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 Ron DeSantis has signed a bill ending permanent alimony. We're back from vacation. Did you have a great vacation. We did not really do anything, but we had a great vacation and we have a fabulous show for you today. Christina Ramirez, president of Next Gen America, talks to us about young voters so important in the
twenty twenty four election. Then we'll talk to the Enigma of Clarence Thomas author Corey Robbin about the latest.
Fuckory in the Supreme Court.
But first we have the host of the Enemy's List, the one, the Only fan.
Favorite, the Lincoln Projects, Rick Wilson.
Welcome back, too, Fast Politics, fan favorite, personal friend of mine, the one the Only Rick Wilson.
Mollie John Fast, How are you on this fine Sunday afternoon.
Now, look, it's a weekend of a little bit of fuckery, a little bit of craziness, some fucker Republican candidates pretending everything is fine, and this is just saying it's fine.
Molly, what's the problem. What's the problem? What do you mean.
Normally there's only seventy one cal.
I mean, he's twice impeached, he's twice indicted federally, state level. I mean, you know, he's just a normal Republican candidate and he might not even get the nomination. Right.
But Molly, but Molly, you're ignoring the national crisis. Joe Biden wore a pair of swim trunks with turtles on them.
Any wore sneakers with tiny socks.
Yeah, I'm sure you're not paying attention to the crisis this has caused around the world because beachwear gate, Because beachwear gate is clearly it clearly says so much about America right now. Obviously it's a sign that he's trying to show solidarity with the global forces of cookery.
Here's the problem with beachwear.
Gate, aside from all the others, besides for how stupid this is. I mean, he was on the beach. He was not wearing a shirt. I guess that's the problem. Biden was on the beach in Delaware. There were the RNC posted the picture and said, Joe Biden has taken seven thousand vacation days or whatever, thirty four of me whatever, the numbers were.
But here's the problem.
He I mean, unless something enormous happens, he will be running against a guy who basically lived in Palm Beach for the winter.
Yes, the vacation day's argument does not work.
Are you sure.
I hate to disappoint all the Trump world political geniuses, and by political geniuses, I mean fucking morons, but this is not an argument that is going to work for y'all. It does not work. I'm sorry. I know that most of you are basically windows licking people who you like to have your gruels served served at room temperature. But
it doesn't work. This is not going to solve your political problem that you're that you're that your candidate is a goddamn weird Palm Beach fifty percent of the time spins on the golf.
Course crimes, who and who does crimes?
And I'm sorry, call me crazy, But the other thing they tried to jack into some sort of like Meja Skanda this week was then some more on lifting any bitty bag of cocaine somewhere in the visitor center of the White House. And I'm like, oh yeah, come on, as I said to somebody, it's like, oh, it was about Laura Trump. Laura was like, I'm like, listen, what did you think that Don Junior just had bad pollen allergies? Get the fuck out of here.
Well, I want to talk about the cocaine cocaine Gate. Cocaine found in the West Wing in area where people tour. I was there a couple of weeks ago. It's not mine, I'm yours.
I was nineteen.
I know you, but I do want to say it's not Joe Biden's. We can say we know it's not Joe Biden's. I'm sorry, but there are many There have been many presidents in my lifetime where we could not totally foresure say that some presidents that you might have even had relationships with.
I'm just saying I.
Will tell you this. I think there's a zero percent chance that w did cocaine while he was in the White House.
I'm not accusing anyone, but I'm just saying that, you know, this is a president where we know he doesn't drink, he's incredibly old, he doesn't do cocaine.
If nothing else we have.
That, Yeah, I mean I'm sure that I'm sure the big, the big drug bust on Joe Biden's probably the occasional B twelve shot.
Right exactly twelve.
And I think, I mean, I think, look, B twelve is a very serious drug and if you find it, called the police right away. But I want to get back to this. Another thing that happened this weekend was run on to Santis as you.
Know him, meet a Ron Ronda Sanchez.
Ronda sanctimonious, as Jason Miller calls him in playbooks.
This weekend has just been skirting along the skidding.
Along the bottom I have I'm making by the way, for those of you because this is an audio podcast and we don't have a video component yet. Do you want a video component? Send CHESSI canon messages on Instagram. You can find his instagram. It just takes a little bit of doing, but I'm sure you can find it. So we're skidding along the bottom here, Ron DeSantis, he says, in fact, he you know, he gives a mainstream media quote.
He you know, he avoids the mainstream media because he hates the liberal media.
That's a narrative, Molly, That's just a narrative. Yes, he says, that's an every time he gets any kind of question or criticism, that the nertive. I'm like, no, Moron, it's a fucking question, Jesus.
But also it does happen to be a narrative, that is correct.
Some narratives happen to true, Ron, that's right.
I mean, I think this is a narrative, and it's a narrative for a reason, because it's what's happening.
Right. A narrative is a description of the events as they occur. Ron, perhaps this is what's occurring. You're getting your shit handed to you because as a candidate, you are a like one hundred hitter. You are a bad candidate.
God, he's a bad candidate.
Thank God he's a bad candidate, because he's a very good autocrat.
The interesting thing in Florida, I'll give your audience a little bit of a little bit of.
Dish, Yes, give us some Florida gop dish, since you know a lot of Florida geopick.
I was with a bunch of lobbyists last night in the Great State of Florida.
Again again the night before and.
