November 5, 2024 • 39 mins
After a whirlwind political season of campaign ads, fundraising texts, and seemingly-endless breaking news…Election Day has finally arrived! To mark the occasion, host Alec Baldwin speaks with Molly Jong-Fast, political analyst for MSNBC, special correspondent for “Vanity Fair,” and host of the podcast “Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast.” Daughter of celebrated writers Erica Jong and Jonathan Fast, Jong-Fast is also the author of the books “Normal Girl,” “Girl [Maladjusted]” and “The Social Climber’s Handbook.” As a member of the press – a profession often attacked by Donald Trump – Jong-Fast has been sounding the alarm about the 45th President’s escalating extremism and authoritarian bent. In this episode, Alec and Jong-Fast discuss Project 2025 and its troubling implications, the effect J.D. Vance has had on the Trump ticket, and her reasons for remaining optimistic about the future.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio. After a long political season full
of fundraising texts, constant campaign ads, and seemingly bottomless breaking news,
the moment we've all been waiting for is finally hear
it's election Day. I wanted to mark the occasion by
(00:24):
speaking with someone who was also deeply invested in the outcome.
Author and political pundit Malijiang Fast. As a member of
the press, a profession that's often found itself attacked by
Donald Trump, Chang Fast has been ringing the alarm bells
loudly about the forty fifth presidents escalating extremism and authoritarian bent.
(00:48):
She is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, political analyst
for MSNBC, and host of the podcast Fast Politics with
Malijang Fasts. She's also the author of the books Girl
Maladjusted and The Social Climber's Handbook. This is my second
opportunity to interview Mollie. I spoke with her and her mother,
(01:11):
novelist Erika Jong, in twenty twelve on one of our
very first podcasts. Her father is author Jonathan Fast. Growing
up in a literary household meant that Jong Fast started
in the family business at a young age. Her first novel,
Normal Girl, was published when she was just twenty one
years old, a fact made even more impressive when you
(01:35):
learn she did not graduate from college.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
So my education is I went to high school, which
was a win for may. I was never a student.
I was dyslexic. I was like the first person in
my family to not go to college, right, right. So
I went and wrote a book, and then I got
an MFA from Bennington.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
So because I'm igner written, meaning that you can get
an MFA without having.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
A BA theoretically, yes, I mean.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
They made an exception for year, not a common pract
I've never done this before.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
I think there are other people who've done it. I
had written some books, so I was able to make
a case that I add an equivalent to a college degree,
which I did not.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
In fact, that's what happened to me with acting, where
they said to me, we want you to come back
and get your degree, and they said, we'll have you
write a paper and we'll wave write a sixty five
page thesis or whatever, but and will waive your studio
acting class requirements in light of your experience professionally over
the last like fifteen years.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
So I went back and we did that.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
That's what that's like.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
We were commenting about how some people work as journalists.
I mean one shining example, like a says Woodward, where
he evolves into a author and wat's books after years
of journalism, and you're.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Kind of the opposite.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yes, I very much said.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Right, And how what do you attribute that to?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Honestly, it's ignorance. I thought you had to be an like.
I didn't understand how anything worked. I have these teenage
kids now, and I'm always like, well, so you should
do this, or you should do that, or you should
talk to people who'll have the job that you want.
Nobody ever explained to me that there were options. I
thought you wrote novels and then you died.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
You know.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
I didn't realize that there were others, some awards, right,
maybe maybe I had a bestseller, maybe didn't. But you know,
I didn't know that you could like be a banker,
go to law school. I mean, these things just didn't
seem like things that people did or if.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
You had to do over again, is it something else
you do?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I don't know. I mean, being a dentist is really hard, right,
I have to say, like, there are certain things where
I just don't have the brain for them, like being
a waiter, Like when people start giving their orders, I
couldn't tell you what they had said.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
The thing for me, though, was that when I think
about you, I think about somebody who writing this is
rather a solitary thing.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, I hate it because you're there sitting around and
basically you're just getting crazier and crazier. Oh, I'll go
have a snack, yeah, maybe a nap. I don't come back,
you know, and three days later. I mean, it's just no,
it's so bad. It's a bad business.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
All the great writers' children, yeah, many of the great
writer's children told me there was like a cheever or
something like that. Yeah, like Ben Shever or Ben Yeah,
or Susan. They'd say, you know, dad just goes out
to that cabin in the backyard and don't you ever
knock on that door ever, Yeah, you never knock on
that doorsturb him.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
That's the difference between male writers and female writers. For example,
my mom too, actually, but that was because she was
a little bit different. But like there are stories of
I can't remember who it was a sort of famous
female writer driving to the edge of her property, locking
herself in the car so she could write. Well, the
children were banging on the outside of the car, like
(04:45):
that's the female writer experience, the male writer experience. And
my mother dad, if that door, if you open that door,
forget it. Yeah. My grandfather was the same way. Howard Fast.
You'd wake up at five o'clock in the morning, you'd
be out there on the type. He had a typewriter,
and you'd hear it and you just knew.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
You know, the Howard Fast is your grandfather.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Yea.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Now, when did you decide, and I'm assuming this is
obviously a decision you made with other people. What was
the genesis of your on camera career? When do you
decide you were ready to go on cast?
Speaker 2 (05:14):
So, I, you know, with everything it was like they
asked me to do. So I started with the networks
that are no longer in existence. So there was this
network called chatter. You could never see it anywhere except
in gas stations on the po the pump yes, and
the pump chadder. So I would do chattering right vacation. Yeah,
(05:35):
Maria Mduno's right exactly. She is, By the way, the
sort of, I want to say, the Walter Cronkite of
this genre. So I started by doing chatter you know
when you do at four am for the four to
six window, we might need you twice for you know.
And also another network that I just recently stopped going on,
(05:57):
but I loved going on it because it was so insane.
Was and I had to stop when I went down SNBC.
But Great Britain News gb News is the worst. It
is the dregs of society. So it's a cable network
started to sell brexit. Okay, it's biggest star is a
man called Nigel Farage, right right, who is just going
(06:20):
right without any positive qualities at all. And you go
on that show and they say to you, wow, you know,
they do like that Foxy thing. But even worse, you know,
well your many people are saying that that Joe Biden
is a demented old man who doesn't know where he died,
right exactly, and that the shadow Cabinet is now presidenting.
(06:43):
Tell us is that correct? And why is it correct?
Speaker 3 (06:47):
And what can you shed on that? Right?
Speaker 2 (06:49):
There was a lot of that, like Pierce Morgan style
stupid oh god.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
But to get back to something which is so your
camera ready. When you decide your camera ready, you're you're
guesting on show.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Around twenty fifteen, I started writing political stuff and getting
into that.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Kind of a shift to political Yeah why.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Because my career as a novelist died and it was
actually yes or just having something for some purpose to
my life. So I had written this historical novel. I
can't it was Nazis or maybe it was something, and
I this Nazias and everything. I had given it to
(07:25):
this very fancy agent and he had said, oh my god,
this is unbelievable, and they got one person was like
this is incredible, and then crickets and then it didn't sell.
And at some point I was like, oh, this is
over for me, Like I cannot write novels like this,
and also I don't even know that I want to.
I went back to a place that I had written
(07:45):
for when I was like thirteen and the forward. I
started writing these pieces about politics every week. I got
better and better at doing it, and then I sort
of went to better places. So I went from there
to Glamour, and then I went to The Bulwark, and
then I went to Vogue, and then I went to
the Atlantic. They hired me at the Atlantic. That was
(08:08):
not a match.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Then I'll tell me why, because I subscribe to the
Atlantic online.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Yeah, a lot of great writers, a lot.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Of great writers. It was not a good place for me.
They felt I was too left, which is, if you
think about it, kind of hilarious because I'm actually not that,
you know, I mean a pro democracy for sure, but
ultimately a lot of people on the left don't think
on and yeah, I would like us all not to die,
(08:35):
you know, with the country getting hotter and hotter. So
it just was not a match. And so I went
to Unty Fair and that's where I've been for a
couple of years. But I had to sort of work
my way back into the career that I had wanted.
And it was pretty interesting and it was a lot
of humility, which was great, and a lot of just
chopping wood and carrying water and like, there is a lot,
(08:56):
I mean, what's cool about American life, And and this is
obviously not as true as it should be. And you'll
see people like who've been incarcerated, who aren't able to
have these kind of revivals in their lives, which is
why we have to work on you know, making the
world better for people who have been incarcerated or people
who have had I had a very lucky opportunity to
(09:19):
sort of start over in the middle of my life.
