September 20, 2025 • 43 mins
The New Republic’s Meredith Shiner examines how to push back against Trump’s increasingly disturbing rule. The Bulwark’s Will Sommer details the chaos in MAGA World following the killing of Charlie Kirk.
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Episode Transcript
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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 White House Staff Secretary Will Sharp
was caught on a hot mic joking our brand is crisis.
We have such a great show for you today. The
New Republic's own Meredith Shiner talks to us about pushing
(00:21):
back against Trump's increasingly disturbing rule. Then we'll talk to
the Bulwarks own Will Sommer about the chaos and maga
world after the killing of Charlie Kirk. But first we
have the stories the media is missing Smillie.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
We have not spoken in what feels like ten million
years since Jimmy Kimmel was suspended for making very benign jokes,
and there's a lot of fall out here, and the
Republicans have killed an attempt to subpoena the FCC chair
to talk about it.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
So here's what happens.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
FCC chair goes on Benny Johnson's podcast, says we can
do this the hard way or the easy way, complaining
Aboutjimmy Kimmel. Disney pulls Jimmy Kimmel partially because next star
who needs to have a merger approved by the Trump administration,
decides that it's not worth getting the Trump administration mad.
(01:13):
This is censorship, but it's corporate censorship. It's not state
run censorship, although the state is basically creating a world
where these corporations are censoring themselves in order to get by.
I think that what is important with this Kimmel canceling
is just like the Trump administration's attacks on universities weren't
(01:36):
actually about anti Semitism.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
They were about.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Stifling free speech and free expression. Just like the way
that Trump used the federal guard in Washington, d C.
Wasn't actually about crime. It was about rolling in federal
troops to scare legislators. Just like those things, this is
not about Jimmy Kiml. This is about speech the President
(02:02):
of the United States doesn't like and he wants to
chill it. And that's what we're looking at here. So
this is so much like the House on an American
activities that put my grandfather in jail. It's kind of amazing.
It's pretty chilling, by the way, I think it's important.
Here we have a ranking member, Robert Garcia. You see
the Democrats who are pushing back. You see the Democrats
(02:24):
who are making noise, and you see the Democrats who
are not right. So Ranking Member Robert Garcia, he's the
ranking on oversight. He said that he and Committee Chair
James Comer have been talking during the hearing and are
going to work together to bring mister Carr in front
of oversight.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
If you're a.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Republican and Tucker Carlson talked about this this week, I
am now agreeing with Tucker Carlson because that's where we
are in this moment. Tucker Carlson talked about it this week,
But basically, this is a road that no one wants
to go down. We have an amendment, it's called the
First Amendment, and what's happening here is that corporations are
(03:01):
giving up their first Amendment right in the hopes of
regulatory favor.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Yeah. I think it's pretty crazy when you're seeing Tucker
Carlson beyond the same side as you and I, And
it's interesting how what we're seeing also, though, is that
some of these comedians that everybody's like, oh, they're going
to come to Jimmy Kimmel's defenses, they're twisting themselves in
knots to try to say that what Trump has done
is okay, and that this is like FAFO or something.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yes, but a lot of them are not, or at
least the smart ones know that when you go down
this road soon you have to just only toe the
line of the regime. And this is how we get
to Russia, right, this is how we get to North Korea.
I think it's worth realizing that these corporations did this
(03:49):
because they saw Paramount do it, because they saw billionaires
at the inauguration. Every single caving leads to more caving,
creates a permissions sure, Obeying in advance leads to Morabeying
in advance leads to moro obeying in advance. By the way,
the obey and advance guy he lives in Canada now,
so let's not be too hot on him. But I
(04:10):
think it is important to realize, like, we got here
because people refuse to resist because the stuff that worked
in twenty sixteen they stopped doing. So there's a way
to get out of this and it looks a lot
like twenty sixteen. By the way, Also important Trump doesn't
take this Kimmel's situation as a win and keep going. Instead,
he says, what what does he say? He says he
(04:32):
wants more more scalps. When asked about Kimmel's suspension for
making remarks about the potential political ideology. You know what
he says, He says, quote, I read someplace that networks
ninety seven percent against me again, ninety seven percent negative,
and yet I won and easily won all seven swing
states popular vote one everything Trump said. They're ninety seven
(04:54):
percent against they get me only bad press. I mean
they're getting a license. I would think maybe their licenses
should be taken away. So welcome to what happens when
you go along to get along.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
So the House has passed the GOP funding bill two
hundred and seventeen votes to two hundred and twelve, and
now it goes to the Senate.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Yeah, this is so embarrassing.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
I'm so angry at Democrats for what's happening right now.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Bolly, I think you just named Mike Johnson's biography. This
is so embarrassing.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
It's also hit Keem Jeffrey's biography because like now it's
gone through the House, it now ends up in the
Senate where Chuck Schumer.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Look, here's the thing. Democrats don't have any power. I
get it.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
I understand, but they could do things like they could say,
you know, we want to be able to subpoena Brendan cart.
They could ask for small things that would show at
least that they have something. So soon Obamacare subsidies are
going to go way, way up because Republicans didn't want
to fund them, So they're going to go up like
twenty percent. This is something that the Republicans have done
(06:01):
to themselves and to the American people more broadly, Democrats
want Republicans to make it so these subsidies don't go up.
But you know what, and again this is something we
saw in twenty sixteen. It may be that voters need
to see what they voted for, and this idea that
Democrats should save voters from things they voted for. They
(06:21):
voted for their Obamacare premiums to go up. Maybe they
didn't know it, but that's what they voted for. So
the idea that Democrats are now going to go in there,
and by the way, Republicans don't want to do it.
They want those Obamacare premiums to go up, and those
premiums may in fact, really really hurt Republicans in the midterms.
So why are Democrats trying to get something that they
(06:45):
won't get credit for. I just don't get it, Like
they are so focused on things that are politically stupid
for them that they forget that they do actually have
to win elections.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Speaking of winning elections, a lot of people seem to
be concerned that the messaging part of the Democratic Party
is now going to be greatly diminished since a lot
of it lives on TikTok, which has been bought by
a conglomerate of Trump supporters.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Including has it gone through.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
The reporting is that it's zeroing in on a deal
that would sell eighty percent of TikTok's US assets to
add Rees and Horwitz, Oracle and silver Lake.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
All Trump supporters.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Yes, and there is already reports on drop site that
they are pulling left wing creators, specifically that talk about Palestine.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, these guys are really pro Israel. They love Israel.
I mean, this is what happens when you don't have freedom.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yeah, I mean I do think this is a recipe
for a lot of people abandoning the platform very fast.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Well, see people have stayed on Twitter, Yeah, even though
it's bad.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Twitter is a disturbing, disturbing example of this but.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
There certainly are places like Blue Sky and Terrible.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Threads, so maybe it's into being okay.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Meredith Shiner is a contributing editor at The New Republic.
Welcome to Baspolitex, Meredith, Bye, Mollie, thank you again for
having me back. Oh I'm so happy to have you back.
And there's so much stuff to talk about. I would
love to talk from it because I feel like a
lot of people this podcast found they are like us,
(08:29):
Like they're concerned about American democracy. You know, we're moms,
we have kids. We'd like to live in a democratic system.
It does feel like swimming in sewage. It does.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
And I think it is very difficult to be a
person in the world right now, whether you are a
parent or not a parent. I think the onslaught of
the headlines is really really difficult to navigate. Like this
is worse than how it felt in the first Trump administration.
And I remember that felt like an onslaught of push
alerts and lines, you know, I speaking about being a mom.
(09:03):
I was getting my son ready for swim class when
I looked down on my phone on Wednesday and saw
the push alert about Jimmy Kimmel's show being suspended indefinitely.
And it is so rare now that I get to
a place where I see something that popped up on
my phone and I have a visceral reaction to it
out loud. And that was a moment where I felt
(09:24):
that way. And I don't want to say that there's
a dichotomy between the people who are paying super close
attention to everything that's happening every single day in Washington,
right Not everyone is watching c SPAN. Not everyone is
keeping close tabs on these a SIP meetings that are
talking about, you know, which vaccines will be available for
our children moving forward nationwide. But something like Jimmy Kimmel
(09:45):
getting canceled in the way that he was that it
was a reflection in an outgrowth of the plans of
this administration that were outlined in Project twenty twenty five
to quash descent and to fundamentally reshape the way we
get to live our lif I think something about that
moment being so public and also so commercial, so like
(10:06):
pop culture oriented, I feel that there are going to
be people who are more inclined to be in tune
with that and to start asking questions about the other
things that are going on because it's really starting to
be more in your face.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
And the question, I think is what breaks through.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Sarah's spent all this time doing a lot of media
that people never saw. A lot of us are very
stressed and are not reading the news. So the question
is like, what is a big enough thing to get
people's attention, to get them to see that none of
this is normal and there's a real chance that this
is in.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
Yeah, I think you're asking a question that sort of
speaks to an individual level. But I really like to
think about a system's question, and what shapes people's understanding
isn't just how much they're opting in. It's when they
opt in what they're getting exposed to. And I still
think that there is a broader need for Democrats in
(11:05):
Washington to be raising the alarm bells or sounding the
alarm bells more than they are currently. I saw the
statement from past Democratic leadership in response to Jimmy Kimmel's
removal from the airwaves. I saw a few members in
different hearings, whether it was Eric Swawall in California or
somewhere else, saying that if and when Democrats take power
(11:28):
in the midterm, that all of these officials involved with
the sec from Brandon carr on down better save their
receipt because there will be investigations. And I think that
there is a responsibility for some of these elected officials
in Washington to start creating conflict and tension because, as
we know, for better for worse, the national media is
(11:49):
deeply oriented around conflict, and if there isn't conflict, that's
not how they actually tell the story.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
This is so brilliant and I agree with everything you're so.
