March 8, 2023 • 43 mins
The New York Times Luke Broadwater details Jim Jordan’s comical missteps heading the committee investigating the “weaponization” of the federal government. Former Twitter employee Haraldur "Halli" Thorleifsson shares his story of becoming the latest victim of Elon Musk's villainous rage. Plus, James Downie of MSNBC analyzes Ron DeSantis' thought process behind running against Donald Trump and his belief that he can win.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discuss the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. And De Santas's latest appointee thinks tapwater
makes people gay. We have a mind blowing show New
York Times Luke Broadwater. We'll talk to us about Jim
Jordan's comical missteps heading a committee investigating the quote unquote
(00:22):
weaponization of the federal government. Some would say he's weaponizing
the weaponization. Then we'll talk to former Twitter engineer Hallie,
who is most famous person in Iceland and also had
a very public fallout with his former boss yesterday on
the Twitter Elon Musk. First, we have MSNBC columnist James Downey.
(00:46):
Welcome to Fast Politics, James, thank you for having me.
We are in De Santas's publication week because if you
can believe it, he's not technically running for president yet.
He is just innocently promoted his book, The Courage to
Be Free, The Courage to Be Free. Yes, that a
lot of time was spent, a lot of people were
(01:07):
I'm sure a lot of people made a lot of
mine to consult over that incredibly inspiring title. The focus
grouping alone of the courage to be free. I mean,
I guess what's the opposite of the courage to be free?
The cowardice to not be free? I mean, only those
liberals opposed freedom? Right, exactly? Why do we hate freedom? Basically?
(01:27):
It seems as if you've read this book, yes, much
to my chagrin, making you probably one of only a
very very small group to read a Republican book like this. Yeah,
And honestly, I've read one or two others, you know,
maybe eight years ago when he had everybody and their
(01:49):
uncle running for the Republican nomination. It seemed remarkably de
Santis's book is actually one of the more readable ones,
which says a whole lot. It was still a bit
of a slogged get through, to say the least. It
pretty much covers, you know, it gives you exactly the
kind of biography you'd be expecting, touching on his upbringing
and going all the way through, you know, sort of
everything sanitized right up through his times Forlorida governor. Right,
(02:13):
And it's actually pretty interesting because I mean, I don't
know if this is interesting, but I've been told, I've
been assured by people involved in this process that De
Santis actually wrote this book, I could believe that it
reads similar to a book he definitely wrote, which is
his first book, which he wrote before write about it
(02:35):
was over a decade ago, and actually which you also read.
I've only read the excerpts that are available online. It's
actually very hard to get a poppy of and that's
actually by design, right, I would think so. And you
go back to articles about it from a couple of
years ago, and there are links to the Amazon page,
and that has since been pulled down. I don't know
if maybe there's a plan to reissue it, as has
(02:55):
happened sometimes with these books, but there are copies circulating around,
and it does from what I have read, it does
read similar to it. That's not necessarily a credit to him.
But on the other hand, I respect it. I mean,
you probably know this mobaby from you know, like a
lot of times when you see a buyeline by a
politician that's been written, you know, that's been written by
their staffers. So on a certain level, I do respect
(03:15):
the politician who actually you know, takes their time, you know,
actually puts in the work to do it themselves. I mean,
I guess theoretically. I mean, what I think is interesting
and we'll get to this in a minute, but there
has been sort of a desire to memory haul the
Ron de Santist back benchro congressman. Oh no, for sure.
I mean you start with entitlements. They basically entitlements. What
(03:39):
I mean, they don't. They barely appear in this book,
with Donald Trump pushing really hard to make him the
what was it, the wheelchair over the cliff guy, I
think is what Trump is describing him as clearly to
Santists when he, when he or whoever was writing this,
did not have a good line. He doesn't really talk
about government spending that much. He doesn't talk really that
(04:00):
much about his time in Congress at all. You know,
the biggest thing he talks about is a failed push
to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, and that is basically, Look,
you know, Trump did this later, but I wanted to
do it first. That's that's what he focuses on. It's
interesting to me because DeSantis is such a he has
now become this sort of Republican warshack right the donor
(04:22):
class cannot get enough of him. Rupert Murdoch delighted by
him even the sort of smart and Ie Smarten quotes.
But those right wing, the thinking class of the GOP
has decided he's their man. But really, really nobody knows
who he is. There's a lot that's changed about him
(04:43):
over the years, for sure. And I think one reason
he's very popular with the donor class is that when
you read the book, you get a sense that America
or well because the conclusion, the title of his conclusion
is literally make America Florida, and in his view, Florida
is all ready great. And I think that's the biggest difference.
I think that's one of the big differences between him
(05:04):
and Trump is that he basically feels everything's fine, everything's
going great. You know, we've got this conservative Supreme Court
doing all their stuff and that's awesome. That just needs
to be protected from the evil liberals. And I think
that message appeals a lot more to the rich donors
and to the rupert Murdocks of the world, in addition
to obviously the many other problems with Donald Trump. I
(05:26):
think that message appeals to them more than Donald Trump's
saying the big and powerful have screwed you over right.
I think that they really like this idea of this
guy who's basically his the extent of his because I
read so Bernie Sanders has a book out a couple
weeks ago, and I read them about the same time,
and there's some passages into Sanders's book that you could
sort of you could almost drop into Sanders's book that
(05:47):
are like play at populism, but they're in an entirely
different context. They're just about culture war. They're just about
things like Disney. It's not about bankruptcy, healthcare bankruptcies and
price of insulin and things like that. It's not talking
about inequality or anything. The only problems in America into
Santis's world are liberal culture. That's it. Everything else is great, right.
(06:09):
I mean it is interesting because if you listen to
a Trump speech, Trump will say, like everything is horrible.
It's a very different than that Stephen Miller. We're all
gonna die and the world is awful. Yeah, I mean
Trump is basically the world's already on fire and only
I can save you. I think it's sepack you is
something like, you know, the last several years I've been
in the hellscape. Whereas again, I think the Santis feels
(06:32):
basically everything's fine. I mean, like, you know, one example
I given my piece is that he doesn't really talk
about like the concept of job creation or government and
the economy just doesn't come up. Government is just there
to protect rich people and basically let them do what
they want. And you know, and what this turns into
practically is that you get you have. And there's been
(06:54):
reporting on this recently that he gets huge donations from
the energy industry and then lerty in his face huge
rate hikes. But in De santiss world, that's fine, that's
just what happens. That's because they're not rich, and if
they were rich, then then the government would protect them.
They should have thought about being rich. In this piece
you wrote, you talked about sort of the ways in
(07:16):
which you could theoretically beat De Santists from you know,
what are the sort of soft spots you see? So
I think again, the economy jumps out that one. You know,
if you flash back nine months ago and everyone was
talking about what happens if the economy, the economy is
going to ruin Joe Biden, things are getting real worth
and if if things do take a turn in the
(07:36):
next eighteen or so months, I mean, I think if
it becomes a campaign about the economy, this is not
a guy that has a lot of solutions there. I mean, obviously,
one area is foreign policy, which is more or less
non existent in his book. He does not talk about
the you know, the conflict in Ukraine. The extent of
his foreign policy appears to be sort of posing against communism,
(07:57):
and that's in a lot of ways more just for
Florida than it is and then more broadly the Fox
News base that will eat up anything anti communist. Again,
that's more domestic than it is international. Obviously, he doesn't
want to talk about his close relationship with donors and
how he's appointed over two hundred, well over two hundred
of them to various political boards. Obviously there's been a
(08:20):
lot of attention on what's been happening with New College,
for example. I think at least one, if not several,
of those, all the new board members he's appointing on
they're all either donors are connected to donors of his
And again I think he doesn't really see anything wrong
with that, which is why he keeps doing it. And
then I think, instead I don't really touch on the
book because it's support of a text based medium. But
I do think this is somebody. When you watch him speak,
(08:43):
the charisma just leaves the room. You know, when he's angry,
and when he's sort of up there being angry about
liberals and get into fights with reporters and stuff. I
can kind of in a twisted way, see what his
appeal is to a certain kind of voter. But outside
of that, like when I watched of his State of
the State earlier, and you just don't really you don't
(09:03):
really see it. That is the incredible thing about his
candidacy is that you have all these people who have
just gone all in before he's even done anything right.
