Hi, I'm Mollie John Fast and this is Fast Politics. Well, we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds.
And Governor Wall says he's sick and tired of hearing about thoughts and prayers. We have a star studded show for you today. Lever News founder David Sirota Stupspy to talk to us about his podcast The master Plan, which is my personal favorite documentary podcast I've heard in a long time. David details how the right mapped out legalizing
corruption through the Supreme Court. And this is really just such an amazing podcast that we'll talk to Yale professor Jason Staley about his new book, Racing History, how fascists rewrite the past to control the future. But first we have the host of the Enemy's List, the Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson.
What the fuck is going on? Rick Wilson?
Well, I believe it was what the Mayans predicted to be the apocalyptic end times, where rains of fire and blood will fall from the sky.
No, look, welcome to Mayans. So early in the election cycle was sixty.
Days to go. You know, Look, here's the thing. We had another week where the media was the zone got so flooded. Even well intentioned media folks could not keep up with crazy bullshit from Trump. It will never cease to amaze me how capable he is of changing the subject so rapidly, not always deliberately sometimes it's inadverton, but of changing the subjection so rapidly and leading to such chaos.
I mean, look, we had things this week that would have been disqualifying for a presidential candidate.
Another week talking about childcare is childcare or something?
Falter yourself care? And all the things we're going to do to make it so big, bigger than anyone ever thought.
Was the were tarriffs are going to fun childcare? How would that even work?
He is rapidly breaking down, rapidly decompensating. Is not mentally all there, you know when he's out there ranting that Egene Carol isn't the chosen one, and it was an ai image of right that was amazing that press conference. I'm sorry I heard for ten eleven, twelve months that any slip or stutter or verbal bump that Joe Biden had was a side of his imminent dementia and Parkinson sweeping over him and killing him instantly, and with Trump, we get ten of those things a week now. I
had a conversation with somebody last night. It was like, we're good, We're a really competent report, Like, oh.
Tell us who because you're at the trip fest, so tell us who.
Ah.
No, no, that was off the record, but they're like, we're trying to keep up. We have so much time and bandwidth every day to write this stuff, and we're trying to keep up. And it's the combination of the newsiness of it and the bullshit of Trump's craziness. It has added up to this very ugly, kind of like dead end a lot of the time, I think.
But I would also add that they don't want to look partisan, and if you call out how crazy Trump is, you look partisan because it's so crazy.
That's the problem with defining devianc down. The craziest aspects of Trump now are. I don't want to say the media is defending them, but the way they're processing them is because they are afraid of having a Fox News fact checkers. There's a fucking line for you that just you should melt your brain, you know, so that they're
being unfair. They're biased against Donald Trump and blah blah blah, and it's such a load of horseshit, and yet simultaneously it has And the argument that was made to me last night also was the processes of editorial and writing do not keep up with Trump's latest insanity. By the time one insanity is being reported, another insanity has occurred. It was a legitimate, I think point. But the thing is, I think the insanity itself needs to be the center of a lot more.
Reporting, right, no question.
You know. I made that case because there's a lot to the question of Trump's mental stability. I'm not saying this as a campaign line or anything else. I honestly believe Donald Trump is mentally ill.
He was mentally ill in twenty sixteen, but in twenty sixteen he could, you know, get on a plane and read a prompter. That is no longer than Trump.
We know Trump in twenty sixteen still had his physicality and his energy level overcame the mental illness in the minds of most voters. In twenty twenty, it was a different election because of COVID and everything else. Although he was slipping in twenty really the decline and fall. The other day I was looking for a video clip, and I found something from December of twenty two where he really seemed off and it was weird how off he was. And I think this gets worse every day. I don't
think it's ever going to get any better. And where along for the ride, unfortunately.
So one of the things that I think is interesting. You are at trip Fest. At trip Fest and popular Democratic boogeyman, your friend Dick Cheney. I was thinking about Dick Cheney because I was thinking about my grandfather, Howard Fast wrote about one hundred columns about Dick Cheney and how evil he was. So Dick Cheney is voting for Vice President Harris discuss.
I'm here with my fellow noted liberal extremists, Judge, Letgig, Liz Cheney. You know all of us are deeply embedded in the antifa movement.
That's right. All you want is to sign the er.
All I want is to nationalize the means of production and usher in the worker's paradise. You know, the usual stuff as one does in the conservative movement.
Minimum basic income for all.
Absolutely, I can't wait to have a national string of collective farms. But yesterday Liz Cheney, echoing what she had said at Duke University earlier in the week, came out and said I am voting for Kamala Harris. She said it again yesterday and articulated it further than she had at Duke, blew the audience way by saying, oh, and by the way, Dick Cheney is voting for Kamala Harris.
What was the room like at that moment? Were you there?
Yeah, we were there. Utterly exploded cuckoo town. I mean, people could not believe it. And I have to tell you, the second it started breaking out on Twitter, long defunct text chains of old bushies were like, oh my god, Oh my god, my phone was melting for hours of people, you know, who've been sort of waiting for the damn to break a little further. And there are a lot
left of the people that are in this category. If anyone wants to argue that Liz and Dick Cheney are not, again, dear listeners, whether you agree with this or not, they are impeccably credentialed conservatives of the First Law. And I will tell you one of the things I picked up very quickly was just how freaked out and pissed off Trump world was because they recognized you can't make Dick Cheney into like antifoot Dick. You can't make it right
right the golden Black Lives Matter. It's not gonna work.
