Rick Wilson, Kate Conger, Ryan Mac & Amanda Becker

The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson skewers Trump for cozying up to Laura Loomer. Kate Conger and Ryan Mac detail their book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter. The 19th's Amanda Becker examines her new book You Must Stand Up: The Fight for Abortion Rights in Post-Dobbs America.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics. Well,
we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's
best minds.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
And Donald Trump has raged truth, the words that will
soon bring him much misery in his existence. I hate
Taylor Swift. We have such a great show for you today,
Kick Konger and Ryan Max dot By to talk to
their new book character Women, how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter.
Then the nineteenth Samanda Becker will tell us about her
new book You Must Stand Up the Fight for Abortion

(00:29):
rights and post dobs America. But first we have the
host of the Enemy's List, the Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
Welcome back to Fast Politics.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
For Wilson, why do you sound so for Lauren Kamala
Harris kicked the ever loving shit out of Donald Trump
up and down that stage just three nights ago, like
he was a rented mule. I mean, listen, you should
be in a happy place right now. We got dogs
and cats living in sin together. Oh, are being eaten
one of the two?

Speaker 1 (00:56):
I don't know, no one's eating dogs. And then they
went to well, maybe not dogs, but geese. And then
they went to, well, maybe not geese, but there's this woman.
They just have nothing.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
Yeah, they have one crazy person who's not a Haitian.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Who in a different town.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
Yeah right, and a differency may have done something with
a cat. But I mean the whole thing is, I know,
you're shocked to hear this, a farrago of lies and horseshit.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Shocking, shocking, Yes, was shocked because those guys are known
for being legit, and there's some possibility that taking Laura
Lumer with you.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
Listen, Laura Lumer. I like to think of her now
as the campaign's general consultant, which I really like. I
think it's going to make the campaign much more efficient.
If Donald Trump really has waited this long to bring
Laura Lumer into the family, it's been a mistake. I mean,
she is so brilliantly able to catch the mood of America,
the sweet spot of American politics. I mean, yesterday calling

(01:53):
out Lindsay Graham for being gay, being a nine to
eleven truther, being a monstrous shit bag human being the
first order. I mean, there's nothing about Laura Lumer honestly
that doesn't make America say this is the right choice
for president, because he's going to surround himself with the
very best people.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Also, I would like to add that it was nine
to eleven this week and he went to the nine
to eleven services he went to.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
I mean he was there, but was he really there?

Speaker 1 (02:21):
And she was on the plane, so I don't know
that she went to the events.

Speaker 3 (02:24):
No, she was on the plane for the debate.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
Also, Yeah, she's been going around to a lot of
places with him.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Yes, and he's been not wearing his wedding ring. I'm
not saying that Alina Habba has anything to worry about,
but you know, tongues are wagging. You have me here
to perform just that kind of stunt.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
Rick Wilson, let me ask you a question. I actually
am in a bad mood and worried more not in
a bad mood, but more worried about a little stay
called Pennsylvania. Yeah, so talk me off the ledge about Pennsylvania.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
I will tell you Pennsylvania is the lynch pen of
the campaign. That's real talk. I'm not going to bass
you and tell you that Pennsylvania is not super super
super important. It is very important. Without Pennsylvania, the world
falls apart and we're all living as mutants in a
radioactive healthscape that makes Mad Max look like sound of music.
It is not great if we don't win Pennsylvania. But

(03:24):
I think we're gonna win Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
Okay, tell me why.

Speaker 3 (03:27):
I do not believe that we are in the same
spot that they think we are. I think Pennsylvania, particularly
in Bucks County, has a big, big number of pro
choice Republican women and independent leaning conservative women who are
pro choice. And I know we're working very much there
at the moment. We're going to be in there with
a lot of resources. We're feeling like there's a degree

(03:48):
of economic uplift you're going to get when the rate
cut kicks in in a week or so, when the
Fed kicks the raids down. Pennsylvania's an area that's been
hard hit by housing, the explosive housing costs. It's going
to be close run thing. I feel much better about
Michigan and Wisconsin than I have in the past. I'm
optimistic about North Carolina. I'm optimistic about Georgia. Don't quote me,
but I'm even starting to feel much better about Nevada,

(04:10):
which I was not super happy about for a long time.

Speaker 1 (04:13):
Yeah, tell us why.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
I think it's starting to come into a position in Nevada.
So Pennsylvania's going to be tough. We got to win it.
And there's a lot of angry, pissed off white bros there.
That's a real talk, that's a real fact.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
And she has been going to Pittsburgh, right, Explain to
us the thinking there.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
She's been going to Pittsburgh, She's been going to Philadelphia.
She's been in the Tea that area between Pittsburgh and
Philadelphia a couple times. Now Walls is there. I think
he probably lives there now. He's everything but a permanent resident.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
Now, well he should because he's the perfect person for there. Right, absolutely,
explain to us why he.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
Scans as a regular suburban, middle class white guy. He
does not scan as a Democratic Party elite ready to
make you eat insect low for whatever the fuck fantasy
of them at the moment. And all of this is
going to come down, I think too. You know, do
we end up with meaningful African American turnout in the
Caller counties around Philadelphia and those Coller counties are Look,

(05:12):
Hillary Clinton must be very very blunt. Her campaign did
a terrible job activating African Americans in those Coller counties.
And that's why Trump won the state. He did not
win the state in twenty twenty. I gotta tell you,
does anybody believe that there are more Trump voters now
than there were in twenty twenty.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
No? Are there?

Speaker 3 (05:31):
No, there are not. They are a declining stock. They're
a dying breed.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
Why Biden did better in Pennsylvania is because they knew
him in Pennsylvania, because Delaware shares a media market connects.

Speaker 3 (05:45):
With Pennsylvania voters. And in fact, you've got in Walls
a guy who is a familiar flavor. He's biden Esque
in that regard. He is somebody they get. They know
who this guy is, they know the type of guy
he is, and he doesn't scare them. It's real hard,
it's real hard for the Trumpers to go. Tim Walls
is a communist socialist from liberal California. That Tim Wall's

(06:09):
plan to make it to seize the means of production.
I mean, come on, get the fuck out of here.
That guy does not scare people. And they hate it.
But he doesn't scare people. They really hate it. They're like,
they're frustrated as shit. They've been looking for, like any
opo punch to hit Tim Walls with. For weeks now,
and they can't make it happen. They can't make the sell.

Speaker 1 (06:28):
Do you think that JD. Vance being in the state
actually hurts Trump?

Speaker 3 (06:33):
Well, look, I tell you one thing. JD. Vance being
in Ohio, being from Ohio has hurt Trump in Ohio.
The number one lesson of every vice presidential candidate is
that your job is to go to weddings and funerals.
As a general rule, do no harm is the primary
mission of a vice presidential candidate. And he has done harm.
He has hurt Donald Trump in his home state of Ohio.

