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 Ejene Carroll vows to do something good with Trump's eighty three point three million dollars. We have such a great show today. The Financial Times, John Burne Murdoch talks to us about the unexpected reason society maybe declining.
He's so interesting. He's one of my favorite guests. Then we'll talk to The New York Times.
Nick Confesssori about his amazing investigation into the Right Wings mission to destroy DEI. But first we have the host of the Enemy's List, the one, the only, the Lincoln Projects Own, Rick Wilson.
Welcome.
It is Monday and the only way to start your week is with one Rick Wilson.
Welcome.
Rick Wilson, Good morning, Molly.
How are you do you know?
I don't owe anyone eighty three million dollars?
You know, I don't know he won eighty three million dollars either, and I find that that is a number.
I would like to keep it that way.
So all weekend you and I have spent gloating, I think quietly gloating about this incredible verdict where now Donald Trump is for the first time ever, I feel like held responsible for a sexual misconduct.
Right, She's not the only accuser there have but been numerous.
It has now been adjudicated twice that he lied and therefore defamed her. There was enough evidence to say that he is a guy who has committed sexual assault. I mean, call me crazy, but I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want that on my resume.
But you know, yeah, I mean he did brag about that in the Access Hollywood team.
It's not that he's that hesitant about it.
Oh No, Look, he is not some blushing guy who's ashamed that he's rape. Right, that great piece you wrote about the women of Egene and your mom's generation who have been through so much.
Of this shit.
Who in that weird gap between sexual liberation and today, there's been a lot of ugly shit in the way or along the way.
They did not grow up sexually liberated. They grew up sexually terrified. Yeah, and I think about my mom telling me these stories about men doing things to her that where she was like I just I just smiled, and you know, was like, I mean the kind of treatment she had in grad school.
Right, I believe it.
It was hard for me to believe, but I knew it was true because it matches with all of these.
Other women's experience in the nineteen fifties and sixties.
And the thing about it is, and I keep going back to this, he came into court treating it like it was just one other Trump bullshit rally. He came into court thinking, I'm just going to show my ass enough. I'm going to do my Trump performance art enough, and that'll change the facts on the ground here. That'll shame, change what I did to her. That'll unring the bell on the same charges a jury of New Yorkers had
previously determined that he had done. That's the thing to me that I love what happened here because you know, it showed for once. You know, you can't like pretend that you're on the pages of Breitbert or truth Social and hope that it hope that it alters an outcome where your behavior, that the kind of behavior that you've been charged with of being abusive to women is plaguing out in front of the jury's faces. You know, it just blows me away.
The fundamental problem here is that candidate Trump thought he could use his legal challenges ninety one counts criminally and his civil cases fundraising, but also is rally right, maybe you would give these speeches and it would help him. But the problem for him, and you saw this in the trial this week, was you know, here he is braging about what a billionaire he is. Good for candidate Trump, not so good for defendant Trump.
This weekend we went through and as you know, my fiancee is exceptional what math for all the reasons a week we know because of her work, she's exceptional a math. We were doing some back of the envelope calculations, and given how leveraged he is financially, given how deep in the weeds he is financially, with everything being mortgaged to the hilt, he's going to have to sell something, and probably pretty fast.
Remember Trump has another financial problem, which is this civil trial, which could be one hundred million plus maybe two hundred million, I think at maybe two thirty where he is going to have to sell things quickly. But I think the thing that I want to just take a minute to talk about here, which we haven't talked so much about, is this number is because of defamation. This number is so high because he could not stop defaming her.
He couldn't shut up long enough to go into court, he couldn't hire a law firm that he didn't want to fuck. And look, let's just be really blunt. This hobble woman is now in my mind like single white female. She's this imitator of Malania's look and all this other weird shit.
But if you look at the videos, in the photos, almost all of his aides look like young Milania.
Of course he.
Has a type, he is a thing. But the fact that you would put your financial future at risk because you want to hit it with your lawyer instead of hiring some junkyard dog Sonovich lawyer out there. But of course, I mean, I know he can't afford that anymore. There risks he puts himself in over and over and over again because of his dumb, childlike ego. It just blows me away. And look, we know now what it means
to vote for Trump. It means you're going to vote for somebody who is an adjudicated sexual assaulter, somebody who raped Egen Carol in a goddamn dressing room, who juris have examined every scrap of evidence that there is out there twice now and said, you know, Donald, you did this, and we know you did it?
Is you and I bows no from writing about Trump World and living in Trump World and basically from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty our whole world with Trump World. Trump is big into defamation.
He's speaking to claiming he'll sue for defamation.
Right.
I would like to point out that in my case, it is five hundred and seven days as of today since Trump went on a rant saying he was going to sue me in the Linked project for defamation. How'd that work out for you, Donny? Because he hasn't done a damn thing.
Right, So he likes to say he's going to sue for deformation, but he also likes to defame. And this number is so high because they made a calculation that was this was how it would be. The reputational harm, right, like the harm of like hundreds of death threats in her email, having to have security, the fear she has, I mean she sleeps with a loaded gun. These are the thing that you cannot necessarily put a cash value on.
