ads are pretty much done. The fundraising expressional yeah, politically right. No, I actually have nuclear weapons in mind.
I tell you I want you to be the first to know that my nuclear weapons pro does that long last come to fruition?
Yes?
But look, and I also am watching the favorability as we always talk about. She is more favorable than Donald Trump. That's just it. She has higher faves than Donald Trump, and those higher faves are going to be something that saves the day. Look, her faves in Florida now are tied with Trump. Same person told me that that there faves in Florida are now tied.
Phrase that is in now.
That doesn't mean she's going to win. It just means that their faves are tied.
Right. I think that that's a really good point.
I would love you to just for two seconds talk about North Carolina because a member the Freedom Caucus said, oh, yes, can you talk us through that? Because I feel like that's something voters hate.
Voters are not fans of preemptive declarations of victory by either party and.
Also disenfranchising them.
So this North Carolina Republican from the Freedo chair of the Freedom Caucus said, because of the hurricane, they should just award all the electoral votes to Donald Trump. It reminds me of the situation in Nebraska, Nebraska's second district, where Republicans decided to steal their electoral vote and now they are fucking pissed.
Continue.
First off, the Freedom Caucus is a caucus, but has nothing to do with freedom. They are the authoritarian wing of the authoritarian Party, the militant wing of the authoritarian Party. And the fact that they're out claiming that anything should just be preemptively handed to Donald Trump. That's the fucking Bath Party in Iraq, right, That's not any party in America. So dom has won with a one and fourteen percent mudgin. Oh okay, I.
Haven't thought of the Bath Party in like a decade. That's so weird.
Yes, okay, go on, thank you for that blast from the past.
You're very welcome the idea that you preemptively award a state to Donald Trump for any purpose whatsoever. I promise you. If let's just say this, if Gavin Newsom came out and said, well, California's an inevitability, we know what's going to happen here, so we're just gonna go ahead and preemptively declare that Trump cannot win our state. Fox would be mobilizing every goddamn reporter in America for communism twenty
twenty four, the California Republic of Communists, bla blah. We're not in a country, thankfully yet, where this sort of thing is acceptable where voters go, oh yeah, well, that's exactly how it works. Is some dipshit neck beard from North Carolina goes out of Claire's that the world is Trump's all, praise the great leader. That's not how it works. She is, I think petitive in North Carolina. I still believe that the western North Carolina, the devastation out there,
is going to drive down Republican turnout. We've got a campaign nationally, it's got about a four point advantage for her right now. She's ahead on a couple of big issues that I watch and care about in national polling, looking out for the middle class and protecting democracy. I think those underpin the groups she needs to win, like she needs to win these Cheney Republicans, these Haley Republicans,
these Lincoln Project Republicans. She needs to win those people, and by being stronger on democracy, that's a real plus for her. Trump's even only ahead, by the way on crime. Depending on the poll you're looking at between two and seven percent on crime.
Well, he did a lot of crime.
Two things, One is that watching Biden apologize to Indigenous people feels like a meaningful and important because Indigenous people have been so mistreated by this country, and be also perhaps thoughtful and political.
The in number of Indigenous people nationally is not something you look at, go okay, the election's going to rise or fall on this. However, the in number of Indigenous people in Nevada and in Arizona, and in Nebraska, and in Wisconsin and in Michigan is not trivial. This, I think is an example of the right politics and the right policy coming together at one moment. Actually, I haven't polled Native Americans at all. I just haven't.
It's very hard to do right too well.
Right, it's every saying we've had an hour package because they're not the demo that we're trying to move, and they have traditionally been more democratic but less interested in the last couple of cycles.
Though they were meaningful in twenty twenty.