(06:58):
And for all that Trump is a guy who loves
people who suck up to him, what did we see
from Trump the other night with JD Vance? He sold
him down the river. I didn't talk to jd about that.
Who I think he's an intern, maybe a coffee boy.
He may have been on the campaign for five minutes,
but I've never spoke to him, met him, or know
anything about him. That is all.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Yeah, so very good. Alec Baldwin doing.

Speaker 3 (07:22):
Trump Molly, That's all I can do.

Speaker 1 (07:24):
You know, it's very impressive.

Speaker 3 (07:26):
I'm a man with many, many severe limitations, and that's
one of them. Don't have a good Trump imitation.

Speaker 1 (07:30):
But here's a question for you. So let's just game
this out. North Carolina early voting has been disturbed by
the worst person in the world, RFK Junior.

Speaker 3 (07:40):
Discuss Look, the early voting has been problematic because we
have RFK fighting to get off the ballot and to
review the ballots right now. You also have today the
Trump folks and their allies. They are trying to bring
lawsuits to forbid college students and state workers and other
people from voting early. The whole thing is, of course,
exactly what you would have expected their usual fuckery.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
Okay, does it work?

Speaker 3 (08:05):
I don't think it works in the end. You know why.
It's September. There's plenty of time to have early voting
continue to successfully give us a real, meaningful lift for Harris.
I don't think there's anything that's gonna stop that, given that,
given that Trump has been such a bad candidate lately,
has had no good days. I mean, Trump does not

(08:25):
have good days anymore, real talk. I mean this in
a serious way, not a dark way. Trump's best day
was the day he got shot. That was the last
moment that his campaign felt like there was something there
beyond just the angry, shitty conspiracy theory, crazy talk bullshit.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
Well it felt new, yeah, right, Well.

Speaker 3 (08:45):
It didn't feel it wasn't new, but it felt purposeful
at least, right. Yeah, But right now, all it feels
like is complaint to palooza and lies and weird shit,
because right now it is just weird shit, and weird
shit doesn't sell after a certain point.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
Yeah, so you feel like North Carolina, that's not going
to be a huge disturbance.

Speaker 3 (09:04):
No, I look, I would I like it to be
slightly less full of fuckery? Yes, of course, is it
disqualifying levels of fuckery? Not really? I think again. Trump
has a problem that he cannot solve with women voters.
He did not solve it the other night in the
debate when he tried to bs his way past and
gave probably the most damaging single answer about abortion I

(09:27):
could have conceived.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah, let's talk about that answer.

Speaker 3 (09:30):
It was so broken brained. I'm still marveling, because look,
what do we know about Trump? He wants to brag.
He wants to say, oh, I killed Rivy Wade. I
put them on the court. Their active bravery on the
court shows how great I am. Sorry, I'm doing it again,
you have to just sorry going on with then he

(09:51):
knows he Trump's feral animal cunning and his awareness. He
knows just how bad, just how shit the the National
Band stuff is. He knows just how bad and how
dangerous all the things the Republicans have done in the
States has become to him. He recognizes that he's stupid,
but he's not that stupid, if that makes sense. He

(10:13):
is not in a good place, okay, he is in
a bad, bad place. That bad place is getting worse
by the day, and he understands it. He really does know.
He knows how bad it is. But he couldn't get
out of his own way with that answer. He couldn't
not do the I'm the greatest thing since prepared mustard,
I'm the God king answer. And so you know, here

(10:34):
we are with Trump pissing off the evangelicals on the
one hand and pissing off the rest of America on
the other. It was a bad play. It was a
terrible play. So that those people are going to make
a big difference in Pennsylvania in particular.

Speaker 1 (10:49):
The thing that gets me incensed about Trump and Trump
is and the way that people talk about Trump, including
in the media, industrial complex of which we are members.
Is that they always say, like, he just needs to
get disciplined. Well, he just has to stick to script.
Has no one been here for the last decade?

Speaker 3 (11:07):
Right, Welcome to the Year of Our Lord twenty twenty four.
We are nine years and five months into this fucking bullshit.
Have you not noticed that Donald Trump has the personal
discipline of an incontinent drunkard. Donald Trump cannot focus on
anything for longer than it gives him an erection, a

(11:28):
belief he's going to make money off of this, or
some sort of cruelty. Nothing. In Trump's world. He is
the ultimate add candidate. He has no ability to focus.
There is no better Trump. There is no better iteration
of Trump. There is no Donald Trump where where he
wakes up in the morning and says, why yes, I
believe I should sit down with my policy advisors and
develop a coherent rationale for this argument. Instead, it's like

(11:51):
Laura Lumer tell me they're eating the cats, they're eating
the dogs, and Stephen Miller, I think he has some
blood in his mouth. He may have eaten the dog,
but I believe him. And it's all fucking crazy town.
He will never be better no Republican who is empowered
and enabled and kissed his ass for as long as
they have has any excuse at all whatsoever. There is

(12:14):
no excuse there. It is over, it is done. He
has poisoned them in a way that they don't even
understand how deep the rot runs in their own brains
and their own party, because they're still rationalizing it. They're
still trying to say, like, well, one of the people
in the Reuters focus group was undecided and said that
Harris didn't have enough granularity on her policy. Trump's policy

(12:34):
was to stand up there and talk about eating dogs
and executing the Central Park five. The madness levels here
are off the charts.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
And I would say the false equivalency here is pretty amazing,
like continually always expected to be normal, and Republicans are
allowed to be insane, not.

Speaker 3 (12:55):
Just allowed to be insane mally. Let's remember the mainstream
media has consistently said things like Trump's energetic and transgressive performance,
this appeal to middle class voters. You know what, There
are some voters that they have appeals to, But there
are some people that like to go to the zoo
and watch monkeys throw shit at them.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
So one of the things that got me upset was
there was a Republican senator I've never heard of, which
in itself has not nothing. He's in I think North
Dakota maybe, and he was saying that he wasn't sure
they were going to certify the election.

Speaker 3 (13:27):
That's Mark Wayne Mullen. That's all one name, Mark Wayne.

Speaker 4 (13:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
Who the fuck is that Mark Wayne Mullen. Okay, first off,
let's be very clear. Mark is a staggering, epic, world
class dipshit the worst Mago cuckoo pants people are like, yo,
Mark Wayne dial batshit back man, that's too much, brother.
He is one of the worst human beings in that body.

Speaker 1 (13:51):
Has he been there a long time? I never even
heard of him.

Speaker 3 (13:54):
No, he's only been there like four years now.

Speaker 1 (13:56):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
He is a guy you can count on Mark Wayne
to be the shittiest human being on earth. He's a
guy who ran and cowered under a bench on one
to six, but now is like the heroes of January sixth,
must fight against the deep state imprisoning our beloved allies.
Fuck this guy. He is a epic, epic piece of shit.