This New York City jury did that yep. By the way, this New York City.
Jury which had to stay anonymous for their own safety.
Right as the judge is saying to them, I recommend you never reveal your name in public. That's not because he thinks that they should be discreet, y'all. That's because he thinks they're going to get murdered by Trumpers. And look, I got swatted two weeks ago. Nikki Haley got swatted last night. These people believe that anybody that opposes Trump is an enemy who should be killed. And she's going to always have to live with that. I hate that for her, and it's terrible.
I want to like pull back and talk about defications a one more minute, because you'll notice that again you are the creator of the everything Trump touches dies Maxim and I want to pull back and talk about one Rudy Juliani who.
Has an monthly income now of twenty three hundred and eight dollars and seven hundred and sixty one dollars in this checking account according to his that's his bankruptcy filing.
So Rudy Julian was quote unquote you worked for him.
He was a mathter mayor. He had a bright New York City future. Now he owes Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss about a gazillion.
Dollars, so let's talk about that. They are election workers.
This is a man who, when we were like warming up for the two thousand and eight campaign, was worth on paper around two hundred million dollars because of the value of Giuliani partners and all this other stuff. He needed both ego and money at the beginning of the Trump era, and so he supported Trump starting in twenty sixteen. The last time we talked was the end of twenty sixteen. I told him he will screw you, he will fuck you over, this will go badly. Don't do this, don't
do this, don't do this. You can come back from where you're at right now. You can rebuild. And I was told go fuck yourself. Basically more polite than that, honestly, but it was pretty much go fuck yourself.
And that was the last time we talked.
I stuck to the guy shipped constantly for years, constantly, you know, I worked for him for a long long time. I was one of the few people that would say, hey, fuck off, stop doing stupid shit, and once in a while he would listen to me, and now he is a guy who is just about to be homeless.
Process that for a second in Florida.
He's not going to lose his condo, because bankruptcy protects your primary residence. Right, He's going to lose everything else he has. He's going to lose every other penny that ever comes into his wallet for the rest of his life is going to disappear.
Ruby Freeman and Shay mass and Ruby Freeman, let us just pause her minute. She is the election worker, and she and her mother both worked in elections. They were defamed by Rudy. Their lives were made terrifying and terrible. It was the same thing as Egene right. Yeah, And ultimately, again, what I think is the most interesting thing about this whole situation is that Rudy could not stop defaming them and continued to defame them.
And here's the thing.
The irony of Trump always talks about defaming people, always talks about always the famous people, always talks about suing people for defamation. When it has happened now to him and to Rudy, it took a really gigantic impact financially because he's actually shut the hell up over the weekend he has not been doing it over the weekend. And as much as I find him as I find that amusing to taught him, I think he finally understood he
doesn't have the cash to do this. He doesn't have the ability to raise the cash to pay this right now. He's in a very tight spot, and I'm here for it. He bought every bit of this on himself. Hey, nobody else's fault but him.
So let's talk about what I think is pretty interesting here. We are Republicans now have this problem. They have a candidate quality problem.
You know, candidate qual used to be the rule of everything we did in the party. And you know who the king of that was, Mitch McConnell. You know why he was the king of that because after we had the Palin experience and twenty ten and then we got wiped out in twenty twelve because.
Al and experience the Palin experience.
Although I will say this, you look at the people now in the Republican Party and it makes the Palins look like Downton Abbey.
It's true.
But long story short, we have this thing with candidate quality that McConnell after twenty twelve and said we will never do that shit again. We will recruit great candidates. We will add was a rule that people in the party really said, this is a pretty smart idea. Let's do this, let's do it this way. Well, how'd that work out for us? Because now what we have is a commitment to mostly the worst possible candidate. Trump is one of the worst possible candidates you could imagine. He
is a broken and corrupt and degenerate weirdo. And every thing that the party is defined by is obedience to the corrupt, broken, degenerate weirdo. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't people that like that, because there clearly are. In twenty twenty, at the Lincoln Project, we developed this thing called the Banned Line. The story of how it
got that name is not the point right now. But back then, but depending on the state you were in, it was between three and eight percent of Republican voters could be persuaded away from Trump. Well, since Dobbs and one to six and some other things, that number has grown to be between seven and eleven percent. I'm going to make an argument that things like e Gen Carroll and this verdict are going to make it an even
larger number. Especially among women voters. And you know what couldn't happen to a shittier human being than Donald Trump. He deserves it, and that number is going to expand. And I think you're going to see women in this country, even the people in the Democratic side, the progressive side, aren't.
Like, oh, look everything Biden does.
They're going to look at the at the fact that you're making a choice now, not between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, or not between Joe Biden a republic but Joe Biden and a guy who's been now adjudicated twice
to have committed sexual assault. Even Republican women, even trumpy oriented women, I think, are going to say, you know, I don't think this is for me, and we're going to try to help them do that, because I think it is an argument that can be made to a lot of these folks who ordinarily, you know, maybe they wouldn't maybe they wouldn't ever consider mooning for Joe Biden, but they may now consider that they're not going to vote for the hold Trump.
