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 Donald Trump says, as he said many times before, that he will close the Department of Education. We have such a great show for you today. CNN political analyst Ron Brownstein tells us what he sees when he crunches these numbers from the twenty twenty four election.
Then we'll talk to investigative reporter Miranda Green about pink slime newspapers that were mailed to voters in swing districts. These newspapers might have swayed the election. But first the.
News Somali, we are hearing the first rounds of Trump appointments. Let us hear the murderer's row of stupid and what you're seeing here.
So again what you see from these appointments, and the first two I think are very instructive. Well, the first one was Susie Wiles. She will be the first ever female chief of staff. So that's a girl boss, if you can use the term ironically. But the two biggest appointments so far are Tom Holman, the borderss are and
Steven Miller, and both Tom Holman and Steven Miller. Tom Holman used to head ICE, has been involved in deportation stuff, and he is most famous for musing before the election to sixty Minutes that you don't have to do family separation, you can just deport the entire family. And I think it's important to realize that these two nominations show pretty clearly where Trump World is going, and it's the thing that Republicans held signs up about during the Republican National Convention,
which is mass deportation. Look, there are other picks that Trump has made that will get past Senate confirmation, people like Marco Rubio to be Secretary of State. Another pick will be Lee Zelden for EPA. He is a climate denier. But I want to talk about Holman and Miller because this is a real clear sign of what they're going to do when they first come into office. And it's going to be deportation, it's going to be workplace right,
it's going to be camps. It certainly I hope that it won't be any of those things, but this seems like a pretty clear sign that that's where we're going. And I just want to pause for a second and realize that they were a huge swing of Latino voters
who voted for Trump. Tom Holman, you know, he is coming for these Latinos, and you're going to have to just we're going to all have to hope that he's checking people's you know, legal illegal border status, because these people are not known for their specificity or their care in the assignment, and it seems highly likely that a lot of people are going to get swept up in
these sweepes. It's quite scary. Also, it's just going to be very logistically difficult to do and of course morally horrifying. So stay tuned for this and we'll definitely see more on this.
So Mai Lee Zilden, who we remember as running against Kathy Hokel on Crime, Crime Crime, is also really really psychotically obsessed with climate change not being real. What are you seeing here?
So I think an interesting pick. You'll remember Scott Pruitt had it in twenty sixteen. He resigned after being the subject of seventeen federal investigations. It's a non agency for Trump. He oversaw the rollback of more than one hundred environmental rules when he was last president. So again, Zelden is here just because it's approach for him and he doesn't
believe the climate change is real. This will be another place where the federal government will either just not do anything, or, more likely in this case, try to make it easier for polluters. We have oil and gas companies asking Trump not to leave the Paris Climate Accord. This is where we are at this moment. We have ex on Mobile warning Donald Trump not to pull out of the Paris Agreement.
I have a hard time imagining x on Mobile gives a fuck about anything, but I just want to point out this is how far down the rabbit hole we are.
Yeah, not good, So byan scratch my head, at least maybe you can make sense this. I can actually Okay, good Mike Hookaby for Arkansas governor who once wrote a book about killing yourself with a fork and knife about our nutrition system and then said fuck that I'm gonna get fat again, and this was a bullshit book. He's going to be a besser to Israel. Make it makes sense.
Yes, I could actually make this make sense because this is like the fascinating grift of Trump World. Mike Huckabee has been leading tours to Israel for years.
All that I need you to make something makes sense for me, you being the wish What are the two of us? Yes, Huckabee, does it sound Hebrew to be No.
He's not a Jew, but you'll remember that religious people, very religious, you know, Zealid love Israel. So in fact, I'm going to read a testimonial from Blue Diamond Travel Experiences our prayer as many many more Christians can travel with Mike and Janet Huckabee and feel the presence of our Great King in just the same way we did. I assume that this will be very good for his
tour guide business. Being the ambassador, Trump has really leveraged the Christians obsession with Israel into his own weird using Israel to whatever. And now Mike Huckabee will figure into this hole. While this, by the way, his twenty twenty four Israel tour is called Unveil the Spiritual Wonders.
