Talking Feds host Harry Litman details the latest of Trump’s legal woes. Professor Jeff Jarvis examines his new book The Web We Weave: Why We Must Reclaim the Internet from Moguls, Misanthropes, and Moral Panic.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and Donald Trump sent seven COVID tests of Vladimir Putin in twenty twenty during the height of the pandemic. We have such a great show for you today. Talking Fed's host Harry Littman stops by to talk to us about the latest of Trump's legal woes. Then we'll talk to Professor Jeff Jarvis about his new book, The Web we Weave, Why we must reclaim the Internet from moguls, misanthropes, and moral panic.
But first the news.
Somali Bob Woodward been putting out blockbuster headlines for longer than you and I have been alive. He's got some more for us. What are you seeing here?
Bob Woodward back with another blockbuster book, filled with information that might have been useful as a little bit earlier, but we'll take it. I think that we saw the COVID test, the Putin COVID test mailings came from that. But also, perhaps even more bafflingly and importantly, Woodward recounts a moment in mar Lago where Trump tells his senior aide to leave the room so he can have a private conversation. This is after he's left the presidency with Vladimir Putin. According to Trump's aids, Trump and Putin have talked on the phone multiple times and maybe as many as seven calls during the period since he's been president. Woodward even went so far as to ask Chason Miller whether Trump and Putin had spoken after he left the White House. Chason Miller came shot back with the very definitive.
Um, uh not that, uh not that I'm aware of.
Miller told Bob Woodward, expect more of these shocking revelations.
Smile as we learn this week. Trump didn't want to do sixteen Minutes because they would fact check him, so he went to the warm arms of Fox News is Laura Ingram, who then fact checked him.
We were talking before this about the Trump fact check and putting it in the news section, and you said that was Laura Ingram and I said, no, that can't be right. I said it cannot have been that Laura Ingram fact checked Donald Trump.
The funny thing is I had done this before because I didn't believe it. The only reason I was confident about is because I'd already fact checked.
This, right.
I went online and I said, oh my god, I'm shocked. So imagine the level of lying that has to happen for Laura Ingram to interject. Donald Trump was musing about how Vice President Harris was not where she should have been in North Carolina visiting people who had been ravaged by this most recent hurricane, not the hurricane that is coming, and Laura interjected, she was there today for three hours, I believe. Now, I would love to know what producers were saying in her ear and what the thinking was where they actually interrupted Trump lying to fact check.
But whatever it was, whoe whoa whoa.
Yeah, I was not in the sea of disinformation that I think a lot of us have been very shocked about how much disinformation has come out around this hurricane. I did not expect Laura Ingram to be a beacon of.
Hope speaking of disinformation. Oh yes, it gets us right to our next thing in news, Well, what.
Would you expect to happen when Elon Musk sits down with Tucker Carlson for his podcast.
Elon Musk son of Pennsylvania because he went to University of Pennsylvania for three years and is now saying that he actually lived in Pennsylvania. By the way, I love the idea that the right is claiming to be the party of the working man while having a Trump surrogate who is a nefarious South African billionaire whose only contact was the state was the three years he went to an Ivy League college there. Okay, sure, but this is not actually why he's on the news cycle today. He and you may remember Tucker Carlson, America's favorite frozen Fish Air, did a little video together where they're like sitting in space being served by a woman, which is like looks sort of like they're in some kind of afterlife simulation.
I saw this as the anti Charlie Rose space right.
A white box, a female assistant.
Make it the White Power Hour, have its own aesthetic.
They were joking because that's what these two humorous fellows do, and they were joking about killing the president and the Vice president. Elon Musk sits atop of tons and tons of government contracts. He's a contractor. In fact, he has security clearances, numerous ones. He is working on things that are being paid for by the federal government right now, and he is joking about why no one has tried to kill Joe Biden. Musk ads it's pointless, and then Carlson Fozen Fish Air to the Stars replies, totally.
He actually said that's deep and true though, about them putting it a puppet, which really he's hit rock bottom, even lower than his Fox show about just aggregating the most unhingish conspiracy theories. Just Alex Jones, shit.
Yeah, I also think that it's just sort of beyond the pale and just as shocking as one could guess, and one could expect it's even worse. So here we have two bits of news that make actually Fox seem better than elon a pretty low bar.