(14:17):
There is a real possibility these people will vote to
not certify the election. There's a very real possibility that
that's what's going to happen. I think I think it's
like a seventy percent possibility. You're going to have people
in the Senate who do not certify the election. We're
going to have a constitutional crisis because Donny dipshit will
not say to his people, I lost. Okay, you're right,

(14:38):
you got me. I lost, and we're going to end
up with an absolute horror show going into next year
is going to be terrible. And everybody right now who
thinks somehow that Donald Trump will be dignified, correct proper,
that he will say, why, yes, you're right. For the
good of the country, I must declare that I I

(15:00):
have lost this election and accept my defeat. On the
field of battle. She could beat him by four hundred
Electoral College votes, and that fucker is going to go
out and go It was stolen. Stalin stolen. One of
those things I like the dictator and the pastry. Also,
the election was stalin.

Speaker 1 (15:13):
Are we worried that this will kip to the Supreme
Court and that they'll overturn the election results.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
Yes, we should be. That is why the defeat has
to be in such a scope it does have to
be like Obama McCain, not like Biden Trump. She has
to beat Trump in a scope well beyond how Biden
beat him. I hate saying that because it's hard.

Speaker 1 (15:36):
Do you think that can happen?

Speaker 3 (15:37):
No, wait, it's going to be very difficult to get there.
I wanted to. I'm working every day to make it happen.
But we should not mistake that this is a very
precarious moment in our history where you have a party
and a president who will do anything to win. They
will lie, cheat, and steel. We have to fight them
every step of the way. Harris is running a great campaign,

(16:00):
running the best campaign that we've seen in our lifetimes.
That doesn't mean that Trump will not try to steal it.
He will try to steal it. There is no chance
on earth that Donald Trump. Just like people say, oh well,
Donald Trump needs to be mature, someone says Donald Trump
needs to be a person who respects the constitution of
the rule of law. Will good luck with that? Have

(16:20):
fun storm in that.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
Castle, Rick Wilson, Now I'm stressed out again.

Speaker 3 (16:25):
Well, Molly, all we can do is just keep kicking
his ass.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
We have even more tour dates for you. Did you
know the Lincoln Projects, Rick Willson have Fast Politics Bali
Jug Faster. Are heading out on tour to bring you
a night of laughs for our dark political landscape. Join
us on August twenty sixth at San Francisco at the
Swedish American Hall, or in la on August twenty seventh
at the Regent Theater. Then we're headed to the Midwest.
We'll be at the Vivarium in Milwaukee on the twenty

(16:54):
first of September and on the twenty second will be
in Chicago with City Wiry. Then we're going to hit
the East coast September thirtieth, We'll be in Boston at
Arts at the Armory. On the first of October, we'll
be in Affiliates City Winery, and then DC on the
second at the Miracle Theater. And today we just announced
that we'll be in New York on the fourteenth of
October at Citywinery. If you need to laugh as we

(17:14):
get through this election and hopefully never hear from a
guy who lives in a golf club again, we got
you covered. Join us in our surprise guests to help
you laugh instead of cry your way through this election
season and give you the inside analysis of what's really
going on right now. Buy your tickets now by heading
to Politics as Unusual dot bio. That's Politics as Unusual
dot bio. Ryan Mack and Kate Kunger are the authors

(17:38):
of Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
Welcome to Fast Politics Cade. Thank you and Ryan.

Speaker 5 (17:48):
Hey, Molly, So you.

Speaker 1 (17:49):
Guys did a book together. First of all, just give
us everything about this book.

Speaker 6 (17:54):
Well you said earlier twenty minutes right.

Speaker 7 (17:57):
So the book is Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter,
and we take you through the saga that has been
Twitter over the last several years, starting with sort of
the twilight era of the company, the end of Jack
Dorsey's tenure as CEO and Perogue Algarol's brief period as
a CEO, and then Elon Musk of course swoops in,

(18:20):
makes it offer to buy it, says he doesn't want
to buy it anymore, says he wants to buy it again,
and then we finished the story with the aftermath of
Elon's takeover in the way that he changed and transformed
the company.

Speaker 1 (18:32):
Yes, so this feels like the kind of book where
you get going on it and you're shocked at how
much worse it really is then you even thought is
it discussed?

Speaker 5 (18:41):
So the genesis of this book was we're reporters at
the New York Times. Kate is the b reporter for
Twitter now x I cover accountability and cover you know,
billionaires and figures in Silicon Valley, and we reported on
this deal from its start to the takeover, and yeah,
we were getting so much reporting that we simply couldn't

(19:03):
put it into every single one of our stories.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
Like we just couldn't.

Speaker 5 (19:07):
We couldn't do a justice, you know, right, And there
were things we'd love to expand upon from you know,
elon try to pull out of the deal, for example,
or even after the deal, the types of cuts he made,
things like not having toilet paper in the bathrooms because
he cut the janitorial service, Like just details like that
that we're just so confounding to us and so bizarre

(19:29):
and so unprecedented in a takeover like this where one
man could you know, essentially buy a company for forty
four billion dollars, you know, at the sap of his fingers.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
Did you think it would happen? And were you shocked?
It's sort of the process that it took, you know.

Speaker 7 (19:44):
This is so funny because I think if you had
asked me on any given day during that summer of
twenty twenty two whether or not the deal was going
to close, I would have given a different answer. And
even up to the moment that everyone's seen online where
Elon walked into the Twitter building with a sink and
made that hokey joke about let that sink in, I

(20:04):
was still not sure that he was actually going to
do it, because at that point it had just been
such a chaotic process that it seemed like he might
still pull the rug out from under the whole thing.
And I think a lot of the people on the
Twitter side of the deal felt that way too. You know,
even as he was there in the building saying he

(20:25):
was about to buy the company, they weren't willing to
leave him until they saw the money in the bank account.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
Yeah. This reminds me a little bit of the Trump administration.
It seemed improbable, impossible, undoable. It got done, but in
a very haphazard way with a lot of unhappy people involved.
Is it similar in that way?

Speaker 3 (20:47):
Yeah? I don't know.

Speaker 5 (20:48):
I didn't do much reporting on the Trump administration. I
know the stories of like you know, he didn't expect
to win, and then they find themselves in twenty sixteen
having to run a government. If that's the framework that
we're thinking of, then with musks takeover, there are a
lot of similarities. Like you made an offer kind of
on a whim. He tried to pull out. Everyone remembers
the bot argument. You know, there's so many bots, there's fraud.

Speaker 3 (21:09):
On this platform.