Right, But I was just gonna say, but I do want to point out that in twenty twenty they made a difference. So we've got a lot of politics inside the politics right now. Harris's campaign I think is running very very well. I think it's a strikingly stronger campaign than it's democratic skeptics in the beginning have figured out. And I'm happy about that in one way because specifically because I look at the mechanics of the campaigns, I
look at the abilities of the campaigns. Right now, Donald Trump is you know, he's doing three thousand person arenas, five thousand person arenas. She's doing twenty five thousand person arenas. He's getting guys who actually had their songs on k Tel records. Great as it's in nineteen eighty nine. Meant she's getting Beyonce. So a lot of these things I think are really meaningful. That how the campaigns are running and being run, to me, that's a big deal. That's
important to me. How those things are functioning. And her campaign is functioning at a very high level. His campaign is not functioning at any level. You know, but look Trump Trump's superpower is he never needed a real campaign when Hillary was sort of off the radar for the last two weeks of the campaign and getting by Jim Comey, and he didn't think he needed a real campaign against
Joe Biden. They thought this would be a race where it was only going to be Joe Biden is too old and also elderly and also ancient, and that that was going to give him some sort of, you know, clean shot at an easy win. Well, that is not the campaign we're in now. And then the fact that Chris Losovita got paid twenty two million dollars to do this job, which is the greatest scam anybody's ever pulled on Donald Trump by far by order of magnitude. It's amazing, and their campaign is in chaos.
Rick Wilson, Molly Jong.
Fast, That's always a pleasure.
Thank you.
Are you concerned about Project twenty twenty five and how awful Trump's second term could be, Well, so are we, which is why we teamed up with iHeart to make a limited series with the experts on what a disaster Project twenty twenty five would be for America's future. Right now, we have just released the final episode of this five
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Please watch it and spread the word.
Raoul Torres is the Attorney General of New Mexico.
Welcome to Fast Politics.
A G.
Torres, thanks for having me. You are in New Mexico.
I am you.
Are the attorney's general.
We are ten days from perhaps the most important election of our lifetime. I feel like Republicans have used attorneys generals in crazy ways over the last decade.
How do you sort of make it sense to us?
The attorneys general serve as the chief legal officer for the respective states that they serve in, and for the majority of American history they played a pretty limited role in both representing state agencies or filing actions on behalf of the state civil actions.
Some of us.
Also have concurrent criminal jurisdiction. I'm formerly the elected district attorney here in Albuquerque, so I come from that background as a prosecutor, but we don't have direct criminal jurisdiction.
But over the last ten.
Or fifteen years, ags have evolved to take on increasingly, i would say, impactful roles in shaping national policy through litigation. You've seen it in the Republican side when they file actions to oppose various things that have been undertaken by the Biden administration or the Obama administration. The same is
also true for the Democratic Attorneys general. Was it in this role at this time at that time, but my colleagues who were serving during the first Trump administration filed a number of actions to protect voting rights, environmental rights, access to reproductive healthcare, in engaging important sort of domestic and international policy issues. And so these offices have increasingly become a place where national policy gets filtered through the courtrooms.
And what you've seen is that while we live in this sort of polarized world where Congress is sort of stuck in place and very little of real significance, seems to be able to move as quickly through that through the legislative process as it used to. A lot of the change that you see on both sides of the equation and to originate oftentimes in ag offices around the country.
So talk to me about forever chemicals, because that's one of the ways in which you're doing so. I mean, if you think about like the Texas Age is doing freeziness, here, you guys on the left are doing something that's actually useful.
So talk us through that.
A lot of ags from around the country, including I think some of my Republican counterparts, but definitely a lot of my Democratic counterparts, we have filed actions against the manufacturers of PFASs or what are commonly referred to as forever chemicals for people who don't really know what that is.
It's a unique kind of chemical compound that has been used in consumer products on everything from the grease resistant lining of pizza boxes, in Hamburger wrapping all the way to carpets and everything else.
Well, lo and behold.
These corporations have known four years and years that many of these compounds are cancer causing. They have really serious side effects. They have been included in firefighting foam. We've had real horrific disclosure of firefighters, first responders and others who've been exposed to that foam, who've been armed and so we have filed an action against the manufacturers, and we have been joined by different ages from across the
country that are doing the same. But it's the kind of thing that we as AGS have been engaging for quite some time. AGS first started to really litigate in this space in the era of big tobacco, and it was concerted and at that time by partisan effort on the part of Attorney's General to get the big tobacco companies to own up to what they had done in terms of marketing and known dangerous and addictive substance, and to start paying for the harm that they had costed the American people.