I'll say, well, let's take the bar even lower. We're going to go a place where we should have a very high bar, which is the Supreme Court. And there's new news about how Justice Brett Kegstan Kavanaugh got confirmed.
Yes, yes, yes, you'll remember Justice Kavanaugh. Keggstand September twenty eighteen, and Donald Trump says that the FBI would have free reign to vet the claims that he had sexually harassed and assaulted women in college. Trump said the FBI was free to talk to everyone he had it on social media. I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate at their discretion. Well, guess what, I know you're going to be shocked to hear this. But Donald Trump was lying and those comments came as a surprise the FBI, who, according to a new report, which would not have been released had it not been for a friend of this podcast, Senator Sheldon white House, actually requested the directed them to conduct a very limited inquiry in a week's time, requested additional guidance from the White House, citing public remarks by Trump and other officials describing a free, willing investigation. But the White House never authorized the agency to independently probe these sexual misconduct allegations. So Justice Kavanaugh just got pushed in there without the formal vetting that he should have gotten.
Why are none of us surprised?
We have even more tour dates for you. Did you know the Lincoln Projects, Rick Wilson have Fast Politics. Male jug Fast 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 Bavariam in Milwaukee on the twenty first of September, and on the twenty second, we'll be in Chicago at City Winery. Then we're going to hit the East coast on September thirtieth. We'll be in Boston that arts at the Armory. On the first of October, will be in affiliate 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 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.
Harry Littman is a former US attorney and host of the podcast Talking Fans.
Oh Yes, Oh Yes, Oh Yes, it's our latest Molly mashup. Really so happy to be joined by Mollie john Fast and are now I can't even count them. Regular gigs of exchanging political questions that I feeled I throw at Molly and legal questions she throws back in me. Thanks as always? Should I start?
Yeah, all right.
I don't normally go international, I don't normally go Jewish, but yesterday was the one year anniversary of the slaughter in Israel, and of course we're between Russia, shot and Yankipoor. So I just wanted to ask you, Mollie. You had an article in Vanity Fair about what you called Trump's efforts to divide American Jews? What inspired you to write the article and why now? And a quick follow up is what do you make of this claim that a lot of American Jews buy that Trump is, in fact, whatever else, he may be better for Israel?
So, yeah, thank you for that question. I did write about that. I completely forgot I wrote about it, which is such a great moment to be in. I do think that this has been a long time thing where the right tells the laugh that they can't be good Jews because they should be more loyal to Israel.
This is yet another moment where everything is weird.
Right.
During that speech, which was about quote unquote fighting anti Semitism, Trump talked about how Jews are actually more loyal to Israel than they are to the United States, and so they should vote for him because he really likes Israel, which is of course an anti Semitic trope, right, the idea that Jews cannot be loyal to the country that they come from. I don't know, you know, my grandparents were all born in this country, so we've been here many generations.
I've never been to Israel.
I think that the reality of my Jewishness does not define how I feel about politics, and the idea that another country should take president over my feeling towards America is wild.
So, but it's a long time thing.
And it's funny because it's like my grandfather, who was a Communist writer or jailed for the House of American Activities, would often fight with these conservative Jews.
And he was a Zionist as anyone, right, because he he really I mean, he had lived.
Through the Holocaust and he had I mean, he had been in the United States, obviously, but yet he had worked for the United States government during World War Two, and he was as committed a patriot as anyone, but he understood the importance of a Jewish homeland after the you know, the slaughterer of so many Jews.
But he also really did fight.
It out with those right wingers who called liberal je just disloyal. I mean, it's just an argument that the right has been using against the left for a very, very long time, and I just wanted to write about it a little bit.
Got it.
I'll just say quickly, all right, what Trump has said about October seventh, if he had been president, it wouldn't have happened. You know, it's not at all clear to me that he's the better candidate.
But anyway, he's certainly not the better candidate for Israel, and the idea that net Yahoo is the best president for Israel also is something that many of the Israeli people would disagree with. So my question for you is it seems like all of the Trump prosecutions are stalled.
Is that correct? And how is this.
Possible that this guy who has you know, he's out on bail, he's you know, Judge Cannon.
