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 Governor Tim Walls says Dems need to be a little meaner. He's from the Midwest. We have such a great show for you today. The Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson joins us to discuss elon short lived rain on Doge and what his exit from the District of Columbia means. Then we'll talk to MSNBC's Antonia Hilton about her new NBC News digital doc The Children's Pastor.
But first the news.
Molly so a few times on the show, the news has come right into our own backyard.
And in this time it's really yes.
Many of you have probably seen the news that DHS officials arrested a staffer from Jerry Nidler's office. Temporarily. Prominently in that video is my wife, and the staffer was arrested as a friend of mine and one of the sweetest, most amazing people I know. And I hate very much that this happened to her, because I can't think of anyone I'd rather not happen to more. But obviously this was a very gross misstep. They said they were looking
for rioters. There was no riot going on. There was people protesting the immigration courts where Eric Adams has allowed Christy Nomes DHS to come in and arrest people going in their immigration court dates, which is in the same building as Congressman Nadler's offices. And in the video circulating you can see my wife not allowing them entry without a warrant into the office at first. I think the thing I'd like to say, I'm be curious of your thoughts, Molly.
Is we on a recent episode discussed that Stephen Miller has said that they have to do more arrests and ratchet things up. And this is what happens when you in bolden law enforcement to go even harder, is that you have roast smith steps like this.
Yes, this is so fucked up, And I think that it's important to remember this's a member of Congress, Democrat who represents the majority of Manhattan. So then why are they arresting staffers in a congressman's office. Why are they arresting staffers of a Democratic congressman? And I think the most likely scenario is because they want to intimidate them, right, there's no way these people are writers, right, they are staffers for a member of Congress. So the question is
what does this mean. I mean, you have these are members of the law enforcement trying to intimidate democratic elected and their staff. I think that we see what this is, right, This is autocratic stuff. Right, when you start arresting your political enemy, is just like Bukel does in Venezuela. You are an autocrat. These are autocratic things, right, Just like Trump administration is going to war with Harvard, they are now trying to arrest their political opponents. And I think
that there is a real straight line here. I think we have to be clear eyed. I think we have to understand this is real autocratic stuff. This is not people breaking the law. This doesn't even look like people breaking the law. This looks like people working in an office for a Democratic congressman. And this is not something where it's like we know what this happened. Because Jesse's wife was there.
She's our picture is on every major news website as we speak.
Right, So this isn't like maybe the reporting is wrong, maybe this didn't happen the way they're saying it. Jesse's wife saw it happen.
It's also on video, right, it's.
On video obviously, but it's more like we even know someone where this happened. So we really have like firsthand knowledge of DHS going into the office of a Democratic congressperson who represents much of Manhattan and arresting a member of his staff. Now, in the end, Jerry Nadler was able to explain to these people that they had no basis to arrest a member of his staff. But I think it's important to realize here, this is what's happening
in America. Okay, this is autocracy. This is it's here. Okay, autocracy is here. The war, the Trump administration's war against Harvard, them arresting members of a Democratic congressman's staff, this is here. Autocracy is here. And I think we have to be clear eyed. We have to understand what we're dealing with, and we have to push back in every possible peaceful way we can, because this is we have. The door
has been opened to this. The second Trump administration was the opening of the door to Trump's worst authoritarian instincts. And we have to be really clear eyed about what's happening. We have to push back, we have to fight in nonviolent but important and smart ways and protect ourselves each other and also American democracy.
Yeah, and I should also say I cannot be more proud of my wife for the way she handled this sid what you see her doing that video is exactly what we all have to do if this comes to our door, which is, we have to demand that they use due process and that they don't skirt the law with their tough guy tactics and bluster her. And that's exactly what you see her do there, And I cannot be more proud of what she did.
Yes, Jesse Canon, wife guy, and we love it. We love it, and it happens to be that that wife is awesome. So really happy that we get to celebrate Jesse Cannon's wife guyness, but also that wife happens to be the best. So I'm glad that everybody's safe. And in the end, Jeryndler really did protect his staff, which is really it says a lot of good stuff about
jery Nandler. Despite the fact that I'm mad at him for any number of things in which I'm mad at members of elected I am, in fact, really glad to see this, and that's what we all need to be doing.
Yeah, so Molly in more of our idiocracy news type thing instead of our authoritarian news. Tulsi Gabbert, she's got to do some innovative stuff here as D and I chief, and she's considering ways to revamp Trump's intelligence BRIEFIX to appeal to his absolutely awful attention span.