And a lot of people are able to do that
in American life. And we're lucky, and that's why we
have to make it so that other people can do
like it.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
It's interesting you say that, because that's certainly something that
is not a condition of life in other countries, even
in the Western European country.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Oh yeah, for you to start.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Again, right, And that's another question, and it's really important.
And like I mean, I have these three teenage children
and my husband I always talking about like in France,
if you don't get into the good schools, you're fucked, right,
you know, there's a certain track and you're on it
and that's it. And that's not how it is in
American life.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
So you were guesting on shows, yes, and then you when.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Did you decide or did somebody else decide to someone
tap you on the show say let's go, or did
you pitch to somebody.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
I don't have my own show. I'm still just a guest,
but I'm a podcast. Yes, I have the podcast. I
have the podcast at iHeart, and you know, I just
am a contributor at MSNBC.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
You still are, Yeah, you're still a Vanity Fair and
you're still at MSMB.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Yeah, and I also do iHeart. I am a part
of the gig economy, so I have these many jobs,
but I got better at it. It was funny. I
was actually talking to a TV executive who is now
retired on the phone the other day and I was like,
how do you get a show if you wanted to
get a show theoretically, And he was talking to me
about someone who has a very big show now and
(10:38):
he said, you know, he just came for Christmas. He
worked on Christmas and Thanksgiving at four o'clock in the morning,
and you know, and that's sort of what I've been
trying to do, is just you know, working.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
The only one who I really watch with any REGULARIA
is O'Donnell.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
He's so smart.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
O'donnald brings a sensibility to that that's really it's not
about me white men.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
And I actually text him all the time. But you know,
Lawrence has worked in the Senate, you know, he worked
in the House. I mean, he just is really a
lot of history. So you can talk to him and
you can say you know what about 'LBJ and he'll
be like, wow, da da da. And I think all
any of us have is historical president, right, because especially
(11:20):
when it comes to polling, we don't have great data.
I mean, that's the big lie now, if you're gonna
talk about like them, this moment in American politics is
right now. In this moment, we have polls which are
highly speculative, a lot of voodoo math going on, and
then we have early voting and that's it. So whenever
(11:41):
you're listening to someone, always sort of think to yourself, like,
what information is this person going on? And historical information
is in itself at least it actually happened. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Now, which would you say is your favorite or preferred medium? Writing? Radio, podcast, television.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
So writing is the worst because you want to die
and writing a memoir, right, writing a memoir effectiveness, effectiveness,
I mean it's just different muscles. Writing is you get
a great sentence, but you know, writing is hard because
you are fighting, you're swimming upstream and this is like
even saying this, I feel very depressed because it's something
(12:23):
my grandfather used to say. But you know, it's hard
to get people to read. Like, it's not it's not
issues you right, it's not any lot of books out there, right,
it's not anyone's preferred method of community, you know, like, oh,
let me sit down and read a book. I mean,
my husband reads like ten books a day, but I
don't think that's the norm.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
That's yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Yeah, well he's literally You're like, why are you staring
at your phone and he's just reading?
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Yeah, I mean they you know, you write what you
say on television to a certain extent, and if you
you know, and if you're doing a monologue on a
show you write it.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
You actually looks like a movie in terms of you
to predict that people are going to want to read
that eighteen months from now.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Yeah, and nobody knows.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
No.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
I mean, this is the answer. It's funny because I
wrote this piece. I have a great editor of Vannie Fair.
I'm obsessed with him. He's so wonderful. He really respects me,
lets me write what I want to write. So I said,
I'm going to write a piece about how no one
knows anything. And he was like, yes, but you could
tell he was just like, Oh, why are you gonna
write a piece about how no one knows anything. And
I wrote this piece which was basically nobody knows how
(13:25):
it's going to play out, which is true, and we
were all like, oh, this might be a little and
then like, you know, a few days later, someone wrote
in another magazine that I am not as fond of that,
the same piece, you know that nobody knows anything, and
I was like, yes, I was right, you know, so nobody.
I mean, we know some things, but we don't know
nearly as much as we need you to think in
(13:48):
order for you to turn on the television.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Well where I think that MSNBC. What bothered me when
I was there was I was like, man, if you
just had one writer on your staff could write because
each segment I saw some of these people, even the
highest rated people, that they say the same thing seven times,
they cover the same ground seven.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Times, and sometimes things like for example, there was this
study published by Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns
Hopkins about SB eight, which is this Texas abortion bell.
So a year before the Supreme Court overturned Row, the
Texas state legislature, which, by the way, in case you
(14:24):
want to find a state where everything sucks in the legislature.
It's Texas, I mean, followed by Oklahoma. Oklahoma with the
legislation is just the things they're passing is just brainworms.
I mean, trust me, in New York State looks like
you know, Paris, France compared to this. So SBA comes
out of Texas and it is no abortions after six weeks.
(14:47):
So the state of Texas really had overturned ROW a
year before the Supreme Court. And what this study found
was that these women are walking coffins. That they were
about two hundred and forty eight excess deaths of infants.
You had babies born that were going to die. So
women would carry these babies and then they would die
(15:07):
or they would die within the first ninety days of life.
And so and we're going to see much more of this,
but this is like the first sort of.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Because we're fantasy people to go through those.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Three years out. Yes, and you see people on the
right defending this, well, we've saved all of these embryos, right,
all these women were forced to carry. You know, these
fetuses survived, but these women were forced to carry these
babies that were going to inevitably die. And that that
is the legacy of Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Author and correspondent Mali Jang Fast. If you enjoy conversations
with dogged political writers, check out my episode with Jane Mayer.
Speaker 5 (15:51):
Just even the opening of it, where it's got the
Money Money Song and him coming in on a helicopter
and a limousine is meeting him and some beautiful girl
gets out of it with a clipboard for him. It's
like a fantasy of what being rich is. One of
the stories I loved the most was interviewing Tony Schwartz,
who wrote the Art of the Deal, and he said
(16:12):
people think there's more to Trump and that there's another Trump,
and when he gets elected, he's going to be different.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
He said, there is.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
No one Trump.
Speaker 5 (16:20):
It's all like, you know, a centimeter deep.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
To hear more of my conversation with Jane Mayer, go
to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Malli
Joan Fast shares her perspective on the people that currently
have Trump's confidences. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to
(16:51):
Here's the Thing. Mally jan Fasts novels and memoirs like
Normal Girl and the Sex Doctors in the Basement, True
stories from a semi celebrity childhood were inspired by her
wild years as a young adult coming of age in
New York City. I wanted to know if she was
willing to share with me a little bit about the
(17:12):
years since spent in sobriety.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
I'm always talking about it. I won't shut up about it.
Like someone DM me the other day and was like,
you know, we have this anonymity at Press Radio, but
I break my anonymity. I'm sober since I was nineteen
years old. The only reason I went to rehab was
because I had seen a movie with that actress from
the bus s. Yes, she's a coke iad no. She
(17:37):
was in a movie about a rehab, right, And I
was like, okay, I'll go to rehab. That was it.
That's how you got Yeah. I thought, this looks okay.
It's like a spa. I had a drug dealer called Felix.
His He had an apartment on the Upper West Side
and I would sit with his girlfriend and watch Baywatch.
(17:57):
They had a pitfall, because you have to have people
and you know, do cocaine and watch by Watch. That's
how you know what EURO was.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
I had a woman who was a drug dealer whose
husband was a dug dealer and he gets arrested. So
the drug dealers come to her and they say, your husband,
he owes us a lot of money, and you're.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Going to pay us. Right, you're going to sell the coke.
Now you're a coke dealer.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Now you're gonna If you don't sell the coke and
pay us back, we're not going to tell you to
pay us. You sell the coke and pay us back,
and if you don't, your husband's going to be killed
in prison.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
We're going to murder him.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
And probably that's nice, but she was like, got it.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
God, I don't need to write anything down. No, I
don't need a pen. I'm good.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
That's like the Donald Trump thing, though, don't ever write
anything down. He doesn't write anything down, he doesn't send emails,
and that is how he's managed to get away with us.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Speaking of Donald Trump, yeah, I mean many of these people,
particularly from a certain political stripe where they're relatively incurious people,
so someone else is getting all the work done, George
Bush Junior, and they're like a hood ornament, and then
other people With Trump, I was always mystified, saddened, crushed
by how many bad guys there were out there that
(19:04):
were going to come and take over the government yea,
and run everything for him. More now and even more now,
I'm mortified. But who do you think has Trump's ear now?