So like Trump could get up there and be like
tiny d and they could be over. I mean there's
no you know, there's no evidence to say he's more
charismatic than Marco. If anything, he may be last absolutely,
(09:26):
you look at all of the candidates that the Republican
donors they've had, they've had an incredible clock record of
picking losers against Donald Trump, and I mean, you know
this guy, you know again they maybe they'll be right
this time. But I learned, I learned seven years ago
not to bet against Donald Trump in political terms. Bet
him to sort of fail to even meet my low
(09:47):
expectations everywhere else, but in terms of elections, right, well,
this is so interesting because I mean I had somebody
who I was talking to who was like making the
argument that De Santis is less terrible than Trump, But
I would argue that actually De Santis is much much
more focused on undermining like the First Amendment. And what's
(10:09):
your take on this? I would agree that the main
reason why Ronda Santis is the main way that he
is more of a threat is competence. I think a
president to Santist is not going to have a suddenly
bombing North Korea because Kim Jong len says something mean
about him. But I do think, on the other hand,
there are all these threats that Trump made about the
(10:30):
First Amendment, where De santists if he wants to do something,
he will. You think of all the efforts that Republicans
made to try and pass, for example, of Obamacare repeal
that failed when Donald Trump was president. I don't think
even those kinds of things would have failed with the Santist.
He has a bigger margin in Florida, but he has
a good track record of corralling legislators to do what
(10:52):
he wants, and so I think the worst case scenario
in terms of like you know, nuclear holocaust maybe less
likely under de Santists, But outside of that, I think
that he's going to be much more twisted, you know,
twisted way competent at undermining liberals. So with this book,
can you sort of figure out what the strategy DeSantis
has to be Trump is I think the strategy is
(11:16):
going to be and I think this is to get
back to what you're talking abo earlier about how the
donors don't have a great track record of picking someone
to beat Trump. I think his strategy is just going
to be out angering Trump. I think he's going to
try and rely upon and also use his and also
use his perch as Florida's governor to try and pass
(11:36):
actual laws that he can point to on the things
that they are sort of both angry about. To give
an example, just sort of this week, Florida withdrew from
the Voter Registration Compact that like allows states to share
data across state lines about like voter registration, and that
was something that Trump had complained about, and then Desantists
almost immediately then turned around and pulled the state out
(11:58):
and so that's he'll say, oh, I got something done right,
and then and then and everything else. He'll just try
to be more angry than Trump. I don't know if
it's going to work, right. I think that the sort
of X factor that Republicans are not realizing here is
that you can't elect someone who has no personality or
(12:18):
who's not charismatic. I mean, it never works historically. Yeah.
On the other hand, they did nominate Mitt Romney, I mean,
except that Mitt Romney, I feel like, and I mean
I think this can be. This is true of John
Kerry too, Like, well, they're not maybe gifted orators. There
are people who sit down in a room with John
Kerry and Mitt Romney who find them charming, whereas I'm
(12:40):
not sure that that's true for De Santis. Yeah, it's interesting.
It seems to be something consistent across both supporters and
attractors say about him is that he's not somebody who wait,
if you're sitting in a room with him, he's not
very He's just not a very personable person. Yeah, as
you said that, those kinds of people don't typically and
as president, we have the opposite end of that spectrum.
(13:03):
Currently in the White House right now. I mean that
Biden is famous for not letting anyone leave until he's
until he's best friends with them. So I have this theory.
Other people have had this theory too, but that this
is really this authoritarian tact that the Republican Party is taking,
and that is what de Santis is hoping to ride
to the White House. I mean, am I nuts or
(13:24):
do you think that's what it is? No? I think
that's a big part of it. I think that because
people really like what he's doing in Florida with legislation,
and they feel like the for example, to move with Disney,
where you know you're bringing in your own people to
point to the board that oversees their special district. I
(13:45):
think this there's there's a feeling among conservatives that that's
what they feel. It's not something I agree with, but
there's a feeling that they are under assault from liberal
soft power, whether it be through companies like Disney or
in the media or whatever. Speaking as a liberal myself,
(14:05):
if this is victory, it's a pretty pretty hollow one
for but they feel that this that that the Sanders's
tactics are the best way to fight back. Yeah, I
mean that means moving in a less democratic direction, and
so be it. I mean, it's it's a natural outgrowth.
I think of the broader sort of minoritarian approach to
politics of just like, hey, you know, we're going to
(14:26):
jerrymander the heck out of every state. And if we
you know, if that's what it takes to win sixty
percent of the you know, the state of legislature with
fifty percent of the vote or whatever, so be it.
That's just the way that, you know, that's just the
way things fall out. I think it's just a natural
next step that if you feel that you don't really
need to represent the majority, then or if the majority
(14:48):
the majority approach is illegitimate, then what's really to stop
you from moving in a more authoritarian direction. Yeah, James,
this was so interesting. I hope you'll come back. Well.
Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. Luke
Broadwater is a congressional reporter with Thin York Times. Welcome
to Fast Politics, Luke Broadwater, Hey, thanks for having me.
(15:12):
Very excited to have you. All Right, we have a
lot to discuss, but first we need to start with
this is a topic I've written about it I appreciate
its incredible stupidity. It is the subject near and dear
to my heart. So I was really pretty excited when
I read your peace on this. So this originally started
(15:32):
as a Tucker Carlson's Church committee, and it has morphed
into this Weaponization of Government Committee. Not just a little
bit about this committee and a little bit about what
you've discovered. Sure, well, you know, I guess I can
take the listeners back to sort of please getting of this.
As part of the negotiations for Kevin McCarthy to become speaker,
(15:52):
the hard right of the Republican Party, they had a
lot of big demands, but really four of them came
into being, and one of them was the creation of
this Weaponization Committee. It's designed to be a committee that's
going to investigate the federal government, specifically the Justice Department
and the FBI, with the premise and the thesis that
(16:16):
these agencies discriminate against Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, but really
anybody who might be conservative right. And so Kevin McCarthy
agrees to this demand. In response, he gets some votes,
gets to become Speaker, and one of the very first
things they do is past the creation of this Weaponization Subcommittee,
(16:37):
and they put it under the Bailey Wick of Jim
Jordan period paragraph continue. Well, in the Republican House, they
view Jim Jordan as their best investigator and that you know,
he is known for grilling people. He doesn't wear a
sports bag, you know, he talks really quick, like an
(16:59):
auctionee here. Sometimes he does prepare so he'll know and
that's actually kind of rare for some of these hearings.
I mean a lot of people don't prepare, they don't
know the material, they don't know the people's names, you know.
But he comes ready to go. And so they thought
this would be McCarthy thought this would be the perfect match.
The problem is they're having a hard time finding the
(17:22):
whistleblowers they need to prove the case. So with this
article that we put out last week, essentially they've brought
in three of their so called whistleblowers from the FBI
or former FBI agents to try to prove the case
that the bureau is biased against conservatives. And because of
(17:43):
the way the committee set up, Democrats got to sit
in on these transcribed interviews, and when the Democrats got
to cross examine these guys, basically all hell broke loose,
and they put out this three hundred page report which
we got a copy of that sort of underscored all
the failings of these so called whistleblowers. It's pretty interesting
(18:03):
because these whistleblowers, I sort of get what happened, right.
They decided that you had these Republicans who are like
everything is biased against us, sariyariyara, and then they needed
to find someone to support this thesis, and that was
where they got into trouble. But explain to us who
(18:24):
these people were. First, we should say that Jim Jordan
has promised that there will be dozens and dozens of
whistleblowers and good and so the Democrats of the first
hearing said, okay, like what are their names? Put them up,
let's let's talk to them, let's meet them. And so
they started to call some of them men. The first
is a guy named George Hill, who's retired FBI analyst
(18:47):
from Boston. Another one's named Stephen Friend, he's a former
special agent from Daytona Beach. And a third named Garrett
Boyle who's a special agent from Wichita, Kansas. Each one
of these former agent or suspended agents alleged there's wrongdoing
at the top of the FBI, and that they were
made to do things that you know, violated their conscience.
(19:11):
One guy says he was made to surveil a January
sixth in his view protester. Turns out the guy, though
was a member of the Three Percenters, owned firearms. Will
you explain what the three Percenters are for those who
are not completely read in on this. They're one of
(19:32):
the right wing militia groups that federal law enforcement has
focused on in the aftermath of the January sixth attack
on the Capitol. Many people have probably heard of the
Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers by now. Both of
those groups have been charged with US seditious conspiracy in
connection to the attack. The Three Percenters haven't been yet.
But they are in that same sort of right wing
(19:56):
world where people go to these meetings they talk about how,
you know, they need to stand up against the government.
They all carry firearms, and so federal law enforcement is
worried about these militia type groups. It's a militia group,
all right, So go on. Those are the type of
examples that they bring up, and so you know, the
(20:17):
agent will say, well, I had to surveil this guy
and he was just a January sixth protester, but he's
actually remembered this militia group. He has firearms, he was
at the Capitol when they Democrats are asking questions, more
of the story comes out, and it's not so simple
that they were, you know, the FBI was targeting somebody
for no reason. There were actually some pretty good reasons.