Oh, I had that on my to do list for next year. That's good.
An unforgettable journey through Israel, blending faith, culture, and history into a unique tapestry. There you go. Ron Brownstein is a senior political analyst for CNN and a senior editor at the Atlantic. Welcome to Fast politics. Ron Brownstein, he molly anything new goal nothing. Absolutely. After this election, I was like, I have to talk to Ron. Ron has to explain to me what happened. I just wrote a piece about all this stuff I got wrong for very
fair about this election. I did not get this right. But you are much more harder than I am, So explain to us what happened.
You know, I'm not sure.
I was much smarter, and I got one big thing wrong, which we will talk about in a minute. But I mean, the most abnormal thing about this election, the most shocking thing about this election was how normal it was. I mean, Donald Trump obviously is not a normal candidate, but to
a large extent, the electorate treated him that way. And you had the normal hydraulics in place, which is in a two party system, when the view of one party goes down, the other party rises, and you know, there are always a lot of things going on, and we have to unpack and understand what happened with young men and Latino men in particular. But Harris underperformed across the board demographically and geographically. She did not have the gaens
among college white women that you would have expected. She did not have the gains among young women that you would have expected. She did not have the gains in suburbia that seem very much possible after the twenty twenty two election. And what you saw was a very normal pattern when you have an outgoing president who is unpopular, who is either running for reelection or stepping aside. In either case, the vast majority of pepeople who are unhappy
with that president's performance vote for the other side. So what did that mean. Well, sixty percent of voters in the exepole said they disapproved of Biden's performance. It was even worse than the number in twenty twenty two, and eighty two percent.
Of those disapprovers voted for Trump.
Seventy percent of voters said that the economy was in bad shape, it was only in fair or poor condition. Seventy percent of those people voted for Trump. That's his vote, that's his forty nine point something that'll probably end up getting when this is all counted. He's just over fifty. Now he possibly, maybe more likely than not, is going
to fall just under fifty. But if you look and compare to twenty twenty two, Molly, the share of people who said the economy was in bad shape but voted for Whitmer or Shapiro or Mark Kelly or Rafael Warnock in twenty two was much higher than the share of people who said the economy was in bad shape and
voted for Harris in those same states. And what that says to me was that people associate and attribute the president control over national economic policy, and it simply was less possible for her to run away from the discontent
over that. Primarily, other things mattered in you know, the border mattered, Prime mattered, But primarily it was harder for her to escape the undertow of discontent about the economy in Biden's performance than it was for Democratic candidates in twenty two, and for that matter, even to some extent in twenty twenty four. You know, people like splocking.
Yes, I want you to talk us through this, because I looked at those numbers and you had people I feel like, the best example here is the example of Carrie Lake in Arizona. You had people vote for Trump and then not bother to fill in the bubbles for carry Lake, who ran as a mini Trump.
So explain that to me my basic feeling about this. You know, there are people who point to Trump having this unique connection with his voters. And I am sure that is true, and that was not able to be replicated. And in many cases the Democrats in the Senate raises did not get appreciably more votes than Harris did, but the Republican got appreciably less than Trump did. Certainly, I think that was the case in Wisconsin.
And Michigan and Arizona and Nevada.
So I actually look at it a little differently. I mean, I go back to the point I made a minute ago, which is that, for example, if you look in twenty twenty two, people who had a negative view of the economy, John Fetterman in twenty twenty two lost them in Pennsylvania, right, he lost them, but he lost them by eighteen points. People who had a negative view of the economy. This time in Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris lost them by.
Thirty seven points. Okay, in Nevada.
Last time, people who are in a negative view of the economy, Catherine court has Master lost them by twenty six points. This time Harris lost them by forty one points. And then you kind of look at it horizontally. In this election, Rosen didn't lose people who are negative on the economy by quite as much as Harris did. And to me, that's the difference is that as the presidential candidate, you are held accountable greater than anybody else.