Speaker 5 (21:10):
I'm not going to buy it. He tries to back out.
He's then forced to buy it at the price he
admits to overpaying for forty four billion dollars, and he
kind of comes in shooting from the hip. There's really
no plan here for what he's going to do with
this thing. He's he's talking about these kind of pie
in the sky concepts, building a quote unquote everything app
wanting to bring in payments to Twitter, but fundamentally misunderstanding

(21:32):
that this is a social platform and a very human platform.
You're connecting humans to talk to each other, and when
people talk to each other, there's all these messy things
that happen, And you know, I think that misunderstanding is
led to the cast that we see today, from the
multiple rounds of layoffs to the issues with governments all
around the world to just the loss of advertisers and

(21:56):
the decrease in valuation. I mean the company is now
worth internally less than twenty billion dollars. You know, that
is a stunning kind of devaluation over two years, done
by the man who's supposed to be one of the
best businessmen in the world.

Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (22:09):
I think there are just a lot of parallels between
him and Trump. I mean, both of them just sort
of command Internet attention. Both of them have this sort
of rotating cast of characters surrounding them, where people are
in one day and then cast out the next. And
there's even this one photo I think it is from

(22:30):
when Elon Musk attended the met gala, but he's in
a tux and he's given the thumbs up post.

Speaker 6 (22:36):
Yeah, and I saw.

Speaker 7 (22:38):
That photo, I was like, whoa, they look eerily early
similar when he's in the right costume and doing the
right post. I think there's a lot of parallels between
the way that they conduct themselves.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
Yeah, I mean I knew some people inside Twitter. I
mean there was a sense there it felt to me
like they had sort of built this little paradise and
that it couldn't be destroyed so easily. And then it
really was what is the feeling of the people who
are in there or were in there because most of
them are gone.

Speaker 5 (23:07):
Probably part of the reason why we wanted to write
this book is we wanted to kind of dispel this
myth that like everything at Twitter was perfect Elon.

Speaker 3 (23:15):
This was a.

Speaker 5 (23:16):
Company that had a lot of issues, from its balance
sheet and its business to employee happiness, I guess, and
content moderation decisions. You know, this is a company that
had to deal with COVID misinformation and the platforming of
President Trump. I mean, these were the New York Post
article about Hunter Biden, monumental decisions that drew it a

(23:38):
lot of flack. And you know, the company was a
lightning rod constantly. So I don't know if i'd call
it a paradise. I mean, it certainly wasn't what it
is today. You know, this kind of mess under Elon,
But it wasn't a happy place. It was, you know,
a lot more stable. It was a place where you
could build a career.

Speaker 7 (23:54):
Yeah, and I think Twitter is such a unique place
even within the tech industry, and I think pretty much
any tech job you get the founders or the CEO
is going to try to convince you to come with
a real sense of mission, right.

Speaker 6 (24:10):
But I think you know, a lot.

Speaker 7 (24:12):
Of Google employees, for instance, feel pretty divorced from the
notion that they are there to like help people access
and catalog the world's information, Right. But I think Twitter
was the place where people who worked there really grasped
onto the mission and believed in it in a way
a lot of other tech employees are just kind of

(24:33):
like rolling their eyes. And I think Bright and I
shared that sense that there was something uniquely important about
what Twitter was doing as a company. In the way
that it was creating this platform for political speech was
really fascinating. But as Ryan said, we also wanted to
portray some of the bumps and lumps that were in there,

(24:56):
problems that were going on at the company, because that
narrative just got very distilled down into like good Twitter
and evil Elon and and we want to take that
a little bit.

Speaker 5 (25:06):
I don't think we can discount how much there were
a group of employees in the company who were excited
about Elon's takeover, or at least wanted to give him
a chance. You know, this is a company that had
stagnated with product production, like they couldn't launch a product
if their life depended on it in some way, you know.
He Compared to some of the other tech companies out there,
things were going really slow. There was little innovation, and

(25:27):
they thought that Elon was the guy who would kickstart
all this. You know, he had electrified cars, he had
put rockets into space. Why couldn't we do better things
under him? And they saw this as kind of the
lightning bolt that they needed to get things going again.
But it was the lightning bolt that essentially started an
inferno inside the company and burn the place down.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
So yeah, right, it totally did. And I know there
was a lot of that. And also like fundamentally the
business was not profitable, right.

Speaker 6 (25:53):
Yes, that's pretty much true.

Speaker 7 (25:55):
There was a period of profitability that the company had,
I want to say, pre COVID, and then during COVID
actually they were doing fairly well and then had kind
of fallen off of their numbers by the time Elon
came in and proposed the acquisition.

Speaker 5 (26:12):
Yeah, I mean, this is a company that gets compared
to Facebook or Meta a lot, you know, and that's
a company that has more than a billion I think
it's close to two billion users across all its platforms now.
Twitter at its peak had hundreds of millions. You know,
this was a company that wasn't drawing in the ad
revenue that a meta draws in, and it was just
kind of this kind of floating business. It was stagnant

(26:35):
in some ways, it floated along, and it was kind
of ripe for the picking for someone like you On
to come and swoop in and make an offer.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
The large request I feel like with Elon was to
try to make or as Trump call him Leon, to
try to make Twitter profitable, right, And he's done a
number of different things to try to do that. He
has done a lot of businesses, and many of them
have struggled with like actual profitability or being priced for

(27:04):
what their ebuita is. To talk to us about that, sure.

Speaker 5 (27:07):
I mean Tesla was not profitable for years. I mean,
the car business is incredibly hard. It's why a lot
of car startups fail. And he went through periods where
he was on the verge of bankruptcy almost to his
last dollar, and was able to pull it out. You know,
I think as something like twenty eighteen, for example, where
he can't manufacture enough Model three cars, this kind of

(27:28):
low cost car, mass market car, and is in this
thing called production hell. And he's really, you know, kind
of at his wits end, sleeping on the factory floor
or on the couch in the factory, trying to make
enough cars. You know, it's part of his mythos. And
he gets out of that period and the company survives,
and you know, the stock price shoots to the roof,
and he is where he is today with this net

(27:49):
worth of more than two hundred and fifty billion dollars.
But he's kind of lived life on the edge and
making these big bets on the idea that these companies,
you know, are going to be worth hundreds of billions
of dollars. SpaceX the same way. It's still private, but
it went through periods where was on the bridge of bankruptcy.
If you know, the next rocket exploded, they wouldn't have
any more capital to build the next one. And he

(28:10):
sees himself as this kind of hero, this kind of
generational entrepreneur who can do things better and more efficient
than the last. That's how he came into Twitter. He
thought Twitter's past management was inept, corrupt, fraudulent, and he
thought he could do these things way more efficiently and
just simply cut and cut and cut and cut and
get things to where he thought they needed to be,

(28:32):
as well as you know, generate these unthought of business lines,
things like selling the verification badges, which he thought he
could do for millions of people. He thought millions of
people would buy these badges at eight dollars a month
and create this new revenue stream for the company, And
that's just been a complete disaster and miscalculation. This idea
of must being a generational entrepreneur has become under fire

(28:56):
with this takeover. You know, it's kind of chewed away
at as mythos.