But big picture of the three things that I would
(20:38):
think emerged from this report are one, most of what
these guys talked about are a lot of it they
did not have first hand knowledge of. It was sort
of just hearsay things they had overheard to A lot
of this was organized by some right wing groups off
the hill, in particular an organization connected to Cash Patel,
(20:59):
who is a former top Trump official, and Cash offered
payments to some of these guys, helped coordinate their travel,
and you can see how it's organized off the hell
for them to sort of coordinate and come up with
comp with these accounts and then come into Congress and
put them forward. And the third is that when when
(21:20):
the Democrats start to look through these men's social media,
there was a lot of extreme stuff on there. I mean,
you know, calling January sixth, the setup implying some sort
of deep state conspiracy. So a lot of conspiratorial thinking
and accusations against their own agencies, which you know, you
(21:41):
could see how that could bring disrepute on the agency
and the bosses might not might might not like it. Also,
I should say that Jim Jordan has said, some of
the other people have who have not yet come in.
We're FBI agents who who have joined the protests, the
pro Trump protests on January sixth, maybe didn't go into
the capital or community violence, but you know, we're there
(22:03):
at something that turned into a turn into a riot,
an attack, an attack on the Capitol, which you could
see why the FBI would want to look into those
things and investigate them. So it just turns the stories
are not so neat and clean for the Republicans here,
and it really undercut some of their central arguments. Well,
Republicans keep going with this. I mean, clearly this was
(22:25):
so far sort of the best they had. I mean,
do you think they retreat and decide that they just
can prove it or you think they keep going. No,
They're going to keep going. I mean, if you watch
Jim Jordan go on Fox News after this, it was
as though nothing happened. They would completely ignored the Democrats report.
There is bad blood between the Republicans and the Democrats
(22:46):
on the committee. If there was any hope that this
panel would actually be like the Church Committee, which did
uncover real wrongdoing and did uncover you know, systematic abuses
like the surveiling of piece for protesters and the like,
there will probably not be a bipartisan effort to do that.
It's going to be extremely politicized and basically a messy
(23:09):
fight for two years in Congress. Now, Jim Jordan did
say that one of the goals here was to frame
up the twenty twenty four election. Donald Trump has long
alleged if the FBI is biased against him, that the
Justice Departs biased against him, that they searched his property unfairly,
and so I would expect to hear a lot of
(23:30):
cover for Donald Trump from this committee over the next
two years. This is my favorite thing that Jim Jordan
does where he says, like not even the quiet part,
like the sketchy part loud, you know, like we're just
doing this to support Donald Trump. I mean you know, yeah,
I mean yeah, you know. He said that out of
(23:52):
his own mouth is to frame up the twenty twenty
four elections. So it's pretty amazing stuff. Okay, So I
want to ask you about this, this piece you wrote
more recently and that other piece was from four days ago,
so even more recently, about what is happening with this horrendous,
(24:12):
horrendous child labor staff. I mean, just like beyond the payout,
I mean, the Times broke this. It's the kind of thing.
You know, you have like fourteen year olds working on
factory lines, you have you know, just all these undocumented
children are working in these American companies and clearly there
are people who know about it. Will you talk to
(24:33):
us a little bit about that? Yeah? Absolutely so. My
colleague Hannah dry Or did a tremendous job with this
first investigation, and basically she went around two different plants
across the country that work with some of the biggest
brands in the world and just found basically openly child
labor going on, you know, in the parking lot. You know, teenagers,
(24:54):
fourteen year olds who are working at these factories. And
many of the people that she found our migrant children,
new immigrants, many of them undocumented, who were unaccompanied miners
who have you know, we're supposed to be placed with
sponsors who would watch over them, take care of them,
(25:14):
make sure they're on the right path, and instead have
ended up into you know, exploitative situations. And I think
it was a really eye opening report. I've sort of
been following the movement on Capitol Hill in regards to this.
Already there's a bill from the Senate Democrats, led by
Brian Schatz that would raise the penalties on businesses who
(25:37):
exploit child labor. Right now, it's actually not a very
hefty fine for violating child labor laws, and you know,
he would raise it to something like six hundred thousand dollars,
which would which were hopefully deter this type of thing.
What would be interesting to see is how the Biden
administration responds to this. They did announce a crackdown where
(26:00):
they're going to put some extra resources into investigating these cases,
but it does seem like there was an internal order,
according to Hannah's reporting at HHS, to process these cases
very quickly, get these kids out with the sponsors. And
you can understand why, right it's better, It's better than
(26:21):
being a ward of the state. You're going to get
people with but if there's not the proper vetting being done,
you could end up in these in these bad situations,
I would expect Chairman Durbin and the Judiciary to haul
in some Cabinet secretaries and ask some point of questions
to see if we can't get this situation remedied. Unbelievable story,
I mean, just mind blowing. This is the kind of
thing that there's not an easy solution too. No, there's not.
(26:45):
You know, obviously, it's a problem that's gone on for decades.
But what we've seen is a really explosion in the
numbers recently, and that's really a volume issue. I mean,
during the pandemic, you didn't have a lot of immigrants
coming into the country. People weren't traveling, they were staying home,
they were afraid of dying. And now you've seen these
numbers tick up tremendously and we have all these record
(27:08):
border crossings and so as a result of that, it's
very difficult for the administration to keep up with the caseload.
And that's why I think they were trying to process
the cases so quickly. You know, there are a lot
of things that could be done. For instance, a lot
of these kids don't actually have legal representation, and there's
not really the money for it or the people who
(27:28):
are trained to do it. So you know, Congress could
allocate more money for more lawyers to represent these migrant
youth to try to make sure they don't end up
being exploited. You know, that's probably not going to happen
with the House and Republicans hands, but there are ways
that Congress could legislate this situation to make it better.
I guess we'll have to see whether there's any chance
(27:50):
that anything bipartisan happening. Seems more likely the Republicans will
probably just use this as a cudgel to beat the
Biden administration over the headwidth and not necessarily proposed any solutions. Yeah,
I think that's right. Thank you so much, Luke. This
was super interesting. I hope you'll come back absolutely. Thanks
for having me, this was fun. Halle is a former
Twitter engineer. Welcome too Fast Politics, Halle. Thank you so
(28:14):
much to be here. Molly, it's very exciting to have you.
I introduced you as the most famous person in Iceland,
maybe a slight exaggeration or now it's a very small country,
so you don't really have too much to be very
known here. So I want to ask you. You have
(28:36):
become very, very very famous in New York and in
California and on the Twitter sphere for something different, I
just want you to sort of explain just a little bit.
You're an entrepreneur, will you explain to us how you
got to Twitter. I have a background and to sign
and so I started a digital agency. It was called
(28:59):
WEEO and I ran it for about seven years, and
I'd even to see worked with a lot of big
tech companies. We had offices, three offices in the States
and then here in Iceland, and we did most of
our work with companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter as well.
So after twenty twenty, which was a very hard year
for a lot of people, I was just exhausted, and
(29:21):
we had been asked many times by both Twitter and
multiple other companies to sort of see if we weren't
wanted to sell, and I thought, I guess this is
a good time to kind of kill it and go
into a company like Twitter, which at the time was
growing very fast. Covid obviously brought a lot of growth
to a lot of these tech companies, So that's how
I came into Twitter as an acquisition. I knew you
(29:43):
had Twitter a little bit, not really, but sort of,
because there were a group of really interesting tech people
on Twitter who were involved in trying to make the
world better and it was for a time a really
great place to work. Once it was sold to this entrepreneur,
it became a very complicated price to work. Tell me
(30:03):
what you can, just explain about your position at the company,
however you're comfortable explaining it, and as little or as much.
Twitter is kind of this company that never lived up
to its potential. I think there's a lot of people
that saw that. I think Yvon saw that. I saw that.
There's there's a bunch of people that said, look, there's
this hugely influential company that is where a lot of
(30:27):
the world's decisions are discussed and often made. But in
comparison to most of it, it's competitors, it's it's very small.
When I joined Twitter and before there was this moment
to try and change the company, which has happened many
times before it there was in many ways a good culture,
but it was also you know, it was not really
a culture of getting things done. So I think there's
(30:48):
a lot of room for improvement at the company. My
role was I first came in, I was asked to
lead an innovation team that was focused on just new
initiatives that went and it's sort of more often changed
over time, but that was kind of most of what
I worked on while I was at the company. Basically,
the company goes to do well. So what happened then
(31:12):
is a company went through multiple layoffs, which has been
very public and Sunday or Saturday, about ten days ago,
my computer was locked, which has happened to a lot
of people, and so for the next few hours I
waited to see if there would be any communication from
a company. Nothing happened. Twenty four hours past the poll
on Monday, I started to email a few people at
(31:32):
the company. I found out my manager actually had been
laid off as well, and a bunch of other people.