I mean, where are we with all these Trump cases?
Yeah.
So the short answer is yes with two asterisks. But you know, we were fighting the clock and we've lost. You know, there was such a thirst for accountability in the manner in the guise of an actual trial, and apart from New York, which I'll get to in a moment, it hasn't happened. He's been able largely to forestall it. And now we're at a point where if it happens, it'll be after the election. If he wins, the two federal ones go away automatically, and the state ones, I think will in one fashion another be smothered or at least delayed. On the other hand, if he loses, justice will grind on. The two asterisks I wanted to note, Molly are first, he's gonna be sentenced in New York, and people are just wondering will he be after the election, And we'll have a short incarceratory penalty. Maybe after the election, maybe not, but it won't be a short incarceratory penalty. But if you've had friends, and I'm not saying you have who are subject to probation and parole, that's a fairly pronounced deprivation of liberty. And I think that itself gives the court a measure of control over him, so he's in the clutches of the criminal justice system in some ways.
In the long run, I mean, he's basically gotten away with it so far.
I think that's right. It'll all come down to the reckoning will be after One big exception that's been interesting is everyone wanted the trial in the Jack Smith case. The Supreme Court snatched it away. Then the mini trial, which I just didn't think was feasible, but he came out with a long brief that lays it out in chapter and verse. So to the extent people wanted it exposed to the American people as it was in January sixth, it's done that, and there's a lot of bombshells, but it really goes back to you political because it looks to me like it hasn't had quite a seismic effect, and it's not, you know, the big October surprise people might might have wanted, notwithstanding that we have it all laid out. But somehow even all these extra details you would know better, but seem kind of baked into the politics of things.
I mean, it's sort of got a perfunctory news coverage, but largely just didn't capture the imagination of the public at all.
It seems to me that's right. I mean, when he was convicted in New York, the polls kind of went down for him, and there are this is going to give rise to some other details. I just had a long YouTube with Marcy Wheeler. There's more stuff to mine there. But it just it hasn't been the huge thing that people were asking for.
So does this mean the law has not.
Just means they haven't done the job that people wanted them to do, but it's really not the law's job to do by this certain point, by the election. It means it's up to the people to decide.
Yeah, But I mean I understand that.
But don't you think that ultimately, if you do a lot of crimes when you're president, that the law should hold you accountable. Yes, naked, so you can run for a president again, hot take.
The Constitution says so as well, especially if it's a certain kind of crime like swearing an oath to the United States and then mounting an insurrection. We're in a very funky spot. That's a much longer conversation. And look to the US Supreme Court, which just started its term yesterday, But yes I do. On the other hand, if he loses, he is by no means out of the woods, right.
Only if he loses. If he wins.
If he wins, all that's left I think is some of the state stuff and you know New York, which has already happened, and I think the Supreme Court would put that on hold. If he wins. His big roll of the dice has succeeded if he wins, and people, of course will decide what president they want without the nawledg of you know, whether he's convicted on multiple cases. All right. Kama Harris has been fielding all these criticisms, but mainly from elite commentariats, guys like us and the right wing, which it seems to me, is flailing to try to get at her that she's got to be more open to the media and she's now begun to do it. She's going to do another sixty minutes. But is that right? We're down to three weeks. Does it really matter that she exposed herself to unscripted interviews and possibly make a gaff or should she just like forget this and pedal to the metal and what she's doing with rally after rally.
Yeah, I think she should just do rallies and call her Daddy and the haunt ones and whatever else she wants to do and ignore. I mean, this is interesting in the fact that it shows that the mainstream media no longer matters. There are people who are fancy pundans who care about her doing sixty minutes, but she doesn't need to do sixty minutes. Like in fact, there was some statistic that if you read the newspaper, you're like significantly more likely to vote for Harris, right, if.
You can even read right.
So obviously this is the thing about like false equivalencies. She cannot make people not push her for comments, right, She cannot make people push her for policy. Trump's policy is childcare is childcare, and he's going to fix the price of housing by deporting millions and millions of people wait till he has to build camps to concentrate them in. I mean, it's just a like completely on an even sense in which these two people are being compared. And what Harris should do, I think is just ignore it. Do whatever the fuck she wants be out there, like doing realies, doing talks, doing whatever. But you know, she doesn't like those interviews where they press her and who cares? And by the way, like, I think that what is irritating the mainstream media is they think it's about her hiding, but I think the reality is it's about the diminished state of the mainstream media. Like, editorial endorsements don't move the needle anymore, editorial board endorsements don't change people's minds.
