Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and Galaine Maxwell has been moved to a minimum security prison camp in Texas.
We have such a great jow for you today.
Politico's Zach Stanton stops by to talk about Donald Trump's job number crisis. Then we'll talk to Tulane's Brian Edwards about the American Century.
But first we have the news, Mollie, mister Epstein, his files have many reductions and whose name do you think they reducted in them?
Donald Trump?
So here's Jason Leopold, who's a really good reporter and who is sort of the master of FOYA.
FOYA is the Freedom of Information Act.
If you feel out forms the right way, you can get these FOYA files sent to you because you have this freedom of information until Trump takes it away, which seems inevitable at this point. Jason is a journalist at Bloomberg. Now he foiled some of the files around the Ebstein files because I don't think he was able to get that.
But while we have labored to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein in the statement read, it is a determination of the Department and justin that no further disclosure would be warranted. So the FBI has redacted Donald Trump's name, along with the names of other prominent public figures,
from references in the Epstein files. Three people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg's Jason Leopold, so internal directives instructed a thousand FBI agents to flag any mention of Trump during a March review of the roughly one hundred thousand pages of records. People familiar with the process told Bloomberg, So, think about this.
So you'll have.
People in the FBI telling a journalist that people sat down with a hundred thousand pages of records, and I'm sure there was more than that, because we know there were videos, there were photographs, and went through and looked for the name of Donald Trump to redact it. Redacting is when you take when you blacken a name so that people can't see it.
It's meant to protect the privacy.
You know, a lot of the victims might have their names were redacted, or to protect national security. I wonder what national security redacting Donald Trump's name from the Epstein files protects.
This is just a crazy story.
FBI agents were directed to search all documents associated with the Epstein case and determine which could be released. This is just such a crazy story. FBI personnel were said to have identified numerous references to Trump and other high profile people, with the names then redacted by feuer officers because they were private citizens at the time.
Okay, so redacting names. It's just so suspicious, right, So.
It feels like a pedophile cabal cover up. I feel like I'm cue not all of a sudden, yes, it's crazy.
Well, it's just like if you were trying to cover something up, this would be the way to do it.
Yeah.
This is also one of those things though that we all assumed would happen, but you can't say it out loud till it actually happens.
We're all like, this is the next step.
So this is the next step. Here we are, and there we go.
Let's talk about some other nice, nice fuckery.
I mean, I feel like this whole intro is just a big, long moment of fuckery, because these judges got together to talk about the horrors they've experienced since ruling against Trump, and you know, it was so disheartening to read this because we have to discuss it. But also when we discuss this, it also makes me feel like, well, now judges are going to hear how bad their lives are going to be if they rule against them.
Yeah, you know, but we have to talk about it because it's really important. So these judges are facing just their lives are becoming nightmares. And you know, there's a reason why these Republicans are such cowards, right that they're just letting Trump do whatever they want because they're scared, and so are judges, and so are all of us.
Were all scared. It's really scary. That's what it is.
Man. That's where we are in America right now. Federal judges worry. The judiciary is at stake. I'm aware. US District Judge John McConnell, who blocked Trump's federal aid freeze earlier this year, said his court has received four or five hundred file threatening voicemails. We're going to come for him, said one voicemail. You know what, motherfucker, your ass is going to be in prison. I mean, look, Trump encouraged this. This is not surprising. They receive these pizza deliveries their
home address, indicating they've been docked. Sometimes they put in the last the pizza gets sent to them by the name of poor district Judge Esther Sallas's son who was killed in twenty twenty. This guy, Robert Lasnik said he was sent pizza's est has been amazing going on television. I was on Nicole's show with her. I mean, these people are putting their lives on the line to protect our democracy, to protect.
The rule of law.
And you know, then we have all these billionaires who who are too scared to even say anything.
So here we are.
So another really stupid news, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is going to shut down, which is going to mean very big things for PBS and NPR and also Donald Trump's jobs numbers.
Wait, this is a lot of people who are going to be out a point.
Yeah.
Despite the efforts of Americans who called, voted, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding, we are now facing the difficult reality of closing our operations, so public broadcasting. I think there'll be some public broadcasting that'll still exist. By the way, it is one point one billion dollars in federal funding. This is like how much it's going to cost. I mean slightly more than how much It's going to cost to fix up Donald Trump's new plane. Yeah, just
a fucking rounding error. But the point is not that it's about money. The point is that it's about control.
