Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And Governor Gavin Newsom says Ron DeSantis is fundamentally authoritarian. It's like the understatement of the year. What a show. It's a show of shows we have for you today. Senator Chris Murphy will stop by to talk about why House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy will be
blamed for a government shutdown. Then we'll talk to neuroscientists and author of Weaponized Lies how to think critically in the post truth era, Daniel Leviton, about how to speak to Trump followers in a way they will listen to. But first we have Mother Jones, DC bureau chief and author of American Psychosis, which is now out in paperback, The One the Only. David Korn Welcome back, Too, Fast Politics.
David Korn, glad to be with you, Molly. I feel like.
I'm always delighted to have you on this podcast because you're my body and also because politically I feel very much aligned with you personally, and since we're both on the opinion side, we can share our opinions.
It's nice to have freedom in America.
First, let's talk. Paperback of the book is out right now, tell us the TLDR.
Yeah. The book that I put out last year, American Psychosis, A Historical Investigation and How the Republican Party Went Crazy, is basically a narrative history of the relationship between the Republican Party and far right extremism over the last seven decades. The big takeaway it didn't start with Trump. From mccarthia to the New Right, to the Southern Strategy, to Sarah Palin to new Getridge to the Tea Party, all the
way up to Trump. The Republican Party has long tried to exploit and encourage far right extremism, bigotry, paranoia, conspiracy mongering to get votes, to win over supporters. Trump just paid it cent a stage. A lot of this have been kept in the shadows for these decades, and established Republicans didn't want to really acknowledge this the way you don't want to acknowledge the crazy Uncle. Trump put it right center stage and made this the essence of the
core of the Republican Party. You know, you had Fox and Rush Limbaugh and Tea Party and Glenn Beck and others who had been encouraging this for years and Trump was sort of the logical extension of that. And so the book is out in paperback this coming week and it's expanded and U this paperback so make you write another chapter or two to give more you to get
it out there. It came out a year ago, and it's still, unfortunately more relevant than ever because it seems that Trump's hold on the party and this gravitational pool of right wing extremism and paranoia and conspiracy and grievances within the party has just gotten stronger and more intense.
He lost selection into as well as they expected to do the Republicans in twenty twenty two, and still the extremism of the party is the driving force that you have people like round Dessantis, who thinks that you know, they can they can score a becoming even more extreme than Trump. The party can't break away from this because essentially this is where the base is. This is where the Republican Party is guided and been guided by its base over the last seven decades. People want to understand
how we got to this point. And I think the depth of the problem it's not about Trump. Trump's a problem, but it's about the tens of millions of Americans who have reached this point that Trump can then exploit them and play them from Marx and Rubes. And they're not going away even if Trump were to drop dead tomorrow from too many big macs.
So I want to talk about this because this is the fundamental problem. I think that the Republican Party finds itself in right now, right and I mean they deserve it. They did it to themselves. I think it's an important caveat. They were so hungry for power they didn't care how they got. But what they did was they created this base that now has been tipped into unreality. And this unreality based finds itself, you know, so dug in and
so committed to Donald Trump that they have decided. If you look at the numbers, they believe that Donald Trump won the twenty twenty election. They believe that he will win again. They are occupying Earth two. So here's a question for you. Let's just we have Donald Trump. Maybe no label succeeds in getting a third party on the ticket and Donald Trump wins. But if not, Donald Trump is not going away. I mean, how will they ever get these people to vote for anyone else?
More important Trump is isn't going right. It can continue even without Donald Trump. You know, conspiracy theories give me a good metaphor here. Don't like the tail chips can't just have one, They lead from one to the other. So you have Birtherism. With Trump, it turns into a variety of theories about you know, conspiracy theories about the deep state, and then it becomes an embrace of QAnon. And then it's the big lie of the election. You mentioned these people living on earth too, in a state
of onreality. Yes, you know, once you believe all these things, once you've taken I don't know, the red pill, the blue people, whatever, and you end up on me. Yet up in the mainpix, you ain't coming back. I mean how a few people can. But by and large you've adopted a theology that unless you decide to break from that theology, which is like leaving the church, which is a hard thing for people to do, whatever their religion
might be, you're stuck there. And these people are going to be stuck in this position of these Republican voters. And so whether Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy or any of these more responsible established Republicans think they can steal the party in another direction. They're wrong. They got here, you know, they rode this tiger, and now the tiger is running the asylum to mixed metaphors. And I think the only hope they have is in some ways demographics.
You know, the Trump voters, you know, the seventy four million Trump voters from West election versus the eighty one million Biden voters are a lot older, they live in less healthy parts of the country. I mean, these people are not going to be persuaded to drop their position. They're not going to drop these views until they end
up horizontal. And I think this is a long you know, it's going to be a long transition period for the Republican Party to basically burn out in a way on these fevered, conspiracy driven politics the Trump embodies and fuels and propels, and that there's no ways to sort of just pull up on the throttle and level the plane. This is a cruise missile that they've launched years ago, and it's past the fail safe point. Oh that was a good metaphor.