Speaker 4 (12:00):
I'll give you a recent example of this. So there
was a hearing on Capitol Hill this week where DC
Mayor Muriel Bowser was called to testify before a House committee.
And I think that this is really notable because Washington,
d C has been occupied now for almost six weeks,
and at the end of the day, the mayor of
d C has not got done a good enough job
(12:20):
of saying how wrong this is, how much it's damaging
the city, and has continued to let this narrative be
around quote unquote crime as opposed to what we're seeing,
which is a massive escalation of authoritarianism in our capital
city at the seat of our government. I think that
because there hasn't been as much resistance on that. It
(12:41):
has completely allowed the media narrative to be something that's
very distorted from the reality. So, like, I saw a
punch Bowl News headline, which is a sentence I never
want to stay out loud.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Yes, punch Bowl News is a B to B kind of.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
Insidery newsletter rag sort of thing. Okay, So they had
the headline about this hearing and it was like, you know,
we expect tension about this hearing on Donald Trump's efforts
to eliminate crime in the district of Columbia.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Talk about taking a Republican narrative. Yes, yes, And so.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
At the end of the day, understanding that this is broken, right,
that both sides journalism is a broken culture of access journalism,
and that relying on Democrats say Republicans say really obscures
the truth. We can all agree on that when Democrats
aren't saying the thing clearly, that's where we get problems
(13:40):
in terms of people's understanding of the seriousness of this moment.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
And this has been a very.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
Significant failure of democratic leadership in Washington. And people are like, well,
you can't blame democrats. Republicans are the authoritarians here. Yes,
that is true, but you have to be an opposition
party that actually outlines what happens. Otherwise that perspective is missing,
and we see how things escalate in the absence of
that perspective.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Yes, and in fact, what I would like now is
to talk for a minute about my hobby. Why I
have a hobby, which is I call Democratic comms people
and complain about what a bad job they're doing.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
I wish that were my job.
Speaker 4 (14:20):
That would be so cathartic and fun for me.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Maybe it's why I don't have a lot of friends.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
I mean, me too, Molly, but we can be friends
with each and we're friends.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
With each other.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
So I was texting leader Jeffreys, comms guy, and I
was saying, you know, I don't see you guys anywhere. Well,
I see our tweets making fun of your statement.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
That's it. I don't see anything.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Look, there are Democrats out there who are doing well.
Robert Garcia, a ranking member of Oversight. Right, the original
guy that Democrats wanted to put in that job. He died, Right,
You'll remember, I don't really want to go down that
rabbit hole.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Yes, but like the guy they wanted in the job.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Seventy six year old Jerry Connolly I was told was
a but we never saw them. So that guy died
and then Democrats were allowed to elevate someone who actually
could do it.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
And it's not an easy job.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Like this is all scary stuff, right, I mean, it's
scary to get past threats.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
But if you are not going to be an opposition party,
then why are you there? What are you doing? You
know there are.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
People who have no power and no money who are
protesting why you get to be in our government if
you're not going to fight for the people, because we
don't work for you, you work for us.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
Yeah, you should want more than a driver and access
to the Capitol Building to have a job in the
United States Capitol Building. And in my mind, and I'm
sure in your mind and the minds of many of
your listeners, like the job was to protect democracy, and honestly,
Congress failed at that after January sixth, even though the
(15:55):
attack came to them, authoritarianism came to them. And so
now we're here, And a few episodes ago, or a
few appearances ago, when I came on to talk to you,
we talked about my peace primary every Democrat, which had
published at the beginning of this administration, and one of
the things that really set me off and inspired me
to write it was the number two Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin,
(16:18):
telling a reporter, well, we've never seen this before. We're
just learning how to deal with it. You have to
give us some time, as if we didn't have four
years of Donald Trump before this, as if we didn't
see January sixth with our own eyes. And I think
that a lot of people who spent a long time
in Washington lived under this delusion that it could just
(16:39):
snap back right, that it would be a normal bounce
back between a democratic administration and a Republican administration, and
everyone could go to their cocktail hour at Johnny's Hafshell
afterwards and have a great time. And at the end
of the day, that was not the design of the
people who were taking power. That was not what they wanted.
They wanted to fundamentally reshape this country. And the people
(17:03):
who are the most intransigent in Washington, the people who
are the least reactive to what's happening, seem to not
really have a clear idea of the symmetry of the
ills in our politics. You know, when I see people
being like, well, we have to condemn violence on the
right and violence on the left. Yes, we should condemn
all violence, but also we should identify where threats are
(17:27):
coming from and what the reality of our country is
right now, because that's the fear and anxiety that everyone
is living in and with, and if you can't speak
clearly to it, you're never going to be an effective politician,
because part of the job of being a politician is
being able to accurately channel and reflect the energy of
(17:49):
the people you are sent to represent. And there are
people who are really scared right now. There are people
who are scared because they believe in the right things,
and there are people who are scared because they're fit.
Physical lives are in danger. Like as we are talking,
there is a standoff between ICE and protesters at a
facility in suburban Chicago because they're trying to kidnap people,
(18:11):
and they're tear gassing protesters and they're throwing congressional candidates
on the ground, And like, this is our country right now,
and four years of this is not who we are
didn't really bring us any closer to a multi racial
democratic future that we deserve.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
They need to have a plan, they need to stick
to the plan. They need to talk, they need to
be everywhere all the time. They need to go on
Joe Rogan. If Joe Rogan is upset, they need to
go on it. Like this whole idea that one of
the things I've been really stripped by is this sort
of rigidness, this refusal to change with the times. I
(18:47):
understand that this is stressful for them, but you know,
it's stressful for all of us.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
And Chicago is such a good example. Pushback works, which
that works? Are there federal troops in Chicago?
Speaker 4 (18:57):
Now?
Speaker 3 (18:57):
Why is that? Because of two things?
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Right, Brenda Johnson and Governor Pritzgar, and they created a
united front and they said no, hell no, if you
push fact, it works, and if you give in, like
when the law firms and the colleges and the billionaires,
they just keep taking and taking and taking. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:16):
I think there are a lot of layers to what
you just said. So I'll start with capitulating in advance.
I think that that has not been an effective strategy
because confessions operate in a universe where there's some sort
of negotiation or good faith actors in both sides. But
these are people who are trying to get to the
same ends as everyone. They're trying to coerce. They're just
(19:38):
trying to coerce for the sake of coercion or extortion
or fundamentally changing the foundations of our democracy, whether it
is the law or higher education. They're trying to ruin
the law, they're trying to ruin the arts. Because their
goal is not the country we used to live in,
and we'll never return to that country. The objective of
(19:59):
the people who would be positioned to defend us should
be confronting reality and then also outline how we get
from here to something else, because we're never really bouncing
back to what we had. We have to rebuild a
new when you think about all of these agencies that
have been destroyed, when you think about HHS and health,
the Human Services and the CDC and the FDA, all
(20:21):
of these things that used to keep us or help
keep us living safely and freely. We've purged scientists, we've
purged experts, we've purged the people that brought their love
of country and their expertise to the project of our government.
And the project of our government was what made democracy
(20:42):
possible even as it was failing. So all of those
things are gone. And in order to emerge from this,
in order to give people hope and have them organized,
like on a everyday people around what a future could be,
you have to articulate it, and you have to articulate
it forcefully. I will say, you know, on your note
about Chicago and Illinois, I really don't want to diminish
(21:05):
the degree to which there are ICE agents and federal
agents across the city now and around the city. And
I think one of the things that we really have
to grapple with is the overall national media attention and
the kinds of conflicts that really generate energy and sourcing
them and understanding where they're from. So I had a
(21:25):
piece two weeks ago in the New Republic, and it
was really focused specifically on what Washington, DC is and
what makes it unique. And at the end of the day,
there are approximately seven hundred thousand people who live in
the District of Columbia who don't have full constitutional citizenship
in this country. They've never had representation in Congress, and
(21:46):
their municipal government operates in this weird conservatorship sort of agreement.
I kind of explain it as like the people of
DC or Britney Spears and the federal government is the
conservators and they're not allowed to actually have any degree
of independence. And so it's very easy for Trump to
send the National Guard into d C because they can
(22:08):
federalize the police force. Because it's only about sixty square
miles of area, he can get the images that he want.
He can put National Guards on the mall or at
the doorways of schools, and he can be effective in
that way. It is much harder to do that in
a place like Chicago or Los Angeles, because the federal
government doesn't have as much authority to operate geographically. It's
(22:31):
much larger, and frankly, I worry about how much we
dehumanized the people of d C. As we have lived
for decades under rhetoric that has made people believe that
government is bad and evil. How does that actually trickle
down to the people who live there. I think a
lot of the daily fear and destruction is really focused
now in communities of color where we have a lot
(22:53):
of immigrants, and also at sort of the outskirts of
the city, because there are less resources to cover those
communities on a local basis, and the national media is
less concerned about that than they were about seeing something
replicated like DC in a different city, which is almost
impossible based on the fundamentals of DC and any other
(23:15):
major city in the country.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Yes, very true, and resistance one point zero. Trump's first
administration was a failure because people push back. Now we
don't see that same kind of concerned effort, and that
is what we need to see in order to stop
this authoritarian slide.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
It doesn't have to be this way. You know, people
are powerful. None of this is popular. Donald Trump is
a lame duck his popularity. He is now the least
popular he's ever been.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
But Mollie I thought Jimmy Kimmel was the unpopular one.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Thank you, Meredith. Okay, bye, Molly, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Will Sommer is a reporter at The Bulwark and the
author of Trust the Plan.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Welcome back to Fast Politics, Will.
