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 no labels say if Rond de Santis is a GOP nominee, they will drop their third party bid just want to have a fascist in the White House. We have such a thrilling show today Semaphores Dave Weigel tells us how the GOP are trying to
win over Islamic voters with their culture wars. Then we'll talk to Maddie Kahn about her new book Young and Restless, The Girls who sparked America's revolutions.
But first we have.
Bloomberg Opinion editor Tim O'Brien. Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Tim O'Brien, Hi, Ali, Hi.
We always encounter each other when there's been sort of a cultural or legal or political car correct.
Yeah, which is every day, so it ends up being fine.
Yeah, but this one, this particular one is epic.
Yes, it is epic, and it's also I feel like I've been through so many machinations with this as already, this federal indictment, there was the day it dropped and like I felt like people were on television saying like this is going to change everything, and then Republicans just decided they were going to fall back in line.
Republicans are always going to fall back in line because they understand that propaganda and disinformation is a path to power, and so they should be kind of put in their own particular shoe box. I do feel like, having watched Donald Trump for ages, I've always felt there's been this myth that's built up around him that he escapes the
law and he escapes accountability. I've always felt that's only because he hasn't really had the incentive prosecutorial artillery aimed at his wheelhouse, and now he does, and I do think this is different. I don't know that he's going to go to jail. I don't know that it's going to prevent him from ascending to the White House again. But Jack Smith landed a factually driven, air tight argument for why Donald Trump is a criminal. I think the system will find him guilty.
No, I definitely think so too.
I mean, thirty seven counts, thirty one of those are covered under this Espionage Act, which is not espionage but is the sort of the crimes that make.
Up modern national security. Right.
I mean I thought it was pretty interesting the defenses that you saw Republicans mount.
I mean, my favorite one.
Was Hugh Hewitt, who has thought of as a sort of more mainstream Republican right now, Well.
I think he's I think he's an off the rails apologies.
They're all off the rails apologists.
But I think he's particularly off the rails, and I think he's ill informed. I don't know Hugh Hewett, but I don't I find I think there's other conservatives who are more substantive than him.
No question, he is not substantive in any way, but I think of him as different than Charlie Kirk, is what I'm saying, right, he writes for mainstream outleads.
He's not a pre pubescent bratt who is a know nothing.
Right, and so he is. Immediately after the indictment tweets. I read the indictment and there's nothing about trying to sell state secrets. I was like, so the bar is like actual espionage when we know people like Reality Winner and people like that who have gone to jail for many years.
Well, and he was in charge with trying to sell state secrets. That's not part of the charges. They're saying that indictment is deficient for something it doesn't.
Do right exactly.
You know, I just thought it was interesting that, like, how on the ground these defenses could be.
Lindsay Graham said a similar thing. But again, they're arguing. They're not arguing on the fact pattern. They are they're setting up straw men to pretend they can find fault with an indictment that is utterly fact driven and damning. And I can't believe the jury wouldn't be swayed by, you know, the speaking indictment that they've filed.
Well, that will be the question. It will and the judge will be Judge Eileen Canna.
Yeah, you know, and even if you know she won't recuse, she probably won't be pulled off of Even if she just lets the machinery the courtroom go in the direction it should and let the jury reach a verdict, she still gets to sentence him, right, and sentencings are subjective acts at the discrimination of the judge. Trump could get as much as ten years on most of the count's twenty years. I think on one of the counts, what if she just says two days.
Right now that said, the appeals process could knock a decision that's too far out of the range out.
It could and I think, you know, this could become a ping pong ball in the appellate court. Obviously, so we don't know, but she's already been basically censured by fellow Republican jurists who have found her previous rulings wanting. I don't know if that's going to putrun any special guard to sort of roll differently on this, but it is deeply ironic that she descended up with her I think it was shrewd of the DOJ. It can mean
the grand jury. I mean, I think they needed to because the crid happened to mar Alago, the alleged crime, right, so they had to convene the grand jury there. But I also think it matters that Laridians found enough credibility and the evidence to hand up an indictment, and then the wheel spun around and she got the case. We're in such a crazy.
Era, yeah, no, definitely.
So now I want to ask you what do you think happens now?
Well, I think you know, he's a desperate person. I think the fact that he started attacking Jack Smith within ten seconds of this being fouled and not just attacking Jack Smith like in his traditional this is a witch hunt, this is the dam's coming after me. He called Jack Smith the coward. Donald Trump doesn't really care about other people. He doesn't focus on them. They don't weighan his mind unless he has a use for them. So if he's enamored of someone at their celebrity or an athlete where
he envies their celebrity, he pays attention. If if it's somebody wants to corrupt or co op, he pays attention. And the third sort of category of human he pays attention to are the people that scare him. And I think he is deeply scared of Jackson and he's projecting cowardice on a Jacksmith because he's afraid, and I think he knows in his reptilian brain. So Donald Trump's seventy seventh birthday is today, Wow, which also happens to be
the anniversary of the Espionajack. I'm not saying correlation is causationation.
Yes, definitely, yeah.