No. Now, I mean, I think that's a really good point. And I do think that Dick Cheney is not involved in Black Lives Matter, as much as that would be amazing.
You can see the shift where a tack vector on Cheney is he's a warmonger who will help continue the war in Ukraine against our friends the Russians.
We didn't talk about Tenant Media the last time, and we were on the podcast Tenant Media. All the worst people on the internet worked for Tenant Media. Laurence Southern, Bennie Johnson, Tim Poole, Beanie Guy, and Dave Rubin. That crew is all. Now we have seen in this big federal indictment they were being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Kremlin. Discuss and there are more people in the indictment. There are more unnamed people.
Let's make three points really clear. This is one of many indictments we had. We saw another one against Dimitri Sions earlier this week. We also saw an FBI raid on Scott Ritter.
Who's Scott Ritterer.
Scott Rider is a former United Nations Arms inspector, former Army captain I believe, who was later arrested for pedophilia and child rape and then got out of prison and became a Russian apologist. Oh wow, so you've got these folks. These are these four people and folks. Molly and I are in the content creation world. Okay, you should know we have the creators of the content. We make a lot of it. They were being paid for hundred thousand dollars a month, just as we are here on the right.
Four. We actually make four million dollars a month. Hi. Sorry, Mary, We're doing this podcast from my helicopter.
Yes, I'm in space on the International Space take which I have heard. No, they were being paid four hundred thousand dollars a month each each to produce pro putin videos.
Unbelievable.
There was one particular video that's made the rounds of this week. We'll find it if you look for it. It's about Timpoole and he is attacking Ukraine like a rabid dog, like a crazy wall. The Ukrainians have no right to the sacred province of Kursk and he was literally reading the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs talking points on the air Live wall Line.
My favorite was Ben Shapiro's defense of them, which was like, how could they have known?
Oh, I don't know, Molly. If a strange guy claiming to be a Belgian billionaire who does doesn't appear on the internet anywhere when he searched for him, named Edward Gregorian, if he comes to you and says, by the way, I'd like to pay you forty thousand dollars a month to do pro putin videos on your website, on your channel, and you don't say to him, really, why pro putin videos?
Where's the money coming from? I mean, inferentially a fucking toaster of and could figure out that this was Russian money. The stupidest person, and I mean even Benny Johnson, who was a low wattage plagiarizing shit ard, should be able to figure And by the way, if you want to guys, want to ever laugh your ass off, Benny Johnson is such a weak dick that when he worked at BuzzFeed he was plagiarizing wells.
Lots, yeah, yeah, yeah, no. No. He's famous for his plagiarism. I do think that's right. I also think we still have more people in this indictment. And also just the defense that they were so stupid that they didn't know what was happening, I think is not really plausible.
Well, I'm sorry, I'm not buying it.
But I do think it's interesting that Bennie Johnson and Temple did this much more. But Timple's whole thing was we're going to do civil war. So right, we're going to do civil war. Well, it turns out that that we're going to do civil war message is the Kremlins message? Correct? Yeah, I think that's important.
We're near a civil war. Civil war is coming. The libtards have forced us into a civil war.
We want to hear the most cursed text ever. Jesse just sent me.
Do it?
What about Rand Paul?
Okay, so let's not forget Rand Paul's chief guy, Jesse Benton, is presently in jail because Jesse Benton was involved in a weird Russian information operation in which he was paid in fucking bitcoin.
Right, bitcoin, you'll remember bitcoin as something that is financing Donald Trump's presidential run.
There's an entire pro Russia faction in the GOP right now, and we got.
To talk about Mike lay.
Yeah, the story did not offend them. This story left him going like, well, where's a my four hundred thousand dollars of them? Well, that's my grandma would say, why by the cow when the milk is free? But they bought the cow. They bought These people, they knew what they were doing. There is nothing on God's green Earth that will convince me that these people, when they're producing pro Russia videos that are overtly pro pudent, overtly anti Ukraine,
overtly anti American, that these people had no clue. Are you telling me you can't figure it out if you're being asked to read the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs talking points about the Battle of Kursk, fuck out?
Yeah. And I think also when you talk about this Tenet Media story, it's important to remember that these were the people that Elon Musk interacted with more than anything.
He retweeted Tenet Media or ten There were the Tenet media players something like three hundred times. I read the other.
Day, and Elon Musk sits on a pile of government contracts, He controls half of the world satellites. He is a major national security player, and he is also a fleet believer in Russian propaganda.
He takes it hook line and sinker. And you know, the greatest conceit on the right is I'm just an independent, critical thinker. I'm just looking at the banks and the data. In fact, you're not looking at the facts of the data. You're looking at Vladimir Putin's ass while you're kissing it. These people, I mean, the more they echo this stuff, the better for me. Honestly, because we've identified an awful lot of Republican voters out there who grew up in
the Cold War. They have boomers, exers, and even early millennials who remember Red Dawn the documentary. Don They remember Red Dawn, They remember the Cold War, they remember the Wall coming down, they remember that the Russians and Putin are the fucking bad guys. And the more this cognitive dissonance sort of splits them apart from what the Trump people have absolutely had their dicks in, it is astounding just how bad it's going to be for them. I think this is going to end up being one of
these stories. It's going to keep unfolding. You know, well, you and I have not exactly been Merrick Carlin's biggest cheerleaders.