In a previous election in twenty sixteen, it was Bannon.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
So certainly there's some dynamic where Don Junior has really
got a you know, because it used to be a
Vanka And now I think because remember Don Junior, at
least he claims to have been really instrumental in the
Jadie Vance pick, right, which was I think if we
go back and look at this election, and again no
one knows what's going to happen, but if he loses,
(19:39):
I think that picking jd Vance will certainly have been
one of the reasons why, because it's just he's not
for anyone. You added Nikki Haley to that ticket, and
you say, well, he's you know, he overturned Vy Wade,
he's bad for women, he's the quote unquote father of IVF,
whatever the fuck that means. But he's at least trying
(20:01):
to grow his electorate. Right. One of the things about Trump,
which has been true since twenty sixteen, has never tried
to grow his electorate. He's only ever been a bass play.
So for example, he'll go on these interviews. You know,
even there was a Sean Hannity interview where Sean Handy said,
you know, you said you wanted to be a dictator,
but we all know, right, Fox is trying to get
(20:21):
him to pivot to a general election, right to this strategy. Right,
the strategy is always you pivot to the general election.
You say, you know, I'm not gonna actually do these
death camps. I'm just gonna have you know. It was
just as right exactly, We're not gonna have you know,
mass deportation now, which were the signs, you know, because
(20:43):
we want to appeal to the people who just want
tax cuts, so we're gonna have minor deportation, easy, right,
We're gonna lie a little bit. And at every point
he said no, you know. So so Sean Hannity says,
you say you want to be dictator on day one,
but you don't really want to be dictator on day one,
And he said, I want to be a dictator ater
on day one. Drill baby dreft. Right. And by the way,
(21:04):
where you know, America's never produce more oil and gas
than it does right now, so.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
More than they told in the world.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Yeah, and more than any of us need, is than
none of.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
Us money to be made by people who hate the Yeah,
who hate the future.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
They don't want the future to cover that's right.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
The reason I asked that is because and I love
your answer that he does. He never changes, he never grows.
It's the same spiel now as it was eight years ago.
There's one pile of these things, and there's one that
stands alone of my greatest fears if he gets elected.
There's a lot of things that I fear will happen.
One of the first things that jumps to my mind
(21:42):
is are we gonna have a war with China over Taiwan?
I was reading a great article, but it was a
Kirkpatrick in the New York or somebody here, what about
this issue about You know, this is a lot of
military watchers, Pentagon level veterans are sitting and saying.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
This is very real.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Yeah, we could we could end up in a war
with them over this because they've announced they want to nationalized.
You know, it's one of this guy who's in there
now in China says he wants to bang wants to
unify everything and Taiwan back.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
But Trump is not going to protect Taiwan. I think
you'll be like she didn't. You know, you want Taiwan,
what's it worth is.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
You're going to have it? Nobody wants Nobody wants it.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
I mean, the reason America started manufacturing chips, right, even
Biden World, they brought manufacturing chips because all the chips
are ring made in Taiwan, and they were like, holy shit,
this could really be a problem.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
Right.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
But my other thing, aside from a pile of specifics
like the environment and military conflicts and so forth, my
biggest thing is that the left, liberals, progressives, democrats, whatever
word you want to use, I don't really don't give
a shit anymore.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
And I'm too old to care. Ye now, I'm too tired.
They're going to give up. They're going to give up.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
They're going to sit there and look at the system
and say, any country where you voted for this guy
the first time and you didn't know who he was
and you got cajoled into doing this, but now you
know who he is and you had four years of
somebody who really did a fairly good job. I mean,
I think Biden is somebody who doesn't get enough credit
for what he did. Things are certainly going to be
better with her in terms of her level of experience.
(23:14):
Another guy who when he ran the first time had
no political record, Now he's running again and learn nothing
on the job for four years.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
He came out the same way. Right. But my point is.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Is that I think that not everybody, and not even
a majority, but a significant number of people are gonna
sit they're and go write checks for these campaigns for congressmen,
congress women, senators and other states to try to keep
the whole system in balance, to try to deal with
the frailty of liberal politics in this country.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Fuck that. I don't want to bother anywing. It doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
It doesn't work. If he wins again, I think there's
going to be a lot of people who are just
politics is going to go off their list of concerns.
I mean, you don't even watch TV anymore news?
Speaker 2 (23:54):
I mean or the answer is that the country is
too big to govern and not a country that includes
ALLMA and New York is not the right. You know
that you sizing here right well, that we have something
that's a little bit off because for example, and I
actually think, and again this is there's a number of
reasons why this could actually be quite bad. But one
(24:14):
of Trump's things is he's going to you know, like,
for example, with California with the fires, California needed federal money,
forest fires horrible. He was like, are these my people?
Are these my voters or are these you know, Democrats?
Because I'm not going to give money to people who
don't like transaction. Right, If you're in a state that's
(24:37):
run by a guy like Avenuwsom, where you're the fifth
biggest economy in the world, and you're paying into a
federal government that won't fucking give you money for forest fires, like,
there's a moment where you think like, oh, we're not
doing this anymore. So, I mean I could see a world,
you know, I don't know that New York figures this out,
but I could see a world where California is like,
(24:58):
fuck you, you know, if we're going to pay billions
of dollars in federal taxes and you're going to tell
us we can't do what we want and not give
us disaster relief, you know. So I think there are
all sorts of crazy things that could happen if Trump
wins that are not necessarily.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Good, Well I think.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
I mean, I'm not endorsing them in any way, but
I'm just saying, like, this transactional way of running the
federal government sooner or later will end with states being like,
why should I pay into this if I can't get out? Right,
New York.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Which gets what is the over under? It's thirty billion. Yeah,
dollars a year goes to other states to fund things
that doesn't come back. How much do we send to
Washington comes back from Washington? The number is like hideous.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah, So the question is why do it? And I
think that's a real question. I mean that, by the way,
is not good. I mean Brexit was terrible for the
British economy because they did this. It is sort of
the same thing, right they said, I don't want to,
you know, have Polish plumbers coming here, so we're going
to just sanction ourselves. I mean, that's it is a self.
(26:00):
I mean, it's not good economically for the country. It's
not good. But you know, if you have a president
who is playing that game with federal funding, I think
you're going to see more of it.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Well, I'm somebody who I can't help but see things
in the plainest terms. I'll sit there and go what
is going on with the political consensus, the political organism
in the state of Arizona. Where you see that Phoenix
had one hundred degree whether for one hundred days in
a row, they never had that performance. Isn't this of
(26:32):
any concern to you? You can't vote for one person
in a political office in the whole state. Forget about
federal election. We include the federal But who doesn't offer
you some ideas to address that issue? And they don't
bring it up. If you're living in Phoenix, Arizona, are
you insane that you know what you are?
Speaker 3 (26:51):
You insane that you don't want this struve?
Speaker 1 (26:52):
If it was one hundred degrees in New York for
one hundred days in a row, yeah, you bet, people
would be flipping out and screaming.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Yeah. People say to me, why do you live in
the people care?
Speaker 2 (27:02):
But Arizona has a democratic governor, and I would say that,
like one of the weird things about climate if you're
just going to be a little optimistic, I hate being
the optimist here, but okay, is that Texas has this
climate problem, right, it's very hot. They have this shitty
grid that is decentralized, not attached to the federal because
(27:24):
they are Texans, so they don't want to be on
the federal they don't want to hear that federal But
also energy from the grid, and they've had to go
largely solar because the renewables are a better bet, right, right,
because right, and they also just work better. And so
you know, the good news is that renewables are cheaper
(27:49):
and they're better, and they work better, and we're on
the edge of them being cheaper than you know, they're already. Like,
the reason that coal is going away is not because
people love the earth, it's it's so expansible, exactly.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Author Mallijang Fast. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a
friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on
the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
When we come back, Mallyjang Fast shares the endgame of
Project twenty twenty five and how it could affect the
(28:25):
next generation of Americans. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening
to Here's the Thing. I spoke with Malijang Fast in
late October leading up to election day One of the
(28:48):
more alarming factors of the twenty twenty four election is
Project twenty twenty five, a nine hundred page manifesto of
radical proposals from a conservative tank that outlines plans for
a second Trump administration. Mali Jiang Fast is one political
writer well versed in this subject.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
I did a YouTube series on Project twenty twenty five
a couple months ago, where I interviewed a lot of
academics who are not necessarily television people. I mean, some
of them are.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
But where can people find them?