Yeah.
So it's funny because it's like I was talking to George Conway last week about this before the judgment came down. We're talking and he said, you know, it could be as much as one hundred million dollars and I thought.
There's no way going bro.
I thought, it's nice that you're so invest in this, and I appreciate that you got heard of Robbie Kaplan.
Who is this incredible lawyer.
I mean, this is like a really I think interesting important point, like Robbie CapMan was not some unknown parking lawyer. Huge Egene hired because she looked.
Like right he who didn't look at Robbie Kapen to go ooh, man can be I want this one to take my case.
She said, I'm going to find a son of a bitch right well.
And also I'm going to find the woman who argued the defense of marriage, you know, who ended the terrible anti LGBTQ rules about marriage in this country in.
Front of the Supreme Court.
So this is a woman who has really been a champion for what is right for a long time. You know, I thought for sure George was being a little bit overly optimistic when he said one hundred million.
And there was something about when that VERDA came down where I.
Couldn't believe the feelings I had about it, even though this has nothing to do with me. There was a feeling that Donald tru a woman of a certain age, a woman Donald Trump's own age, right, Donald Trump married to someone who is in her fifties, but a woman Donald Trump's own age appear of his had brought him down.
Yeah. No, listen.
The first thing I thought the minute I saw the case come down, and all I thought was she's my mom's age. And I think, like a lot of other Americans, the first thing I thought was, how would I feel if that was my mother who had had to live with this shit for forty years and then have this guy come out and talk the shit about her that he does. I mean, would how would I feel? And I was That was my contemplation of it. And look,
I met Egeene. I guess once or twice. We had her on the podcast years ago, you and I did when we had the other podcast, but I didn't. I wasn't emotionally invested in her. But I loved watching the moment where somebody who yes, she has she has great attorneys, she has some means to be able to be in the fight against him.
But she's not wealthy.
No, no, but no, Yeah, that's what I'm saying, is she's not wealthy, didn't she wasn't able to throw millions of dollars into this case.
But her story was an unlock.
I think for a lot of people in this country, and I think for a lot, I hope, I hope. Maybe I'm wrong. Look, I could be wrong, but I hope for a lot of other other victims of his kind of abusiveness will come out and talk about it. I hope that he will. I hope that he right now is grinding his teeth because Donald Trump is acutely aware, probably to the penny, how much money he really has, and it's not the same amount that he wants you to think.
Rick Wilson, I hope you'll come back.
John Burton Murdoch is a data journalist at the Financial Times. Welcome back to Fast Politics, my most haunting guest, John Murdoch.
Thanks you for having me.
I'm sorry to tell you I am still not over.
At the last interview we did, which was maybe a month ago, where we talked about American life expectancy.
We're talking about something else.
Today, but then we're going to go back into the American life expectancy conversation because as an American with a life. I don't know if it exactly got me upset as much as it is just a fascinating window into all of the many things we're doing wrong over here.
Yeah at work.
I'm happy to be your sort of non American voice on all of that stuff.
Yeah.
But so let's first talk about this piece you wrote, which is called is the West Talking Itself into Decline? Really interesting? Explain to us a sort of pisis behind this?
Sure, So this one sort of came out of a few thoughts I've been having recently and a few pieces I've been reading. And essentially the way to come at this is to think about the human progress over the last two three hundred years. Specifically, the key point is the Industrial Revolution. So for a very long time, economic historians, kind of anyone who's interested in human progress has been trying to think what caused the Industrial Revolution to happen,
when it did and where it did. So, this huge event that led to rapid growth not just in economic output but in life expectancy and life satisfaction, all of those things, What caused it to happen when and where it did? The American economic historian Robert Allen has this theory that Britain's successes in commerce at the time meant that British workers had especially high wages, and the fact that the UK had a lot of pole meant that
you also had cheap energy. So this combination of high wages and cheap energy meant that it really made a lot of sense to get into using machinery things where you need few people and where cheap energy was helpful. So that's the standard theory that that's why this happened went and where it did. But where this gets interesting is there's another theory from an American Israeli called Joel Mockier, and his theory is that it wasn't necessarily as much
about things like the costs of labor and energy. It was about culture, and it was about how people in Britain at that time were thinking about the world and their place in it, and what it kind of meant to be human and what we could do as humans to change our outcomes. This sounds all very sort of handwayving fuzzy, but I think it's really useful to think
about how revolutionary that was at that time. So this was a period where societies were super religious and the main theory was that the quality of your life and the world around you was essentially came from God. Everything was provided by God. If you wanted to have a good life, then you had to rely. You would hope that God would pray to God that that happened. And if you wanted your future, your next year, your next decade to be better, it would again depend on some
of what was providing to you. You didn't have a huge amount of So when when people like Fromtis Bacon, the British Promossiper, came along and started to say, what if we actually have some input here, What if we can and do things to change our outcome and to make the world a better place. What if we can try and come up with ways and use things like science and experimentation to find better ways of doing things.