At least he did.
It looks like they're actually doing this. Finally, I think it's remarkable.
Well, and it must be so much evidence that he can't possibly put it off because we know Merrick Garland and he's conflict avoidant.
Eric Donland went to wake over with the mariego how am I going to cause trouble merrek lonaland wakes up in the Marigo's How can I be as invisible as possible?
I mean I didn't know he was still working there. Well, Merek, what Jesse wants us to talk about? Dmitri Simes? Who the fuck is that?
Dmitri the other guy who was indicted this week. He is part of the Rampaul network. As we've talked about a few minutes ago. Dmitri is a guy who's been on Channel one, one of the Russian propaganda channels, and he has been somebody who's been out there taking the absolutely pro Russian position on Ukraine. Ukraine is the sacred motherland of Russia and it must be destroyed. Zelenski is a puppet of.
The Jewish Nazi.
He's a Jewish Nazi. I was just.
As they say, exactly.
But yeah, look, and I mean there's a really key line in the main indictment of the tenant indictment. That key line is the first sentence that these people were working for RT, which is a Russian government controlled propaganda channel, and for personal reasons that will hopefully become apparent on Wednesday. That line is super important for me. But I'll let you know more like next week about it.
Oh no, this is not fair.
I'll tell you later.
Are you fucking better? We're going to hit one other thing now, which is Nate Silver.
Must we Yes? What are we going to hit him with?
Is the question?
Because as the polling averages have gotten better and better for the Vice President, Nate Silver has decided that they're not better, and in fact she is losing to Donald Trump. What is his methodology?
Besides his methodology, from what I can tell, is that Peter Thiele is running the polymarket site and Nate's making a pile off of that. I think Nate also, I'm going to give Nate a little fraction of grace here. I also think that there is some PTSD from twenty
sixteen with Nate's ever gotten over. Maybe that's it. I can't really understand it, because every professional who's looking at these numbers and looking at the electoral college pathways and the mechanics and the mathematics of these pathways, this is in a steadily improving picture for Vice President Harris. It is a darkening cloud for Donald Trump. You know, Look, they pulled out this week, as you know, of New Hampshire, Virginia, and Minnesota. Those are not the top tier gettable states,
but they thought all of them were gettable. They thought New Hampshire was very gettable. Those three are dead. Now they're running out of money. The polling in the states is moving in the wrong direction for them. The next tranch of states they were looking at right now to pull out of whatever one they choose of the three or four that are in contention, which are like what North Carolina. Yeah, now they're going to have to put
money into Florida. Now. They don't think they're going to lose Florida, but it's getting close enough where they're freaking out.
And Florida's expensive.
Florida has ten of the top thirty media markets in the country. It's very expensive and running out of money. He spent thirty one million dollars more than he raised last month.
Those spending numbers show that Trump is spending a lot less than Harris. But isn't it true that there are dark money packs that are not included in those buys?
One hundred percent? There are many dark money packs that are out there. However, they are not sufficiently drawing off to counterbalance what Harris and the Democratic super PACs are doing right now. They're not in the same financial tier as the overall Harris plus Democratic superPAC era.
But what about like Elon?
Elon hasn't given any money. It was bullshit. Like many things from Elon, you'll be surprised to hear he was full of shit.
What about the America Pack? And Rick explained to us who is funding it and what it looks like.
There are a number of Trump super packs that are out there, but one consistent through line of every single Trump super pack is that they're running your money through Trump related entities and enterprises. So you'll find in a lot of them American made media, and that is a Trump family super pac controlled by Jared Kushner and Brad Parscal.
Last time I checked, that takes an enormous skim off the top of every dollar they spend, so maybe fifty sixty cents of every dollar does not go to persuade voters. It goes back to fund the Trump family and the Trump enterprises. Look, this is the most successful business Donald Trump has ever had, by in order of magnitude.
Just like Pat you can. And he's figured out that running for president is a good business.
Trump likes to improvise, Okay, he likes to make ups. Yet he likes to run and gun, and so that makes it hard for him to run a real campaign where he's doing big dollar donor fundraising all that. He hates all that shit. But these super packs allow individual donors. Heyre writ two million dollar check right in the a million dollars a year, right, he did this and that, and you know what that shit it's dark money. It
is hidden away. They've also built all these LLCs that are like Wyoming LLC's managed through Delaware with poking in the Cayman Isle. All this bullshit, right, but.
It's also Trump World funneling the money. You get the least bang for the buck.
Absolutely, it's like a race car where you know, you fill it up with gas and I hope it's going to go five hundred miles, but the first thing you do is somebody takes out, you know, half of the gas in the tank.
Thank you, Rick Wilson, You are welcome.
We have even more tour dates for you. Did you know the Linkeodn projects. Rick Wilson have Fast Politics BOLEI jug Fast are heading out on tour to bring you a night of laughs for our dark political landscape. Join us on August twenty sixth at San Francisco at the Swedish American Hall, or in la on August twenty seventh at the Regent Theater. Then we're headed to the Midwest. We'll be at the Bavarium in Milwaukee on the twenty first of September, and on the twenty second we'll be
in Chicago at City Winery. Then we're going to hit the East coast. On September thirtieth, we'll be in Boston at Arts at the Armory. On the first of October, we'll be in Affiliates City Winery, and then DC on the second at the Miracle Theater. And today we just announced that we'll be in New York on the fourteenth of October at City Winery. If you need to laugh as we get through this election and hopefully never hear from a guy who lives in a golf club again,
we got you covered. Join us in our surprise guests to help you laugh instead of cry your way through this election season and give you the inside analysis of what's really going on right now. Buy your tickets now by heading to Politics as Unusual dot bio. That's Politics as Unusual dot bio. David Serota is the founder of lever News, the creator of the podcast The Masterplin, and screenplay author of Don't Look Up.