Speaker 2 (29:22):
It's on If you google YouTube Malli Jong Fast, Project
twenty twenty five, it comes up. Yeah. Basically, what I
did was I talked to like this woman, Theedra Scott Pell,
who is an academic who studies at Harvard who studied
the advent of the tea party and sort of the
outgrowth of it, and she's talked to a lot of people.
I talked to a guy called Thomas Zimmer from Georgetown
(29:46):
and we talked about what it would look like and
what Project twenty twenty five does, which, by the way,
I want to say.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Those are the details. It was authored by, who it
came if, it was.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Honored by, it's from the Heritage Foundation. It was published
on the Heritage Foundation site. Donald Trump disabout it even
though like fifty people who wrote it worked in his administration,
or maybe more it's you know, the president of the
Heritage Foundation had his introduction of his book written by
Jadie Vance. Kevin Roberts is his name, the president of
(30:15):
the Heritage Foundation. There are so many This thing is
like interconnected, like you can't believe. So the idea that
somehow Donald Trump is not connected to Project twenty twenty
five is complete lie. And even more so is that
today this morning when he was on the curvy couch
on Fox News, Fox and Friends with his sycophantic minions,
(30:36):
he said, we're going to get rid of the Department
of Education, which is one of the tenants of Project
twenty twenty five is to end the federal Department of Education.
So that means pelgrants. That means money for the red
states where the education is not funded as well comes
from federal money. It will know more, what do.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
The advertise is the benefit of that. They want to
will limit the Department of Education for what purpose?
Speaker 2 (31:03):
They hate the federal government to make a jumbise soillienaires
can have tax cuts. They're selling Christian nationalism, right, They're
selling you know, you don't want the government involved in your.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
School forcing your kid to mean to kill a mocking.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Right, exactly. You don't want the federal government. You just
want the state. By the way, let me just add
the end game with all of this is to get
people out of public schools and into religious schools. That's
the school voucher thing, right. The goal here is to
end public schools because public schools are non denominational. And
when you look at a lot of the Project twenty
(31:37):
twenty five stuff, it's to really get religion into teaching.
And in fact, in Oklahoma, which we talked about before,
Oklahoma is a place where they've sort of been trying
out at the state level a lot of the Project
twenty twenty five fantasies including Bibles and schools, the Ten
Commandments and schools reuniting or perhaps putting church and state
(31:58):
back together again as reassembling, right exactly.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Well, I mean what I.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Find is that when people say to you, when one party,
the Republican Party, seems to want to dumb down the
electrode as much as possible, I think those are easier
to manipulate fear. You want to inject as much fear
into all.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
Of the discussion about big government.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
And what I also noticed the Republican Party the party
of the wealthiest people.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
In this country for the most part.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Yes, I mean people who are giants in my business
are Republicans who own the companies.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
And you know the Trump tax cuts. I mean, this
is like the unwritten story of this whole election is
the Trump tax cuts expire in twenty twenty five. So
some of them are just like a Nelson poultse is just.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Don't care about right, right, They don't care about abortion
or gay marriage or whatever. But the thing is is
that these people they want to dumb it all down
and they want to inject that level of fear in there.
And it's working in this country where you see that
this guy could have run in twenty sixteen and fooled people, right,
and he's close to fooling them.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
Yeah, he's very close.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
I mean, the fact that this race is even this
close at all. Can you imagine if Biden didn't jump
drop out, imagine we'd be dead. Yeah, So for that,
I want to thank her, even even though I have
my criticisms of her. Yeah. I mean, as Democrats, we
have nothing but criticisms of our own party, criticize everybody,
whereas the other side just they just circle the wagons.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
But my biggest fear in this election is that an
enormous swath of people will give up on.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Politics in this country. Right. They may not move out
of the country, although I know some people were contemplating that.
Yeah they might.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
They might sit there and say, I'm going to give
myself a couple of years to get away from it.
So I don't want to watch it burn down. The
only thing, off, of course, that I worry about is
the Supreme Court too.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Yeah, no, worry about a couple of people are going
to go right.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
No.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
I mean it's October eighteenth, and I'm still very optimistic
about this election. So I'm very optimistic. I'm seeing early
numbers out of Pennsylvania. They look good. I think that
the fact that the bottom of the ticket has the
Democrats so ahead and the top of the ticket is
so tight is some kind of math. I just think
this is going to go better than we think.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
What do you think Trump's gonna do if he loses Marlago?
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Selling States water watches? I mean, I think he'll try
to keep as much power as he can, and you're
gonna have ultimately, you will have Republicans say, you know
they're gonna have a reckoning. Right this whole time they
have refused to. I mean in twenty twenty four, we
knew that he wasn't the best candidate for them and
(34:27):
that if they and picnicky Haley they could have won, right.
I mean, maybe they still win with him, but he's
certainly not a great candidate, and they're gonna I think
they'll have a reckoning and they'll have to figure it out.
Speaker 3 (34:37):
What do you think the chances are he'll be in jail?
Speaker 2 (34:40):
You know, the federal cases are really bad. Like you
don't want everyone saying me, like, once you get indicted
in a federal case, because we're talking about the mayor
who has numerous federal indictments and more comings supposedly a
superseding indictment or something else, once they get you on
a federal indictment, that's no good. You really don't want that.
(35:00):
So I don't know that he goes to jail. I
feel like there's more of like a house arrest scenario.
You know something right, ankle basic right, I mean, what
are you going to send the Secret Service to jail?
That doesn't make a lot of sense. I think that's
more likely than just I think that's.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
A great essay. You should write, Secret Service in Jail.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
I think it described to describe Trump's Trump walks into
the cafeteria and they all have their arm around their
meat loaf or whatever, and then the secrets It was like,
could you clear this table place President's citting there for
his meat.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah, that's why I think he won't go to jail.
But federal cases really, I mean you you know, and
the fundamental thing which we should be saying every day
is that Donald Trump is running for president, so he
doesn't go to jail, which is yeah, absolutely, and because
he can pay his legal fees.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
What are you working on now? You're gonna write another
book or no?
Speaker 2 (35:45):
So I have this book coming out in June about
a memoir called How to Lose Your Mom, about my
mom having dementia and my husband getting cancer and my
year where everybody kind of imploded and your.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Husband had cancer, your mom's dementia, and your kids are teenagers. Yes, yeah,
but the free lemons across the board in the slot
machine here.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
They're fun though way, and one of them's in college.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
When you say how to lose your mom, I can't
imagine how one would lose their mom. When your mom
is your mom, you figured she was never going to
stop talking for the rest of her life. And if
so fact, we're going to play a clip here from
the last show we did, which was back in twenty twelve.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
On the one hand, you're supposed to look like a
fashion model retouched, and on the other hand, you're supposed
to claim to a sophistication you don't and cannot have
at that age. And I think that women who are
fourteen fifteen are in the most difficult position they have
ever been in modern society.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
What do you think about that?
Speaker 2 (36:49):
I mean, I agree, I think there's a lot of sexuality.
I think it's not explained to young girls in a
way very confusing, Molly. But I think that's a legacy
of the family movement. I mean, we said we.
Speaker 4 (37:01):
Want a legacy of the feminist movement. It is a
legacy in here, I really feel fierce. It is the
legacy of a distortion of women's desire for equal rights.
Equal rights are not platform shoes. You can't and naked
clothes equal rights.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
But you can't blow up an atom bomb and then
choose how it's going to go.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
But we.
Speaker 4 (37:23):
We did not blow up that atom bomb. The media
took our legitimate desire for equality and turned it into garbage.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
But they turned it into what the people wanted. First
of all, I don't think they wouldn't exist.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
People the media what the people want.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
We'll be back in a moment from a response to
Victoria's secret. Let me ask you something which is And
of course there's many many possibilities here. It goes without saying,
but pick one of the things that your fondest of
that your mother taught you.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Everything very fabulous about me comes from my mom. Know,
every weird French word I've worked into my right, my oubra,
every you know, fabulous trip, every city that I know,
I know it because she showed it to me. Right,
Every beautiful piece of jewelry was hers. Everything that is
(38:20):
glamorous and fabulous and ephemeral comes from my mom, and
a lot of the intellectual stuff too. So I'm very
I owe her a great dedication.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
She gave the world.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
She really did, and she was and my mom was
so struggled with alcoholism her whole life, and if anything,
I am just so lucky that I was able to
get sober. And I am not in any way better
than she is. And I have the exact same disease
and our grandmother, my grandmother had it too, and it's
(38:53):
just it is just the legacy of alcoholism. So I
am forever grateful and also forever said about how hard
it's been yeah for her.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
One of our favorite episodes, Oh thank you.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
My thanks to Mali jang Fast And just a reminder,
if you haven't yet had the opportunity to do so,
please vote today. You can go to vote dot org
to check your registration status, see who is on the ballot,
and find your polling place. That's vote dot Org. Here's
the Thing is recorded at CDM Studios. This episode was
(39:34):
produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hobin. Our
engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich.
