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 Elon Musk says Biden taxing the ultra rich would upset a lot of donors. I think it might. We have a great show for you today. Senator Amy Klobshar stops by to talk about her new book,
The Joy of Politics. Then we'll talk to Showtimes the Circuses, Jennifer Paul Mary about her new piece, and Vanity Fair about Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and how she's successfully governed a divided state. But first we have vaccine scientists, pediatrician and all around good guy and author of The Deadly Rise of Anti Science, doctor Peter Hotez. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Doctor Peter Hotez.
It's great to talk to you, Molly. I think this may be the first time that we don't actually talk about COVID so much with them.
Right, we can just talk about COVID derangement syndrome. It's a good name, right, I mean, that's where we are basically. So I mean, let's just like top line here, So OURFK Junior has returned from the shadows. I guess at one point he was normal.
Well, you know, I have a new book coming out called The Deadly Rise of Anti Science. And one of the things you'll see about the book, compared to the last one, I wrote about vaccines did not cause Rachel's autism, where there was a lot of stuff about RFK and my discussions with him.
You have an autistic daughter named Rachel, and she did not get her autism from vaccines.
Right, she has autism and intellectual disabilities. And I wrote the book to basically counter the prevailing view about the anti prevailing anti vaccine activist sentiment that claimed vaccines cause autism, and a lot of that came from O. RFK Junior, and I debunk that whole thing and also provided the alternative narrative about what autism is, how it begins in early fetal brain development, the concepts of neurodiversity, and what
autism genes are. And we did whole exim genomics sequencing on Rachel and my wife Ann and I, and we found Rachel's autism gene.
That was the whole thing. That's really interesting. It was just a specific gene that was formed differently.
Yeah, in this case, it's involved in neuronal communications. In her case, it's a type of gene called the neuronal side of skeleton genes, and several of the autism genes are that hers. In fact, it turned out to be one that hadn't been discovered before, and it was actually written up in a biomedical journal along with five other instances where they found it. So the technology is so amazing that they once you find one, then you can pick up, you know, several other kids or adults with it.
So is there a world in which that there'll be a treatment for this or now.
Well potentially, And then you know, there's this whole other thread about what does that mean, you know, for people who are very diverse, and then gets some the whole discussion of high functioning versus not high functioning? What does it mean? DAVI the associated intellectual dess. But the point is so RFK was very engaged at that point and then you know, from my point of view, he kind of I don't say he ever disappeared, but he wasn't
that prominent. So that in the newest book that I have called The Deadly Rise of Anti Science and why so many Americans died because they were falsely led to believe that they didn't need a COVID vaccine or that it wasn't safe. In this kind of nonsense, you know, the major groups that identify are the organizations like the House Freedom Caucus and individual US senators and the role of Fox News and spreading that disinformation in the talking
heads and RFK. I don't even know if he's mentioned in the book, and so that's point one point two, when you know he announces running for president. Other than I cringed from his past track record, I was interesting that I noticed that he wasn't talking about vaccines and all, and I think, boy, you must have been pretty well coached. They probably said, look, Bobby, you know this is what this is what you want to stay away from this one help you at all talk about all the other stuff.
And he was doing that. So I was kind of surprised, you know, when he went on Rogan and then just went off on the whole vaccine again. It was like, you know, it was like it was two thousand and five again, and I thought that was really interesting or in an odd way, I'm going to just.
Read you a little bit that Chelsea sent me on the Rogan podcast, he simply waved away this inconvenient fact and continue to argue that life saving vaccines are dangerous. Kennedy told Rogan that it could be aluminum in the vaccines that's causing problems. I remember in two thousand and four asking my pediatrician and she said there wasn't aluminum in vaccines, but in at't typically ingest seven to nine milligrams of aluminum per day through food, and a typical
vaccine has less than half a milligram. Infants will be exposed to far more aluminum through their diet than vaccines. And there's no scientific evidence that aluminum is linked to autism or any other health condition cited by Kennedy.
Right, So remember how this works. So, and this is why I don't ever do a public debate with someone like RFK Junior, because he keeps on moving the goalposts.
So right, right, Because the initial the OG assertion from the Wakefield paper in the Lancet in nineteen ninety eight was that it was the measles momps rubella vaccine, the live virus vaccine replicates in the gut, and somehow that led to autism, and it never made sense to me, the paper was retracted, although it took a decade to get it retracted because it was false.
And then the damage was done by then.
But then, you know, they kept on whatever you call it, whack a mole or moving the goalpost. Then they shifted to thymerisol preservative that used to be in vaccines, and RFK Junior was a big proponent of that, and then that got debunked, And by debunked, I mean these large cohorts studies saying, kid, you know, kids who got the MMR vaccine were no more likely to acquire autism than kids who didn't, and kids on the autism spectrum were no more likely to have gotten MMR than kids who didn't.
So then it switched to thimerosol. And then it switched to spacing vaccines too close together.
If you remember the whole yes.
Getting McCarthy, then you know, we got to green the vaccines and or all these books written about that, and that was all that was all bs too and then and then that got debunked, and then it fell to alum in vaccines, and then that got debunked, and then
it went to something called vaccines caused chronic illness. You know, I mean, I mean, so they just made it harder and harder to kind of and and that's and that's the frustration of debating this stuff is because you know, you you keep knocking one down, as they call it, whackome, well, you keep knocking one down and another one pops up.