Welcome Too Fast Politics.
Dave Serota, thank you, thanks for having me.
Jesse and I's obsession are these kind of stories, and you know, we did something on Project twenty twenty five on YouTube which was like an interviews here and this just is like an endless topic that is like informs everything around us. So explain to us how you came to this project. You know, let's start there.
So Master Plan traces the fifty year history of how corruption was legalized in America and it connects directly to Project twenty twenty five because one of the organizations and funders that began part of this Master plan is the sponsor of the organization, is the sponsor of what we
now know as Project twenty twenty five. So the story starts in and around the time of Watergate, as so many things do, and Watergate, as we trace in our podcast, Watergate was actually people know about the break in, et cetera, et cetera. It was actually the first major campaign finance scandal of the late twentieth century in that it was
funded in part by illegal, secret corporate donations. I mean, it's sort of the first version of dark money, where we're talking about brand name corporations American Airlines and the like funding the break in.
American Airlinese.
Yeah, American Airlines was one of the major corporations that put secretly large sums of money into Richard Nixon's slush fund, and it was ultimately American Airlines and its executives were prosecuted for that by the Watergate prosecutors. It's something that I think people don't really know now.
I don't.
Yeah, It's like I mean, when I started reporting this, I was kind of blown away. And that's one of many corporations that was prosecuted.
Like Benny Johnson didn't know that he was getting four hundred thousand dollars from Russia or didn't. No, I'm just kidding.
Go on, sorry, Right, So, I think a lot of people also know that that after Watergate there were these campaign finance reforms that were supposed to clean up Washington. These are the modern campaign finance laws that Gerald Ford signed.
And that Citizens United ended effectively.
Correct. Right, So what happens is at the roughly this same time, a guy named Lewis Powell, who was the head of the American Bar Association, a tobacco industry lawyer, kind of pinnacle of the establishment. He writes this memo to the Chamber of Commerce in which he lays out a case that corporate America is under attack, that the ralph Naders of the world are winning too many things. I mean, this is the era you know, where Medicare, Medicaid,
the EPA, all this stuff is passing. And he says, you know, corporations need to go on the attack, and really the government has become too democratically responsive. The corporations have to focus on taking over the courts and building a movement to take over the government. And one of their focuses is deregulating the campaign finance system and effectively
gutting the anti corruption, anti bribery laws. And so in those post Watergate reforms were some loopholes that actually created the what we now know to be the corporate Political Action Committee. There was an explosion of these corporate packs because of these loopholes. And what also came out of this movement at the time was the push to enshrine a radical theory into law, which was money and politics
isn't corruption. Money in politics is constitutionally protected speech. So the Buckley v. Valo case comes out of this era. By the way, Buckley, that radical idea was masterminded by none other than you cannot make this up John Bolton, the same John Bolton.
I mean that continues to be. One of the truly amazing things about this whole story is and it's all the same people again and again and again, and it's like, not even is it all the same people. It's like my grandpa was jailed by the House on an American Activities Howard Fast by the Roy you know, Roy Cohen worked for that and later trained Donald Trump.
We have a term for this, We call it the master Plan cinematic universe. These same people Robert Bork, John Bolton. I mean, these are the they just keep popping up. Here's the thing, after they enshrine, you know, money isn't corruption,
money is free speech. Lewis Powell, the guy who wrote that memo, he ends up on the Supreme Court and he soon after creates a ruling that says corporations are entitled to those same free speech rights to spend in an unlimited fashion on elections, which is the basis becomes the basis for the citizens United decisions. So the point here is the deregulated campaign finance system, the Supreme Court gutting the anti bribery laws in this country. This is
not a force of nature, It's not an inevitability. The master planners, essentially corporations and oligarchs did this on purpose. They knew that they could not win the policies they want in a one person, one vote, functioning democracy, so they knew they had to have ways legally to use their money to rig that process.
And I feel like it's important to point out that Republicans still basically feel this way that the Supreme Court right now is making decisions. Like when you're talking, all I can think of is that the Supreme Court this year made a decision which said that you can bribe a politician if you're not being clear about exactly what you want.
I read that ruling as almost even worse, like I think you've almost understated it, which is basically like a politician can do a favor for a donor as long as the donor gives them the money afterwards, as like a gratuity. It's like, if you just sequence the money correctly, it's all fine. And to be clear, the Supreme Court did this. I think a lot of people didn't mention
this when that ruling came out. The Supreme Court did this when the Supreme Court has people on the court who are taking gifts from the people whose cases they're overseeing.
This last Supreme Court session, I thought a few cases were like, see, we're not that bad, and then everything else was like, let's set the table.
For our guy, Donald Trump yep, one hundred percent.
Well.
I think John Roberts, who we report a lot about in Master Plan, I believe in the idea that he has this theory that the court will accept a set of cases that are like even more insane than they're willing to accept so that they make a show out of voting them down, to make the like other crazy ones that they're going to put through seem like that they're moderate or moderate. I mean that's the moving of the Overton window for sure.