So it was really quite revolutionary thinking, and so Joe and Morkir's theory is that maybe actually this was the key. It was the fact that in British society at that time you had a group of people who were starting to think more about what can we do to make the world better? What can we do to make ourselves richer and to make ourselves healthier and to live longer.
And it was that sort of culture of thinking about progress and betterment which led British society at that time, British entrepreneurs to actually start running these things into practice, and that's about the Industrial Revolution. So that's the sort of the big picture of where this, where this whole
peace styro came from. And what I wanted to do in this piece Don't was to throw this forward and say, okay, well, if if if we know, or at least if we if we think that a culture that is focused on progress and improvement and experimentation can produce real tangible outcomes, can lead to more economic growth, can lead to longer life expectancy and large populations, then what does that mean
for today? And so to answer that question, I replicated this this approach from some academics really some which was to look at the language that people use over time. So Google has this amazing database of millions and millions of books that have been published going back one hundreds of years, so all the way back from sort of the year fifteen hundred, sixteen hundred through to the present day. And what we can do with that is we can look at the type of language that has been used
over top. What we see is that in the English speaking world, but also we can expand out to the broader west. So if we look at French books and German books as well, what we see is that in those early years that's sort of sixteen seven hundreds and the lead up to the Industrial Revolution, you really see
this shift to a culture of progress. So the language being used in books, you started getting a lot of words about the future and progress and betterment and growth and that kind of thing before the economy and life expecting to see everything took up. So it really supports the idea that language and culture do matter. But the really interesting thing that I've then seen in the last say one hundred years, or particularly the last fifty sixty years,
is that that has actually now reversed. So in Britain, in the US, in France and Germany and so on. The language that we use in whether you know it's measured in books, but this is really the language we use as a culture. We've stopped talking as much about progress in the future and advancing things, and we've started talking more about warrants and risks and threats, and so this for me was super super interesting in terms of how we think about the world at the moment, at
our place here to what the future might hold. Because we have two things here. One, we have a decent bit of evidence to show that the way we talk about the future and progress of the culture actually has
a beneficial impact on us today and the future. And two we've stopped doing that, And so that, for me is just a super interesting thing to think about, both in terms of how we've got to this point over the last few decades of talking less about things getting better and talking more about things getting worse, And then two, how can we change that going forward?
The sense is that the more we talk about things getting worse, the more things actually do get worse.
Yeah, look, I mean it's obviously it's complex the way these things, these things work, and that causality can work both ways. Obviously, you know, if the world becomes worse, we're going to talk more about the world becoming worse. But the interesting thing to think about here is how much of what we talk about is about, for example, the world getting scarier, and how much is the world actually getting more dangerous? Because those two things for me
are quite different. Something can be dangerous, but because you don't talk about it in that way, you might not be scared by it. And similarly, something can be feel scary where it actually is it. So I think it's useful to think about again the language here. And we have all sorts of data, for example, on how news headlines have got much much more negative over the last Blackade.
This is sort of the Fox News phenomenon.
Yeah, so it's spokes news, but I think we see this kind of right across the political spectrum to a degree. You know, it's not necessarily always scare mongering, but if we're talking more about things getting worse or things that we're worried about, then that does show up across the board. And yet at the same time, we know that omity has pretty much never been lower. We know that all sorts of these things of life expectancy is generally, certainly for.
Most except in America.
It's this question of why are the way we talk about the world has become so much more negative? And what can we do to change that if we want to?
Is the regression thing? Is it tied to conservatism?
That's quite hard to pick out. I think from the data I've seen, it's pretty much across the board. So this is, as I say, it can manifest in different ways. So with someone like within news organization like bots News, this might be talking about, for example, like vieas around crime all the time, or maybe talking negatively about things like immigration.
But then we.
Also see this from more liberal and progressive outlets talking much much more about things like inequality or poverty, even when poverty has fallen and inequality by most measures have not risen over some time. So it's not saying that the people using this language are deliberately trying to talk negatively, but we do to see, depending on how you measure it. Basically, this has happened right across the political spectrum.
And what's happening here is that this is breeding more nihilism, right like, this catastrophizing creates a more nihilistic culture where people are less are less interested in. I mean, again, we don't really know, but there certainly is a theory of the case that's that.
Right, yeah, exactly. The things that have made society better over the years have involved a bit of risk taking. They've involved someone coming out and saying, you know what, this might not work, but I'm going to try it, and that attitude. That mindset tends to be squashed by things like worry and stress and fear. So that's the theory here that as people start to worry more, and especially as you say, when it gets to the level of nihilism of just thinking well, you know, we're all screwed,
then that is that can be really paralyzing. And so so the key thing here is well, how can we how can we change that? You know, climate change is a good example where if if you are if you want to help make the world more resilient and help reduce our impact on the planet, then if you're currently thinking well, you know, we're all screwed, it's all over by our kids are going to have no will to work into then that does not empower you to make shape.