Yeah, you know, this is again let us file this under Thank god they're idiots, because otherwise we'd all be cooked. And look, we may all end up being cooked. But right now, the biggest problem is that. And again this is Tulsi Gabbert, right, the woman who defended Bisher, right, the butcher of Syria, president of Syria who gots his own people. This guy not a good guy. Telsey Gabbert very dubious, spouts Russian propaganda. Hillary Clinton said she was
a Russian asset. Again, who is to say, but she is the woman who delivers the presidential Daily Brief, which is in itself very worrying. But one of her big problems, because Trump is a moron and she is perhaps compromised, is that Trump eat too interested in the PDB, and so one of the things that they that his staff
has had to do. And this was true in Trump one point zero two is try to get him interested in it, And so Gabbert has figured out that the only way that she can get him interested is to
make it seem like perhaps Fox News. Look again, Fox News hosts are the one thing that has been with both administrations Trump one point o Trump two point zero is that the most powerful people in the world, at least in this moment are Fox News is programmers and bookers, because they are the people who are actually getting Trump's attention.
Yeah, and this is hilarious as there's headlines that say things this week like Trump was not informed of Ukraine attack on Russia. And it's because this we've read these reports so many times that he can't pay attention to these.
Oh boy, so again, Americans may be tuning out, but so is their presence.
Boy well, speaking of tuning out, Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House's Brain, who I don't think it's just so tuned in. He says, four point eight million Americans won't lose Medicaid access unless they choose.
To do so.
Yeah, So they choose to do so, they will. Again, this is the whole thing that they've been doing on the Sunday shows is all of the members of this administration, which I mean, good for them for going on the
Sunday shows, but bad for them for lying. They're lying because look why Mike Johnson is going on Sunday shows right now is because he knows that he needs the Senate to pass the big beautiful bill filled with bullshit the BBBB, the Big Beautiful Bullshit Bill is now it has passed the House and it now needs the Senate. Has been on vacation, but now the Senate is back, and Johnson wants the Senate to pass the one piece
of legislation that this administration is going to pass. This is likely the only thing they'll do by July fourth. It's not going to make this July fourth deadline unless the Senate is completely functions in a totally different way than it has historically, which it may because remember, these people have completely given up their power to Trump, and so Trump was able to whip the House vote very very fast by calling people and yelling at them or
doing something else. I don't know, maybe they were threatening them, who even knows. But now this bill goes to the Senate. The question is will Republican senators be the pathetic, craven opportunists that they were with Trump's cabinet, And the answer is maybe yes, right, I mean, they signed off on things like putting RFK Junior in charge of all of our health, which is why none of us know now
like bird flu, they cured it or maybe they didn't. Right, we don't know what the fuck is going on there because they're not releasing information, you know, and they've still they're no longer recommending the COVID vaccine for pregnant women. So and we all know that COVID can be very, very terrible for pregnant women, right, I mean, we've seen numerous stories about how it's much much worse for pregnant women.
So I don't know what's going to happen here, but they are literally on television lying about what this bill is going to do, at least what the House version of this bill does. Again, these Medicare cuts may get tempered in the Senate, but they may not. I mean, we'll see what this Senate does. Again. You will not lose money betting that Republicans will be cowardly. So there's a likely scenario where Republicans in the Senate rubber stamp Trump's agenda. And by the way, this is the MAGA
agenda in this House bill. So we'll see what happens. But there is literally no evidence to support Republican bravery. Rick Wilson is the founder of the Lincoln Project and the host of the Enemy's List. Welcome back to past politics, Rick Wilson.
Only Jong fast I would ask how you're doing, But I know how you're doing.
I'm doing Okay, we did. We lost port Spartacus yesterday. I had to put him down. Waited maybe a little too long to put him down.
So that was the story with my Riley.
He yeah, you know, he was really in pain and it was.
And that's just not fair. That's just not fair to them. So you need the right thing.
There's a lesson in there to do it, maybe a month or two earlier.
But enough about Elon being fired.
Yes, speaking of which, you see that interview, this CBS interview. Was it CBS where they asked him about his work with destroying the federal government and.
He's like, we're talking about rockets.
We're here to talk about We're not here to talk about all the carnage.
I but apparently we are do you.
Get to turn it on and off like that? Is that?
No? Look, I have some rules about politics that I've always followed and not everybody does. But you treat civilians one way and active combatants in politics another. And he chose to make himself an active combatant in our politics. He chose to put himself in a position where he hurt people, where he deliberately chose to hurt people. And because of that, you don't get to walk back out the door and go, never mind, Hey, I'm sorry I
burned down your village, but let's continue trading. You know, it just doesn't work that way.