The night before, but last night, and it's interesting because suddenly people are chit chatting again. Basically, the feeling is this, Ron DeSantis bet the entire house, and everybody wanted to stay safe from his budget. Veto's right because in lord of the governor has a line on a vito, but only for the budget so he can fuck people really badly. And DeSantis went ahead and did that to anybody who endorsed Trump or wasn't like cooperative enough with him, or
wasn't he wasn't like his little bitch boys. Well, here's the thing. This the political climate. You knowing, Nothing turns politicians to hate more than weakness, and the perception that this guy is suddenly weak and pathetic and lame and not the twenty seven foot tall, solid titanium giant killer that he pretended to be is biting in. Yeah, we're also hearing out in the rest of the country, not
just in Florida. So, by the way, what'll happen is he'll come back here and try to try this strong arm shit again, and people will be like, no, fuck off, I would like my donations from Disney to come back, you know. And a lot of these guys get a lot of money from Disney, okay, and from all these other people that he fucked over. And I just want to tell your audience one more time. Ron Desanta has just signed a bill. If you want to talk about
a guy who is so fucking disconnected. There's an industry in Florida called the phosphate industry. They mind phosphate. It produces in the course of doing this a low level radioactive waste. Okay, now right, radioactive waste, bad all around, low level, but still he signed a bill allowing the phosphate industry to now use the radioactive waste that they
produce in building roads in the state of Florida. So once again, he signed a bill to allow the phosphate industry to use the radioactive waste that they produce in building roads in the state of Florida. I'm sorry, because what dirt is too fucking expensive, because concrete is so you have to have radioactive waste in the work. I mean, we were already a state full of enough fucking mutants without radioactive roads.
I mean, think about what's going to happen to your alligators.
Right, I mean those some bitches are going to get to be like forty feet long, and they're gonna have conversations. They're going to get opposable thumbs, right.
I feel like I saw this movie.
The whole thing is it's like a mad Max radioactive waste shit show. But he's just so bad. He's so bad at governing. He's good at being an authoritarian punk, and he's good at hurting people.
Right, I want to pull on a thread here and not plug my threads account, So Elon Musk, because I think these two things sort of relate to each other. Elon Musk decided he was going to buy Twitter and sort of remake the mainstream media, right, I mean that was what was coming from behind. He said, we don't need this stupid NPR. We don't need this stupid you know mainstream. We don't need Vanny Fair. What we need are citizen journalists like you know, these sort of disgraced
crypto bros or the crass and Steins. Those are going to be our journalists. We're going to remake the mainstream media. And he got going on it, he got all his tech brosen and it didn't work, right, I mean, it just didn't work.
Call me crazy, Call me crazy that the decline of Twitter and the arrival of Tucker Carlson happened almost simultaneously.
You So, Tucker's numbers have gone way down to I have.
And when Tucker's numbers started to tank, it wasn't just that he didn't have the Fox ecosystem. It's that the place he chose to do it has been so fundamentally
broken by Elon Musk's terrible business decisions. The fact that he believed that he was going to I'm going to level the playing field between as I said on threats today, like an account called you know Cuckmaster six sixty six versus you know you or me or anybody else who's in media journalism politics, who is actually you know, talking by and large and broadly about ideas and occurrences and
events and news. The fact that he deliberately algorithmically elevated the worst fucking trolls in in the world and up a system where if you were a mouth breathing, mildew trailer bubba dumbfuck from ass Lick, Arkansas, you could get a blue.
Really getting peak Rick, we are right.
Now because I am on my shit. If you gave that person a blue check mark and therefore algorithmically elevated them for eight dollars a month. The idea he had that is it wouldn't affect the rest of the human beings who use Twitter, and they all have basically said, God, this plays stinks like a damn dead hooker and I'm in the trunk of a pento. It's just awful. Twitter is. It's insufferable these days because the algorithmic elevation of the worst of the worst was done to troll people like us.
Okay, it reminds me of Clubhouse. When I joined Clubhouse, it had this sort of you know, you would go, you'd hear occasionally a celebrity talk, and you think it was pretty interesting. And then what happened was Clubhouse is they would just make all their investors huge, so they got this supported, and then it became all their investors who nobody really cared about because they're not famous or notable people.
But I want to tie this.
So Elon tried to come after the mainstream media, and you know, there was nothing wrong with innovation per se. But what I want to come back to is Ron DeSantis. DeSantis had a similar kind of thing where he would not give interviews to anyone who wasn't a sort of astro turfed fake site.
Do you think that has ultimately actually hurt him?
Yes. Look, here's the thing he and Florida in particular. Will not speak to traditional media. He won't talk to the Associated Press or the SAP Times, Miami Herald, Orlando Sentinel. He won't talk to reporters. He does not talk to them. He will not talk to Peter Shorsha Florida Politics, the largest political website in Florida by an order of magnitude.
He will, however, talk to like Real Florida, Maga, Red State, Red State Voice, and you know Epstein Today News and all these like you know, all these crazy ass edge case. There's one called Florida's Voice, which is run by a bunch of people who are like, you know, Ben Shapiro is my role model. It's just it's just amazing. And the problem with it all is that it made him weak.