And then they switched it over for a while to the HPV vaccine recervical cancer and other cancers, and they said it caused infertility or autoimmunity, and that was all bs and and then and if you remember, they started sorted the same thing about COVID vaccines. And the reason they said it was because they had, you know, all the all the graphics. They could just copy paste the false claim from HPV vaccine at the COVID vaccines. That's
the nature of the anti vaccine movement. But it takes somebody, you know, that's been really looking at this over a period of years to figure out what the heck they're doing and to debunk it.
It's just ridiculous.
And then the other piece to this is and again I thought RFK was done talking about this, but he went back to it and others and Rogan as well as the insidious pharma links or this kind of stuff.
So and the term they throw out all the time you see on social media's pharma shill s hill, and you know they claim as I'm secretly, you know, taking money from pharma companies, and when in fact, we made you know, developed two protot covid prototype vaccines that we licensed to two organizations in India and Indonesia, no patents, minimizing strings attached and everything in the open access literature, two to three dollars a dose, and wound up one
hundred million doses administered in India and Indonesia, providing proof of concept that you could bypass the pharma companies and provide an alternative model. And any rational person would say, hey, I'll bet RFK Junior would really love that concept, or Joe Rogan would love that concept. Instead, you know, it's so important to demonize me or someone else that they just throw that out the window and just want to make up stuff.
It's kind of incredible. Obviously. What's happening with Joe Rogan here is that Republicans know that Trump is going to get the nomination. They know that he can't possibly win a general and so the hope is that they are hoping they can find someone to pump up so that Biden will have, you know, a harder time or maybe not win at all. I mean that clearly seems to be the general sense here.
I mean, oh, I see, So what you're saying is they're kind of schmoozing up RFK in order to take photes away from Biden Nerd.
Right. During the pandemic, there was this unholy alliance between yoga moms who would largely vote Democratic, who were always a little suspicious of modern medicine, right, and the Trumpers. And so the hope is that these people because look, I mean, David Zachs, Elon Musk, they're not RFK junior supporters, right, they're supporters of Ron DeSantis, but they know that RFK could pull away some of these more.
It's interesting to say that because, you know, the other thing that may be relevant is, like two or three days before this whole blew up with Rogan and Elon, our good friend Steve Bannon started attacking me. He publicly declared me a criminal quote unquote on his social media feed, which was retweeted by someone who calls herself the chief Operating Officer Chief executive officer of the War Room. So
I said, no, that's interesting. And Bannon's gone after me before with Marjorie Taylor Green, so I knew there was going to be an issue as soon as I saw Bannon reven that up again and attacking me. And then it was interesting. I can't prove it's related, but it's interesting. Then all the Rogan Elon stuff followed a couple of after that.
And you'll remember that Bannon is a big RFK Junior fan for obvious reasons. I mean, he was involved in this, you know, RFK Junior stuff just as much as any of these people because he knows that those left leaning independents could you know, I mean, the electoral college is a numbers game, right, Like all they need to do is pull enough votes away so that Biden doesn't win
and Trump does. And I think that that's where this has gone, and that's why they've tacked so quickly, and that's where this is going.
I'm just part of the collateral damage for all. Sorry it doesn't surprise me, but you know, that's part of what the extremists. What they do is they target science and scientists, and you know, to understand that whole space. I started talking for the new book. I started talking to political scientists, like, I don't know if you know Ruth ben gad Uh, Yeah, of course she's terrific, and so I've talked to her and she says, yeah, I mean, she points out and then I went to a deep
dive for the book. You know this what Stalin did in the thirties, right, You have to derail the intelligency, and you go after the science, not only the science, but the scientists and portray them as enemies of the state. And that's exactly what's happening with me and a couple of other colleagues. So that's another component of the of
the book as well. It's not just the fact that they're targeting the science and the fact that they allowed two hundred thousand Americans to needlessly perished because they refused to COVID vaccine. They were victims of that disinformation, but also going after the scientist and basically telling the troops there that were public enemies. And it makes it really tough.
What I thought was so odd about this was I always thought that eventually, you know, when people started dying of COVID, that there would be some kind of tact so that there would be some kind of change that people would say, well, you know, look I saw this person die in front.
Of some sort of auto correction, right right, I know it. I mean, it's just amazing I gave You don't see so much in Houston, but when you go into the more conservative rural areas of Texas. I gave a lecture University of Texas Tyler Medical Center, which is in East Texas, and basically you just talk to people, and everybody you talk to has lost a loved one because they refused to COVID vaccine. That's where you see it at home. And what's so heartbreaking about that is you know these
are good people, right. I mean I gave medical grand rounds to Stanford a few weeks ago, and I said, look, if my car broke down from a flat tire, and you gave me the choice, would I want that car? If you have a flat tire in Palo Alto, California, or in East Texas. I would have said East Texas in a moment, because you know there'd be ten people fighting over who was going to help you change your tire, as opposed to in Palo Alto everybody would probably drive
right by. So so you know, these are good kind people, and they were victims. Basically, they were target for this stuff. And that's what's so heartbreaking.
So here's the question. They were targeted. They are victims. They never had that moment where they were like, oh, we're all dying, maybe we should get back. So maybe these people don't have our best interests at heart. In fact, they came out of it thinking that they had been duped by you. That's right.
So what happened was, and this is exactly and I wrote about this recently in a journal faceve journal, I basically said, so what happened was, you're right. You would think, right if you were a member of the House Freedom Caucus, you know, actively promoting this vaccine disinformation, or Fox News anchor at night or you know, one of the talking heads, you say, oh my god, look what's happening here and have some pause for reflection. Instead, what they did was
they just doubled the lie. They said, no, no, it wasn't us, it was the COVID vaccines that did that. And by the way, the scientists created the COVID virus in the first place. So instead they've they've been doubled down and doing this kind of revisionist history, which is equally damaging as well.