That makes you almost lean back. So is that question of how we can fix that.
Climate change is such a good example because it's like, here we have a problem that is enormous and cataclysmic, but it's also you know, there are some things to be hopeful about, and it keeps shifting like the ozone layer, which growing up in the eighties and nineties was like the focus is sort of regenerating. So we're in a race against temperature. But there are reasons to be optimistic about something that was really presented to me as a
young child as cataclysmic. So I do think there's real reason to not be nihilistic and to really take optimism where we can get it.
Yeah, one hundred percent. I think the the azone example is a great one that made. Another one is acid rain. So like when I was in school, we talked about acid rain all the time, and then because of technology is getting much cleaner and some regulations coming in, acid rain is basically not say anymore. And it's the same in all sorts of things, like lots of measures of air pollution show that that's now at least not getting worse,
even though it's perhaps not quite getting better yet. And all of the things that have allowed us does a species, to have less impact on society have come from new technologies, cleaner technologies, more efficient technologies, not from you know, people just deciding well, I'm going to eat less or I'm going to do less. And so basically to the extent that we are tackling climate change, it's coming from though that focus on growth and progress. A brilliant guest, you
should get on your show. Is a a woman called hand of Richie who's just just got to book out on on all of this in terms of of climate change. But yeah, basically, if we care about a problem, we want to fix that problem, then the best way of doing that is to focus on progress and advancing and what we can do more and better.
Yeah.
One last thing about the thing we just talked about is the West talking itself into decline. The larger thesis here is that the more negative your news is, the more it creates a cycle of negativity that leads to inactivity that leads to less good outcomes.
Exactly.
So let's talk about this life expectancy thing because I just want you to go back and explain to us the reason why Americans are more likely to die at every age.
Yeah, it's a big question, but it's a as you say, it's just an incredibly important thing for us to talk about. And basically, I think a huge part of this, a huge, absolutely enormous parts of this that I think people are starting to get their heads around, but it's still understated, is drugs. Is opioids out in particular. So I think when people think about life expectancy, they tend to imagine
two things. One they think about older people, because if you know that life expectancy is in say the seventies or eighties, then you are the temptations to think, well, you know, why is someone dying age seventy five instead of seventy eight, for example. The second thing is that people think about the healthcare system, because again they're thinking, well, you know, we know that the American healthcare system is more expensive, a few people have access to it, and therefore,
could that explain what's happening here? And I think, you know, neither of those things are wrong, but I think they both divert attention from where the bulk of this is
really happening. So if we start with the age the age parts of this, when we look at what the chances of Americans dying in any given year, if you look at the chance of someone who is already seventy five years old dying before they reach the age of eighty or eighty five or ninety, that looks pretty much the same in America as it does in Canada and England and Wales and France, Germany all these other countries.
So this is not really about older people dying slightly earlier in the US than elsewhere Whereas if you look at someone who is ten years old or five years old, and you look at the chance of them living to reach say thirty or forty, and you look at that in the US, missus elsewhere, there's an absolutely enormous gap. So about one in twenty five American five year olds will not live to reach forty years old. So imagine like a classroom, like a five year olds, a kindergarten class.
One child in that class, on average in the US will not live to be forty and that's just absolutely astonishing. In all of these other rich countries, that's about one in one hundred, and you know that is tragic enough, but one in twenty five is astonishing. So the big difference, the big thing that causes US life expectancy to be lower, is far more people dying at age twenty or twenty
five or thirty or thirty five. And even though those ages are really low, when you have huge amounts of people dying at those ages, it could pull down the whole number.
Because when one child dies, there are parents affected and grandparents affected, and deaths of just spare and cultures effected. I mean, and I'm not even talking about like you lose a teenager and that's a loss for a community.
Yeah, I mean absolutely, But so it's a big impact socially like that. But even just in terms of numbers, if someone dies at age twenty instead of instead of living to be eighty, that has a way bigger impact on life expectancy than like twenty people dying at seventy five instead of like seventy seven. So the big thing that pulls down us life expectancy is all of these people who die in their twenties and thirteen, and of course all of those people in their twenties and thirties.
This comes on to the second part of this being actually less about the healthcare system than people think. These are not people who are dying because they're unable to get access to medical attention to healthcare. These are people who are dying because they've got a gunshot wound, or they've had a fence in an overdose, or perhaps they've been hit by a car. So there is very little at this point that the healthcare system can actually do for these people, even if they do get that far.
These are usually people who have simply been being killed. But again, this is not to say that access to healthcare is not important. It's not to say that we shouldn't as a society and as interested people continue to try and support politicians who are going to increase healthcare coverage.
But it's to say that when you really think about what is dramatically different between America and other countries in the West, it is people dying at young ages from external injuries, homicide, suicide, guns, cars, these kinds of things, and simply not being able to benefit from healthcare access even if they had it, because they've been killed already.