It's so funny because it's like we kept thinking right when Trump took office in January, kept saying, you know, we all had a clock going of how long Elon would be interested in federal government play. It turns out it's you know, now again, I think it's worth pausing for a minute and realizing that part of why Elon is making such a big show of leaving is because it is one hundred. You know, it's whatever, the number is,
one hundred and thirty. It is yeah, that where a special government, you know, where he would need technically congressional approval, though this Congress has completely given up any authority, so they might give it to him. But I just think that there, you know, and and again, and there's so much reporting this weekend about this. So and I've talked to actually people who were, you know, talking about how they've put people in as deputy chief of staff and
different federal agencies who are like recent college grads. Oh yeah, So there are a lot of people in these agencies that are just Elon holdovers, and maybe they're ideologically in lined with them, and maybe they're not.
There is a degree to which you can't pretend that Doge hasn't become kind of an infection in the government. These people, it has been a class of people were attracted to work for Elon who are basically these little in cell government terrorists, and they're having fun still and a lot of them have figured out that there's not really a lot of adult supervision in the Trump administration
right now. Even with you On gone, maybe the party's a little less wild every night, but at play in the government, they're still collecting our day in the government.
Yeah, and then of course there's palent here, which is collecting our data which the government as well.
Which I want to say, and I know I know that like the weakest form of teasing the MAGI is
what if Barack Obama did this? But I will tell you, Molly, if Barack Obama or Joe Biden had suggested that a single company that's a major donor to the president's owned by a guy like Peter Thiel, who's a major supporter of the president, collected all government data about every single American citizen to run it through their super secret AI system, Republicans would burn Washington to the ground and blow the
ashes around with a fucking leaf blower. Yeah, it would be, they would go, absolutely say, and by the way, they would be right to do so, a right, they'd be right to do so.
But Democrats would never dare or do something like that.
No, of course not. They would go, wow, there's some civil liberties stuff behind this. Maybe we do not do this, but yeah, And and honestly, a lot of folks in MAGA are are look at the Pallenger thing going wait, what what us wait us to us?
Two?
What you use? I thought it was only the bad people.
It's It's is honestly kind of amazing that there's so much that they're just there's no sense in which they believed any of the stuff they've been saying, right like, And the very few people who have really stood up, and there's very, very vanishingly few are the Libertarians, right, I mean, the the only people Rand Paul, Thomas Massey. I mean, these are not how.
We find ourselves in agreement with Rand Paul more often than not these days.
Because only because ramboll is the only person who's like, this is not okay.
But you know, only and it trickles down everywhere. Mind. They the thing this morning in the Times about the Texas woman who is tracked through a series. There's a company called Flock. Flock. Nobody's ever heard of Flock, but they run a network of AI driven license plate reading cameras around the whole country, and Texas is now using Flock.
These owned by these guys in Atlanta, Georgia. They're using Flock to track women who they suspect of driving out of Texas to get abortions in other states by monitoring their license plate cameras. In what world is the government's too big and needs to stay out of our business? Do you track women down by tracking their license plate across a network of ninety thousand cameras around the country.
Insane. I mean that is insane. That is let me tell you how.
And the flock gives these cameras basically to communities around the country so they can sell the data to other people too.
Yeah. No, no, that's and that is not none of it.
It is like that this intrusion. Pete Water had a great piece about this, like, none of this is conservative, none of this is republican, none of this is small government, none of this is the state has too much power. Now, it's like whatever daddy wants.
No, yeah, yeah, no, I mean it's it's just so crazy. So let's just talk though for a minute about speaking of Donald Trump being in great shape and totally I want to talk about Donald Trump retweeting something.
That oh my god, I know what you're talking about.
Yeah, So I'm going to read sort of a little bit here because I think it's it is so stupid that it should be just we should focus on a two seconds. So, I mean, there's a lot there was a lot of stupid shit. And by the way, a lot of members of the Trump administration lying on the Sunday shows, including the FDA Commissioner making up, you know, stuff about vaccines. We had Russ Vought lying about.
They got Russ Loot out of his hole, though I was kind of amazed by that.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know Russ Vought. We had him saying that he you know, he's still may impound funds. He said, we're not in love with the law. That was a great moment. He also said that Medicaid cuts will not lose coverage. People won't lose coverage. We know that it will be millions of people losing coverage. We had more Jony Earnst double downing, but the one I want to talk about is okay. So Donald Trump retweets something that says that basically that there's no Joe Biden.