By the way, Gorsag Cavanaugh, I mean, these people have all you know, Gorsich's mother was in the EPA under.
Nixon Master Plan Cinematic Universe.
Yeah.
But the other thing I was going to say was I feel like what we see in this world again and again is that the eleventh circuit really sets them up for this. You know, there's a circuit that's so crazy they will take anything.
Yeah, and the fifth circuit down in Texas as well. Yeah, this is all part of a plan. It's not an inevitability. And look, I think you can look back to the nineteen seventies when the conservative movement was essentially out of power, and you can look back now and say, wow, they really had a vision. And the interesting thing is, as we document in our podcast, is that they wrote a lot of it down. I mean we found never before seen documents about this. I mean we have a document.
Let me just give you an example where Gerald Ford is literally being flown into Disney World for a meeting about how to implement Lewis Powell's memo, and months later Gerald Ford is then the president who's signing those loopholes in the campaign finance laws, signing them into law. And so the point is is not to be You know, sometimes I feel like I sound like the guy from It's Always Sonny in Philadelphia at the whiteboard, like a
crazy person, like how much expira? But like they wrote it all down, it's all documented, it's all they did it all, and they said they were doing it all well.
And I also think we constantly doubt ourselves. But like Merret Garland, who again I would like to criticize more than I do, but because of his inability to hold anyone accountable. But he did announce yesterday that like three of the biggest Trump YouTubers are actually willingly or unwittingly either as bad take you money from Russia so for their pro Trump views. So like, if you occupy reality, none of this should be all that shocker.
No, And what we've allowed to happen is we've created a system where money buys our politics, buys the political discourse. And what I worry about here is that we're now so immersed in this culture of corruption that we've become desensitized to it that we've simply accepted it as supposedly. It's no longer corruption, it's just what politics is. And the truth is that's not the way it has to be.
I think back to I think a lot of people can't even remember this era, but the late nineties early two thousands, where John McCain decided to make campaign finance and corruption a major national issue, and I think people forget that His first major set of political headlines in his career was he got burned in a corruption scandal, the Keating five scandal, where he was one of the five senators who was pressuring a federal banking regulator, and out of that he came to the campaign finance cause
with the zeal of a convert. And my point in bringing this up is, yes, you can name any corruption scandal from today's headlines, this week's headlines and say, you know, this is just what politics is and there's nothing to be done about it. But in my lifetime, I can remember when political leaders said, you know what, this is not okay, even Republicans, and you know, it's interesting one of his aides tells us in the podcast, you know, we told him that nobody would really care about corruption.
It wasn't going to be a salient issue in the election, and McCain ignored us and proved us wrong. He went in, you know, he campaigned in that primary, and part of the way he won New Hampshire, the major way was was on this anti corruption platform. And so the question is where is that politics now? It feels like it's gone.
Yeah, I mean, I agreed, and will be so interesting to see. By the way, if Trump wins an American democracy, he dies, that'll be sad for all of us. But if Trump loses and American democracy survives, which I think is a possibility, a real possibility, it'll be interesting to see. You know, if there's any interest in the Republican Party
rejecting some of these larger authoritarianism. I want you to talk about how the sort of baby authoritarianism of the seventies begets this larger authority, because this is all the road to Trump.
Absolutely, I mean one hundred percent. Let me give you an example. We talked about Project twenty twenty five. So the Powell Memo is written one of the people who says that he was inspired to become politically active because of the Powell Memo is a guy named Joe Cores from out here. I'm coming to you from Denver, Colorado. Out here in Colorado, and Joe Cors provides the seed
funding for what became the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation in all of this organizing legal you know, the conservative movement is building a legal movement, it's building a political organization for elections. The Heritage Foundation carves out its role as the policy machine for this movement, and it decides that one of the ways it can be most effective
is to produce this Mandate for Leadership Series. That's what they called it, and it's a detailed agenda for Republican presidents. And if that sounds familiar, that's because Project twenty twenty five is the ninth iteration of the Mandate for Leadership Series,
and the Mandate for Leadership Series. The first famous one was in nineteen eighty which was for Ronald Reagan and he implemented, according to Heritage itself, sixty to sixty five percent of its recommendations that were executive order, executive power of the unitary executive essentially centralizing power in the presidency. And so now we are at Project twenty twenty five, which again is the ninth iteration of this, and it's much the same or similar kinds of policies to vest
more and more power in executive branch. There's so many times nine hundred pages, right, I got the social safety that got the regulatory state, got what the Heritage Foundation calls the quote unquote administrative state, but really centrally vest the president with as much power as possible. So you look at that through line and then you see the Supreme Court case that says the president has immunity. And these are Supreme Court justices, many of them came out
of this movement. You realize this is not a natural inevitability. I mean, one other thing, just to go off on one other tangent here, because I know you remember this. I think the other part of the story that we tell that kind of still blows my mind is how quickly they flipped the court. There's like a period of a few months in two thousand and five where the Court goes from William Rehnquist and Sandrade O'Connor to John Roberts and Sam Alito and the throwing out of Harriet
Myers in favor of Sam Alito. I think because there was so much going on, it was sort of on the eve of the Republicans losing in the mid terms, the eve of Obama coming into office, that we forget that, like the court shifted so significantly, so in like a
bat of an eye. Right, if you want to go back to a period of history and like rewind, has you had a time machine and you could rewind something to change the whole next twenty years, it would be those few months where John Roberts and sam Alito get on that court and switch out for Renquist and O'Connor. It just kind of blows my mind.