I'm redirecting you here. No labels. They are responsible for some of these, maybe not all but some of these very junkie polls that we're seeing out there, the ones that say that people don't want Biden four hundred and twenty six days before the election. But let's talk about them. What is happening? Who are they, their donors? What is the plan here?
Yeah, well, before we switched to no labels, I would be my polist would hate me if I didn't remind people to buy the paperback version of Americans like ostis and tell people that if you subscribe to my newsletter or land you can get the book at a discount if you go to Davidcorn dot com and sign up anyway, But no labels, there's a lot of I think it's fair to say, without being pejorative about it, hysteria. Sometimes
hysteria is justified about no labels. This group, this dark money group, we don't know where all the money's coming from, that wants to put on a third party candidate on the ballot next year, with a lot of people, a lot of Democratic strategists, a lot of never Trump Republicans believing that this ticket, if led by Joe Manchin or somebody else, would draw more votes from Biden than Trump and could threaten Biden victory, particularly in key close swing
states like Georgia, Arizona, and all the other ones that we know about. And so they say they're raising seventy million dollars. They're not telling us where the money is coming from.
But we think it's coming from a lot of Republicans.
I found a list of donors to this effort that accounts for a couple million dollars, and you know which I wrote about in Mother Jones, and that list leaned heavily towards Republicans, included even some Trump donors. There were some centrist, pro business type Democrats who have been funding No Labels for years, long before this third party project came along, and they're still giving money, some of these Democratic backers of the past, but by and large this
group has been dominated by Republican funders. You have the two heads of No Labels, the state party chapter of No Labels in Colorado, both Republicans. One of them said, well, if this ends up helping Trump, I don't mind. People have been out there who are pro Trump. Even conservative right wing radio host Hugh Hewitt just the other day said, if No Labels helps Trump, which I think it is, that's a good thing. They keep insisting that they don't
want to throw the election to Trump. And the person who runs No Labels is a woman named Nancy Jacobson, who used to be a Democratic fund under mainly for conservative, moderate pro business Democrats. She's married to Mark Penn, the former Democratic consultant who's been on the outs for the Democrats for many years.
Now.
They're sort of trying to get back at the Clinton.
There's a lot of mini series subplots going on in all this. It's really hard to figure out if this is really what they're doing, if their aim is to elect Trump, or if they don't care and their aim is just to get in the mix and have influence and scare the pants off other people and as a form of revenge. That way, there's no logic to their math. They keep saying that most of Americans don't want Trump or Biden, but they think that most Americans want Joe Biden or Larry Hogan.
Right, Joe Manchin. I mean what is interesting, and I want to talk for a minute about this idea that Joe Manchin is somehow more desirable than Joe Biden. Joe Manchin is this single reason along with Kirsten Cinema, that we don't have student loan forgiveness, right, we don't have the Freedom to Vote Act, we don't have I mean, those two are the reason why we don't have a lot of stuff we have, and we have a Supreme
Court that is radically remaking this country. So I do think it's worth thinking about, like, who is the Democrat who would support Joe Manchin. Look, I think Joe Manchin is power hungry and wants attention and wants money and wants power, and that's where this is going, and that's why he's decided that he wants to flirt with this.
Maybe he does it, maybe he doesn't. But I think a good point is, like, if you can live with being the person who re elects Trump and kills American democracy, ask yourself if you can be that person, because you will because history will look back on you, and they will look back on you not fondly. And you may be the thing that causes climate catastrophe that we are on the edge of. You may be the thing that
ends American democracy And are you ready for that? And I think that's a question Joe Manchin needs to ask himself and Larry Hogan too.
Yeah, I broke the story, was it? I guess two years ago now that Joe Manchin was thinking of leaving the Democratic Party. It told people that he was considering doing this, and then he denied that was the case. But I had solid evidence and he backed off. This is just purely a hunch.
There is not.
An uproar from the American public for Joe manchon presidency. Let us Mary Ogan or John Huntsman, who John Huntsman and who whoeverly is? People do these names that they're being raised, But to be named in this way keeps Manchin in the mix. He loves to be in the
center of attention. And Evan and asked whether he would do this, he says, you know, he refuses to say yes or no, which is a smart thing for a politician to do, because if you were to say no, people would say, oh, now, we don't have to pay as much attention to Joe Manchin as Joe Manchin would
like us to pay. So I still think at the end of the day, the end of this year, at the beginning of next year, into the spring, when you start doing these polls and you put Joe Manchin in and he polls nine ten percent, and it looks like, you know, it's clear that he'll take votes. You know, if anti Trump votes away from Biden, that you know he because of the reasons you just enumerated, maybe not so much climate change. He's not going to go out of his long storied political career as the guy who
elected Donald Trump to a second term. There are very few people who run the third party here, a third party boy or independent who end up being well reguarded afterwards. Ross pro was a crazy person, John Anderson his career and never went anywhere after nineteen eighty when he is a modern Republican Iran and that so, I think Manchin cares a lot about his reputation and his image and may not go.