Speaker 5 (24:02):
Soma Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
We are a.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Week from the really terrible murder of Charlie Kirk and
turning point. USA has become kind of a sort of
hot commodity in Trump world. It is a humongous organization
that had millions of people in it and now there's
sort of a there's kind of a legacy fight going
(24:28):
on here a little bit.
Speaker 6 (24:30):
Yeah, So, as I read my newsletter this week about
how there's a real battle over what Charlie Kirk would
have wanted, what the legacy of Charlie Kirk is, and
who should run Turning Point USA after his death. And
so we have people from the you know, the main
fault line here is Israel. And so you have people
like Candice Owen's Tucker Carlson, who had been critical of Israel.
(24:51):
They're saying, well, you know, in the days leading up
to his death, these donors, these pro Israel donors were
tormenting Charlie and they wanted him to ban people like
Tucker Carlson from Turning Point USA events.
Speaker 5 (25:03):
And then on the other.
Speaker 6 (25:03):
Hand, you have people like Laura Lumer, Benchkapiro, even JD Vance,
you know, Benjamin Etta, who got involved to dispute the
client the idea that that Israel Minister of Israel.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
So wait, there's some there's a there's a lie going
around that Israel murdered Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 5 (25:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (25:21):
I would say that's probably the biggest conspiracy theory right
now on the right is that Israel murdered Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 5 (25:26):
There's really no evidence of it, basically, I.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
Think, really no evidence.
Speaker 6 (25:33):
Of you know, even people like Steve Bannon have been
who has not endorsed the Israel hypothesis, but have been
there's kind of the sense of like disappointment, I think,
dissatisfaction with the official narrative, you know, as we're seeing
on the left too. But I think there's this sense of,
you know, this has to have been the work of
some you know, left wing network, and particularly the fact
that it's a it's a white guy from a Maga
(25:55):
family in Utah. Is they're kind of like, you know,
this isn't quite maybe the pretext we wanted, and so
people are, you know, coming up with other theories, and
so canis Owen's Tucker Carlson when they come out there
and they say, well, in his final days, Charlie Kirk
was being tormented over Israel. I think certainly in Kansas's case,
there's this implication. She's not saying, you know, the Masad
sent to sniper or whatever, but she's sort of there's
(26:16):
this insinuation, you know, Okay, well this is who was
mad at him, right, before his death, and they were
concerned he would flip and become critical of Israel and
then the next day he was murdered.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
I don't think it's just that the story doesn't meet
some of the narrative desires. I also think there's a
larger issue here, which is that if everything is a conspiracy,
then nothing can be just the most likely explanation. And
so when you and I think we'll keep seeing this
(26:46):
around Trump world, right, that these a lot of guns
and a lot of kids in this age bracket of
their twenties who are boys who are disaffected and unhappy
and spending too much time online and doing real bad stuff.
So like, I just wonder if you could talk about
sort of the conspiracy minded stuff that is eroding some
(27:10):
of the unity I think in this group too.
Speaker 6 (27:13):
I mean, look, this is a universe where people are
prone basically any big event that happens, they're going to
say there was a sinister force behind it. If there's
a fire in California, it wasn't global warming or that's
the dry season, it's that you know, the lasers they
are being shot down to start fires, and so in
that way, you know this is a group that and
of course, you know, the obvious example being, you know,
(27:34):
the idea that school shootings were false flags. They're very
steeped in this, and so then when they have something
that happens, where the narrative is you know more or
less what I mean, this guy appears to have been
coming from a liberal perspective on you know, gay rights
something like that. They are still like, what else is there?
What's the truth? Are these text messages real? And really
in a way that's sort of distracting, I think from
(27:56):
the Trump administration's effort to crack down on the left.
You know, were I was seeing you know, far right
accounts say like you know, Nick Fuent is the saying this, saying,
you know, hey, dummies, we're trying to crush the left here.
We have this once in a generation opportunity. As you know,
people like Benny Johnson have said, this is an enormous
chance to really punish liberal institutions basically pretextually and so
(28:16):
but instead we're going to talk about Israel, and so
there's been a lot of frustration over that.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Now there is I saw that Candice Owens has like
a whole story of a weekend Can you talk us
through that.
Speaker 5 (28:28):
Yeah, So a lot of this has focused on this
sort of right wing influencer retreat that was held in
Bridge Hampton in the Hamptons.
Speaker 6 (28:36):
At a hotel one does Well, I was going to say,
you know, I know, I see you at the influencers,
and you know, that demonstrates how much money is really
just floating around on the right. So basically, Bill Ackman.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
These are the richest people in the world.
Speaker 6 (28:51):
Yeah, literally yes, And I mean that also helps explain
why Turning Point USA became so enormous, because these right
wing rich guys said, oh great, this guy's gonna, you know,
turn a bunch of young people to the right.
Speaker 5 (29:01):
Why not give him a ton of money.
Speaker 6 (29:03):
So basically, Bill Ackman, the billionaire, decided to with Charlie Kirk,
they hosted this, like, as I said, an influencer retreat
in the Hamptons in early August. And there's sort of
different takes on why they did this. On one hand,
Charlie Kirk himself was growing slightly more critical of Israel.
He's like ninety nine percent supportive, sort of saying, you know,
(29:24):
should we wrap up this Warren Gaza. Young people are
really tunning against this and then, so there was this
idea in Kida his owns. It's telling that Bill Ackman said, okay, well,
like let's get all these people together and talk about Israel.
But she's claimed that this basically devolved into sort of
an ambush with Charlie Kirk where Bill Ackman some other
pro Israel people really confronted him and said, you know,
(29:44):
you need to get back in line, and in fact,
you need to go to Israel and sort of almost
like a like a re education tour.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Right Is that true? Do we know if that's true?
Speaker 5 (29:53):
Well, so Bill Ackman has said there was no confrontation.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
I kind of it was a very long Bill Ackman
tweet that I saw, incredibly about two thousand words.
Speaker 5 (30:03):
And this should give me the sense of how rich
this guy was.
Speaker 6 (30:04):
It struck me that he said, well, I decided to
host it because I like, I'm hanging out there in
the Hamptons and I kind of wanted to pop into
a couple events. So sure, I'll fund bringing one hundred
people to the Hamptons and putting them up in a
hotel for the weekend, so I could, you know, pop
in for an hour. But anyway, so he claimed there
was no confrontation. You know, some other people who were
there turning point, USA has said there was no confrontation.
Some people will say, though, that there was sort of
(30:25):
a perhaps a dispute or at a little bit of
a debate about Israel. But I think the most telling
thing here is the day after the retreat, Charlie Kirk
goes on Megan Kelly's show, and Meghan Kelly herself is
kind of drifting away from Israel. I think she sort
of just sees the way the winds are blowing. And
so he goes on there and he says, you know,
I am so sick of these israel people treating me,
(30:46):
just jumping all over me for any mild criticism. He
calls it repulsive the way they're treating him. I mean,
he acts like a guy who just got harangued for
a weekend at the Hamptons, you know, whether or not
that happened.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
And then he says that she may be libeled him,
and there's some threats of a loss suit. So just
get me to where we are now with this situation.
Speaker 6 (31:04):
So basically, as a result, so Tucker Carlson and Megan
Kelly have kind of backed up her claims about this
tension between Charlie Kirk and Israel. A lot of other
right wing people got involved. Jade Vance said essentially, can
we wait until the funeral is over, which, you know,
fair point. Benjamin at Yaho put out a video saying
we didn't kill Charlie Kirk. He loved Israel, and so
now we're looking.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
At this point gotten really nuts.
Speaker 6 (31:24):
Yeah, it's an international story now, but basically, I think
if you pull the lens back a little, the issue
is the Charlie Kirk legacy and his kind of martyrdom
on the right and what that means, how that's going
to be interpreted, and is he going to be interpreted
as this very straightforward right wing maga guy. Or you
can see Tucker Carlson is trying to shift this as well.
(31:45):
He's saying Charlie's views on economics and specifically wealth distribution,
he was becoming much more populist in his final days.
Or you can see the sort of mainline TPUSA people
are saying, you know, Charlie was an evangelical Christian, which
is correct, and they're trying to make this kind of
a big church moment as well. This is going to
start a revival across America, whereas Candice Owns is saying
(32:06):
Charlie was on the verge of becoming Catholic, and so
there's this very like and then you know, I will
say had he converted to Catholicism On the right, there's
kind of a political tenor to that as well. That
means you're sort of further on the right typically and
perhaps more critical of Israel, someone like Nick Fuente's. So
there's a lot of like religious political overtones here and
there's just like it's getting very vicious.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
This is sometimes what happens when very wealthy people die
or someone with a lot of power, that people come
in and try to kind of co opt the narrative.
That's not a left or right issue, that's just a
human nature issue. That said, there is sort of this
other ripple, which is the wife, right, the witness.
Speaker 6 (32:48):
Yeah, so Erica Kirk, who gave last week is sort
of what was very well received on the right as
sort of a eulogy immediately after his assassination, I believe
it two days after. And so she obviously has a
lot of there's a lot of support for her, a
lot of energy for her on the right. And on Friday,
or excuse me, on Thursday, they made her the CEO
of Turning Point USA, so sort of as his air
(33:10):
his replacement. It's a little unclear to me whether she's
going to have as big a media role as he did.
Obviously it would be difficult for her, even before the
assassination to have had it as outsized a role, but
it's a little unclear where that she wants that.
Speaker 5 (33:22):
Obviously she has a lot of other things going on.