It made him a weaker candidate on the stump, because, you know what, you don't actually get to go and play the game by your own rules when you're campaigning for president. There are actually reporters there and if you still, if you don't answer their questions, you know what they're gonna do. They're gonna report whatever the fuck they want about you, and they're going to report the truth because
Desantas made himself weak. He made himself into an athlete who was not trained for the business of politics in America in twenty twenty five three. And you have got to be able to go out and take a punch and give a punch. You've got to be able to go out and answer questions. And you've got to be able, more than anything to understand that the fantasy bubble you create in your head is not real. The line of bs you're selling yourself or your donors are, your maniacal
wife is not real. And so so as he's collided more and more with the fact that his numbers have gone down. Remember when he.
Started, right, he was the hope, he was the great home.
He was the golden child.
Right.
It was basically and our survey about a year ago, now well nine months ago, nine months ago, the first I think nine months goes when we sort of paying attention, like with our big survey, Trump was at fifty one and he was at thirty.
Six, right, and it was like could happen?
And now Trump is it like in our numbers at like fifty six and Desanta's is at fourteen. What's happening? Three things are happening.
Tell us.
First off, there's an old phrase in advertising that you can't sell bad dog food with good advertising because the dogs don't see the advertising, but they do taste the food. So you can go out and pretend Rond de Santis is the second Coming and he's this great leader and all this other stuff.
But people have met him before.
But when you sit him down in a room and ask him questions and he gets pissy and cranky and weird because he's weird, it starts to drop off when the mega donors are in these rooms and they're like, yes, obviously, well what will happen is he'll get one hundred million dollars that it will clear the field. Donald Trump will realize that Rond de Santis is so powerful and he'll leave the race. It's all fantasy.
It is a very nice fantasy for them.
I mean not for us and not for American democracy, but it's nice that they felt they could still love a candidate who wasn't Donald Trump and who was so bad at retail politics.
I want one more minute.
I know we're doing this too long, but you and I really do truly hate DeSantis.
Truly hate is the wrong word.
No, it's not. I actually hate him because he's a shir He's a bad person and a bad candidate.
I just want to say that I thought he was one really dangerous guy, and so I feel very believed that he's crashing and burning because I think he's a really scary guy. But I just I want to say one last thing about him, which is that video.
And it struck me.
I think I've mentioned this before, Jesse, tell me if I have, actually don't, it's fine. But when people met him and he said okay, like, Hi, I'm Joe, and he said okay, like that is not good retail politics.
No, he's not good. Set aside my visceral dislike for him because he is what I call an unlimited government conservative. He believes in using the power of the state to hurt his political enemies. And as a person who believes that the state is a source many times of danger and overreach. That's not even a mistake, that's a lot of times it overreaches by miss and stupidity and whatever. This is a deliberate embrace of a philosophy of using the power of the government to harm people, and he's
done it a lot. It's not just Disney, it's not just teachers, it's not just drag queens. This is a guy trying to use the power of his office to cause fear, pain, intimidation, and hurt. And I think that's the lowest sort of political traveler that come up. Ace he's experiencing is very satisfying. I don't I'm not going to take my eyes off him yet. Trump could still, you know, have an aneurysm. But I will also say he is. He is now also attracting something that everyone
who's in real politics has observed before. All these mega donors are calling him now all the time, fix your campaign, Fix your campaign.
Yes, that must be a fun experience. Have you had that experience.
Ever, you know, Molly, I have been on both ends of that equation. I've been on the I've been on the end of the equation where they where I'm the guy who gets brought in after they fix the campaign. I've been the guy on the other side of it.
Not a good feeling, right, No, oh no, No, it's not a good feeling.
It's not a good phone call.
It's a dangerous phone call because if you don't turn it around immediately, the money cuts off. And by the way, that's what's happening with the big guys right now. There's a slow drain off of him with the major candidates. Some of them are like, well, I guess we'll get Christy some money. But Jeff Row the guy he brought in to run a Weber.
Pack, the guy that Puck News made famous for some unknown reason, Yes, who.
Spent one hundred million dollars of donor money last year on eleven candidates and elected one of them. So good ratio, bro. My understanding is that after the weird serial killer homo erotic Ron DeSantis.
Yes, we're talking so for those who do not completely know Rick Wilson Shorthand, we are talking about a video that Ron DeSantis's campaign posted that was very anti gay but also very sexy.
Creepily homo erotic and associated him with criminals and Patrick Bateman, the famous serial killer.
Yes, it was a very strange video.
Very strange.
Yeah.
My understanding is that Casey DeSantis's reaction to that was not good. And by not good, I mean I'm going to use a word that is not in common parlance anymore, but it was used when they were tearing whales apart on ships. There it is flensing f l E and s I in g flinsing. I understand that there was that there was some flensing afoot during that entire period. Because here's the dirty secret of Casey DeSantis. She's playing the role of moms for Liberty, like Mini Van Taliban
all that other stuff. But she desperately, desperately, desperately wants to go to Washington, d C. And be invited to swink little soirees the homes of Temmy Haddad and Julianna Glover, and.
She has the opera gloves for it.
She wants the opera gloves. She wants the Kennedy Center, she wants to be invited to Fashion Week. She wants all that stuff. That's what she wants. And now she's starting to realize that the path they're pursuing to get there, there's no way to sent her back, there's no way to swing back to the middle. After you've been somebody who's like, we're going to run an half that says we're going to end the gay way of life. Oh that doesn't sound bothers him at all.
Rick Wilson is, will you please come back very soon? You know, I will Christina Ramirez as president at next Gen America.
Welcome to Fast Politics. Christina, thanks so much for having me. Can you explain to us what next Jane is?