Sitting for a.
Long interview with the journalists for the New York Times might be great for you or me, but it's not going to do anything for her.
And the question is always what vote is she going to get? That she wouldn't have any way by doing sixteen minutes right.
Right and the call her daddy vote. Those are women that she really needs to win a lot of independence, a lot of Republicans, and they need to care about their reproductive health care. I think that's very smart. I think that was really a hole in one. I think Walls should go on Joe Rogan one hundred percent. Put Walls on Joe Rogan. Do it because he Walls is a great candidate. Put him on Joe Rogan. That's my take.
Yeah, I saw him just a couple of days ago, he's really winning. Okay, your turn.
I just read some reporting today that the Supreme Court that Roberts, who loves to like say bullshit, was upset by the pushback he got on the Trump is immune forever and ever and he is a god king. Make it make sense and also tell me what you think might happen here.
Yeah, Roberts, So first, you know he's wanted to be mister statesman. But the big story I would say last year, Mollie is it was latent all the time, which is when the chips are down, and by that I mean for the Republican Party. No, mister statesman. Really, he's in lockstep now. He wrote, you know, he's within the cocoon of the Supreme Court, and he wrote an opinion that he actually saw as being somewhat tempered. Had to go a little bit right to get Alito in talk and maybe Gorse it's not to right separately, but you know, we had this really remarkable I know it doesn't seem so astonishing if you haven't been in the court, but having corked there, the leak of that memo where he just is scathing towards the DC Circuit is you know, the whole thing with immunity, and that immunity opinion. You know, they're just living in a different world. It's not just judges everywhere, but academics and people who think something is deeply wrong about this. So what is going to happen? The first question actually is will Trump succeed in making it go up and down, up and down, up and down, because the goal of Chuckin and Smith is not But even that one up and down trip that's left, that means Smith is already accepted that no trials'll say twenty twenty six, And I personally think that Chuckin she's likely to be where Smith is, and I would have zero surprise if the court again smacks her down on what she says about the immunity, which is now going to be sort of sentenced by sentence on the indictment. So I did say, you know, eight minutes ago that he's not out of the woods yet. But it's a very long path, and you know there's going to be national fatigue and everything else over this most important and righteous prosecution. But I think the Supreme Court isn't done putting its stamp on. Okay to you, JD Vance and one of your recent podcasts, you noted how he in some way is Trump isn't without Trump. So what do you mean by that and what do you see as let's say Trump loses for this question just because it's a more interesting way to put it.
Who is JD.
Vance? And what is the Republican Party post Trump?
Okay? So I would say two things.
A lot of people watch that debate and thought what I thought, which was this eye is good at making Trumpism without Trump work, and the way he's able to do it is by lying. One of the things about trump Ism without Trump is that Trump he lies. He leaves open the possibility that he will not have a national abortion ban. Of course he's gonna have a national abortion ban. He leaves open the door to things that otherwise would be so unpalatable that people wouldn't vote for them. Jadevans takes a step further and he just lies. So for example, there was this exchange about Obamacare. Right, Trump wanted to end Obamacare, but the way jd. Van spun it, he was like, he wanted to fix the exchanges.
They were too expensive. We were trying to cost cut.
I mean, they were trying to cost cut yeah, but they were trying to cut cut and it struck me that, like one of Trump's things that he doesn't do because he's not organized and because he's so erratic, is that he gets so wrapped up in his craziness that he's not focused. And a really focused politician who didn't have the same kind of distractions. It strikes me that perhaps it's emotionality that's bubbling below the circumpus, who knows, or maybe it's some larger issue with cognitive decline. Someone like that would be able to sell trump Ism in a way where you wouldn't even know you were buying it. Part of the problem with DeSantis is when Desanta's got there up there and tried to sell trump Ism, none of that's very popular, right. People don't like the idea of losing Social Security. They paid into it, they feel it's theirs, they feel they are entitled to it as well they are. But like when someone like jade Van says like we're going to take away you know, he doesn't quite say it like that, but he tries to leave the door open the way Trump does. It doesn't work because he's not a charismatic guy. But what Vance did where he just lied about it. I thought, this is the way they're going to if they can do it, this is the way they're going to do it. I could see that as a future of Trump is I also think that if Trump gets elected now, I don't think he did so much actual running of the place four years ago. It's hard for me to imagine that, older, less interested, he's going to be doing more. So that makes me wonder how much of it will fall to Vance. And I think Vance is much more organized than Trump, and so ultimately he could get a lot more done. Also, you have Project twenty twenty five of all the GOP think tanks are ready to go the minute he wins.
