June 5, 2024 • 43 mins
Atlantic columnist George Conway examines how we can end MAGA. Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill details her move to hold Supreme Court justices accountable for their questionable ethics. Media Matters CEO Angelo Carusone explains the Right’s new playbook to take down media outlets.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 Trumpy think tank America First Policy
Put Policy in quotes institute is seeking to allow election
officials to refuse to certify results.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I can't imagine why we have such a great show
for you today.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Congresswoman Mikey Cheryl stops by to talk about her move
to hold Supreme Court justices to.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Account for ethics.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Then we'll talk to Media Matters CEO Angelo Arisone about
the rights new playbook to take down media outlets. But
first we have Atlantic columnist George Conway. Welcome back to
Fast Politics. George Conway, Hello, so pretty exciting stuff. Did
(00:54):
you think that Donald Trump being a convicted felon, that
Republicans would just continue on the Trump train? Now, not
all Republicans, because we're seeing polling that shows that there's
definitely a section of Republicans who are affected by this.
But are you surprised with which the zeal the rest
of the party has continued on with him?
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Not at all.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
I didn't think that most of the face is going
to care. They've already decided that they're not going to
care about anything.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
That he could go out and.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
As Trump said a few years ago, shoot people on
Fifth Avenue, and they'd say, those people deserve being shot.
They're just refusing to admit they're wrong. They're refusing to
admit error. They are bound to him. It's something of
a cult.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
You know.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
There's nothing you can do about those people. But that's
that for normal people. It's usually a bad thing when
a candidate for public office gets indicted and then convicted.
So I think obviously it's going to hurt him with
some people, and he needs every single vote. No, the
conviction politically is going to be overall harmful.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Sort of the Republican narrative that has formed that they
are pumping out to the mainstream media, and a pretty
rapid clip is that this has just made Trump stronger,
that he's raised two zillion dollars.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Well, first of all, I will see if they're actually
telling the truth. I mean, these people have been known
sometimes doctor tell the truth.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
I don't know if you know that, Lolly, but that's
one thing.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
And secondly, it's like what are they going to spend
it on? They're going to convince people that he didn't
get convicted of a crime if they got money out
of it to temporary spike and I don't I don't
know that's going.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
To help them.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Do you think Republicans are sort of panicked or do
you think they genuinely believe what they're saying?
Speaker 4 (02:35):
No, I think it's come I mean, I think some
of them believe what they're saying. I think some of
them don't. I think a lot of them are just
going to say whatever they're told to say, and a
lot a lot of them just going to say. You know,
they they're very good at just denial that this is
what they have become.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
They've become.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
They deny reality, They lie, They live for these lies,
and they just tell more of them. And when their
lies are shown to be lies, they come up with
and the life that they're going to tell is this
is good. Well, if it's so good, why are you
so unhappy?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
They don't have an answer to that.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
No, they don't.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
So.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
One of the people who has gotten very into Libs
have made him president again now is Scott Jennings on CNN.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
You were on with him last week and he.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Did a lot of that obfuscating sort of like the
genteel Trumper.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
Yeah, no, he does that. But he was just outright
lying about the case and saying that it wasn't clear
what Trump was charged withal and we're just complete nonsense.
They just spout these talking points out without regard to
whether they're true.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
That's just what they do. And you notice that with
a lot.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
Of these people who like to say, well, I'm not
really that supportive of Donald Trump. I don't I'm not
a Trumper, I'm not a hardcore Trumper, blah blah blah,
and then they just spout out the same talking points
because that's what they do. And I told you something
about how they feel about Trump or how embarrassed they
are the Trump is their standard bearers. They just said
they can't talk about him, they cannot defend him. So
(04:03):
they just say, well, I'm not really a big Trump supporter.
But and then they say something on the attack like oh,
but Biden is this, Kamala Harris is this? Oh oh,
this case is that, And it's like, okay, but dude,
the guy's a condicted criminal. He's got fifty odd other
counts he's got to deal with, including things where he's
dead to rights for stealing classified documents. They talk about
(04:23):
everything except him. They don't actually defend him because they
know they can't, so they lie about why he's in
the circumstances that he's in, and they go on the
attack and say, you know, this is really about something else,
a weaponization of politics, the weaponization of the criminal law, caravans,
you know.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
I mean, this is what they do.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
When you think about this spit of defensiveness. One of
the things you once said to me, and I think
about it a lot, is like you just are going
to have to win and win and win, and then
eventually you'll have sort of destroyed this Trump Republican Party
and it'll become something else.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
No, I always adhere to that view. I mean, I
want these cases to proceed. I do think he should
and will and could spend the rest of his life
in prison at some point.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
And I think he's going to lose the selection.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
I mean, I don't think it's you know, one hundred percent.
I think there's a small chance he could win it,
which would I think be a small chance it's.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Something very very bad.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
But all that said, I mean, ultimately he's got to
be beat at the ballot box. I've always felt that way.
I've always said that that, and I've always said that
he will be beaten at the ballot box. I just
think it's important that the advantage that he currently has
is going to be eradicated soon. The advantage that he
currently has is he's been off the radar screen pretty
much for the last several years. And this trial actually
(05:48):
add to an extent I didn't quite fully appreciate until
it was going on. This trial actually kept off the
radar screen in some ways. It kept people not from
focusing on the crazy things.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
That he said, as it does, and.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
It became about the trial moment of the day and
whether or not the prosecution was fair and this and
all that. He was up in Wildwood, New Jersey talking about,
you know, how good a person Hannibal lecture was right, right,
So he's not going to get that mass anymore.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
I mean that press conference after the guilty conviction was
just an unfocused mass.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
No, he is an unfocused mess. He's going to get worse,
and the people they need to see this, Okay, this
isn't you know. There's been a lot of criticism of
the media, just the put putting him on in twenty
sixteen unfiltered and so on and so forth. Well, we
actually need some of that because if you actually watch
him and listen to him, he's not Obviously, you can't
(06:46):
put him on without saying, Okay, he lied about this thing,
he lied about that thing, lied about the next thing.
But you can show him saying absolutely crazy things that
are demonstrably untrue, like I never said locker up, shutting me.
Even his own people know that he said lock him up.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
They liked it. You know, he's a pathological liar. The's
a lot of different.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
Things that are not good. The more people see of him,
I think the better. It reminds me of four years
ago when he was holding those atrocious coronavirus press gatherings
at like four o'clock or five o'clock every day and
the White House actually had to pull them. The more
the American people see of him, the more the Trump
(07:29):
people are going to have to figure out how to
run a campaign without him. And that's what happened in
twenty twenty. And he's going to be absolutely appalling at
the debate. He's crazier than ever before.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
And I think the way that the Biden campaign.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
Can take advantage of that is to continue to needle
him leading up to that debate, and for Biden to
needle him really that debate. You know, I think the
American people just need to see the crazy again, and
I don't think it's going to take that much.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
I think they're going to.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
See more of it now that the trial is over.
The trial actually that protected him by giving people something
else to talk about other than how crazy he was.
So there's a question of, oh, we did this witness
say that, Oh is this witness going to testify to that,
Oh are the charges there?
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Blah blah blah.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
You know, he's got to actually talk to the American
people now, and he is more incoherent than ever and
he's crazy whatever, And I think that.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
That's going to make the big difference.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
And as far as you know the future of Republicanism,
I mean, you know, as I've said to you many times,
it's just it has to be.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Beaten and it will be beaten.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
And what's going to happen this time around is there's
really not going to be much of a Republican party
left Trump music selections and you have you know that
the party is on multiple levels, that there's the state
level it's falling apart at the various state organization levels
in Michigan, for example, but basically at each other's throats,
the relative normans and the psychos, and the same as
(08:53):
in Arizona.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
It's happening all around the country.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
These state organizations are foundering because they are being taken
over by.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
The lowest extreme and and I don't mean extreme in.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
Some ideological sense that sort of gives them a little
too much credit to they actually believe in something which
is nihilistic at the national level, is basically systematically destroying
a national party. And the way he's doing that is
he's basically taking it, moved it to Palm Beach, and
he's merged it with his campaign. And we all know
what happens when campaigns and bring campaigns and particularly losing ones.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Or if you have a winning campaign, then.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
Maybe you could create a political organization like you know,
Organizing for America.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
But even Obama had problems doing that.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
Actually, even at Obama, even Organizable for America had problems
like that. Well, what happens to political campaign basically is
everybody goes their separate ways.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
It disappears.
Speaker 4 (09:46):
So if you merge a national political party structure personally,
you move it from Washington to Florida, then you merge
it with a temporary structure that a campaign is a
pop up store based very expensive one, but it's a
pop up store. And then what happens on November sixth
after they lose because the way there's can be no
(10:08):
functional Republican Party by the end of next year, Donald
Trump loses its selection. You know, it's going to be
very important what happens next. Among sensible people and the
right and the center who don't want to be Democrats,
this is their chance.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
To actually create something in value.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
Whether it's a can function without sort of the crazies,
because the crazies.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
They're just too many of them out there now. Whether
we can have.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
A functional conservative, center right party, I don't think that's
an open question, but it's not going to be the
Republican Party. They're just not going to be a functional
Republican party come next year.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Do you think that Trump will be able to sort
of woo back these big donors. We've certainly seen some
of them come back. And also what do you think
is going on there, like when people who are theoretically
known as you know, I'm thinking of all those sort
of Steve Schwartzman types like make it make sense the
a couple.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
Of things that are going to on their's one those
people are they don't understand politics that well. Secondly, all
they care about is, you know, taxes and regulation, and
they just convinced themselves that no.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Matter what, Donald Trump is better.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
Than the alternative, which isn't really true for reasons I
could separately get into.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
And third is they're afraid he's going to win and
they don't want to be on his bad side. That's
a very important one.