Speaker 1 (29:00):
Yeah, it seems to me that he was doing a
lot lot better before he bought Twitter because there was
this sort of deniability about his political beliefs. It was
a certain right. I mean, now it's all out there.
Do you think that this myth kind of has hurt him?

Speaker 7 (29:19):
It has to some extent, you know, I think in
buying Twitter, I think, you know, Elon sort of put
himself in the dangerous position that a lot of people
in the media industry that have done where now spending
time on Twitter.

Speaker 6 (29:31):
It's supposedly part of his.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
Job, right, It's true. It is a good point.

Speaker 5 (29:36):
You know, Hey, that is it is part of my job.
Don't take that red from my kit, but it is.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
He really does need to sort of touch grass, right,
I mean that's what you're saying.

Speaker 7 (29:44):
It's on Twitter all day, every day, and I have
notifications turned on for his account, and it got to
the point I used to have like an older iPhone,
like a iPhone eight or something, and I had to
upgrade because it was killing my battery because I got
so many notifications about you. He's prolific, and I think
it has hurt his public image. I think it's also

(30:07):
really started to chip away at his fan base within Tesla,
which is at financial risk for him. You know, his
Tesla shareholders are not happy about the amount of time
and attention that he spends on x rather than at Tesla.
And because he is such a big PERSDA, that's a

(30:30):
big draw for retail investors to Tesla, and so Tesla
actually has a disproportionate number of retail investors who are
invested in the company because they like Elon.

Speaker 6 (30:40):
They're drawn to him, they think he's cool.

Speaker 7 (30:42):
And so as he chips away at that public persona
and kind of bursts the bubble for people. That affects
Tesla's stock a little bit more than it might if
it was a different company.

Speaker 5 (30:53):
I also think, you know, this has hurt his mythos,
this idea that he is this great entrepreneur. And I
don't think we can and take this away from him
that he ushered in the electric car revolution in the
United States, and he put rockets in a space and
privatize the space industry. But just because you can do
those things and build kind of generational companies doesn't necessarily

(31:15):
make you the best fit to run a social media company.
And I think it was that hubris that he came
in with, you know, why can't I do this? Why
can't I run Twitter? It must be so much easier
than putting a rocket into space and have it land
on a platform. These are different problems, and these are
you know, some some are engineering problems. You know, some
are electrical engineering problems. But this is a human problem.

(31:37):
This is a social interaction problem, and I think not
grasping that has really hurt his image in the public eye.

Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yeah, for sure, Explain to me where the company is
now and where he is now.

Speaker 7 (31:47):
I mean, I think X is in very precarious shape
at this point, and he obviously cut the company back
a lot, and now I think his engineering time, energy
resources are somewhat split between x the social media platform
and xai, the sort of AI company slash chatbot that

(32:08):
he's trying to build. And you know, the platform itself
is increasingly partisan and focused on Musk's politics in particular,
and it's also in you know, pretty decayed financial shape.

Speaker 6 (32:22):
You know, we've seen.

Speaker 7 (32:23):
AD revenue continue to fall and fall on fall. Some
of these big projects that the company has tried in
order to bring back AD dollars have sort of faltered.

Speaker 6 (32:33):
You know.

Speaker 7 (32:34):
One of those was doing these long form video shows
with big personalities, and I think Tucker Carlson is probably
the only example there of someone who's had a successful
show built on X and even he has kind of
migrated and started airing his show on his own platform
around his own website now, I believe, so they really
struggled to figure out a way to counteract that decline

(32:57):
in revenue, and at the same time, you know, I
think there's there's a core set of users who are
attracted to the partisanship of the platform, but more and
more that alienates people and drives them to competitors like threads.

Speaker 1 (33:13):
Can he just keep this going forever? Will he need
to sell the platform at some point? Or can he
just ride into the bottom?

Speaker 6 (33:21):
I think Ryan and I disagree about this.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
Good, Yeah, just tell us about that and then we're.

Speaker 7 (33:26):
I kind of don't know if there is a bottom, honestly.
I mean, I think he can just keep going should
he choose to do so, and has the financial resources
to do it, and certainly the interests.

Speaker 6 (33:38):
Right, and then that's not a lot of seat fail.
But I don't know. I think Ryan disagrees a little
bit on this that.

Speaker 5 (33:43):
There is no bottom, or there is a bottom.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
That he'll have to sell it at some point.

Speaker 5 (33:47):
I don't think he'll have to sell. You know, we
haven't really talked about the debt payments that he has.
By the way, he raised billions of dollars in debt
he has.

Speaker 6 (33:54):
I think he.

Speaker 5 (33:55):
Services to service that debt. He pays more than a
billion dollars in interest payments a year, which.

Speaker 4 (34:00):
Is kind of this.

Speaker 5 (34:01):
Yeah, can you I don't if you can relate to that.
That seems like a lot of money.

Speaker 6 (34:05):
Yeah, yeahs are lower.

Speaker 5 (34:09):
I don't know what your credit card bill feels are
looking like, but but yeah, I mean, like I think
that that's if we're talking about pain points for Elon,
that is certainly one of them. This is not a
guy who has a lot of cash on handy. I mean,
he has a high net worse, don't get me wrong,
more than two to fifty billion dollars. But he's not
liquid on that. That's a lot of tied up in
a lot of equities in Tesla at SpaceX. He leverages

(34:31):
his Tesla shares to raise money and cap and cash essentially,
which is allowed. But you know, we're talking about unrealized
gains right now in the election. It's exactly that, and
I think he'll start to feel those pain points. Whether
or not he'll sell it is another question. I think
he still personally drives a lot of value from the platform.

Speaker 3 (34:51):
I think the.

Speaker 5 (34:51):
Platform is exactly what he wants it to be. I
don't know what price you can put on that kind
of personal enjoyment.

Speaker 1 (34:58):
In the end. Do you think there's some conclusion to
this or do you think this is just him like
having a hobby.

Speaker 7 (35:05):
You know, I think in all of our reporting, we
were never able to find what the greater plan was
for Twitter. In fact, over and over again, you see
these moments of just his sort of profound impulsivity and unpreparedness,
the things that he encounters during the deal. And I
think that his political leanings are similar of just this

(35:28):
is something that interests him and fascinates him, and he's
just kind of dabbling and going with the flow. And
I don't think that there is some sort of grand
master plan tacked up on the wall with all the
red yarn behind him.

Speaker 5 (35:42):
I think he's just I think the way to view
him is how we view him when he build his companies.
There is this kind of centered hero complex. He is
the man who's going to bring us to Mars. But
if you view it, you know, in this, in this relationship,
he is the man who is going to help stop
the immigration crisis at the southern border. He's the man
that's going to solve election fraud and all these and

(36:06):
wokeness and all these things that he thinks ails the company,
and the way to do that is by supporting Donald Trump.
And it's that hero complex that has serving well in
the past, and it's how he views the world, and
I think it's how it's going to serve him in
the future. So I think that's the kind of number
one way to analyze what he's thinking about this election.