So that is what makes US life expectancy so low, and that is why the US life expectancy has gone backwards so much in the last five to ten years. It's not that loads of seventy five year olds have started dying slightly early. It's that the number of twenty and thirty year olds dying in America has absolutely rocketed, especially due to vent it Up.
Thank you, John, so interesting, really appreciate you.
Thank to you.
Nick Confissi is a political investigations reporter at The New York Times.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Nick, good to be here. Melly very excited to have you. This piece is a banger. Okay.
So the title the piece of America is under attack inside the ANTIDEI crusade. Can you talk us through how this gets written a little bit?
Sure?
I mean I came into this story partly through some reporting on Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. I did a story last summer about how he had become kind of the education governor, how he had built so much of his agenda as governor and then as a presidential candidate around this idea of battling woke forces, left wing forces and education K through twelve and college.
I feel like education should go in quote.
Well, listen, a governor has a lot of power over schools, certainly in Florida, and he did a lot to change what could be taught, how it could be taught, what teachers could do. He was very aggressive about it, and it was very popular to a certain extent in Florida, and it became his resume to be a top tier
presidential candidate. And so I was trying to find out more about his work with outside education experts and activists on the right, Moms for Liberty people at Hilldale College, which is a conservative institution, and of course the Claremont Institute, because the Claremont people had really been front and center
in his events. I mean, he had a gathering for donors last winter in Florida where he essentially like gave a stage to four people from the Claremont Institute, which is in California, and said, tell us how to beat woke in America, And they did a whole panel for donors. So I was looking for emails and documents that would shed a little bit of light on the role of
these outside people in his policy making. And I got some things for the DeSantis piece, but it turned out that I was on to more of a trop with information about not just Florida, but a whole loose network of activists and advocates around the country that Claremont was kind of at the center of that were behind a lot of these efforts to ban quote unquote DEI in higher education.
So yeah, I mean it's wild stuff.
So I would love like a family tree here to sort of talk us through how these networks interact with each other.
The Claremont Institute was founded by acolytes of the conservative thinker Leo Stress, and over the years they had been kind of iconoclastic and sort of in opposition to mainstream conservatism. They thought that mainstream Republican institutions, which they called conservatism and were kind of complicit with a liberal regime that
was taking down the country. And when Trump came to power, they found a real dovetailing between the Trump movement and their own ideas in thinking about American politics and culture. And a big part of their beliefs is that higher education is kind of the test bed for the liberal regime. That's where the left, you know, controls people's thinking, breeds future liberals, turns the educated class and the leadership class
into basically anti American people. And of course this kind of sentiment overlaps with a broader set of gripes and.
Worries on the right.
And there isn't any shortage of conservatives who think that colleges are terrible and everyone there is liberal and kids are learning crazy things. But what happened was that in the aftermath of Black Lives Matters and the crazy Summer of twenty twenty, they really felt on the defensive. A lot of conservatives felt on the defensive about the new movement for racial justice and some of its offshoots in academia, in schools.
In workplaces.
And so this group of Claremont said, okay, we have to take the fight, we have to fight back against this, and how are we going to do it. We're going to go after the colleges, the root of all evil. And they scrounged up contributes from different foundations. Some of them you may have heard of, some not. A lot of the normal big funder is on the rights, and smaller family foundations that aren't household names.
There are one or two family foundations here right. It's amazing to me we see a lot of the Tau Family Foundation.
That was one that was listening to the documents as a foundation that they had applied for funding from. The Serle Freedom Trust, which is now based on Wisconsin, was a group that they did get money for some projects on. And these are foundations in the control of families who tend to be on the right. And there was obviously, I'm sure as you know, in that period and even now, there was just a lot of worry and anger what
was happening on college campuses. So I think they found a ready audience when they said, look, we actually have the solution here, and their strategy was simple, Let's do a bunch of reports in conjunction with state think tanks. Let's identify, basically through googling, by the way, let's identify everybody who has DEI in their title. Well, right up, a report that says DEI is terrible, and what equity
actually means is this, and what diversity actually means. It's this, it's anti white, it's it's racialism, it's it's reverse racism. Here are all the people who do that stuff at this school. Here's the report. Hand it to lawmakers and push them to basically put those programs on the shopping block. And that's kind of where you get some of these wholesale bands on DEI offices. The most sweeping courser in Florida and Texas, they've actually said, look, you can't have offices
in personnel devoted to these things anymore. At public universities. They've defunded them, and they believe that by doing this they can really reshape higher education to be wide. Well, that's a really good question. You know, in earlier years among mainstream conservatives, you saw a big push for what's
called institutional neutrality. You probably heard of the Chicago Principles right, and this was an idea that the administrations of universities should put their finger on the scale of what beliefs are okay, what are like okay arguments and ideas. The administration should just create an atmosphere where scholars and students have intellectual freedom to explore the world and pursue knowledge. And the most common argument on the right was, look, can we go back to a state of more neutrality.