And this is really we're only here for my own edification. I understand this is a podcast, but this is a question I want answered. Doesn't it seem like Harris is overperforming? For example, so originally you had this Biden map before he dropped out, which showed him losing. This is the
famous pod Bros. Where they had a map that showed him losing four hundred electoral votes, right, which I didn't even know was possible, but it is, turns out and then Harris jumps in and she reversed the tide, right, So you see the down ballot candidates actually do better, and they do better in swing states where the campaign
has taken over the airwaves. So that makes the case that a Harris did actually help and b that the campaign did actually help, Which gets me to my next thought, which is, does this mean that Donald Trump is just singularly powerful and that it's not so much about the Republican brand or the Democratic brand, but merely about the incredible, unheard of power of Trump.
So to your first point, I think it is unequivocal that Harris did better than Biden would have done. I mean I talked to one political scientist who said that based on Biden's approval, the right track, wrong track, and the perceptions of the economy, that his model would have had a six.
Point popular vote loss for the incumbent.
Harris is going to end up losing by somewhere between one point five and two points. What I think I got wrong the most, and a lot of people got wrong the most, was that the twenty twenty two model turned out to be not quite as replicable.
In twenty four as of the period.
And what I mean by that if you look at twenty twenty in the states where both sides weren't spending money, whether they were red states like Texas and Florida or blue states like California and New York. In twenty two, Republicans improved in those states, which is what you would expect when sixty five percent of the country thinks we're on the wrong track and the president's approval rating is low.
But what Democrats were able to do in twenty two was basically quarantine the swing state and in the states where they ran a full scale campaign Wittmer, Shapiro, Evers, Mark Kelly, Katie Hobbs, John Fetterman, Raphael Warnock. They ran vastly better than Democrats did in the non competitive state. Okay, fast forward to twenty four. Right, fast forward to twenty four, The same thing happens in the non competitive states. New Jersey gets worse, Arizona gets worse, Florida gets worse, Texas
gets worse. You know, whether it's a blue state or a red state, when you're dealing with a forty percent approval rating for the outgoing president, they all get worse. Now, what do we look in side the quarantine line in the swing states? It works to some extent. Harris doesn't deteriorate in them as much as she does outside of the swing states, but she doesn't run nearly as well.
The differential isn't nearly as big as it was in twenty two for Whitmer and Shapiro and Ebrs and Warnock and Kelly, and the undertow kind of seeps in.
You know, the quarantine. The moat doesn't work.
The quarantine doesn't work, As I said, even in those states. To me, like, out of all the numbers I've looked at, the one that really jumps out at me is that in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, significantly more of the voters who are negative on the economy voted against Harris than voted against the Democratic candidates in twenty two. We can argue about why that is. You know, a lot of factors probably went into that, including Trump's improving image, which.
We should talk about.
But a big part of it, I think is that you just can't escape that verdict as the president. And the fact that she declined everywhere, the fact that the urban centers decline, the inner suburbs decline, the outer suburbs decline, the rural places decline. They all declined by about the same amount. I wrote this the Center for Rural Studies, which is a think tank. They have a classification system that categorizes all counties in six groupings, from the most
urban to the most rural. They all declined by about the same amount. That is not something that is about messaging or positioning. That is about a common national experience, a shared national verdict, which is inflati, which is inflation above all, and maybe a little bit of the border and crime, but of inflation.
I mean it seems like that's an anxiety about implanturing, right, yes.
More than anything else. Absolutely, I think what was it?
Forty six percent of people in the exitpos said they were worse off than they were four years ago, and over eighty percent of them voted for Trump. I mean, that's kind of the heart of the election right there.
Doesn't that mean that Trump has more power as a candidate? I mean, isn't that what that is? His ability to appeal to a broad swath.
I would say his ability to turn out people inclined to support him is his superpower. But I think equally critical was that the cross pressure of the economy caused a lot of voters who.