Yeah?
So, next Gen America is the country's largest youth organization. In the last presidential race in twenty twenty, we help mobilize one in nine young voters across the country, leading to the largest youth voter turnout in American history and
helping elect Joe Biden and send Donald Trump packing. We focus on young people because they are the largest, the most progressive, and the most diverse generation in American history, and we believe they have the power to remake American politics and save democracy.
So explain to me what that looks like. Yeah.
So, we organize young people anywhere and everywhere we can, so we will in this upcoming presidential race. We will be on hundreds of college campuses and battleground states talking to young voters, making sure they're registered and get them pledged to vote. We will have a volunteer army of close to thirty thousand volunteers that will help us send tens of millions of calls and text to young people
in states. They'll even hop on dating apps because we can search by age, geography, and you can even seek people's political persuasions. And we will also organize with and mobilize influencers across the country, including college athletes, to mobilize young people. So anywhere and everywhere that young people are, both in real life and online, we will try and be to make sure that they make their voices heard and turn out and record them.
Say more about the dating apps.
During COVID, when everything went virtual, there was a huge increase in people using dating apps, so a ninety percent increase in people using dating apps. And we have always been trying to figure out new ways to reach young people.
Where are young people congregating?
Where are they meeting? And so we knew that they were meeting on dating apps and dating apps in some ways you would think were set up just for organizing. Because we can search again by age, if we want to find someone a young voter in Wisconsin, we can search by gender. We can talk to them. Also if we want to talk to young queer voters, you know right now is Pride month. For example, in ninety three percent of young queer voters, of which one in four
young people identify as voted for progressive candidates. We are an explicitly progressive organization, so our volunteers will have real life conversations in dating apps, telling young people about what their voting plans are, making sure they're ready to vote. No, we're not trying to catfish anyone. No one shows up to their first DAID in surprise it's a location or anything.
But we will talk to people about issues that they care about and just make sure that they're ready to vote in the upcoming elections.
Explain to me a little bit about what you are going to do in twenty four and what that's going to look like.
I think everybody knows this is going to be a huge, huge election. Our organization has been around for ten years. We were started a decade ago with the premise that if we could organize young people to scale, we could take on one of the biggest challenges that our country faces, which is the climate crisis. And I'll tell you ten years ago, most political strategists thought it was a waste
of time and money to focus on young people. And it's ten years later, We've had three consecutive elections with historic youth voter turnout, and we want to keep up that momentum. At next Gen America, we endorsed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and we endorse them because no administration has done more to deliver on progressive policy change. When they were talking about climate change, student debt, gun safety reform,
gay marriage, and the list goes on. That is why we endorse this administration so early, because for us, it's not enough about a party or any single one politician. It really comes down to policy that helps make young people's lives better. So we're going to be doing everything we can to talk to and connect to young people to make sure they know what's at stake this election
and help millions of them. We'll be contacting ten point five million young people roughly across nine states to try and turn them out this election.
What do you think?
I mean, it's interesting because it's like we've seen a lot of people on the right. They know that young people, they are Democrats, they do not respond to this sort of Republican oligarchy, and you're seeing like real beginnings of anxiety when it comes to conservatives.
I'm just curious, like this is a theory you.
Guys have had for a while, but it's only recently that that young people have really kind of delivered. Why do you think that is.
Well, there's several It is true Republicans are now reaching fever pitch about young voters because they are voting so overwhelmingly for Democrats, and that is not historically the case. Up until about two thousand and four, Republicans and Democrats pretty evenly split the youth vote. And today you see that young people you count Gen Z and millennials, they are now the largest voting block and they are clearly repulsed by the Republican Party. And the Republican Party has
a few choices. They can change their policies to answer to a very progressive generation. Of course they're not doing that. Instead, they're going full throttle on policies to further exclude a very young queer, a very diverse generation, and also make it much harder for them to vote. But like I said, our organization has been around for ten years. There have been other projects, but there's been very little investment from progressives or conservatives into young voters, and so it's taken time.
In some of the states that we're in, we've seen the youth vote share increase over six years, eight years, some clients ten years. Because this is electorate where a lot of candidates and campaigns are not going to put the money and time into talking to young voters because
they are new or infrequent voters. And so what we've been able to prove in a place like Pennsylvania where we've been for since twenty sixteen is if you invest and start registering and engaging young voters early, that over time they will turn out that It's not a question. This is not young people are not apathetic. This is
actually the most civically engaged generation in American history. It's about putting time and money into young people and then again delivering on progressive policy because that is ultimately what young people care about. They are voting overwhelmingly for Democrats, but a huge percentage of them actually see themselves as independents, even though how they vote is not necessarily the case.
So basically, you're saying, if you treat young people the way you treat other voters, right, if you they'll behave the way other voters behave.
Right. If you spend time and money engaging with young people, guess what they turn out? And there's a whole lot of young voters. Like I said, there's seventy million young eligible voters from when Biden and Harris took the presidency in twenty twenty. By twenty twenty four, there will be seventeen million young people that will have turned eighteen in that time period. That is a huge number of young people that have become eligible to vote just in this short time period.
So I want to ask you.
One of the things that the pundit industrial complex is quite passionate about is this idea that even though Biden's been this wildly successful president and he's achieved a lot of progressive victories and infrastructure and this, and that people.
Think he's too old. What do you think about that?