Can we stop having the deid cancel a talk by a conservative because it made some people upset? We go back to a place where everybody gets to say what they want and study what they want and do scholarship and let the best ideas went out. That was the old idea. But the Claremont people belong to a different school of thought. Chris Ruffo, I think is also in the school of thought. They come out of the more traditional understanding of education. It's purpose, and in their minds,
academic freedom as a means to an end. It's not worth much if it doesn't get you to the right kind of society. And I think what's interesting is that this vision of education where academic freedom really has to be subordinated to creating the right kind of country is actually something they happened in common with some people on the left right who say that, look, academic freedom is finding good, but it's not good if it hurts the
wrong people, if it bothers the wrong people. With these ideas great an atmosphere that makes certain people feel unwelcome. And so they kind of have that in common. And then in the minimalism as an older tradition on the left end, the rate of let's have real academic freedom, a real exchange of ideas. But the Claremont people basically don't want to get back to a place of neutrality. They actually want to replace what they think of as
the reigning ideology on campuses with their politics. And that's in the emails I got. They say, look, are you even find emails from the chairman of Claremont, Tom Klingenstein, complaining about the way that most conservatives opposed CRT And he was saying, we're not trying to get politics out of the university. We're trying to get all our politics into the university.
Can you do like two seconds on Christopher Ruffo, just for people who are not as terminally in this as we are.
Chris Ruver is a conservative activist in documentarian and journalists who was a Claremont scholar back in the day. It was kind of part of their crowd at the Manhattan Institute, and he's the guy who popularized critical race theory as the kind of catch all term for stuffed conservatives didn't
like that liberals did about race and speech. That was a very successful campaign because he got politicians around the country to start outlying critical race theory, which you know, is a fairly abstruse academic framework that basically tries to look at how racism can be embedded in seemingly neutral laws, restitutions. And I think in the conservative imagination, critical race theory is kind of embedded in so many disciplines that it's
almost like a fundamental part of higher education. I think that's kind of overdrawn. But as political branding, they're very successful and saying you cannot teach critical race theory, which is something most people don't actually learn college. But what's interesting in the story is around the time that Rufo is popularizing CRT as this kind of buggerboop, the Claremont people were strulling figure out what cash all term.
That they wanted to eat.
So they kept planning around with different things, and in the emails they talked about how what they really oppose is the regime of antidiscrimination, but you can't say that because as a sacred cow, people think it's bad to discriminate, and they aren't receptive to the bigger Claremont argument that anti discrimination rules create this whole downstream effective kind of rigid DEI trainings and things at schools, in the workplaces. And so they said, what else can we call it?
And how can we stigmatize this stuff? And sometimes they called it critical social justice education and sometimes critical social justice And then within you know, eighteen months or two years of this project on building, they were like, no, let's call it DEDI, and they decided that was the most effective brand for kind of all this stuff that
they like. And the reason I'm saying stuff, which is not a very journalistic word, Molly, is it's actually a pretty hard to put your finger in any of these conversations and arguments about exactly what we're talking about when we talk about DEI, because it encompasses this huge range of policies and practices that probably vary a lot in how reasonable people think they are, and so DEI has become this catch all term for everything from you know,
a minority equipment program for first generation college students to affirmative action. But they decided at one point DEI was the way to go to kind of counterbrand and stigmatize these liberal ideas.
Right.
It's so interesting in a way because it is like, you think about the idea of like, being anti discrimination sounds like something that would be very hard to in the modern world we live in be anti right, anti anti discrimination seems like, I mean, at least, you know, I live in a blue city in a blue state.
But I mean, that seems insane to me.
But the way they cooked it up is sort of I guess the thinking.
Was that would be more palatable on the right.
You know.
MOLL is interesting because they basically argue that once you have a set of laws that say you can't discriminate, and this is their argument, you inevitably get to the iban Kennedy version or the idea of anti racism that if you say you can't discriminate, then, in their view, inevitably you end up with processes and rules that say that if there is any difference in outcome among racial groups just because of racism, and therefore you've got to
flatten out those differences and mandates different outcomes.
And that's what they hit the most.
Equity, right, this idea of equity that you have to produce similar outcomes somehow.
But it's built on the supposition that the white guys who get the job are actually the most qualified, and not that the system is inherently benefficiary to them, but they are inherently the beneficiaries.
I think it's even deeper than that. Their argument, and this is in the emails, is that discrepancies and outcome is just not a problem. Their argument, their belief is that, and this is in one of the emails, Blacks will be overrepresented in some spheres whites and others Asians and a stillators. Unquoting loosely from an email from Scott yen Or, who was the head of this project for Claremont, to
Tom Clinstein, the Claremont chairman. They believe that these are not really areas of social concern, that these differences are normal and natural and we should worry about it, and that in trying to worry about it and fix it, we create a terrible society.
When you saw these emails, were you Some of them are so blatantly disgusting. I mean, like the one where she complains about nanny's. It's hard to read these emails and not think that a lot of these people are racist.