Remain hasard Trump to vote for him.
Anyway, It's worth noting a couple of these between the exit polls and votecasts, which are two major sources right of people's attitudes as they were voting, fifty five percent said he was too extreme, fifty five percent said they were he would lead the country in an authoritarian direction. Two thirds almost said they wanted the abortion to remain
legal in all most circumstances. Fifty five fifty six percent majority said they opposed mass deportation, and roughly that many said they want the government to do more to provide access to healthcare, all of which they're not going to get with Trump. And the reason he won is because there was a substantial slice of voters in each of those questions who express negative views about Trump who voted
for him. Anyway, Here, I'm going to give you the world premiere of something that will be in my Atlantic column later this week. Voters who said abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. Okay, pro choice voters but were negative on the economy said the economy was only fair or poor.
How do you think they voted? Trump won? And this was a big group. This is over one.
Third of the electorate said they were pro choice but the economy was fair poor.
Trump won them.
Wow? Is that because he just was able to neutralize the issue by saying that he wanted to throw it back to the States and then just shutting it down.
Some of that and some of that.
The economy mattered more to them the way I phrased it. And this is not the first time this has happened. This was what happened to Carter with Reagae, It's what happened to George H. W. Bush with Clinton. If people are dissatisfied with the status quo, stability is the risk people view continuing along the track of an unacceptable present to be a greater risk than leaping into an unpredictable future. And Trump, again, this is a well trod dynamic. The
shocking part is that it applied to Trump. You know, I mean that Trump got all of the traditional benefits. He recumbent, and he's someone to try to overthrow the government, and he has ninety four felony indictments and convictions.
And adjudicated sexual assault and all of that.
And yet if you kind of look at the numbers and didn't have his name on it, it would be like, humph, this is what the out party gets.
And you know, maybe part of that.
And this is where I think there's going to be a lot of second guessing about some of the Democratic strategy in twenty three and twenty four. His favorability was much higher in the electorate in twenty four than it wasn't twenty two. His retrospective job approval was over fifty percent.
That's insane.
And that is pretty striking given everything else. A big part of that is that voters, as we've talked about before, you could see this happening all the way through twenty three and twenty four. Voters were judging Trump retrospectively through the lens of what they didn't like currently about Biden,
primarily inflating and maybe the border. But it also meant that all of the other things they didn't like about Trump, they kept his approval rating from ever hitting fifty while he was president, were kind of fading in their memory, and Democrats didn't really do a great job of reminding
them of that until the end. I mean, let's just consider here, this was the only president ever who's approval rating never reached fifty percent while he was in office in Gallup, and his retrospective job approprating in Vodecast was fifty or fifty one percent. Like that is something, and that is partially a reflection of I said, the hydraulics,
you know, Biden goes down, Republicans go up. But it's also the extent to which everything else about his presidency, which by the way, people are going to get exposed to again that they didn't like kind of faded next to the fact that people felt they had more money in their pocket at the end of the week.
That is wild, wild, wild wild.
And by the way, like, here's one thing that goes with that.
Biden won the popular vote by four and a half point, right, So we're gonna have to wait and see when we get the actual analysis it's done with the data files, which is both Catalyst and Pew. But right now, Biden won by four and a half points. But when among the people who voted in twenty twenty in both the exipol and votecast, they were even in how they voted in twenty twenty plus one for Biden or zero difference. So that means that a lot of people who voted
for Biden in twenty twenty did not come back. Did they not come back because they didn't fear Trump enough? Did they not come back because they didn't like the results they got from Biden? Was it both? But there was a big fall off in the kind of surge anti Maga voter. It came out in eighteen twenty two.
I wondered if that was the Democratic base staying home. Well, it was something she lost young people.
Well, she won young people, but retreated from Biden in twenty I actually think that was probably the surge. Again, when Catalyst and Pugh does this and they match their analysis to the actual voter file, will have a better idea.