These are really important lawsuits, and for me, you know, as the cover job done with environmental stuff, one of the really things that have made me so has made me so despondent, is the way the federal government has refused to regulate every thing from food to fuel. I mean just really given up on even trying to hold big companies accountable. And one of the most infuriating is their inability or total disinterest in regulating technology.
You filed the case against Meta talk us through that.
Yes, so we've actually filed two pretty significant lawsuits. We filed an action against Meta last year, focusing in on both Facebook and Instagram for doing two things. Basically, The first is marketing a product and building and delivering a product that they know is harmful to the psychological health
and mental health of young people. We have growing awareness about the impact of excessive social media use on anxiety, depression, the ways in which it leads to self image issues, particularly for young women and girls, and increase in team suicide, and those other issues. About forty three or forty four other attorneys general across the country filed and action focused
almost exclusively on those psychological harms. We included in our complaint allegations of that same kind of behavior, but in part because of my background as a child abuse prosecutor and an Internet crimes prosecutor, we were acutely focused on predation and the way in which these platforms not just allow for predators to identify, groom and target children online, but the algorithms and the structure of the platforms actually
facilitates and amplifies the ability of these platforms to connect children and young users that the companies know and have and actually count on being on these platforms Because there is a market incentive there is a financial incentive for them to get young users hooked on these platforms so that they can market, you know, consumer goods and use
that revenue to build and expand the company. But what has been I think sort of underreported and certainly largely unrecognized by parents and policymakers is the way in which the algorithm itself and the platform itself will connect people with their particular interests. And so what that means is every company builds a digital profile of every user on the platform. The more you use it, then the more
they understand what your preferences are. For ninety nine percent of the users, that means understanding their preferences for a sneeker or for going on a particular type of vacation, or reading a particular type of book. That's the business model that sits behind what is a free downloadable app
on the phone. The value proposition is in connecting people with their unique interests, but the problem lies in the fact that it will also connect people who have a sexual interest in children with children that they know or on the platform. It is the scale of the harm that has been known to these companies for years that is truly astonishing. So what we did is we actually
created a decoy account using artificial intelligence. We had an undercover agent who's actually a middle aged man, who presented an account that looked like an underage girl and created a profile on the platform, and that account was immediately inundated with solicitations for sex, graphic child sexual abuse material.
And what it did is it proved what the company has known for years that something on the order of one hundred thousand children every single day on the platform either received sexually explicit material or solicited online for sex.
And so we have pulled the curtain back on internal communications between trust and safety officials and experts who have been warning the most senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, about this harm and the fact that they're specific features that could actually facilitate this interaction, and they have repeatedly sort of looked at changing the system and usually deferred to anything that continues to promote engagement and use and basically
prioritize profit over public safety and the safety of the most vulnerable users on the platform. And so we filed that.
Action last year.