Speaker 1 (36:24):
So interesting. Thanks you guys, Thank you so much.

Speaker 6 (36:27):
This is really great.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
Are you concerned about Project twenty twenty five and how
awful Trump's second term could be? Well, so are we,
which is why we teamed up with iHeart to make
a limited series with the experts on what a disaster
Project twenty twenty five would be for America's future. Right now,
we have just released the final episode of this five

(36:50):
episode series. They're all available by looking up Molly Jong
Fast Project twenty twenty five on YouTube, and if you
are more of a podcast person and not say a YouTuber,
you can hit play and put your phone in the
lock screen and it will play back just like the podcast.
All five episodes are online now. We need to educate

(37:11):
Americans on what Trump's second term would or could do
to this country, so please watch it and spread the word.

Speaker 2 (37:20):
Amanda Becker is the Washington correspondent for the nineteenth and
author of You Must Stand Up, The Fight for Abortion
Rights and Postdobs America.

Speaker 1 (37:28):
Welcome Back, too fast politics. Amanda Becker, Hi, thanks for
having me. We're delighted to have you. I want you
to talk about the Nineteenth for a minute. Sort of
just give us this landscape of the Nineteenth. A lot
of us know about it and have been big fans
of it for a long time, but not everyone. So explain.

Speaker 4 (37:47):
Yeah, So, The Nineteenth is a nonprofit, independent newsroom focused
on the intersection of politics, policy, and gender. We started
about four and a half years ago and officially law
about four years ago, and I have been there since
the beginning as the Nineteenth Washington Correspondent. So we are

(38:08):
really focused on the women and LGBTQ people in politics,
on the policies that matter to them. And so, you know,
we're covering everything from you know, the fall of Row
and kind of the chaos that has followed that, it's
impact on the elections, all of the anti trans legislation

(38:29):
in the States, and really anything that's important to women
and LGBTQ people.

Speaker 1 (38:35):
You know, Harris is a Democratic presidential candidate. She's a woman.
There has been some discussion about the sort of shift
from Hillary Clinton, you know, when she was the candidate.
She's also a woman. We live in this country of
sort of hyper misogyny that a lot of it's really,
I think, institutionalized. And how have you seen a change

(38:58):
since twenty sixteen?

Speaker 4 (39:00):
You know, I've been thinking about this a lot, Molly,
And actually my family was texting me when I was
standing on the floor at the Democratic National Convention kind
of watching Vice President Kamala Harris give her a speech.
It just felt different. And I've been trying to explain
to myself even kind of what felt different about it.
And you might have some ideas about this as well,

(39:21):
but I think that she is felt as like a
new generation of leaders. You know, she's not that much
younger than Clinton, but I think that that difference matters
in terms of their ages. And it just felt really different.
I mean, I was with Clinton following her campaign for
two years in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen, and now

(39:43):
I'm covering this election, you know, a little bit less
day to day as I was then, as I was
at a wire service at the time, But it just
felt really different. And I think that women in this
country have realized the impact of Donald Trump being elected
over Hillary Clinton in a very real way, right because
it led to the loss of forty nine years of

(40:04):
abortion rights in this country, and there's really no denying
that that is evident in the way people are thinking
about voting now, and so I think that also has
something to do with the enthusiasm for Kamala Harris's candidacy.

Speaker 1 (40:18):
I agree, but I'm just trying to sort of figure
this out. If this is true, which you know, this
would mean sort of that the women can make up
the difference. Like one of the things I've seen in
this campaign is Trump has gone like all in on misogyny.
So like he's going on these far right podcasts of

(40:38):
young podcasters, he's selling NFTs. I mean that I think
maybe more scamm than misogyny. But like you know, he's
got Whule Cogan. So many of the speakers at the
RNC had like allegations of domestic violence, right, Like this
was like if you were it was like big divorce
dad energy, right. Bill Ackman is his greatest champion. Like

(41:00):
you know, anyone on their first wife is not going
to necessarily respond to this message. But how do you
think that, Like, I mean, I think his calculus is
that he's going to be able to run up the
numbers with divorce Dad energy and that he'll get enough
white women so he'll be able to win. There certainly
are white women who identify more with their race than

(41:22):
their gender. I mean, do you think that's shifting.

Speaker 4 (41:25):
So if you look at polling, and I know pulling
is incredibly imperfect, we are seeing shifts among white women
and among married women, and that would be different than
in twenty sixteen or even in twenty twenty because right
white women have broken for Trump the past two elections.
And I know that's hard for a lot of liberal

(41:45):
white women's stomach, but that is the truth. I remember
getting hate mail in twenty twenty when I wrote about
how white women back to Trump. That is something. Honestly,
I think that that is one of the stories of
this election. Unfortunately, you know, it takes six months or
so to get the validated voter data, so all we're
going to have close to the election to kind of

(42:05):
look at what happened is except pulling, which is you know,
just as imperfect as any other type of poll. I
think this election has the potential to be the one
in which white women break for the Democratic candidate. And
I don't know how much of that will end up
being because it's Kamala Harris. I don't know how much
of that will end up being because this is the

(42:26):
first presidential election without Roe v. Wade in place, or
a combination of things, including what we're hearing from the Republicans,
which is you have Trump's kind of strain of how
he looks at gender and masculinity, and then you also
have Jad Vancis, when this is somebody who has talked
openly about what he sees as the negative impacts of

(42:48):
the sexual revolution. He thinks no fault divorce can be
a bad thing. And these reflect larger trends in the
right wing of the Republican Party that you know has
floated legislation and states to kind of roll back no
fault divorce and a variety of other things that we're
seen as empowering women over the past fifty years.

Speaker 1 (43:07):
Yeah, I mean, vance was really a choice to double
down on that. I think a lot of us wondered
if picking someone like Nikki Haley might give again, Like
so much of this election on the hair side, anyway,
has been about creating a permission structure to give Republicans
to vote for a Democrat. So, for example, Dick Cheney
endorsement is not for liberals, It's not even necessarily for

(43:31):
normal voters. It's for very far right people who can't
stop MacDonald Trump and who you know, see Dick Cheney
as that permission. So on the Hair side, we've seen
a lot of that. On the Trump side, we've seen
none of that. So the question is right, like, he
could have picked Nicki Haley as a vice president and
he was like new go. He did nothing to sort
of grow the electorate. Now there's a world in which

(43:54):
that doesn't matter. But don't you think that eventually that
comes back to bite him.