I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to you
by iHeart Radio.
This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio. After a long political season full
of fundraising texts, constant campaign ads, and seemingly bottomless breaking news,
the moment we've all been waiting for is finally hear
it's election Day. I wanted to mark the occasion by
(00:24):
speaking with someone who was also deeply invested in the outcome.
Author and political pundit Malijiang Fast. As a member of
the press, a profession that's often found itself attacked by
Donald Trump, Chang Fast has been ringing the alarm bells
loudly about the forty fifth presidents escalating extremism and authoritarian bent.
(00:48):
She is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, political analyst
for MSNBC, and host of the podcast Fast Politics with
Malijang Fasts. She's also the author of the books Girl
Maladjusted and The Social Climber's Handbook. This is my second
opportunity to interview Mollie. I spoke with her and her mother,
(01:11):
novelist Erika Jong, in twenty twelve on one of our
very first podcasts. Her father is author Jonathan Fast. Growing
up in a literary household meant that Jong Fast started
in the family business at a young age. Her first novel,
Normal Girl, was published when she was just twenty one
years old, a fact made even more impressive when you
(01:35):
learn she did not graduate from college.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
So my education is I went to high school, which
was a win for may. I was never a student.
I was dyslexic. I was like the first person in
my family to not go to college, right, right. So
I went and wrote a book, and then I got
an MFA from Bennington.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
So because I'm igner written, meaning that you can get
an MFA without having.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
A BA theoretically, yes, I mean.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
They made an exception for year, not a common pract
I've never done this before.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
I think there are other people who've done it. I
had written some books, so I was able to make
a case that I add an equivalent to a college degree,
which I did not.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
In fact, that's what happened to me with acting, where
they said to me, we want you to come back
and get your degree, and they said, we'll have you
write a paper and we'll wave write a sixty five
page thesis or whatever, but and will waive your studio
acting class requirements in light of your experience professionally over
the last like fifteen years.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
So I went back and we did that.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
That's what that's like.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
We were commenting about how some people work as journalists.
I mean one shining example, like a says Woodward, where
he evolves into a author and wat's books after years
of journalism, and you're.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Kind of the opposite.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yes, I very much said.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Right, And how what do you attribute that to?
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Honestly, it's ignorance. I thought you had to be an like.
I didn't understand how anything worked. I have these teenage
kids now, and I'm always like, well, so you should
do this, or you should do that, or you should
talk to people who'll have the job that you want.
Nobody ever explained to me that there were options. I
thought you wrote novels and then you died.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
You know.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
I didn't realize that there were others, some awards, right,
maybe maybe I had a bestseller, maybe didn't. But you know,
I didn't know that you could like be a banker,
go to law school. I mean, these things just didn't
seem like things that people did or if.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
You had to do over again, is it something else
you do?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I don't know. I mean, being a dentist is really hard, right,
I have to say, like, there are certain things where
I just don't have the brain for them, like being
a waiter, Like when people start giving their orders, I
couldn't tell you what they had said.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
The thing for me, though, was that when I think
about you, I think about somebody who writing this is
rather a solitary thing.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, I hate it because you're there sitting around and
basically you're just getting crazier and crazier. Oh, I'll go
have a snack, yeah, maybe a nap. I don't come back,
you know, and three days later. I mean, it's just no,
it's so bad. It's a bad business.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
All the great writers' children, yeah, many of the great
writer's children told me there was like a cheever or
something like that. Yeah, like Ben Shever or Ben Yeah,
or Susan. They'd say, you know, dad just goes out
to that cabin in the backyard and don't you ever
knock on that door ever, Yeah, you never knock on
that doorsturb him.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
That's the difference between male writers and female writers. For example,
my mom too, actually, but that was because she was
a little bit different. But like there are stories of
I can't remember who it was a sort of famous
female writer driving to the edge of her property, locking
herself in the car so she could write. Well, the
children were banging on the outside of the car, like
(04:45):
that's the female writer experience, the male writer experience. And
my mother dad, if that door, if you open that door,
forget it. Yeah. My grandfather was the same way. Howard Fast.
You'd wake up at five o'clock in the morning, you'd
be out there on the type. He had a typewriter,
and you'd hear it and you just knew.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
You know, the Howard Fast is your grandfather.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Yea.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Now, when did you decide, and I'm assuming this is
obviously a decision you made with other people. What was
the genesis of your on camera career? When do you
decide you were ready to go on cast?
Speaker 2 (05:14):
So, I, you know, with everything it was like they
asked me to do. So I started with the networks
that are no longer in existence. So there was this
network called chatter. You could never see it anywhere except
in gas stations on the po the pump yes, and
the pump chadder. So I would do chattering right vacation. Yeah,
(05:35):
Maria Mduno's right exactly. She is, By the way, the
sort of, I want to say, the Walter Cronkite of
this genre. So I started by doing chatter you know
when you do at four am for the four to
six window, we might need you twice for you know.
And also another network that I just recently stopped going on,
(05:57):
but I loved going on it because it was so insane.
Was and I had to stop when I went down SNBC.
But Great Britain News gb News is the worst. It
is the dregs of society. So it's a cable network
started to sell brexit. Okay, it's biggest star is a
man called Nigel Farage, right right, who is just going
(06:20):
right without any positive qualities at all. And you go
on that show and they say to you, wow, you know,
they do like that Foxy thing. But even worse, you know,
well your many people are saying that that Joe Biden
is a demented old man who doesn't know where he died,
right exactly, and that the shadow Cabinet is now presidenting.
(06:43):
Tell us is that correct? And why is it correct?
Speaker 3 (06:47):
And what can you shed on that? Right?
Speaker 2 (06:49):
There was a lot of that, like Pierce Morgan style
stupid oh god.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
But to get back to something which is so your
camera ready. When you decide your camera ready, you're you're
guesting on show.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Around twenty fifteen, I started writing political stuff and getting
into that.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Kind of a shift to political Yeah why.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Because my career as a novelist died and it was
actually yes or just having something for some purpose to
my life. So I had written this historical novel. I
can't it was Nazis or maybe it was something, and
I this Nazias and everything. I had given it to
(07:25):
this very fancy agent and he had said, oh my god,
this is unbelievable, and they got one person was like
this is incredible, and then crickets and then it didn't sell.
And at some point I was like, oh, this is
over for me, Like I cannot write novels like this,
and also I don't even know that I want to.
I went back to a place that I had written
(07:45):
for when I was like thirteen and the forward. I
started writing these pieces about politics every week. I got
better and better at doing it, and then I sort
of went to better places. So I went from there
to Glamour, and then I went to The Bulwark, and
then I went to Vogue, and then I went to
the Atlantic. They hired me at the Atlantic. That was
(08:08):
not a match.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Then I'll tell me why, because I subscribe to the
Atlantic online.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Yeah, a lot of great writers, a lot.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Of great writers. It was not a good place for me.
They felt I was too left, which is, if you
think about it, kind of hilarious because I'm actually not that,
you know, I mean a pro democracy for sure, but
ultimately a lot of people on the left don't think
on and yeah, I would like us all not to die,
(08:35):
you know, with the country getting hotter and hotter. So
it just was not a match. And so I went
to Unty Fair and that's where I've been for a
couple of years. But I had to sort of work
my way back into the career that I had wanted.
And it was pretty interesting and it was a lot
of humility, which was great, and a lot of just
chopping wood and carrying water and like, there is a lot,
(08:56):
I mean, what's cool about American life, And and this is
obviously not as true as it should be. And you'll
see people like who've been incarcerated, who aren't able to
have these kind of revivals in their lives, which is
why we have to work on you know, making the
world better for people who have been incarcerated or people
who have had I had a very lucky opportunity to
(09:19):
sort of start over in the middle of my life.
And a lot of people are able to do that
in American life. And we're lucky, and that's why we
have to make it so that other people can do
like it.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
It's interesting you say that, because that's certainly something that
is not a condition of life in other countries, even
in the Western European country.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Oh yeah, for you to start.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
Again, right, And that's another question, and it's really important.