We followed it up with an undercover operation called Operation Metaphile, where we again created accounts, and we arrested three men who showed up at a hotel at a motel here in New Mexico thinking that they were going to be meeting up with an underage girl to have sex, and they actually were taking to custody. What we were trying to do, though, with that parallel criminal investigation is demonstrate to policymakers into parents that the farm where I identifying
isn't just virtual, It isn't this digital experience. It is paper thin in terms of the separation between the types of experience they're having on their phones and on the platforms and the possibility of real victimization in the real world. We followed that up with a separate lawsuit against Snap because Snap has marketed itself primarily on the benefits of what's known as ephemeral content. This idea that you can picture an image or video, send it to somebody else,
and it goes away. The truth is, though it doesn't go away, it's easily captured, and which means it is a prime channel by which people can engage in sextortion. And sextortion is when they trick a young person into sending a sexually explicit image of themselves and then immediately turn around and extort them, saying, turn over this amount of crypto, this amount of money, and if you don't, we will send these images to your school, to your parents,
your community. And we have seen teen suicide all over the country, all over the world by a lot of young people, interestingly, a lot of young men who are tricked into sending these images, young young boys. And I've met parents from all over America who who have lost, you know, their thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year old son to suicide because they have been tricked into sending this material
to somebody that then turns around and extorts them. All of this though, all of this conduct has been known to the leaders and executives inside these companies for years, and Congress has just failed to act, failed to regulate,
and so now it's falling to us. But there's a unique parallel here because not unlike big tobacco, it's a big global corporate behemoth that is knowingly marketing addictive, dangerous products to young people without due respect for the ultimate harm that they could be causing, without telling people about it, without providing warnings about what could be there, and ultimately they have been able to do that because back in the late nineties, Congress granted them broad immunity from liability
for this action. In the earliest days of the Internet, in the passage of the Communications Decency Acts Section two thirty, we were trying to facilitate this burgeoning Internet economy and that but this was back in the days when we were all waiting for a dial up tone to get on the Internet, were looking at all of this material sort of on a laptop, and we're thinking about message boards.
So there was no smartphones, there was no social media applications, and there certainly weren't the kinds of big global corporations that we have now and we have watched for the last ten years Congress just completely unable to carve back or eliminate that that immunity that has been granted to
these companies. And so we have to from a legal perspective, file these cases very much in the same way that you file a product liability case, because Section two thirty says these companies aren't liable for the third party content put out there by someone else, but they are liable for the decisions they make about the features that are included in their products. And so that's how we're going about,
you know, bringing these lawsuits. We've been we're one of the first states in the country to focus on sexual predation and one of the first states in the country to actually survive a challenge under Section two thirty. And it looks like we're going to be able to present our case to a jury here in New Mexico and ultimately hopefully not only recover damages for children who have been harmed by these products, but ultimately get injunctive relief
to change the way these corporations do business. It is no coincidence that you have seen update and press releases and publications of all of these new safety features, so called sactors in so called sort of safety modifications since these lawsuits have been filed. And from my perspective, it's a cynical attempt to avoid and held account or what they have done way that they have prioritized profit over safety.
And when this comes up, you know, we get asked routinely, well what do you think about the latest update of the newest feature? And what I tell them is, look, if these companies, Meta and Zuckerberg and these guys were spent as much time focusing on actually making these products safe, and if they dedicated the resources that they currently expand on lobbyists, lawyers, publicists and marketing firms on just listening to their own trust in safety people and redesigning the platforms,
we wouldn't be in this situation. But you know, this is sort of the standard corporate playbook where people get called out, people start fearing, shareholders, directors and others start thinking about the bottom line, and they think, oh god, this is serious. We better start doing something. But you know, the steps that they're taking, these are things that could have been done years ago. Because they have known about
these problems for years. They didn't do it until they really thought there was a chance that it was going to impact the bottom line.
Yeah, I'm not surprised at all.
But it does show that the only way any of these tech companies are going to behave in a responsible way is if they're legally held accountable.
Right, that's right, But it also shows something else that's really really important. It is the disparity that you have between the pace of change in legal institutions and the
pace of change in technology. Right, they're able to operate now with technology under a legal framework that was created for a totally different world, and the lesson for us as a country is that we need to be able to close the gap between our ability to adapt to a changing technological environment, because what we usually end up doing is by the time we've identified a harm, corrected for it, come up with a new legislative solution, the
technology has leapt forward. And what I worry about now is that we're going to be having a conversation about fixing the problems with social media applications, and by the time we correct that, the genie is out of the bottle on artificial intelligence and we are once again trying
to play catch up from a legal standpoint. And I think one of the real challenges that we're going to face in the next five, ten, fifteen years is to see if we can update our institutions to respond more effectively and more quickly to a rapidly evolving technological landscape, which, as we have seen, can bring great benefits to people, to businesses, to productivity, to human connections, to sharing of information.