There was nobody really for me too, that I really
knew that I could reach out to, So I emailed
the head of HR. I emailed Elon and a few
other sort of HR accounts to see what would happen
if they responded to me. I wanted to know. I
kind of assumed obviously that I've been laid off. I
(31:52):
didn't know, but without any actual communication, it's a strange
situation to be in. So ahead of Hr replied a
couple of times, I wasn't able to answer whether working
the company about and so I just decided we have
a CEO the company who was very active on Twitter,
and you know, he wasn't replying to my email, so
I figured it might make sense to see if he
(32:14):
would be open. And it turns out that you may
not be able to get him on email or on
the phone, but he will respond to tweets, as cat
Turd has found out. So tell me what you're working
on in Iceland. I want to know. You have muscular dystrophe,
and you've had a very successful life with a very
(32:38):
full life of children and a wife and a really
great career, and you started businesses. But you are in
a wheelchair. Yeah. So I was born with a muscular
disagree and it's a progressive disease, so over time it
kind of you know, there's a lot of different types
of muscle disagree with the one I have. It started
with my legs when I was twenty five. I had
to start doing a wheelchair. I've been getting just more
(33:00):
more wobbly on my feet Poland and then for the
past twenty years, it's kind of just you know, my
legs have continued to deteriorate and the rest of my body.
Muscles in my body are slowly giving up, So my
upper body, in my arms, most of my body has
been infected in some ways and most of it and
pretty significant place. I'm so sorry to even bring this
(33:22):
up to you, but what you've done with this situation
is you've focused on wheelchair ramps in Iceland. Will you
talk a little bit about that? Yeah, back Twiceland, me,
my wife and our two kids. We've lived in a
multiple countries, and we are living in Europe and in
Asia and South America and obviously in North America. And
(33:44):
I've seen that it's pretty obvious that there's a pretty
big difference between country and country and even the city
to city what kind of accessibility there is in each
of these places. So moving back here, I noticed pretty
quickly there's having been a while away, I noticed there
was a lot of places that were not accessible. And
so one night when I was I went out with
(34:05):
my wife and our two kids and our son who's
three years old the time, he was thirsty. We wanted
to get a drink, so we stopped at our corner
store and I noticed straight away that there were steps
going in, and so for the next five or so minutes,
I waited outside while my family went inside the shop.
And while I did that, I probably didn't I don't
(34:27):
think I had in my phone, otherwise I probably would
have been on Twitter. But I just sat out there
and I thought about this, how one step or two
steps in this case have such a huge impact on
a lot of people's lives, so people that use wheelchairs
or have accessibility needs, and how simple it is to
actually solve this. So we set up a fund. We
(34:48):
initially built a hundred draps in downtown Kuec So Wheelchair Raps,
and then we formed a bigger sort of coalition, raised
more money and we are building fifteen hundred in two
raps all across Iceland. So we're about two years into
this four year effort. You became Iceland Person of the Year.
(35:09):
Will you talk about that. I'm sorry to embarrass you.
I know this is embarrassing. Okay, It's a very small country.
So it was like between me and a few sheep,
I was about personally year and I think, which was
obviously great, but a very strange feeling because as a person,
there are good things that I do hopefully in my life,
but I've been very you know, I'm not a person
(35:31):
of the Year all the time. It's a very strange
feeling to have to live up to that. So but yes,
I was. I was very hard and glad that happened.
So most people I know have tried to avoid paying taxes.
You actually paid more taxes. Will you explain that this
is complicated? But when we talked about tax contents to
(35:52):
people that you know, I was feeling this out, trying
to figure out what was the best way to do
a lot of we talked to some people and some
of them suggest it. You know, we moved to let's
say because of the way we structured a deal. It
was all paid depending to the country where I lived.
So you could move to let's say, Dubai or even
there's some some things in Portugal where you pay no
(36:13):
income tax, so we could have moved somewhere like that,
but we decided that we wanted to Iceland. And because
of the way that was structured, like all of the
how of the money was well, the taxes were paid
here in Iceland, so you actually chose to pay more
taxes to support the Icelandic government because you believed in
what they were doing. Listen, No, I think the politics aside.
(36:35):
There is this model in Iceland in many countries that
is um you know, the state obviously is in all
countries is run by taxpayer money. But in certain countries
like Iceland, that means that you have free healthcare, you
have three schools, obviously that all the rest of it,
you know, the roads, the police, whatever it is. Yes,
(36:56):
I do believe that the only way for a system
like that to make so as if people that have
more money pay it back into it. And you know,
I grew up with a you know, in a working
cast home. We didn't really have much, but I was
able to go through with all of my school I
went to university, I got some degrees at the university,
or I got a system from the state. You know,
(37:17):
I got a free wheelchair, I got a very heavily
subsidized car. I was paid by the state sort of disability.
So there's a bunch of things that made it possible
for me to become ultimately financially successful. That if I
hadn't had them. There just no way. So if I
had been if I had grown up in a country
(37:37):
they didn't have all these safety nets, I wouldn't have
been able to do. But ultimately did, and I think,
I thought, and I still think that it's important that
that system is maintained. I want to ask you about
your restaurant, because you're opening a restaurant in Iceland. By
the way, we were all going to have to come
to Iceland now and also moved to Iceland, but explained
(38:00):
about the restaurant you're opening. So Willen was eleven years old.
My mom died in a car accident, and it was
obviously devastating for a kid. And I know it was
at a time forty five now, so it's thirty five
years ago, and there wasn't a lot of maybe support
systems or people didn't I think, really know how to
(38:21):
deal with tragedy like that. So I kind of just
compartmentalized that, put it away in a box, and I
didn't really think about my mom. I couldn't say her
name or go into a conversation because it was just
too emotional for many, many years. So a few years
ago I stopped drinking which I think was partly to
try and deal with things like that. And I wanted
(38:41):
to reconnect with my mom again. Obviously she had never
gone away. I constantly think about her, but it was
just in a different way. So I wanted to build
up something to remember her. And so when we moved
back here to Iceland, there was a house I lived
one block over from where I grew up, and there
was this house that was beautiful that was across the street,
(39:03):
and I would often go there. You know what. I
remember walking by this house with my mother, and the
ground floor was on sale when we moved back, and
I saw that, and I thought, well, to be wonderful
to create a place that would be in memory of her.
So we've been working on that now for quite some time,
and in a few weeks we're going to open up
(39:24):
a restaurants called or That, which is what's her name.
And it's really built on this limity of a kid
of their mother. So it's it's not really like the
thing we experienced with your parents, when your kid are
obviously not the full picture of someone. It's you know,
you look up to someone like your mom, your dad,
or your grandparents or whoever, and there's these larger than
(39:48):
life beings. Obviously nobody can live up to that, but
in our heads they are. And so I just wanted
to box off that feeling and create a place that
was sort of magical and wonderful where come in and
it would be this warm, inviting atmosphere like you do
when you're in a safe space, like with with somebody
loves as a kid, like your mother or whoever that
(40:10):
might be. So that's coming up very quickly. It's been
a wild ride to get there. But we're a couple
of weeks out. I am just so honored to get
to talk to you and delighted, and I appreciate all
the hard work you're doing and I'm just grateful to
get to have you on the on the show. Thank
(40:30):
you so much. No Molly John Fast, Jesse Cannon, Bitch
McConnell versus Fox News. First this week it was Steve
Bannon versus Fox News. To quote Tucker Carlson, what is
going on? So Fox is under a lot of pressure.
(40:54):
There is this incredible lawsuit from Dominion the voting machine.
It is for multiple many hundreds of millions, possibly billions
of dollars. Part of the lawsuit is in Delaware where
the claims are not caps so we don't even know
the kind of money Dominion could get from Fox. But
(41:14):
instead of deciding to tread lightly, Tucker Crawlson has decided
to double down. So he has used the footage he
got from Kevin McCarthy. By the way, Kevin McCarthy is
basically at this point, Tucker Crlson's hostage, right Tucker Crowson said,
I will make you speaker, but you have to be
my hostage, and basically he is. And so here we
(41:37):
have Kevin McCarthy gave Tucker the January six footage, Tucker
found stuff that didn't look that bad, aired it on
his show, and then sort of propagated this whole conspiracy
theory that none of what we know has happened has happened,
and that the real villains of January sixth are Liz
Cheney and Adam Kinsinger. But here's the thing that I
(41:59):
think is so weird. Him and Margie are now saying
that the quad Shaman really was leded to the Capitol
by police, so that's why he was standing at the
podium and everything. I feel like there was this theory
of the last election. That a lot of why they lost,
as they see like such freaks. What worse person could
(42:19):
they champion than this fucking guy that's QAnon Shaman to
be freed. I just think that the Qnon Shalman, more
than anything, is not the hero you want, right the
QAnon Shalman. First of all, he wears horns, he wears
no clothing. He does eat organic food, so that's something.