He was executed in twenty twenty, and their clones and doubles, robotic engineered soulness, mindless entries are what you see now. Philip Bump, who is a very straight down the middle, very better than even odds that Trump shared this dumb post because he didn't have his glasses on a like the photo not impossible. And now the White House Press Secretary will have to be like experts agree, it's quite possible cyborgs walk across among us, no matter what the fake news claims.
The fact that they are claiming now that Joe Biden is dead and was replaced by an alien cyborg, clone.
Robot whatever, I mean, we don't know that. I mean, Trump definitely retweeted it. But again, try he retweeted it.
And here's the thing, Molly, this actually is a great example and what Bump says there about. You know, Levitt will go out and say the tweet speaks for itself or something to that efface, and she'll get very aggressive. And honestly, most reporters will just shrug and go, oh, okay, he's just being crazy late at night, right, But I think it deserves actually to be spoken about and looked at and reviewed for what it is. It's one more
sign of his disconnection from reality. And it's also one more sign that Trump has always been conscious of throwing little bits of bait out to the weirdest edges of his coalition.
And that feels there.
And I mean, he's got to be worried because Dan Bongino is covering up all the Epstein stuff.
Now wait, say more about that.
Mauga's theory now is that cash Hotel, Dan Bongino and Pam Bondi are secretly redacting all the Epstein stuff because the deep state got to them.
That is really good. I have to say, it's so good. That's a great story and so good. And you know, the reality is you cannot once you get down the rabbit hole here, like in.
Moh No, there's no escaping once once you start thinking that there's a global lizard overlord conspiracy, you know, as Hunter S. Thompson said, you know about about drugs, It's like, you know, once you've gotta stash that big that the temptation just go all in. I'm mangling the quote a little bit, right, but it really is, you know, but
I think I think sometimes you can go back. There have been times, like during the peak of the QAnon stuff, when Trump was in a lot of political trouble, right, he would throw out little things, you know, like I'm the storm and all that shit, right right, And I don't know that we can just dismiss this as a as a a click error on Trump's part, because there is a history of.
Him there is appealing to the cuckoo of his face. Yeah, I do want to also point out that I think that's a really good point. I do think Trump is again the Elon dislodgment is instability. Right, Whether or not he's really gone whatever, who knows what to believe, but there is a certain amount of instability now, I think.
I think the sign that it's gone, that Elon's lost all of his political power is a weird small sign. There was a guy named Jared Isaacman, and I will just say this, in the realm of the Trump administration, Jared Isaacman actually knew what he was going to be doing, like actually had knowledge of space roid so he was gonna be the head of NASA. But he was a friend of Elon's. And so over the weekend Trump killed Isaacman's appointment. He had about seventy five or eighty votes
in the Senate. He was really not a controversial guy. But this is Susie Wiles, as I like to say, settling all family business. She's crying up Elon. She's wanted to kill elonof from the very beginning, right right right.
And by the way, the excuse they used is a great one.
No, I actually hadn't heard the excuse yet.
That he donated to Democrats, and that's why they're cutting him loose.
Trump the guy that gave Hillary Clinton over three hundred thousand dollars when she's running for US Senate.
That guy, that guy said And by the way, then the reporting said, well, but the guy had told Trump that he had donated to Democrats. But Trump didn't care.
Again, so had Steven Schwartzman and Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook and Elon Musk and everybody else. No, I do that that's not why they fired it. They fired because they wouldn't get rid of anybody with an Elon power center that Susie found threatening.
I do think that Trump will continue to torture Zuckerberg and actually, oh yeah, yeah, and there is no world in which Trump is going to forgive zuck I think that's fair. Right.
No, never, Look, he's at war with Tim Cook, who's like the least offensive of the tech guys, that's right, and just been very very neutral about handling Trump and very smart about it. But he's now like Apple has to pay twenty five percent.
In the end, Really is the author of this thesis? How good do you feel about the fact that it really is? Is everything? Trump touches us.
Look like every day that I wish that people believe the part two of.
It, which is.
Because I'm the one who can do you know this, like the abusive boyfriend, things like I can cure him, I can change him, Yeah, can you Yeah? That's that that is That is somebody in abusive relationships. People here, you know that. People, everybody knows a friend who's in an abusive relationship or a bad relationship. It's like, I can change him. It's my fault. No, you can't. Yeah,
And they never realize it. And it's like the illusion and seduction of power is so meaningfully overwhelming to these people. And a lot of the tech people are now using the sort of excuse frame of well, I have to do what's best for my shareholders, and if I just be nice to him, he'll find somebody else to be pissed off that eventually.