Yeah, But it is interesting that the Espionajack, I think, was passed in nineteen seventeen on the same date that in nineteen forty six, Donald Trump was born In any event, I think he's very aware of this. For all of his bravado, and he is not a sophisticated man. And he got through his previous prior years with better legal advisors well Cage here and more wanton legal advisors around him than he has now. And he's he's open now,
he's vulnerable, and I think he feels it. Yeah, So that means I think there's going to be political violence, right. What are his other options?
Well, he's certainly encouraging political violence. But yeah, you'll remember encouraging political violence. In Trump has encouraged political violence before. He will do it again. I mean that is that's not I mean, that's kind of how he does it. The question I think is more will his people be violent?
Right?
Yeah? And you know January six would say yes, some of his political rallies would say yes, right. It turnout in Miami would say no, right right?
I mean, or even in New York. Right.
There was a whole indictments circus.
Yeah. Yeah, I remember like when Marjorie Taylor Green showed up and everyone was like, go away, silly woman. When you jumped back into her car and sped off. I mean, you know, in a way that's heartening. Like maybe the Trump Show is not going to get people onto the streets in the way it might have a few years ago. But I think that's still where he's going to go, especially if he gets convicted, and especially if he gets.
Sentenced, right right, right, No, And I mean I think there's a real chance. There's also like remember there are the Georgia indictments.
And there still is a possible January sixth indictment from the Justice Department on insurrection, which would, if he's found guilty, keep him from running again.
Also, Jack Smith, when would that happen?
I don't know, I have no idea. I mean, clearly they felt and I think they were right that the classified documents case was such a clear linear argument. And in the January sixth case, they're going to have to prove the Trump fomented the insurrection on January sixth, that he incited it, and he was a co conspirator in a sedition that could be open to interpretation in the way that this one isn't. But that's also the case
that could keep him out of the Oval office. The Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War was aimed a keeping Confederates running government because they were seditious, and that language is still in there, right, Like, that's the heart of this is, we don't want rebellious people, irresponsible seditionists running
our government, whether the Confederates or Donald Trump. But weirdly, in all of this, depending on the timing, if Trump were to run and win, he then if you were president, could dismiss these cases.
Right And in fact, it seems like a very likely, especially with Judge Cannon, that a lot of these cases may happen after he's won the primary, the GOP primary, which I think he'll win, while he's running for president. I was actually texting with Ron DeSantis, Yes, Ron DeSantis, we're very close. No, with with Ron brownsde you know who happens to have the same name as Ron de Santis and lit a thowsful human being.
Yes, Ron Brownstein.
He was saying, and he may not feel this way now, but he was saying he thought this actually pretty much clenched the GOP nomination for Trump.
Well, I think that's actually an interesting thing to look at, and I'm not convinced it will. I think he may have clinched it regardless of this right. You know, after like three to four weeks after you know, Manhattan, da Alvin Brad indicted Trump and charged him in the courtroom. A few weeks after that event, the polls suggested that it gave Trump a boost, and I think that was
a flimsy case relative to all the other ones. Like if if you had to have a ranking of where to go at him, that one felt me far down on the totem pole. It will be interesting to see in three to four weeks if there's some polling, and all the polls aren't reliable, but I will voters respond to this action. I think it would be interesting if they have a different response to this than they did to brag. And if they did, I think that may
also have an electoral component to it. I think most Americans are sick of this car crash, but they don't want the car crash to get resolved in a unreliable way.
What does that mean.
I think they want the process to play out in a way in which it is clear and discernible, right, And I think this is a clear, discernible action. I think there's anywhereere you've got to interpret Trump's judgment or interpret did he do x Y or Z, people will start complaining. But like the Georgia case, in this case, like there's a tape in Georgia where he says, find me the eleven thousand and seven hundred votes or whatever, it's like, there's nothing like debatable around that he called
them up and asked them to commit voting fraud. And in the document's case, his own cameras record his own people moving the stuff around to evade the law, and the obstruction case is open to interpretation. On the second you get into interpretation of the January sixth case, you know, people can fill that void. It can fill that vacuum, you know. I do think voters have stood up at crucial moments since twenty sixteen. Trump is not one a
federal electoral referendum. Since twenty sixteen, twenty eighteen, twenty twenty twenty two, he's lost, despite everyone saying that trump Ism and Trump were going to rule the dead and it got deeply embarrassed in twenty two. So I don't know, but I am heartened that somewhere in the great unknown that is the United States, that some people are enough, people are to start at paid attention. Since twenty sixteen. But I get the sense that you don't believe that. Do you not feel that?
No?
I do.
I mean the I think that those midterms were a referendum on Trump is. I think Trump has the numbers to continue with the GOP base, but I don't think he has the numbers.
To win a general election.
Right, And so I actually feel, you know, in my mind, the worst case scenario continues to be DeSantis because it, you know, trump is without Trump is quite scary.
Yeah, I mean, I.
Don't like Youngkin, but he doesn't seem to me quite as But I mean, I don't know. This Republican Party has definitely taken authoritarianism as their thing now in a really craven way.
Right because, like you have, you have trained lawyers advocating for it.
Yeah, exactly, and they don't think there's anything wrong with it, and they're very defensive about it. So you know, I'm more worried about this sort of trump Ism without Trump than I am about Trump, because I think that people know what Trump is.
Well, and that's going to stay with us, Molly, like that's a given, Like trump Ism is going to be with us for I don't know, I wouldn't say a generation, But I would say until it gets completely wrung out of the GOP primary process, it's not gone.