This is true, But Marjorie Taylor Green continues to maybe
(42:42):
not be such a great thought leader for the Republican Party.
And this whole panoply of fakery is our moment of fuckery.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds
in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you
(43:02):
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 discuss the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. And De Santas's latest appointee thinks tapwater
makes people gay. We have a mind blowing show New
York Times Luke Broadwater. We'll talk to us about Jim
Jordan's comical missteps heading a committee investigating the quote unquote
(00:22):
weaponization of the federal government. Some would say he's weaponizing
the weaponization. Then we'll talk to former Twitter engineer Hallie,
who is most famous person in Iceland and also had
a very public fallout with his former boss yesterday on
the Twitter Elon Musk. First, we have MSNBC columnist James Downey.
(00:46):
Welcome to Fast Politics, James, thank you for having me.
We are in De Santas's publication week because if you
can believe it, he's not technically running for president yet.
He is just innocently promoted his book, The Courage to
Be Free, The Courage to Be Free. Yes, that a
lot of time was spent, a lot of people were
(01:07):
I'm sure a lot of people made a lot of
mine to consult over that incredibly inspiring title. The focus
grouping alone of the courage to be free. I mean,
I guess what's the opposite of the courage to be free?
The cowardice to not be free? I mean, only those
liberals opposed freedom? Right, exactly? Why do we hate freedom? Basically?
(01:27):
It seems as if you've read this book, yes, much
to my chagrin, making you probably one of only a
very very small group to read a Republican book like this. Yeah,
And honestly, I've read one or two others, you know,
maybe eight years ago when he had everybody and their
(01:49):
uncle running for the Republican nomination. It seemed remarkably de
Santis's book is actually one of the more readable ones,
which says a whole lot. It was still a bit
of a slogged get through, to say the least. It
pretty much covers, you know, it gives you exactly the
kind of biography you'd be expecting, touching on his upbringing
and going all the way through, you know, sort of
everything sanitized right up through his times Forlorida governor. Right,
(02:13):
And it's actually pretty interesting because I mean, I don't
know if this is interesting, but I've been told, I've
been assured by people involved in this process that De
Santis actually wrote this book, I could believe that it
reads similar to a book he definitely wrote, which is
his first book, which he wrote before write about it
(02:35):
was over a decade ago, and actually which you also read.
I've only read the excerpts that are available online. It's
actually very hard to get a poppy of and that's
actually by design, right, I would think so. And you
go back to articles about it from a couple of
years ago, and there are links to the Amazon page,
and that has since been pulled down. I don't know
if maybe there's a plan to reissue it, as has
(02:55):
happened sometimes with these books, but there are copies circulating around,
and it does from what I have read, it does
read similar to it. That's not necessarily a credit to him.
But on the other hand, I respect it. I mean,
you probably know this mobaby from you know, like a
lot of times when you see a buyeline by a
politician that's been written, you know, that's been written by
their staffers. So on a certain level, I do respect
(03:15):
the politician who actually you know, takes their time, you know,
actually puts in the work to do it themselves. I mean,
I guess theoretically. I mean, what I think is interesting
and we'll get to this in a minute, but there
has been sort of a desire to memory haul the
Ron de Santist back benchro congressman. Oh no, for sure.
I mean you start with entitlements. They basically entitlements. What
(03:39):
I mean, they don't. They barely appear in this book,
with Donald Trump pushing really hard to make him the
what was it, the wheelchair over the cliff guy, I
think is what Trump is describing him as clearly to
Santists when he, when he or whoever was writing this,
did not have a good line. He doesn't really talk
about government spending that much. He doesn't talk really that
(04:00):
much about his time in Congress at all. You know,
the biggest thing he talks about is a failed push
to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, and that is basically, Look,
you know, Trump did this later, but I wanted to
do it first. That's that's what he focuses on. It's
interesting to me because DeSantis is such a he has
now become this sort of Republican warshack right the donor
(04:22):
class cannot get enough of him. Rupert Murdoch delighted by
him even the sort of smart and Ie Smarten quotes.
But those right wing, the thinking class of the GOP
has decided he's their man. But really, really nobody knows
who he is. There's a lot that's changed about him
(04:43):
over the years, for sure. And I think one reason
he's very popular with the donor class is that when
you read the book, you get a sense that America
or well because the conclusion, the title of his conclusion
is literally make America Florida, and in his view, Florida
is all ready great. And I think that's the biggest difference.
I think that's one of the big differences between him
(05:04):
and Trump is that he basically feels everything's fine, everything's
going great. You know, we've got this conservative Supreme Court
doing all their stuff and that's awesome. That just needs
to be protected from the evil liberals. And I think
that message appeals a lot more to the rich donors
and to the rupert Murdocks of the world, in addition
to obviously the many other problems with Donald Trump. I
(05:26):
think that message appeals to them more than Donald Trump's
saying the big and powerful have screwed you over right.
I think that they really like this idea of this
guy who's basically his the extent of his because I
read so Bernie Sanders has a book out a couple
weeks ago, and I read them about the same time,
and there's some passages into Sanders's book that you could
sort of you could almost drop into Sanders's book that
(05:47):
are like play at populism, but they're in an entirely
different context. They're just about culture war. They're just about
things like Disney. It's not about bankruptcy, healthcare bankruptcies and
price of insulin and things like that. It's not talking
about inequality or anything. The only problems in America into
Santis's world are liberal culture. That's it. Everything else is great, right.
(06:09):
I mean it is interesting because if you listen to
a Trump speech, Trump will say, like everything is horrible.
It's a very different than that Stephen Miller. We're all
gonna die and the world is awful. Yeah, I mean
Trump is basically the world's already on fire and only
I can save you. I think it's sepack you is
something like, you know, the last several years I've been
in the hellscape. Whereas again, I think the Santis feels
(06:32):
basically everything's fine. I mean, like, you know, one example
I given my piece is that he doesn't really talk
about like the concept of job creation or government and
the economy just doesn't come up. Government is just there
to protect rich people and basically let them do what
they want. And you know, and what this turns into
practically is that you get you have. And there's been
(06:54):
reporting on this recently that he gets huge donations from
the energy industry and then lerty in his face huge
rate hikes. But in De santiss world, that's fine, that's
just what happens. That's because they're not rich, and if
they were rich, then then the government would protect them.
They should have thought about being rich. In this piece
you wrote, you talked about sort of the ways in
(07:16):
which you could theoretically beat De Santists from you know,
what are the sort of soft spots you see? So
I think again, the economy jumps out that one. You know,
if you flash back nine months ago and everyone was
talking about what happens if the economy, the economy is
going to ruin Joe Biden, things are getting real worth
and if if things do take a turn in the
(07:36):
next eighteen or so months, I mean, I think if
it becomes a campaign about the economy, this is not
a guy that has a lot of solutions there. I mean, obviously,
one area is foreign policy, which is more or less
non existent in his book. He does not talk about
the you know, the conflict in Ukraine. The extent of
his foreign policy appears to be sort of posing against communism,
(07:57):
and that's in a lot of ways more just for
Florida than it is and then more broadly the Fox
News base that will eat up anything anti communist. Again,
that's more domestic than it is international. Obviously, he doesn't
want to talk about his close relationship with donors and
how he's appointed over two hundred, well over two hundred
of them to various political boards. Obviously there's been a
(08:20):
lot of attention on what's been happening with New College,
for example. I think at least one, if not several,
of those, all the new board members he's appointing on
they're all either donors are connected to donors of his
And again I think he doesn't really see anything wrong
with that, which is why he keeps doing it. And
then I think, instead I don't really touch on the
book because it's support of a text based medium. But
I do think this is somebody. When you watch him speak,
(08:43):
the charisma just leaves the room. You know, when he's angry,
and when he's sort of up there being angry about
liberals and get into fights with reporters and stuff. I
can kind of in a twisted way, see what his
appeal is to a certain kind of voter. But outside
of that, like when I watched of his State of
the State earlier, and you just don't really you don't
(09:03):
really see it. That is the incredible thing about his
candidacy is that you have all these people who have
just gone all in before he's even done anything right.
So like Trump could get up there and be like
tiny d and they could be over. I mean there's
no you know, there's no evidence to say he's more
charismatic than Marco. If anything, he may be last absolutely,
(09:26):
you look at all of the candidates that the Republican
donors they've had, they've had an incredible clock record of
picking losers against Donald Trump, and I mean, you know
this guy, you know again they maybe they'll be right
this time. But I learned, I learned seven years ago
not to bet against Donald Trump in political terms. Bet
him to sort of fail to even meet my low
(09:47):
expectations everywhere else, but in terms of elections, right, well,
this is so interesting because I mean I had somebody
who I was talking to who was like making the
argument that De Santis is less terrible than Trump, But
I would argue that actually De Santis is much much
more focused on undermining like the First Amendment. And what's
(10:09):
your take on this? I would agree that the main
reason why Ronda Santis is the main way that he
is more of a threat is competence. I think a
president to Santist is not going to have a suddenly
bombing North Korea because Kim Jong len says something mean
about him. But I do think, on the other hand,
there are all these threats that Trump made about the
(10:30):
First Amendment, where De santists if he wants to do something,
he will. You think of all the efforts that Republicans
made to try and pass, for example, of Obamacare repeal
that failed when Donald Trump was president. I don't think
even those kinds of things would have failed with the Santist.