Now.
Will they find somebody else, some other person out there will. Maybe they'll go to the rock, right.
The real problem with Nancy Jacobson and Mark Penn is that they just want attention and money, and this is a very good way for them to get it.
Yeah, and it's very dangerous though. It is playing with fire because I'm not getting overwhelmed or upset by the polls coming out now, but they do show that Trump has a chance of regaining the wordhouse, and that there is a great Graham Green line that it is nothing like a hanging to concentrate the mind. That should parcentrate our collective mind. Anybody who's not living in the unreality of Trump world should recognize that Trump poses a profound
threat to American democracy. He's already told us the plan to implement authoritarianism should he get back in. He wants to pardon the January sixth insurrectionist writers and therefore encourage more political violences embraced QAnon. I mean, it's all out there, and so it seems to me.
That the number one priority now is to make sure that doesn't happen, because if it does happen, then American democraty can't deal with the student debt crisis, can't deal with healthcare, can't deal with the product.
Can't deal with anything. All Right, So let's talk about Georgia. Grand Jury says, perhaps we should indict David Purdue and Kelly Laffler and Lindsey Graham.
Yeah, I think this is good. We'll seeing how the system works. Trump and all his henchmen and hensch women are out there always saying it's a deep state conspiracy. It's against me, they're rigging the system, all these all this bs. Well, now we see in Georgia there's a two grand jury system. There's first a grand jury that investigates and recommends possible indictments. Then there's a grand ury
that actually votes on these indictments. And so we're seeing, well with the release right before we started recording this of the recommendation that that first grand jury made of people of persons who they thought should be indicted, and it turns out, well, you know what, Fannie Willis, who the Trump is attacking as a wild woman for going for this case, decided not to take or the next grand jury as well, not to take all these recommendations and put forward an even more modest you know, it's
a sweeping indictment, but it's less sweeping than what this first gen grand jury recommended and voted for. So Lindsey Graham they thought they recommended and they voted to recommend that he'd be indicted. Well, the second grand jury and Fannie Willis is not. They have not indicted him. They did not indict David Perdue and Kelly Leffler, who senators at the time it seems well, great, this is how it's supposed to work, and there was some degree of
prosecutorial grand jury discretion here. It wasn't that they just took this long list and just got you know, put
out a wide net. We don't know what the reasoning is behind the decision not to indict these people who were recommended, and it could be a good case, it could be a hard case to bring, but we do know that she and the second grand jury would not held bent to include everybody in everything that the first jury recommended that and I think that shows some degree of discretion, maybe modesty, and that the system is working at as it should work.
Yeah, and I think it's certainly an important data point that this is a real serious case that people are taken very seriously and rico as a real charge that we've seen Fanny Willis use before.
Yeah, this is not going to convince Donald Trump or anyone else, or is you know, millions of could followers that this is a legitimate enterprise. But I think he can reassure the rest of us that, you know, the system is working somewhat judiciously here. As an aside, it is interesting to go back to twenty sixteen, and this wonderful tweet on Lindsey. If we don't get rid of Trump,
he will destroy us all. And it seemed that there are many people around Trump who are being destroyed, I have been destroyed, and who are being indicted because they followed him as dear leader. It seems for the time being that Lindsey Graham has just escaped by his whiskers on the same fate.
Yeah, exactly, and for that, you mean, well deserved, David corn. I hope you will come back.
I will come back whenever you ask.
Chris Murphy is the junior senator from Connecticut. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Senator Chris.
Murphy, thanks for having me. Glad to be back.
We're back. It's the fall. The House is coming back. They're led by incredible Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has plans to impeach Biden on what. He's not sure, but he'll think of something. I mean, what is it like to be a Democratic senator in whatever this is.
That's a great question, and we don't have enough time. Let me say this, I am glad to be a senator, not a congressman, because well, we have deep disagreements in the United States Senate with our Rebelican colleagues. There are fewer total complete jackasses in the Senate than there are in the House, and few are arcifists. Right, So we passed all the budget bills out of the Appropriations Committee before the recess. We had pretty broad Republican and Democratic
buy in on all of them. And now we're faced with this House of representatives who see to kind of change their ransom demand every day. We'll pass up if you let us impeach Joe Biden, will pass a budget as long as we abandon Ukraine.
Right.
We don't really know what they want, but it's something really reckless and irresponsible, and we will hopefully once they get back into town, flesh out a little bit more as to what they need in order to just keep paying the bills of the federal government. Past September thirtieth, one.