Which means that basically that every election is going to be fascism more normal.
Well, you know, I think it's even beyond what is fascism mean in the US context. To me, there's clearly this desire to just call institutional credibility into question, about the point where no one trusts facts, no one trusts what institutions say, whether those institutions are are the courts or the government, or the media or any sort of
local authority. And that's an okay place for elites to live because they can also always resource themselves privately, But for most people who depend on both institutions and processes just for the normal given taricul their daily lives, that's anarchy. And I think, actually, these people aren't the far right, the MAGA people of the GOP aren't populist conservatives or anarchists.
They want disorder because they're angry and they think the system as a whole is untrustworthy and should be brought down. And so in the American context, I really worry about just dissolution and fragmentation sort of like late Rome.
Yeah, no, and I think there's a real anxiety that that's where we are.
But so then the question is how do we solve that?
Yeah, and I don't know how we solve that. Give us like a two minutes on how we solve it.
Well, I think leadership always matters. I think it matters in times of uncertainty, in times of chaos, that people of courage stand up, exert influence, authority and trust to get things back on track. And I think that Democrats have been bad at recruiting young, dynamic, credible people in giving them airtime so a base can be cultivated around them. I think historically the GOP has been better at that.
So I think part of the solution is the Democrats need to get better at recruiting and promoting sharp, new, dynamic faces. I think secondarily, people have to fight for facts. But that's also a nebulous battle.
Right exactly.
The media is as poorly trusted as any other institution, in a lot of cases less so. But I think there's a long history behind that, and I think that that's a tough battle. And I think actually the United States is at a juncture that could go in very much the wrong way given all the factors in play. I'm not entirely pessimistic. I'm not optimistic. I just think we're on a bit of an I think we're on a knife edge in American society right now.
Yeah again, how long can we be on a knife's edge?
How long is it going to take England to recover from Brexit?
Right?
I mean, I think I think societies can stay in flextu a long time, but they erode. And there's a lot of things we always do well in the US because there's a lot of unique virtues and skilled in the US, But there's also this weird I think the United States, the sort of sense of inevitability and survival that come what nay, everything bumps up against this anormous ship of the state that the US sales on. I
think the Trump ERI calls that into question. I think people need to do the right thing and embrace values that are our disting values like democracy, equity, the facts, which is not happening right now. And the response the GOP's response to the Trump indictment is grotesque and disheartening because they're just craven politicos who want to acquire position and power for the sake of acquiring power with an agenda free world view.
Tim O'Brien, thank you so much for joining us.
Molly, thank you for having me. It's always a treat.
Dave Weigel is a reporter at Semaphore. Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Dave, thanks for having me back. I appreciate it.
Always delight to have you. So we're in this incredibly.
I don't know if I'm incredibly depressed or just a little depressed, but I'm thinking about our political situation right now and feeling pretty depressed. Can you talk to us a little bit about the sort of insanity that's happening right.
Now in MAGA world.
Yeah, well, obviously the deep state is taking down Donald Trump because he got too close to the truth about child drafficking. That's what's happening in Florida today, right.
It's the only answer that makes sense.
Yeah, the former president is showing up for his Dan Corty's got a couple special features that most people don't get, which is that he doesn't need to get a mug shot, I just need to get fingerprinted. But he is participating with investigation to his handling of classified material and more importantly. I mean, this is the thing I think, I think everyone kind of gets it right, but more importantly, just not cooperating with law enforcement and the FBI once they
realize that he's taking stuff from the White House. That's what separates what's happened to Trump, that from what happened to Mike Pence, which is already forgotten, and the investigation into into Joe Biden. This is it's very clear from the indictment, which is which is a just like a fun read. I feel like it is a fun read.
It's true.
I'm usually fun read. Yeah, with photos, just for the details. Had he just behaved differently and handed the stuff back when asked about it, I'm not sure that this would be happening today. But that's happening. You have. I have
some colleagues down there. I'm not down there myself, but you have what it's not probably probably a pretty reliable traveling maggot troop of Kerry Lake and vi Vey Ramaswami and Laura Lumer who lives in Florida, and Trump super fans who are saying this is a miscarriage of justice, that this is Joe Biden trying to take down his
his chief political opponent. I think that they don't really be there saying because every Republican, with the exception of Basa Hudginson is running for president, has said almost the same thing, right, And.
Now I want to talk about these candidates, because this is something that is completely like, here are these candidates. They are running against Donald Trump, right, They're running against him, and yet Donald Trump has made defending him the litmus test of this primary. So well, they're running against him, they're defending him.
What.
This is a trap for a lot of these candidates for a number of reasons. I think most people can even into it. Why. The first one that they're all dealing with is that most Republican voters, most people who say they're going to vote in this primary, like Donald Trump, and they think that he's being railroaded. If you look at the CBS poll which asked pretty directly about this that came out over the weekend, less than thirty percent close to twenty eight percent Republicans who thought there might
be some merit into this case. In Florida, the vast majority said there was no merit, and half of the people who said there was said that it was probably a political sting to get him out of the race anyway. And when you're that is your elector that's who you're appealing to, you can either go for that small group that is not enough to win the nomination, or you can say, I agree that this is that he's being railroaded. I think what you've seen is a couple different responses.