Speaker 6 (33:24):
And so I think people are sort of from a
practical point of view, seeing this chance of you know,
Turning Point USA, this behemoth organization with a huge amount
of money.
Speaker 5 (33:33):
What's going to happen to it?
Speaker 6 (33:34):
Eric Bowling, the former Fox host who's on the board
at Turning Point, he came out and said, you know,
Cannon Owens, you know they hadn't talked in years. You know,
he want Charlie wanted nothing to do with her, essentially,
So there's this really and again, you know, I do
want to emphasize the memorial hasn't happened, the funeral hasn't happened,
So what is that going to look like? How vicious
is this fight going to get? And I think it
also like there are for people who are outside of
(33:57):
this world who don't think that they're, you know, going
to inherit the Charlie or legacy. For the average person,
there's a question of how does this affect the Trump
administration's efforts to crack down on people and how does
this play into twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 5 (34:08):
I mean, this organization has a lot of PIPA.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
So let's talk through because clearly the Trump administration has
used the Charlie Kirk killing as a way to crush dissent,
and we see this with Jimmy Kimmel. So Brendan Carr
goes on the podcast of Benny Johnson and says, we
(34:30):
can do this the hard way or we can do
this the easy way. And we've seen Trump do this too.
We've seen they tend to talk like this.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
We can do this.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
I mean, we've earned Trump say we can do this
the hard way or the easy way. So immediately Disney
pulls Jimmy Kimmel's show.
Speaker 6 (34:47):
Yes, And the first domino to fall were these local
stations that flip out because Brendan Carr says, you know,
maybe we'll threaten your licenses. Obviously they have some of
them have mergers that are that will require you's approval.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
Six billion dollars more they want to buy. So Next
Star wants to buy another it's called Tegna. Tegna right,
another small not that small obviously, but local news stations.
Speaker 6 (35:12):
Yeah, and the size of this merger, it would be enormous.
It would probably violate current SEC rules about stations as
you know, conglomerate size.
Speaker 5 (35:20):
And so they really need Brendan Colin to trust.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
But because the law has been sort of ignored in
nine months of Trump administration, they know they can get
by if they just make Trump happy.
Speaker 5 (35:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (35:32):
So, I mean he goes on on Benny Johnson, which
you know was iously Benny in the past, just recently
was receiving Russian money just a year ago to vunt
his operation. And so now they come out and they say, uh,
you know, well, we're gonna within within twelve hours or something,
you know, Jimmy Kimmel's show is on ICE. And so
I think, as we've seen over and over, whether it's
(35:53):
sixty minutes, whether it's ABC's previous capitulation to Trump with
George Defhanopolis, these companies are absolutely terrified Trump. And even
if they could win on the legal side. I think
Brett as sixty minutes easily could have. Brendan Carr has
made clear that you know, he's going to hold anything up.
He's going to cause a lot of trouble if you
don't go along with the way Trump wants.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Yeah, and that I think is where we find ourselves.
So here's a I wonder there has been, and this
I think is important and also terrifying. The right has
seen that going down, this taking people off the air
because they say stuff you don't like road could really
(36:35):
actually backfire against them too. So talk us through sort
of the pushback we're seeing on both sides. And again
we saw earlier this week Pam Bondy, Donald Trump's greatest champion,
said something to the effect of, like, there's free speech
and then there's speech we don't like and that's not
covered by the So talk us through Pam Bondy and
the other Republicans pushing back. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (36:56):
Sure, So. Pam Bondi in sort of a classic PANM.
Bondi move.
Speaker 6 (36:58):
I mean, she basically was saying whateverone else in the
administration was saying about a crackdown, but she phrased it
in this way about hate speech that I think Republicans
sound very triggering because they're used to hate speech, you know,
that idea being weaponized against them, and so she had
to walk that back. But what I think it's really
interesting and more telling is that Trump has not walked
it back. I mean, he said, well, you know, yeah,
(37:18):
you know, you can't be you know, he's he's threatened
reporters this week, he's threatened you know, he's he's had comedians,
you know, can't really make fun of him. And so
the there's clearly, I think a big crackdown brewing. I mean,
we're we're already seeing it. Mean to be frank with
Jimmy Kimmel, and I think there's this sense. I think
the thing to go back to is that the difference
(37:40):
between the first Trump administration and the second Trump administration
has really been the growth of this movement called the
New Right.
Speaker 5 (37:45):
This is jd.
Speaker 6 (37:46):
Vance, Peter Teelemnious, Moldbug, all these these so called thinkers right,
and their idea is, you know, we stuck by the rules,
we did the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and where
did that get us? Well, conservatives are out of power culturally,
you know, they believe that's.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
Got billions of dollars. But that was not enough exactly.
Speaker 5 (38:05):
And so so now they're they're very explicit.
Speaker 6 (38:07):
About, you know, we're going to be like Victor Oorbona,
We're going to use government power to crush our enemies,
whether it's political or cultural. We're not going to worry
about whether that's hypocritical, whether that's what the founders would
have wanted, anything like that. But we're I mean, there's
really no limit as they see it, in terms of
their power.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Yeah, it's a kind of scary.
Speaker 6 (38:24):
Yeah, absolutely, And I mean I think you know, there's
also you know, there's gonna be a chilling effect on
media institutions. I mean because really people have said this,
but you know, if you look at Jimmy Kimill said,
it's really not objectionable at all. I mean, it's not
like you know, these these comments. You know, in the
past you can say, oh, yeah, you know that guy,
you can see why that guy got suspended or something
like that. But I think that is going to be
(38:44):
even more chilling because then people are gonna be like, well,
you can kind of just get picked at random by
Benny Johnson and he'll put a clip in front of
the SEC chairman and then you're.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Out, which is true, which is what it is. Now.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
It strikes me that this is a lot like when
the Trump administration, when universities made deals with the Trump administration,
they made these deals they were not legal, so they
had no instead of like, for example, if you fought
back against Trump, you would probably win because I mean,
just like when Sherry Redstone settled that sixteen million dollar
(39:18):
for VLIS lawsuit with the Trump administration, every legal scholar
said there was no way that the Trump administration would
have won a lawsuit because you didn't like the way
an episode of sixty Minutes was edited, Like that's not
how any of this works. But it didn't matter because
it set a precedent for settling these kind of things.
(39:38):
So and once you go into these deals with Trump,
because they're not necessarily legal, you have to trust him.
Speaker 6 (39:45):
Yeah, I mean, look, I mean this is kind of
the same playbook we've seen with all these institutions. I mean,
going after the law firms, going after the media, going
after academia, and you know, again, they are not for
the most part, there is not even like a shred
of a legal case. It's just you know, I didn't
like who you represented in the case of these law firms,
or you know, I don't like that you allowed these
protests for the universities. As you said, there's no like,
it's not really like an official deal with the Department
(40:06):
of Justice. You know, even after these so called deals
are signed, then there's kind of this dispute afterwards. I mean,
you're kind of letting the vampire in the house and
then hoping that he you know, just goes to his
room or something like like once he's in, he's going
to keep shaking you down. As again, you know, because
there have been so many examples of this, I think
we've kind of forgotten the George Staffanopolis thing where that
you know, step monopolists kind of mischaracterized slightly, the Eging
(40:30):
Carol case. And then suddenly ABC, you know, folds to
Trump gives him I believe, sixteen million dollars to the library,
and that I think you might say, Okay, they've they
paid their protection money, now we can.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
Move on, or it's not how it works, of course not.
Speaker 6 (40:43):
And then you know he's going to come back and
he's going to say, oh, well, you know I didn't
like what Jimmy Kimmel said.
Speaker 5 (40:47):
You know, it'd be a shame if all your your
affiliates lost their licenses.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Yeah, and so I think what we've seen with all
of these quote unquote deals is that they don't work.
So it begs the question, why do we think these
intostitutions keep making them.
Speaker 6 (41:01):
I mean, I think that you know, we live in
a time where I think these you know, these businesses
seem feel really empowered to you know, to just focus
on the you know, delivering for their shareholders, and they
just want to avoid.
Speaker 5 (41:12):
Like any kind of you know.
Speaker 6 (41:13):
I mean, you can see how much troubled Cracker Barrel
got into for God's sake, for changing their logo. They
had to redo all the restaurants and and so you know,
there's this terror of kind of like the iosauron of
Trump falling on you.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Uh.
Speaker 6 (41:26):
And you know, but as you said, I mean, it
will never be enough. I mean, you can look at
Fox News. We can't can't imagine a channel that would
be more slavish in his devotion to Trump. But as soon,
you know, we know Trump, he'll rails people on Fox News.
Or when the Wall Street Journal ran the Epstein birthday letter.
You know, now he's suing them, so you know it
really unless you're.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
Gonna go like full billion dollars, Yeah, so, I.
Speaker 5 (41:46):
Mean, unless you're gonna go like full Benny Johnson mode.
Speaker 6 (41:48):
You know, there's really no level to which you can
stoop for the president in media that that is going
to be enough for them.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
Thank you, Will Sommer, Thanks for having me no moment perfectly,
Jessy Cannon.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
My junk fast so Ken Clippen Steed Front of the
Show has a very very disturbing report that the FBI
is writying a new war on trans people and you
could see it on the right wing messaging now is
they're trying to make Trantifa a thing, which God help us.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
Yeah, I mean, look, they're going to do all of that,
and that's why we all have to be focused on
pushing back in the best way we can. We need
to push back peacefully. We need to push back in
the way that is peaceful, but is clear that this
is not okay. There is no world in which throwing
trans people under the bus makes anyone safer. We do
(42:42):
not abandon each other. This is such a dark, dark moment,
and you know we're not going to get out of
this until people say peacefully that it's enough. That's it
for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday,
and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make
(43:06):
sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast,
please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
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 White House Staff Secretary Will Sharp
was caught on a hot mic joking our brand is crisis.