You know, there's several things. One I think for young people, we get asked this question all the time, and I like to remind political pundits that it is true that in twenty twenty, Joe Biden was not the candidate of young voters, but it was the guy that was actually even older than him that was the candidate, which was Bernie Sanders. So it really had nothing to do with agent,
had everything to do with progressive policy. And what drives me crazy about the political pundit class that talks about Joe Biden's age is that they often forget to mention Trump's age. I mean, he is no spring chicken himself. And to me, honestly, it wouldn't matter if Donald Trump, and I think the a lot of young people understand this too, if Donald Trump was fifty years younger than Joe Biden, because his policies feel straight out of the
nineteen fifties. That whether you are talking about women's rights, abortion, LGBTQ equality, climate change, gun safety, legislation, race in America, on any single issue, it is day and night between the two candidates. And we don't want to go backwards. Young people do not want to go backwards. We want to go forward, and there is only one candidate on the ticket in the Democratic Party that wants to do that.
One of the things we're seeing conservatives do is try I mean, I think they're pretty convinced that Donald Trump is going to be the GOP candidate, and I think they're pretty worried. One of the things we're seeing is they're trying to prop up third party candidate. It's like RFK Junior. I mean, do you think that young people that that kind of anti vacs, anti science stuff speaks to young people.
I don't know that.
I don't the number rate when we talk about young people. Young people are not a monoliths, but like, what are the key patterns? Right? Young people overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. You know, depending on the race or state, you're talking at least like sixty two to sometimes even like seventy five percent of the young people in certain races have been voting for Democrats. That's how John Fetterman got elected
and flipped that seat in the Senate. That's how we were able to protect Warnock seat, and Georgia and Senator Cortez Matsto and Nevada. Young voters really came through the idea, right, is that they can shave off margins with third party candidates. I think the other thing is that where I do think Democrats worry me is that one they may not invest in young people because they're going to be an afterthought.
They know they need them, but they also still have long held beliefs about young people that are untrue, right, that young people don't turn out that they're not reliable. Or also as young people get older, they get more conservative anyway, which is actually the data saying is not true, especially for older millennials. And then I think we have to really take seriously, even more so than the third party candidates, is voter suppression that will be targeted at
young people. I am very worried about local county election administrators in Republican places where there are big colleges all of a sudden when they announce where they're going to have polling locations in twenty twenty four before the election, and there's going to be a bunch of countings that no longer have those college polling locations available. And that
is very diffuse. It's very difficult to attack through litigation and fight back against and so we're going to have to have a whole strategy as progressives about what we do and how we do rapid response, not if that happens, but when that happens.
Right it makes sense. I want to ask you, what are the things that kind of keep you up at.
Night at next gen? We have always so we don't put our hope in any single one politician or party. We put our hope in America's young people. But it very very much keeps me up and worries me. One how Republicans and the far right will attack young voters' power. Two, that we have made big progress on climate change, the most existential crisis of our time, and that if Republicans gain power, they will roll back the gains we have made. We need to continue to make gains, not be fighting
to hold on to what little we've gained. And the last part is that we've also seen what they have done long term. The fact that you know this coming week is the year a year to the date when we saw the reversal and overturning of Roe v. Wade, an abortion access limited to tens of millions of peace people, and going back fifty years overnight, they can continue to do that on many issues, and so I think this is a very pissed off generation as well. They should be.
They're exercising their power. But it worries me that how far Republicans will go to limit that power, and also how sleepy sometimes Democrats may remain to invest in that power.
When you're sort of looking on the horizon, what states do you feel like Democrats could sort of change a narrative in.
There has been big shifts right Like we look at Georgia, we look at Arizona. Arizona very young state. A lot of what changed Arizona, which I don't think it's told enough, and the narrative is especially a lot of young Latinos organizing in that state, building that electorate over time. And then the big battleground states we know will prove in
twenty twenty four. We know we need to be in Pennsylvania, we know we need to be in Arizona, Georgia, in Wisconsin, Nevada, But also where can we shift the map long term?
Had we gone back six years ago and said to Democratic political strategists that Georgia was going to be at Bellweather and be able to determine the outcome of the rest of the country for the Senate, for the presidency, people would have laughed at that and not shifted because of people like Stacy Abrams of nze Ufut who did the hard work of registering and organizing voters that most people ignored. So you know, I also live in my home state of Texas, where it's the third youngest state
in the country. One in three eligible voters is under the age of thirty. It's also one of the most diverse places we have to be willing to make long term investments in changing states and understand that demographics are not destiny. They're simply a core ingredient and the recipe for change.
Do you think Texas is a pipe dream for Democrats one percent?
I do not think that. I think it's a big state and it's a big prize and that Republicans know they need to hang on to it. Again, That's why I say demographics are not destiny. But like in Texas,
half of the people turning eighteen are Latino. If you talk about and then if you look at the fact that only Utah and Alaska are younger, and that you have hundreds of thousands of people moving into the state from more progressive states California, for example, there are big shifts happening, but you have to make investment in those demographics. And so there has been a lot one and shifted
in Texas. But I think where we fail on the left as we expect things to change overnight, and we also don't often invest in the exact communities we need to change. Especially you know, when you talk about the Latino population, which is critical to changing Texas, the fact that you know, our most common age for white Americans is age fifty five in the United States. For African Americans it's twenty seven. For Latinos it's age eleven. So if you want to change Texas, you have to invest
in young people of color. And guess which voters are the ones that Democrats and all candidates invest the least in young people of color.