So m it's silencing reporting.
Yeah, and silencing reporting.
So hard to think of something worse than this, But here we are, ladies and gentlemen.
Just a complete fucking shit show.
Somali.
We now have a report from Yale Budget Lab about Trump's tariffs, which I'm We've starting to become convinced shouldn't call teriffs, we should call his robbing of the American people to give to the rich. It's going to cost us all at least twenty four hundred dollars a year for the average home.
Yeah, congratulations to all of us. Trump's tariffs are terrible, They're inflationary, their attacks on the consumer. It will cost twenty four hundred dollars per household the tariff rates combined with surprisingly weak jobs report for Friday morning, it's the latest that American household space and much more deep difficult. We went from the envy of the world to very much not just complete disaster.
Personally, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, though, I livid at the Democratic establishment for not messaging this more.
Here's the thing, if you want to like get in the weeds here, we have no mainstream media anymore. So you have a group of people who are Democratic electeds who are now tasked with transmitting what's happening. I mean, I'm happy to blame them for a lot of stuff, because there's been mistakes have been made again and again and again on multiple levels, in multiple different ways. But I'm just not I don't you know, it's like an
impossible situation. I don't know how you make up for the shortfall of people now getting their news from Charlie Kirk. I don't know how you do that.
I think that's going on podcasts and making tiktoks about it. I mean, I think Zoron is the ouprint is that he has an issue that he thinks is important, he makes an engaging video on it, and that's how information is delivered.
Now It's not quite so simple, but yes.
Zach Stanton is the deputy editor of Playbook and a contributor to Political Magazine.
Zack Stanton, welcome my pleasure to be here.
Luckily we have waited until after the Friday news dump to go through all of the sewage I think we start with Trump didn't like the jobs reports, so he fired the statistician.
Yes, he has fired the person in charge of jobs numbers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, entirely because the jobs numbers were downgraded for previous months and they came in much weaker than expected for July. They always come out the first Friday of every month, we get the previous month's numbers.
He didn't like the numbers.
He had advanced notice of them, and so despite his claim that he just now found out about this, he had some advance warning. It's of a piece of certainly an ongoing politicization of the civil service, and of more broadly a sort of a purge that is taking place across pretty much everything that the federal government has its tendrils on, ranging from the Smithsonian, where we saw this week the sort of censoring of the impeachment exhibit. He
didn't like it exactly. He didn't like it. Where this ends, it's hard to know. But it's also bizarre to me, just on a pure messaging or narrative level, in that you know, with the job numbers, and with recent economic moves, he had had sort of a good negative news cycle for Jerome Powell for the first time, and he immediately steps on it by doing something like this.
Yes, I mean, the only thing Trump can do at this moment is bring the conversation back to Jeffrey Epstein. I think that is his only smart play I wanted to talk about. Her name is Erica mcer as, a Commissioner on Labor and Statistics MCAR. She was voted bipartisan, voting eighty six yes, is including Vice President Jade Events.
Including Vice President Jadie Vance. But you know, it's it's in keeping with pretty much what we've seen from Vance, but also more broadly senate Republicans ever since Trump has re emerged as the center of the national conversation that really any ideological preferences that people have, or any sort of independent views of their own all gets subsumed by Trump. That he is sort of the yes or no, up or down question that defines our politics, or at least
defines what it means to be a Republican. We've seen that this week, not only with things like this, but you know, we're now seeing like Republican Senate candidates do pro tiff ads, which is kind of a stunning development that I wouldn't have expected, you know, a year ago, at this time.
Necessarily, it's just simply.
A matter of whether or not Donald Trump is in favor of something, and that becomes sort of a litmus test, and all else flows from it.
So he can fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I'm going to get really nerdy with you here for a minute, because I was reading about the
Bureau of Labor and Statistics. And as much as Trump is wrong to fire people who displease him, the reason why a lot of times these numbers are revised is because they don't get necessarily accurate measure And what needs to happen is people need to respond to surveys in order to get surveyed information, and so in fact, the surveys are getting a little bit less accurate because people do not trust the.
Government as much.
So as much as Trump is absolutely, are all numbers woke? Maybe yes, it does speak to a larger problem with trust and institutions and trust in the federal government.