We have such a great show for you today. The
New Republic's own Meredith Shiner talks to us about pushing
(00:21):
back against Trump's increasingly disturbing rule. Then we'll talk to
the Bulwarks own Will Sommer about the chaos and maga
world after the killing of Charlie Kirk. But first we
have the stories the media is missing Smillie.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
We have not spoken in what feels like ten million
years since Jimmy Kimmel was suspended for making very benign jokes,
and there's a lot of fall out here, and the
Republicans have killed an attempt to subpoena the FCC chair
to talk about it.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
So here's what happens.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
FCC chair goes on Benny Johnson's podcast, says we can
do this the hard way or the easy way, complaining
Aboutjimmy Kimmel. Disney pulls Jimmy Kimmel partially because next star
who needs to have a merger approved by the Trump administration,
decides that it's not worth getting the Trump administration mad.
(01:13):
This is censorship, but it's corporate censorship. It's not state
run censorship, although the state is basically creating a world
where these corporations are censoring themselves in order to get by.
I think that what is important with this Kimmel canceling
is just like the Trump administration's attacks on universities weren't
(01:36):
actually about anti Semitism.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
They were about.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Stifling free speech and free expression. Just like the way
that Trump used the federal guard in Washington, d C.
Wasn't actually about crime. It was about rolling in federal
troops to scare legislators. Just like those things, this is
not about Jimmy Kiml. This is about speech the President
(02:02):
of the United States doesn't like and he wants to
chill it. And that's what we're looking at here. So
this is so much like the House on an American
activities that put my grandfather in jail. It's kind of amazing.
It's pretty chilling, by the way, I think it's important.
Here we have a ranking member, Robert Garcia. You see
the Democrats who are pushing back. You see the Democrats
(02:24):
who are making noise, and you see the Democrats who
are not right. So Ranking Member Robert Garcia, he's the
ranking on oversight. He said that he and Committee Chair
James Comer have been talking during the hearing and are
going to work together to bring mister Carr in front
of oversight.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
If you're a.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Republican and Tucker Carlson talked about this this week, I
am now agreeing with Tucker Carlson because that's where we
are in this moment. Tucker Carlson talked about it this week,
But basically, this is a road that no one wants
to go down. We have an amendment, it's called the
First Amendment, and what's happening here is that corporations are
(03:01):
giving up their first Amendment right in the hopes of
regulatory favor.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Yeah. I think it's pretty crazy when you're seeing Tucker
Carlson beyond the same side as you and I, And
it's interesting how what we're seeing also, though, is that
some of these comedians that everybody's like, oh, they're going
to come to Jimmy Kimmel's defenses, they're twisting themselves in
knots to try to say that what Trump has done
is okay, and that this is like FAFO or something.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yes, but a lot of them are not, or at
least the smart ones know that when you go down
this road soon you have to just only toe the
line of the regime. And this is how we get
to Russia, right, this is how we get to North Korea.
I think it's worth realizing that these corporations did this
(03:49):
because they saw Paramount do it, because they saw billionaires
at the inauguration. Every single caving leads to more caving,
creates a permissions sure, Obeying in advance leads to Morabeying
in advance leads to moro obeying in advance. By the way,
the obey and advance guy he lives in Canada now,
so let's not be too hot on him. But I
(04:10):
think it is important to realize, like, we got here
because people refuse to resist because the stuff that worked
in twenty sixteen they stopped doing. So there's a way
to get out of this and it looks a lot
like twenty sixteen. By the way, Also important Trump doesn't
take this Kimmel's situation as a win and keep going. Instead,
he says, what what does he say? He says he
(04:32):
wants more more scalps. When asked about Kimmel's suspension for
making remarks about the potential political ideology. You know what
he says, He says, quote, I read someplace that networks
ninety seven percent against me again, ninety seven percent negative,
and yet I won and easily won all seven swing
states popular vote one everything Trump said. They're ninety seven
(04:54):
percent against they get me only bad press. I mean
they're getting a license. I would think maybe their licenses
should be taken away. So welcome to what happens when
you go along to get along.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
So the House has passed the GOP funding bill two
hundred and seventeen votes to two hundred and twelve, and
now it goes to the Senate.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Yeah, this is so embarrassing.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
I'm so angry at Democrats for what's happening right now.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Bolly, I think you just named Mike Johnson's biography. This
is so embarrassing.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
It's also hit Keem Jeffrey's biography because like now it's
gone through the House, it now ends up in the
Senate where Chuck Schumer.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Look, here's the thing. Democrats don't have any power. I
get it.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
I understand, but they could do things like they could say,
you know, we want to be able to subpoena Brendan cart.
They could ask for small things that would show at
least that they have something. So soon Obamacare subsidies are
going to go way, way up because Republicans didn't want
to fund them, So they're going to go up like
twenty percent. This is something that the Republicans have done
(06:01):
to themselves and to the American people more broadly, Democrats
want Republicans to make it so these subsidies don't go up.
But you know what, and again this is something we
saw in twenty sixteen. It may be that voters need
to see what they voted for, and this idea that
Democrats should save voters from things they voted for. They
(06:21):
voted for their Obamacare premiums to go up. Maybe they
didn't know it, but that's what they voted for. So
the idea that Democrats are now going to go in there,
and by the way, Republicans don't want to do it.
They want those Obamacare premiums to go up, and those
premiums may in fact, really really hurt Republicans in the midterms.
So why are Democrats trying to get something that they
(06:45):
won't get credit for. I just don't get it, Like
they are so focused on things that are politically stupid
for them that they forget that they do actually have
to win elections.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Speaking of winning elections, a lot of people seem to
be concerned that the messaging part of the Democratic Party
is now going to be greatly diminished since a lot
of it lives on TikTok, which has been bought by
a conglomerate of Trump supporters.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Including has it gone through.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
The reporting is that it's zeroing in on a deal
that would sell eighty percent of TikTok's US assets to
add Rees and Horwitz, Oracle and silver Lake.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
All Trump supporters.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Yes, and there is already reports on drop site that
they are pulling left wing creators, specifically that talk about Palestine.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, these guys are really pro Israel. They love Israel.
I mean, this is what happens when you don't have freedom.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yeah, I mean I do think this is a recipe
for a lot of people abandoning the platform very fast.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Well, see people have stayed on Twitter, Yeah, even though
it's bad.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Twitter is a disturbing, disturbing example of this but.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
There certainly are places like Blue Sky and Terrible.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Threads, so maybe it's into being okay.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Meredith Shiner is a contributing editor at The New Republic.
Welcome to Baspolitex, Meredith, Bye, Mollie, thank you again for
having me back. Oh I'm so happy to have you back.
And there's so much stuff to talk about. I would
love to talk from it because I feel like a
lot of people this podcast found they are like us,
(08:29):
Like they're concerned about American democracy. You know, we're moms,
we have kids. We'd like to live in a democratic system.
It does feel like swimming in sewage. It does.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
And I think it is very difficult to be a
person in the world right now, whether you are a
parent or not a parent. I think the onslaught of
the headlines is really really difficult to navigate. Like this
is worse than how it felt in the first Trump administration.
And I remember that felt like an onslaught of push
alerts and lines, you know, I speaking about being a mom.
(09:03):
I was getting my son ready for swim class when
I looked down on my phone on Wednesday and saw
the push alert about Jimmy Kimmel's show being suspended indefinitely.
And it is so rare now that I get to
a place where I see something that popped up on
my phone and I have a visceral reaction to it
out loud. And that was a moment where I felt
(09:24):
that way. And I don't want to say that there's
a dichotomy between the people who are paying super close
attention to everything that's happening every single day in Washington,
right Not everyone is watching c SPAN. Not everyone is
keeping close tabs on these a SIP meetings that are
talking about, you know, which vaccines will be available for
our children moving forward nationwide. But something like Jimmy Kimmel
(09:45):
getting canceled in the way that he was that it
was a reflection in an outgrowth of the plans of
this administration that were outlined in Project twenty twenty five
to quash descent and to fundamentally reshape the way we
get to live our lif I think something about that
moment being so public and also so commercial, so like
(10:06):
pop culture oriented, I feel that there are going to
be people who are more inclined to be in tune
with that and to start asking questions about the other
things that are going on because it's really starting to
be more in your face.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
And the question, I think is what breaks through.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Sarah's spent all this time doing a lot of media
that people never saw. A lot of us are very
stressed and are not reading the news. So the question
is like, what is a big enough thing to get
people's attention, to get them to see that none of
this is normal and there's a real chance that this
is in.
Speaker 4 (10:41):
Yeah, I think you're asking a question that sort of
speaks to an individual level. But I really like to
think about a system's question, and what shapes people's understanding
isn't just how much they're opting in. It's when they
opt in what they're getting exposed to. And I still
think that there is a broader need for Democrats in
(11:05):
Washington to be raising the alarm bells or sounding the
alarm bells more than they are currently. I saw the
statement from past Democratic leadership in response to Jimmy Kimmel's
removal from the airwaves. I saw a few members in
different hearings, whether it was Eric Swawall in California or
somewhere else, saying that if and when Democrats take power
(11:28):
in the midterm, that all of these officials involved with
the sec from Brandon carr on down better save their
receipt because there will be investigations. And I think that
there is a responsibility for some of these elected officials
in Washington to start creating conflict and tension because, as
we know, for better for worse, the national media is
(11:49):
deeply oriented around conflict, and if there isn't conflict, that's
not how they actually tell the story.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
This is so brilliant and I agree with everything you're so.