One is the AA vague response, which is literally turning your campaign over into a kind of flavor flav you know Chuck d situation where you're just showing up and saying, yeah, boy, whenever Trump says something.
He's there today and he has like a sheet that he wants everyone to sign that will say they'll defend Donald Trump, every candidate.
That they'll specifically that if they're elected president, they will pardon him.
Pardon him, yes, yes, yes, the Willie.
Mantion pardoning him. That is the That is one extreme. The other extreme is is Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, is a former prosecutor, and he's just saying we yes, Trump should leave the race. He has the way he's behaved in this indictment is is is untenable. H he cannot leave the country. He should drop out. Asa Hutchinson, who is appollent one percent, does not have
that appeal to most of the party. In between, you've got the rest of the responses, which are I think Nikay Halley kind of dramatized the most because she put out one response then added to it on Fox saying, we all are worried that the law enforcement is being weaponized in some way. And at the same time, Donald Trump made some mistakes and if you nominate me, I'm
not going to have the same problems. They're all meandering towards saying this guy will be harder to elect and if he is elected, is going to have just a ton of problems governing. I think what they have to deal with again, Vivica just leaning into it, some candidates jumping around it, is well, if our base thinks that everything he's faced with is a conspiracy or fake or the deep state, then what's even the downside of him
him winning again? I maybe because this is something that a lot of Trump and DeSantis debaters, and that's most of the problem based now they have is do you want a candidate who like DeSantis will get in there. There'll be a scandal from time to time, but nothing existential. He kind of swats back his enemies, or do you want somebody who's less focused and is constantly getting into trouble.
The needle they're trying to thread is that the Republican voters to say, if Trump's getting in trouble, that means he's doing the right thing and everything he's accused of his fake right.
I thought they were just being cowardly cowards, which they are. But these candidates have seen the polling and they see that there's no lane for someone who does it, who isn't a trumpy sycophan, right.
Right, And all of them, I should add, when they're getting into this race and thinking about how do you get the nomination, they all do things seriously about it unless they're they're just doing this to raise money, is all right? What would need to happen for me to win? And if you boil it down, it is they need rhn dea Santis to fade, and they think he will. It's one thing I think every Republican running for present believe they just have more raw political talent than he does.
It's hard to lass, right, Yeah, they need Trump to be so knocked out of the race. That they're not competing against us. So you'll get them kind of talking on background or off the record about how they think that Trump could be forced not to run. The problems
could be overwhelming, he could drop out. I think that that gets less and less likely whatever they open their mouths, because one argument they're making is this is Joe Biden's chief political foe, and this is everything that's being thrown at him as a way to get himut of the race. If he then drops out of the race, what's the next question is it? Hey, are you are do you endorse how the deep state took out Joe Biden's most powerful political opponent and is making a settle for one
of you guys. It's not tenable as just a logical exercise unless you're Asa Hudgerson you're saying, yeah, this is pretty bad. She should not review should not be running.
That is a really good point.
I mean, it's just the calculus is so impossible, right, and then also you have to defend Trump, but you also have to I mean, DeSantis wanted to run to the right of him, and these other people are sort of trying to run to the right of him too, or at least sort of the same, if not more.
Right.
Yeah, they have not distinguished themselves much on policy compared to Trump, except to the right. And you bring up to Santis, He's the one who's done the most of this. He has said that he was true Mega, he was true America first, even when Trump was and the examples he gives me. He gave some of this in Iowa when he did this for his to date only real press conference in the campaign, and he was saying, well, basically the Trump was willing to do amnesty for dreamers.
Trump has talked down entitlement reform, has no plans of ever performing soci security Medicare. He said with Hugh Hewitt in more recent interview that Trump's Supreme Court appointees were obviously good and he's on record supporting them, but he wanted to put more conservative judges in the mold of Alito and Scalia so that he is attacked from the right right. But that's basically it. Nobody disagrees with the premise,
I mean. And part of this is that Trump has just kind of won a lot of the policy debates in the party. If you were covering the Republicans in twenty sixteen, there was a disagreement on whether you would solve immigration with a border wall and things that move so far that Republicans are arguing drug smuggling a thing that happens mostly through you know, legal ports of entry, we need to build a border wall to stop that. They've embraced so many of Trump's ideas that they've build
retrofically defend how he acted as president. They really haven't distinguished himselves much. And here is a different thing that I would do that he would not if he wins. They just say I would do it more efficiently, I would do it without scandal. Please don't take what I just said as an endorsement of people investigating it.
Yeah.
That's the thing again that I don't totally get is it seems like Trump was a cult of personality, right, and that now he's running against people who so, Okay, they don't have policy, but they also don't necessarily have personality.