If he wins, last question this round to Molly Jong fast and I will make my answer short to please your great producer.
Is there any chance the document's case is the most open and chuckcase. It is the case that has been dismissed for seemingly no reason.
A lotless reasons, poor reasons.
Is there any world in which that keeps going? I mean, what happens there?
Yeah? So I think there is. As you say, it is the most open and shut It's conic when he isn't president that anything remotely like that would have been prosecuted. Cannon's in the tank. She's done all the work she sort of can for him, So we pause it. If he wins again federal case, he just orders DOJ to stand down. If he loses, I think the Eleventh Circuit in a matter of months will reverse that. The DOJ I thought was, we're kind of weenies in not moving to recuse her. But I think there's only so much she can do. Yeah, my betting odds would be I would bet that if he loses, that one will proceed. We'll go to conviction and will be a fairly substantial term of imprisonment for the former president of the United States.
Pure false. Affluent white men can get away with anything.
False, but more a lot more but false. And I'll say one more thing because I'm I'm a former fat and prosecutor. People who are charged mainly have done it, and yet good lawyering helps, and I'm not saying it doesn't. But get away with anything, nag I won't go that far.
But he's gotten away with this so far.
Yes he has.
Thanks Harry, always a pleasure.
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 episode series. They're all available by looking up Molly John 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 a podcast. All five episodes are online now. We need to educate a Maria Keons on what Trump's second term would or could do to this country, So please watch it and spread the word. Jeff Jarvis is the director of the tow Night Center of Entrepreneurial Journalism and the author of the Web we Weave Why we Must Reclaim the Internet from moguls, misanthropes, and moral panic. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome, Jeff Jarvis, Too Fast Politics.
Thank you. So you know it's reflexed to say, oh, thanks for having me, but I really mean it. I am a disciple of yours. I hang on your every word. I'm grateful when I see you on TV and grateful to MSNBC for making you a contributor. So really thank you for having me. I've been hoping for this conversation.
Well, I'm I'm such a fan of yours because you were very much the pundits pundit.
Oh well shucks.
And you also do a.
Thing that many of us don't do as much as probably we should, which is you hold people to account, which you know, the whole system of being in the media is that we're all you know, we're doing this job, but there's a feeling like maybe we're buddy buddy, and maybe we shouldn't say, you know, we shouldn't do media on media violands. You're here to talk about the state of the mainstream media, and hopefully you will come back many more times and do that. But you are also here because you have a new book out, and talk to me about this book.
We can get rid of that pretty quickly. So it's a book about defending the freedoms of the Internet called The Web We Weave. And this is the first interview I've done about the book. So we'll make it quick because then we want to dish on media, but it's basically a critique of media's moral panic about the Internet. And my fear is the more that media treat the Internet as the enemy, the worse the policy will be about it. The same thing happened with novels and Nickelodeon's.
Yes, printing press everything.
I have another book out called the Gutenberg Parenthesis about the printing press, and I delve deeply into that. So this is an effort to say I defend the Internet, not the companies, but the Internet because somebody has to. And the only area where you and I have disagreed on the socials over time.
That's right, and you actually know a lot more about it than I do, so I'd love for you to talk about it because it's a topic that is very misunderstood section two thirty.
So you have said over time and you're among many who say something must be done and how can the companies get away with this? And then I respond to you and saying we need to have this conversation because Section two thirty is kind of a first Amendment for the Internet in that it enables freedom of expression. That you might say, oh, well, that's what the problem, but there's a whole bunch of awful expression. But it's also a case that the Internet has enabled communities who were always there but for too long not heard in big, old mass media run by people who look like me. Old white men now have their spot light and their microphone and their ability to be heard. And my fear is that if we hold platforms accountable and suable for everything that's said there, they will use that as an excuse to get rid of much speech, especially those who are not otherwise heard.