Well, that one ely are talking about is from Heather McDonald, who is a fellow at the Manhattanst to Hear in
New York. She was not formerly a part of the Claremont program or campaign, but she corresponded frequently with the personnel of Claremont who were most involved, and so we saw a lot of banter between them, and you know, I obviously was checked by that email as well, where she basically castigated working women who have nannies from what head of McDonald called the low IQ third world, and basically that they're bad mothers for outsourcing their childcare to
those caregivers. And the and the email donald says that she was walking around her neighborhood in Manhattan and saw the nannies and this is what she thought, And a friend of mine was joking, that's what you thought, Like that was your first thought that there was this huge social problem of female lawyers outsourcing their child rearing to people with low IQ's and that was your first thought, but I guess it was to release one of her
first thoughts. You also see this really pronounced hostility to gay people. And one thing that was a little surprising to me in the reporting, I kind of expected to find a lot of traffic and email about trans healthcare, trans issues, and maybe it was because I wasn't searching for the right documents from my document requests, but there was very little of that. There was a lot of talking about Gabe on gay Man in.
Particular right and Peter Teal.
They were gossiping about Peter Teal, who had a minor scandal. I guess you could call it. That's what they call it.
Is that him husband falling out the window.
I don't have the details right in front of it, but there was a boyfriend.
I believe he committed suicide.
Not the husband. So the husband was okay, but the boyfriend died.
There was a confrontation between the Teal's husband and boyfriend, and the boyfriend committed suicide. I believe the story. Again, but you know, they were gossiping about that. But their gossip was, oh, it's so Taudry that he had an affair and that's just the way of gays to have these affairs because of quote testosterone unchecked by female modesty. I was like Adam Heather mat Donald. But you also
see emails and discussion from Scott yan or Claremont. We're talking about essentially his belief that there can't be a healthy society until homosexuality is restigmatized, until gay people are back in the closet. I think we're living in an odd era at Molly, Like on the one end, gay marriage is legal on the other and it's under attack. Again. This kind of fairly new right is under attack and there is a backlash in many dimensions. I guess it was naive of me, but I was surprised to read that.
I was a little surprised that pure dislike and the really throwback kind of attitude, but kind of more than that, this fear that public acceptance of homosexuality was going to lead to social ruin, that it was somehow undermining Western civilization. That's how they think about it.
Yeah, because they suck. Thank you so much for joining us, nag.
It's great to be with you.
No moment.
Rick Wilson here we are you and I what is your moment of fuckery?
My moment of fuckery this week is Donald Trump and Greg Abbot and this bullshit on the border where they have a one mile section of border that they've declared to be the Berlin Wall of Greg Abbot's version of Bertle and they're pretending this is some great national crisis. They won't pass an immigration bill because they want it
for a political issue. They're not doing anything on the border right now with this National Guard group except for you know, trying to get you know, Fox stories over and over again of just how dangerous the border caravans are. And the final element of the fuckery is all these other Republican governors saying, well, I'm gonna send my National Guard, and DeSantis is sending his own like personal shock troop army. They formed a couple of years ago, the Florida Guard,
as I call it, the run Stuffele. You know, they're gonna all send them down there and they're gonna they're gonna guard the border. What they're saying is be Trump Supreme Court who said we can't do this. We're going to ignore them on this one and keep throwing kids into barbed wire in an ice cold river. Good look, guys, good fucking luck.
My moment of fuckery is this that this weekend, and you and I, since we're Internet people, you and I, you will know exactly what I'm talking.
About this weekend.
While Donald Trump finally Judge Kaplan found a number of which Donald Trump cans decided right, it's too expensive for defamation. All of Donald Trump's allies, all of those Internet people you know who may or may not even live in this country, those guys who run you know, go News one, two three and Maga World you know, and bright Bard and also would let us not forget. I don't even want to say their names because I don't want to
elevate them. Those guys spent the weekend just trying to find trash on Egene Carroll, going through every Internet thing they could find, every doc.
YEP, every article she's ever written, trying to find one moment where she wasn't exactly.
Every time she said she liked sex.
They've decided that that is now an excuse that a man can violate her. Here's the deal, guys, that's not how any of this.
Works, not how any of this works until.
They are able to control this country, which is their dream. We still have rules and laws against what you can do to people, even if they like sex, and for that, those misogynistic assholes are my moment of fucker.
Mollie Can I had a small supplementary moment of fuckery. Yes, I think this is one that I think America really needs to be prepared for. This weekend was the first weekend of the release of Ben Shapiro's rap song Yes I Will tell you It's in the In the apocrypha locked in a Secrevatican library, is a prophecy that when Ben Shapiro's rap career begins, it is the end of the earth as we know it and the apocalypse is
near it. I just want to say those words together one more time, Ben Shapiro's rap career.
I thought it was satire when I saw it first.
Apparently no. So anyway, thanks.
For having me now you're the best, so good, Thank you, thank you.
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.