But it's also like, well, you said masks were good, but masks were good. Like that's like I, as someone who has spent the day, actually the last three days, just swarmed with the kind of hateful twitter you get all the time. What I think is interesting is like, you know, they're like, we've got you now. You know, doctor Hotes, you said that masks were you know, on da da da da dah. You said masks help prevent diseases. We all know that, But masks still help prevent respiratory diseases.
Like what are we being shown here? Yeah?
I don't know. And one of the things that I did that the CDC and others did was I always went into my underlying assumption, so for instance, and that helps you know when things change. So for instance, when the two first doses of the mRNA vaccines were given out, I said, by the way, don't be surprised if we're gonna need a booster, because that's the way most vaccines work.
And so it's not going to be and done and two and done, and it could be three and done, and I was looking pretty good throughout the delta and BA one omicron waves. But then, you know, the virus started mutating more and it looked like the m R and A vaccines were not as durable as we thought. And I, you know, I said that, I mean, I you know, I mean, I got a lot of credit for being one of the few that said we're not two doses is not enough.
You know.
The mistake was I could have gone farther and said three may not.
Be enough either. But and that's where we are.
But the point is I explained the science behind it at each step, both before said it, during said and after set it'd say this is what you should look for for the change. But what I see from the conspiracy sites, and they do this a lot now, is they will edit something I said and put a short segment without giving the rest of the statement, and then follow it up and make it, you know, and try
to make you look stupid. And that's what they do when I get stalked and they shove a cell phone camera in your face and they edited up the wazoo to make you look less credible.
Yeah, it's just so fucking depressing. I have to say.
But the other thing is you might say, well, why are they doing this, And the answer is it's part. So what's happened is, you know, if you look at the canon of stuff from people deep in the Fox News rabbit hole, it's you know, in addition to the election being stolen and putin over Zelenski and Trump, and in that canon is watch out for the scientists, and the scientists are dangerous and it makes no sense. And so what I say is, look, I mean, everyone's entitled to your conservative views or.
Even extreme conservative views.
I mean, do you want to believe Hillary Clinton runs a pedophile ringing a pizza parlor, you know, knock yourself out. But somehow we've got to delink that from the anti science because that's what's killing people and it's very tough to thrill that needle.
Yeah, no, I agree. I mean that I think that's right, and I think that that's what we're seeing now. I want you to stay safe, okay, because we need you, and to come back when your book comes out. Thank you. Amy Klombashar is Minnesota's senior senator and the author of the Joy of Politics, A Surviving Cancer, A Campaign, A Pandemic an insurrection and life's other unexpected curve balls. Welcome back, because you've been here before too fast Politics, Senator Amy klobaschar.
Well, thanks Molly, it is wonderful to be on again.
The book is called The Joy of Politics. What book is this your second, third, fourth book?
I think, well, if you count my college senior essay.
Yes, which we of course do in this organization, yes.
Espectually because it's called Uncovering the Dome and it's about the Capitol, but it's about the Vikings Twins sports stadium that actually was passed into law and became a stadium when I was in college. So I wrote that book, which was used in college classes a lot because they could say she wrote this when she was your age.
So yeah, so this is book four. Yeah, work four.
And then I did a sort of a more standard bio book called Center next Door. And then I did the Anti Trust book that actually got on the New York Times bestseller list but was quite thick, with two hundred pages of footnotes. But this book, The Joy of Politics, is actually, i'd say more of a personal book.
It's not a standard bio.
It is about how I got through obstacles, including breast cancer of the pandemic like everyone else, although my husband got very sick and was in the hospital.
And one of the first people really to get sick right.
Right at the beginning when there were I think there were only nineteen people in a hospital in the whole state of Virginia. I remember looking at the time with COVID and yeah, he got it from a friend of ours who at the time only had a cough. No one knew that's how you got it, and later found out he had the antibody, so we figured out that's
where he got it. And he got really sick and was on oxygen, not a ventilator, but oxygen for a week in a little hospital in Virginia because that's where he just happened to drive and someone met him in the parking lot and he got tests and he ended up there and we didn't even get the test back for two weeks on or ten days on COVID at the time, so early on, and he got through it so that when his only long haul symptom, well, some
people have very serious situations. His seems to erupt only when I say we need to clean the basement, and then it's a very smart man. He had COVID and I can't do that because of all the dust. That's the only time he ever brings it up.
Yeah, good for him.
Yeah, anyway, he got through it, and we then, like everyone else, just got through that pandemic. And I also talk about the insurrection and my role there because I was a chair of the rules committee and Roy Blunt and I were in charge of counting the electoral ballots that day and making sure everything got done.
By four in the morning.
It was just the two of us and Vice President Pence and three young pairs of pages holding the mahogany boxes with the electoral ballots.
That must have been a pretty weird experience.
Yes, it really was, because it was this sort of ceremony pomp.
I remember actually being on some shows.
Ahead of time about it and how we knew that was by the time we knew then that some Republicans obviously were not going to vote like they had in the past to verify the results of the states, and so I went on a few shows and they all would say at the end, well, it's going to be fine then, and I go, well, you know, never, sir, And I think we knew the numbers were fine, but there was just brewing anger, and Trump kept bringing it up, and it turned out that they just hadn't planned the
security for that kind of situation. And there we were, and it was this just ridiculously ceremonious thing in the morning and with Roy and Me leading this group of senators to the House and we start reading the ballot numbers for Alaska and we get to Arizona and that's the first objection.