Right.
And that's a really good point. I come from nineties magazines, so I remember when you wanted to write a piece in Vogue, you had to get it through five editors and then Anna Winter, and it was like really a production, and sometimes people would change their minds about what they wanted, and so you really there was just such a barrier to entry. And now if you have a good idea, even if it's not fully developed, you can share it with you know, hundreds of thousands, maybe as many as a million people.
Right, and we can hear voices and communities that otherwise are not heart Black Twitter is an amazing and wonderful thing. I don't know if you saw this as you're traveling from one weird city to the next. But right before we went on the air, Taylor Lorenz announced that she's leaving the Washington Post and starting her own substock. So now she can say what she wants to say without that kind of gauntlet she would have to go through and had to go through in the New York Times of the Washington Post. And I can't wait to see her unchained.
Yeah, I think there's still a lot to recommend a lot of these places, especially because they find well, we're on the opinion side, so it's much easier, you.
Know, to write stuff we don't have to.
But you know that there are a lot of journalists who are these Like one of my best friends is a reporter for the New York Times, and she writes these stories that take months and months to report out and need endless fact checking and legal and it's just a very intense process.
And I respect that I started young, but I've been in the field for fifty years. I have some regrets now about how I've spent my life in mainstreams, so called mainstream air quotes, mass media. I'm disappointed, in disillusioned, especially these days with the institutions like the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN, and the right has always gone after instream media, fake news, Lougan Press, a awful, awful right. One could track it back to the Iraq War and so on, but really, in the last I think two years or so, the disappointment and anger on the left about the New York Times, Washington Post at all is loud and palpable, and I think that there are things going wrong at those institutions that they're not listening to this criticism. They're getting all the more defensive about it. I was on a podcast this morning and recording one with someone from big Old Media who just was constantly defensive about big media, and they're not understanding. I think that there are huge issues there. What do you see in the reaction to big old media.
Yeah, it's a really good point.
It's something that I think a lot about because, you know, especially now that we're on this tour, people ask we do questions at the end, and people have complaints about mainstream media questions about it.
You see.
I feel that the opinion side, and this is as someone who is on the opinion side, is such a small smattering of content, and while it can be you know, for example, there are certainly opinion columnists whose beliefs I do not share. I think a lot of the reporting is super important, and I think that some of that stuff, I mean, Pro Publica does it, The New York Times does it, the Washington Post does it, but not a ton of places do it, and that's because it's super expensive. And I think that is important enough. And we haven't seen substacks really be able to kind of do that yet. Now maybe there's a time when they'll be able to do it. But you know, if we don't have the reporting, it's hard to write those opinion pieces if we especially with an administration like if Trump comes back into power, like there were so many stories we would absolutely not have known about it were it not for reporting, Like I'm thinking about all the Scott prud stuff or the Ryan Zink stuff. So much corruption, and even with these court cases, with the Trump court cases, you need someone in there to like look at the filings and to know how to make sense of them. And even like I think of Jason Leopold, who does these amazing Foier requests.
It's hours and hours and.
Hours of work with very little content produced, sometimes for months and months and months. So I think that stuff is so important that people should just hold their nose when they don't like the opinion stuff. I also think the mainstream media has not met the moment. I think everyone who is that they the conventional framing highly problematic, does not tell the story, elevates the autocrat, creates a false equivalency. I truly believe that, and I think a lot of smart people do too. It's hard because there's not really a handbook for covering the rise of autocracy in a free press.
But there is, and it's Hannah Arrant.
Oh interesting, Okay, let's talk about that.