He has a bigger margin in Florida, but he has
a good track record of corralling legislators to do what
(10:52):
he wants, and so I think the worst case scenario
in terms of like you know, nuclear holocaust maybe less
likely under de Santists, But outside of that, I think
that he's going to be much more twisted, you know,
twisted way competent at undermining liberals. So with this book,
can you sort of figure out what the strategy DeSantis
has to be Trump is I think the strategy is
(11:16):
going to be and I think this is to get
back to what you're talking abo earlier about how the
donors don't have a great track record of picking someone
to beat Trump. I think his strategy is just going
to be out angering Trump. I think he's going to
try and rely upon and also use his and also
use his perch as Florida's governor to try and pass
(11:36):
actual laws that he can point to on the things
that they are sort of both angry about. To give
an example, just sort of this week, Florida withdrew from
the Voter Registration Compact that like allows states to share
data across state lines about like voter registration, and that
was something that Trump had complained about, and then Desantists
almost immediately then turned around and pulled the state out
(11:58):
and so that's he'll say, oh, I got something done right,
and then and then and everything else. He'll just try
to be more angry than Trump. I don't know if
it's going to work, right. I think that the sort
of X factor that Republicans are not realizing here is
that you can't elect someone who has no personality or
(12:18):
who's not charismatic. I mean, it never works historically. Yeah.
On the other hand, they did nominate Mitt Romney, I mean,
except that Mitt Romney, I feel like, and I mean
I think this can be. This is true of John
Kerry too, Like, well, they're not maybe gifted orators. There
are people who sit down in a room with John
Kerry and Mitt Romney who find them charming, whereas I'm
(12:40):
not sure that that's true for De Santis. Yeah, it's interesting.
It seems to be something consistent across both supporters and
attractors say about him is that he's not somebody who wait,
if you're sitting in a room with him, he's not
very He's just not a very personable person. Yeah, as
you said that, those kinds of people don't typically and
as president, we have the opposite end of that spectrum.
(13:03):
Currently in the White House right now. I mean that
Biden is famous for not letting anyone leave until he's
until he's best friends with them. So I have this theory.
Other people have had this theory too, but that this
is really this authoritarian tact that the Republican Party is taking,
and that is what de Santis is hoping to ride
to the White House. I mean, am I nuts or
(13:24):
do you think that's what it is? No? I think
that's a big part of it. I think that because
people really like what he's doing in Florida with legislation,
and they feel like the for example, to move with Disney,
where you know you're bringing in your own people to
point to the board that oversees their special district. I
(13:45):
think this there's there's a feeling among conservatives that that's
what they feel. It's not something I agree with, but
there's a feeling that they are under assault from liberal
soft power, whether it be through companies like Disney or
in the media or whatever. Speaking as a liberal myself,
(14:05):
if this is victory, it's a pretty pretty hollow one
for but they feel that this that that the Sanders's
tactics are the best way to fight back. Yeah, I
mean that means moving in a less democratic direction, and
so be it. I mean, it's it's a natural outgrowth.
I think of the broader sort of minoritarian approach to
politics of just like, hey, you know, we're going to
(14:26):
jerrymander the heck out of every state. And if we
you know, if that's what it takes to win sixty
percent of the you know, the state of legislature with
fifty percent of the vote or whatever, so be it.
That's just the way that, you know, that's just the
way things fall out. I think it's just a natural
next step that if you feel that you don't really
need to represent the majority, then or if the majority
(14:48):
the majority approach is illegitimate, then what's really to stop
you from moving in a more authoritarian direction. Yeah, James,
this was so interesting. I hope you'll come back. Well.
Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. Luke
Broadwater is a congressional reporter with Thin York Times. Welcome
to Fast Politics, Luke Broadwater, Hey, thanks for having me.
(15:12):
Very excited to have you. All Right, we have a
lot to discuss, but first we need to start with
this is a topic I've written about it I appreciate
its incredible stupidity. It is the subject near and dear
to my heart. So I was really pretty excited when
I read your peace on this. So this originally started
(15:32):
as a Tucker Carlson's Church committee, and it has morphed
into this Weaponization of Government Committee. Not just a little
bit about this committee and a little bit about what
you've discovered. Sure, well, you know, I guess I can
take the listeners back to sort of please getting of this.
As part of the negotiations for Kevin McCarthy to become speaker,
(15:52):
the hard right of the Republican Party, they had a
lot of big demands, but really four of them came
into being, and one of them was the creation of
this Weaponization Committee. It's designed to be a committee that's
going to investigate the federal government, specifically the Justice Department
and the FBI, with the premise and the thesis that
(16:16):
these agencies discriminate against Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, but really
anybody who might be conservative right. And so Kevin McCarthy
agrees to this demand. In response, he gets some votes,
gets to become Speaker, and one of the very first
things they do is past the creation of this Weaponization Subcommittee,
(16:37):
and they put it under the Bailey Wick of Jim
Jordan period paragraph continue. Well, in the Republican House, they
view Jim Jordan as their best investigator and that you know,
he is known for grilling people. He doesn't wear a
sports bag, you know, he talks really quick, like an
(16:59):
auctionee here. Sometimes he does prepare so he'll know and
that's actually kind of rare for some of these hearings.
I mean a lot of people don't prepare, they don't
know the material, they don't know the people's names, you know.
But he comes ready to go. And so they thought
this would be McCarthy thought this would be the perfect match.
The problem is they're having a hard time finding the
(17:22):
whistleblowers they need to prove the case. So with this
article that we put out last week, essentially they've brought
in three of their so called whistleblowers from the FBI
or former FBI agents to try to prove the case
that the bureau is biased against conservatives. And because of
(17:43):
the way the committee set up, Democrats got to sit
in on these transcribed interviews, and when the Democrats got
to cross examine these guys, basically all hell broke loose,
and they put out this three hundred page report which
we got a copy of that sort of underscored all
the failings of these so called whistleblowers. It's pretty interesting
(18:03):
because these whistleblowers, I sort of get what happened, right.
They decided that you had these Republicans who are like
everything is biased against us, sariyariyara, and then they needed
to find someone to support this thesis, and that was
where they got into trouble. But explain to us who
(18:24):
these people were. First, we should say that Jim Jordan
has promised that there will be dozens and dozens of
whistleblowers and good and so the Democrats of the first
hearing said, okay, like what are their names? Put them up,
let's let's talk to them, let's meet them. And so
they started to call some of them men. The first
is a guy named George Hill, who's retired FBI analyst
(18:47):
from Boston. Another one's named Stephen Friend, he's a former
special agent from Daytona Beach. And a third named Garrett
Boyle who's a special agent from Wichita, Kansas. Each one
of these former agent or suspended agents alleged there's wrongdoing
at the top of the FBI, and that they were
made to do things that you know, violated their conscience.
(19:11):
One guy says he was made to surveil a January
sixth in his view protester. Turns out the guy, though
was a member of the Three Percenters, owned firearms. Will
you explain what the three Percenters are for those who
are not completely read in on this. They're one of
(19:32):
the right wing militia groups that federal law enforcement has
focused on in the aftermath of the January sixth attack
on the Capitol. Many people have probably heard of the
Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers by now. Both of
those groups have been charged with US seditious conspiracy in
connection to the attack. The Three Percenters haven't been yet.
But they are in that same sort of right wing
(19:56):
world where people go to these meetings they talk about how,
you know, they need to stand up against the government.
They all carry firearms, and so federal law enforcement is
worried about these militia type groups. It's a militia group,
all right, So go on. Those are the type of
examples that they bring up, and so you know, the
(20:17):
agent will say, well, I had to surveil this guy
and he was just a January sixth protester, but he's
actually remembered this militia group. He has firearms, he was
at the Capitol when they Democrats are asking questions, more
of the story comes out, and it's not so simple
that they were, you know, the FBI was targeting somebody
for no reason. There were actually some pretty good reasons.