I don't riot, I don't definitely not.
It never works that way with Trump. It has never. It has never been that way with Trump. Once you humiliate yourself to him, he hates you more.
It is interesting, though, that it doesn't work. I had been really worried about Elon's seemingly endless financial You know, I had been worried about right Elon Musk piggybank forever the richest man in the world. That seemed like a very you know, a sort of disaster scenario. But it seems like he's just not going to give any more money.
There have been two separate interviews that I've seen, there may be more, the two where he has basically said, I've spent what I'm going to spend, I've done what I'm going to do. I think he is probably extremely bitter right now. If you can't spend three hundred and fifty million dollars and keep Donald Trump on your side, there aren't many people that can have that kind of liquid cash in the universe, right And so if that's not enough to keep Trump as an ally, what what would be?
What do you think about that? I mean, what do you think about is he gone? Will he no longer donate? And also, I mean, like, do you feel better about that now? I mean, he certainly seems like he's not.
There were a lot of major Democratic donors that I've sat with over the last year, well six months, let's call it just since the election, who are like, no matter what, we do. We can't rival Elon. He's gonna go nucas everywhere. And now if I put ten million dollars into this, he'll put twenty or fifty or one hundred. And I think Elon is off the board now in a meaningful way. And that meaningful way is this understanding that Tesla is a doomed brand, right fucked? Tesla is fa fucked?
Right? Well, they were down seventy one percent in the last call, which seems like a lot to me if I'm not a mask. Yeah, it's a real number, seventy one per And the.
Way the way I got banned from Twitter was basically outlining that story. They reacted to the head line. But what I said was if you kill their stock price, Elon can't play these games anymore. Well, their stock prices and the shitter. It's up a little bit now that he's out of the White House, but he has this interlocking set of companies he has to maintain. Tesla has
to do well so he can fund SpaceX. SpaceX has to do well so he can expand Starlink, and which is a which is actually his best business in a lot of ways, non controversial, not politically facing, works great. You know, it's a good product, whereas Tesla's product is old and stale and now has a bad brand. SpaceX. As much as I want it to work out, I think we need good rockets. It hasn't been a straight line from A to B to get them into into
orbit right now. And if she focuses his admittedly formidable intellect on some of these things for a year or two years, he might turn back into the guy, the lovable elon, the nerd who could match things. He got addicted to politics.
I don't think. I don't I actually think that that chip has sailed. I think they may have. Even if he can, in fact pretend to be that person, I don't think it matters. I think that he killed the poorest children in the world. Yeah, I believe me. Yeah.
And I had somebody from Marco World reach out to me today because I tweeted about the death. I was like, proud of yourself, Marco, what's a Marco guy? Reached out and he goes, how dare you take that tone with him? He didn't do that? Did that? I'm like, no, he's pretty good with it though he pulled the trigger.
But I'm curious, like how do you defend that.
You can't defend it. Look, we we're gonna kill three hundred thousand people this year alone, from what the numbers that I've seen. Three hundred thousand people, Molly are going to die because of food and the food that it's going into those countries now, on those bags of rice and lintels and.
Soybas it says Russia.
You know it's in Mandarin. And you've given up not only the moral high ground, but we've given up. We've given up political power in those places where the AID made a difference. We've given up moral power. And Ewon did it because he was pissed off because he thought USAID helped end a part time which it did. Oh well.
Antonia Hilton is the co host of the Weekend on AMASNBC and a producer of the new NBC News digital doc Children's Pastor. Welcome to Fast Politics, Antonio.
Hilton, thanks for having me, Mollie.
Delighted to have you so talk to us about this documentary. How you got here, why you decided to do it.
Yeah, we have been working on this for six months, Mollie.
This is a story about an influential pastor who's now based in Missouri, but who has traveled from state to state in his career, and as he's moved around, he has been dogged by, but never really held accountable for decades worth of allegations, mostly from women, although NBC News has spoken to men as well, and the women alleged that he raped and sexually abused them as children as part of an influential and very popular children's ministry that
he and his wife, Becky Campbell formed in the eighties.
And the through.
Line of this or the purpose of telling this story now is, first, this man is still out there. Pastor Joe Campbell is part of you remember infamous, disgraced televangelist Jim Baker.
Oh yes, very wow.
So he is a member of Jim Baker's televangelist ministry in Missouri and he still runs a camp for children in the Ozarks to this day.
Oh wow.