Of the things I wanted to ask you about was we have Mitch McConnell. He is again not my choice, but is probably the most effective majority leader Republicans have ever had in the Senate. Right, he got three Supreme Court justices where he really only Donald Trump really should have only had won, which is a life to which has radically remade our country and the image of terrifying
Handmaid's tail esque dystopia. Republicans have decided that even though they are furious with Joe Biden for being eighty, they are are and not having any health issues. Particularly, they are totally set with McConnell, who seems to have quite serious health issues, because he's probably better than anyone else they can replace him with.
Well, I mean, first of all, is you know this. They are furious with Joe Biden because he's actually enacting progressive priorities. He is a lethally effective United States president who has defeated some of the most significant, most powerful interests in Washington, the drug industry, the oil industry, the
gun industry, and has set Republicans on their heels. Republicans know they can't complain about those things because passing gun safety legislation and lowering prescription drug costs and doing something about climate are really popular, so they try to invent other things to be mad about, like his age. But yes, it is true, mister McConnell is of similar age and is actually showing signs of decline. Video McConnell is pretty scary, but I interact with him and see him interact with
others on a pretty regular basis. My sense is that those are pretty isolated incidences, and he still remains pretty effective in the Senate. But I generally don't give my Republican colleagues advice on who should leader. They'll make that themselves.
Yeah, it's true, but you know it is just to take a moment here to talk about this idea, Nancy Pelosi. I don't see a lot of talk about like how I mean, she really was. I feel I don't see enough talk about how effective she was. And you see all of the potential pitfalls that she avoided, Kevin McCarthy stepping into each one of them.
Yeah, but it's easier to avoid those pitfalls when you're working with a caucus, the Democratic caucus that believes in small D democracy and our serious human beings. Like these guys are not serious human beings like people the speaker McCarthy are leading. They're basically just interested in being Twitter celebrities and owning the Libs and going out drinking at night with their buddies, like they're not actually interested in legislating.
So basical BIZZI is an exceptional leader, and she did things that nobody expected, so she deserves all the ploducts she gets. But it also is easier to run the Democratic caucus than it is to run the Republican caucus.
So you are in a period that we're Democrats are passing a ton of legislation right, and we're ships has incredible tentacles, from prescription drug negotiation, to credits for evs, to building bridges. I mean that's inflation production. Then you have the Chips Act. You have all sorts of really interesting stuff. I've been really impressed to the Biden administrations trying to get have meetings with Japan in South Korea to try to prevent China from being able to sort
of do what they do. Talk to me about where this is and is there a place for other stuff that you guys can get through.
Yeah, the list of accomplishment is so long when it comes to the legislative victories of this administration and the previous Congress that we start to forget some of the most significant ones. You named many of the highlights, but on that list is also the protection of gay marriage
from judicial fiat. On that list is one of the most significant investments in veterans care in the history of the country, making sure everybody was exposed to toxic chemicals gets veterans and it fits the burn pits, right, do you also reference there's just a long series of pretty significant foreign policy victories here as well, and the really important subtle work of building our allies in Asia, not
just Japan in South Korea. But it's also the deeper partnership we now have with Australia does isolate China and make it a little bit more likely that we would be able to win a conflict or more importantly, prevent a conflict with China. So it's just nice to have an adult in the White House, and sometimes we don't do a good enough job of explaining everything that has happened. So what can we do moving forward? I mean, it's a limited list because you've got these arsonists in charge
of the House of Representatives. So it seems like these days our work is basically just trying to keep the lights on, don't default on the debt, don't shut down the government. Are there maybe some areas of overlap on the next iteration of industrial policy? Maybe could we do something on social media regulation? Possibly there are some narrow areas of agreement potentially with the House. But man, they're unfortunately pretty narrow because those guys are literally not interested
in governing. They just like to kind of show up and have the trappings of the office some very little else intrigued step.
So let's talk for a minute about this incredible Tommy Tuberville situation. I have a Republican kid. I have one kid as a Republican. I think we actually dropped him when he was little, and that he should be okay if but we did actually drop him.
But he's I don't know what my kids are yet, so I'm not well.
Prepare yourself emotionally. But my one Republican kid, very involved in the Civil Air Patrol, very involved in the Armed services, wants to be ROTC. And he went to encampment this summer, which is like a sort of military training camp that the military runs and on an Air Force base. He became friends with a lot of kids whose parents are the military. But anyway, the net net of the story is the military is really mad at Tuberville and that Tubervil.
They really see that this is Tuberville's doing. Can you talk to us about this?
So this is really messing with the security of the country. By the end of the year, if Tubberville's conduct continues unabated, you will have ninety percent of all military promotions having been blocked, meaning you will have hundreds, close to maybe one thousand senior military members in the wrong jobs. That really messes with your ability to run the military. If everybody is stuck in the wrong job and you have
all sorts of leader ship positions that are vacant. This is not philosophical, This is practical in terms of the impact it has, especially if we.