Speaker 4 (43:58):
I had to say, I was shocked when he chose
jd Vance. I'm from Ohio, I grew up there, so
I followed the politics there pretty closely still. Actually his
grandparents are from the same region of Kentucky that my
grandparents are from. They settled in Cincinnati, has settled in Middletown,
which is about, you know, twenty five miles away from
where my family is. And so I followed his story

(44:22):
right over the years. And his story has shifted, of course,
and he frames it in different ways.

Speaker 1 (44:27):
Yes, like his name, his story has shifted, yes.

Speaker 4 (44:31):
Yes, And when Trump chose him I just thought to myself, frankly,
what is he thinking, Because from my perspective, picking jd
Vance did nothing and not only didn't hunting to bring
in any more people who weren't already backing Trump. It
was a play to like the base. It was potentially

(44:54):
a move that would alienate people in the middle. And
I have to just think it was related to the
assassination attempt and kind of like flying high after recovering
from that and coming out of that and feeling invincible,
and of course Joe Biden was still on the top
of the Democratic ticket, thens they just thought this was
a lock. But I don't see how jd Vance boosts

(45:16):
Trump's chances in any way in November, and could potentially
in fact hurt them.

Speaker 1 (45:21):
Yeah, I mean that's my sense. But again, it just
seems like a calculus with no thought of growing the electorate.
But Trump has never had much interest in growing the
elector right.

Speaker 4 (45:29):
No, I think what they're going to have to rely
on is the loyalist and churning out as many of
them as possible, you know, running kind of a fear
campaign based on immigration in particular and the economy as well.
To a certain extent, and hope that that's enough and
that they can get enough men and drive up enough
men and maybe get some men of color in there
that didn't support.

Speaker 6 (45:50):
Them the last time.

Speaker 4 (45:51):
I think we could potentially see a bigger gender gap
than we've ever seen. And there's been a gender gap
in politics and it's been growing, and I think that
that will only be exacerbated this year.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
So talk to me about your book.

Speaker 4 (46:03):
Yes, So, it came out last week. It's called You
Must Stand Up The Fight for Abortion Rights and Post
Dobbs America. It is the first year. It opens in
June twenty twenty two at a clinic in Tuscaloosa as
the Dobbs decision comes out, and it ends a year
later at that same clinic talking about kind of what
could be next. It's primary geographic settings along with Tuscaloosa, Alabama,

(46:29):
our Phoenix, Arizona to a slightly lesser extent Maryland, and
then also some chapters from places like Wisconsin, Kentucky, Massachusetts,
Ohio to just show the absolute chaos in the.

Speaker 1 (46:40):
First year after Dobbs.

Speaker 4 (46:42):
Told from the perspectives of doctors, healthcare providers, people working
at clinics, but also lawyers, students, moms, friends, everyday voters
who were mobilizing trying to protect abortion rights in kind
of that pivotal first year after we lost to the
federal right to an abortion.

Speaker 1 (47:01):
Sometimes I take a moment to talk about how I
was right and glowed. This is one of them. I
was right, and I hate it when the Supreme Court
let SBA ride right when they took it on the
shadow dock it and did not overturn it in Texas.
When Texas overturned Row a year before the Supreme Court

(47:22):
officially put the knife in the legislation, what did you think?
Did you think it was the end? I thought it
was the end, but I'm very negative, so.

Speaker 4 (47:30):
I also thought it was the end. I think anyone
working in this space, whether they were at a clinic
and in a clinical setting or you know, working on
policy at the national level, also thought it was the end.
The title of my book, You Must Stand Up is
from a doctor in Arizona, and it's from a blog
that she wrote in I believe it was twenty eighteen,

(47:51):
may have been twenty nineteen, but I think it was
twenty eighteen. So, you know, while the Dobbs decision in
the fall Row took many kind of rank and file
on the Americans by surprise, for the people who are
working in this space or in space is adjacent to
reproductive health. They saw this coming even before SB eight,
but certainly when the Supreme Court let sbight go into effect.

(48:15):
That is when, for example, the chapter I have set
in Massachusetts, which is really a chapter about how can
a state where the vast, vast majority of its residents
support abortion rights, how can they make sure that they're
delivering for the people in their state and giving them
what they want. Massachusetts SB eight was when they mobilized,
was when they got a coalition back together that had

(48:37):
worked on this issue before, because they thought, you know,
this is the end, and it doesn't matter that this
is in Texas, it doesn't matter that it's going to be,
you know, worse in red states. They're going to try
to come for people in Massachusetts too. And so they
got together and passed one of the strongest abortion provider
shield laws we have in this country.

Speaker 6 (48:56):
Right now.

Speaker 1 (48:57):
Yes, when you look at this, how this happened, What
do you think the greatest driver was of the push
to get rid of row overturning Row?

Speaker 4 (49:07):
Yeah, I think it really depends whether you're talking about
the average person who might oppose abortion or be represented
by some of the groups or some of the kind
of behind the scenes architects. There are many people in
this country, including women, who believe abortion is wrong, and
they you know, it has been a fifty year project

(49:27):
to overturn Row. The anti abortion movement wanted to establish
beetle personhood back when Roe was decided. That is still
their end goal, and they've been working for that, and
they truly believe that they are working on kind of
like the moral fight of their time. Now I am
not convinced. Let's say that a lot of the funders

(49:48):
of this are motivated by that same moral conviction necessarily
and a lot of arts behind the scenes. I think
what this is about is power. Who has power, who
can amass more power, who can take away power from
other people? And it's about politics. And you know, abortion
was not a political issue until the eighties and even

(50:08):
into the nineties. You know, it is when it really
took hold, and that was a story about power, right
they were reorganizing. It was a few Republican strategists who
were trying to make evangelicals a reliable voting block for
Republican candidates, and it's related to kind of the decline
in the acceptability of fighting for segregated schools. And they

(50:32):
came up with, you know, being anti abortion as a
new way to appeal to those voters. Now, that was
just about winning races, right, So it all comes back
to power, and so they knew if they kind of
combined that new voting block of Evangelical Christians with US
Catholics that had traditionally been Democrats or trended democrat, they

(50:54):
could get a lock on power. And so this is
a story about power, and this is story about what
it means to be an American and what rights you
have as an American.

Speaker 1 (51:04):
So interesting and I think really important. There's so much
in this story, but what's the solution to the real problem.

Speaker 4 (51:13):
So if you are someone who supports abortion rights and
would like to see something row like back in place,
that's kind of what my book is about. The second half.
It's people trying to figure out. I like to think
of it as the book is a story about democratic
erosion and how we got to a place where much
of the country has laws in place that the citizens

(51:34):
do not support. But also it's showing you people in
a variety of roles who have figured out what their
role is to play in strengthening our democracy. So it's
everything from doctors and even medical students realizing that it's
not an option to not be an advocate or an activist.