And like I mean, I have these three teenage children
and my husband I always talking about like in France,
if you don't get into the good schools, you're fucked, right,
you know, there's a certain track and you're on it
and that's it. And that's not how it is in
American life.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
So you were guesting on shows, yes, and then you when.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Did you decide or did somebody else decide to someone
tap you on the show say let's go, or did
you pitch to somebody.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
I don't have my own show. I'm still just a guest,
but I'm a podcast. Yes, I have the podcast. I
have the podcast at iHeart, and you know, I just
am a contributor at MSNBC.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
You still are, Yeah, you're still a Vanity Fair and
you're still at MSMB.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Yeah, and I also do iHeart. I am a part
of the gig economy, so I have these many jobs,
but I got better at it. It was funny. I
was actually talking to a TV executive who is now
retired on the phone the other day and I was like,
how do you get a show if you wanted to
get a show theoretically, And he was talking to me
about someone who has a very big show now and
(10:38):
he said, you know, he just came for Christmas. He
worked on Christmas and Thanksgiving at four o'clock in the morning,
and you know, and that's sort of what I've been
trying to do, is just you know, working.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
The only one who I really watch with any REGULARIA
is O'Donnell.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
He's so smart.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
O'donnald brings a sensibility to that that's really it's not
about me white men.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
And I actually text him all the time. But you know,
Lawrence has worked in the Senate, you know, he worked
in the House. I mean, he just is really a
lot of history. So you can talk to him and
you can say you know what about 'LBJ and he'll
be like, wow, da da da. And I think all
any of us have is historical president, right, because especially
(11:20):
when it comes to polling, we don't have great data.
I mean, that's the big lie now, if you're gonna
talk about like them, this moment in American politics is
right now. In this moment, we have polls which are
highly speculative, a lot of voodoo math going on, and
then we have early voting and that's it. So whenever
(11:41):
you're listening to someone, always sort of think to yourself, like,
what information is this person going on? And historical information
is in itself at least it actually happened. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Now, which would you say is your favorite or preferred medium? Writing? Radio, podcast, television.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
So writing is the worst because you want to die
and writing a memoir, right, writing a memoir effectiveness, effectiveness,
I mean it's just different muscles. Writing is you get
a great sentence, but you know, writing is hard because
you are fighting, you're swimming upstream and this is like
even saying this, I feel very depressed because it's something
(12:23):
my grandfather used to say. But you know, it's hard
to get people to read. Like, it's not it's not
issues you right, it's not any lot of books out there, right,
it's not anyone's preferred method of community, you know, like, oh,
let me sit down and read a book. I mean,
my husband reads like ten books a day, but I
don't think that's the norm.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
That's yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Yeah, well he's literally You're like, why are you staring
at your phone and he's just reading?
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Yeah, I mean they you know, you write what you
say on television to a certain extent, and if you
you know, and if you're doing a monologue on a
show you write it.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
You actually looks like a movie in terms of you
to predict that people are going to want to read
that eighteen months from now.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Yeah, and nobody knows.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
No.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
I mean, this is the answer. It's funny because I
wrote this piece. I have a great editor of Vannie Fair.
I'm obsessed with him. He's so wonderful. He really respects me,
lets me write what I want to write. So I said,
I'm going to write a piece about how no one
knows anything. And he was like, yes, but you could
tell he was just like, Oh, why are you gonna
write a piece about how no one knows anything. And
I wrote this piece which was basically nobody knows how
(13:25):
it's going to play out, which is true, and we
were all like, oh, this might be a little and
then like, you know, a few days later, someone wrote
in another magazine that I am not as fond of that,
the same piece, you know that nobody knows anything, and
I was like, yes, I was right, you know, so nobody.
I mean, we know some things, but we don't know
nearly as much as we need you to think in
(13:48):
order for you to turn on the television.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Well where I think that MSNBC. What bothered me when
I was there was I was like, man, if you
just had one writer on your staff could write because
each segment I saw some of these people, even the
highest rated people, that they say the same thing seven times,
they cover the same ground seven.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Times, and sometimes things like for example, there was this
study published by Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns
Hopkins about SB eight, which is this Texas abortion bell.
So a year before the Supreme Court overturned Row, the
Texas state legislature, which, by the way, in case you
(14:24):
want to find a state where everything sucks in the legislature.
It's Texas, I mean, followed by Oklahoma. Oklahoma with the
legislation is just the things they're passing is just brainworms.
I mean, trust me, in New York State looks like
you know, Paris, France compared to this. So SBA comes
out of Texas and it is no abortions after six weeks.
(14:47):
So the state of Texas really had overturned ROW a
year before the Supreme Court. And what this study found
was that these women are walking coffins. That they were
about two hundred and forty eight excess deaths of infants.
You had babies born that were going to die. So
women would carry these babies and then they would die
(15:07):
or they would die within the first ninety days of life.
And so and we're going to see much more of this,
but this is like the first sort of.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Because we're fantasy people to go through those.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Three years out. Yes, and you see people on the
right defending this, well, we've saved all of these embryos, right,
all these women were forced to carry. You know, these
fetuses survived, but these women were forced to carry these
babies that were going to inevitably die. And that that
is the legacy of Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Author and correspondent Mali Jang Fast. If you enjoy conversations
with dogged political writers, check out my episode with Jane Mayer.
Speaker 5 (15:51):
Just even the opening of it, where it's got the
Money Money Song and him coming in on a helicopter
and a limousine is meeting him and some beautiful girl
gets out of it with a clipboard for him. It's
like a fantasy of what being rich is. One of
the stories I loved the most was interviewing Tony Schwartz,
who wrote the Art of the Deal, and he said
(16:12):
people think there's more to Trump and that there's another Trump,
and when he gets elected, he's going to be different.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
He said, there is.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
No one Trump.
Speaker 5 (16:20):
It's all like, you know, a centimeter deep.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
To hear more of my conversation with Jane Mayer, go
to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Malli
Joan Fast shares her perspective on the people that currently
have Trump's confidences. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to
(16:51):
Here's the Thing. Mally jan Fasts novels and memoirs like
Normal Girl and the Sex Doctors in the Basement, True
stories from a semi celebrity childhood were inspired by her
wild years as a young adult coming of age in
New York City. I wanted to know if she was
willing to share with me a little bit about the
(17:12):
years since spent in sobriety.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
I'm always talking about it. I won't shut up about it.
Like someone DM me the other day and was like,
you know, we have this anonymity at Press Radio, but
I break my anonymity. I'm sober since I was nineteen
years old. The only reason I went to rehab was
because I had seen a movie with that actress from
the bus s. Yes, she's a coke iad no. She
(17:37):
was in a movie about a rehab, right, And I
was like, okay, I'll go to rehab. That was it.
That's how you got Yeah. I thought, this looks okay.
It's like a spa. I had a drug dealer called Felix.
His He had an apartment on the Upper West Side
and I would sit with his girlfriend and watch Baywatch.
(17:57):
They had a pitfall, because you have to have people
and you know, do cocaine and watch by Watch. That's
how you know what EURO was.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
I had a woman who was a drug dealer whose
husband was a dug dealer and he gets arrested. So
the drug dealers come to her and they say, your husband,
he owes us a lot of money, and you're.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Going to pay us. Right, you're going to sell the coke.
Now you're a coke dealer.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Now you're gonna If you don't sell the coke and
pay us back, we're not going to tell you to
pay us. You sell the coke and pay us back,
and if you don't, your husband's going to be killed
in prison.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
We're going to murder him.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
And probably that's nice, but she was like, got it.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
God, I don't need to write anything down. No, I
don't need a pen. I'm good.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
That's like the Donald Trump thing, though, don't ever write
anything down. He doesn't write anything down, he doesn't send emails,
and that is how he's managed to get away with us.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Speaking of Donald Trump, yeah, I mean many of these people,
particularly from a certain political stripe where they're relatively incurious people,
so someone else is getting all the work done, George
Bush Junior, and they're like a hood ornament, and then
other people With Trump, I was always mystified, saddened, crushed
by how many bad guys there were out there that
(19:04):
were going to come and take over the government yea,
and run everything for him. More now and even more now,
I'm mortified. But who do you think has Trump's ear now?
In a previous election in twenty sixteen, it was Bannon.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
So certainly there's some dynamic where Don Junior has really
got a you know, because it used to be a
Vanka And now I think because remember Don Junior, at
least he claims to have been really instrumental in the
Jadie Vance pick, right, which was I think if we
go back and look at this election, and again no
one knows what's going to happen, but if he loses,
(19:39):
I think that picking jd Vance will certainly have been
one of the reasons why, because it's just he's not
for anyone. You added Nikki Haley to that ticket, and
you say, well, he's you know, he overturned Vy Wade,
he's bad for women, he's the quote unquote father of IVF,
whatever the fuck that means. But he's at least trying
(20:01):
to grow his electorate. Right. One of the things about Trump,
which has been true since twenty sixteen, has never tried
to grow his electorate. He's only ever been a bass play.