Speaker 4 (12:00):
I'll give you a recent example of this. So there
was a hearing on Capitol Hill this week where DC
Mayor Muriel Bowser was called to testify before a House committee.
And I think that this is really notable because Washington,
d C has been occupied now for almost six weeks,
and at the end of the day, the mayor of
d C has not got done a good enough job
(12:20):
of saying how wrong this is, how much it's damaging
the city, and has continued to let this narrative be
around quote unquote crime as opposed to what we're seeing,
which is a massive escalation of authoritarianism in our capital
city at the seat of our government. I think that
because there hasn't been as much resistance on that. It
(12:41):
has completely allowed the media narrative to be something that's
very distorted from the reality. So, like, I saw a
punch Bowl News headline, which is a sentence I never
want to stay out loud.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Yes, punch Bowl News is a B to B kind of.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
Insidery newsletter rag sort of thing. Okay, So they had
the headline about this hearing and it was like, you know,
we expect tension about this hearing on Donald Trump's efforts
to eliminate crime in the district of Columbia.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Talk about taking a Republican narrative. Yes, yes, And so.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
At the end of the day, understanding that this is broken, right,
that both sides journalism is a broken culture of access journalism,
and that relying on Democrats say Republicans say really obscures
the truth. We can all agree on that when Democrats
aren't saying the thing clearly, that's where we get problems
(13:40):
in terms of people's understanding of the seriousness of this moment.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
And this has been a very.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
Significant failure of democratic leadership in Washington. And people are like, well,
you can't blame democrats. Republicans are the authoritarians here. Yes,
that is true, but you have to be an opposition
party that actually outlines what happens. Otherwise that perspective is missing,
and we see how things escalate in the absence of
that perspective.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Yes, and in fact, what I would like now is
to talk for a minute about my hobby. Why I
have a hobby, which is I call Democratic comms people
and complain about what a bad job they're doing.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
I wish that were my job.
Speaker 4 (14:20):
That would be so cathartic and fun for me.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Maybe it's why I don't have a lot of friends.
Speaker 4 (14:25):
I mean, me too, Molly, but we can be friends
with each and we're friends.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
With each other.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
So I was texting leader Jeffreys, comms guy, and I
was saying, you know, I don't see you guys anywhere. Well,
I see our tweets making fun of your statement.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
That's it. I don't see anything.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Look, there are Democrats out there who are doing well.
Robert Garcia, a ranking member of Oversight. Right, the original
guy that Democrats wanted to put in that job. He died, Right,
You'll remember, I don't really want to go down that
rabbit hole.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Yes, but like the guy they wanted in the job.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Seventy six year old Jerry Connolly I was told was
a but we never saw them. So that guy died
and then Democrats were allowed to elevate someone who actually
could do it.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
And it's not an easy job.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Like this is all scary stuff, right, I mean, it's
scary to get past threats.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
But if you are not going to be an opposition party,
then why are you there? What are you doing? You
know there are.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
People who have no power and no money who are
protesting why you get to be in our government if
you're not going to fight for the people, because we
don't work for you, you work for us.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
Yeah, you should want more than a driver and access
to the Capitol Building to have a job in the
United States Capitol Building. And in my mind, and I'm
sure in your mind and the minds of many of
your listeners, like the job was to protect democracy, and honestly,
Congress failed at that after January sixth, even though the
(15:55):
attack came to them, authoritarianism came to them. And so
now we're here, And a few episodes ago, or a
few appearances ago, when I came on to talk to you,
we talked about my peace primary every Democrat, which had
published at the beginning of this administration, and one of
the things that really set me off and inspired me
to write it was the number two Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin,
(16:18):
telling a reporter, well, we've never seen this before. We're
just learning how to deal with it. You have to
give us some time, as if we didn't have four
years of Donald Trump before this, as if we didn't
see January sixth with our own eyes. And I think
that a lot of people who spent a long time
in Washington lived under this delusion that it could just
(16:39):
snap back right, that it would be a normal bounce
back between a democratic administration and a Republican administration, and
everyone could go to their cocktail hour at Johnny's Hafshell
afterwards and have a great time. And at the end
of the day, that was not the design of the
people who were taking power. That was not what they wanted.
They wanted to fundamentally reshape this country. And the people
(17:03):
who are the most intransigent in Washington, the people who
are the least reactive to what's happening, seem to not
really have a clear idea of the symmetry of the
ills in our politics. You know, when I see people
being like, well, we have to condemn violence on the
right and violence on the left. Yes, we should condemn
all violence, but also we should identify where threats are
(17:27):
coming from and what the reality of our country is
right now, because that's the fear and anxiety that everyone
is living in and with, and if you can't speak
clearly to it, you're never going to be an effective politician,
because part of the job of being a politician is
being able to accurately channel and reflect the energy of
(17:49):
the people you are sent to represent. And there are
people who are really scared right now. There are people
who are scared because they believe in the right things,
and there are people who are scared because they're fit.
Physical lives are in danger. Like as we are talking,
there is a standoff between ICE and protesters at a
facility in suburban Chicago because they're trying to kidnap people,
(18:11):
and they're tear gassing protesters and they're throwing congressional candidates
on the ground, And like, this is our country right now,
and four years of this is not who we are
didn't really bring us any closer to a multi racial
democratic future that we deserve.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
They need to have a plan, they need to stick
to the plan. They need to talk, they need to
be everywhere all the time. They need to go on
Joe Rogan. If Joe Rogan is upset, they need to
go on it. Like this whole idea that one of
the things I've been really stripped by is this sort
of rigidness, this refusal to change with the times. I
(18:47):
understand that this is stressful for them, but you know,
it's stressful for all of us.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
And Chicago is such a good example. Pushback works, which
that works? Are there federal troops in Chicago?
Speaker 4 (18:57):
Now?
Speaker 3 (18:57):
Why is that? Because of two things?
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Right, Brenda Johnson and Governor Pritzgar, and they created a
united front and they said no, hell no, if you
push fact, it works, and if you give in, like
when the law firms and the colleges and the billionaires,
they just keep taking and taking and taking. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:16):
I think there are a lot of layers to what
you just said. So I'll start with capitulating in advance.
I think that that has not been an effective strategy
because confessions operate in a universe where there's some sort
of negotiation or good faith actors in both sides. But
these are people who are trying to get to the
same ends as everyone. They're trying to coerce. They're just
(19:38):
trying to coerce for the sake of coercion or extortion
or fundamentally changing the foundations of our democracy, whether it
is the law or higher education. They're trying to ruin
the law, they're trying to ruin the arts. Because their
goal is not the country we used to live in,
and we'll never return to that country. The objective of
(19:59):
the people who would be positioned to defend us should
be confronting reality and then also outline how we get
from here to something else, because we're never really bouncing
back to what we had. We have to rebuild a
new when you think about all of these agencies that
have been destroyed, when you think about HHS and health,
the Human Services and the CDC and the FDA, all
(20:21):
of these things that used to keep us or help
keep us living safely and freely. We've purged scientists, we've
purged experts, we've purged the people that brought their love
of country and their expertise to the project of our government.
And the project of our government was what made democracy
(20:42):
possible even as it was failing. So all of those
things are gone. And in order to emerge from this,
in order to give people hope and have them organized,
like on a everyday people around what a future could be,
you have to articulate it, and you have to articulate
it forcefully. I will say, you know, on your note
about Chicago and Illinois, I really don't want to diminish
(21:05):
the degree to which there are ICE agents and federal
agents across the city now and around the city. And
I think one of the things that we really have
to grapple with is the overall national media attention and
the kinds of conflicts that really generate energy and sourcing
them and understanding where they're from. So I had a
(21:25):
piece two weeks ago in the New Republic, and it
was really focused specifically on what Washington, DC is and
what makes it unique. And at the end of the day,
there are approximately seven hundred thousand people who live in
the District of Columbia who don't have full constitutional citizenship
in this country. They've never had representation in Congress, and
(21:46):
their municipal government operates in this weird conservatorship sort of agreement.
I kind of explain it as like the people of
DC or Britney Spears and the federal government is the
conservators and they're not allowed to actually have any degree
of independence. And so it's very easy for Trump to
send the National Guard into d C because they can
(22:08):
federalize the police force. Because it's only about sixty square
miles of area, he can get the images that he want.
He can put National Guards on the mall or at
the doorways of schools, and he can be effective in
that way. It is much harder to do that in
a place like Chicago or Los Angeles, because the federal
government doesn't have as much authority to operate geographically. It's
(22:31):
much larger, and frankly, I worry about how much we
dehumanized the people of d C. As we have lived
for decades under rhetoric that has made people believe that
government is bad and evil. How does that actually trickle
down to the people who live there. I think a
lot of the daily fear and destruction is really focused
now in communities of color where we have a lot
(22:53):
of immigrants, and also at sort of the outskirts of
the city, because there are less resources to cover those
communities on a local basis, and the national media is
less concerned about that than they were about seeing something
replicated like DC in a different city, which is almost
impossible based on the fundamentals of DC and any other
(23:15):
major city in the country.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Yes, very true, and resistance one point zero. Trump's first
administration was a failure because people push back. Now we
don't see that same kind of concerned effort, and that
is what we need to see in order to stop
this authoritarian slide.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
It doesn't have to be this way. You know, people
are powerful. None of this is popular. Donald Trump is
a lame duck his popularity. He is now the least
popular he's ever been.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
But Mollie I thought Jimmy Kimmel was the unpopular one.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Thank you, Meredith. Okay, bye, Molly, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Will Sommer is a reporter at The Bulwark and the
author of Trust the Plan.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Welcome back to Fast Politics, Will.