Speaker 4 (11:24):
And then to go back to the second point, you know,
they think that somehow they're going to be better off
under a Trump administration than under a Biden administration. They're
just failing to consider the effect of the political system
and the effect of Trump on the political system, and
how that will in turn impact economic because I think
that if you have I mean the reason why I
(11:44):
do think they're not wrong in many ways we're overregulated, not.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
We're underregulated in some ways. That we're overregulated in many ways.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
And I generally think lower taxes are better than higher taxes,
except when you're running among these nephysites.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
But let's set that aside.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
If Donald's is elected, we're going to have a political
system petering on the edge of complete and utter chaos
because this country is going to become, i think, pretty
much ungovernable. And that's a fundamental reason why the American
economy is the shortness of the world. Is that because
you know, for all its faults, we have a stable
political system.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
We're not going to have a.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Stable political system if he's elected, and we're going to
see human and financial capital flight the likes of which
we have not seen in this country and ever. So
that's why I think these people are being very, very
very shortsighted. But I also do think, you know, they
don't understand that, they don't understand any of this. They
just look at things very very narrowly, and they don't
(12:41):
look at history, and they don't look at the second
order results, even though that that's what they would look
at if they were running making a business decision, an
actual business decisions. And I also think that they're just
you know, there is a degree to which these people
are terrified of Trump. They don't want to be singled out.
Is the people who are asked to him money and
then did not and men be preceded enemies of Trump
(13:04):
because Trump will seek for men. There are a bunch
of different things going on there.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
George Conway, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Spring us here.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
And I bet you are trying to look fashionable, So
why not pick up some fashionable all new Fast Politics merchandise.
We just opened a news store with all new designs
just for you. Get t shirts, hoodies, hats, and top
bags to grab some head to fastpolitics dot com. Congresswoman
(13:38):
Mikey Cheryl represents New Jersey's eleventh congressional district. Welcome back
to Fast Politics, congress Woman.
Speaker 5 (13:47):
Cheryl, Well, thank you so much. It's great to be back.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
It's going to get me too upset to even ask
the question, but needless to say, Justice Thomas we Knew
had some conflicts in his home life, mainly his wife's
involvement in Stop the Steal.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
And then now we learn.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
That Justice Alito, it's basically the real housewives of the
Supreme Court. Talk to me about your theory the case.
Speaker 5 (14:16):
Well, the case is that here we have Supreme Court
justices acting incredibly unethically, and it's so offensive to me
as an almost lifetime public Sermont and It's so many
of the jobs I've held, whether it was in the
military or for the Department of Justice, at the US
Attorney's Office, we were always held to a standard of
(14:36):
not just ensuring we weren't committee acts of impropriety. But
it wasn't just impropriety, it was the appearance of impropriety.
Because that's the high standard you need to hold yourself
to as an elected official or as a public servant,
because you are representing to the public the institution you serve,
and they need to know that you are doing so
(14:59):
faithfully and that you are doing so in a way
that is best serving the public, not your own personal
and self interest. And you look at the justices, you
look at Alito, you look at Thomas, and they are
doing anything but I mean this RV and the money
and the flights for Alito and just you know, the payouts.
(15:19):
Really and then you see, as you mentioned Justice Thomas's wife,
and then you saw these flags at both of Alito's house,
one the stop feel the Christian white Nationalist flag. I mean,
these are people that are supposed to decide cases without bias,
and it didn't occur to Justice Alito, for example, that
that would be seen as incredibly biased. It's really mind boggling.
(15:43):
And so what this legislation does is to first of all,
give people some ethical training, which they seem to be
in dire need of, and to explain to some of
our justices what it means to serve in that office
and what the public expects from them.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
There is right.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Now no formal binding ethics code for the Supreme Court.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
They sort of crafted one ad hoc.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
It's not like if you work for a Supreme Court
justice when there's a real ethics code.
Speaker 5 (16:11):
They're sort of self policing at this point, which is
going about as well as one might suspect. And so
that's why this legislation also has an independent investigative unit
that files a report a standard that again most of
us are happy to be held to. That is what
we are trying to accomplish here, to really help restore
(16:34):
faith in our Supreme Court.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Right, and that makes sense. So how would you do
that and how would this work? And also I'm glad
you're trying anything.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
You can.
Speaker 5 (16:44):
Thank you so much because you know, I think it's
so important that we engage on this. You know, we've
seen some really upsetting outcomes. In the Court that seems
to have become very partisan, very political, very results oriented,
and so over time you've seen decisions that fel wildly
out of step with a transparent democracy and with the
(17:05):
views of the American people. And by then I'm talking
about the Citizens United decision, the DC versus Heller decision,
and the way that the Court has almost worked in
every way to make it impossible to do even some
of the minimal work of gun safety as we see
our children slaughtered across the nation. And I think the
one that we have seen the most evidence of being
completely out of step with the American people is certainly
(17:27):
the overturning of Row. When we sub Donald Trump building
a court with the express intent of overturning Row. And
now we've seen in the reddest states in the nation
this pushback against these terraconian laws. That shows why it's
so needed. I think that we have a court that's
held to higher ethical standards, and that the public understands
(17:49):
better how the court understands and the justices understand their
own responsibilities to the public right.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
And also the Supreme Court is radically remaking the kind
in all different ways. And they have two abortion cases
on the docket that are coming out this month. I mean,
you know, it's not like they aren't just swinging for
the fences, right. A lot of the cases they're taking,
you know, are trying to really dismantle the administrative state.
Speaker 5 (18:15):
Yeah, I would call them really radical. To see, for example,
the two abortion cases we're seeing before the court, it
just gives credence to what I've seen in this constant
attack on women's freedoms and women's health, the constant attack
on reproductive freedom and the wearable race to the bottom
in some of the states that have implemented draconian abortion bands.
(18:38):
And now you see these attempts at doing so nationwide.
So this myth of press Stone case and the discussion
in the remarks there and how Alito's brought up for
example Comstock, this is all the Heritage Foundation playbook for
implementing a nationwide abortion ban. And we've got to act now.
(19:00):
Example with Amtala, the Amtala case, the Emergency Medical Treatment
and Labor Act, this is a case where in putting
out regulations based on INTALA, the administration has said, you
can provide an abortion for the health of the mother
if you have a woman coming to your emergency room
who's suffering from a miscarriage and hemorrhaging. You can provide
(19:22):
care for that woman, which often involves an abortion of
the dead fetus so that she does not get a
horrible infection and can have children again. And if you
think I'm being a little dramatic about this, we are
seeing case after case after case of is like Texas,
of women who have suffered just this, and we have
Idaho on the other side of this, state of Idaho
(19:43):
saying no, it's only in the death of the mother.
It's only if a woman is dying that you can
provide an abortion. So let's imagine a doctor put in
the situation knowing that that person will go to jail. Well,
they're not making the decision, which is why we've seen
women being medevacked out of Idaho at an alarming rate.
Imagine you're hemorrhaging and you're being metevacked because a doctor
(20:05):
refuses to make a decision on your care in your
own emergency room. So this is what we're fighting against
in these court cases. And this is how far out
of step this court is with the American public.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Yeah, they're going to push back on any kind of
ethics standard. But theoretically, say they were saying, Republicans, how would.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
You pass this? How could you do this?
Speaker 1 (20:27):
I mean again, you have to fight, because the more
you fight, the more you move the Oberton window towards
actual self policing and real accountability for the judiciary, which
has to exist. But I'm just curious, like, in an
ideal world where Republicans were normal and they didn't think
of the Supreme Court as a completely partisan exercise, how
(20:48):
would you create this bill and get a past.
Speaker 5 (20:50):
In an ideal world where Republicans were normal, I would
have found a Republican co sponsor of this piece of legislation.
We would have gotten other members on both sides of
the Aisle to co sponsor it, and then we would
have gotten it asked on suspension because in an ideal world,
most people would understand that this is completely egregious conduct
(21:11):
by our Supreme Corport that is unacceptable. And I say
suspension because you don't even need a rule, but you
do need tons of votes for it. So we would
just get tons of votes on both sides of the
pass it over to the Senate. They would see that mandate,
they would pass and send it to the President. I mean,
that would be ideally what we've seen. But now when
we're in a world where as long as you are
going to be a vote to take away rights from women,
(21:33):
as long as you are going to do everything you
can to implement a nationwide abortion ban in our Supreme Court,
then no Republican is going to hold you accountable for
much of anything else, as far as I can tell exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
I was happy to see the Senate is talking about hearings,
and I know Sheldon white House is anxious to get
some hearings going, and hopefully you'll have a partner in
Dick Durbin. Can you talk to us about the contraception Amendment,
which is another idea that's both happening in the Senate
and in the Congress at the same time, and you're working.
Speaker 5 (22:04):
On There's a lot of stuff that we're working on
right now related to the courts, related to the ethics
of the court, but also related to a lot of
these abortion laws. That it's not just coming from the
Court where they're trying to implement these nationwide abortion mans
but certainly coming from a lot of legislators. The area
that I've been focused on most recently is the National
(22:27):
Defense Authorization Act. Because when we see these attacks on
women across the country. I'm hearing from women in New Jersey,
for example, Look, I'm not I'm pregnant. I'm not going
to go to my headquarters in Texas while I'm pregnant,
or I'm hearing from people in blue states. I'm in
law school and I'm not going to take jobs in
certain cities because I might start my family in the
(22:47):
next several years and I don't want to have horrible healthcare,
reproductive healthcare. So I think that's horrible that here, as
a woman in the United States of America, you can
only live in certain places and expect to get decent
reproductive healthcare and dangering your life if you go to
certain cities. That's horrible. But even worse to me is
the plight of many of our military women who actually
(23:10):
don't even have that option. Because when the military says,
you know, we need you to go to flight school
in Pensacola, Florida, as I did, or we need you
to go to flight school in Corpus Christi, Texas as
I did, you don't get a choice. And we have
over one hundred and forty thousand troops station in Texas.