But if I had a guest today, the irregularly voting Democratic leaning constituencies, they came out to vote against Trump in eighteen twenty and twenty twenty two, a lot of them stayed home, whereas Trump continued to turn out his irregularly voting, his low propensity voters, particularly younger men.
Again, we'll look.
At later when we get these other sources, but right now, what we have, the exits of the votecast told us that Republicans outnumbered Democrats among voters to the biggest degree I think ever in the exipolse. I mean the exipolse, you know, the exipole was Republicans were four points more of the electorate than Democrats, and I think votecast was the same.
There's never been a gap like that, never, never.
But that's because he got those low propensity ones and twos out right.
And then the low propensity Democrats would be my supposition did not come back. Now, why you know, one view is they did not have the sufficient sense of alarm about MAGA, despite Trump being more radical than he was in twenty or sixteen. The other are though, is that they came out, they voted for Biden, and their lives didn't get better in the way that they hoped, and interest rates and inflation were weighing on them, and they were just like, screw.
It, unbelievable. Ron Brownstein, appreciate you so much, and also so Deprodson. We're all gonna die, but thank you for coming on.
Can I just say one last thing real quick?
Yeah, you don't get movement of this magnitude on an ideological shift. I don't think the consistency of this across every kind of county says to me that this was more about performance than anything else. It was a common national verdict. Biden's administration did not deliver what people hope, even though they had a lot of positive achievement.
Should that make me feel better, Yes, yes, okay, it should.
Make you feel better, only in the sense that if Trump doesn't deliver. People hired Trump to solve some specific problems, particularly they're squeeze in the cost of living. They remain hesitant about a lot of the things that he wants to do back the APA, undermining vaccines.
Mass deportation.
If he gives them a lot of that and doesn't deal with doesn't solve the problem that they hired him to do. You could see the same kind of uniform movement in the other direction in the elections of the near future, and.
It is, I might add, a very hard problem to solve, right, I mean, there's no quick fix for making things less expensive. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Ron Brownstein. Will you please come.
Back, thank you, thank you. You know where to find me.
Miranda Green is an independent investigative reporter. I'm Miranda. Welcome to Bath Politics Biggs. Talk to us about what you discovered and how the right and mago world more specifically gets its news.
Yeah, you know, I think post this most recent election, a lot of the rhetoric and a lot of the kind of internal dialogue has been about what the media missed, right, A lot of kind of self lagulation about what we could have done more, or how we didn't see that
Trump would win with such overwhelming numbers. And as people were having that dialogue, it made me think about the reporting that I've been doing these past two years, which is not just about kind of where people are getting the news, but also how the right has really created this ground game of taking advantage of the depletion of local news across the country and how they're leveraging that to get out their message in oftentimes very secretive, non
transparent ways. And the reporting that I've been doing these past couple of years has been looking into this kind of playbook that a lot of these organizations, largely backed by the oil and gas industry, are using to take advantage of this kind of dual lack of trust in mainstream media and also lack of opportunity of taking advantage of a local news that no longer exists across the majority most of the country, you know, newspapers around seventy
five percent since two thousand and five across the country. More than half of the counties across the United States only have one or no local news sources. And this is something that players in the oil and gas industry and on the right are taking advantage of. And so that was something that I really wanted to highlight.
So make that make sense when it comes to oil and gas and local news and what that means.
Sure, you know, the oil and gas industry has been feeling the pressure for at least five years now. You know, it started under the Obama administration, It was lacks or under the first Trump administration, and it became much stronger
under the Biden administration. This idea that we as a globe are seeing the impacts of climate change, that climate change scientists and science show is because of human impact, because of the emissions of the Oil and Gas Sact, and that in order to change that, we need to
dramatically curb those emissions. And so, you know, the businesses that make their money off of these admissions, they're struggling to figure out how to continue to make money, how to continue to benefit their shareholders, and to stay afloat. You know, their business is like anything else, and so one of the ways that they can do that is by you know, helping to change public perception over their industry.