Yeah, I'm trying not to get agitated. Can you tell us some of the crazier stuff that you found in this series?
Sure, I mean, listen, the secret meetings about organizing for the Powell Memo are kind of mind blowing. Again, they wrote it all down. I mean, we found one document, here's a fun one one document at one of these task forces where it's corporate executives getting together, how do we implement Lewis Powell's agenda? Where Roger ales Yes gives a presentation saying that corporate executives should use their power
as advertisers to influence TV programming. And there's a series of letters on some of the ALMMO task forces are not only you know, the executives from major industrial corporations, but we're talking about executives from ABC, CBS, et cetera, et cetera. And there's correspondence in which these executives are saying they are trying to influence the news coverage to be less anti business a more pro quote unquote free market.
There was I think people who are old enough to remember this, there was a Ford administration US government sponsored ad campaign in conjunction with Exxon and other major corporations through the Ad Council to basically promote free market capitalism because they were afraid of the rising tide of like, you know, natiorism. The Chamber of Commerce produced a movie
starring Jimmy Stewart to promote this. I mean that we have clips in the in the in the podcast about I mean, Jimmy Stewart sounds like a right wing Maybe he was, I guess he was a right wing guy. I mean it's like super right wing propaganda. And then and then the one other I'll give you is that. So the Buckley v. Valeo case, right, this is this case to say money is speech, money is not corruption. Is it the Buckley it's his brother, James Buckley was a senator.
Yeah, yeah, because that family is filled with conservative propagandas.
Yes, James Buckley, the New York senator who is the brother of William F. Buckley. James Buckley, by the way, goes on to become after being in the Senate, a federalist society, right wing judge. Of course. In Buckley v. Valeo, it's the Ford administration. Remember I told you Ford had to, you know, sign these these laws. The Ford administration doesn't like the new campaign finance laws, but it's after Watergate,
so Gerald Ford kind of has to sign it. So Robert Bork, master planned Cinematic Universe, is still the Solicitor General. So his job is to officially defend the law and to try to stop the Buckley case from going forward. That's his like official job. He's representing the government. So he files a sort of weak brief defending the Federal Election Commission saying, you know, money is regulatable, it's not
free money. In politics is not free speech. But then he files a second brief much stronger on behalf of the Ford administration, undermining his own case. In other words, undermining his own defense. It's this sort of bait and switch which proves pivotal and gets the Supreme Court to create this foundational pillar that money in politics can't be
regulated because it's constitutionally protected speech. If you want to go back to I mean, that is the fundamental foundational building block of the rest of the corruption that comes. Nothing else can stand up. Oh, one other tiny little nugget that I love. Anthony Kennedy, the guy who writes Citizens United. Do you know what Anthony Kennedy did? What the first part of his career was. Do you know
what he before he was a judge. Now, Anthony Kennedy was a corporate lobbyist known for handing out campaign cash to legislators in Sacramento. Right, So by the time he writes citizens you're like, you know, Anthony Kennedy's this like swing vote is his longtime trip. It's like, wait a minute, you're telling me the guy who was like in the Sacramento swamp of politics, a corporate lobbyist who, by the way helped draft Ronald Reagan's first anti tax ballot measure.
That now it all makes sense, Like, of course, the guy who wrote Citizens United was a corporate lobbyist, you know, who got his start in the swamp of essentially soft corrupt politics.
Yeah. I'm not super surprised. It's just crushingly depressing them.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like if you wrote this as a movie, right, you turned in a script, the executives would say, you know, the script is too on the nose. It's like two, it's two on the nose.
Yeah, so interesting. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Are you concerned about Project twenty twenty five and how awful Trump's second term could be? Well, so are we, which is why we teamed up with iHeart to make a limited series with the experts on what a disaster Project twenty twenty five would be for America his future. Right now, we have just released the final episode of
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Jason Stanley is a professor at Yale University as well as the author of e Racing History, How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.
Welcome back to Fast Pologics, Jason Stanley.
Great to be in discussion with you, Molly.
We've had you on a ton of times about your book How Fascism Works, and also just in general about what is happening in this sort of run up to the election. Talk to as about this new book, Erasing History.
So Erasing History is about educational authoritarianism. You'll notice that across the world when authoritarians get into power, they go after not just the courts, as we see in the United States where the Supreme Court is dominated by Trump's lackeys, but they go after the schools. So that's not just in the United States, it's every country. As Vladimir Putin recently said, wars are won by teachers. So what I do in Erasing History is explain the theoretical reason why
authoritarians always go after schools. It's among their primary targets schools, voting, press courts. So I've set the situation in the United States where we're watching university after university system be destroyed and public schools under attack, a mood of terror and
atmosphere of fear among teachers and professors. Now and I explain both conceptually and historically and setting into international contexts, how it works and why authoritarians always go after schools and universities as one of their very first targets.
So one of the states where this is happening, I think it's interesting. There are different Republican run state it's different red states where they're sort of trying this out, and the biggest one is probably Florida. Explain to us how in Florida this kind of erasing history authoritarian war on education manifests.