They have their families with them who are getting medical
care in that area, many of whom may have children
(23:32):
on the base or in the area, and Texas ranks
forty ninth in the nation right now with over one
hundred and forty thousand troops station, they're forty ninth in
the nation. As far as reproductive healthcare, a lot of
the legislation I'll be introducing next week for the Defense
Act is trying to, for example, strip some of the
language in Title ten, which governs our bases about not
(23:55):
being able to provide abortion care on our basis, to
provide education to both the doctors who change bases about
what the landscape is for reproductive healthcare in that state
and what is different from the state law and what
you can provide on base and give that same education
to women. Also putting Amtala type language into Title ten.
(24:17):
If I can't strip out some of the other bad
what I would call like Hidak type language, which is
entitled I can't strip that out, getting Atala language in
so that it's not just life of the mother, because
right now you can only provide an abortion on a base.
If it's the life of the mother, or rape or incest,
so we need at least the health of the mother
in there so we can better protect service women and
(24:38):
give them basic care. So we have this whole kind
of platform of abortion legislation that we need to introduce
to protect service women across the country. But you know,
with the Republican majority in the House, much of this
is I think going to be on the backs of
my Senate colleagues to carry it. So while I'm pushing
(24:59):
this legislation now so that whatever the Supreme Court comes
out with with respect to this and tall upcase or
the Mythipreston FDA case, we're writing legislation now to meet that.
And we'll be working closely with our colleagues in the
Senate so that we can provide some real leadership here
on the way forward, because we are seeing a tax
on reproductive healthcare and we have got to do more
(25:21):
to fight back. I mean, this is really unacceptable, Molly.
I don't know how you felt that when Roe was overturned.
I felt awful. But then when people started saying next,
they're coming after IVF, Next, they're coming after contraception, I thought,
no way, no way. I mean, my whole life is
built on the ability to choose one and how to
have my family. My grandmother had eight kids. I would
not be in Congress I had eight kids, right, I mean,
(25:42):
so threatening, the whole thing, And yet that's where we
are just two years later. We are not doing enough
in this space.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
What I've been really shocked by is the level of
denial that even normal people have greeted this with. So
I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.
Thank you so much, congresswoman.
Speaker 5 (26:00):
It is always great talking to you guys. And shout
out to Jesse from Montclair. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Angelo Karasone is the CEO of Media Matters. Welcome back, Angelo,
Thanks for having me give us a little fill in
since we last talked to you. Did the bad guys win?
I feel like the bad guys won.
Speaker 6 (26:25):
With context? And that's a big question.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
They came after you talk us through what happened at
Media Matters. And you are the head of Media Matters.
Just for those who are a little out of you know,
read in. Media Matters is a wildly successful media monitoring organization.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
You guys watch Fox News so we don't have to.
Speaker 7 (26:47):
Yeah, and we do a lot of you know, obviously
a ton of research and tracking, and we do a
lot of investigative reporting, and that's you know, a big
part of what we are designed to do is to
sort of unwind the damage that the right wing echo
chamber has done since like the nineties, right, And so
you know, we're about twenty years old now, and we're
in a particularly unique moment because everything is sort of
(27:09):
up in the air in the right wing medium. And yeah,
and obviously we know we made a lot of big
enemies over the years, gone back and Tuber Carlson and
Bill O'Reilly and the Murdocks and now so yeah, I
mean basically, the short of it is that obviously everybody
knows that X has increased. It's the extremism. You know,
they've loosened the rules. The anti Semitism obviously was on
the rise on the platform. Advertisers for various reasons, had
(27:33):
left the platform when Elon must took over and continued
to leave the platform last summer, they you know, X
came out and said, hey, we are releasing some new
tools for advertisers. Your ads are never going to appear
alongside this kind of extremist content.
Speaker 6 (27:46):
You don't have to worry. You're never going to be embarrassed.
Speaker 7 (27:48):
And one of our you know, because we do research
and investigative reporting, one of the things that happened is
that we started publishing content showing that in fact, whatever
system X was promising was working wasn't operating as it
says it was, and in fact, adds for pro Hitler
accounts and Nazi content was appearing alongside major advertisers and
(28:08):
you know, and the subtreameous content. So that's basically what happened,
is that we started to sort of chip away at
this notion that they were improving the platform, and that
also happletical inside of the same week that Musk had
endorsed that what sort of supremacist great replacement theory, right,
and a bunch of advertisers left in that time period,
and he threatened to sue us and then followed through
(28:30):
on it. And part of the reason he followed through
on it, looks like is because as soon as he
threatened to sue us, everyone came out of the woodwork.
Speaker 6 (28:35):
Glenn Beck and Tucker Crosson and Megan Kelly.
Speaker 7 (28:37):
Laura Logan, I mean, anyone that we've held accountable of
the years, the guy that runs Rumble, which is an
increasing sort of place of right wing misinformation. They all
came out and said, the best thing you can do
is destroy Media Matters. And so what he did was
file lawsuit against us.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
And he's always a person who wants to make other
right wing people happy.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
That's kind of his thing, of course.
Speaker 7 (28:58):
I mean that's part of this read his his own
red Pillow journey, right, is that he's actually a pretty
vivid example of how some of the feedback loops online
can radicalize not just.
Speaker 6 (29:07):
People, but in particular young people.
Speaker 7 (29:09):
It says a lot about the way his mind works
that you know, he's compared more to say, a person
in puberty than like, you know, fully formed adult. But
basically what he did is he suit us in the
North District of Texas. So you know, Media Matters is
a DC based organization Twitter where now x is a
Nevada based corporation that operates in California.
Speaker 6 (29:26):
But he's students in the North District of.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Texas because jurisdiction shopping and is this the Matthew Cosmaric District.
Speaker 6 (29:33):
No, but it's similar.
Speaker 7 (29:34):
It has similar sets of sort of judges and in particular,
it's one of the few places where there aren't slap protections,
which are those like strategic lawsuits that if you file,
you get you know, you can get damages if you
sort of engage in one of these types of you know,
litigation design to just bury people. It's one of the
few places that doesn't sort of protect against that. And so,
but he didn't just stop there. What he did is
(29:55):
then he sued us in Ireland and then threatened to
us in some other places. And in the core of
doing this, Steven Miller, former Trumpe advisor, sort of popped
up and said, hey, you shouldn't just stop there, you
should make it and encourage Republican state attorney generals to
launch investigations into medium matters. And that's what he did.
He then sort of pressured, he started publicly pressuring state
(30:17):
ag is to do it. Ken Paxton and the Texas
Attorney General and Andrew Valley, the Missouri Attorney General, each
launched their own investigations. And what we did, which I
think is really significant and I'm pretty proud of it,
is that one of the ways these things play out
is that as state ag launches an investigation, you sort
of negotiate how much information you're going to give. Eventually,
(30:37):
if they're not happy, they go to their own state
court and they get the court to enforce a ruling
against you to sort of hand over even more information.
And what they were looking for was all types of
things about our sources, how we do our work, our
funding and donor information, which Musk has promised to sort
of retaliate against all. Obviously it's all designed to sort
(30:57):
of destroy us. Instead of waiting for that, we sued
Ken Paxton first, and we got a ruling against him
in DC Court, which is a significant ruling because it's
sort of a new this is sort of new tactics
that the right wing is deploying, and we sort of
launched sort of a counter offensive, which was to say, wait,
you can't deploy these new tactics. Here's here's why federal
courts should intervene in these types of investigations, because they're
(31:21):
very clearly intended to stightful reporting. So we won that,
so we got an injunction against Ken Paxton. We're currently
dealing with Andrew Bailey in Missouri and I think I
think we will prevail there as well. But where we
are fighting that out in federal court. He sued us
in his own state court and said, hey, I don't
have to file the rules here because.
Speaker 6 (31:39):
Media Matters is going to break the laws. So I'm
going to skip.
Speaker 7 (31:42):
The couple steps in the process so that they can't
run to federal court and get a federal judge to
prevent me from doing this. That argument hasn't fully played
out the way that he had hoped so, but it's
just it hasn't taken a little bit of time to
sort of sort that out. So in terms of the
bad guys winning there, I don't think they won there.
They obviously cost us a bunch of money. I know
we have to fight this out, but in the ex litigation,
(32:04):
you know, part of the way these complex litigations play
out is they cost to fortune, you know, especially if
you are designed if you're not hoping to win money
from it, which obviously these not. If you're just hoping
to cause maximum damage to the target, what you basically
do is you, you know, you slow roll the process.
You fight about every little thing, typically things that lawyers
would sort out out of court, you sort of fight
(32:26):
about them. You force briefings, you force judges to have
to weigh in on them. All that stuff costs money.
That is the strategy is to bleed us try and
I think, you know, the one thing that I will
say about Medium matters is what we do is relatively unique,
and we make the worst enemies and over time, I
think what we have to think about is, because this
is going to be a sustained fight, how do we
make sure that our twentieth year is not where we end?
(32:48):
And that means that we sort of gear up for
what's going to be a very long halve fight. He
is going to incinerate cash to destroy us, and we
have to be sort of mindful of that and Gerd
and so one of the effects is that, you know,
we started to reorganize our step.
Speaker 6 (33:02):
We laid off of about a dozen people about.