And then we get back and we start giving our speeches.
And at the time, I was very focused on the order because everyone got three four minutes and I was in charge of that. And then all of a sudden, you know, our staff says, it seems like people have invaded the capital. And the next thing, you know, Vice
President Pens is taken away from the presiding chair. We're in the chamber, and eventually they'd say, we got to leave, and we go to that secure location, which by the way, contained everyone except for the leaders that you saw in the January sixth hearings, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell and Boone. They were all in one room, but all of the rest of the Senate and the pages were in the other So I tell that story of that day and how focused we were on getting
back to finish our jobs. And we did, and at four in the morning, as I said, it was just the three of us, but this time we were walking over the broken glass and the spray painted by the spray painted pillars with racist vulgarities. But we said that democracy would prevail, and in the end it did.
It did, but it was I mean, I just can't even imagine how No, I won't.
But remember, like a lot of workplaces, when you have an invasion, you don't even know if there's like anthrax in there. People don't go back to the scene of the crime. Like twelve hours later, the whole set But we felt so strongly, those of us in leadership, that we had to get back to that room and that
otherwise they would have won. And that is the same way in coming president and now President Biden felt, and Roy Blunt and I felt about keeping the inauguration on that platform because that was the first place they invaded, so people wanted to have it in a bunker.
So I had a.
Story of how much pressure we were under to change that, and we felt very secure. Different group of people were in charge of the security. We said it was going any risk, we wouldn't do it. But we felt very strongly we should be on that platform, even though we had plastic windows behind us, and we had whitewashed pillars that they couldn't even get the spray paint off of, and it looked all nights on TV. But that was
the truth. And yet everyone rose to the occasion. And probably my two most memorable moments that I recount in the book were Lady Gaga boisterously belting out the star spangled banner with the words and our flag was still there, and motioning to our flag than Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in the history of the United States at age twenty two, with that beautiful poem she wrote in just those two weeks after the inauguration, with those memorable words,
we must find light in this never ending shade, And that kind of defined my work after that for the next few years, including leading the Freedom to Vote Act, which we came close, but a lot of states have done some things that are taking some of those provisions and putting him into law, including.
My own state of Minnesota.
And Also we made the case nationally that this wasn't just a state by state problem. When they try to ban Saturday voting in Georgia, as they just did in the last election.
Yeah, how worried are you about this want on the part of Republicans to cement a minority rule?
Really really concerned.
I recount in the book how and argue for filibuster reform, which would have mattered in the last in a big way. But the way things work now, to think of it simply is that the first thing to think about is when they lost that presidential race, and the shadow of Donald Trump is still looming above us.
But when they.
Lost it, instead of changing their candidates or changing their positions, they decided, well, why don't we try to change our voters.
And that's why we saw the.
Reversals in certain states of some of the remedies that made it easier for people to vote. Then the second thing that happens is years of working on this, they put in these ultra conservative Supreme Court justices, and as I point out, the crazy way the Senate rules work now, it takes only fifty one votes to put one of those justices on, not sixty. So that's what you saw in those numbers with Amy Coney, Barrett and Gorsic and Caapna. However, to reverse what they do, like when they threw out
Roe v. Wade and the Dobbs decision. The way our rules work in the Senate, even when we had the majority in the House, it takes sixty votes to codify Roe v. Wade into a lot.
Yeah.
It takes sixty votes to do something about voting rights or immigration. And that is why I make this case that you literally have this minority rule now on major issues that affect Americans, when it only takes fifty one votes to put those judges on, but it takes sixty to reverse any of the change unless it's involving spending
and taxing. Because decades ago, Robert Byrd, who is no longer with us, he died ten years ago, he somehow not because it's in the Constitution created the Bird rule, right.
Yes, and so we are still abiding by that.
Will you explain what the Bird rule is for everyone who and also me who's forgotten what it is but know it exists.
Okay, so here it is. What's that about? Is that if it's a about taxing or spending. It's something called reconciliation. You can pass things with fifty one votes. And what's interesting, and that's how we did the Inflation Reduction Act that allowed us to do that great thing on the pharmaceutical crisis. It allowed us to invest in climate change, but it didn't allow us to do anything on immigration. It wouldn't allow us to do anything on voting. It wouldn't allow
us to put Roe v. Wade into place. So it is literally one of those exceptions that he carved out. There are over one hundred and fifty exceptions to the filibuster, including for compensation for space accidents.
That's only forty one.
Because over time, all right, go on, it's just unbelievable. Over time, people were actually pragmatic. They said, well, this is really important, we need to get it done, so we'll make an exception. But somehow now when it comes to people's very civil rights, we're not able to get that exception. So that is one of the things I
go through in the book. But if I had to say what brings the book together, it is this simple idea that yes, we've had set backs, but the focus in politics should not be to lament each and every setback, but to rejoice in and move forward with the comebacks and the story of how with this crazy rules in place and the fifty to fifty Senate that last summer about a year ago, when everyone counted us out, we were able to get past the Inflation Reduction Act, which
I just explained, but also health care for our veteran station by burn Pitt, the semiconductor bill to make chips in America again, the beginnings of a gun safety law that wasn't at all enough, but for the first time we took on the NRA with our Republican colleagues, the infrastructure law. So many of these things are bipartisan and took a lot of hard work. But the point is,
believe me, and I'm sure you remember this moment. People were counting out the President, they were counting out the Democrats in the House and Senate, and we were able to get this done.