Were to get into a conflict.
I mean, maybe now, given that we are mainly supplying arms to the Ukrainians, you can find a way to manage this, but who knows when the next sort of crisis begins Republicans can stop us. I mean, the fact of the matter is, not a single Republican the Senate has come out and openly criticized Tuberville. There's no evidence that McConnell nor any of these lieutenants have put the screws to Tuberville and said, hey, there's going to be
consequences if you keep this up. And so my hope is that Republicans start to put pressure on him, or choose to join us in changing the rules of the Senate so that we can move some of these promotions through budged together. The rules now require you do every promotion separately, and right now we have what four hundred of these things pending. Every promotion takes two or three days.
There's just no way we can do that. So maybe we can budge them all together, but that takes Republicans to agree with us, and it's up to them whether they want to allow Tubberville to put the national security of the country in continued jeopardy.
It's a really good point that Mitch McConnell. I mean, we know that Mitch McConnell can pretty much make these senators, especially people like Tommy Tarberville, who has not much upstairs, and that guy, they can make him do whatever they want.
He's on TV every night with a cheshire Cat grin because he knows not only is he not getting pressure from Republicans, he's getting pats on the back from Republicans.
And why is that right?
We should have said this at the outset, But what is Tubberville's motivation here? He is he's holding all these promotions hostage to try to force President Biden to an act an anti abortion, anti choice policy in the military deny the ability of women in the military to be able to access full reproductive health care services. And the reason that he is not getting pushedback from his Republican colleagues is because their number one priority is not the
security of the nation. It is banning abortions nationally. Their number one agenda item is to tell women what healthcare they can get and what healthcare they can't get, and they are willing to do any in order to enact that anti women agenda. And so that's what you're seeing here is that Tommy Jabberville is getting away with this because he is fronting the number one priority issue for Republicans, which is banning abortions nationwide.
Unbelievable. And what I think is so amazing about that issue is that it is wildland popular. Speaking of wildly and popular Republican policies. Where are we with the guns?
I mean, we're making really important progress. And I got to tell you, having been a part of this movement for ten years, embarrassed that I didn't work on this issue before Sandy Hook. But I've been at the center of it since Sandy Hook, and there were a lot of days during those last ten years where I generally wonder are we ever going to be the Internet right? Thirty years since we passed anything the INTERRA opposed is
that our future. And last year we proved in fact that we've built movement that is now more powerful than the NRA, and that we have the ability, when the time is right, to get just enough Republicans to pass laws that crack down on illegal gun ownership, even if those laws are opposed by the NRA. And what we're seeing is the Biden administration not surprisingly do the right thing. So there's a really small change that we made in
the BILLI passed last year. It just updates the definition of gun dealer because what we found there are a lot of people who are selling guns but are not licensed, and that means they're not doing background checks. We updated that definition, and the Biden administration just implemented that change
last week in a way that is pretty expansive. That is likely going to require thousands, tens of thousands of people who are right now selling guns online and a gun shows who don't do background checks to now do background checks, and that is an absolute game changer. The administration could have just sat on the sidelines and kind of milk toast implementation, but they did. They went as far as they could legally go in putting out a rule that updates the definition of what it means to
be a gun dealer. And the result is going to be a lot less homicides because a lot less dangerous people are going to own weapons. So obviously, the bill we passed last year's not everything they need to do, but the Biden administration is doing as much as they possibly can do with the legislation that we passed, and that's great news.
Yeah, that is great news. And I think that it's great to hear some optimism from you about this because it does feel like just pretty scary. Do you think there's any chance of raising the purchase age?
Yes, I mean, I think the short answer to what is possible is pretty easy. We are going to pass the universal background checks, we are going to increase the age, and we are going to eventually ban assault weapons, and all of that is going to happen. We are marching inexorable direction towards tougher gun laws. Maybe it's going to take five to ten years to complete that attenda going to complete it. And I know that because I've just
seen the way that Republicans have changed their behavior. Not all of them, but now ten or fifteen of them in the Senate, including Mitch McConnell, are more afraid of Mom's demand action than they are of the NRA because they look at these cities where they get ten percent of the vote and the suburbs where now they're getting forty percent of the vote, and they realize that if they don't start showing that they're not Neanderthals on the issue of gun violence, they are going to continue to
lead votes in really important places.
Yeah, I mean, it does seem like that the public sentiment is with Democrats on those.
And it's slower than it should be. But if you look, especially when it comes to these presidential elections, at what are the motivating issues that turn out low propensity voters, guns is at the top of the list. So why is Joe Biden talking about assault weapons all the time, even though it's really unlikely that we're going to pass an assault weapons ban during his first term. It's because
he knows. It's because he's the smartest politician in the party, and he knows that being clear that a democratic priority is passing in the sault weapons ban is what will turn out a lot of young voters in the upcoming election.