Speaker 7 (33:04):
Two weeks ago, which is really sad, and a lot
of that is thinking about, okay, how do we make
ourselves sustainable for the long call? And what I'll just
wrap on saying here it's not entirely self interested. It's
the truth is that it isn't just that he's suing us.
It isn't just that the ages are doing it. The
part that's the So what aside from the try to
take out a very effective opponent, is that they are
(33:24):
actually writing a new playbook for how you sort of
destroy and stifle reporting, takeout critics or any sort of
organization that does work that they don't like. And it
isn't just that they're using traditional tools. They are writing
a new playbook sort of. There's one two punches between
you know, filing these lawsuits, including in international jurisdictions, which
(33:44):
just burns money, and then also getting state attorney generals
to speed run discovery and sort of write it flows
through your documentation does make it a lot harder for
any organization to survive those attacks. And that is sort
of a big alarm bell. And thankfully it's just my opinion.
I mean, US Press Freedom Tracker, which is one of
the big journalism washdogs, counts this as one of their
(34:05):
big cases to track because of the way that it's
playing out. It will sort of be a little bit
of a canary of the coal mine for how Monoga
World and the far right deal with news outlets and
truthfully other organizations. So we're sort of a little bit
of the tip of the spear here in how they're
deploying new tactics.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Yeah, the idea that.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
The ages of these two states are basically Elon's personal
lawyers is kind of scare.
Speaker 7 (34:32):
There are things that are really disturbing about it, which
is that it's not like they just did this because
they saw the news.
Speaker 6 (34:37):
He was posting about it on x on his platform.
Speaker 5 (34:40):
And then Andrew Bailey.
Speaker 7 (34:42):
Who himself is he's the Missori attorney general who's in
a heated primary right now, he had sort of talked
about the investigation, sent some letters, but he never took
the next step. And then after we won the injunction
against Ken Paxton, he still hadn't taken that next step yet.
Speaker 6 (34:56):
He was just talking.
Speaker 7 (34:57):
And then Elon Musk does a Twitter space with him
and a few days later he launches into a lawsuit
against us. He sort of takes that next step, right,
So there's some commonalities in who their lawyers are, you know,
and some overlap there and who they're using to defend
themselves and the cases against us. And it is very
unsettling because he basically was able to send and leverage
(35:18):
state power to attempt to dig through what he had
said he wanted was our donor information because obviously because
we're a nonprofit. We raise money from you know, individuals foundations,
because one of the ways that you could undermine us,
right is you forced us to spend so much money
that we don't have. The other end of it is
that you try to cut off the supply. And he's
been pretty brazen about this. This isn't a conjecture. And
(35:39):
so you need that information though to figure out how
to cut off the supply. And one way to do
that is, he hopes, is to litigation. That's very tough.
Actually that information is protected, and conservatives have fought very
hard to make sure that information is protected.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Right. Incredible irony here is that there are.
Speaker 6 (35:58):
But then you leverage state attorney gense to do that.
It's a shortcut.
Speaker 7 (36:01):
And I think even though this stuff gets complicated with
the legal side, but that's where it becomes really disturbing
for any organization, right. You know, one of the things
that you see play out with these state ag fights
with reproductive health right and trans issues is that they're
going after some of the people that benefit from those
services right now, but what they've escalated in our case,
and it seems to be largely or entirely at the
(36:23):
behest of elon Musk is to also go one step
further and say, all right, well let's start rifling through
and figuring out who's.
Speaker 6 (36:29):
Funding this so that we can then go after that.
Speaker 7 (36:31):
And that is you know, obviously we're fighting as vigorously
and that was partly why we sort of took those
proactive steps to fight the ages. But that is a
new strategy on their part, and it isn't just that
he is. You know that he's able to post a
couple posts on Twitter and people jump for it, and
that that does not bode well.
Speaker 6 (36:51):
For where we go from here.
Speaker 7 (36:53):
If somebody like Musk or Musk even just Musk can
continue to direct state ags to go after basically any
of us credit, this is will be the new nor honestly,
and I think when we look at the landscape, part
of it was how do we engage with this? And
I think we saw this fight as not just one
that like we have to win for a variety of reasons,
including to be miss effective, but also we have to
(37:13):
make sure that they're not writing a new playbook in
front of us that we didn't just sort of like
let sort of get sort of refined and then deployed
against other organizations and other newsrooms, and that is definitely,
to me, the bigger thing that's taking place here.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
So let's just have.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
A minute here to talk about you cover conservative media,
which has now, like all other media, kind of fragmented.
It's funny because in twenty sixteen, Fox was sort of
the place you'd get mentioned dun Tucker Carlton Show, and
you'd get death threats and it would be you know,
he had so much power. It feels like he doesn't
(37:50):
have the same kind of power, even though he has
his own little empire.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Is that right?
Speaker 1 (37:55):
And I mean it feels like all those media outlets
are much more diffuse, and that's true on the left too,
But I'm just curious if you could weigh in on that.
Speaker 7 (38:04):
I think you're totally right, and I think that, to me,
the most significant part about the moment that we're in
right now is that we haven't had a moment like
this in more than thirty years. And by that, I
mean this is the first presidential election in thirty years
where Rush Limbaugh is not the single largest get out
the vote operation.
Speaker 6 (38:21):
First presidential election thirty years.
Speaker 7 (38:23):
It's hard to emphasize or understood just how significant that
is for our politics, our culture, our democracy, and it's
more than just limbo. It's that what happened in the
nineties is that you had the combination of talk radio
and the birth of Fox News, and those things together
created sort of a center of gravity. So that to
your point, this diffuse right ring media, and there was
(38:43):
plenty of it, it didn't just function as a diffuse
right ringmedia. It actually was able to be converted into
an echo chamber. When you had a center of gravity,
you could sort of, you know, drive a narrative through
that media apparatus and it could echo, reverberate, and that
of course has transformative power. Your arms are is on
poin in that right now, there's no center of gravity.
It's a chorus without a conductor. And that's partly why
(39:05):
there's so much political chaos, you know, saying with the
speaker fights, it's partly why there isn't a single place
you could go to that has agenda setting power on
the right. And when you look, you know, when you
look at the fights like Tucker's weaker Candice almost got
fired from Daily Wire, you know there all their numbers
are down. It is a particularly unique moment because they're
all trying to resort and reshuffle, and so they're simultaneously
(39:27):
disoriented and disruptive, but they're also more blood thirsty and scarier.
And I think that tension is sometimes hard to reconcile
because they're both simultaneously less of a threat in terms
of their ability to operationalize misinformation disinformation, but they're also
more of a threat because they're increasingly building organizing power
on what used to be considered with fringes.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Right, and they're also desperate for the viewers.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
So when we look at the Is trial verdicts, their
general feeling was Trump is stronger.
Speaker 3 (39:59):
Now.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Look so what you've done, Libs, you've done it now? Right?
Speaker 7 (40:03):
Yes, the net effect of all of this is to
radicalize even more people. So I don't know if you
remember diamond and silk. Yes, diamond dyed silk is still around.
Silk today joined started a militia, a militia with a
former bounty under And this is all in response to
the child So the reason I start there is that
the snabshot is that they're increasingly getting people into this
(40:23):
like more justifiable vigilanteism and sort of preparing for more
extreme tactics, and the way that they did that was
by both undermining the legitimacy of the entire process, but
then also sort of whipping people up into a frenzy
and getting them to believe that it's it's increasingly time
to not just take matters into their own hands. But
(40:43):
in the short term, the most significant thing they can
do is intensified their support for Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
This is a question I've been asking everyone because nobody's
really been able to answer it. Your a normal suburban
mom in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Where are you getting your news?
Speaker 7 (40:59):
You're getting in is sort of indirectly from I say, TikTok.
But it's not just that you're getting it from TikTok.
You're getting it downstream from TikTok if you're not on it,
So you'll see it on your Facebook wheels a couple
of days or a couple weeks later, or you'll get
it secondhand through your own sort of social networks or friends,
your word of mouth communication, and that's where you're getting
it from largely. And I think that's sometimes not reflected
(41:21):
in the polls, and that they all think Donald Trump
is bad. They think the rule of law is important,
but the prevailing sentiment in those circles and those narratives
putting us out out of the polls. Say, but just
if you look at where people consume, how they get
their information, that that audience, they basically think that everybody's corrupt, right, right,
So like Nuance, and so it's like, well all politicians
are corrupt, so all right, you know, and then they
(41:44):
immediately pivot back to how this affects their own personal life,
and that is the core economic issues, and that is
mostly center around groceries.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
Right, if you're running the Biden campaign, where are you
going to try to get your message through?
Speaker 7 (41:59):
I would be almost entirely in non political programming, So
I would be having urga speaking to people that are
talking about crime, true crime, much.
Speaker 6 (42:08):
More local content.
Speaker 7 (42:09):
I would be almost doing no national news, no national programming,
and I would not be hiring like major influencers. I'd
be really working with micro influencers, so people that are
promit in their community, sort of engaging more about not
only things that have been done, but sort of talking
a little bit more about say you know that it's
the grocery stores that are actually sort of inflating to
Bill's somewhat artificially, sort of shifting that back.
Speaker 6 (42:31):
I would not be doing much national.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Oh interesting, Thank you so much, Angelo, Thank.
Speaker 3 (42:36):
You no more perfectly.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Jesse Cannon, my junk fest.
Speaker 7 (42:44):
What are you seeing here with the Washington Post in
my workplace the Daily Beast.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
Both the Washington Post and the Daily Beast are going
to have editors who come from British conservative media. Too
soon to know what that means, but certainly a little
bit scary, and as both of us came up through
the Daily Beast, it's pretty heartbreaking to us.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
And that, my friends, is my moment of fuckery.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
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.