And so the women that we've spoken to, they have been motivated over the decades to continue to try to tell their stories to friends, to family, clergy members, to law enforcement, often hitting one road block or you know, person who wanted to discredit or not believe them after another, but their real motivation has been the fear that there are more people out there like them who have potentially
been harmed by this person. And for us at NBC and MSNBC, this is kind of exactly the sort of impact and community based reporting that we try to do, you know, whenever you cover a major religious organization. He was a part of the Assemblies of God, which is the largest Pentecostal denomination, incredibly influential denomination here in the US.
You know, there are the political elements, of course, the power, the gender dynamics to it, but there's also simply just the opportunity as reporters to do the right thing and to give a platform a voice to people who have been harmed by or potentially armed by very powerful people for quite a long time, and to bring them back into the frame, to make the people the real human beings at the center of the story kind of you know, off didn't become statistics or just sort of the avatars
of our day to day political conversations. Make them the heart of something. And so that's what this investigation for our team was really about. And I was really honored to get to do this with my good friend and senior investigative reporter here, Mike Kick, Simba, Roberto Daza, and so many others in this building. You know, it's the kind of work, Molly that just reminds me why I grew up wanting to do this in the first place for so long, and why priests like this are so special.
So what has happened since the movie? Like I mean, is there a chance for accountability here?
I think there's a chance for accountability here. NBC News has made exhaustive and extensive efforts to reach Pastor Joe Campbell, to reach his wife Becky, and to reach Jim Baker, the televangelist with whom he works now. We called him, texted him and he had his read receipts on we emailed. Then I made in person visits to the campgrounds this is the camp that he's still runs for kids in the Ozarks in Missouri, and then to the compound the
Jim Baker runs where the Campbell's often live. I spoke to staff at that site, I handed hand to hand delivered a letter with the allegations with an invitation to talk, to sit down, to record an interview, or even just discuss over the phone. And I did the same when I visited the campsite. I left a note for the family there. We have never, at least as of this recording, we have not heard from Pastor Joe Campbell, from any members of his family, or from Jim Baker's ministry to
respond to any of these allegations at all. Molly, I've been on air all week telling our viewers if you have a story about Pastor Joe Campbell, if you have feedback for us, a detail you think we're missing, reach out because we're going to continue reporting this story out.
We know that law enforcement and in states like Oklahoma and Missouri where Pastor Campbell operated, that there are law enforcement that are already in some cases aware of him or are certainly now aware of our So there's opportunity there, But there's also the potential for you know, like I said, he's running a camp for kids exists in the ozarks,
So we want to hear from people. If you have a child who has attended that camp and you need to speak to us, the door is very open, the dms, the emails are open, and that's where I think the impact comes from.
But he's still there. Yeah, yeah, how does that work? I mean, why are people sending their kids there.
You know, that's one of the most interesting challenges or questions I guess as reporters that you kind of meditate on when you're working on a project like this. Right, everyone wants to think, like, if I heard this powerful person that I had befriended or trusted as my pastor, if I heard they even just the rumor that they may be harmed a child in this way, most people would say, I like to think I would call the police, I'd run the other direction, I'd take my kids out, or at.
The very least, I wouldn't send my kids there.
Right, That's the question, certainly the question that at times we've asked people through the course of our reporting. But this pastor, Joe Campbell, was incredibly charismatic, beloved by people in the ministries that he's been a part of, and you know, in many cases, what we found, really a pattern that emerged in our reporting was that so many of the they're now women, but when they were just young girls that he's alleged to have done all this too.
They came from very similar backgrounds and families isolated as children often maybe parent or parents missing from the home, dealing with a lot of poverty in states like Oklahoma or Missouri and depending on the resources of the church, which is so common throughout the United States, by the way, across all denominations, but certainly Pentecostal and Evangelical denominations playing these immense cultural and political roles in their local communities,
distributing aid and food, being a place where kids can consistently come after school to get a warm meal and to hang out with people who are supposed to protect and guide them. And so kids who up in that position where they're dependent on this ministry, it makes it really challenging from what they've told us to then come forward and tell people, oh, the man you love, the man you depend on sometimes for events, support, trips out of states, opportunities, he's been harming me in this way.
And for the women that did try to Carrie Jackson is one. She alleges that he raped and sexually abused her from the ages of nine to twelve. When she came forward, she was brought into a hearing run by a regional office of the Assemblies of God and questioned aggressively by grown men astors in the church. At times, Joe Campbell himself present watching her getting interrogated, asked to do things like describe his naked body. This is a child, and so there's this sort of gut reaction to discredit
children women's voices often. And two, it appears from the reporting, maintain the status quo, sort of continue to believe what you might want to believe about the person that has built your community up and who so many depend on. And even after, you know, shortly after Carrie Jackson's allegations, then another woman named Fadrir Creed, or a girl named
Fader Creed, accuses him. She's brought in essentially as a foster child into his family in Missouri, and within a month of her living there, she alleges he began to sexually abuse her. There was so much evidence that her case moved to trial, but because she was a child and struggled to deal with the pressure, the trauma, and the criticism from her community and her congregants, she ended up not being able to testify and charges were dropped.