But big picture of the three things that I would
(20:38):
think emerged from this report are one, most of what
these guys talked about are a lot of it they
did not have first hand knowledge of. It was sort
of just hearsay things they had overheard to A lot
of this was organized by some right wing groups off
the hill, in particular an organization connected to Cash Patel,
(20:59):
who is a former top Trump official, and Cash offered
payments to some of these guys, helped coordinate their travel,
and you can see how it's organized off the hell
for them to sort of coordinate and come up with
comp with these accounts and then come into Congress and
put them forward. And the third is that when when
(21:20):
the Democrats start to look through these men's social media,
there was a lot of extreme stuff on there. I mean,
you know, calling January sixth, the setup implying some sort
of deep state conspiracy. So a lot of conspiratorial thinking
and accusations against their own agencies, which you know, you
(21:41):
could see how that could bring disrepute on the agency
and the bosses might not might might not like it. Also,
I should say that Jim Jordan has said, some of
the other people have who have not yet come in.
We're FBI agents who who have joined the protests, the
pro Trump protests on January sixth, maybe didn't go into
the capital or community violence, but you know, we're there
(22:03):
at something that turned into a turn into a riot,
an attack, an attack on the Capitol, which you could
see why the FBI would want to look into those
things and investigate them. So it just turns the stories
are not so neat and clean for the Republicans here,
and it really undercut some of their central arguments. Well,
Republicans keep going with this. I mean, clearly this was
(22:25):
so far sort of the best they had. I mean,
do you think they retreat and decide that they just
can prove it or you think they keep going. No,
They're going to keep going. I mean, if you watch
Jim Jordan go on Fox News after this, it was
as though nothing happened. They would completely ignored the Democrats report.
There is bad blood between the Republicans and the Democrats
(22:46):
on the committee. If there was any hope that this
panel would actually be like the Church Committee, which did
uncover real wrongdoing and did uncover you know, systematic abuses
like the surveiling of piece for protesters and the like,
there will probably not be a bipartisan effort to do that.
It's going to be extremely politicized and basically a messy
(23:09):
fight for two years in Congress. Now, Jim Jordan did
say that one of the goals here was to frame
up the twenty twenty four election. Donald Trump has long
alleged if the FBI is biased against him, that the
Justice Departs biased against him, that they searched his property unfairly,
and so I would expect to hear a lot of
(23:30):
cover for Donald Trump from this committee over the next
two years. This is my favorite thing that Jim Jordan
does where he says, like not even the quiet part,
like the sketchy part loud, you know, like we're just
doing this to support Donald Trump. I mean you know, yeah,
I mean yeah, you know. He said that out of
(23:52):
his own mouth is to frame up the twenty twenty
four elections. So it's pretty amazing stuff. Okay, So I
want to ask you about this, this piece you wrote
more recently and that other piece was from four days ago,
so even more recently, about what is happening with this horrendous,
(24:12):
horrendous child labor staff. I mean, just like beyond the payout,
I mean, the Times broke this. It's the kind of thing.
You know, you have like fourteen year olds working on
factory lines, you have you know, just all these undocumented
children are working in these American companies and clearly there
are people who know about it. Will you talk to
(24:33):
us a little bit about that? Yeah? Absolutely so. My
colleague Hannah dry Or did a tremendous job with this
first investigation, and basically she went around two different plants
across the country that work with some of the biggest
brands in the world and just found basically openly child
labor going on, you know, in the parking lot. You know, teenagers,
(24:54):
fourteen year olds who are working at these factories. And
many of the people that she found our migrant children,
new immigrants, many of them undocumented, who were unaccompanied miners
who have you know, we're supposed to be placed with
sponsors who would watch over them, take care of them,
(25:14):
make sure they're on the right path, and instead have
ended up into you know, exploitative situations. And I think
it was a really eye opening report. I've sort of
been following the movement on Capitol Hill in regards to this.
Already there's a bill from the Senate Democrats, led by
Brian Schatz that would raise the penalties on businesses who
(25:37):
exploit child labor. Right now, it's actually not a very
hefty fine for violating child labor laws, and you know,
he would raise it to something like six hundred thousand dollars,
which would which were hopefully deter this type of thing.
What would be interesting to see is how the Biden
administration responds to this. They did announce a crackdown where
(26:00):
they're going to put some extra resources into investigating these cases,
but it does seem like there was an internal order,
according to Hannah's reporting at HHS, to process these cases
very quickly, get these kids out with the sponsors. And
you can understand why, right it's better, It's better than
(26:21):
being a ward of the state. You're going to get
people with but if there's not the proper vetting being done,
you could end up in these in these bad situations,
I would expect Chairman Durbin and the Judiciary to haul
in some Cabinet secretaries and ask some point of questions
to see if we can't get this situation remedied. Unbelievable story,
I mean, just mind blowing. This is the kind of
thing that there's not an easy solution too. No, there's not.
(26:45):
You know, obviously, it's a problem that's gone on for decades.
But what we've seen is a really explosion in the
numbers recently, and that's really a volume issue. I mean,
during the pandemic, you didn't have a lot of immigrants
coming into the country. People weren't traveling, they were staying home,
they were afraid of dying. And now you've seen these
numbers tick up tremendously and we have all these record
(27:08):
border crossings and so as a result of that, it's
very difficult for the administration to keep up with the caseload.
And that's why I think they were trying to process
the cases so quickly. You know, there are a lot
of things that could be done. For instance, a lot
of these kids don't actually have legal representation, and there's
not really the money for it or the people who
(27:28):
are trained to do it. So you know, Congress could
allocate more money for more lawyers to represent these migrant
youth to try to make sure they don't end up
being exploited. You know, that's probably not going to happen
with the House and Republicans hands, but there are ways
that Congress could legislate this situation to make it better.
I guess we'll have to see whether there's any chance
(27:50):
that anything bipartisan happening. Seems more likely the Republicans will
probably just use this as a cudgel to beat the
Biden administration over the headwidth and not necessarily proposed any solutions. Yeah,
I think that's right. Thank you so much, Luke. This
was super interesting. I hope you'll come back absolutely. Thanks
for having me, this was fun. Halle is a former
Twitter engineer. Welcome too Fast Politics, Halle. Thank you so
(28:14):
much to be here. Molly, it's very exciting to have you.
I introduced you as the most famous person in Iceland,
maybe a slight exaggeration or now it's a very small country,
so you don't really have too much to be very
known here. So I want to ask you. You have
(28:36):
become very, very very famous in New York and in
California and on the Twitter sphere for something different, I
just want you to sort of explain just a little bit.
You're an entrepreneur, will you explain to us how you
got to Twitter. I have a background and to sign
and so I started a digital agency. It was called
(28:59):
WEEO and I ran it for about seven years, and
I'd even to see worked with a lot of big
tech companies. We had offices, three offices in the States
and then here in Iceland, and we did most of
our work with companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter as well.
So after twenty twenty, which was a very hard year
for a lot of people, I was just exhausted, and
(29:21):
we had been asked many times by both Twitter and
multiple other companies to sort of see if we weren't
wanted to sell, and I thought, I guess this is
a good time to kind of kill it and go
into a company like Twitter, which at the time was
growing very fast. Covid obviously brought a lot of growth
to a lot of these tech companies, So that's how
I came into Twitter as an acquisition. I knew you
(29:43):
had Twitter a little bit, not really, but sort of,
because there were a group of really interesting tech people
on Twitter who were involved in trying to make the
world better and it was for a time a really
great place to work. Once it was sold to this entrepreneur,
it became a very complicated price to work. Tell me
(30:03):
what you can, just explain about your position at the company,
however you're comfortable explaining it, and as little or as much.
Twitter is kind of this company that never lived up
to its potential. I think there's a lot of people
that saw that. I think Yvon saw that. I saw that.
There's there's a bunch of people that said, look, there's
this hugely influential company that is where a lot of
(30:27):
the world's decisions are discussed and often made. But in
comparison to most of it, it's competitors, it's it's very small.
When I joined Twitter and before there was this moment
to try and change the company, which has happened many
times before it there was in many ways a good culture,
but it was also you know, it was not really
a culture of getting things done. So I think there's
(30:48):
a lot of room for improvement at the company. My
role was I first came in, I was asked to
lead an innovation team that was focused on just new
initiatives that went and it's sort of more often changed
over time, but that was kind of most of what
I worked on while I was at the company. Basically,
the company goes to do well. So what happened then
(31:12):
is a company went through multiple layoffs, which has been
very public and Sunday or Saturday, about ten days ago,
my computer was locked, which has happened to a lot
of people, and so for the next few hours I
waited to see if there would be any communication from
a company. Nothing happened. Twenty four hours past the poll
on Monday, I started to email a few people at
(31:32):
the company. I found out my manager actually had been
laid off as well, and a bunch of other people.