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 Trumpy think tank America First Policy
Put Policy in quotes institute is seeking to allow election
officials to refuse to certify results.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I can't imagine why we have such a great show
for you today.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Congresswoman Mikey Cheryl stops by to talk about her move
to hold Supreme Court justices to.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Account for ethics.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Then we'll talk to Media Matters CEO Angelo Arisone about
the rights new playbook to take down media outlets. But
first we have Atlantic columnist George Conway. Welcome back to
Fast Politics. George Conway, Hello, so pretty exciting stuff. Did
(00:54):
you think that Donald Trump being a convicted felon, that
Republicans would just continue on the Trump train? Now, not
all Republicans, because we're seeing polling that shows that there's
definitely a section of Republicans who are affected by this.
But are you surprised with which the zeal the rest
of the party has continued on with him?
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Not at all.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
I didn't think that most of the face is going
to care. They've already decided that they're not going to
care about anything.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
That he could go out and.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
As Trump said a few years ago, shoot people on
Fifth Avenue, and they'd say, those people deserve being shot.
They're just refusing to admit they're wrong. They're refusing to
admit error. They are bound to him. It's something of
a cult.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
You know.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
There's nothing you can do about those people. But that's
that for normal people. It's usually a bad thing when
a candidate for public office gets indicted and then convicted.
So I think obviously it's going to hurt him with
some people, and he needs every single vote. No, the
conviction politically is going to be overall harmful.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Sort of the Republican narrative that has formed that they
are pumping out to the mainstream media, and a pretty
rapid clip is that this has just made Trump stronger,
that he's raised two zillion dollars.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Well, first of all, I will see if they're actually
telling the truth. I mean, these people have been known
sometimes doctor tell the truth.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
I don't know if you know that, Lolly, but that's
one thing.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
And secondly, it's like what are they going to spend
it on? They're going to convince people that he didn't
get convicted of a crime if they got money out
of it to temporary spike and I don't I don't
know that's going.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
To help them.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Do you think Republicans are sort of panicked or do
you think they genuinely believe what they're saying?
Speaker 4 (02:35):
No, I think it's come I mean, I think some
of them believe what they're saying. I think some of
them don't. I think a lot of them are just
going to say whatever they're told to say, and a
lot a lot of them just going to say. You know,
they they're very good at just denial that this is
what they have become.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
They've become.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
They deny reality, They lie, They live for these lies,
and they just tell more of them. And when their
lies are shown to be lies, they come up with
and the life that they're going to tell is this
is good. Well, if it's so good, why are you
so unhappy?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
They don't have an answer to that.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
No, they don't.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
So.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
One of the people who has gotten very into Libs
have made him president again now is Scott Jennings on CNN.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
You were on with him last week and he.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Did a lot of that obfuscating sort of like the
genteel Trumper.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
Yeah, no, he does that. But he was just outright
lying about the case and saying that it wasn't clear
what Trump was charged withal and we're just complete nonsense.
They just spout these talking points out without regard to
whether they're true.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
That's just what they do. And you notice that with
a lot.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
Of these people who like to say, well, I'm not
really that supportive of Donald Trump. I don't I'm not
a Trumper, I'm not a hardcore Trumper, blah blah blah,
and then they just spout out the same talking points
because that's what they do. And I told you something
about how they feel about Trump or how embarrassed they
are the Trump is their standard bearers. They just said
they can't talk about him, they cannot defend him. So
(04:03):
they just say, well, I'm not really a big Trump supporter.
But and then they say something on the attack like oh,
but Biden is this, Kamala Harris is this? Oh oh,
this case is that, And it's like, okay, but dude,
the guy's a condicted criminal. He's got fifty odd other
counts he's got to deal with, including things where he's
dead to rights for stealing classified documents. They talk about
(04:23):
everything except him. They don't actually defend him because they
know they can't, so they lie about why he's in
the circumstances that he's in, and they go on the
attack and say, you know, this is really about something else,
a weaponization of politics, the weaponization of the criminal law, caravans,
you know.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
I mean, this is what they do.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
When you think about this spit of defensiveness. One of
the things you once said to me, and I think
about it a lot, is like you just are going
to have to win and win and win, and then
eventually you'll have sort of destroyed this Trump Republican Party
and it'll become something else.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
No, I always adhere to that view. I mean, I
want these cases to proceed. I do think he should
and will and could spend the rest of his life
in prison at some point.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
And I think he's going to lose the selection.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
I mean, I don't think it's you know, one hundred percent.
I think there's a small chance he could win it,
which would I think be a small chance it's.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
Something very very bad.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
But all that said, I mean, ultimately he's got to
be beat at the ballot box. I've always felt that way.
I've always said that that, and I've always said that
he will be beaten at the ballot box. I just
think it's important that the advantage that he currently has
is going to be eradicated soon. The advantage that he
currently has is he's been off the radar screen pretty
much for the last several years. And this trial actually
(05:48):
add to an extent I didn't quite fully appreciate until
it was going on. This trial actually kept off the
radar screen in some ways. It kept people not from
focusing on the crazy things.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
That he said, as it does, and.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
It became about the trial moment of the day and
whether or not the prosecution was fair and this and
all that. He was up in Wildwood, New Jersey talking about,
you know, how good a person Hannibal lecture was right, right,
So he's not going to get that mass anymore.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
I mean that press conference after the guilty conviction was
just an unfocused mass.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
No, he is an unfocused mess. He's going to get worse,
and the people they need to see this, Okay, this
isn't you know. There's been a lot of criticism of
the media, just the put putting him on in twenty
sixteen unfiltered and so on and so forth. Well, we
actually need some of that because if you actually watch
him and listen to him, he's not Obviously, you can't
(06:46):
put him on without saying, Okay, he lied about this thing,
he lied about that thing, lied about the next thing.
But you can show him saying absolutely crazy things that
are demonstrably untrue, like I never said locker up, shutting me.
Even his own people know that he said lock him up.
Speaker 3 (07:04):
They liked it. You know, he's a pathological liar. The's
a lot of different.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
Things that are not good. The more people see of him,
I think the better. It reminds me of four years
ago when he was holding those atrocious coronavirus press gatherings
at like four o'clock or five o'clock every day and
the White House actually had to pull them. The more
the American people see of him, the more the Trump
(07:29):
people are going to have to figure out how to
run a campaign without him. And that's what happened in
twenty twenty. And he's going to be absolutely appalling at
the debate. He's crazier than ever before.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
And I think the way that the Biden campaign.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
Can take advantage of that is to continue to needle
him leading up to that debate, and for Biden to
needle him really that debate. You know, I think the
American people just need to see the crazy again, and
I don't think it's going to take that much.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
I think they're going to.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
See more of it now that the trial is over.
The trial actually that protected him by giving people something
else to talk about other than how crazy he was.
So there's a question of, oh, we did this witness
say that, Oh is this witness going to testify to that,
Oh are the charges there?
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Blah blah blah.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
You know, he's got to actually talk to the American
people now, and he is more incoherent than ever and
he's crazy whatever, And I think that.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
That's going to make the big difference.
Speaker 4 (08:22):
And as far as you know the future of Republicanism,
I mean, you know, as I've said to you many times,
it's just it has to be.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Beaten and it will be beaten.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
And what's going to happen this time around is there's
really not going to be much of a Republican party
left Trump music selections and you have you know that
the party is on multiple levels, that there's the state
level it's falling apart at the various state organization levels
in Michigan, for example, but basically at each other's throats,
the relative normans and the psychos, and the same as
(08:53):
in Arizona.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
It's happening all around the country.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
These state organizations are foundering because they are being taken
over by.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
The lowest extreme and and I don't mean extreme in.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
Some ideological sense that sort of gives them a little
too much credit to they actually believe in something which
is nihilistic at the national level, is basically systematically destroying
a national party. And the way he's doing that is
he's basically taking it, moved it to Palm Beach, and
he's merged it with his campaign. And we all know
what happens when campaigns and bring campaigns and particularly losing ones.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Or if you have a winning campaign, then.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
Maybe you could create a political organization like you know,
Organizing for America.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
But even Obama had problems doing that.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
Actually, even at Obama, even Organizable for America had problems
like that. Well, what happens to political campaign basically is
everybody goes their separate ways.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
It disappears.
Speaker 4 (09:46):
So if you merge a national political party structure personally,
you move it from Washington to Florida, then you merge
it with a temporary structure that a campaign is a
pop up store based very expensive one, but it's a
pop up store. And then what happens on November sixth
after they lose because the way there's can be no
(10:08):
functional Republican Party by the end of next year, Donald
Trump loses its selection. You know, it's going to be
very important what happens next. Among sensible people and the
right and the center who don't want to be Democrats,
this is their chance.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
To actually create something in value.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
Whether it's a can function without sort of the crazies,
because the crazies.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
They're just too many of them out there now. Whether
we can have.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
A functional conservative, center right party, I don't think that's
an open question, but it's not going to be the
Republican Party. They're just not going to be a functional
Republican party come next year.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Do you think that Trump will be able to sort
of woo back these big donors. We've certainly seen some
of them come back. And also what do you think
is going on there, like when people who are theoretically
known as you know, I'm thinking of all those sort
of Steve Schwartzman types like make it make sense the
a couple.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
Of things that are going to on their's one those
people are they don't understand politics that well. Secondly, all
they care about is, you know, taxes and regulation, and
they just convinced themselves that no.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Matter what, Donald Trump is better.
Speaker 4 (11:13):
Than the alternative, which isn't really true for reasons I
could separately get into.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
And third is they're afraid he's going to win and
they don't want to be on his bad side. That's
a very important one.