Absolutely.
And the irony of it, of course, is that people will trust numbers even less now if they don't have any reason to believe that they're independently, verifiable or based in reality. It all just gets stuck in this general mud of seeming like it's all politics. And I think that's one of the challenges here, is that there are certain voters who are just cynical about it all and think that all politicians lie and don't necessarily differentiate between
little eyes and consequential ones. And so it's difficult to know whether or not this is going to resonate with voters in the way that it should. But it's hard to imagine too many voters getting that worked up about the Bureau of Labor statistics. But it's like a canary in the coal mine in some sense.
Well, and also, if you want to lower inflation, which it's not entirely clear that Donald Trump wants to lower inflation, but if you do want to make things cheaper, which if you were to say Donald Trump had been given a mandate in any way, shape or form, it would
be to make things cheaper. Yes, you would want your government to be trusted, you would want your debt to be good, you would want your currency to be the standard and not to experience dollar flight, which seems like he's just at every point setting himself up for a world in which the dollar stops being the reserve currency and our debt becomes so expensive to service. He just feels right now like we are on the sort of edge of catastrophe.
Yeah, you know in a way that that's how it's held for a while now. But it does feel, you know, certainly, with the economy in particular, that we're on some sort of precipice of no longer being you know, the big dog on the block.
I guess you know that we're.
No longer the ones that are sort of running the show, and that with the dollar getting weaker, which Trump sees is in many ways a good thing because it can boost exports. But between that and the size of the federal debt, there are any number of fronts on which it just feels like we're being squeezed and it's hard to know how to get out of that.
Yeah, I don't know, and it's a real question. So let's talk about the political calculus. The house has been sent home by Mike Johnson a few days early.
That was last week's drama. The Gang of Five has this plan. The rule is it called the rule of five, the Game of four five whatever.
We're not into accuracy here, the Rule of five, the Gang of four, that crew they are going to release the Epstein files discuss.
Well, you know, it's again it's hard to know how this exactly plays out.
There is a reality that I.
Think every Republican is facing right now, which is that back home in their districts for all of August, the
House doesn't come back till September. Second, I think it is and between economic news, which is its own thing where they're not going to differentiate themselves from Trump and Epstein, which is now set to really dominate the conversation for the next couple of weeks because it has this strange lasting power in a way that very few stories have been able to break through and sort of remain center stage in the Trump era. You have this pressure that
they're facing. It's not necessarily something we for Playbook talk to a Republican strategist who said that it's not necessarily that it's the thing that most voters will care about, but it is the thing that the loudest voters will care about. And so when you go to a town hall Forum or something like that. It is the type of thing they're going to be pressed on, you know, they're going to look for opportunities here to show some if not independence, then some responsiveness to what voters want.
And the thing with this issue, compared to so many other criticisms of Donald Trump, is that Epstein Files is like really easy to understand. It's like it's very digestible in a way that like, if I'm talking about the Bureau of Labor Statistics firing, I have to explain it, like there's so much backstory there, whereas Epstein is like easy, you know, it's just a snap of the fingers. You can understand what's at stake and what the moving parts are.
And so I think it resonates with folks. So we'll see how that actually comes through to fruition.
The Ploomberg story about the foyer, where Jason Leopold sees that they have had all of these people in the FBI redact Trump's name from the files.
That feels like another two days on the story.
Yeah, these things just sort of snowball with this story in particular, it's just sort of this smoke that stays in the air and it's like you have a smoky room with a fan, but the fan doesn't suck the air out, it just circulates. And that's kind of what
they're stuck in. And you know the thing with Trump is that he's thrown so many things against the wall here to try and see what will stick, to try and change the conversation in some way, and maybe the conversation will change and people will talk about the Bureau of Labor statistics are something else, terriffs, but none of it seems to really be erasing this from people's consciousness.
My favorite part was said, the White House says this story is.
Over, and I was like, I know you want the story to be over, but you don't get to say it.
And it's like it is an interesting moment because Trump has been so good at bifurcating reality and creating a base that trusts him more than they trust anything else, right their own families. But there's something about this story that gets to the core. I have this theory that Trump is a coastal elitist, the way that I am right, but I'm much poorer than he is. The point here
is he's a coastal elitist. Right always grew up with wealth power, friends with all of the Jeffrey Epstein people, right, the fanciest people, the people who is now his administration is trying to you know, academics, literati, you know, the members of the mainstream media, the people who he is now targeting.