Speaker 5 (24:02):
Soma Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
We are a.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Week from the really terrible murder of Charlie Kirk and
turning point. USA has become kind of a sort of
hot commodity in Trump world. It is a humongous organization
that had millions of people in it and now there's
sort of a there's kind of a legacy fight going
(24:28):
on here a little bit.
Speaker 6 (24:30):
Yeah, So, as I read my newsletter this week about
how there's a real battle over what Charlie Kirk would
have wanted, what the legacy of Charlie Kirk is, and
who should run Turning Point USA after his death. And
so we have people from the you know, the main
fault line here is Israel. And so you have people
like Candice Owen's Tucker Carlson, who had been critical of Israel.
(24:51):
They're saying, well, you know, in the days leading up
to his death, these donors, these pro Israel donors were
tormenting Charlie and they wanted him to ban people like
Tucker Carlson from Turning Point USA events.
Speaker 5 (25:03):
And then on the other.
Speaker 6 (25:03):
Hand, you have people like Laura Lumer, Benchkapiro, even JD Vance,
you know, Benjamin Etta, who got involved to dispute the
client the idea that that Israel Minister of Israel.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
So wait, there's some there's a there's a lie going
around that Israel murdered Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 5 (25:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (25:21):
I would say that's probably the biggest conspiracy theory right
now on the right is that Israel murdered Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 5 (25:26):
There's really no evidence of it, basically, I.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
Think, really no evidence.
Speaker 6 (25:33):
Of you know, even people like Steve Bannon have been
who has not endorsed the Israel hypothesis, but have been
there's kind of the sense of like disappointment, I think,
dissatisfaction with the official narrative, you know, as we're seeing
on the left too. But I think there's this sense of,
you know, this has to have been the work of
some you know, left wing network, and particularly the fact
that it's a it's a white guy from a Maga
(25:55):
family in Utah. Is they're kind of like, you know,
this isn't quite maybe the pretext we wanted, and so
people are, you know, coming up with other theories, and
so canis Owen's Tucker Carlson when they come out there
and they say, well, in his final days, Charlie Kirk
was being tormented over Israel. I think certainly in Kansas's case,
there's this implication. She's not saying, you know, the Masad
sent to sniper or whatever, but she's sort of there's
(26:16):
this insinuation, you know, Okay, well this is who was
mad at him, right, before his death, and they were
concerned he would flip and become critical of Israel and
then the next day he was murdered.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
I don't think it's just that the story doesn't meet
some of the narrative desires. I also think there's a
larger issue here, which is that if everything is a conspiracy,
then nothing can be just the most likely explanation. And
so when you and I think we'll keep seeing this
(26:46):
around Trump world, right, that these a lot of guns
and a lot of kids in this age bracket of
their twenties who are boys who are disaffected and unhappy
and spending too much time online and doing real bad stuff.
So like, I just wonder if you could talk about
sort of the conspiracy minded stuff that is eroding some
(27:10):
of the unity I think in this group too.
Speaker 6 (27:13):
I mean, look, this is a universe where people are
prone basically any big event that happens, they're going to
say there was a sinister force behind it. If there's
a fire in California, it wasn't global warming or that's
the dry season, it's that you know, the lasers they
are being shot down to start fires, and so in
that way, you know this is a group that and
of course, you know, the obvious example being, you know,
(27:34):
the idea that school shootings were false flags. They're very
steeped in this, and so then when they have something
that happens, where the narrative is you know more or
less what I mean, this guy appears to have been
coming from a liberal perspective on you know, gay rights
something like that. They are still like, what else is there?
What's the truth? Are these text messages real? And really
in a way that's sort of distracting, I think from
(27:56):
the Trump administration's effort to crack down on the left.
You know, were I was seeing you know, far right
accounts say like you know, Nick Fuent is the saying this, saying,
you know, hey, dummies, we're trying to crush the left here.
We have this once in a generation opportunity. As you know,
people like Benny Johnson have said, this is an enormous
chance to really punish liberal institutions basically pretextually and so
(28:16):
but instead we're going to talk about Israel, and so
there's been a lot of frustration over that.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Now there is I saw that Candice Owens has like
a whole story of a weekend Can you talk us
through that.
Speaker 5 (28:28):
Yeah, So a lot of this has focused on this
sort of right wing influencer retreat that was held in
Bridge Hampton in the Hamptons.
Speaker 6 (28:36):
At a hotel one does Well, I was going to say,
you know, I know, I see you at the influencers,
and you know, that demonstrates how much money is really
just floating around on the right. So basically, Bill Ackman.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
These are the richest people in the world.
Speaker 6 (28:51):
Yeah, literally yes, And I mean that also helps explain
why Turning Point USA became so enormous, because these right
wing rich guys said, oh great, this guy's gonna, you know,
turn a bunch of young people to the right.
Speaker 5 (29:01):
Why not give him a ton of money.
Speaker 6 (29:03):
So basically, Bill Ackman, the billionaire, decided to with Charlie Kirk,
they hosted this, like, as I said, an influencer retreat
in the Hamptons in early August. And there's sort of
different takes on why they did this. On one hand,
Charlie Kirk himself was growing slightly more critical of Israel.
He's like ninety nine percent supportive, sort of saying, you know,
(29:24):
should we wrap up this Warren Gaza. Young people are
really tunning against this and then, so there was this
idea in Kida his owns. It's telling that Bill Ackman said, okay, well,
like let's get all these people together and talk about Israel.
But she's claimed that this basically devolved into sort of
an ambush with Charlie Kirk where Bill Ackman some other
pro Israel people really confronted him and said, you know,
(29:44):
you need to get back in line, and in fact,
you need to go to Israel and sort of almost
like a like a re education tour.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Right Is that true? Do we know if that's true?
Speaker 5 (29:53):
Well, so Bill Ackman has said there was no confrontation.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
I kind of it was a very long Bill Ackman
tweet that I saw, incredibly about two thousand words.
Speaker 5 (30:03):
And this should give me the sense of how rich
this guy was.
Speaker 6 (30:04):
It struck me that he said, well, I decided to
host it because I like, I'm hanging out there in
the Hamptons and I kind of wanted to pop into
a couple events. So sure, I'll fund bringing one hundred
people to the Hamptons and putting them up in a
hotel for the weekend, so I could, you know, pop
in for an hour. But anyway, so he claimed there
was no confrontation. You know, some other people who were
there turning point, USA has said there was no confrontation.
Some people will say, though, that there was sort of
(30:25):
a perhaps a dispute or at a little bit of
a debate about Israel. But I think the most telling
thing here is the day after the retreat, Charlie Kirk
goes on Megan Kelly's show, and Meghan Kelly herself is
kind of drifting away from Israel. I think she sort
of just sees the way the winds are blowing. And
so he goes on there and he says, you know,
I am so sick of these israel people treating me,
(30:46):
just jumping all over me for any mild criticism. He
calls it repulsive the way they're treating him. I mean,
he acts like a guy who just got harangued for
a weekend at the Hamptons, you know, whether or not
that happened.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
And then he says that she may be libeled him,
and there's some threats of a loss suit. So just
get me to where we are now with this situation.
Speaker 6 (31:04):
So basically, as a result, so Tucker Carlson and Megan
Kelly have kind of backed up her claims about this
tension between Charlie Kirk and Israel. A lot of other
right wing people got involved. Jade Vance said essentially, can
we wait until the funeral is over, which, you know,
fair point. Benjamin at Yaho put out a video saying
we didn't kill Charlie Kirk. He loved Israel, and so
now we're looking.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
At this point gotten really nuts.
Speaker 6 (31:24):
Yeah, it's an international story now, but basically, I think
if you pull the lens back a little, the issue
is the Charlie Kirk legacy and his kind of martyrdom
on the right and what that means, how that's going
to be interpreted, and is he going to be interpreted
as this very straightforward right wing maga guy. Or you
can see Tucker Carlson is trying to shift this as well.
(31:45):
He's saying Charlie's views on economics and specifically wealth distribution,
he was becoming much more populist in his final days.
Or you can see the sort of mainline TPUSA people
are saying, you know, Charlie was an evangelical Christian, which
is correct, and they're trying to make this kind of
a big church moment as well. This is going to
start a revival across America, whereas Candice Owns is saying
(32:06):
Charlie was on the verge of becoming Catholic, and so
there's this very like and then you know, I will
say had he converted to Catholicism On the right, there's
kind of a political tenor to that as well. That
means you're sort of further on the right typically and
perhaps more critical of Israel, someone like Nick Fuente's. So
there's a lot of like religious political overtones here and
there's just like it's getting very vicious.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
This is sometimes what happens when very wealthy people die
or someone with a lot of power, that people come
in and try to kind of co opt the narrative.
That's not a left or right issue, that's just a
human nature issue. That said, there is sort of this
other ripple, which is the wife, right, the witness.
Speaker 6 (32:48):
Yeah, so Erica Kirk, who gave last week is sort
of what was very well received on the right as
sort of a eulogy immediately after his assassination, I believe
it two days after. And so she obviously has a
lot of there's a lot of support for her, a
lot of energy for her on the right. And on Friday,
or excuse me, on Thursday, they made her the CEO
of Turning Point USA, so sort of as his air
(33:10):
his replacement. It's a little unclear to me whether she's
going to have as big a media role as he did.
Obviously it would be difficult for her, even before the
assassination to have had it as outsized a role, but
it's a little unclear where that she wants that.
Speaker 5 (33:22):
Obviously she has a lot of other things going on.
Speaker 6 (33:24):
And so I think people are sort of from a
practical point of view, seeing this chance of you know,
Turning Point USA, this behemoth organization with a huge amount
of money.