There was nobody really for me too, that I really
knew that I could reach out to, So I emailed
the head of HR. I emailed Elon and a few
other sort of HR accounts to see what would happen
if they responded to me. I wanted to know. I
kind of assumed obviously that I've been laid off. I
(31:52):
didn't know, but without any actual communication, it's a strange
situation to be in. So ahead of Hr replied a
couple of times, I wasn't able to answer whether working
the company about and so I just decided we have
a CEO the company who was very active on Twitter,
and you know, he wasn't replying to my email, so
I figured it might make sense to see if he
(32:14):
would be open. And it turns out that you may
not be able to get him on email or on
the phone, but he will respond to tweets, as cat
Turd has found out. So tell me what you're working
on in Iceland. I want to know. You have muscular dystrophe,
and you've had a very successful life with a very
(32:38):
full life of children and a wife and a really
great career, and you started businesses. But you are in
a wheelchair. Yeah. So I was born with a muscular
disagree and it's a progressive disease, so over time it
kind of you know, there's a lot of different types
of muscle disagree with the one I have. It started
with my legs when I was twenty five. I had
to start doing a wheelchair. I've been getting just more
(33:00):
more wobbly on my feet Poland and then for the
past twenty years, it's kind of just you know, my
legs have continued to deteriorate and the rest of my body.
Muscles in my body are slowly giving up, So my
upper body, in my arms, most of my body has
been infected in some ways and most of it and
pretty significant place. I'm so sorry to even bring this
(33:22):
up to you, but what you've done with this situation
is you've focused on wheelchair ramps in Iceland. Will you
talk a little bit about that? Yeah, back Twiceland, me,
my wife and our two kids. We've lived in a
multiple countries, and we are living in Europe and in
Asia and South America and obviously in North America. And
(33:44):
I've seen that it's pretty obvious that there's a pretty
big difference between country and country and even the city
to city what kind of accessibility there is in each
of these places. So moving back here, I noticed pretty
quickly there's having been a while away, I noticed there
was a lot of places that were not accessible. And
so one night when I was I went out with
(34:05):
my wife and our two kids and our son who's
three years old the time, he was thirsty. We wanted
to get a drink, so we stopped at our corner
store and I noticed straight away that there were steps
going in, and so for the next five or so minutes,
I waited outside while my family went inside the shop.
And while I did that, I probably didn't I don't
(34:27):
think I had in my phone, otherwise I probably would
have been on Twitter. But I just sat out there
and I thought about this, how one step or two
steps in this case have such a huge impact on
a lot of people's lives, so people that use wheelchairs
or have accessibility needs, and how simple it is to
actually solve this. So we set up a fund. We
(34:48):
initially built a hundred draps in downtown Kuec So Wheelchair Raps,
and then we formed a bigger sort of coalition, raised
more money and we are building fifteen hundred in two
raps all across Iceland. So we're about two years into
this four year effort. You became Iceland Person of the Year.
(35:09):
Will you talk about that. I'm sorry to embarrass you.
I know this is embarrassing. Okay, It's a very small country.
So it was like between me and a few sheep,
I was about personally year and I think, which was
obviously great, but a very strange feeling because as a person,
there are good things that I do hopefully in my life,
but I've been very you know, I'm not a person
(35:31):
of the Year all the time. It's a very strange
feeling to have to live up to that. So but yes,
I was. I was very hard and glad that happened.
So most people I know have tried to avoid paying taxes.
You actually paid more taxes. Will you explain that this
is complicated? But when we talked about tax contents to
(35:52):
people that you know, I was feeling this out, trying
to figure out what was the best way to do
a lot of we talked to some people and some
of them suggest it. You know, we moved to let's
say because of the way we structured a deal. It
was all paid depending to the country where I lived.
So you could move to let's say, Dubai or even
there's some some things in Portugal where you pay no
(36:13):
income tax, so we could have moved somewhere like that,
but we decided that we wanted to Iceland. And because
of the way that was structured, like all of the
how of the money was well, the taxes were paid
here in Iceland, so you actually chose to pay more
taxes to support the Icelandic government because you believed in
what they were doing. Listen, No, I think the politics aside.
(36:35):
There is this model in Iceland in many countries that
is um you know, the state obviously is in all
countries is run by taxpayer money. But in certain countries
like Iceland, that means that you have free healthcare, you
have three schools, obviously that all the rest of it,
you know, the roads, the police, whatever it is. Yes,
(36:56):
I do believe that the only way for a system
like that to make so as if people that have
more money pay it back into it. And you know,
I grew up with a you know, in a working
cast home. We didn't really have much, but I was
able to go through with all of my school I
went to university, I got some degrees at the university,
or I got a system from the state. You know,
(37:17):
I got a free wheelchair, I got a very heavily
subsidized car. I was paid by the state sort of disability.
So there's a bunch of things that made it possible
for me to become ultimately financially successful. That if I
hadn't had them. There just no way. So if I
had been if I had grown up in a country
(37:37):
they didn't have all these safety nets, I wouldn't have
been able to do. But ultimately did, and I think,
I thought, and I still think that it's important that
that system is maintained. I want to ask you about
your restaurant, because you're opening a restaurant in Iceland. By
the way, we were all going to have to come
to Iceland now and also moved to Iceland, but explained
(38:00):
about the restaurant you're opening. So Willen was eleven years old.
My mom died in a car accident, and it was
obviously devastating for a kid. And I know it was
at a time forty five now, so it's thirty five
years ago, and there wasn't a lot of maybe support
systems or people didn't I think, really know how to
(38:21):
deal with tragedy like that. So I kind of just
compartmentalized that, put it away in a box, and I
didn't really think about my mom. I couldn't say her
name or go into a conversation because it was just
too emotional for many, many years. So a few years
ago I stopped drinking which I think was partly to
try and deal with things like that. And I wanted
(38:41):
to reconnect with my mom again. Obviously she had never
gone away. I constantly think about her, but it was
just in a different way. So I wanted to build
up something to remember her. And so when we moved
back here to Iceland, there was a house I lived
one block over from where I grew up, and there
was this house that was beautiful that was across the street,
(39:03):
and I would often go there. You know what. I
remember walking by this house with my mother, and the
ground floor was on sale when we moved back, and
I saw that, and I thought, well, to be wonderful
to create a place that would be in memory of her.
So we've been working on that now for quite some time,
and in a few weeks we're going to open up
(39:24):
a restaurants called or That, which is what's her name.
And it's really built on this limity of a kid
of their mother. So it's it's not really like the
thing we experienced with your parents, when your kid are
obviously not the full picture of someone. It's you know,
you look up to someone like your mom, your dad,
or your grandparents or whoever, and there's these larger than
(39:48):
life beings. Obviously nobody can live up to that, but
in our heads they are. And so I just wanted
to box off that feeling and create a place that
was sort of magical and wonderful where come in and
it would be this warm, inviting atmosphere like you do
when you're in a safe space, like with with somebody
loves as a kid, like your mother or whoever that
(40:10):
might be. So that's coming up very quickly. It's been
a wild ride to get there. But we're a couple
of weeks out. I am just so honored to get
to talk to you and delighted, and I appreciate all
the hard work you're doing and I'm just grateful to
get to have you on the on the show. Thank
(40:30):
you so much. No Molly John Fast, Jesse Cannon, Bitch
McConnell versus Fox News. First this week it was Steve
Bannon versus Fox News. To quote Tucker Carlson, what is
going on? So Fox is under a lot of pressure.
(40:54):
There is this incredible lawsuit from Dominion the voting machine.
It is for multiple many hundreds of millions, possibly billions
of dollars. Part of the lawsuit is in Delaware where
the claims are not caps so we don't even know
the kind of money Dominion could get from Fox. But
(41:14):
instead of deciding to tread lightly, Tucker Crawlson has decided
to double down. So he has used the footage he
got from Kevin McCarthy. By the way, Kevin McCarthy is
basically at this point, Tucker Crlson's hostage, right Tucker Crowson said,
I will make you speaker, but you have to be
my hostage, and basically he is. And so here we
(41:37):
have Kevin McCarthy gave Tucker the January six footage, Tucker
found stuff that didn't look that bad, aired it on
his show, and then sort of propagated this whole conspiracy
theory that none of what we know has happened has happened,
and that the real villains of January sixth are Liz
Cheney and Adam Kinsinger. But here's the thing that I
(41:59):
think is so weird. Him and Margie are now saying
that the quad Shaman really was leded to the Capitol
by police, so that's why he was standing at the
podium and everything. I feel like there was this theory
of the last election. That a lot of why they lost,
as they see like such freaks. What worse person could
(42:19):
they champion than this fucking guy that's QAnon Shaman to
be freed. I just think that the Qnon Shalman, more
than anything, is not the hero you want, right the
QAnon Shalman. First of all, he wears horns, he wears
no clothing. He does eat organic food, so that's something.
This is true, But Marjorie Taylor Green continues to maybe
(42:42):
not be such a great thought leader for the Republican Party.
And this whole panoply of fakery is our moment of fuckery.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds
in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you
(43:02):
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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