Those are the people that he grew up with.
So my question is is it that the base remembers that he is actually not one of them?
That is there there's some little bit.
Of this story that is like, oh, actually he's he's actually in the intelligence for lack of a better word, then you know, he is a member of the glitarati. He can't drain the swamp because he's in the swamp.
Yeah, you know, I think that for some people, being of the swamp, for lack of a better way of putting it, is kind of an asset. Like, you know, there's this idea that he understands this world, which is why he's uniquely able to be immune to its charms or something like that, and so he's going to fight for us against them. And this is something that's been
part of his brand for quite some time. You know, I remember years ago I read I came across a New York magazine story from I want to say two thousand and four, two thousand and five that was basically this giant feature piece in New York Magazine advocating for
New York City to become its own nation. And you know, it's a little bit of a modest idea type approach, but the very tail end of the story of the article is suggesting, you know, that we will need someone who is able to speak New York Keys but also
resonates with read America, how about Donald Trump? And it was like Trump was able to be seen as relatable to a lot of people and in a similar way, though it's very different and I'm not at all comparing them in a broad sense, but it's reminiscent of like Richard Nixon always having the sort of chip on his shoulder at like not being at the cool kids table.
You know.
In Nixon's case, he tried to join this nice fraternity in college and was denied, and so he started his own competing fraternity that was called, I think was the Orthogonians or something like that, the idea being that they were all like right angles, they were all squares, and so he found that he was able to gain power and influence on campus by really playing to people's insecurities about being left out and not being in the inside crowd.
And for Donald Trump, there's been sort of a similar dynamic in many ways where he is part of this crowd and really seeks its approval. But there's always part of him that's going to be, you know, the kid from Queens who is struggling to break through in Manhattan and trying to get the approval of those folks. And that's part of the reason why he's so solicitous, even as he hates The New York Times is very obsessed with you know, how they cover him all of us
like validation. It's a very human thing for Donald Trump. It's something that is a through line that carries through decades of his public life.
Talk to me about the redistricting. Besides Trump firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the redistricting is a big deal. Talk me through what you think of it as a sort of play and does it work? And also, like you know, there's so many parts of this story like it's an anti democratic, it's this is that, But I also wonder and.
I want you to talk us through it.
Like people who turn out for Trump don't necessarily turn out for random R And so the idea that you're going to so if you if you redistrict all these seats in Texas to our plus one or our plus four.
You know Trump won it by nine. So talk us through that exactly.
Yeah.
So in Texas, just for those who haven't heard about it, Texas is undergoing a redistricting at Trump's behest to create essentially five new Republican US House seats. This is in order to pad the overall nationwide US House majority that Republicans have, and it's doing so really against the wishes of a lot of Republican incumbents in Texas who are mindful of not wanting to imperil the advantage of their incumbency.
And what I mean by that is that in order to create five new Republican districts, you need to dilute the number of Republicans in the existing districts. And so, in a wave election, if it works out well for Democrats, and it generally tends to be that midterms do work out well for the party that not in power, in a wave election, you potentially could have a good year
for Democrats in a place like Texas. But you know, the Republican calculus, as you note, is really based on this idea that Trump voters are Republican voters, and I don't necessarily see evidence that that's entirely the case. You know, Democrats in recent cycles have performed exceptionally well in low turnout elections. This is true of special elections, it's true
of midterms. You know, it's very different than it was decades ago, when Republicans were the ones that dominated in low turnout elections.
Democrats do now.
And so if you're looking at the midterms in twenty twenty six, and you're looking at, you know, an election where Trump is not going to be on the ballot, and so a lot of the low propensity voters are either not going to vote, or you know, there is this idea that a lot of voters have that Trump is like you know, has had all these different positions over the years, and so he's not doctrinaire, and so
he's different, He's not like the other Republicans. You know, this is a way that some people think about it. Given all of that, you know, it's hard to know whether this calculus that they've made is it all going to work out for them? But what Texas is doing is sort of setting off this arms race for redistricting nationwide, where you have other red states also at Trump's behest Trump in the White House, pressuring them to try and
do similar mid cycle redistricting, which is very unusual. You only have redistricting once every ten years in normal circumstance. But they're looking at doing it in Ohio where JD. Vances is sort of inveighing on Republicans there to try and do something and potentially take out someone like a Marci Capito type in the Toledo area. They're talking about doing it in Florida, where Governor DeSantis is even talking about trying to pay for a census before twenty thirty.