So that's a.
Lot of the individual stories from my own life of finding out I had breast cancer and having to go to the Senate floor with a bunch of guys who had no idea what this was or what it was like to have hot finishes. Let me tell you that and then getting through that and going on to work with my colleagues to get these bills passed.
You know, that's joy.
It's joy to help constituents when a family's trying to adopt a child from another country and they run into red tape, or someone gets their benefits denied and you fix it for them, or you come up with a new idea for a law. And I think right now, it's so easy to just hate our politics because of all the divides. But I just want people to remember that there are people that have hope and they never give it up every single day, and they go to
work to get things done. But both elected officials and staff and people in government in general.
I think about Biden, He's had incredibly successful presidency thus far. Why is there so much noise about him having open primaries not running again. I mean, can you just explain this to me? I mean, I just don't get it.
Well, I think it is politics, and there's always going to be people that are running, people who don't like someone like someone. But I just kind of always go back to having just spent the last four days in my state just where people are, and I think people got pretty exhausted by the pandemic. They were in the three hundred million separate silos, right they got pissed off. They were writing angry texts and tweets. And now suddenly they're all in together. And wasn't always an easy transition,
but it's getting better every day. I think a lot of them want one stability and they want to move forward. They know we got workforce problems, they know it's hard to get childcare and housing, and they want someone who's going to work on it and not just look for divides. So when I look to Joe Biden, I think there's going to be quite the case to make We are in a results business in politics, No matter all the noise and what all the divides are and all the mean stuff, we're in.
The results are into business. It results or no. He got us through the pandemic. He put our economy on strong footing, and it actually came out of the pandemic in a better place than so many other nations did. And he continues one by one to tackle the problems of our nation and our world. And he led the effort to bring people together on Ukraine. So I think that there's going to be along with obviously presidents of Lensky. I think there's going to be a lot of focus on those results.
I think people.
Will when they get to the in the end, to the ballot box, They're going to look at what results and what it matters to them.
Are people just dissatisfied with presidents? I mean it just is sort of baffling to me.
People have been through a lot.
So when you're gone through flat, don't you're not just like, I love politics.
It's cool. I'm me up.
It like not the first thing.
And that's actually not to keep bringing this back, but I wrote this book to get at that, because there is understandable anger. In fact, my book was announced back in November the same day as Bernie's book, and my book is called The Joy of Politics, and Bernie's book is called It's Okay to Be Angry at Capitalism.
And this was hilarious and so as your friends.
And as we went into December, I was trying to get two bills past one involving the tech companies. Where As my husband said to my daughter last summer, be nice to your mom. This weekend, she's taking on the four biggest companies in the world. Has ever known, and she just got banned from Russia. So one of them was that a tech bill, but the other one was for the Afghan refugees to get them out of Limbo,
a bill I actually have with Lindsey Graham. So here I am trying to get this done, and everywhere I go it's it's roadblox and Bernie keeps watching me on the floor. And then every night had come up to me and say, I got one thing to say to you.
Where's the joy? Joy out there? Where's the joy?
And so one of the things that we all have to do in our own lives right now, it's not just politicians, is to just remember where we came from a few years ago and where we are now. As irritating as some stuff may be, our country is still an amazing place to be. It's still a place where people come to pursue their dreams. It's still a place where you can grow up with nothing and through education and just through it all do whatever you want, basically.
And there's a lot of things, of course that hold us back, but there's some amazing success stories in this country, and I just don't want us to forget that or forget what we stand for when it comes to freedom and when it comes to a place where everyone has the ability to get their fair shot.
Do you think there'll be tech regulation on the horizon? I mean, where do you think we are right now?
Yes, I do, in part because the rest of the world is moving. So a few things are going to dictate change. The first is AI artificial intelligence. We're going to have to put rules of the road in place on that, which the companies themselves who are involved in that part of tech have been very outwardly supportive of. But we got to make sure it's the right regulations, so that's going to happen. The second thing is other
countries are moving. Europe is moving big time on competition policy and privacy, and I would like us to have our own, uniquely American form of regulation. But at some point the companies can't keep that. It's going to destroy
them when they're agreeing to it. In other places, that's like you can't always put your own stuff at the top of the search engine when you have thy percent market share at Google, or you can't charge thirty percent Apple and Google on the app store for certain companies and not others and try to justify why it would be that much on every sale made, or you can't copy other products like Amazon has been wont to do at times, or that you can't get hood kids hooked
on fentanyl by putting allowing cartels to lace pills with ventanyl and then saying you don't have enough people to take things down, which we're seeing on Facebook and some of these other social media platforms.
These are all big deal things.
So I think the combination of AI Europe moving and then how bad it's getting just makes me believe that some of this is going to pass. So I'm in it for the long game, as much as they wish that wasn't true.
But as I see, you know, we have losing.