They have I think, more recognizable politician personalities. They're not going to be as flamboyant as Trump is. They're not going to insult people the way that he does. When they do it is usually through staff. I mean, I think that the DeSantis staff attitude. You way to argue on Twitter is kind of will make fun of you for the question to ask. But nobody punches as many targets as Trump does. So yeah, they are running as wouldn't be nice if there was a normal Republican president
who took these issues on. But I mean, I didn't mention one thing. I've been covering a lot because I can't talk about it is even gender issues. They have tried to get to his right on and which been tough because Trump since he left the presidency has got as he moved around this on gender identity, on everything touching that issue is the frontier of LGBT rights. So nobody really disagrees with him. They just think, well, look what he did when the White House, he had a
transgender military band to get tied up. He didn't really do anything about the schools. If I get in, I know what my plan is. And so they've basically adopted a lot of his policies. They've gone further through right and they've run on efficiency. That is something every primary is different. You mentioned called a personality. It's still unsettled, and question to me how much of Republican disappointment with Trump is he didn't deliver on X or Y policy and how much is just I trust him, but he
got railroaded. If they think that he just got railroaded and then in the next term he would do everything everything left on his agenda, You're then all right, what are you offering that he's not offering kind of nothing. You're offering the ability to run for a second term because he can't. But that's about it.
It's a completely strange situation. I mean, I guess it's really just twenty fifteen all over again.
Right, So the main difference is beyond disrumpting former president. So you have a permission structure. All these every Republican voter in this primary, almost unless they were not alive yet or they didn't vote, they've all voted for Donald Trump at some point. So you have Republicans who have already voted for this guy. They're already used to his idea,
his ideas, his version of politics. You have him losing an election, which a lot of Republicans don't think he did, and you actually have a more conservative base for Trump than you did in the past. So this is I don't think it's forgotten per se. But I think it gets left out of some analysis is that Trump did best withstead of working class Republican voters who were not necessarily the most conservative, the most conservative would vote for Cruise in a lot of these primaries. That is now
his base. It's actually more modern Republicans who just don't want Trump back, who are saying they'll even vote for DeSantis, who's again, not to repeat it what I said, but running to Trump's right. But since he's not him and that he's the fresh face, he's the alternative, they're looking for something else there. You're not seeing a debate about how Trump would change the party because he already has.
So he's in a better position than he was in twenty Sixteen's campaigning less, I mean, he's doing less actual in person events. But these legal problems are the best example of just how much better he's he had a position he's in with the same sort of tragedy of the comments of the other candidates that you had in twenty sixteen. If this is what happened to Trump, let's imagine is twenty sixteen or twenty fifteen, and let's imagine Trump had somehow got classified documents, or let's imagine he's
in court over alleged sexual abuse. What would have happened then is what happened with the Trump University lawsuit, which is other candidates saying, hey, this is bad. He did something unethical. We can't have a president who did that. As the nominee, he's going to be in trouble.
But now no more.
He is winning the attention economy, and so you're seeing everybody else sort of shrivel up and die.
Yeah, that's fair. I think it's this six inquid abut it.
Yeah, yeah, I mean depressing.
It's actually made me really, I mean, there are other things that are making me depress, but I feel like that's also one of them. I feel like the listeners don't like it when I start talking a bit hoo to depress him. I can't imagine why they don't find that Trump. So MEGA has sort of figured out another group to appeal to explain this, because this is really interesting LGBTQ stuff.
If you're looking at what issues are relatively new for the party for this cycle. Obviously not gay rights, obviously not the traditional marriage those are not new, but a confidence that they can win voters who don't like Republicans and other issues on gender issues, that's pretty new for the version of that's new, and you saw Republicans do this in two thousand and four, much less to do those in eight They have as much a light to
stand on. With gay marriage and black voters, there's big a lot of outreached in Ohio to religious black voters, to religious minorities in general, religious spanics saying the traditional family is going to be destroyed by the left and not by us. We want a moment a constitution. You're seeing a new version of that around LGBT issues, transgender people.
One thing I was just kind of focusing on over the last couple of days is you're seeing a lot with Muslim voters who the Republicans just stopped competing for ten years ago. I mean, the politics the party have shifted so much that you remember the inciting event for Trump to introduce the Muslim travel ban.
No, I just remember he sort of had the band teed up, but I don't remember what caused it.
Well, he kind of did. The event was the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. He was sort of taking this what was the popular Republican position for fifteen sixteen years was this is a pluralistic, democratic country with tolerance, and we can't have Muslim sharia law, believe in terrorists coming in and ruining it. That has changed and he talks less about the Muslim ban. Now he does talk about
preventing medicaid from covering gender medicine, hormones, et cetera. In that spirit, they've been doing more outreach to voters who just may have totally bailed on their party over immigration policies, over the Muslim band, et cetera. But they also are not socially liberal. They're not progressive. If they hear about groomors, they're going to agree with that.
I mean.
One example is the new outreach chair of the Michigan Republican Party, And Michigan's a place where this really kind of picked up in Dearborn, where parents are protesting some sexual content in school, mostly Muslim parents. The hour's chair of the Michigan Party is the first Muslim to have that job, and if you look at her Twitter account or social media, it's all about gender, it's all about the left groomers. She's a big fan of libs, of TikTok.
They've gone in a more cultural direction because they think there is more territory to gain there. That's pretty new for this cycle, if not a lot of of the policies are.
It's so fucked up because we're not in cable news, so we can say this that the right has decided that, Like.
I mean, you can see this progression.
Right. They started with we just want to protect children, don't say gay to third grade, then to high school, you know, we just want to protect them.
From drag queens.
And then all of a sudden they're like, we just don't want pride shove down our throat. And then you see where this is going, right, I mean, this is like clearly they're going to go after gay people, and it's just it just is sort of mind blowing that. I mean, this is like one of the few issues that is really settled and is popular and they're going to go.