God love them and.
The idea that you know there too they can maybe squeeze out a couple more Republican House seats. And meanwhile in California you have sort of this response that's happening from Governor Gavin Newsom who notes that there are still I think nine Republicans in the congressional delegation not for a law. Yeah, and so like there is an easy
scenario in which you can draw these maps. But the problem that you have in California is a problem that you have in a lot of Blue states, which is that many Blue states have sort of unilaterally disarmed themselves in this fight by passing nonpartisan redistricting commissions, this idea being that district shouldn't be drawn by politicians, they should be drawn in a nonpartisan, in a fair way. And
in California, voters enacted this years ago. And what Newson would have to do, and what he's talking about doing is going before voters this year and basically saying, yeah, doing this kind of he says, as a one time thing. But you know, once you open Pandora's box, you can't really close it again, and so it's hard to know. It just seems like this is a spiral that is hard to stop once it starts. Once one state redistricts another one who's going to follow a suit, and it just goes on and on.
We're at a time but on the scale of how fucked we are.
One being like a constitution, normal constitutional democracy, ten being uh huh, where do you think we are here?
That's a good question.
I mean, it would depend on the day and probably depend on how much sleep I've got.
But you know, but maybe a six and a half.
We'll go six six, six and a half is good.
That's good.
A solid six.
Closing PBS got us to six and a half, I think exactly, Yes, Zack Stanton, will you please come back anytime?
Happy to be here.
Brian Edwards is the dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Too Late. Welcome to Fast Politics, Brian Edwards.
It is so great to be here as someone who's been enjoying listening to your show for a long time.
As we say, we do this with Pete Siegel from Wait Waite, you're a longtime listener, first time caller. I really wanted to talk to you about this idea of after the American century, like that there was a moment in nineteen forty one, after sort of right at the tail end of World War Two, when a mayor was we were the sort of the center of the.
World, and perhaps we are not anymore.
So this is an idea brought on by a book you've written a while ago that really did breakthrough from the academic world to the cultural world. So I mean, obviously those two things are the same, but talk to us about what that means.
Well, the idea of the American century is really, as you said, influential in the second half or a little bit the last sixty years of the century. And the question of when it ends as interesting. Henry Luce Winter of nineteen forty one, months before Pearl Harbor, publishes this massively influential editorial in which he argues that although the United States wasn't yet in the war, we already were kind.
Of in the war to a certain extent.
It's a very interesting argument, and that really that the world was about to become a century ruled by America, American culture, and he lays out this idea of what we would come to call soft power, that the United States was going to be really the leader of a certain way of imagining the world that would follow World War Two. I mean, this is still when it comes out, not only is the war happening, but it's still a world dominated in many ways by British and French imperialism, colonialism.
I mean, this idea that never said on the British Empire. That was still the world that we were living in, and the United States did not have whether or not geopolitically, it.
Was in that moment of his sentence, it hadn't.
We hadn't come to terms with ourselves as leaders in that way. So what I love about the argument, and what's so fascinating about it is he says in this long essay that things like American slang and music and culture would have a political purpose or have a political efficacy and make the world one that would be American.
And of course he's right to a certain extent. I mean, and one of the really interesting things about US power post World War two is that as the colonial empires of Europe, of Britain and France in particular, start to fall apart in the wake of World War Two, the US doesn't take on the mantle in the same way, but we do nonetheless become the global superpower, and American culture is incredibly efficient in setting the stage for that.
How long does that last? As a question does it end? And when would it end?
That's really been on my mind for a really long time, and in part because I spent a lot of time outside the United States looking at HOW and talking to folks at HOW and studying how American popular culture, movies, digital culture, music culture, then social media culture, shopping malls, architecture cut starts to be copied around the.
World in sometimes really surprising ways.
So tell me when this period sort of starts and when it ends.
I would say it starts during World War two. I mean I do.