But you know, you just you see.
Time time again how people want to not feel uncomfortable and not some of the facts in front of them in order to keep their community, their ministry and maybe even their psyche intact.
It sounds as if there's a certain amount of intimidation going on. As that fair.
I think absolutely the women we've spoken to would tell you that that's the case. Phaedr. Creed, the woman who he allegedly abused in Missouri, talks about how people would follow her in grocery stores, come to her home harassment.
She wanted it.
She was a harlot essentially, and then it actually persisted for years even after charges were dismissed, and you know, she tried to move on with her life and you know certainly wasn't speaking about it regularly. You know, she was trying to build her own life and family. She would still see people who would criticize and attack her, and so I think they would. They would definitely agree with you on that, Molly, and I think it tells
you so much too. I think just about the kind of culture around power, gender and politics in this country that it takes like an entire army of women to come forward with the same patterns and clues photographs. I mean, Carrie, the woman I mentioned in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has childhood diary entries recounting her memory the contemporaneous notes, photographs of Joe and his wife and family, and the need to have like this tsunami of evidence to even have a chance
at being believed. Yeah, it's astounding, but I think there's a reason that pattern repeats in our country, whether you're talking about these religious cases of abuse like this one, or you're talking about like the Diddy trial, which we're all watching unfold.
Yeah, the Diddy trial is a great example of that, because that is a situation too where the woman who is testifying talk to us about that, because that's a similar scenario.
Yeah.
I have been following my friends here at NBCNMSNBC all there reporting from the courtroom, and I think there's sort of two sides of this story that have emerged. And I think in a lot of cases, the media, and I mean that very broadly, like news organizations, gossip organizations, social media sites like Instagram, accounts like the Shade Room,
so big picture media. There's a lot of attention on the salacious details, the drugs that were used, the lubricants and baby oils, the freak offs, and I don't see a lot of people very publicly at least engaging in what I think the real story is, which is a story about race, power and gender, about how hard it is when someone is an icon in a specific community who has achieved things many people in that community thought
were simply impossible. I mean, this is sort of a cosbisque story, right, where this person has done the impossible, innovated in this in his field, and created careers and lives for so many people, or just simply bands have
a certain emotional attachment to them and their music. And then this alternative story and video, right because of the infamous twenty sixteen hotel video we've now all seen of how did he was physically abusing Cassie at that time, It's hard for people to make sense of that, and so it seems like they then want to focus instead of having the conversation about what it says about all of us that we allowed someone like this to perhaps operate in our myths, that we celebrated, that we gave
them money, that we elevated them, that they had access to people in the cultural and political spheres all over our country and world, instead of kind of interrogating what that says about all of us, that instead we want to focus on the grimiest and most salacious parts of the story, and you see the same patterns of people saying, well, Cassie, it was a techar relationship, she must have liked it.
Why did she stick around the same kinds of questions that the women I spoke to in communities in Oklahoma and Missouri and now in Tennessee they were asked the same questions back in the seventies, eighties and beyond that now are being asked of Cassie. And there's something so disturbing to me about that we repeat the same mistakes, we have the same conversations over again, and then perhaps we don't learn anything new.
I mean, I also just wonder, like the whole theory of the case with Ditty, from what I understand and again, is just that somehow their relationship negates these the volatile nature of their relationship, somehow undermines these allegations, which in my mind is just a non starter. Right, you can have crazy relationships and still do bad stuff. Like the idea that one thing can be true ergo nothing else is true seems wild to me.
Yeah, I mean, I spent a lot of time talking to mental health practitioners and doctors as part of another side of my reporting, which I have covered a lot of the history of mental health treatment in the US, and basically every expert in that field describes cases like Cassie's is actually really familiar to them, like textbook kind of familiar, where you know, there's a grooming process, someone testing boundaries, and there is the confusion about like love
and dependence and codependence. And I think people think once she says something like well I loved him that, then that means she totally signed up for and understood, you know, what this relationship was, and therefore you know she needs to be held accountable for that. You know, very often victims of all kinds of abuse actually have a lot of love and affection and empathy and attachment to the people who've inflicted and enacted that upon them. It's not abnormal,
that's not the outlier. That is the norm. And so I know that there are a lot of journalists hoping because the other dimension of this case, right is a lot of people saying, well, like, maybe this is just domestic violence and there's not the whole reco case that the federal government is supposed to be making here right now.