A third of the nation's newspapers by the year twenty twenty five. Yeah, I think that the news organization should be able to combine their leverage to get better rates from Facebook and Google. So that's one of the bills that we got through the committee recently, and any example of what I'm pushing. I don't want to destroy these companies. They've given us great things, but this idea that we
don't put any rules in place. It was Adam Smith, the godfather of capitalism, who the founding Fathers saw is one of their major major inspirations. When it came to the economy, it was he who said in mister invisible Hand. He was the one that said, beware the standing army of monopolies. And that's why we have always, on a bipartisan basis, put in competitive guardrails and competition policy. But somehow tech has just been able to say, Hey, you
can't sue us, there's no rules. We're like companies in a garage. But guess what garage anymore. We're the biggest companies in the world. So I hope that they'll come around, given what's happening in the rest of the world and how another industrialized nations are agreeing to rules or getting it's not really up to them. Is that right now in Washington it is. They seem to control a lot of decisions. And so my hope is that the public
will rise up. And we've already seen this with privacy, and it's going to start being a thing in elections. One mom likened her situation. I did a thing before Hakeem was the minority leader. He and I did a joint thing with moms from Brooklyn and from Minnesota, and one of the moms said that she had three kids and for the youngest, she just could not keep up with all the sites that the child was on, way
too young for the sites are on. Kept enlisting the older kid to try to help her to do workarounds and to stop it and to do everything she could. And she said she felt like a water fossl was on and the water was overflowing and she was out there with a mop by herself, just trying to clean it up. And I think that really captures how a lot of parents feel right now about what's happening on the internet.
Thank you, Amy koebershar Well, thank you Mollie. A joy to be on with you. Hi, it's Mollie and I am wildly excited that for the first time, Fast Politics, the show you're listening to right now, is going to have merch for sale over at shop dot fastpoliticspod dot com. You can now buy shirts, hats, hoodies, and toe bags
with our incredible designs. We've heard your cries to spread the word about our podcast and get a tow bag with my adorable Leo the rescue Puppy on it and now you can grab this merchandise only at shop dot fastpoliticspod dot com. Thanks for your support. Jennifer Paulmary is the co host of Showtimes a Circus and a political advisor. Welcome to Fast Politics, Jennifer Paul Mary.
Thank you, Mollie.
It's loateful to be with.
You, delighted to have you. So I want to talk to you about the big piece you wrote in the magazine that I am a special correspondent for and you are also a special correspondent or.
Some No, I'm not as cool as that. I'm just a contributing editor.
An unspecial correspondent. I'm kidding, of course, talk to me about the governor of Michigan.
I met Gretchen Witmer in the Saul of twenty twenty in the middle of the pandemic, right. I went out to Lansing to interview her for Showtime the Circus about how she was dealing with the politics around COVID. And you know, I worked for Hillary Clinton on her presenters of the campaign, as our communications are very interested in women leaders, writing a couple of books about it. What struck me about her right away is I was like, Wow,
she does not take the criticism personally. You know, at that point Trump had already done the whole that woman from Michigan a couple of times, you know, said that gone after her in that way.
I was there on.
Constitution Day, so it was September seventeenth, I believed, twenty twenty, and there was a Second Amendment pro Second Amendment rally at the Capitol, you know, a couple miles from her house, all sorts of assault weapons. There, a lot of like ditch the witch signs people trying to get a repeal effort underway.
Bill Barr had been.
In Michigan the day before, addressing a college and said that complaint compared her COVID lockdowns to slave And what we came to find out three weeks later was she was the target of this kidnapping and assassination plot.
And what's crazy, you know.
And she told me later that when I talked to her about all of these things in her backyard and Lansing in September of twenty twenty, she already knew about the plot. She didn't talk about it yet, but she already knew, and she knew that Bill Barr knew, and he still said these things that he said to her about her and about you know, slavery, and she talked about when we did the interview, she talked about what the administration says and how this rile peoples up and
it is dangerous. And I was just really struck that she pushes back, doesn't give in, doesn't change her position in the face of all this criticism, and manages not to take it personally, which was which is different than what I've seen for other leaders. And like from what I experienced personally with when Hillary was attacked, you know, you're thinking, you're attacked, we must be doing something wrong. And so I wanted to come back and spend a week with her to figure out, like, where is this
coming from. She's a gen X leader. She's not the first through the door, right, She's Jennifer grand Home was the first woman governor of Michigan, so gradual womber watch Jennifer Grant.
Help take a lot of things there.
She watched Hillary take a lot of things and arrows. And so there's an interesting thing happening now with gen x women leaders coming to the floor, and you know they're able to They're able to deal with some of this some of the incoming better. And obviously Michigan has
this incredible amount of women leaders. All three of state bid elected officers or women, the ag, the Secretary of State, forty percent of the state legislature, which is now Democrat after being both houses being held by Republicans first time in forty years. Half of the Congressional delegation are women. So there's just a lot of interesting happening with women in Michigan, and I wanted to explore.
So I want you to say a little more about what it means, because this is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. How do you feel like this? This ability to not take it personally is an asset for a woman running at the national level, which she obviously will be soon.
Yeah, I mean I will, like well, I think that she would be a very good presidential contender if she did choose to, you know, in twenty eight or whenever it is, if she does choose to run. But you know, one of the things that happened when in the Clinton campaign was I had this epiphany very late, like in October of twenty sixteen, and I was like trying to think of why everybody hated her so much.
I just watched footage from like the last.
Locker up rally, and I just had this thought that what we had done was show that Hillary Clinton could do the job the same way the job has always been done, which means the same way a man has done the job, which means you're robbing her of half of her humanity, which means, of course people think inauthentic. Right, of course, people think that she's suspicious or hiding something because we were trying to force her, you know, force
like a square peg into a round hole. And I still thought she would win at that time, but it was sort of like this chasm opened up, and I saw how much it matters the role models we have in our head. We just had no other way to think about a president other than had that it is done by a man, and so I'm looking for women that are speaking a little differently about leadership. And to see that she didn't take it personally, which I have to say, you know, Hillary would always say, I listened
to curticism, I try not to take it personally. I listened to like what I can learn from and then try to disregard the rest. But still it was hard to not think at the root of all the criticism that you know you personally are doing something wrong, and you know whitmer two important things I think for her seeing grand Home succeed, be attack, Hillary succeed and be attacked.