I'm so interesting.
And what would you say to people who say that, like the Tino vote, Democrats are having trouble with the Latino vote.
Yeah, I think about you know in my state, especially in South Texas gets pointed to in Florida.
That's right.
The Latino vote is not monolith it. People ask me all the time, you know in Texas our Latinos Republicans or Democrats, And I say, we're neither.
We're poor.
And who comes and speaks to our pain and what we face and our pain will win our vote. So in the Valley you have counties we're during the Democratic primary long term held by Democrats. Bernie Sanders won those counties hands down during the twenty twenty Democratic primary because he spent a lot of time and my he's talking about fifteen dollars an hour supporting unions, making sure there was access to higher education for everyone, basic bread and
butter issues to make people's lives better. And then you had Trump come in and win because Trump put in money. I think you can see it as there is still Latinos are overwhelmingly Democratic, but there's a portion of the Latino vote for up that's up for grabs. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. I think that that means Democrats have to do a better job, and that
they have to lead with strong economic populist messaging. Because most Latinos make under are the ethnic group that are least likely to make more than fifteen dollars an hour, are the least likely to have healthcare, the least likely to go to college. So speak to that pain and you will win the Latino vote.
You know, we have this very tight labor market. We have children working in factories. We have Republicans trying to ease child labor laws so that they can have children working in factories. Are you surprised that there isn't more interest in a path to citizenship?
So I spent my first job. I spent a decade across Texas organizing mostly undocumented construction workers, and I spent years believing. I remember participating in the two thousand and six mega marches, and for people that don't remember, those were up until the uprisings that happened around Black Lives Matter, those were the largest marches that had happened in US history.
And strikes of day long strikes by millions of undocumented workers striking, and I believed when I was young that with so many people striking and so many people mobilizing, that of course there would have to be action. And instead we saw Republican states, local municipalities, and even some Democrats go after the immigrant community and pass really draconian policy. It's in the economic best interest of this country to create a pathway citizenship, but it is not in the
best interest of big business to do so. I saw from ten years of organizing undocumented construction workers, who were often not paid for their work, who were often left injured on the job, that the status quo was good for business. It wasn't good for American born workers, it wasn't good for immigrants. But you know who benefited were the largest construction companies in my home state, the largest
contributor to the Republican Party. Also happened to be the largest employer of undocumented labor, which was the construction industry. So I think we have to remember why we are
where we are. But there's still a lot more organizing we have to do, and that's why building political power is ultimately I think, how we will win citizenship because the economic reality that benefits big business, whether we're talking about in agriculture, construction, housekeeping, or in these factories where young people are being employed, children being employed to do adults jobs.
Thank you, Christina, Thanks so much.
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Cries to spread the word about our podcast and get a to bag with my adorable Leo the Rescue Puppy on it, and now you can grab this merchandise only at shop dot fastpoliticspod dot com. Thanks for your support. Corey Robin is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and author of the Enigma of Clarence Thomas. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Corey Rabin, nice to be here.
So wanted to talk to you about the Supreme Court because that's really it's Supreme Court season, right it is.
Yes, it's a silly season.
It used to not be that the Supreme Court would just dump all of their controversial opinions and go on vacation.
Yeah.
No, it's become an annual thing and the way to kick off the summer. It's interesting.
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about your favorite and mine. Is it favorite? I think favorite is the wrong word. He's actually the longest serving justice.
He is.
People don't realize how young he was when he was appointed to the court.
We're talking about one Clarence Thomas. I actually do because when Clarence Thomas was going through the Anita Hill hearings, my grandfather was still alive, Howard Fast and she was not quite a Communist anymore, but both he and my mother were quite enraged with Justice Thomas as a pick, especially because of how young he was.
Yeah, and you know now he's going to be in a few years, he will be the longest serving justice in American history.
So it's a little ironic because he's the worst talk to me about his incredible scandal. I feel like scandal is like not the right word because it's kind of an understatement, like what scandal plus plus plus.
Well, I mean, as everybody knows now, he's been getting these extraordinary gifts, most from Harlan Crow's or real estate tycoon out of Texas, not declaring them, and living, you know, a pretty fancy life. But I honestly, I think the bigger scandal is that Thomas, pretty much in his court opinions going back to the nineties, laid out a roadmap for how and why wealthy people should have access to
public officials and justified this. And you know, I'm hoping that coming out of this is not only that you know, these ethics rules get enforced and all the rest of it, but people take a closer look at what Thomas has basically been telling us since he joined the Court, which is what that wealthy people have a kind of access to public officials that ordinary citizens don't. And not only do they have that access, but they should have that access, and to try to limit them from having that access
is to go against the rules of basic democracy. That has been Thomason's opinion when it comes to campaign finance, and it's it's a kind of an extraordinary opinion because it basically sets out the rules of the road for living in an oligarchy.
Right.
I was on television with someone really dumb and they were like, what we should do is pay each of the Supreme Court justice is a million dollars And I was like, that's really fucking stupid. But it stuck with me because it was so stupid.
But you know, in a way though, it's it tells you that you know the kind of sums that we're talking about here, that this is the way people think that you can protect, you know, from an oligarchies that requires a minimum of a million dollar you know, salary for a public official. That's how bad things have gotten.
Right.
First of all, the idea that it's so hard to find people who will serve on the Supreme Court.