Well, I think.
Key to that to a lot of people would be, well, you're gonna have to bring in experts who make that make all of this make sense for people. You know, I don't think the average person can be expected to understand the way that PTSG and trauma function. And that's okay, So how do you demonstrate that? How do you make
sure people are having responsible conversations about that? And then the question for us is like, well, how do we cover it and what kinds of voices do we bring on air so that it's not oh, again, all the attention on there was a freak off that lasted four days. I've heard that a million times this week.
Right, are you surprised at how much me too has sort of we went from no me too to you know a lot of looking at men's behavior. There's been so much backlash to backlash to backlash, and now we're in another cycle of backlash where if you loved the person, they couldn't have done anything bad to you, which is like, we all know that's insane. So are you surprised at how much the culture has sort of dictated what is
a crime and what is not a crime. Because eighteen months ago you pinched someone's butt, and you could lose your job. And now we have people who are running orgies and god knows what else being said that it's okay because they loved the person, right.
I wish I could tell you, Molly that I'm that I'm surprised, but I remember, so, you know, a lot of my job at MSNBC the last three to five years has been covering the culture war in schools, book banning, the anti CRT movement anti and I remember while covering the George Floyd protests, like literally leaving protests in downtown
Brooklyn and calling my mom and talking to her. And my mom is a lawyer and a professor, and she's the daughter of two civil rights activists, and I remember her saying to me, there will be a backlash to this. You know, this moment where you know people are asking these questions and they're you know, buying black authors books and.
They're right right elevating.
You just know there's going to be a moment where they get real tired of doing that and the pendulum swing back in the other direction. I remember being, oh yeah, and she was like that because that's what history tells us, so now we're living it, and that applies to everything from like the almost four hundred books banned from the Naval Academy a couple to the conversation the transpiring now around the Diddy trial. I see all of that as connected, and so in some ways it's not a surprise at all.
But I do sometimes think that all of us, like we get overwhelmed and we forget to connect the dots for people about like where we are in the stage of the backlash and what specifically some of these like movements and counter movements are truly about, and using plain language to really describe it. I like constantly like reevaluate for myself, like before I'm doing a ninety second hit on a MSNBC or I'm working on a long term investigation like this one with a ton of colleagues on
this specific you know pastor in this church. How do I use my language really careful and effectively. How do I think about my responsibility to the people that I'm reporting on, And how do I use every opportunity every new story I do to obviously tell the truest and most direct and effective story I can, but also use it in a way to like repair relationships and bring more clarity to the communities that I visit and I
drop into. I think too often, like a lot of that just kind of falls to the side and the daily like rush and panic and hair on fire stuff. But like, I really try to catch myself to be
better about that. And for me, it really began with that phone call with my mom when I was saving a George Floyd postest, which she was like, you're like, right now, you're on you think you're like a hot moment, but you're actually like part of a very long timeline here, and keep track of where you are and make sense of that for the people you're talking to too.
Yeah, And I think that is the big question, is sort of how do we protect vulnerable people? Right because for us whatever, But for these women and for these victims, that's another story. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm such a fan of yours.
Interviewers, Molly, thank you for having me really great.
Thank you.
No, no moment.
Fuck Rick Wilson. Can we talk about your moment of fuck ray?
I think we could talk about my moment of fuckery. My moment of fuckery was the reaction on Sunday morning by a lot of magas to this absolutely fucking genius, top secret, brilliant plan that Ukraine pulled off where they shipped attack drones all over Russia hidden in semi trucks and took out about forty percent of Russia's air force today bomber air force, the bombers that were striking Ukraine
every single night and killing civilians. And the reaction by MAGA was, how dare they not inform Donald Trump in advance? How dare they escalate this conflict like this? I'm like, fuck off. Two and a half years of Russia Nuki are not nuking but but bombing the shit out of civilian targets in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians strike back with this brilliant plan. It took them a year and a half to hatch it. Nobody in trumperl can keep a secret for an hour and a half, much less a
year and a half. So I'm glad they didn't tell Trump's people. But the modern reaction to it has been amazing to me. It's like, oh, I'm sorry, poor Russia, They're the victim in this. Poor Donald Trump's the victim in it.
Uh sure, thank you, Rick Wilson.
As always, I will talk to you again. Soon.
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.