I've been rereading Hannah Iran. I even reread William Shier's Rise and Fall of the Third Break, which might be you want to commit me because I'm wacky, but it's not. It's because I want to understand the parallels. And I have another book out called The Gutenberg Parenthesis, and in there I quote Errant at some length where she explains the beginnings of totalitarianism in a way that I think puts a different challenge on journalism. It's this, it's a challenge of belonging because what Arod says is that is that the totalitarians and authoritarians separate people from their communities so that they are lonely. And I don't mean lonely in the trivial way of the surgeon General and in sell people and not getting dates. I mean a profound loneliness in being alienated from society, and then they are vulnerable to the siren call of the cultist, the fascist, the authoritarian. So the problem becomes that we don't have a pluralistic society where some of these people have that other pull on them, and Arrant I think shows us what happens. So the most recent example of this is the Springfield Dogs and Cats story where Jamel Bowie did a great TikTok videos. TikTok videos are spectacular, folks, if you were subscribed, and he explained that as blood libel, as trying to stir race hate. Now we can see that and it's obvious, but in the coverage of it, we don't see that. We see, well, it was proven to be false. Bart Walls Retjournal. Okay, it's not about facts, because I also believe that when people say this crazy stuff, it's not about their belief it's about signaling, and it's about a loyalty test to their god Trump, And so what does a journalism look like that's not about facts and fact checking and information. I mean, all that's fine and we need that. But the deeper struggle in society right now, I think is about belonging and about education and about people's ability to think critically. And I'm not sure where a new journalism fits in there.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right.
I think that it's still very hard to kind of get our heads around it.
That would be my take on this.
And I also think that we are in a moment where mainstream.
Media is really I don't know.
I don't want to defend the mainstream media because I think that what you're doing is useful, and I think that there's way too much like we're all buddies here kind of stuff, which I don't think is helpful. So I appreciate what you're doing, but I do think it's just a very tough moment an American life for a lot of us. And look, if Trump wins, the mainstream media will be off the hook because we'll all be in jail.
Yeah, not to put too fine a point, on.
It, but I think that's true, or.
Losing our cable licenses or whatever.
We become scum and not heard from. I haven't been on MSBCT for about four years. Joe Scarborough can drive me nuts every other day, but he's out there calling fascism fascism. Nicole Wallace, I think is the greatest, and she's a former Republican who's calling fascism fascism and racism racism and they're considered opinion, whereas our mainstream reported media aren't doing it. They won't call lies, lies, racism, racism, misogyny, misogyny, and fascism fascism, and I think that means that they ultimately lie to the public when they try to treat everything asymmetrically with their white glove euphemisms.
For all this, I don't know that it's an intentional lie, as much as it's trouble addressing it. I think again, the answer there is ref working right, because the right is always saying, you know, this is unfair to us. You're making false equivalencies, and they're very good at it, and they're very good at being furious. I think that mainstream media is a little bit terrified, but there's also like a corporate structure for a lot of this media, so if the right push is hard enough, they can kind of unravel the whole thing by boycotting or saying, you know, someone's gone too far. It's ironic because then on their side, if one of them goes too far, they instead are like, you know, unapologetic, and if anything, they double down.
What frightens me is I think the one out that we do have these days is MSNBC. It's on constantly. That's how I see you all the time. I don't think that's because Comcast is an enlightened company. I think it was because that was the market opportunity. It is. As someone inside the company once said to me, Jeff, remember it's a Republican company. So I fear that with pressure, even that outlet for us could disappear.
I mean, the good news I would say is that the way it works with all of these now, especially where there is such a lower bar to entry, is that ultimately, if there's appetite, the thing will exist. Yes, And if you look at for example, one of the big problems right now is that the cable has been too slow to go to streaming, so you have all these people in this country who are under the age of forty five who do not have cable boxes because that's not how they watch TV. But they want to watch news and they can't right because they don't you know, they either have.
To stream MSNBC. It's not organic.
And I think there's a place for an organic streamer where you turn on your Apple TV and there's news going. And I think that that's going to happen pretty soon. As my guess, if there's appetite, it is the capitalist system still, and I think there is appetite for liberal news now.
The thing that I worry about.
Is someone who comes from magazines, is magazines were too slow to get online and so they ended up really sort of playing themselves. So my anxiety is more like, can news get online in the way it needs too fast enough to capture audiences.
So not to overplug myself. But I have a third book out right now called Magazine. It's a short little book. I started the magazine Entertainment Weekly. I worked for people at Time Inc.
I love magazines, really Time Magazine. Yeah, but I think.