A lot of this is happening because people, the kind of public consciousness has changed to understand that, you know, climate change is largely asked that, you know, because of these companies, because of what they're doing. What is happening is that you know, as mainstream media, as reporters have changed from you know, myself included from having to write stories that said, on one side, climate change is real.
On the other side, let's quote a climate denier. And now we are finally in this you know, this place where we don't have to do that anymore. The science shows that climate change is at the hands of you know, of humans, that it is coming from fossil fuels by and large, and so we don't need to do that.
But the media is turning against these industries, and so you know, what they're doing, by and large is trying to find, well, how are alternative ways of getting our messaging out there if we can no longer rely on reporters to kind of carry this one sided messaging because
they're going to poke holes in it. And so what they have done and I found in my reporting largely across the southeast and areas where you know it is Republican and areas where oil and gas still has a stronghold because it's largely produced in those areas, they are buying up local newspapers, creating newspapers online and paying for content in kind of you know, papers that are willing to take that kind of news to take those kind of pay to play stories to push this messaging that
shows that they are still they are great community supporters, that they are there for jobs, that you know, they have the best interests of Americans at heart, and that what they're doing is not that bad. In a lot of the reporting I found in these papers where they are kind of buying this influence or creating this influence, It's not so much that they were pushing anti climate change initiatives or that they were saying how great oil
and gas was. They were just not reporting on the negative aspects of their companies at all.
Right, So they were sort of just selectively covering what they felt like covering that worked for their narrative exactly.
And you know, you have to keep in mind in these communities. You know, I'm talking about rural Alabama, I'm talking about communities in the Gulf Coast of Florida. I'm even talking about community in Richmond's, California, just outside of San Francisco. I mean, in these communities, they have very
few other options for local news. So when these newspapers come online and then residents are thinking, Okay, this is a place where I can read community profiles, this is a place where I can understand the businesses that are opening around me. They're not aware of what they're not seeing in those papers because they have so few other alternatives. So by being able to control this narrative in this way, that is a when for these companies, and it's something
that they openly talk about. Actually they and they learn
from one another. And the reporting that I did for a story I worked on with The Guardian about Alabama Power and it's control of these two newspapers in Alabama, one of their PR specialists, who ironically was a former reporter, actually went on too a PR podcast and they asked him, you know, where did you come up with this idea of launching this Alabama News Center, which is one of these organizations that they launched in I think it was twenty sixteen, And he said, we were thinking that we
were pitching our stories to reporters. Reporters were no longer writing the stories that we wanted them to write, so we're thinking, how else do we get these stories out there? We're going to launch our own newsroom. And they actually said we got this idea from chev because the year earlier, in twenty fifteen, Chevron had launched the Richmond Standard in California, which was a newspaper that had not exist prior in that area, and it was a huge community that was
lacking local news. And it's doing something very similar where it was covering local news. It was covering what was happening in the community, but it was not covering itself critically, even though it was the largest employer in the area.
Wow, how does this relate besides climate change?
Yeah, you know, I spoke to Anne Nelson. He is a prolific writer. She wrote a book about kind of the oil and gas influence and the kind of dark money behind manipulation and in the media. And one of the things that she said to me, which I thought was really interesting, is that, you know a lot of the donors that donate to conservative interests and the Trump campaign, you know, they make their money in oil and gas. You know, some of the largest donors out there, Harold
Ham out of Oklahoma, Timothy Dunn out of Texas. That is where they made their bread and butter. And they care about the future of the industry that they've made this money up, and they care about conservative ideology, and so they're not necessarily just focused on oil and gas and climate initiatives, but that is kind of where a
lot of some of this money stems from. And so you start seeing the echo chamber of this and other news organizations and other kind of pink slime journalism, which is another aspects that I've covered, where it's these news seeming websites that exist online that are perpetuating this kind of not journalistic news articles that people are picking up and reading and thinking that they are vetted in the
same way. And that is kind of, you know, I think the heart of so much of what people are trying to grapple with here, which is again, where are Trump voters getting their messaging? Where is the other side getting their messaging? Where's Middle America reading? And these are some of the places where you know, Middle America is getting their news, not exclusively, but it is definitely a
part of the puzzle here. These organizations like Metric Media, which is part of a larger network which has more than eleven hundred online news sites that span the country. I mean, they found an opportunity here to really get their messaging out and they are known pay to play players.