And thus you have to pay them.
I mean, there are so many parts of this idea that is stupid, right, Yes, Like, I mean, you know, you have a fucking federal society. His entire goal is to just groom great numbers of young conservatives to be on that said court. So what are the sort of consequences of Clarence Thomas's relationship with Harlan Crowe and what it's opened.
The door to.
I think the real problem here is not the actual relationship between him and Crow. It really is the right word turn of the court. I mean you just talked to you just now about the Federalist Society. Whether these people are you know, getting payoffs or not, they are dedicated to pushing the court in this direction where the rules of the road, you know, are such that you know, men of tremendous wealth have a kind of access and you know that ordinary citizens don't. And I think that's
really the biggest problem here. I mean, we could talk till we're blue in the face about ethics reforms and all the rest of it, and it should happen. None of that will undo that pipeline that the Federalist society has created. None of that will undo that, and that's what we're living with and I think really need to focus on.
And there is no liberal answer to the federalist society.
No, no. I mean, historically we've had reactionary Supreme courts throughout American history that it's not new, but they've never been undone by a kind of a liberal version of the federalist society. It's always been overwhelmingly popular social movements, you know, really cataclysmic social conflicts that have been able to undo the work of a reactionary court. So I think to try to come up with some counterparts of the federalist society. Liberals and Democrats have been trying to
play that game for quite some time. Let's come up with a version of Fox News. Let's come up with a version of X. Whatever X is on the right. That's not how you're really going to undo this work that the right has been able to do.
Right, let's talk a little bit about this idea of Republicans trying to cement minority rule.
Yes, the first thing to remember is that the constitution and liberals, I think have a hard time remembering this because they have a view of the Constitution that's derived from the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties when you had all kinds of civil rights reforms happening and so forth. But the truth is is that the Constitution already privileges minorities. And by minorities, I don't mean racial and ethnic, gender or sexual minorities. I mean wealthy minorities, people of great
property and great wealth. That's baked into the design of the constitution. It's why we have things like the Senate,
the Electoral College, and all the rest of it. So you were already starting from that, and the Republicans going back to the nineteen sixties have really been slowly trying to undo the progress of the New Deal and the Great Society by things like turning more power back to the states in terms of control over voting and really creating a kind of a you know, demographic and balance that allows for the Republican Party to rule despite the fact that it doesn't command a majority of support and
things of that sort. And this has been going on. You know, it goes back again, like I said, to the nineteen sixties. You know, we think of a lot of the voting you know, and election shenanigans is somehow an innovation of Donald Trump, you know, and that's just not the case. Under Richard Nixon, they started going after voting rights. Under Ronald Reagan they did. And so this has really been a long term project.
John Roberts has been working on messing with voting rights too.
Yeah, absolutely, I mean John Roberts, he came into the Reagan administration. It was a young lawyer in the Justice Department. He was almost, you know, the kingkin of the effort. I mean, well, first, you know, in Congress, there was an effort to reform the Voting Rights Act in nineteen eighty two to make it more progressive, and the Republicans really fought that effort quite a bit, and they lost
some of that. And so then comes in John Roberts in the in the Justice Department, who starts issuing a stream of memos interpreting the Voting Rights really cutting it back. And you know, not to get too technical or wonky about it, but the lynchpin of his effort was to really gut what's called the Section five of the Voting Rights Act, which is that whole preclearance where you know, the Justice Department and the federal government could go in
advance and stop local white supremacist efforts. And from the get go, John and Roberts saw this as something that had to be undone, and he tried to do as much as he could in the Reagan administration and finally had full success once he became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. So again a very long standing project just sort of one other historical footnote to this, because again I think people have a hard time thinking that any
of this proceeds Donald Trump. One of the first big efforts to get the Voting Rights Act in Congress was led by Gerald Ford in the House of Representatives. People have a much work benign view it for it as somehow part of this.
But they probably shouldn't.
Exactly, they should not.
Yeah, the thing I always think about with Trump and trump Ism is that Trump did a lot of this stuff.
Republicans were quietly doing.
Right, but he just did the much louder I would put it even more strongly than that. He vocalized what they were doing. He put it into words, And that's really the innovation is is you know, he just put into speech what had been done, as you say, quietly in practice, right.
I mean, that was sort of Nixonian in a way. But I do think of like a lot of the Supreme Court stuff we're seeing now was Roberts trying to quietly shift the country with the Court, and then all of a sudden you had these trump petus justices come in and be like, we don't need to be quiet about it anymore.
Exactly, and so that's you know, come back to Clarence Thomas. Thomas was somebody who was always saying the quiet part out loud. Nobody ever paid attention to him because they thought he was not very smart, or you know, they thought he was you know, Scullya's puppet. But the truth of the matter is he was always the avant garde leading the avant garde in the court. It was an avant garde of one. And now you know he's commanding a majority, which is you know, truly frightening.
Yeah, it is interesting now as we look at the decisions that have come out so far. We had two decisions that were sort of not as insane as a lot.
Of us worried. Tell me what your take on that is.
And we're talking about there's a voting Rights Act that was a little bit you know, you can't just completely racistly jerry mander a state and also you know, you can't separate and for some reason, to baffling reason, Gorsach is good on Native American rights but bad on all other rights for all other people.