I'll follow Loose himself and say that his naming of the American Century is at a key moment because there's this internal debate politically about getting involved in the war. And if you look backwards. Even though, of course when when when Y two K was we thought and nicknaming the end of the twentieth century.
I remember it.
At the time, we probably had on our coffee tables, you know, these big books the American Century. President Clinton was referring to kind of, you know, the end of this century. We started to name it backwards one hundred years, but really it was the conditions for the American Century were post war, and you know, and what's interesting too, is how the Europeans, especially the French and Western Europeans, felt a bit of anxiety about the rise of American soft power.
The French used to call it.
In the fifties and sixties coca colin, coca colonization, Coca colonization.
I guess this idea. I mean it's great.
You know.
Then in Europe, you know, in the eighties and nineties when popular music was taking over the radios sum European countries. I think Spain it limited the number of American songs that even could be played per hour because the culture was so you know, charismatic. Of course, the second half of the twenty century really is a very dominant time. As Hollywood starts to you know, continue to grow, and movie theaters around the world are just filled with American cinema.
The culture kind of pendulum shifts. Does it end, you know, with nine to eleven? And this is a question we can say, when does it end? I don't think it ends right.
The soft power I want to talk about solf power.
The soft power that has been has been given up by Marco Rubio and Trump and Trump two point zero. So what does it mean to give up soft power in a global sense?
Well, what is soft power?
Soft power is something that kind of operates on another wavelength, that's doing work for a nation without trying to do work. It's doing work for a nation without even being on this same side of the political hard so called hard power. You might have Hollywood films and Hollywood filmmakers at different moments a critical of military actions by the US and still be effective at making it possible for the United States to act in certain ways.
I'll give you an example.
You know, I was spending a lot of time in the first decade of this century writing a book, writing this book called After the American Century, and shuttling back and forth between Morocco, Egypt, Iran, and Lebanon. And at the time the movie Babbel was incredibly popular in the United States, and euraut To the director, was very critical of the so called War on Terror. But this film was just incredibly resisted, very strongly by folks in Muslim
majority countries as being very hostile to them. So it didn't it doesn't even necessarily matter what the explicit politics of American culture makers might be to to kind of help pave the you know, pave the way for for hard power to operate, and so that could happen in a lot of places.
I mean, and it's very abstract.
I wonder if you could talk about this idea after history, because it strikes me and I really like Francis, but talk about calling balls and strikes a little early I wonder if you could sort of talk about it and sort of get us to where we are right now.
Yeah, well, of course, you know the idea of the end of history that Francis Fukuyama proposes. You know, the nineteen nineties is a really interesting decade because it looks like for a moment, or for an extended moment of the nineties, that with the apparent fall of the Soviet Union, that we had won, that there was an economic and cultural system that won. And so there's a number of people who are claiming kind of victory and that what would come next. I mean, this is why the nineties
are really interesting. Of course, you know, conflicts continue through the nineties. There was not the end of history, and what's really brewing, particularly in the part of the world that I was living in and spending a lot of time in North Africa, in the Middle East, there is a whole lot of reconfigurations happening between the end of the Iran Iraq War and nine to eleven. Really in nineties are a very fraught period obviously in the Balkans
as well. So this calling you said, calling the calling the count a little bit too early for sure, as if the Cold War, the terms of engagement were between two economic systems, and we had won.
Clearly was not the case. Something else was happening.
But the other thing that's happening that I think is really important to thinking about soft power and really important to thinking about the.
Present moment is the digital revolution.
Because Henry Lewis, after all, was the was the head of Time magazine, head of Time Life, Right, he was really a publisher in what I would call the analog age. You know, we're reading his publications in Life magazine, Hollywood pictures are being carried around in canisters. The radio and television operated in a tremendously different way than they do today, needless to say. And it was an analog logic for how people would engage with American soft power, right. I
call it like broadcasting logic of broadcasting. Remember the RCA Victor kind of logo, where there's this dog listening to a kind of the trub the ear of a record player. Like that was this idea that America would give culture and the rest of the world would listen and take it all in and not have anything to say about it. The digital revolution makes clear that that that's not the way culture operates. People can listen, they can talk back,
they can engage back. Now, this is quite obvious to anybody now, because we're used to commenting, we're used to sharing, we're used to being all of us actors in making culture happen. And that's a tremendous difference that the twenty first century starts to bring in, and it therefore changes how soft power operates. People engage with American cultural products. The products themselves become things like Twitter and Facebook and eventually Instagram.