And Republicans know that too, They've seen the polling. It doesn't mean that they're going to get right on assault weapons, but it does mean that when the opportunity presents itself on something like the bipartisan Safer Communities act, more of them than ever before are likely at to sign up.
Now you're sort of in this period. Do we think there's going to be a government shutdown? I mean, is right to be anxious about this, And historically these government shutdowns, I mean, two of the things that are on the Republican House agenda right now, a government shutdown and an impeachment for seemingly no reason, are pretty unpopular.
I love these interviews. I don't even know this guy, but I see him on like my news clips occasionally. Cala Murray's like the head of the Oversight Committee, right, He's like awesome. It's like he gets repeatedly asked, have you found any evidence of wrongdoing by the President Biden? And every single time he like he takes a little while but I ma interers and know we found nothing.
Do you still want to impeach him? Absolutely? So yeah, I think everybody should be worried about a shutdown because this is just a nightmare of a ruling coalition in the House of Representatives. I think the one silver lining here is the fact that everybody in America knows who would be at fault if the government shut down. In previous shutdown prices, it was kind of up for grabs.
Is going to be starting gonna get blamed?
Is it Republicans? No? Now everybody knows that McCarthy's in charge of a bunch of lunatics, and so McCarthy knows that he knows that if the government shuts down that he'll get blamed and that that'll hurt them politically. And that's in part I think why he cut a deal on the debts, feeling that was pretty weak. I mean, at least when it comes to the priorities that he articulated, because he knew if we defaulted on the debt, nobody
would be clout about who was responsible. They would know Republicans. So that's the one silver aligning is that ultimately McCarthy may agree to a continuing resolution because he knows, so get blamed.
Yeah, I mean that definitely does seem like how it's going to go. And I mean, who knows if he's smart enough to know that.
And it helps also, Molly, that we have been working together in the Senate. So the Senate, as I mentioned earlier, has passed all the appropriations bills in a bipartisan way, lots of Republicans supporting these bills. So he doesn't have the excuse that, oh, Democrats aren't coming to the table or nobody's listening to Republicans. No, in fact, the Senate has shown that, like, we can do this. It's just your Republicans the ones that are being obstinate Chris.
Murphy, Senator Murphy, thank you for joining us.
I hope you'll come back always fun. Thanks.
Thanks. Daniel Leviton is a cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, and author of Weaponize Lies, How to Think Critically in the Post Truth Era. Welcome to Fast Politics, Daniel.
Well, thank you for having me.
This is like you are Jesse, our producer's absolute sweet spot in the world. Cognitive psychologist neuroscientist writes on move on music comes into the Trump era and you are writing about Trump, so talk to us about how you made this evolution.
Oh, what an interesting question. I don't think of myself as writing about Trump per se. I try to walk the line of being a political in that I think science should be a political I think that science exists in the public trust. It should be free. Everything I say in my books I put out there in interviews and in other ways so that people don't have to buy the book if they don't want to. I used
nice to have it all collected one place. But I think that science should exist outside the realm of politics. But you're right, it's hard to not get political when you talk about news these days. It's almost inescapable. And the way I got into this was that I had read a book when I was in school called How to Lie with Statistics in the forties. I just loved that book. It's a short, little book and it's irreverend.
It's kind of like if Kurt Vonnegut had been a statistician, right, And I started teaching a course back in nineteen ninety nine on critical thinking to my college undergraduates, the seniors
who are about to go off of the world. We used that book and part of their assignment was to collect examples from newspapers and then later on social media where if people were really using statistics or making claims that were distorted or just flat out wrong, but maybe in a sneaky way so that the average person might not notice it.
Oh, that is interesting thread, that needle for me.
Well, so from that, you know, I had this big box, this archived file box, full of these wonderful examples that students.
Had given me.
In my book The Organized Mind, which came out in twenty fourteen, I devoted a chapter to critical thinking. By twenty fifteen, when the election cycle was starting and we first started hearing about and encountering fake news. That is, I should define that prior to that, there was the news.
It wasn't like an alternative news.
There was the news. I mean, I grew up in the era of Huntley Brinkley and Cronkite, and you got the news, and an opinion was something different. Around the time that cable news channels came to be, an opinion was broadcast on news channels or ostensible news channels. It became difficult to separate opinion from fact and opinion from news, and that led to something of an emerging crisis in
twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen about what is news? And so I wrote this book called A Field Guide to Lies, which was basically me wanting to write how lie was statistics, but that had already been written.
And that's where I.
Try to package together a lot of strategies might aim there, Molly was. I wanted the average person, you know, well, like an eighth grade education, to be able to know how to make sense of competing claims. I didn't want to be in the business of telling people what to think, right.
But just sort of how to be able to see what's true.
Yeah.