After it anyway.
Well, it's for them, not settled, and it touches on so many things. And one question people have when I write about it is did it Republicans learn from the midterms this is not like not a winning issue. Well they didn't. They think what they think? They want to keep pounding away on it. They think that as more people find out what they're talking about, they're going to
come to their side. And you saw Gallop this week had it updated of its twenty twenty one poll on a couple of gender issues, and over the last two years, the number of people who want what the poll calls somebody's birth gender to determine which sports they play. You know, if you're born female but transition to female, you're too bad, you're playing male sports. That attitude got much more popular by seven points. That went to sixty nine percent who
agree with that. Even when they asked is it moral to change genders? Which is fairly open ended question, that decreased too, and among Democrats it was stable. Most Democrats actually said, oh no, it's more of them. I should say believe that Morald to do so, it's perfectly fine. But more Democrats again they shifted by seven points, were aligned, i'd say with Nikki Ailey position on transgender athletes. And this is something that the White House put out a
new guidance for schools based on this. It got some pushback, but that's a good example the Biden station trying to find some ground they can defend on a policy that might not be that might be very easily demogogued. So that is new. That's how Republicans are reacting to it. That's what I hear. I mean when I cover these candidates, I hear that in every speech. I don't hear much talk about tax cuts. I don't hear much talk about
foreign policy outside Ukraine. Just the issue matrix has shifted a lot, and a lot of it can be dealt with by saying I want to replace Biden, but a lot more can be like we won a more conservative country and a rollback of a lot of liberal rights and privileges that people got used to over the last ten years.
So crazy.
I was reading that piece you wrote where you had the people and the audience are like, we're really concerned with inflation and we really want, you know, to hear about taxes, and then you know, that was I think that was in Iowa last week, right, And then every single candidate just talked about gender at.
Least if they touched a policy that was that. I mean a lot of the time they spent on stage was introducing themselves because many of them are not very
well known. That was a promise. All that made the all following all, following Trump, the rest has basically been like this idea, and this has been popular for years that the Democrats, when they have power, purposely are trying to destroy the country, not just taking it in a different direction than they would like to, but going out of their way to undermine it so that the country is unrecognizable. That's the theme. And so you know, going around the edges with Mark, tax policy is going to
be different. I mean Hutchinson, I got. I'm not picking on Hutchinson. I'm just saying, as a candidate who's not playing the defend drum game.
Right, he is a little more different than everybody else.
Yeah. Yeah.
One of his lines is that he would reduce the federal workforce by ten percent. And you listen to that and like, you could probably do that. There's probably ways to do that. That but that gets less applause than Vick Ramaswami saying No, I want to be like a CEO. I want to fire as many of these federal employees as possibly. I want to reinterpret the federal scheduling of government employees that we can replace them with our guys.
You can if you're desantists. I want to replace basically everyone the FBI with attorneys who are going to be politicize things. And you could read between the lines, you know that would that mean that these are attorneys who are not going to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. Probably not. Like the thing about that is, you know, if you were a Hillary Clinton, for example, he hearing that the FBI is slanty favorite Democrats is gonna be weird. But that's what they talked about.
That was great. Thank you so much, Dave Hi.
It's Molly 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.
Maddie con is the author of Young and Restless, The Girls who Sparked America's Revolutions.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Maddie con Thank you so much for having me.
First, I want you to explain to us why you decided to write this book and how, uh you know, teenage girls do not get a ton of, you know, airtime, except when they're being used to bully trans kids. So talk to me about teenage girls and how you decided to write those.
Yes, I agree with you, they are more often being weaponized against their will than they are speaking for themselves in public. I think one of the things that I feel about having written this book is a lot of people I think wonder, like, what is the adult audience for a book about teenage girls. I like to start by reminding people that if you've ever read a book about a war or seen a movie about a war, you are deeply invested in the history of teenage boys.
So this book is truly for everybody. And I think that the history of teenage girls has gotten really short shrift, and part of that means that I think we don't totally understand how the progress that has been made in this country, limited though it may be, has actually happened since teenage girls have been on the forefront of so
much of it. And I decided to write the book because I had the lucky experience of having been in correspondence with and communication with teenage girls for basically my
entire professional life. I worked at Elle and then I worked at Glamour, and that meant that I was constantly coming into contact with these amazing, ambitious, determined, fierce teenage girls who were trying to change the world in all kinds of ways and had become in the course of what felt to me at the time like a decade or so, these incredible communicators who were managing to move the needle at least in public discourse on issues like climate change and gun violence in ways that I felt
like adults had not yet become hip too. And when I first started this project, I thought I would really write about this generation of teenage girls and what was going on with them such that they were on the forefront of all of these social movements.
And then I started to.
Do more research and put my good old library skills to work and talk to historians and dig in deeper.
And I guess, you know, I would have always known that students were so involved in the civil rights movement, but it turned out that there had been this incredible history of teenage girls, advocating for labor rights, for suffrage, for Title nine, for second wave feminism that had been buried for really centuries, and so the project became much bigger and much more daunting, And the book really came out of that whole process. So it starts in the eighteen hundreds and it continues until today.
So talk to me about Rosa Parks. I don't think I realized how young she was.