What you do is you create a culture of terror around teachers and professors so they feel they can't even go near history that might get them in trouble. And it's best to think of this as perspectives on the present history. Is it reflects certain group's perspectives on the present first. As you'll see in Erasing History, DeSantis has created a culture of fear in public schools and universities.
Let's remember what Descantis does. He's created a fake electoral police force whose job is to target non existent cases of voter fraud.
Really or well, in there's almost no.
Voter fraud in the United States.
It's like zero point zero zero zero two five percent or something completely non existent problem. The only goal is to camp down minority votes, especially black votes, by creating an atmosphere fear. That's what authoritarians do. They create in that atmosphere fears. Then they've passed these divisive concept laws which say that you can't teach anything that makes people feel badly about their race or their gender identity. I like to make comparisons here between what's happening with Florida
and the Day in Germany. The af Day is the far right, extreme neo fascist extremist party that in fact is officially an extremist party according to the German police, and they have the same goal. They're running to say the Nazi regime was not all bad. We've got to stop dumping on the Nazi regime is bad. There are some good aspects of it.
I shouldn't laugh because it's so fucking bleak, but like some good Nazis as a hell of a hell to die on.
Exactly, it's like saying there's some good enslavers. It's especially horrifying when Jewish Americans back this stuff because they're essentially backing anti Semitic neo fascist movements in Germany of all places. They're saying, you shouldn't have education that makes people feel badly. The primary purpose is to create this culture of reporting people, to get people used to reporting people. So there's online forms and KNA that the state has up to report
professors who are teaching divisit concepts. So these are concepts like white privilege. So if you teach black history, you're teaching that most Black Americans were excluded from the mortgage market, from federal housing loans until the nineteen seventies, so most Black Americans don't have inherited wealth because they didn't get to inherit a house. But that is deemed white privilege, and you're not allowed to teach it. So you're not allowed to teach the truth. The truth. You're not allowed
to teach the truth. And then We're seeing more and more textbooks talk about how slavery wasn't all bad. Enslaved people got skills things like this and again and again, and teachers are under sheer terror. LGBT perspectives are being eliminated. New College of Florida they just threw out in the college library all their gender studies books, all books on't right.
I saw the photos of that. Yeah, it looked like circa nineteen thirty three Germany.
The first Nazi book burning in May tenth, nineteen thirty three. One third of it, I believe, I believe it was one third. I'm at be getting the percentages wrong. But one out of the three collections destroyed was Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for sexu Elivisenschaft's collection, which was all books from LGBT perspectives and photographs documenting gender fluidity. So yes, it
looks like nineteen thirty three. So when these laws passed, initially in Florida, now in Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, initially people are like, oh, they won't have much of an effect. They're having a tremendous effect. Curricula have to be rearranged. I mean Tony Morrison's books are being banned our Nobel Prize winner in literature. So this thing of banning the perspectives or removing the perspectives of distinguished writers from minority
groups is so. We see this in Hungary with cortege there, Jewish Holocaust survivor Nobel Prize winner in literature whose work has been removed from the national curriculum, and we're seeing open and explicit admiration of Victor Or Bond, the Hungarian autocrat who also started his campaign with an attack on universities for supposedly spreading gender ideology. So if you're an LGBT youth or child of LGBT parents, what's being targeted
is the normalcy of your life. Florida instituted this post ten year review, which said that every five years you're reviewed, and you're reviewed on a long number of dimensions, including intellectual diversity.
So they're undoing tenure basically totally.
Almost twenty percent of the University of Florida's professors received unsatisfactory reviews and are going to be fired. Similar bills have been passed in Ohio and Indiana, and we can expect the same results there. In Ohio, State and University of Indiana are two of the world's greatest public universities. The United States is willingly dismantling it's the best university system in the world, to stuff it with right wing supporters of the Republican Party and to destroy it.
Can you explain to us how Trump world could enact this on a federal level.
They want to eliminate the Department of Education, so this means that there'd be no way to oversee what states are doing. They're going to target federal funding for universities. Private universities like my own university, tend to think that they're outside the scope of this destruction. They'll target federal funding or private universities if they don't do whatever the
government says. They'll start with DEI programs, I think, and then they'll move to things like divisive concept laws, which essentially removes African American studies from the curriculum. It removes gender studies, things like this. So they're going to target federal funding. They've already said that on the public school level,
they're going to maybe pass federal divisive concept legislation. Trump has talked about making sure there's patriotic education, so we see this in Hungary, obviously, in Russia, India, these are cases, Israel, these are cases I look at in the book where there's substantial misrepresentation of history, but Trump so in Hungary. I have friends in Hungary whose kids go to public schools, and they talk about the blatant nationalist nonsense their kids
are forced to swallow. And this is the kind of thing we're going to expect to see in the United States. We're going to expect to see bans on criticizing the Fonders or talking about how they were enslavers. We can expect to see a course of vicious clampdown on LGBT. Florida has already removed any mention of Black Lives Matter protests from their curriculum, and we're going to return to the kind of fake history that was taught for many decades.