Another way to look at it was there's some professions that train people in how to sort out the truth from the bs. One of those is in as to give a journalists, which is a profession with training. Another is police detective, another is lawyer, another is scientist. And we spend a lot of time training people in these professions to be able to sort through and figure out, well, wait a minute, that doesn't add up. The average person
doesn't get that, and I think they should. I think starting in eighth grade, the average person should have that same training. That's what it means to have an informed electorate.
Yeah, is the problem here that we are not thinking clearly? Or is the problem here that we are just not thinking, or what is our problem here?
What is your problem?
I would say, however we wanted to find the problem. It's exacerbated by the fact that the Internet gives us easy access to lots of stuff. And on the Internet, as that old New Yorker cartoon goes, nobody knows if you're a dog.
Right right. So on the Internet it's hard to.
Know whether something is actually verified or not. You put something into a search engine, you google it as it were, and the answers you get maybe true, they may not be. And that puts a big burden on all of us. Not proposing the Internet should be regulated necessarily, I'm just saying that we now have a burden. We didn't have a generation a go, and so the problem is most of us are unprepared to evaluate every claim that comes in in a systematic fashion and try to figure out
if it's true. We tend to use shortcuts like, well, my friend told me that, or I read it on the internet, or they couldn't publish that if it wasn't true. There's a naivety there. And also, you know, to our defense, it's burdensome to have to question everything. It's no fun. It makes you the DeBie down or at a party.
H that's true. It's funny because my husband sent me this photograph he took of a raccoon eating pizza out of the trash in the park, and I was like, is that real?
Right? Maybe it was Nate.
That was my first comment.
I was, because that real.
So here's my question for you along this line. So I believe nothing is real because I spend a lot of time on the Internet. Will the next generation, or these slightly savvier people who are just slightly younger than us, or the ones that grow up on the internet, will they just be like that? Will they just believe nothing is real? As opposed to the older generation, which believes that everything is real.
Oh well, what a horrible dichotomy.
Not to paint such broad strokes, But it doesn't it seem like that's where this is headed.
Hopefully, I would say the bigger problem isn't that we're going to have a generation of people who believe that nothing is real. I fear a generation of people, half of whom will believe things that ain't so right and they will believe them.
Further.
Well, that's where we are now, right, Yeah, there is.
No talking to people you disagree with. It doesn't matter if you're a publican or a Democrat, far left, far right, centrist, even off that two ended spectrum. You know, you're a libertarian, what your Green Party, whatever it is. If you disagree with somebody, it's very difficult these days to have a productive conversation because we don't even agree on the facts. And it's become kind of a tired trope that I
keep coming back to. But as Senator Daniel Patrick moynihan said, you're entitled to your own opinions, you aren't entitled to your own facts.
So, I mean, I think that this gets back to this idea of the death of institutions. Right, So you have a percentage of this country that does not believe in elections, or in government, or in teachers. There is this sense in which part of this country, you know, they don't believe doctor right, they don't believe they have no trusted members of the community. So where does that go? I mean, how do you get facts if you just.
Know one I am on the left side of the political spectrum unabashedly. I worked for the election of Ted lu and for Rocata and Adam Schiff in California. I worked the campaign for Jerry Brown for president. I'm just putting out there where I sit so that your listeners can evaluate what I have to say with for knowledge. But I would differ with you. I don't think that half the country doesn't believe in elections. They believe very much in elections, right, they just don't believe in the
outcome of elections. The outcome they don't like. It's not the outcome they don't like necessarily, they just don't believe that the outcome that we got was honest and fair and just and to their credit. I mean, I think it's demonstrably true that Trump lost the election. There's no legal room there. But our country has been in this
situation before. You may remember that Democrat Samuel Tilden led to Republican Rutherford Hayes by a quarter of a million votes nationwide, but a special commission awarded their electoral votes
to Hayes in eighteen seventy seven. You had cases between eighteen seventy four and nineteen oh four where sixty two times the House majority of either party phonied up a challenge to a member the opposition who'd won by a few voights votes, and they tossed them out, and Representative William McKinley of Ohio was expelled by the Democratic majority after winning reelection. So this kind of stuff has happened before. I don't mean that that's a good thing, but we've
somehow managed to recover. The difference is everything seems more fast paced. In the eighteen eighties, it took days or weeks or months for these things to people to form opinions. Now we formed them in seconds, and we've got ar Fifteen's right. I don't but I mean, yeah, right, I.
Mean no, I think that's a real problem. And again, I mean there have been times in American life when we have seen problems that we could not solve, right the post Civil War times when Americans were really a country that needed to unite, or even I think about like after the murder of JFK or MLK. I mean
there were times, or the Vietnam War. But this feels a little bit different because it's like this sort of power vacuum where Republicans are just sort of giving all the power to Trump, and Trump seems completely uninterested in any kind of harmony. Yeah.