Well, Rosa Parks would have been in her thirties and forties when we meet her, sort of when she comes into the historical view for most people. But she had started her activism as a fairly young woman. And one of the things that I think people really don't realize about her is that she was deeply, deeply invested in the work of young people. Before she took the action that led to the Montgomery bus boycott, she was the head of the NAACP Youth Council in Montgomery, and she
was constantly mentoring teenagers, boys and girls. When she went to the Highlander Folks School, she had been prepared, which, by the way, the Highlander Folks School sort of a training ground for organizers, particularly in the civil rights kind of sleep away camp for activists. She had been prepared to kind of give up on her activism. She just felt like these people were too stuck in their ways.
She wasn't making traction, And when she left, she said, I'm going to go back basically for the kids that I think this next generation has so much potential. I'm going to continue in this work because I want to
work with young people. And one of the young people that she was very invested in, especially before nineteen fifty five when she started the Montgomery bus boycott, was a teenager named Claudette Colvin who was in high school and actually had been arrested nine months before Rosa Parks for the same crime for refusing to give up her seat
on a segregated bus. Claudette maybe would have thought at one point that she would have been the person who became the face of the Montgomery bus boycott, but for a variety of reasons, she was kind of cast aside by the movement, and Rosa Parks took a real interest in her and didn't want her to give up on her organizing just because you know, she wasn't going to be the figurehead of this particular aspect of the movement. And they were really close. As I say in the book,
Rosa Parks knew how Claudette took her coffee. I mean, these two women spent a lot of time together. And a few months later, after the bus boycott had already started and Rosa Parks became the woman that we all know her to be, Claudette Covin did go back to her activism and she became the plaintiff in this extraordinary case that is part of the reason the boycott ended, Browder v. Gale, which ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional.
So talk to me about this Chinese immigrant, Mabel ping Wa.
Yes, I try not to play favorites in the book, but I do love her story. So Mabel was a Chinese immigrant at a time where there were very few discrimination. I guess we could say that much hasn't changed. Was rampant, and she was the daughter of also Chinese immigrants. Her father was a minister, which is how he kind of circumvented these really stringent and very discriminatory immigration laws that prevented Chinese people from coming to this country. And she was,
by all accounts, just brilliant. She thrived in high school, she went to Barro and she joined a very very small group of Chinese students at Barnard and was very very involved, particularly actually in the plight of Chinese women in China. She was following Chinese politics really closely, as were a lot of her peers, and partially because of that, she became really involved in the suffrage movement, which was
exploding at this time. This is like nineteen twelve, nineteen thirteen, nineteen fourteen, around that time in New York, and people were just totally obsessed with the way that she talked about this issue. There was a newspaper article that said when she spoke, people left mabilized by her talks, like she was that charismatic and articulate, And partially she made
her case for sort of global women's rights. And for many reasons, she got landed on the radar of the suffragists who were operating in New York at the time, trying to build consensus about this idea of this crazy idea of which in voting, and Mabel, who was so precocious and so articulate, became this great way to get
people interested in this cause. And what I liked about her story is that she was very aware of how she was being used and how she wanted to be heard, because I think there is this tension in that story between these white women who are running this movement and the very young Chinese teenager that they want to have
kind of trotted out at their gatherings. But Mabel really never held back and told these groups of mostly white women again exactly what she thought of their hypocrisies and their stances, and how they were planning to vote and how they were organizing. She became one of the first women to earn a PhD from Columbia in economics. And I think that one thing I just think everyone should know about Mabel is that she eventually sort of gave
up her activism as an adult. That she decided after her father died and the Great Depression to run her father's church, and she had friends in high places who begged her to come back to the world of more public facing organizing. And I just think one thing I wanted to do with this book was to say that not every story of girlhood extraordinaryness ends in someone becoming a public figure or someone wanting that kind of stage
for the rest of their life. And hard as it was, for me who wanted me able to be famous and huge and great. I think one of the things I tried to do with the book was remind people that really girls get to decide for themselves what kind of future they want to have.
So let's talk about this idea that girls get to decide for themselves, what kind of future they have? Talked to me about what you see teenage girls' role right now in America and the legacy there.
Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things I found from this book was and I think most people who have read a headline in the past five years know this to be true too, is that teenage and girls in particular who are loud and who are quick and who are savvy about how to use whatever the technological organizing tools of their days are get a lot of attention, and they often get attention in ways that adults, and sadly, particularly I think adult women don't
get attention when teenagers are criticizing adults in public. That gets attention for good and for ill in ways that when adults do it, it's just political sniping or sparring, and it doesn't garner that same level of interest. And
so I think that it's two things right. It's that girls are incredible communicators for these causes, and we see that happening with people like Greta Tunberg with the organizers that came out of Parkland and started March for Our Lives, both girls and boys in that case, and non binary activists too. But I think the problem is, and this is something that comes up a lot in the book and has come up across generations, is that teenagers don't
have real power. Most of the people that we're talking about only just were able to vote, or not even are yet able to vote. They can't elect people, they can't campaign for office themselves, they can't run yet. I mean, there are very very limited spheres of influence that teenagers can have in a public space, and the most powerful one that they can have is speaking is being heard.