(51:56):
It's actually an essential part of your practice if you're
going to be an bgyn and want to take care
of patients. It is young mothers in Kentucky who found
out about how they could get involved through a Jewish
women's group and started trying to defeat a ballot measure
there that would have you know, abortion is already banned

(52:16):
in Kentucky, but there was an effort to actually add
that to the constitution. They were able to push back
on that amendment and defeat it. They actually took to
the streets, one of them for the first time, to
go canvassing and door knocking for that issue. I think
if you talk to the people who the legal strategists,
they say that we're in a kind of spaghetti at
the wall moment where, you know, the abortion rights movement

(52:38):
on a national level has been accused by some of
being kind of gatekeepers on strategy for the past couple decades,
and you're seeing kind of the universe of organizations bringing
really high profile cases expand beyond kind of the one
or two usual groups that were doing that and the
build up to Dobbs. A lot of people across the

(52:58):
political spectrum, include being a main character in my book,
have started likening the period we're in right now to
prohibition right and looking the repeal of prohibition as a
template for how we could restore abortion rights in this country.
Because what we're seeing with these ballot measures right across
the country, any time a ballot measure has been put

(53:20):
before the people, abortion rights has won. There are ten
states that right now that are going to be voting
on abortion rights ballot measures in November. And while that's
great for the people in those states, and the reason
they're doing it is because voters have realized, like legislation
can be fleeting, it can be overturned, it can be

(53:41):
the best way to protect a right is to have
it in your constitution. While that's great for the people
in the states who have a citizen referred ballot measure process,
not every state has that, So in Alabama that's not
an option for them. And so when I was talking
to one of the women who works at the clinic
in Alabama. She was saying, I actually think you know,
ultimately what we need is a constitutional convention and anment

(54:03):
to the US Constitution that is related to bodily autonomy.

Speaker 1 (54:07):
Yeah, I think that's right. Thank you so much for
joining us.

Speaker 4 (54:11):
Thank you, No, no moment good.

Speaker 3 (54:16):
My moment of fuckery is one of these classic high
order mistakes. New Coke Land War in Asia, Parachute Pants.
The magas have decided that they're going to take on
the cultural juggernaut that we all know and love. S
Taylor Swift. I welcome this decision on their part because
it is truly one of the dumbest things I've ever

(54:37):
heard in my life. The idea that jadvancewroled and said,
I don't think anyone's going to be persuaded by a
billionaire entertainer, like, bitch, have you met your boss?

Speaker 1 (54:48):
But he's not a billionaire. That's somewhat difference.

Speaker 3 (54:51):
That is an effering and a distinction. But look, she's
going to be a force multiplier in this campaign. It's
not going to decide the campaign, but she's going to
be a major force multiplier in the campaign. It is
going to make a big difference because there is a
generation of young girls who grew up with Taylor Swift
who are now voting age this generation of their moms
who grew up with Taylor Swift and taking their daughters
to Taylor Swift. You know, Andrew Breitbart was not right

(55:12):
about a lot of things, but he said one time
that politics is downstream of culture, and that's why Republicans
are always so desperate to get any kind of star.
And even like these d minus celebrities, We've got Scott Poe,
but she is the biggest cultural icon of our time.
She is a big deal. And their sense of denial

(55:33):
and despair about this is just sweet, sweet maga teers
flowing in a beautiful river of fuckery. They're attacking her,
they're bitching about her, they're complaining, I'm here for all
of it, all of it.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
Yeah, it does seem like the party that is at
war with women right as at war about Troyce.

Speaker 3 (55:55):
I mean, why not go to war with the most
beloved female pop star. Oh, I don't know of you know,
since Madonna. It is a painful I'd argue of all time.
You can make the all time argument. Yeah, you could
you absolutely could.

Speaker 1 (56:08):
She does a thing that Madonna doesn't do, which is
she's wholesome. Yeah, so here they are going to war
with the wholesome, self made American billionaire.

Speaker 3 (56:17):
I'm pro Madonna and I vote, but I take your point. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
If she were even the slightest bit Maga, they would
be obsessed with her, right, She's the dream. Remember the
news cycle when they thought when they discovered she wasn't
Maga and they were so upset.

Speaker 3 (56:33):
Yeah, well now they're so upset at a level that
makes that look like they couldn't find a parking space.
They are losing their minds on her. And please, guys,
I want you to continue to call her a dumb
slut and call her a failure and call her stupid,
because nothing could ever go wrong with the Swifties finding
out about what Mauga's doing to Taylor. Nothing could ever

(56:55):
go wrong there. Guys, y'all just keep tearing it up.
You just keep criticizing her all you want, Just go for it.
I await your capitulation on the field of battle because
she is undefeated.

Speaker 1 (57:07):
Thank you. Rick Wilson, all right, all right, Jesse Cannon.

Speaker 2 (57:13):
Molly Jong Fast, jd Vance he's really showing that he's
a member of the Trump administration because he's taken on
Trump's trade he let the mask slip.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
No, I disagree. I actually think that by admitting you
were lying, that's like not what you're supposed to do.
Like you like, what Trump would have done is he
would have said, yeah, no, that's what I said. You know,
something along the lines of Paul Mattaford right where you'd
make enough confusion so that you never really admit that

(57:43):
you're lying, even if everyone knows you're lying. This was actually,
I think like one of the I mean, I would
say it rare, but it's all missteps with Jada Vance,
Dana Bash did a really excellent job of asking him
a very specific question and then following up.

Speaker 8 (58:02):
The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump
and I start talking about cat means. If I have to,
it's just mean, create stories so that the American media
actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.
Then that's what I'm gonna do. Dana, Because you just
said that you're creating the public policy.

Speaker 6 (58:21):
Sorry, you just said that you're creating the story.

Speaker 1 (58:23):
Is that, Dana, you just said that this is a
story that you created, so that the eating dog re acting.

Speaker 8 (58:31):
Not we are creating, we are, Dana. It comes from
first hand accounts from my constituents. I say that we're
creating a story, meaning we're creating the American media focusing
on it.

Speaker 1 (58:41):
What I thought was really interesting about this was obviously
it's not happening, but it's also they finally just you know,
for whatever reason, but Vans couldn't keep it going. And
then Mike DeLine, who remembers the governor of Ohio and
ran about twenty points ahead of Vance, even though Vance's

(59:03):
campaign had to pour money into it. Dwine actually really
just set him, you know, really, he said, I think
it's unfortunate that this came up. But let me tell
you what we do now. We know that Haitians in
Springfield are legal. They came to Springfield to work. Ohio
is on the move in Springfield has made it great.

(59:24):
The point is that this was meant to be a
sort of standard other the way Trump often does it,
you know, the same as what he did to Muslims,
the same as what he did to Mexicans, the same
as what he did to all these other ethnic groups.
He targets, but instead in this one, they just went
too far and they made up a completely insane lie

(59:48):
which is now debunked, and that is our moment of
fuck Ray. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the
best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos.
If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to
a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks

(01:00:10):
for listening.