So for example, he'll go on these interviews. You know,
even there was a Sean Hannity interview where Sean Handy said,
you know, you said you wanted to be a dictator,
but we all know, right, Fox is trying to get
(20:21):
him to pivot to a general election, right to this strategy. Right,
the strategy is always you pivot to the general election.
You say, you know, I'm not gonna actually do these
death camps. I'm just gonna have you know. It was
just as right exactly, We're not gonna have you know,
mass deportation now, which were the signs, you know, because
(20:43):
we want to appeal to the people who just want
tax cuts, so we're gonna have minor deportation, easy, right,
We're gonna lie a little bit. And at every point
he said no, you know. So so Sean Hannity says,
you say you want to be dictator on day one,
but you don't really want to be dictator on day one,
And he said, I want to be a dictator ater
on day one. Drill baby dreft. Right. And by the way,
(21:04):
where you know, America's never produce more oil and gas
than it does right now, so.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
More than they told in the world.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Yeah, and more than any of us need, is than
none of.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
Us money to be made by people who hate the Yeah,
who hate the future.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (21:20):
They don't want the future to cover that's right.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
The reason I asked that is because and I love
your answer that he does. He never changes, he never grows.
It's the same spiel now as it was eight years ago.
There's one pile of these things, and there's one that
stands alone of my greatest fears if he gets elected.
There's a lot of things that I fear will happen.
One of the first things that jumps to my mind
(21:42):
is are we gonna have a war with China over Taiwan?
I was reading a great article, but it was a
Kirkpatrick in the New York or somebody here, what about
this issue about You know, this is a lot of
military watchers, Pentagon level veterans are sitting and saying.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
This is very real.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Yeah, we could we could end up in a war
with them over this because they've announced they want to nationalized.
You know, it's one of this guy who's in there
now in China says he wants to bang wants to
unify everything and Taiwan back.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
But Trump is not going to protect Taiwan. I think
you'll be like she didn't. You know, you want Taiwan,
what's it worth is.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
You're going to have it? Nobody wants Nobody wants it.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
I mean, the reason America started manufacturing chips, right, even
Biden World, they brought manufacturing chips because all the chips
are ring made in Taiwan, and they were like, holy shit,
this could really be a problem.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
Right.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
But my other thing, aside from a pile of specifics
like the environment and military conflicts and so forth, my
biggest thing is that the left, liberals, progressives, democrats, whatever
word you want to use, I don't really don't give
a shit anymore.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
And I'm too old to care. Ye now, I'm too tired.
They're going to give up. They're going to give up.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
They're going to sit there and look at the system
and say, any country where you voted for this guy
the first time and you didn't know who he was
and you got cajoled into doing this, but now you
know who he is and you had four years of
somebody who really did a fairly good job. I mean,
I think Biden is somebody who doesn't get enough credit
for what he did. Things are certainly going to be
better with her in terms of her level of experience.
(23:14):
Another guy who when he ran the first time had
no political record, Now he's running again and learn nothing
on the job for four years.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
He came out the same way. Right. But my point is.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Is that I think that not everybody, and not even
a majority, but a significant number of people are gonna
sit they're and go write checks for these campaigns for congressmen,
congress women, senators and other states to try to keep
the whole system in balance, to try to deal with
the frailty of liberal politics in this country.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Fuck that. I don't want to bother anywing. It doesn't work.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
It doesn't work. If he wins again, I think there's
going to be a lot of people who are just
politics is going to go off their list of concerns.
I mean, you don't even watch TV anymore news?
Speaker 2 (23:54):
I mean or the answer is that the country is
too big to govern and not a country that includes
ALLMA and New York is not the right. You know
that you sizing here right well, that we have something
that's a little bit off because for example, and I
actually think, and again this is there's a number of
reasons why this could actually be quite bad. But one
(24:14):
of Trump's things is he's going to you know, like,
for example, with California with the fires, California needed federal money,
forest fires horrible. He was like, are these my people?
Are these my voters or are these you know, Democrats?
Because I'm not going to give money to people who
don't like transaction. Right, If you're in a state that's
(24:37):
run by a guy like Avenuwsom, where you're the fifth
biggest economy in the world, and you're paying into a
federal government that won't fucking give you money for forest fires, like,
there's a moment where you think like, oh, we're not
doing this anymore. So, I mean I could see a world,
you know, I don't know that New York figures this out,
but I could see a world where California is like,
(24:58):
fuck you, you know, if we're going to pay billions
of dollars in federal taxes and you're going to tell
us we can't do what we want and not give
us disaster relief, you know. So I think there are
all sorts of crazy things that could happen if Trump
wins that are not necessarily.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Good, Well I think.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
I mean, I'm not endorsing them in any way, but
I'm just saying, like, this transactional way of running the
federal government sooner or later will end with states being like,
why should I pay into this if I can't get out? Right,
New York.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Which gets what is the over under? It's thirty billion. Yeah,
dollars a year goes to other states to fund things
that doesn't come back. How much do we send to
Washington comes back from Washington? The number is like hideous.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah, So the question is why do it? And I
think that's a real question. I mean that, by the way,
is not good. I mean Brexit was terrible for the
British economy because they did this. It is sort of
the same thing, right they said, I don't want to,
you know, have Polish plumbers coming here, so we're going
to just sanction ourselves. I mean, that's it is a self.
(26:00):
I mean, it's not good economically for the country. It's
not good. But you know, if you have a president
who is playing that game with federal funding, I think
you're going to see more of it.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Well, I'm somebody who I can't help but see things
in the plainest terms. I'll sit there and go what
is going on with the political consensus, the political organism
in the state of Arizona. Where you see that Phoenix
had one hundred degree whether for one hundred days in
a row, they never had that performance. Isn't this of
(26:32):
any concern to you? You can't vote for one person
in a political office in the whole state. Forget about
federal election. We include the federal But who doesn't offer
you some ideas to address that issue? And they don't
bring it up. If you're living in Phoenix, Arizona, are
you insane that you know what you are?
Speaker 3 (26:51):
You insane that you don't want this struve?
Speaker 1 (26:52):
If it was one hundred degrees in New York for
one hundred days in a row, yeah, you bet, people
would be flipping out and screaming.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Yeah. People say to me, why do you live in
the people care?
Speaker 2 (27:02):
But Arizona has a democratic governor, and I would say that,
like one of the weird things about climate if you're
just going to be a little optimistic, I hate being
the optimist here, but okay, is that Texas has this
climate problem, right, it's very hot. They have this shitty
grid that is decentralized, not attached to the federal because
(27:24):
they are Texans, so they don't want to be on
the federal they don't want to hear that federal But
also energy from the grid, and they've had to go
largely solar because the renewables are a better bet, right, right,
because right, and they also just work better. And so
you know, the good news is that renewables are cheaper
(27:49):
and they're better, and they work better, and we're on
the edge of them being cheaper than you know, they're already. Like,
the reason that coal is going away is not because
people love the earth, it's it's so expansible, exactly.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Author Mallijang Fast. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a
friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on
the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
When we come back, Mallyjang Fast shares the endgame of
Project twenty twenty five and how it could affect the
(28:25):
next generation of Americans. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening
to Here's the Thing. I spoke with Malijang Fast in
late October leading up to election day One of the
(28:48):
more alarming factors of the twenty twenty four election is
Project twenty twenty five, a nine hundred page manifesto of
radical proposals from a conservative tank that outlines plans for
a second Trump administration. Mali Jiang Fast is one political
writer well versed in this subject.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
I did a YouTube series on Project twenty twenty five
a couple months ago, where I interviewed a lot of
academics who are not necessarily television people. I mean, some
of them are.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
But where can people find them?
Speaker 2 (29:22):
It's on If you google YouTube Malli Jong Fast, Project
twenty twenty five, it comes up. Yeah. Basically, what I
did was I talked to like this woman, Theedra Scott Pell,
who is an academic who studies at Harvard who studied
the advent of the tea party and sort of the
outgrowth of it, and she's talked to a lot of people.