Speaker 4 (11:24):
And then to go back to the second point, you know,
they think that somehow they're going to be better off
under a Trump administration than under a Biden administration. They're
just failing to consider the effect of the political system
and the effect of Trump on the political system, and
how that will in turn impact economic because I think
that if you have I mean the reason why I
(11:44):
do think they're not wrong in many ways we're overregulated, not.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
We're underregulated in some ways. That we're overregulated in many ways.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
And I generally think lower taxes are better than higher taxes,
except when you're running among these nephysites.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
But let's set that aside.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
If Donald's is elected, we're going to have a political
system petering on the edge of complete and utter chaos
because this country is going to become, i think, pretty
much ungovernable. And that's a fundamental reason why the American
economy is the shortness of the world. Is that because
you know, for all its faults, we have a stable
political system.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
We're not going to have a.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Stable political system if he's elected, and we're going to
see human and financial capital flight the likes of which
we have not seen in this country and ever. So
that's why I think these people are being very, very
very shortsighted. But I also do think, you know, they
don't understand that, they don't understand any of this. They
just look at things very very narrowly, and they don't
(12:41):
look at history, and they don't look at the second
order results, even though that that's what they would look
at if they were running making a business decision, an
actual business decisions. And I also think that they're just
you know, there is a degree to which these people
are terrified of Trump. They don't want to be singled out.
Is the people who are asked to him money and
then did not and men be preceded enemies of Trump
(13:04):
because Trump will seek for men. There are a bunch
of different things going on there.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
George Conway, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Spring us here.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
And I bet you are trying to look fashionable, So
why not pick up some fashionable all new Fast Politics merchandise.
We just opened a news store with all new designs
just for you. Get t shirts, hoodies, hats, and top
bags to grab some head to fastpolitics dot com. Congresswoman
(13:38):
Mikey Cheryl represents New Jersey's eleventh congressional district. Welcome back
to Fast Politics, congress Woman.
Speaker 5 (13:47):
Cheryl, Well, thank you so much. It's great to be back.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
It's going to get me too upset to even ask
the question, but needless to say, Justice Thomas we Knew
had some conflicts in his home life, mainly his wife's
involvement in Stop the Steal.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
And then now we learn.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
That Justice Alito, it's basically the real housewives of the
Supreme Court. Talk to me about your theory the case.
Speaker 5 (14:16):
Well, the case is that here we have Supreme Court
justices acting incredibly unethically, and it's so offensive to me
as an almost lifetime public Sermont and It's so many
of the jobs I've held, whether it was in the
military or for the Department of Justice, at the US
Attorney's Office, we were always held to a standard of
(14:36):
not just ensuring we weren't committee acts of impropriety. But
it wasn't just impropriety, it was the appearance of impropriety.
Because that's the high standard you need to hold yourself
to as an elected official or as a public servant,
because you are representing to the public the institution you serve,
and they need to know that you are doing so
(14:59):
faithfully and that you are doing so in a way
that is best serving the public, not your own personal
and self interest. And you look at the justices, you
look at Alito, you look at Thomas, and they are
doing anything but I mean this RV and the money
and the flights for Alito and just you know, the payouts.
(15:19):
Really and then you see, as you mentioned Justice Thomas's wife,
and then you saw these flags at both of Alito's house,
one the stop feel the Christian white Nationalist flag. I mean,
these are people that are supposed to decide cases without bias,
and it didn't occur to Justice Alito, for example, that
that would be seen as incredibly biased. It's really mind boggling.
(15:43):
And so what this legislation does is to first of all,
give people some ethical training, which they seem to be
in dire need of, and to explain to some of
our justices what it means to serve in that office
and what the public expects from them.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
There is right.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Now no formal binding ethics code for the Supreme Court.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
They sort of crafted one ad hoc.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
It's not like if you work for a Supreme Court
justice when there's a real ethics code.
Speaker 5 (16:11):
They're sort of self policing at this point, which is
going about as well as one might suspect. And so
that's why this legislation also has an independent investigative unit
that files a report a standard that again most of
us are happy to be held to. That is what
we are trying to accomplish here, to really help restore
(16:34):
faith in our Supreme Court.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Right, and that makes sense. So how would you do
that and how would this work? And also I'm glad
you're trying anything.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
You can.
Speaker 5 (16:44):
Thank you so much because you know, I think it's
so important that we engage on this. You know, we've
seen some really upsetting outcomes. In the Court that seems
to have become very partisan, very political, very results oriented,
and so over time you've seen decisions that fel wildly
out of step with a transparent democracy and with the
(17:05):
views of the American people. And by then I'm talking
about the Citizens United decision, the DC versus Heller decision,
and the way that the Court has almost worked in
every way to make it impossible to do even some
of the minimal work of gun safety as we see
our children slaughtered across the nation. And I think the
one that we have seen the most evidence of being
completely out of step with the American people is certainly
(17:27):
the overturning of Row. When we sub Donald Trump building
a court with the express intent of overturning Row. And
now we've seen in the reddest states in the nation
this pushback against these terraconian laws. That shows why it's
so needed. I think that we have a court that's
held to higher ethical standards, and that the public understands
(17:49):
better how the court understands and the justices understand their
own responsibilities to the public right.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
And also the Supreme Court is radically remaking the kind
in all different ways. And they have two abortion cases
on the docket that are coming out this month. I mean,
you know, it's not like they aren't just swinging for
the fences, right. A lot of the cases they're taking,
you know, are trying to really dismantle the administrative state.
Speaker 5 (18:15):
Yeah, I would call them really radical. To see, for example,
the two abortion cases we're seeing before the court, it
just gives credence to what I've seen in this constant
attack on women's freedoms and women's health, the constant attack
on reproductive freedom and the wearable race to the bottom
in some of the states that have implemented draconian abortion bands.
(18:38):
And now you see these attempts at doing so nationwide.
So this myth of press Stone case and the discussion
in the remarks there and how Alito's brought up for
example Comstock, this is all the Heritage Foundation playbook for
implementing a nationwide abortion ban. And we've got to act now.
(19:00):
Example with Amtala, the Amtala case, the Emergency Medical Treatment
and Labor Act, this is a case where in putting
out regulations based on INTALA, the administration has said, you
can provide an abortion for the health of the mother
if you have a woman coming to your emergency room
who's suffering from a miscarriage and hemorrhaging. You can provide
(19:22):
care for that woman, which often involves an abortion of
the dead fetus so that she does not get a
horrible infection and can have children again. And if you
think I'm being a little dramatic about this, we are
seeing case after case after case of is like Texas,
of women who have suffered just this, and we have
Idaho on the other side of this, state of Idaho
(19:43):
saying no, it's only in the death of the mother.
It's only if a woman is dying that you can
provide an abortion. So let's imagine a doctor put in
the situation knowing that that person will go to jail. Well,
they're not making the decision, which is why we've seen
women being medevacked out of Idaho at an alarming rate.
Imagine you're hemorrhaging and you're being metevacked because a doctor
(20:05):
refuses to make a decision on your care in your
own emergency room. So this is what we're fighting against
in these court cases. And this is how far out
of step this court is with the American public.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Yeah, they're going to push back on any kind of
ethics standard. But theoretically, say they were saying, Republicans, how would.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
You pass this? How could you do this?
Speaker 1 (20:27):
I mean again, you have to fight, because the more
you fight, the more you move the Oberton window towards
actual self policing and real accountability for the judiciary, which
has to exist. But I'm just curious, like, in an
ideal world where Republicans were normal and they didn't think
of the Supreme Court as a completely partisan exercise, how
(20:48):
would you create this bill and get a past.
Speaker 5 (20:50):
In an ideal world where Republicans were normal, I would
have found a Republican co sponsor of this piece of legislation.
We would have gotten other members on both sides of
the Aisle to co sponsor it, and then we would
have gotten it asked on suspension because in an ideal world,
most people would understand that this is completely egregious conduct
(21:11):
by our Supreme Corport that is unacceptable. And I say
suspension because you don't even need a rule, but you
do need tons of votes for it. So we would
just get tons of votes on both sides of the
pass it over to the Senate. They would see that mandate,
they would pass and send it to the President. I mean,
that would be ideally what we've seen. But now when
we're in a world where as long as you are
going to be a vote to take away rights from women,
(21:33):
as long as you are going to do everything you
can to implement a nationwide abortion ban in our Supreme Court,
then no Republican is going to hold you accountable for
much of anything else, as far as I can tell exactly.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
I was happy to see the Senate is talking about hearings,
and I know Sheldon white House is anxious to get
some hearings going, and hopefully you'll have a partner in
Dick Durbin. Can you talk to us about the contraception Amendment,
which is another idea that's both happening in the Senate
and in the Congress at the same time, and you're working.
Speaker 5 (22:04):
On There's a lot of stuff that we're working on
right now related to the courts, related to the ethics
of the court, but also related to a lot of
these abortion laws. That it's not just coming from the
Court where they're trying to implement these nationwide abortion mans
but certainly coming from a lot of legislators. The area
that I've been focused on most recently is the National
(22:27):
Defense Authorization Act. Because when we see these attacks on
women across the country. I'm hearing from women in New Jersey,
for example, Look, I'm not I'm pregnant. I'm not going
to go to my headquarters in Texas while I'm pregnant,
or I'm hearing from people in blue states. I'm in
law school and I'm not going to take jobs in
certain cities because I might start my family in the
(22:47):
next several years and I don't want to have horrible healthcare,
reproductive healthcare. So I think that's horrible that here, as
a woman in the United States of America, you can
only live in certain places and expect to get decent
reproductive healthcare and dangering your life if you go to
certain cities. That's horrible. But even worse to me is
the plight of many of our military women who actually
(23:10):
don't even have that option. Because when the military says,
you know, we need you to go to flight school
in Pensacola, Florida, as I did, or we need you
to go to flight school in Corpus Christi, Texas as
I did, you don't get a choice. And we have
over one hundred and forty thousand troops station in Texas.
They have their families with them who are getting medical
care in that area, many of whom may have children
(23:32):
on the base or in the area, and Texas ranks
forty ninth in the nation right now with over one
hundred and forty thousand troops station, they're forty ninth in
the nation. As far as reproductive healthcare, a lot of
the legislation I'll be introducing next week for the Defense
Act is trying to, for example, strip some of the
language in Title ten, which governs our bases about not
(23:55):
being able to provide abortion care on our basis, to
provide education to both the doctors who change bases about
what the landscape is for reproductive healthcare in that state
and what is different from the state law and what
you can provide on base and give that same education
to women. Also putting Amtala type language into Title ten.
(24:17):
If I can't strip out some of the other bad
what I would call like Hidak type language, which is
entitled I can't strip that out, getting Atala language in
so that it's not just life of the mother, because
right now you can only provide an abortion on a base.
If it's the life of the mother, or rape or incest,
so we need at least the health of the mother
in there so we can better protect service women and
(24:38):
give them basic care. So we have this whole kind
of platform of abortion legislation that we need to introduce
to protect service women across the country. But you know,
with the Republican majority in the House, much of this
is I think going to be on the backs of
my Senate colleagues to carry it. So while I'm pushing
(24:59):
this legislation now so that whatever the Supreme Court comes
out with with respect to this and tall upcase or
the Mythipreston FDA case, we're writing legislation now to meet that.
And we'll be working closely with our colleagues in the
Senate so that we can provide some real leadership here
on the way forward, because we are seeing a tax
on reproductive healthcare and we have got to do more
(25:21):
to fight back. I mean, this is really unacceptable, Molly.
I don't know how you felt that when Roe was overturned.
I felt awful. But then when people started saying next,
they're coming after IVF, Next, they're coming after contraception, I thought,
no way, no way. I mean, my whole life is
built on the ability to choose one and how to
have my family. My grandmother had eight kids. I would
not be in Congress I had eight kids, right, I mean,
(25:42):
so threatening, the whole thing, And yet that's where we
are just two years later. We are not doing enough
in this space.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
What I've been really shocked by is the level of
denial that even normal people have greeted this with. So
I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.
Thank you so much, congresswoman.
Speaker 5 (26:00):
It is always great talking to you guys. And shout
out to Jesse from Montclair. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Angelo Karasone is the CEO of Media Matters. Welcome back, Angelo,
Thanks for having me give us a little fill in
since we last talked to you. Did the bad guys win?
I feel like the bad guys won.
Speaker 6 (26:25):
With context? And that's a big question.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
They came after you talk us through what happened at
Media Matters. And you are the head of Media Matters.
Just for those who are a little out of you know,
read in. Media Matters is a wildly successful media monitoring organization.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
You guys watch Fox News so we don't have to.
Speaker 7 (26:47):
Yeah, and we do a lot of you know, obviously
a ton of research and tracking, and we do a
lot of investigative reporting, and that's you know, a big
part of what we are designed to do is to
sort of unwind the damage that the right wing echo
chamber has done since like the nineties, right, And so
you know, we're about twenty years old now, and we're
in a particularly unique moment because everything is sort of
(27:09):
up in the air in the right wing medium. And yeah,
and obviously we know we made a lot of big
enemies over the years, gone back and Tuber Carlson and
Bill O'Reilly and the Murdocks and now so yeah, I
mean basically, the short of it is that obviously everybody
knows that X has increased. It's the extremism. You know,
they've loosened the rules. The anti Semitism obviously was on
the rise on the platform. Advertisers for various reasons, had
(27:33):
left the platform when Elon must took over and continued
to leave the platform last summer, they you know, X
came out and said, hey, we are releasing some new
tools for advertisers. Your ads are never going to appear
alongside this kind of extremist content.
Speaker 6 (27:46):
You don't have to worry. You're never going to be embarrassed.
Speaker 7 (27:48):
And one of our you know, because we do research
and investigative reporting, one of the things that happened is
that we started publishing content showing that in fact, whatever
system X was promising was working wasn't operating as it
says it was, and in fact, adds for pro Hitler
accounts and Nazi content was appearing alongside major advertisers and
(28:08):
you know, and the subtreameous content. So that's basically what happened,
is that we started to sort of chip away at
this notion that they were improving the platform, and that
also happletical inside of the same week that Musk had
endorsed that what sort of supremacist great replacement theory, right,
and a bunch of advertisers left in that time period,
and he threatened to sue us and then followed through
(28:30):
on it. And part of the reason he followed through
on it, looks like is because as soon as he
threatened to sue us, everyone came out of the woodwork.
Speaker 6 (28:35):
Glenn Beck and Tucker Crosson and Megan Kelly.
Speaker 7 (28:37):
Laura Logan, I mean, anyone that we've held accountable of
the years, the guy that runs Rumble, which is an
increasing sort of place of right wing misinformation. They all
came out and said, the best thing you can do
is destroy Media Matters. And so what he did was
file lawsuit against us.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
And he's always a person who wants to make other
right wing people happy.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
That's kind of his thing, of course.
Speaker 7 (28:58):
I mean that's part of this read his his own
red Pillow journey, right, is that he's actually a pretty
vivid example of how some of the feedback loops online
can radicalize not just.
Speaker 6 (29:07):
People, but in particular young people.
Speaker 7 (29:09):
It says a lot about the way his mind works
that you know, he's compared more to say, a person
in puberty than like, you know, fully formed adult. But
basically what he did is he suit us in the
North District of Texas. So you know, Media Matters is
a DC based organization Twitter where now x is a
Nevada based corporation that operates in California.
Speaker 6 (29:26):
But he's students in the North District of.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Texas because jurisdiction shopping and is this the Matthew Cosmaric District.
Speaker 6 (29:33):
No, but it's similar.
Speaker 7 (29:34):
It has similar sets of sort of judges and in particular,
it's one of the few places where there aren't slap protections,
which are those like strategic lawsuits that if you file,
you get you know, you can get damages if you
sort of engage in one of these types of you know,
litigation design to just bury people. It's one of the
few places that doesn't sort of protect against that. And so,
but he didn't just stop there. What he did is
(29:55):
then he sued us in Ireland and then threatened to
us in some other places. And in the core of
doing this, Steven Miller, former Trumpe advisor, sort of popped
up and said, hey, you shouldn't just stop there, you
should make it and encourage Republican state attorney generals to
launch investigations into medium matters. And that's what he did.
He then sort of pressured, he started publicly pressuring state
(30:17):
ag is to do it. Ken Paxton and the Texas
Attorney General and Andrew Valley, the Missouri Attorney General, each
launched their own investigations. And what we did, which I
think is really significant and I'm pretty proud of it,
is that one of the ways these things play out
is that as state ag launches an investigation, you sort
of negotiate how much information you're going to give. Eventually,
(30:37):
if they're not happy, they go to their own state
court and they get the court to enforce a ruling
against you to sort of hand over even more information.
And what they were looking for was all types of
things about our sources, how we do our work, our
funding and donor information, which Musk has promised to sort
of retaliate against all. Obviously it's all designed to sort
(30:57):
of destroy us. Instead of waiting for that, we sued
Ken Paxton first, and we got a ruling against him
in DC Court, which is a significant ruling because it's
sort of a new this is sort of new tactics
that the right wing is deploying, and we sort of
launched sort of a counter offensive, which was to say, wait,
you can't deploy these new tactics. Here's here's why federal
courts should intervene in these types of investigations, because they're
(31:21):
very clearly intended to stightful reporting. So we won that,
so we got an injunction against Ken Paxton. We're currently
dealing with Andrew Bailey in Missouri and I think I
think we will prevail there as well. But where we
are fighting that out in federal court. He sued us
in his own state court and said, hey, I don't
have to file the rules here because.
Speaker 6 (31:39):
Media Matters is going to break the laws. So I'm
going to skip.
Speaker 7 (31:42):
The couple steps in the process so that they can't
run to federal court and get a federal judge to
prevent me from doing this. That argument hasn't fully played
out the way that he had hoped so, but it's
just it hasn't taken a little bit of time to
sort of sort that out. So in terms of the
bad guys winning there, I don't think they won there.
They obviously cost us a bunch of money. I know
we have to fight this out, but in the ex litigation,
(32:04):
you know, part of the way these complex litigations play
out is they cost to fortune, you know, especially if
you are designed if you're not hoping to win money
from it, which obviously these not. If you're just hoping
to cause maximum damage to the target, what you basically
do is you, you know, you slow roll the process.
You fight about every little thing, typically things that lawyers
would sort out out of court, you sort of fight
(32:26):
about them. You force briefings, you force judges to have
to weigh in on them. All that stuff costs money.
That is the strategy is to bleed us try and
I think, you know, the one thing that I will
say about Medium matters is what we do is relatively unique,
and we make the worst enemies and over time, I
think what we have to think about is, because this
is going to be a sustained fight, how do we
make sure that our twentieth year is not where we end?
(32:48):
And that means that we sort of gear up for
what's going to be a very long halve fight. He
is going to incinerate cash to destroy us, and we
have to be sort of mindful of that and Gerd
and so one of the effects is that, you know,
we started to reorganize our step.
Speaker 6 (33:02):
We laid off of about a dozen people about.