I didn't learn about reconstruction in high school. I kind of learned, okay, black people had to vote for a little and then they weren't ready for democracy, so they lost it. I learned lies until two thousand. So the book goes through a lot of textbooks. I hired research assistance to go over Russian textbooks, US textbooks, textbooks in India and some of the material in Israel as well as Hungary and other countries. And I put this in perspective to see what an education agenda under a one
party state that we face. We face the lost, permanent loss of our democracy, and essentially Trump until he dies and then whoever Trumpet points as his successor, So we can look at what's going to happen with education. And what I do in the book is I place their agenda into a larger international agenda. Now what you have that's distinctive about the United States is do you have these tech billionaires, the ones that Obama criticized in his DNC speech, whose goal is to just lower their own
taxes and destroy public goods. And schools are the central public goods and democracy. So they are laser like focused on destroying schools. They want to destroy the public schools. Their own kids go to elite private schools. Their own kids education won't be affected elite private high schools, but the kids of other people, the public school system will be destroyed. There will be no common basis of reality. There will be some miss mash of religious schools to
satisfy the religious right. The Christian Nationalists and just private charters schools. So we see this in Devasti's program or schools.
One of the things I'm so struck by is trumpsm is not that popular. It seems to be you know, he may win, but it's looking like he may not. There are still down ballot at the state level, we see endless Trump mimeographs, Trump copies who are embracing a lot of the scariest elements of trump Ism, and that is the anti democracy elements. How do we get to a place where the Republican Party rejects this authoritarian bent or is it too late?
Well, much of the Republican Party is an authoritarian party that aims for a one party state, and they're already explicitly anti democratic. Many states in the South are super majority Republican, Even states like North Carolina super majority Republican legislature, even though the majority of registered voters are Democrats. So the Republican goal is to create a one party state in the United States, and it is David Pepper discusses in his book.
And he's a sort of Ohio expert.
Right, we have let the states become one party states. So I just got back from doing political work in Tennessee. In Tennessee, rape and incest are not excuses to have an abortion. Abortions are illegal, even in the cases of rape and incests. To get any contraception, anyone under the age of eighteen has to have pre parental consent, and the list goes on. Tennessee also is looking to fire
professors who teach black history. Essentially, so what happens once you move to a one party state is they lock down control, they gerrymander things, and then they pass the most extreme legislation. It's really important to have movements that challenge these super majorities in these one party autocratic states. There need to be grassroots movements. Even if you live in a state that Trump is going to win, you have to go out and vote for democratic state representatives.
We need to overturn some of these supermajorities. The goal is to make it such that voting is irrelevant because the Republicans have the levers of power. Unfortunately, the majority of Supreme Court justices are simply in the pocket of the Republican Party and are purely partisan actors. And it's not clear what to do with that situation.
What just an absolute disaster. Just give me something hopeful about the authoritarian band.
Oh. Absolutely.
The great thing about the United States is that we seem, even if it takes decades and decades and decades, we seem to be able to confront these forces. Most Southern states have never been democracies because of white supremacy. I mean, when I tell people in Europe that the South has the largest group of African Americans, that Mississi is well over thirty percent Black. Black people in these states have
virtually no power, no political power. This continues America. But you know, as you can see for example, from Amani Perry and Jarvis Gibvens Black Teacher Project, they digitized all these documents from black teachers in the Jim Crow South. There is a long history of teaching black history under the table, as it were. There's a long history of resistance. They're going to put cameras in classrooms to make that harder.
So insane, That is so insane, I mean, what, but I get what you're saying about how these Southern states have never really had democracy and they've really always been sort of laboratories of oppression.
But it's still so depressing.
And there's a lot of hope in erasing history. There's a lot of discussion of movements to reclaim history, to fight back against these forces, even in Russia, the scary place to do it.
You're not living in a.
Democracy unless there's a struggle against fascism that's just how life works, or some kind of authoritarianism. So it's a democracy. We have to preserve our democracy. We need to look to the local level. We need to prevent Trump from winning at the federal level to preserve the.
Best, the most.
The one area that America dominates is universities. So if Trump wins, they're going to dismantle the US university system. And if you think that the United States could maintain a great university system under this culture of fear and intimidation, look at China. China's university system is in deep decline because you know, you can't really teach freely under those conditions.
Yeah, yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you. I hope you'll come back.
Molly anytime you want to talk.
No, mo, Rick Wilson, your moment of fucker.
My moment of fucker. This week is a state level issue. In Florida, the pro choice ballot initiative got a record number of signatures, vastly more than it needed to be on the ballot. And now Ron DeSantis, I fucking kid you not, that twisted little dwarf Savona roll a bitch sending his election police along with regular cops, to people's
houses saying did you sign this petition? And they have files of people's driver's licenses and their personal information and their photographs, and they are trying to intimidate voters by sending the Ron de Santis election police to people's houses. This little shit bag, this old fuck wit, is absolutely engaging in the worst kind of demagogic reaction I've ever seen.
I mean, I had low opinion of the guy before, I had a minimal opinion of the guy before, but this is something that is so borderline Nazi I can't even concede it. The fact that people who signed a petition are being hunted down by Ron DeSantis's election cops, get the fuck out.
That is an amazingly scary and horrible thing. Ron Santis is about to be term limited out anyway, so Lacey's running a hearty fuck that guy. And when Matt Gates wins, he's going to put Rond de Santa's in Gitmo. My moment of fuckery involves the woman who could be Liz Cheney but isn't, Nicki Haley. Nicki Haley is going to die on the hill, that trump Ism is not that bad. She's willing to campaign with him. She thinks he's a good candidate.
I heard she's going to play Harrison debate prep.
I mean, find yourself a primary candidate who is willing to suck up to Trump and remember everything Trump touches dies. 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.