I talked to a guy called Thomas Zimmer from Georgetown
(29:46):
and we talked about what it would look like and
what Project twenty twenty five does, which, by the way,
I want to say.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Those are the details. It was authored by, who it
came if, it was.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Honored by, it's from the Heritage Foundation. It was published
on the Heritage Foundation site. Donald Trump disabout it even
though like fifty people who wrote it worked in his administration,
or maybe more it's you know, the president of the
Heritage Foundation had his introduction of his book written by
Jadie Vance. Kevin Roberts is his name, the president of
(30:15):
the Heritage Foundation. There are so many This thing is
like interconnected, like you can't believe. So the idea that
somehow Donald Trump is not connected to Project twenty twenty
five is complete lie. And even more so is that
today this morning when he was on the curvy couch
on Fox News, Fox and Friends with his sycophantic minions,
(30:36):
he said, we're going to get rid of the Department
of Education, which is one of the tenants of Project
twenty twenty five is to end the federal Department of Education.
So that means pelgrants. That means money for the red
states where the education is not funded as well comes
from federal money. It will know more, what do.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
The advertise is the benefit of that. They want to
will limit the Department of Education for what purpose?
Speaker 2 (31:03):
They hate the federal government to make a jumbise soillienaires
can have tax cuts. They're selling Christian nationalism, right, They're
selling you know, you don't want the government involved in your.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
School forcing your kid to mean to kill a mocking.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Right, exactly. You don't want the federal government. You just
want the state. By the way, let me just add
the end game with all of this is to get
people out of public schools and into religious schools. That's
the school voucher thing, right. The goal here is to
end public schools because public schools are non denominational. And
when you look at a lot of the Project twenty
(31:37):
twenty five stuff, it's to really get religion into teaching.
And in fact, in Oklahoma, which we talked about before,
Oklahoma is a place where they've sort of been trying
out at the state level a lot of the Project
twenty twenty five fantasies including Bibles and schools, the Ten
Commandments and schools reuniting or perhaps putting church and state
(31:58):
back together again as reassembling, right exactly.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Well, I mean what I.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Find is that when people say to you, when one party,
the Republican Party, seems to want to dumb down the
electrode as much as possible, I think those are easier
to manipulate fear. You want to inject as much fear
into all.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
Of the discussion about big government.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
And what I also noticed the Republican Party the party
of the wealthiest people.
Speaker 3 (32:22):
In this country for the most part.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Yes, I mean people who are giants in my business
are Republicans who own the companies.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
And you know the Trump tax cuts. I mean, this
is like the unwritten story of this whole election is
the Trump tax cuts expire in twenty twenty five. So
some of them are just like a Nelson poultse is just.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Don't care about right, right, They don't care about abortion
or gay marriage or whatever. But the thing is is
that these people they want to dumb it all down
and they want to inject that level of fear in there.
And it's working in this country where you see that
this guy could have run in twenty sixteen and fooled people, right,
and he's close to fooling them.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
Yeah, he's very close.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
I mean, the fact that this race is even this
close at all. Can you imagine if Biden didn't jump
drop out, imagine we'd be dead. Yeah, So for that,
I want to thank her, even even though I have
my criticisms of her. Yeah. I mean, as Democrats, we
have nothing but criticisms of our own party, criticize everybody,
whereas the other side just they just circle the wagons.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
But my biggest fear in this election is that an
enormous swath of people will give up on.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Politics in this country. Right. They may not move out
of the country, although I know some people were contemplating that.
Yeah they might.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
They might sit there and say, I'm going to give
myself a couple of years to get away from it.
So I don't want to watch it burn down. The
only thing, off, of course, that I worry about is
the Supreme Court too.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Yeah, no, worry about a couple of people are going
to go right.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
No.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
I mean it's October eighteenth, and I'm still very optimistic
about this election. So I'm very optimistic. I'm seeing early
numbers out of Pennsylvania. They look good. I think that
the fact that the bottom of the ticket has the
Democrats so ahead and the top of the ticket is
so tight is some kind of math. I just think
this is going to go better than we think.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
What do you think Trump's gonna do if he loses Marlago?
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Selling States water watches? I mean, I think he'll try
to keep as much power as he can, and you're
gonna have ultimately, you will have Republicans say, you know
they're gonna have a reckoning. Right this whole time they
have refused to. I mean in twenty twenty four, we
knew that he wasn't the best candidate for them and
(34:27):
that if they and picnicky Haley they could have won, right.
I mean, maybe they still win with him, but he's
certainly not a great candidate, and they're gonna I think
they'll have a reckoning and they'll have to figure it out.
Speaker 3 (34:37):
What do you think the chances are he'll be in jail?
Speaker 2 (34:40):
You know, the federal cases are really bad. Like you
don't want everyone saying me, like, once you get indicted
in a federal case, because we're talking about the mayor
who has numerous federal indictments and more comings supposedly a
superseding indictment or something else, once they get you on
a federal indictment, that's no good. You really don't want that.
(35:00):
So I don't know that he goes to jail. I
feel like there's more of like a house arrest scenario.
You know something right, ankle basic right, I mean, what
are you going to send the Secret Service to jail?
That doesn't make a lot of sense. I think that's
more likely than just I think that's.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
A great essay. You should write, Secret Service in Jail.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
I think it described to describe Trump's Trump walks into
the cafeteria and they all have their arm around their
meat loaf or whatever, and then the secrets It was like,
could you clear this table place President's citting there for
his meat.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah, that's why I think he won't go to jail.
But federal cases really, I mean you you know, and
the fundamental thing which we should be saying every day
is that Donald Trump is running for president, so he
doesn't go to jail, which is yeah, absolutely, and because
he can pay his legal fees.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
What are you working on now? You're gonna write another
book or no?
Speaker 2 (35:45):
So I have this book coming out in June about
a memoir called How to Lose Your Mom, about my
mom having dementia and my husband getting cancer and my
year where everybody kind of imploded and your.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Husband had cancer, your mom's dementia, and your kids are teenagers. Yes, yeah,
but the free lemons across the board in the slot
machine here.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
They're fun though way, and one of them's in college.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
When you say how to lose your mom, I can't
imagine how one would lose their mom. When your mom
is your mom, you figured she was never going to
stop talking for the rest of her life. And if
so fact, we're going to play a clip here from
the last show we did, which was back in twenty twelve.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
On the one hand, you're supposed to look like a
fashion model retouched, and on the other hand, you're supposed
to claim to a sophistication you don't and cannot have
at that age. And I think that women who are
fourteen fifteen are in the most difficult position they have
ever been in modern society.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
What do you think about that?
Speaker 2 (36:49):
I mean, I agree, I think there's a lot of sexuality.
I think it's not explained to young girls in a
way very confusing, Molly. But I think that's a legacy
of the family movement. I mean, we said we.
Speaker 4 (37:01):
Want a legacy of the feminist movement. It is a
legacy in here, I really feel fierce. It is the
legacy of a distortion of women's desire for equal rights.
Equal rights are not platform shoes. You can't and naked
clothes equal rights.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
But you can't blow up an atom bomb and then
choose how it's going to go.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
But we.
Speaker 4 (37:23):
We did not blow up that atom bomb. The media
took our legitimate desire for equality and turned it into garbage.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
But they turned it into what the people wanted. First
of all, I don't think they wouldn't exist.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
People the media what the people want.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
We'll be back in a moment from a response to
Victoria's secret. Let me ask you something which is And
of course there's many many possibilities here. It goes without saying,
but pick one of the things that your fondest of
that your mother taught you.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Everything very fabulous about me comes from my mom. Know,
every weird French word I've worked into my right, my oubra,
every you know, fabulous trip, every city that I know,
I know it because she showed it to me. Right,
Every beautiful piece of jewelry was hers. Everything that is
(38:20):
glamorous and fabulous and ephemeral comes from my mom, and
a lot of the intellectual stuff too. So I'm very
I owe her a great dedication.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
She gave the world.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
She really did, and she was and my mom was
so struggled with alcoholism her whole life, and if anything,
I am just so lucky that I was able to
get sober. And I am not in any way better
than she is. And I have the exact same disease
and our grandmother, my grandmother had it too, and it's
(38:53):
just it is just the legacy of alcoholism. So I
am forever grateful and also forever said about how hard
it's been yeah for her.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
One of our favorite episodes, Oh thank you.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
My thanks to Mali jang Fast And just a reminder,
if you haven't yet had the opportunity to do so,
please vote today. You can go to vote dot org
to check your registration status, see who is on the ballot,
and find your polling place. That's vote dot Org. Here's
the Thing is recorded at CDM Studios. This episode was
(39:34):
produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hobin. Our
engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich.
I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to you
by iHeart Radio.
Host
Alec Baldwin
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