Is she expected to succeed.
And do well in politics and knew not to take it seriously when people came after her, And so I think that that makes you you lose a sense of defensiveness that you know, it's encumbersome. It's cumbersome for any candidate, but particularly for women. And you're just relatable. And the thing that she always talks about, you know, you ask people like what shipu's leader?
What motivates yous? And she has and some level.
Very common answer that I had found frustrating until I went friends of time with her, which was, well, I'm part of the Sandwich generation. I had to take care of my terminally ill mother when she was dying and take care of my daughter at the same time, and that was frustrating to deal with insurance companies, so it set her. She didn't set her default to action, but
also she knew how to get things done. And you're like, okay, that sounds very common and it's and to women, a very common experience for women, sort of a unique experience women, that's experiences unique for women. And then I thought, of course that's it, Like, that's it, Molly, Like, we now see this is lead, This is a different role, This is a different style leadership, This is a different model of leadership. And we recognize that. We see how there are a lot of women that can relate to that.
And then this is one thing that was striking to me because normally with women leaders, you don't hear people say when you ask them what do you think of that person? They don't normally say she's just like me, she's one of us, right, No, it's certainly not, but that's what they say about her. I also, I would say, I've heard that said about Amy clubis sharm. When I
would go to clublish our events in New Hampshire. When she was running for president, people would say like, oh, she's just one of us, She's just a normal middle class mom, normal middle class mom ten fifteen years ago.
But then they wouldn't vote for her.
Didn't mean, right, someone are gonna be president and that's like, so what's really exciting? And like, Whitmer is sort of a to tell this story. But she's not the only woman that's like that, right, So that that's what's exciting.
It's like, as I'm looking for.
I'm not one of the people that believes a woman can't win or like God for biby, try that again, because Hillary got more votes, right, she proved a woman can win, and she did it with halfy humanity.
Tied behind her back.
I'm looking for progress to see women don't have to model themselves after men in order to be seen as leaders and like what the advent of? You know? And I think part of the reason why Witmer is able to shed all of that is because there are so many women leaders in Michigan, so they're not just judged by you know, because otherwise people expect each woman to embody the qualities of all women, and then that's an impossible standard. Feel like that's one of the things that
happened to Hillary. Because there are so many women leaders, they're judged on their own ability, not as a composite, fake person.
I'm able to relate better with voters.
Or like the last country in the world who can't fucking get it together? What do you think that is?
I think a.
Big piece of it is how we elect leaders in a parliamentary system. It would be easier because you know, consider this if Hillary had they've had a parliamentary system, and then rather than going through a primary, you were
selected by your peers. Women do well with their peers, you can, you know, so you're selected by so in this case, say five hundred and thirty five members of Congress, you know roughly three hundred Democrats say, if you are making your argument to you know three or four hundred people who are able to know you as an individual.
They can know you, and this is so important, they can talk about you right to others as a human, as an individual, and when you go before the country, you're going you're going before the country as your parties, as these people have are all your validators. They have selected you, rather than wanting in an open primary where you don't have that kind of validation, and you're not able to get to know the people who are secting know as leader one on one. And I know Hillary
Clinton believes that is like the big problem. And then there's just you know, American culture. It's such a big culture, such a big country.
So not very male dominated in most professions.
Still there haven't been like these avenues for women to come through and be able to have their stories be heard. But I really do think it's possible.
You don't think Americans are just fucking sexist, right.
I think that everyone has unconscious gender bias, and then that is pretty crippling in the country's gender bias, we've unconscious race bias.
And it's not just a.
Problem on the right by any means, and I think sometimes it's you know, I experienced it a lot with Democrats. The problem with Democrats is they're so sure they're not racist and they're not sexist. They're very if they don't like a woman, and very like think that there's a legitimate reason for it, as opposed to like welling into those those kinds of traps.
I've seen this a lot, by the way, a lot. I remember a man who very involved in democratic politics explaining to me why he wasn't racist or sexist. He just didn't like the vice president.
Also didn't like Hillary, also didn't like him. Was this Warren?
Yeah, right, not racist or sexist, She's just not. And then the things you hear about Kamala Harris are all the things that are said about.
That are said by racist senexus.
Well, like, what are her credentials?
There's just something about her.
I don't like, we had an acronym for it, t sajh idl.
There's just something about her.
I don't like, there's just about her just and they can't get to the root of it because it is like the psychiciotist thing, you know. But with Harris, it's like, well, what's she really doing? And there's good research about this. People assume a woman leader's not getting anything done unless she's over communicating about it, or like, what are really her credentials? With happening with Harris, the constant head one she faces, you're like, there you go.
She's first. She's first in many ways in.
The Harris situation, I do think you have the incredible problem of being vice president, which is that is a job totally I mean, it's you know, they made a whole show about it. It's the worst job in the world. You're both the most important and also completely you know, overshadowed.
Talk about mismatched expectations for someone coming into a job. She's so exceptional. She's the first, she's the first woman, she's the first Black woman, she's the first Asian woman.
She's going to ignite this ticket on you know.