I think you're right in that there have always been politicians who are out for themselves. Yeah, and there were sometimes presidents who put their interests ahead of the interest of the country in small ways. Nixon, Yeah, but Nixon ultimately resigned, Gore ultimately decided not to fight for the sake of harmony of the country. You know, the word
decorum keeps coming up in these conversations. There was a level of decorum and civility that is missing in the Trump campaign, which is a kind of take no prisoners. And the thing that disturbs me about the Trump presidency is all norms went out the window. And of course you can say, well, you know, politics has become corrupt, we need to shake things up. But I mean, this
is a whole other level of insanity. Clearly, to my mind, if he were to win again, would be emboldened to really press every possible button to self destruct government and any kind of regulation or constraints. I think he's a kleptocrat at heart and an unprincipled one, and it worries me. I mean, I'm just saying stuff that a lot of other people have said, and you didn't have me on to talk about that.
I think, no, no, right, all right.
I think the question is, you know, where do we go from here?
Right?
How do we get back to that? I mean, how do we get these people back?
Have you ever read any Lee McIntyre.
No.
He's a wonderful philosopher who has written a series of books on the post truth era and what led to it, and he traces the current predicament we're in back to the tobacco companies with their false information campaigns in the fifties, hiring their own scientists to say that tobacco was harmless, that sort of thing. And so he's one of many voices saying that Trump is not the problem per se. Trump is the symptom of a generalized mistrust of scientists
and of facts and fact wielders. And part of the problem is that people who are college educated democrats like me are often perceived by the UnCollege educated members of the right as disrespectful towards them, as finger wagging, and as elitist. And what McIntyre McIntyre actually went to a conference of the flat earthers.
Oh yeah, and.
He writes about it, and he's wonderful if flat earthers they really exist, and there's a lot of them, and they really believe that the rounders is the government conspiracy.
And apart from that.
They don't seem to hold any other weird conspiracy beliefs. It's not like they're all tin foil hat feet people. This is this one thing they can't let go of. And actually they had a website for a while that said uniting flat earthers from around the globe, but I think somebody hipped them to that that was not the right.
These people do get discredited. I mean a great example is COVID, Right, they said COVID is going to go away. It's going to be rocking and rolling by Eastern you know. But what I think is interesting is that despite this evidence that these people are not telling the truth, their followers continue following.
Why is that, Well, I think the followers dispute the evidence, and so I think there are two things. One of the things I appreciate about Lee McIntyre's approach, which gets back actually to Reagan and Tip O'Neil. You have conversations with people you disagree with, and the way to do it is to not start by saying you're wrong, but to listen to them and hear what they have to
say and try to find some common ground. I've sat down with people who I think hold views that will harm this country imminently, in the process of talking to them, just calmly and not allowing it to devolve into name calling, I find that in many cases we want the same things. We want the same things with the country. We want we want security, you know, again outside aggressors. We want a better life for our kids. We want healthcare for everyone.
We want you know, equality. What we disagree about is how to get there right. But we don't disagree on our values. We disagree on the tactics or the strategies. And that's a starting point. It's a wonderful starting point. I was making calls for the Democratic Party for the last presidential election, and you know, I would call people and say, do you know where your precinct is or you know you're voting place and such. I got this one guy in Florida and he says, oh, you're calling
me because I'm on the Demo. I'm registered as a Democrat. I said, well, that's right, I'm calling I got the list from the Democrats. He says, well, I'm voting for Trump.
So I said, all right, that's fine.
You know where to go to vote? Do you know what hours it's open? And he says, you understand I'm voting for Trump, don't you? And I said that is your right as a citizen. I'm not here to tell you who to vote for. I just want to make sure that you get to the polls, that you get to vote, and that your vote is counted, because if you're going to complain about things and you didn't vote,
you're kinda the ice and we're not talking. We talked for forty minutes, and my supervisor was going nuts because I'm supposed to make, you know, like a call every ninety seconds, right. I just heard what he had to say. And it turns out his whole family are Democrats, large family, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, kids. None of them would listen to him. They just all thought he was a crank. And I said, I see your point. Yeah, there's dysfunction here.
This is bad. This is bad. At the end of the call, he.
Said, Wow, nobody has listened to me. I'm going to go vote and I'm going to vote for bide. We listen that we don't make them feel stupid, because they're not stupid. You know, a lot of times they want to find common ground.
It's incredibly self destructive. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope you'll come back.
Oh, thank you for having me.
There a moment.
Jesse Cannon joined.
So, mister Trump, Ronald Decantis, and Vivike the Fake all went down to an Iowa football game and was that fun?
So when I saw this, I thought that it wasn't real because it seemed too good to be true. Basically, the Vake, ron de Santis, and Donald J. Trump all went to an Iowa football game together and there they discovered that there are some people in Iowa who love them and some people in Iowa who are just desperate to give them the finger. We saw lots of pictures of Trump getting the finger and also De Santis getting the finger, and we also saw some iconic booing. So
U that is our moment of fuckery. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds and politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, Please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again thanks for listening.