And I think the tension is always going to be for young people who are so good at getting their voices out there and often are so much better at that than adults are. Where do they want their influence or I guess how do they want their influence to live? Because just speaking and getting attention for an issue is not the same as being able to achieve some kind
of legislative or political victory. And I think a lot of young people who do this work find it frustrating that they are drawing so much attention to these causes, but then when it comes time to address these issues in policy ways or legislative ways, nobody really wants to give them a seat at the table. And I think that's always going to be the tension of teenage organizing.
So let me ask you about Greta Thurnberg, because she is a f like right now, the sort of teenage girl organizer of the moment. Yeah, talk to me about her and where she sort of fits in with the legacy.
Well, I think one thing that's really interesting about Greta is when you listen to her speeches, she is constantly talking about how she shouldn't have to be here, she shouldn't have to be doing this. One of the things that she often says is angrily, you know you've stolen my childhood. I don't want to be spending my time telling you that you're burning this planet. I don't want
to be famous. I don't want to be a celebrity, but I'm called to action because nobody seems to be doing the things that need to be done to safeguard the future of the earth. I think that that is an undercurrent for a lot of teenage activists that Greta makes very explicit that there are other ways she would
like to be spending her time. I mean, I write in the book about the children who advocated for nuclear disarmament, who write explicitly in their letters to the president or in their organizing materials, we don't want to be here. We want to be doing our homework, riding our bikes,
playing outside, doing any number of other things. There is a kind of self sacrifice that I think is part of the narrative of teenage activism that I think Greta summarizes really well and speaks to I think some people definitely, and Greta being the flashpoint that she is, this is definitely true of her find that to be I don't know, holier than thou somehow or not solutions oriented in some way.
I think though, that when what children and young people have, when the most potent force that they have on their side is their youth, part of the effective way of communicating publicly is to say this should not be my responsibility, but because adults aren't doing their job. It is my responsibility. And that comes up again and again and again when Greta is giving speeches. You guys are supposed to be finding the solutions to these problems, but you're not doing it.
So I have to make a big fuss about it. And clearly it's worked. I mean, people are talking about her and about climate change, partially because so many bad things are happening in the world brought on by climate change, but in ways that they definitely didn't a few years.
I want to get back to this really horrendous thing that Nikki Haley said this weekend. Yes, she said that teenage girls are killing themselves because of trans athletes in sports. Obviously, we are in the middle of a mental health crisis post pandemic, likely inspired by the post pandemic, right, mental health crisis that is in many ways about the pandemic and about a lot of other things. But I'm just curious,
what do you think about this idea. You know that people use teenage girls like this in this way to beat up trans kids, and we're seeing this as like, you know, I mean, like they never cared about girls sports either, and now there's like this concern for girls sports.
Yes, and they definitely don't want equal AD dollars going to the WNBA, and they don't care to see those games on TV, and they have no interest in supporting the infrastructure of women and girls' sports except to use it as a cudgel against trans people. I mean, truly,
I find it. First of all, I find it maddening, But on a really deep level, I find it really heartbreaking because for this book, I talk to so many young women across the country who feel so much genuine anxiety and fear about the direction that this world is going in. Many of them have trans friends. I talk to a lot of trans girls for this book, who, of course are included in the category of girl as I and I think most normal people define it. And it's such a distraction to try to pit these groups
of people against each other. But I also think it's really in line with the way that America fetishizes girlhood as sort of an idea without any content or humanity behind it. So we have this vision of you know, the American girl, blonde, white, probably pigtails, innocence, naivete, and that ideal needs to be preserved at all costs, But girls themselves are being cast aside and treated terribly in this culture all the time by these same people that
say that they act to protect them. I mean, it doesn't surprise me, and I'm sure it doesn't surprise you that this same rhetoric of protecting girlhood comes at a time where we're also hearing about ten year olds who are having to travel out of state to get abortions. It is all part of the same discussion and the same ideology that lifts up this one image of girlhood that has truly no content and no humanity at the
expense of literally every single girl in this country. I mean, I don't think that there is a girl dealing with anxiety alive who would say that trans girls are their biggest problem. It's a ridiculous and manufactured thing, but it fits squarely in this tradition of using girls as a shield or as a way to distract without actually asking
them what's going on in their lives. And I just really find it hard to believe that Nikki Haley is invested in the mental health crisis of teenagers in general and certainly girls in particular, if that's her idea for how to solve. And also, this isn't my point, but we know that the much bigger threat to teenage girls is sis teenage boys, not trans girls. So I think that too. Just expose this for what it is, which
is really cynical and really damaging. And that's the worst part, because it's not just a gross political thing to do. It really really affects people, and it affects families, and it's just so not worth it. And yet I know this is not going to be the last time in this election cycle that we hear something like this.
Maddie, this was great. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me on now.
Jesse Cannon, Mai junk Fast.
You know, it's a funny thing. There is quite the scene outside that courtroom for Trump getting indicted today.
What'd you see there?
Well, I was in New York City, thank god, and not in Miami in the middle of the June heat. But I would like to say that I was on Sky News earlier today and they played a package where they interviewed all of these people at the courthouse, and the people at the courthouse seemed completely crazy, and I realized while I was watching this video that the rest of the world is laughing at us, and the rest of the world laughing at us is today's moment of fuckery.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.