And I remember being, you know, in.
Egypt before the Talkerer uprisings, the Middle East uprisings two thousand and nine, twenty ten, twenty eleven, and talking to young Egyptians and they're like, how can we have a voice. This was right before everybody with a smartphone could have a voice. And in fact, the Middle East uprisings of that period were incredibly propelled by millions and millions of people now being able to communicate with each other in ways that they hadn't been able to before.
So it's really important what.
We think about soft power, and we think about Henry Loos and this idea of an American century to think about how culture moves through the world, how all of us engage with it. I mean, here we are in a podcast right forms that just didn't exist in this
earlier moment, and it changes absolutely everything about politics. To me, that is incredibly important to talk about at this moment, especially because of the relationship of this presidency and this president with things like reality television, with social media being quite a genius at it actually being very able to use the prevailing technologies. You know, they use to say that, you know, when you look at every presidential campaign, you know,
you decide who the winner is. I always have thought that whoever was able to best use the then prevailing entertainment technology, whether it was Kennedy against Nixon and the television debates, or those who could use the Internet at
different moments, you know, would be the winner. And I think that to really understand how soft powered American hard power now are in tension with each other, you have to think about the president and the presidency in relationship to those media technologies, including reality television, which is in a lot of ways what we feel like we're watching even while we're watching global politics.
That's not incidental in my opinion.
Now we're just going to go into therapy.
For me, one of the things that makes me really anxious is this sort of post truth society, This sort of idea that we are in America where there are two sets of facts.
That our president is on Earth to a.
Lot of his people on Earth too, some of us are on Earth one make me feel better about that we're in this bifurcated reality.
There's an Earth one on Earth two.
A certain percentage of Americans are occupying Earth too. We're in a country where truth is not universally agreed upon.
Discuss well, I mean this idea of the filter bubble, I guess is what some people used to call it, That the media that we most of us get is curated for us by algorithms that we ourselves have something to do with creating, is of course, really worries for all of us who believe in having public discourse and having real and open conversation debate around the things that matter which our country are politics and so on, and so the idea that we can't find ways to bridge
those gaps, whether it's made literal by like the idea of the political aisle, or in metaphor, I guess, by your idea of Earth one or Earth two, or this idea of the filter bubble, that we can't break through it that just like you know that that's really worrisome.
I mean, I get really patriotic at this moment as I say, my kids think I'm the most patriotic member of our family, and I think, you know, I start going back to the founders of the United States that we need a civic discourse to have a successful democracy, and then bring it to the present with how is it that we engage with ideas and news and information. So your idea of Earth's too Yeah, that's really worrisome, this idea that we can't hear. I mean, I hope I'm not the only I know. Lots of us try
to consume media from a lot of different perspectives. It's a great thought experiment. If someone listening doesn't do it themselves. Something that you care a lot about, go see how it's being reported in a completely different venue than than your own political persuasion, and it is.
It's as if it's a different reality.
Sometimes it does strike me that it seems like social media is growing, mainstream media is shrinking, reporting is suffering, AI is poised to go to zero, right, they will no longer link to reporting. They will just you know, your AI butler will go and get your facts. And maybe they're right and maybe they're wrong. I mean, doesn't this seem like we're heading towards a catastrophe?
Well, where's my optimism in all that? I mean my optimism. I am optimistic in this sense. And by the way, sitting standing here in New Orleans in August, where it's an immensely hotter and more humid than wherever you are right now, is I can still be optimistic here. My optimism is that there are so many more avenues and venues for journalists and people with opinions and ideas to enter into the discourse that that in itself is a good thing.
It's super risky.
Because the algorithms are fed, you know, or tend to be, as much as we understand, fed by emotional responses and self perpetuating filter bubbles, as I said, and so we got to figure out ways to get outside of them.
And AI the way you described it.
You know, as as it curates and as it brings things together, seems to limit even further. So that's a pessimics experience. But my optimism is that there's more and more ways for folks to enter into the discourse. That's I do believe in the discourse. I know it's one of your favorite words.
Do you think that's enough.
We have to be active in our engagement with it.
At least twenty five percent of the country, including much of the federal government, has a sort of fact free vision of what the future can be, right, and you have a percentage of the country that's completely disengaged right from any sense of what's happening. It just strikes me that it's an unsustainable pottern.
You know, as an educator, I see college students coming to us who want to break free of that, who are anxious about certainly anxious, and often have ideas about how we can break free of that and looking for other venues. And one thing that's true about the ways in which digital media intersects with culture is endlessly creative and finding new places for us in ways for us
to engage. The rise of substack, the rise of podcasts, the rise of different ways that work outside of the kind of corporate media culture that could otherwise be very stifling. I mean, that's the interesting. Yeah, we're talking about now we're talking about the media. But that's the interesting tension as people who again young people.
As an educator, I always.
Say you have to be an optimist if you're an educator, because the folks who are in front of you always coming into college are coming next, are going to be the ones who are pretty soon going to be running the show.
And they are right now.
My sense for the last few years is really frustrated at what they've inherited. They've frustrated by cancel culture. They're certainly frustrated by political culture. And their creativity is something that we're trying to mold.
Or help or facilitate.
So that's the incredible novelty and creativity that we keep seeing in the realm of culture and in the realm of how journalism and discourse kind of intersect with it.
But I mean, the other thing that we were talking about before around the American Century relates to that, right, because one of the things that the intersection of the American century logic, let's go back, like now get a little bit more contemporary, go back to post nine to eleven world when we get into this long war on terror, right, which also consumes our culture becomes our form of this twenty year war. That's also our form of entertainment and
television dramas. And we're obsessed with this war against an emotion, right, a war named against an emotion, not named against an actual antagonist. It's everywhere, It's everywhere, and you can't find it.
Right.
That's very existential for all of us for the last two decades, and really, in some ways COVID kind of distracts us from that and wipes out that sensation that was really prevailing. But during all that time, and of course American culture of soft power continues, it is still incredibly popular. I mean again, I've just been on four
continents this summer. I've just been trapped doing a lot of travel, talking to a lot of folks in South America, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, Latin America and Singapore and so on. And you still see everywhere American culture is still very popular. It's not the only popular thing, but there's this disassociation
of our politics with the popularity of our culture. American language that you know, English language, but really from American culture is of course more and more dominant around the world.
But it doesn't work the way it did.
Under Henry Lus's American Century model, you could love the culture and get very and hate the politics, will be resistant to the politics. And that wasn't how it was supposed to go. Under the American Century line. You're supposed to see in American music and Hollywood and jazz and abstract expressionism in the twentieth century, that this was a culture of freedom and everybody wanted freedom after it all.
But now the thing that really is worrisome in a sense is that that is that equation is falling apart.
Higher education is a part of the two.
I mean, part of the soft power of the United States is that American higher educa educated is, you know, as a model that folks really admired around the world. Most of the great universities, by every ranking were located in the United States, I mean, you know, with some notable important exceptions, and even when people didn't aspire to come study in the United States, they were around the world copying the model, whether it was the seminar room, whether it was the idea of the campus, or the
liberal arts. Kind of general curriculum was being sometimes with the help of American universities in the Middle East and the Gulf and around the world and other times just autonomously by different countries Like that was a model that people really really respected American science and science and technology the same thing.
Right, We've been that kind of soft power too.
Brian Edwards, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Well, it's great chatting Litiamali. I really appreciate the chance a moment.
Jesse Cannon Molly, do you report from Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut has an interesting conclusion, which those wasted twenty one point seven billion in just six months.
Fraud, waste and abuse, maybe not fraud, but certainly waste and absolute abuse.
Elon mus Department of Government was.
Expensive, but luckily he's a billionaire, so he could just give that money. Wasting government funds, making a series of mistake. You know, like half the country, half the federal government is being paid to not work at this moment, not quite half, but a lot of federal employees.
They wasted twenty one billion dollars. Yeah, they suck.
I mean you could have seen that when it was happening, right, the Deferbred resignation program where they paid all these people not to work fourteen point eight billion. Because all these people are not are being paid not to work, six point one billion spent on one hundred thousand plus workers placed an administrative leave pending separation. And then also you're going to eventually have to retrain the people you're going to have to rehire, and that's going to be a
disaster too. I mean, this is so incredibly wait a ball, let's real talk. A lot of stupid crap has happened in the last six months, but this is the stupidest and the crappiest.
Quote me.
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