That magazines are coming to their end. They're at the end of their arc because of what you just said. They didn't understand how to update themselves for a community and conversational based media rather than a content based media. They still insisted that we have to make this thing that makes us special, when in fact, what magazines should have seen was that they were maypoles that people gathered around of common interest and taste. And they lost the opportunity and they wasted millions and millions of dollars to try to figure out the Internet and never did. It's a tragedy.
As someone who loves magazines comes from magazines, there was a great opportunity.
I mean, I think some magazines have survived Vanity Fair.
It's much smaller than it was, you know, Vanny Fairs where I work, and I love them, and I'm very happy there, a New Yorker and a couple of different places. But I do think ultimately they had the market share and they gave it away.
Yeah, and I think they misinterpreted what their role in society was. As I went back to the history of magazines, Welly, it fascinated me that in eighteen fifty when Harper's Magazine started, it started in a time of the industrialization and mechanization of print Before that, the average circulation of a daily newspaper in the US was four thousand. It was a good substack newsletter, right, So long comes this avalanche of new content and new speech, and Harper's came along, and their mission at the beginning was curatorial. There's so much good stuff out there. Somebody has to find the good stuff. That's why we're here. And that's what it did before it eventually developed its own voice. And so I wonder where is the Harper's of eighteen fifty four today? Where is that role that magazines used to play to say, we're going to find the good and interesting and authoritative voices and experience not just the writers we assigned, but the people who were already out there on YouTube, on substack, on the socials. I think there's a huge opportunity to rethink a magazine's role in society around the speech that now exists.
Oh yeah, I mean, I think that was the secret of Drudge too, was able to put together, was able to find everything in a way, and that was really the secret of Twitter now whatever it is. The thing that really haunts me, if you want to go down this wrap, is we are this enormous country right. Three hundred plus three hundred and thirty million people in this country, and very small amount of us read the news, So where are people getting their news? Where are they getting their information?
So that I think is a failure of our old mainstream media. And I started newspaper sites for Advance, the same company as Vanity Fair, and my boss, Steve Neuhaus is now the chairman of the company, was brilliant about understanding that the Internet was fundamentally about conversation. But it was really hard to take what was seen as the content of magazines and bring it to online. Almost every magazine company out there thought we ought to have TV shows, we ought to have a website, rather than understanding that they should, I think loose their people onto TikTok as long as it exists, and Twitter I'll not call it X and other places to build relationships with this public in new ways. That's anathetical to how they think, but I think that's what's going to if anything can and rescue them. It's about letting the Taylor Lorenzs of the world Louis within the Washington Post, rather than putting handcuffs orders such that she can't do what she did wants to do and has to leave right.
No, you have to be.
I mean that is one of the nice things about being a vany fairs that I don't have the same kind of right.
They want your voice right, and I just.
Don't have the same kind of regulations that they do at the Washington Post.
This is so interesting. I hope you will come back.
Oh, I hope you'll have me.
Yes, I absolutely will.
And it's so interesting and I think it's a really important conversation.
Thank you, Willy.
No moment Thicko Jesse Cannon probly judged fast. I kind of consider myself the terrible culture reporter sometimes on this podcast. So to tee up what we're going to do here, I have to explain to our audience who theo Vona is, because I imagine some of them are smart enough to not realize that this is a comedian who got famous by powering around the Joe Rogan and Tim Dillon world. But that is like they're sober but seamstoned buddy that somehow has taken a real liking to interviewing all sides of politics. He's recently hat on Bernie and Mark Cuban in addition to Trump, and today his guest was Teamster's union president Sean O'Brien. Tell us what you saw here.
Teamsters were in big trouble. They were rescued by a man called Joe Biden as a reward for that.
The Democrats are being completely fucked over by the Teamsters who are not endorsing Harris and who are largely just going their own way. Teamster President Sewan O'Brien rips into Democrats on THEO Vaughn's podcast, saying that the party fucked over his union members and revealing that a recent meeting with Chuck Schumer got fucking ugly. I'm going to give this guy a hearty fuck. That guy can't wait to see what Republicans with their right to work states do to union members. Ain't going to be pretty. You guys should vote in your own interests. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds in politics make sense of all the chaos. If you enjoyed this podcast, please send it to a friend or an enemy and keep the conversation going