Yeah, I mean, the course such thing is interesting and I think was somewhat expected because, as you say, he's had this, you know, reputation for quite some time of leading you know, the charge on a Native American rights, and has been quite good about that. The voting rights decision was a genuine surprise. I mean I was shocked by it because while Roberts also has one of these, you know, he's a quieter Gendler reputation, when it comes
to voting rights. He has been absolutely ruthless and very clear. As we said just a second ago, the fact that he wrote this decision, it's not just the side that he took, it's the language he used and the arguments he deployed really were surprising. This is the justice you said, if you want to stop discrimination on the basis of race, you have to stop discriminating on the basis of race,
which he used against a desegregation effort. He's somebody who has really been if we want to gut voting rights, we want to stop affirmative action, all these things, we have to adopt this formally color blind jurisprudence. And the surprise of that decision is that he seemed to really throw that out the window. You know that you can take race into consideration. It wasn't just the society he took. It was the way he took It was a genuine surprise.
What else are you sort of watching now?
You know, there's a bunch of economic stuff that will be coming down next year. You know, one of the things that really does seem to unite the Republicans on the Court the Conservatives is chipping away at federal administrative agencies. This stuff gets very technical and people get very bored by it, but it really goes to the heart of what the New Deal was all about, which was creating these federal agencies that could interpret their own rules and
have a certain degree of autonomy. And you know, one of the ways that the Conservatives have really gone after the New Deal is to say no, unless Congress dots every I and crosses every te on some administrative policy, these agencies can't do that. And they already the Court already had a case like this involving the National Labor Relations Board, which strangely Kagan and so Domayor joined the
Conservatives on. But we're going to see more of that kind of stuff, and that, to me, I think is one of the big things to be watching for.
Thank you so much. I hope you'll come.
Back, Thank you. I really enjoyed it.
No moment fuck Do.
You have a moment of fuckery, my friend, I.
Do have a moment of fuckery. I always have a moment of fuckery.
Only one moment.
My moment of fuckery this week, once again, I'm sorry to say, is going to come back down to Clarence Thomas again.
Oh.
Piece of the New York Times on Sunday reveals that Harlan Crow isn't the only sugar daddy, and the Clarence Thomas pantheon of billionaire sponsors, yes and enablers of a lifestyle to win the salary of a Supreme Court justice would not ordinarily allow. Look, it's not just Thomas's fault. He should know better, but it's also the Court and John Roberts and if they don't stop the bleeding on these stories and the recently stories are happening. Is not
because liberals are out to good Clarence Thomas. It's because Clarence Thomas is living a lifestyle with billionaire donors who are giving him tons of money and travel and goodies and trips, and then having cases and issues come before the Supreme Court. This is a moment of fuckery. I mean, this is a more serious MOMENTI fuckery than I normally
will throw out. But I really believe that if we let the Supreme Court become tainted by this continued, obvious, painful corruption, that the outcomes will not be a sustained trust in the Court at any level in the future. And we need that in this country. We need a court that people can trust again. And they're not going to trust it for a long while because of the
current status of how the majority got out there. But Clarence Thomas has been on the Court now for damn near thirty five years and should know better than to be on the take.
That's a very good moment of fuckery, and I don't know.
And more serious than the usual I'm sorry to say.
I mean, yeah, well, the Supreme Court is fucked up, man. So my moment of fuckery comes from the Internet and the billionaire v billionaire so Elon bought Twitter for forty four billion dollars. Musk has been delighting and interacting with libs of TikTok and all the right wing accounts.
That are his favorite.
Now all of a sudden, you know, because of this rate limit debacle. So during July fourth weekend for those of you who are not completely online all.
The time and have actual lives and families.
Elon Musk decided over July fourth weekend that he was going to rate limit how many posts you could read, and that this was going to solve datas which was the thing that was ruining Twitter. He always the thing I love about Elan is every like couple weeks he decides like, this is not making money, not because it's never really made money or made great gobs of money, but instead because of data scraping. So he limited the amount of posts you could read, and it was called
Great Limit. It turned out to be a debacle because it turns out that people don't want to only be able to read six hundred posts. During that time, Mark Zuckerberg, quietly waiting in the wings, decided that he would launch his new Twitter called Threads. This was a moment of fuck grate. Am I ruining for Mark Zuckerberg? No, Mark Zuckerberg, I'm mean involved in genocides. Really unhelpful in many many ways,
including the twenty sixteen election. Did a lot of bad stuff, but does have some content moderation, which is a stark contrast from one Elon Musk, who has zero content moderation, and when you write to him for a comment, the press department at Twitter, which is now nobody, responds with a poop emoji. And for that, this billionaire the billionaire cage match is my moment of hockery.
I can't blame you on that one at all. You know, when you've got people defending Elon, like Cernovich and others, and they're all trying to get themselves into a lather about a hypothetical cage fight between these guys. I mean, look, Mark Zuckerberg signing up for Threads. We all knew what we were getting, which was, you know, the rape and pillars. He was stealing the rabig pillage of our privacy at every level. But it's just like the degree to which
Elon has psychotically driven Twitter off the cliff is. It's inexplicable to me as somebody who I generally think of myself as having a fairly stable mental view of the universe. But the people around Elon, when we figure this all out in the end, the way they've influenced the sky and the crazies that got into him and gave him the Maga mind virus. It's going to cost him billions of dollars to have new friends.
Yes, Wow, thoughts, prayers, Thank you, Rick Wilson.
Anytime you'all have a great evening.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.