New York Times to the story on them back in twenty twenty about how they take money for specific stories that they write, and they kind of put them together into these packages of these websites that look mostly real. They're a little odd, they're a little funky. But if you're a normal reader and you're kind of pushed to these websites, you don't know, right, you know, journalists like us, we have a trained eye. Where like most stories have bylines,
it's kind of weird if they don't articles. What makes articles distinct is that they have both sides of the story, and they both perspectives, right Like, any time I write a story about anyone, you know, say I write a story about Exxon, I reach out to Exxon, and I give them a chance to comments, and I make sure that I have try to represent their point of view in the story, even if they don't want to talk
to me. These stories don't do that. And what they're doing furthermore, in what they were specifically doing in the lead up to this election that I noticed is that in addition to these websites that kind of exist online and sometimes there really have a ton of content, sometimes kind of seem a bit like sleeper cells, they were publishing print versions of some of these key websites ing key counties and then sending them to people's mailboxes directly
who obviously had not paid for them, had no idea what they were, but they were showing up and kind of pushing specific key issues related to that election.
That makes a lot of sense. I know what red sludges explain to us what pink sludges.
Yeah, So pink slime is a terminology that kind of it's kind of this gross terminology. Honestly, it comes from this idea the term that people have used to describe the additive filler and meat in food, So you know, additives in something like hamburgers or chicken nuggets, say something,
it's called pink slime. And so it's been kind of reutilized as this idea that there is these fake news sites that just have this fake content that's like fluff and filler contents in these these websites that look real but really have bias and have a partisan kind of
you know, spin on them. And so that's why I tend to try to like to use the word news seeming or news appearing, because it looks real, but if you look close, it's it's not what it seems it is something that has been utilized by organizations for years now, but really seems to kind of pick up and take off, especially around elections or key culture war issues.
Interesting.
So, one of the papers that I actually highlighted that came out was shipped to people's doorsteps in North Dakota October fifteenth. Was a very interesting kind of odd oddity because this this paper showed up with people's stores is called the Central Lord Dakota News, and it's ten pages long, and it's very clearly right leaning. But North Dakota is right leading, so, you know, not the kind of place that you know, maybe people would automatically.
Fill this away.
And it talks about key issues that I'm sure voters and that state care about, inflation, security issues, immigration. But if you dig deeper into the story, you realize there's kind of an odd angle to some of these articles. It talks a lot about protests. It talks a lot about the Dakota access protests that happened back in twenty sixteen. So this is eight years ago, right, twenty sixteen. This nowhere close to, you know, what we're currently dealing with.
Why would they be have an entire section in this paper that says, you know, on this day in twenty sixty and that talks about all these disruptive protests. Well, turns out that the Key pipeline company but that owns the Dakota Access pipeline, has a lawsuit against Greenpeace, which is a major organization that have protesters protesting against the pipeline that is coming up in North Dakota in February.
And this lawsuit is considered one of the biggest lawsuits it's probably going to happen in the state in its history. And this is you know, most likely part of their ground game to try to get public perception to benefit them and turn against remind locals how frustrating that situation was. And so again it's all wrapped up in other stories that seem just like, Okay, this is part of the news cycle. This is not the out of the ordinary,
but it's putting that back into people's mind. You know, do you remember eight years ago about all these protests. Do you remember that the roads are blocked. Do you remember that the police had to deal with this? You remember it was expensive for the state to try to remind people before in the lead up to this lawsuit. In this court case, is about to happen.
Wow, how widespread is this news? Like? What percentage of Americans do you think get these mailers or read this news online?