Speaker 7 (33:04):
Two weeks ago, which is really sad, and a lot
of that is thinking about, okay, how do we make
ourselves sustainable for the long call? And what I'll just
wrap on saying here it's not entirely self interested. It's
the truth is that it isn't just that he's suing us.
It isn't just that the ages are doing it. The
part that's the So what aside from the try to
take out a very effective opponent, is that they are
(33:24):
actually writing a new playbook for how you sort of
destroy and stifle reporting, takeout critics or any sort of
organization that does work that they don't like. And it
isn't just that they're using traditional tools. They are writing
a new playbook sort of. There's one two punches between
you know, filing these lawsuits, including in international jurisdictions, which
(33:44):
just burns money, and then also getting state attorney generals
to speed run discovery and sort of write it flows
through your documentation does make it a lot harder for
any organization to survive those attacks. And that is sort
of a big alarm bell. And thankfully it's just my opinion.
I mean, US Press Freedom Tracker, which is one of
the big journalism washdogs, counts this as one of their
(34:05):
big cases to track because of the way that it's
playing out. It will sort of be a little bit
of a canary of the coal mine for how Monoga
World and the far right deal with news outlets and
truthfully other organizations. So we're sort of a little bit
of the tip of the spear here in how they're
deploying new tactics.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Yeah, the idea that.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
The ages of these two states are basically Elon's personal
lawyers is kind of scare.
Speaker 7 (34:32):
There are things that are really disturbing about it, which
is that it's not like they just did this because
they saw the news.
Speaker 6 (34:37):
He was posting about it on x on his platform.
Speaker 5 (34:40):
And then Andrew Bailey.
Speaker 7 (34:42):
Who himself is he's the Missori attorney general who's in
a heated primary right now, he had sort of talked
about the investigation, sent some letters, but he never took
the next step. And then after we won the injunction
against Ken Paxton, he still hadn't taken that next step yet.
Speaker 6 (34:56):
He was just talking.
Speaker 7 (34:57):
And then Elon Musk does a Twitter space with him
and a few days later he launches into a lawsuit
against us. He sort of takes that next step, right,
So there's some commonalities in who their lawyers are, you know,
and some overlap there and who they're using to defend
themselves and the cases against us. And it is very
unsettling because he basically was able to send and leverage
(35:18):
state power to attempt to dig through what he had
said he wanted was our donor information because obviously because
we're a nonprofit. We raise money from you know, individuals foundations,
because one of the ways that you could undermine us,
right is you forced us to spend so much money
that we don't have. The other end of it is
that you try to cut off the supply. And he's
been pretty brazen about this. This isn't a conjecture. And
(35:39):
so you need that information though to figure out how
to cut off the supply. And one way to do
that is, he hopes, is to litigation. That's very tough.
Actually that information is protected, and conservatives have fought very
hard to make sure that information is protected.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
Right. Incredible irony here is that there are.
Speaker 6 (35:58):
But then you leverage state attorney gense to do that.
It's a shortcut.
Speaker 7 (36:01):
And I think even though this stuff gets complicated with
the legal side, but that's where it becomes really disturbing
for any organization, right. You know, one of the things
that you see play out with these state ag fights
with reproductive health right and trans issues is that they're
going after some of the people that benefit from those
services right now, but what they've escalated in our case,
and it seems to be largely or entirely at the
(36:23):
behest of elon Musk is to also go one step
further and say, all right, well let's start rifling through
and figuring out who's.
Speaker 6 (36:29):
Funding this so that we can then go after that.
Speaker 7 (36:31):
And that is you know, obviously we're fighting as vigorously
and that was partly why we sort of took those
proactive steps to fight the ages. But that is a
new strategy on their part, and it isn't just that
he is. You know that he's able to post a
couple posts on Twitter and people jump for it, and
that that does not bode well.
Speaker 6 (36:51):
For where we go from here.
Speaker 7 (36:53):
If somebody like Musk or Musk even just Musk can
continue to direct state ags to go after basically any
of us credit, this is will be the new nor honestly,
and I think when we look at the landscape, part
of it was how do we engage with this? And
I think we saw this fight as not just one
that like we have to win for a variety of reasons,
including to be miss effective, but also we have to
(37:13):
make sure that they're not writing a new playbook in
front of us that we didn't just sort of like
let sort of get sort of refined and then deployed
against other organizations and other newsrooms, and that is definitely,
to me, the bigger thing that's taking place here.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
So let's just have.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
A minute here to talk about you cover conservative media,
which has now, like all other media, kind of fragmented.
It's funny because in twenty sixteen, Fox was sort of
the place you'd get mentioned dun Tucker Carlton Show, and
you'd get death threats and it would be you know,
he had so much power. It feels like he doesn't
(37:50):
have the same kind of power, even though he has
his own little empire.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Is that right?
Speaker 1 (37:55):
And I mean it feels like all those media outlets
are much more diffuse, and that's true on the left too,
But I'm just curious if you could weigh in on that.
Speaker 7 (38:04):
I think you're totally right, and I think that, to me,
the most significant part about the moment that we're in
right now is that we haven't had a moment like
this in more than thirty years. And by that, I
mean this is the first presidential election in thirty years
where Rush Limbaugh is not the single largest get out
the vote operation.
Speaker 6 (38:21):
First presidential election thirty years.
Speaker 7 (38:23):
It's hard to emphasize or understood just how significant that
is for our politics, our culture, our democracy, and it's
more than just limbo. It's that what happened in the
nineties is that you had the combination of talk radio
and the birth of Fox News, and those things together
created sort of a center of gravity. So that to
your point, this diffuse right ring media, and there was
(38:43):
plenty of it, it didn't just function as a diffuse
right ringmedia. It actually was able to be converted into
an echo chamber. When you had a center of gravity,
you could sort of, you know, drive a narrative through
that media apparatus and it could echo, reverberate, and that
of course has transformative power. Your arms are is on
poin in that right now, there's no center of gravity.
It's a chorus without a conductor. And that's partly why
(39:05):
there's so much political chaos, you know, saying with the
speaker fights, it's partly why there isn't a single place
you could go to that has agenda setting power on
the right. And when you look, you know, when you
look at the fights like Tucker's weaker Candice almost got
fired from Daily Wire, you know there all their numbers
are down. It is a particularly unique moment because they're
all trying to resort and reshuffle, and so they're simultaneously
(39:27):
disoriented and disruptive, but they're also more blood thirsty and scarier.
And I think that tension is sometimes hard to reconcile
because they're both simultaneously less of a threat in terms
of their ability to operationalize misinformation disinformation, but they're also
more of a threat because they're increasingly building organizing power
on what used to be considered with fringes.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Right, and they're also desperate for the viewers.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
So when we look at the Is trial verdicts, their
general feeling was Trump is stronger.
Speaker 3 (39:59):
Now.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Look so what you've done, Libs, you've done it now? Right?
Speaker 7 (40:03):
Yes, the net effect of all of this is to
radicalize even more people. So I don't know if you
remember diamond and silk. Yes, diamond dyed silk is still around.
Silk today joined started a militia, a militia with a
former bounty under And this is all in response to
the child So the reason I start there is that
the snabshot is that they're increasingly getting people into this
(40:23):
like more justifiable vigilanteism and sort of preparing for more
extreme tactics, and the way that they did that was
by both undermining the legitimacy of the entire process, but
then also sort of whipping people up into a frenzy
and getting them to believe that it's it's increasingly time
to not just take matters into their own hands. But
(40:43):
in the short term, the most significant thing they can
do is intensified their support for Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
This is a question I've been asking everyone because nobody's
really been able to answer it. Your a normal suburban
mom in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Where are you getting your news?
Speaker 7 (40:59):
You're getting in is sort of indirectly from I say, TikTok.
But it's not just that you're getting it from TikTok.
You're getting it downstream from TikTok if you're not on it,
So you'll see it on your Facebook wheels a couple
of days or a couple weeks later, or you'll get
it secondhand through your own sort of social networks or friends,
your word of mouth communication, and that's where you're getting
it from largely. And I think that's sometimes not reflected
(41:21):
in the polls, and that they all think Donald Trump
is bad. They think the rule of law is important,
but the prevailing sentiment in those circles and those narratives
putting us out out of the polls. Say, but just
if you look at where people consume, how they get
their information, that that audience, they basically think that everybody's corrupt, right, right,
So like Nuance, and so it's like, well all politicians
are corrupt, so all right, you know, and then they
(41:44):
immediately pivot back to how this affects their own personal life,
and that is the core economic issues, and that is
mostly center around groceries.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
Right, if you're running the Biden campaign, where are you
going to try to get your message through?
Speaker 7 (41:59):
I would be almost entirely in non political programming, So
I would be having urga speaking to people that are
talking about crime, true crime, much.
Speaker 6 (42:08):
More local content.
Speaker 7 (42:09):
I would be almost doing no national news, no national programming,
and I would not be hiring like major influencers. I'd
be really working with micro influencers, so people that are
promit in their community, sort of engaging more about not
only things that have been done, but sort of talking
a little bit more about say you know that it's
the grocery stores that are actually sort of inflating to
Bill's somewhat artificially, sort of shifting that back.
Speaker 6 (42:31):
I would not be doing much national.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Oh interesting, Thank you so much, Angelo, Thank.
Speaker 3 (42:36):
You no more perfectly.
Speaker 2 (42:41):
Jesse Cannon, my junk fest.
Speaker 7 (42:44):
What are you seeing here with the Washington Post in
my workplace the Daily Beast.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
Both the Washington Post and the Daily Beast are going
to have editors who come from British conservative media. Too
soon to know what that means, but certainly a little
bit scary, and as both of us came up through
the Daily Beast, it's pretty heartbreaking to us.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
And that, my friends, is my moment of fuckery.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
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.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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