Speaker 5 (33:33):
What's going to happen to it?
Speaker 6 (33:34):
Eric Bowling, the former Fox host who's on the board
at Turning Point, he came out and said, you know,
Cannon Owens, you know they hadn't talked in years. You know,
he want Charlie wanted nothing to do with her, essentially,
So there's this really and again, you know, I do
want to emphasize the memorial hasn't happened, the funeral hasn't happened,
So what is that going to look like? How vicious
is this fight going to get? And I think it
also like there are for people who are outside of
(33:57):
this world who don't think that they're, you know, going
to inherit the Charlie or legacy. For the average person,
there's a question of how does this affect the Trump
administration's efforts to crack down on people and how does
this play into twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 5 (34:08):
I mean, this organization has a lot of PIPA.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
So let's talk through because clearly the Trump administration has
used the Charlie Kirk killing as a way to crush dissent,
and we see this with Jimmy Kimmel. So Brendan Carr
goes on the podcast of Benny Johnson and says, we
(34:30):
can do this the hard way or we can do
this the easy way. And we've seen Trump do this too.
We've seen they tend to talk like this.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
We can do this.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
I mean, we've earned Trump say we can do this
the hard way or the easy way. So immediately Disney
pulls Jimmy Kimmel's show.
Speaker 6 (34:47):
Yes, And the first domino to fall were these local
stations that flip out because Brendan Carr says, you know,
maybe we'll threaten your licenses. Obviously they have some of
them have mergers that are that will require you's approval.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
Six billion dollars more they want to buy. So Next
Star wants to buy another it's called Tegna. Tegna right,
another small not that small obviously, but local news stations.
Speaker 6 (35:12):
Yeah, and the size of this merger, it would be enormous.
It would probably violate current SEC rules about stations as
you know, conglomerate size.
Speaker 5 (35:20):
And so they really need Brendan Colin to trust.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
But because the law has been sort of ignored in
nine months of Trump administration, they know they can get
by if they just make Trump happy.
Speaker 5 (35:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (35:32):
So, I mean he goes on on Benny Johnson, which
you know was iously Benny in the past, just recently
was receiving Russian money just a year ago to vunt
his operation. And so now they come out and they say, uh,
you know, well, we're gonna within within twelve hours or something,
you know, Jimmy Kimmel's show is on ICE. And so
I think, as we've seen over and over, whether it's
(35:53):
sixty minutes, whether it's ABC's previous capitulation to Trump with
George Defhanopolis, these companies are absolutely terrified Trump. And even
if they could win on the legal side. I think
Brett as sixty minutes easily could have. Brendan Carr has
made clear that you know, he's going to hold anything up.
He's going to cause a lot of trouble if you
don't go along with the way Trump wants.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Yeah, and that I think is where we find ourselves.
So here's a I wonder there has been, and this
I think is important and also terrifying. The right has
seen that going down, this taking people off the air
because they say stuff you don't like road could really
(36:35):
actually backfire against them too. So talk us through sort
of the pushback we're seeing on both sides. And again
we saw earlier this week Pam Bondy, Donald Trump's greatest champion,
said something to the effect of, like, there's free speech
and then there's speech we don't like and that's not
covered by the So talk us through Pam Bondy and
the other Republicans pushing back. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (36:56):
Sure, So. Pam Bondi in sort of a classic PANM.
Bondi move.
Speaker 6 (36:58):
I mean, she basically was saying whateverone else in the
administration was saying about a crackdown, but she phrased it
in this way about hate speech that I think Republicans
sound very triggering because they're used to hate speech, you know,
that idea being weaponized against them, and so she had
to walk that back. But what I think it's really
interesting and more telling is that Trump has not walked
it back. I mean, he said, well, you know, yeah,
(37:18):
you know, you can't be you know, he's he's threatened
reporters this week, he's threatened you know, he's he's had comedians,
you know, can't really make fun of him. And so
the there's clearly, I think a big crackdown brewing. I mean,
we're we're already seeing it. Mean to be frank with
Jimmy Kimmel, and I think there's this sense. I think
the thing to go back to is that the difference
(37:40):
between the first Trump administration and the second Trump administration
has really been the growth of this movement called the
New Right.
Speaker 5 (37:45):
This is jd.
Speaker 6 (37:46):
Vance, Peter Teelemnious, Moldbug, all these these so called thinkers right,
and their idea is, you know, we stuck by the rules,
we did the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and where
did that get us? Well, conservatives are out of power culturally,
you know, they believe that's.
Speaker 3 (38:01):
Got billions of dollars. But that was not enough exactly.
Speaker 5 (38:05):
And so so now they're they're very explicit.
Speaker 6 (38:07):
About, you know, we're going to be like Victor Oorbona,
We're going to use government power to crush our enemies,
whether it's political or cultural. We're not going to worry
about whether that's hypocritical, whether that's what the founders would
have wanted, anything like that. But we're I mean, there's
really no limit as they see it, in terms of
their power.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
Yeah, it's a kind of scary.
Speaker 6 (38:24):
Yeah, absolutely, And I mean I think you know, there's
also you know, there's gonna be a chilling effect on
media institutions. I mean because really people have said this,
but you know, if you look at Jimmy Kimill said,
it's really not objectionable at all. I mean, it's not
like you know, these these comments. You know, in the
past you can say, oh, yeah, you know that guy,
you can see why that guy got suspended or something
like that. But I think that is going to be
(38:44):
even more chilling because then people are gonna be like, well,
you can kind of just get picked at random by
Benny Johnson and he'll put a clip in front of
the SEC chairman and then you're.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Out, which is true, which is what it is. Now.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
It strikes me that this is a lot like when
the Trump administration, when universities made deals with the Trump administration,
they made these deals they were not legal, so they
had no instead of like, for example, if you fought
back against Trump, you would probably win because I mean,
just like when Sherry Redstone settled that sixteen million dollar
(39:18):
for VLIS lawsuit with the Trump administration, every legal scholar
said there was no way that the Trump administration would
have won a lawsuit because you didn't like the way
an episode of sixty Minutes was edited, Like that's not
how any of this works. But it didn't matter because
it set a precedent for settling these kind of things.
(39:38):
So and once you go into these deals with Trump,
because they're not necessarily legal, you have to trust him.
Speaker 6 (39:45):
Yeah, I mean, look, I mean this is kind of
the same playbook we've seen with all these institutions. I mean,
going after the law firms, going after the media, going
after academia, and you know, again, they are not for
the most part, there is not even like a shred
of a legal case. It's just you know, I didn't
like who you represented in the case of these law firms,
or you know, I don't like that you allowed these
protests for the universities. As you said, there's no like,
it's not really like an official deal with the Department
(40:06):
of Justice. You know, even after these so called deals
are signed, then there's kind of this dispute afterwards. I mean,
you're kind of letting the vampire in the house and
then hoping that he you know, just goes to his
room or something like like once he's in, he's going
to keep shaking you down. As again, you know, because
there have been so many examples of this, I think
we've kind of forgotten the George Staffanopolis thing where that
you know, step monopolists kind of mischaracterized slightly, the Eging
(40:30):
Carol case. And then suddenly ABC, you know, folds to
Trump gives him I believe, sixteen million dollars to the library,
and that I think you might say, Okay, they've they
paid their protection money, now we can.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
Move on, or it's not how it works, of course not.
Speaker 6 (40:43):
And then you know he's going to come back and
he's going to say, oh, well, you know I didn't
like what Jimmy Kimmel said.
Speaker 5 (40:47):
You know, it'd be a shame if all your your
affiliates lost their licenses.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Yeah, and so I think what we've seen with all
of these quote unquote deals is that they don't work.
So it begs the question, why do we think these
intostitutions keep making them.
Speaker 6 (41:01):
I mean, I think that you know, we live in
a time where I think these you know, these businesses
seem feel really empowered to you know, to just focus
on the you know, delivering for their shareholders, and they
just want to avoid.
Speaker 5 (41:12):
Like any kind of you know.
Speaker 6 (41:13):
I mean, you can see how much troubled Cracker Barrel
got into for God's sake, for changing their logo. They
had to redo all the restaurants and and so you know,
there's this terror of kind of like the iosauron of
Trump falling on you.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Uh.
Speaker 6 (41:26):
And you know, but as you said, I mean, it
will never be enough. I mean, you can look at
Fox News. We can't can't imagine a channel that would
be more slavish in his devotion to Trump. But as soon,
you know, we know Trump, he'll rails people on Fox News.
Or when the Wall Street Journal ran the Epstein birthday letter.
You know, now he's suing them, so you know it
really unless you're.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
Gonna go like full billion dollars, Yeah, so, I.
Speaker 5 (41:46):
Mean, unless you're gonna go like full Benny Johnson mode.
Speaker 6 (41:48):
You know, there's really no level to which you can
stoop for the president in media that that is going
to be enough for them.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
Thank you, Will Sommer, Thanks for having me no moment perfectly,
Jessy Cannon.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
My junk fast so Ken Clippen Steed Front of the
Show has a very very disturbing report that the FBI
is writying a new war on trans people and you
could see it on the right wing messaging now is
they're trying to make Trantifa a thing, which God help us.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
Yeah, I mean, look, they're going to do all of that,
and that's why we all have to be focused on
pushing back in the best way we can. We need
to push back peacefully. We need to push back in
the way that is peaceful, but is clear that this
is not okay. There is no world in which throwing
trans people under the bus makes anyone safer. We do
(42:42):
not abandon each other. This is such a dark, dark moment,
and you know we're not going to get out of
this until people say peacefully that it's enough. That's it
for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday,
and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make
(43:06):
sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast,
please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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