But there is always a downside to technology. There's always a side of the technology that can be used or exploited to horn people, and we have to be mindful of that, We've gone through this process too many times for us to really think that these companies can be
trusted to regulate themselves. And there's another really dangerous and important element which is hard for people to understand who are lawyers and aren't thinking about this, But one of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions that we had recently was a decision by the Supreme Court to eliminate what's
called Chevron deference. What that did is the best chance that we had as a from an institutional standpoint to continue to adapt quickly to emerging threats or emerging potential harms was to empower executive agencies to address things that a legislative body just doesn't have the technical expertise or
the understanding to get in front of. By striking that down, the Supreme Court has basically placed the burden back on Congress to continue updating the legal framework that we have in the legal tools that we have to hold people.
Account right exactly. And I think that's a really such an important point. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope you wilcome back.
Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity.
No moment, Rick Wilson, Yes, our moment of fuckery today, we're going to talk about everyone's favorite. By the way, Donald Trump did say it might be smart to get a vice president who's a zero well success Donald for all right, I almost feel like, if we're going to do our moment of fuckery about JD. Vans, we should for a second have Jesse first play this video of Donald Trump yesterday or two days ago.
It's a theory he has.
So Jesse's going to first play Donald Trump's theory of vice presidents.
I love Trump having any kind of theory.
This guy, he's dumb as a rock.
Of course, you could make.
The case that, you know, there's a theory pick a really bad vice president.
That way, they'd never get rid of you. So maybe she did a very smart thing. Who does But we're gonna say, kamala yaha.
So that's a theory. That's a theory.
And now, Jesse Cannon, we're going to talk about Donald Trump's vice presidential nominee, who was today on CNN trying to defend the indefense.
Ball thank you, So let me ask you.
Obviously, Trump's former chief of Staff, General John Kelly sure was alarmed. He says by what he heard when Trump's that he wanted to use the National Guard or the Pentagon to go after the enemy within Americans with whom he disagrees, including.
The pelosis Adam Schiff.
And then he gave an interview he said the Trump quote certainly falls into the general definition of fascist that he has quote. Certainly an authoritarian admirers people who are dictators.
You've called him a disgruntled former employee, But why shouldn't Americans out there listen to somebody who worked closely with Trump, worked with him longer than you've worked with him, retired for star Marine general, serve his country honorably, who is conservative, who says he agrees with Trump on most policies, but is worried about this.
Aspect of Trump.
So let me just say two things in response. So, first of all, a lot of what John Kelly pretty much all of what John Kelly accuses Donald Trump of saying. There were other people in the room, Mike Pence's former chief of staff, for example, who've explicitly said Donald Trump never said those things, right, So one on expansive, guy, I'm not going to support Trump because Mike, Mike Pence's former chief said that Donald Trump didn't say those things right, So that's number one.
Number two.
I actually think there's an interesting conversation here to have, Jake, which is, why does John Kelly.
Not support Donald Trump.
It's about policy, it's not about personality.
He says, he agrees with Trump.
On most policy. No, he agrees with Trump on most policy.
He disagrees with Trump on but how Trump views his role and the fascism and the authoritari.
I don't buy that, Jake.
I don't buy that, because if you actually look at John Kelly, at folks like Liz Cheney, the fundamental disagreement they have with Donald Trump is even though they say that they're conservative, they're conservative in the sense that they want America to get involved in a ton of ridiculous military conflicts.
Thank you, Rick Wilson.
You know, there's a reason why jd. Vance's favorability rating is roughly half of Tim Walls is that.
He's a douchebag.
He's not just an asshole, he's like a legitimate douchebag. This guy knows exactly what he's doing. He's besmirching the reputation of a guy who gave forty years of his life to our country. Whose son died in combat and JD. Vance is thinking you're too dumb to realize what he's trying to say. It is offensive, it is cheap, it is stupid, and it relies on an audience that doesn't
understand and that just saying they're globalists. They what wars is codeword for we think you're too stupid to understand it.
Yeah, thank you, Rick Wilson.
You are welcome as always my friend. I'll talk to you soon.
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