And she's going to be this historic, groundbreaking, exciting vice president. But you know what she really is vice president, which is very much behind the scenes job. You know, I have pretty an insight to how she spends her days. It is the days of a shadow president, because her most important job is to be ready to do that job. Right. So but that's not you know, that's not set up to meet expectations of excitement.
It's a very very like that's a very tough situation to be.
Talk to me about what the governor is is up to now?
So what's interesting about her?
When I think she's you know, we sort of know for her sort of a disservice to hers. We sort of know her by you know, all the crazy things that have happened to her, men showing up at her home at office with guns to complain about the job she's doing, the plot and like that.
That's like a very Michigan thing. I mean, I feel like every elected woman in Michigan has a story of like some guys showing up at her office with a gun.
Jocelyn Ben's in the Secretary of State I think Mally Moros is a state you know, state senator.
She's sort of you.
Know, I'm sure Debbie Dingle has a story like that.
Yeah, go on, yeah, Debbie Dingle, Debby seven out. And so it's sort of distracting. But I've thought a lot about why that was happening to Whitmer on such a you know, dramatic scale, and I think that from Michigan. And I really think it's it's the patriarchy crumbling. Look, it's it's the debris that hits you as the thing is crumbling, Because what's happening in Michigan is women leaders
are not the exception. Women leaders are the rule. I think that's the reckoning that women leaders of this generation of Gen X millennial are going through. First through the door of the baby armor's a ton of blowback, next wave through the door, getting a lot of blowback. But
where's it coming from. It's coming from the fact. I mean, if you are resorting to guns, as you know, as some people did in Michigan to stop a woman who is already in charge, that is its own admission that you have lost if you're trying to keep women from having power. So I think you know, so I am
not pessimistic about how people feel about women. Are leaders, are women's chances, because I think that's probably what this reckoning is, kind of the battle of the bulge for some men that you know, obviously not all that want to stop women in power. But the other thing is that Lemmer just keeps winning. She was first elected in two thousand, so she spent almost twenty five years in politics and has never won election by less than eight
a general election by less than eight points. Dramatically overperforms and she's very skilled. She finds a way to win. Winning a trifecta both Republicans. The Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate and the state legislature. She had a plan for how they might win back both houses.
It seemed unlikely they managed to get it done. I talked to one reporter who said, everyone in Lansing understands the only reason the Democrats are in charge, the only reason a house the Senate Democrat has their seat is because of this is because of her in the kind of campaign that that she ran, and she's very aggressively moving forward a very gressive agenda. Now, sometimes your strength
becomes your weakness. Right, you could see a scenario in which some of the things that she passed may end at being unpopular or problematic in the implementation. Like what I haven't seeing. There's not anything that I've seen that they've taken to date that would be in that category. There's some tax rebates, some Democrats even don't like some
tax preferences for car companies. Things like that, a lot of money, a lot of money going out the door, whether in the form of a tax rebates or being or you know, those kinds of things that can you just never know how these things play out, right, they can come back at you.
So it is it's not as if.
She has this, you know, not anybody's got some kind of easy, easy path for you don't know how many things are going to play out.
But what she is, you know, and I told her about you have a very divided state politically. Do you think that you should.
Trend your expectations or maybe taper or put moderate a position based on where other people are? And she said no. She said that she thinks her job is to make the most informed say and she has a very rigorous decision making process, really impressively led by.
Her chief has stabbed jo Anne. Hal's very rigorous, very inclusive.
Once it made a decision, they stick with it and they get it done.
And she's like, my job is to go was flame.
Why I think it's the right thing to people don't agree with it, So you could see how like that could you know, that could create political problems down the hike. But she seems at peace with this. And then also the attacks, they haven't they take a toll. She's been clear on that. She's been clear of the tactic under her family. She's kind of been dealing with this her
whole career. A very interesting thing about her, and I think it's being her age right because like I said before, like she's coming into this reckoning of like people coming to terms with women being in power for real and over long periods of time, not just a one off.
GRETUA member is the first person to have figned a warrant for Larry Nasser, the US gymnastics doctor.
She was in the middle of that fight because a because the county prosecutor, a man had to resign because he was part of a human traffic chex ring and she was asked to come in and fill out the term, so like the point being something BIG's going on here, right, She's just kind of in the you know, she's been in the eye of that storm and been in it for a while, so pretty comfortable in dealing with them.
Yeah, it's so interesting. Thank you so much. I hope you'll come back.
Michigan women. You're fascinating Michigan women.
We love it. Good for them, no more perfectly. Jesse Cannon, Molly Jong Fast.
You know that Joe Biden is an evil dictator when his son actually, wait, how did I mess that up? That's right, He's not an evil dictator. His son actually had a deplete guilty for his text troubles.
So I think it's important that we just talk about this for a minute. One of the things Republicans have been just losing their minds about is Hunter Biden. You will have seen his pictures. You will have seen people he said this, he'sa that. But I would want to point out so he had a gun charge and some tax stuff. He didn't pay his taxes. He owed thirty thousand dollars in proper deductions and filing his taxes, like Roger Stone and his wife said with the DJ last
year for two million dollars in unpaid taxes. There was no outrage. It was just a normal day. So people settle with the irs all the time. I'm not defending Hunter Biden because honestly, who cares. But Republicans are just furious. And the reason why it's our moment of fuckery is that you can never make these people happy. There is no world in which telling these people they will never think it's enough. They will never feel that Joe Biden has held Hunter accountable enough. And for that that is
our moment of fuckery. That's it for this episode. To Fast Politics, tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics make 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.