Yeah, it's really hard to tell how widespread this practice is. We know that there are at least eleven hundred websites that exists across every single state and many communities to target at them. It's really hard to tell how many people are actually getting the sense to them, you know, besides people who are tweeting them out or sending them to me. That's kind of how I get an inkling of what's happening. We do know it's overwhelmingly on the right.
You know, they arought eleven hundred sites on the right. There are about seventy sites on the left that do this. So it's not entirely done by conservatives, but it is largely done by conservatives. And what's really interesting too, is that the conservatives that are doing this, their funding is tied to the Koche Brothers. Their funding is tied to this kind of conservative apparatus that is taking advantage of
alternative news. We see organizations like Center Square, we see organizations like The Daily Signal from the End, the Daily Caller, News Foundation. You know, those are all right leaning state policy network backed Coke money taking organizations. They're all kind of part of this network. And what I am noticing as a reporter is that this is bigger than just the election. This is about how do we rework trust in news to be trust in us. People don't trust
the mainstream media. There are a lot of conservatives aren't reading the New York Times, They're not going on NBC or ABC. They are looking for partisan news, and so partisan think tanks, partisan entities are thinking, well, how do we capitalize off of this and how do we then utilize those eyeballs to push our best interests. It's very strategic. They are echo chambers of one another. You know, these metric media sites have shared Daily Caller articles, they do
share Center Square articles. I mean, they are creating this robust conservative news movement. And the thing that I find the most concerning as a reporter is that there's so little transparency there. You know, if people choose to read write leaning or left leaning news, that's their prerogative. If they want to listen to Joe Rogan because they like him and they like his perspective and they kind of
know where it's coming from. That's their prerogative. But if you go on Metric Media's website and you look at their about as section, there's nothing there. If you try to contact anyone, it is just a form you fill out.
We really appreciate you taking the time.
I would just say from a you know, I think that the lack of transparency in these pink s Lin sites is really the most concerning here. That you know, listeners and readers should be able to choose where they get their news from, but they should know who is behind that news. They should know where the money from, they should know the motivation behind those individuals who are pushing those narratives. And as long as they do, you know,
that's up to them. I think that you know, more opportunity and more you know, venue to find news is never bad, but it's the facts. I want to make sure that the facts are accurate, that people are really understanding what they're reading and understanding, you know, what the motivations are for those who are you know, putting out those those papers that they're picking up. Thank you so much, thank you, Mollie, pect.
Jesse Cannon, so my young fast.
Unfortunately, the Republicans seem to have quenched having the majority in the House. But there's an interesting asterix that you and I were just discussing. What are you seeing here?
Trump is nominating people who feel more establishment because he thinks it will be easier to get Some of these people a need to send a confirmation and some of them don't. But he's trying to pick from a sort of group that's more quote unquote establishment, and this is leading him to take Republicans from the House of Representatives. Now the House of Representatives has not yet been called, though Republicans are going to win the House of Representatives.
They're going to win it by four five seats about what they had in the previous Congress, or is we like to think of it here at fast politics in unngovernable majority, right, we saw Mike Johnson really had a lot of trouble getting stuff passed, almost always had to caucus with the Democrats. Now he has this situation where Donald Trump has literally already is talking about taking five Republican members of Congress and putting them either in his
cabinet or in his administration. That will mean that while those I mean, we'll see what happens how he'll take them out or when they have specials. Each state has different calculus for special et cetera.
We know how this shakes out of New York State and if he's taking a least Stephonic out. We saw this with George Santos already.
The only thing I would say with that is that Stephonic has a safe red seat, So George Santos didn't.
Yes, but it's still time where that seat will be blank and the majority will be slimmer right, and.
That'll be a real problem for Mike Johnson.
And potentially our democratic name only Governor Kathy Hochold might slow walk.
That one hard to imagine, but it's possible that, my friends, Mike Johnson with his ungovernable Republican majority is our moment of fuck Gray. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening and