The Official Language of the United States

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What do you think makes the perfect snack?

Hmm, it's gotta be when I'm really craving it and it's convenient.

Could you be more specific?

When it's cravenient.

Okay.

Like a freshly baked cookie made with real butter, available right now in the street at AM PM, or a savory breakfast sandwich I can grab in just a second at AM PM.

I'm seeing a pattern here.

Well, yeah, we're talking about what I crave.

Which is anything from AM PM?

What more could you want?

Stop by AM P.M., where the snacks and drinks drinks are perfectly craveable and convenient.

That's cravenience.

AMPM, too much good stuff.

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Hello, and welcome to Strong Message Here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It's Helen Lewis.

And it's Amanda Nucci.

And this week we are steering well clear of Britain as the local elections are going on

and voyaging instead across the Atlantic Ocean.

Yes, we're not allowed to mention any of the British political parties or engage in any political issues.

Even once, I think if we mentioned one of them, we'd have to mention all of them.

And we'd be here for some hours.

And there are 150 members of BBC Compliance in this room where we're recording.

Right now.

To make sure we don't.

I'm joking, of course, but ironically, that joke will now have to go to BBC Compliance just to make sure that it can go out.

And that one as well.

Can I ask you instead about puppy training?

Do you want to ask me about puppy training?

And none of your puppy, your puppy's not running for election in any.

It's apolitical.

No, we had a puppy.

We went to the first puppy training class over a course of the next six or seven weeks.

Percy.

What flavour of puppy?

A mongrel or anything?

Cavapoo.

Cavapoo.

Cavapoo.

So Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and

Poodle.

We've had one before.

They're very intelligent, but at the moment, they bite everything that moves.

So Percy.

Including my niece.

So the reason I'm mentioning this is, so puppy classes, we will start with, you know, sit and we will work up to accept that one day you will be replaced by a robot.

But until then, as we were doing familiarisation, so with the various puppies being let off the leash to kind of get used to other puppies.

And there was something about their behaviour that just made me think of something else because what they do is they creep up quite boldly on another dog.

But as soon as that other dog looks at them, they run away.

They turn into little tiny puppies again.

That for me was a visualization of how the stock market works.

It's the city.

It's that kind of, and we've been seeing it with the tariffs.

You know,

yeah, yeah, we're going to take on Trump.

We've got to be decisive.

Oh, no, he's backed off on.

Oh, you know, that kind of thing sound bold and they sound like they know what they're doing.

And then the moment anything uncertain comes up, they just run away like little kids.

So whenever I see a puppy in the park i i kind of see a stockbroker

can i uh ask about the name because i always say when naming your children never name your children anything you'd be embarrassed to bellow across a supermarket aren't you yes how do you feel about bellowing percy across your local well it's uh my wife's grandfather's name oh yes a family tradition is a family name yeah percy there we go rachel said she grew up hearing her grandmother shout give over purse

and thought he was called purse because he had all the money

well like she was a mugger Yeah.

Okay, well, I've been doing something less fun with my week, which is I've been reading all of the Trump 100 Days interviews.

There's a pretty good one with Time magazine, in which he starts, as he seems to do, many of these going, well, Joe Biden wouldn't do this, would he?

And they went, Joe Biden did do this, he did this with Joe Biden.

Joe Biden was never president.

Well, yes, according to Trump, no.

And then my magazine, The Atlantic, has done one.

Now, regular listeners will remember that the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally added to a signal chat by Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor.

Currently.

Yes.

Trump invited Jeffrey Goldberg to sort of ride along in this interview with the two Washington correspondents.

So they were all in the Oval Office, and there was a line in it that I did give credit to the White House aides on this one.

Several White House aides, upon reading Trump's message announcing the interview, joked about playing a prank on National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, the official who accidentally added Goldberg to the signal chat.

Tell Waltz to go into the Oval they dared one another, but don't tell him who's there.

Did that happen?

No, I'm afraid not.

I do like the fact that he might be haunted for the rest of his life.

Maybe just get a a cardboard cutout of Jeff and take it along to his events.

Well, it's nice to know that, you know, in amongst trying to negotiate 195 trade deals and put out three wars, they've got time to plan.

There's always time for a little bit of comedy.

That's nice.

Absolutely.

But actually, that's the big theme that came out of that interview, which is that Trump is enjoying his second term.

Yes.

He's got no one to say no to him.

He's installed a load of loyalists.

And, you know, they're learning the idea that whatever it is that they're doing, they thought were all these things that were too hot to touch.

Actually, they grasp them and it's fine.

And there's another very telling line about how people treat Trump in that interview, which is that they decide to do anything he wants the second time he asks.

Because they say the first time, well, he says a lot of shit.

You don't really know whether or not he's making sense.

But if he says it twice, then you just uncomplainingly do it.

Yes, I've noticed in the way Trump speaks, you know, when he's asked a question, he's very good, brackets.

or terrible, depending on your perspective, whether you see him as a genius or crazy, close brackets.

Back to the main paragraph.

He's very good at saying two things at once, two opposite things at once.

So if you said, if you asked him a question like,

I don't know.

Do you think Zelensky has done enough to bring peace to Ukraine?

Yeah, I mean, he's done a lot.

He's certainly working very hard.

And, you know, I like the guy.

I met him.

I like the guy.

He's certainly on board.

Although I've got to say that some aspects of what he's doing seems to me just trying to drag the thing out.

I'm not sure I like the guy.

I'm not sure I like the guy.

So we'll see what happens.

It usually ends with we'll see what happens.

Yeah.

So he'll say yes and no simultaneously, provided he says we'll see what happens.

I think we'll see what happens is his like sign-off.

That's where the aides can come in and then ask him what he really means, I suppose.

Well, it's brilliant, isn't it?

Because it means that he can just, whatever then happens, he can say, well, I always said I didn't like him, or he can always said he was a great guy.

So that's what I'm saying.

I don't know whether it's sort of deliberate or if it's subconsciously deliberate in that it's part of, it's just the way his language is constructed, which is to try and convey two separate meanings simultaneously.

Yeah, I think it smashes through what we always assumed that politicians had to do, which was have a line and stick to it and be consistent.

And you were allowed to go, aha, I see you changed your mind on this.

And he contains multitudes.

It turns out that that didn't matter.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was thinking that this is a good time to look back on the presidency so far because I think it has been obsessed with language.

So if you talk to anybody in the administration or the kind of magazial world more generally, they would say, you know, the problem with universities, they're filled with these academics who are just obsessed with language, these postmodernists, you know, Judith Butler wants to, you know, redefine everything, all these words.

But they know that the fundamental critique that those scholars were making, which is that how you talk about things affects how you think about them, is true and correct.

And they're sort of applying that thesis anyway to universities, to their own ministries.

There is a hilarious and increasing post on the New York Times, which is the words that the Trump administration are encouraging employees not to use.

Oh, go on.

It's several hundred words long.

It includes things like clean energy, climate science.

Okay, you can understand why the Trump administration is trying to discourage that because they have a skeptical, but it's sense of belonging.

Don't say that anywhere.

Sex.

Try and avoid saying sex or expression or female.

Female's on the list as it's fostering inclusivity.

Trauma, apparently, there's no trauma anymore, so we can avoid.

Code ended trauma, another great thing to chalk up to the Trump presidency.

This is all about them nurturing freedom of expression.

Yes, with banned word lists.

Yes, unconscious bias and confirmation bias has been banned, which kind of indicates the sort of bias that the Trump lexicon has, really.

But that's the thing.

They think that all of that stuff is very trendy language that was used to smuggle these big concepts about power.

Yes.

But they fundamentally accepted the premise, right?

They would accept sort of

Michel Foucault's thesis about power.

They just want to use it in the opposite direction.

Absolutely, yes.

And they're kind of they're weighing in on universities and instructing them to have more viewpoint diversity, which are probably words that are on the banned list.

They're using the kind of the walk phraseology to make it appear legitimate and normal and indeed liberal.

That's the thing that's tricky to me.

I think it's a reasonable critique to say that American universities are broadly liberal and left-leaning, and actually, it's quite hard if you're a conservative academic, and it's got harder over the last 50 years.

And it's okay to have some places that place a different emphasis.

Something like the University of Texas, Austin, has been specifically set up to do that.

It's perfectly legitimate.

What you can't then do is go, actually, we want to flip the switch and we want them all to be default conservative because that's no better than them all being default liberal.

And I think that's been the critique that I think has been quite compelling for the last couple of months.

Yes, and also it sort of runs counter to the image Trump projects of doing away with regulation, deregulating society.

Too many people are telling us too many things that we should be doing and shouldn't be doing.

But he must be building up a huge bureaucracy of people who have to then monitor whether these places use these words or don't use these words at the same time as he's reducing the workforce within government.

I presume that they hope that big balls of Doge can do it all with the spreadsheet.

I mean, that must be the hope.

But the other way.

He's forgotten about me.

Yeah, well, no, he lives within my heart.

Always a place in my heart for big balls.

The other way that I think they're doing it is they understand that language can be used to create dividing lines.

So, a really good example of that is the renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

Now, on one level, you might say fairly pitiful, low-hanging fruit.

Is this really what you want to spend your time on?

But it did provide the pretext then for them banning the Associated Press from the White House press pool.

Yes.

And so, what they can do is you have to talk about the things in the way we want to say them.

And if you don't, then you're not unbiased, actually, and we can kick you out and deny you access.

So, you are just making sure that everybody mouths the right words already.

They're playing on your half of the pitch.

I think that's very noticeable.

And I think what you can also notice is how they confront reality by applying language to it that kind of takes you away from the fact and back onto the rules of language that they want you to imply.

So, you know, climate change has been described as poor forestry management in California.

And federal employees, you get some cabinet ministers talking about them as deep state activists, the ones who have been fired.

And the energy secretary, Chris Wright, described climate and net zero as a sinister attempt to take away freedom.

So it's that application of their own sort of lexicon.

to something that otherwise you would think could be factually measurable, but it's now not, it becomes a subjective thing that it conveys an impression rather than, and it also allows them to, you know, invent the other, the enemy, because that always has to be someone else's fault, hasn't it?

One of the ones that really stood out to me, so the case of the deportation of a guy called Kilmar Obrego Garcia.

So he was under an order that said he couldn't be deported.

And nonetheless, he was.

He was taken to this El Salvadorian prison that you will have seen on the news.

The Supreme Court has ordered that that was unlawful and he should be returned.

But the bit that the Trump administration is picking a fight over is the news media describing this guy as, quote, Maryland father.

And they will say sarcastically, Maryland father.

Oh, you know, you guys are just so upset about the fate of this Maryland father.

Because their contention is based on his you know as far as I can see it very thin evidence that he's a member of the MS-13 gang so they think he should always be described front and centre as gang member yeah and you know then they think that using Maryland father is an attempt to conjure sympathy for him uh which is not necessarily wrong but it does reflect that idea that they want to just force the media to say things the way they want it to accept their frames and their language and the thing about it is even if this guy does turn out to be the worst criminal in the history of the US he's nonetheless entitled to due process and that is what the Supreme Court is

if we're talking about language, I mean, there was something Trump tweeted out, truths out,

very early on in the new administration, which was he who saves his country does not violate any law, which I think was

a Napoleon-esque phrase.

And J.D.

Vance also tweeted, judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.

That sense that there is going to be a rumble at some point between the Supreme Court and Trump.

Well, it's the only branch of government that really has got the power left to oppose him, isn't it?

The judiciary.

The media has said, you know, the Liberal media has said all kinds of things about Trump.

It turned out not to make a difference to him getting re-elected this time around.

The Republican Party is supie.

I mean, you have quotes coming out from them about the fact that, you know, I'm afraid.

That's right.

You know, all the background briefing is all, you know, I'm worried that, you know, one post on Truth Social and there'll be people turning up with signs and maybe worse at my house.

You know, there's a kind of culture of intimidation.

So they're not a check on him anymore.

I was talking to journalists who work work out there they talk about are they on the list is someone on the list and i asked you know what does that mean well it means you will just be given a hard time as a journalist you know you will be investigated by their version of the inland revenue you will you will just spend the next few years having to lawyer up yeah and there is that i think it was lisa murkowski of alaska who also said we're all afraid yeah i haven't seen yet over here a reporting on that because there's an indefinable it's about fear it's about threat it's it's not something visual it's not something visible it's not something measurable but just that air of if you just put a foot out of line you will have a hard time for the next three four years it's particularly difficult i think because the realer the threat is the more reluctant people are to talk about it when people are getting a pretty hard time on social media you find they're actually often quite happy to talk about it because they feel it's terrible annoying and upsetting but they don't feel kind of physically endangered so they you know they will they will talk about it when people genuinely think paper might turn up at my children's school they're very reluctant to publicize that and i think that is a you know that is just a facet that conversation that's very hard to deal with do you get a sense that the media is afraid in the us

i think that there is a feeling that trump is deliberately trying to make it harder at the same time i think there is a feeling that he understands some of its theatricality yeah and he expects you know it's it's objective he spent a lot of time calling my colleague ashley a radical hard left lunatic and then invited her to do an interview with him and i said well if you really believe that why would you do it so there's a kind of I always think the way to understand Trump is through wrestling and that idea of Kayfabebe, you know, the idea of putting on a show, that you're the heel and you're playing up to the crowd, but it's understood that you're just putting on an act.

But there's an assumption that if he's sort of, you know, in the way that he had a meeting with Zelensky after having said appalling things and let J.D.

Vance kind of say, why am I even thanked us?

There's an assumption that some of this is beating you up in public for the crowd and that you shouldn't take that seriously or really hold that against

part of the game.

Yeah.

I think that's also part of you know his his genesis being you know he's a salesman you just got to work out what can i say that will just get the effect that i want you know and and there's no sense of is it true or is it a lie it's more is it effective i remember asking ages ago when i was thinking about directing a movie i spoke to like a film producer and i said just what's it like and he said he said the first thing is you will end up lying that's what you do you will lie i said why is that because you can't get the cast involved until they know the film is financed You can't get the money people involved until they know who the cast is.

So you have to go to both of them and just say to the actors, yes, we're fully financed.

And say to the financers, yes, the cast are on board.

And I thought, that's terrible.

But, you know, I have found myself.

No, it'll be fine.

You know, and I think that's, for me, that was an insight into what is going on, you know, unfortunately and frighteningly on a state and international level with Trump, which is he's doing what you have to do, as far as he can see, in saying whatever it takes to get the effect desired.

So that thing of, you know, we will solve the war in Ukraine on day one.

He now says, I was just saying that to yeah, he told Time magazine, you know, I was joking about that.

And you're like, I heard you say that a lot, and you never gave that impression.

And then he will always go back to, well, it wouldn't have started even if I was in charge.

He's also a master of the counterfactual.

That's right.

And he says, well, you know, that's sort of like asking for driving directions and someone saying, I wouldn't have started from here.

That's his whole approach to any intractable foreign policy problem.

It's like, well, it shouldn't have happened, should it?

Yeah.

And of course, there's nothing you can prove to see whether that's true or false.

You can't go back in time to

simulate.

Yes, he's about that on talk about having a third term, which is unconstitutional.

But he does that.

Joking and not joking.

Joking and maybe I'm not.

He said in January this was he said that he told supporters it would be the greatest honor of my life to serve not once but twice or three times or four times.

But he then said this was merely an effort to provide headlines for the fake news, adding that the the honor would be to serve twice.

So it's that, you know.

I mean, I think he would serve a third term if he thought he could crash through.

I mean, I really do.

I also think particularly he will struggle to deal with this last two years of his presidency after the midterms, in which you would expect the Democrats will make gains.

That's the sort of baseline assumption, right?

Is that in the offseason, the opposition makes gains.

And he will at that point become a lame duck, and what he says won't be so interesting anymore.

And I think that could be a really dangerous time in terms of Trump and speech and language because he will want people to still be paying as much attention to him then as they are now and he will not want to see his power fading away.

And I think that's the point where playing a lot of footsie with the third term is a way to keep him relevant.

Yes.

But I worry though that people think, oh, we'll just we'll just hang on till the midterms and then it'll be fine.

Because that assumes that in the interim he won't do something to make invalid a lot of the Democrat candidates.

You know, that sense of calling them criminals now.

It wouldn't surprise me if someone then said, well, these criminals should not stand for election in the same way that someone can be deported, irrespective of what the Supreme Court says, if he just brands that person a gang member.

Well, also the other thing is that one of the many, many executive orders, and let's maybe talk about the executive orders in a minute, was about restoring integrity.

There we are.

Preserving and protecting the integrity of American elections.

Now, that's actually about tightening up the identity checks, particularly on mail-in ballots.

And I reported from Florida in 2022 where Ron DeSantis, whose one-time campaign aide Susie Wilson is now White House Chief of Staff.

So, you know, this is where a lot of this playbook was developed, the kind of Florida playbook.

You know, they were kind of rounding up people on election day for voting illegally.

People who had thought that maybe their conviction was spent and they were okay.

But there was a big show of, if you vote illegally, we're going to come down really hard on you.

And, you know, that is worrying to people.

And you can see how that has a chilling effect on people.

You're wanting to risk it.

You know, it's people who think I'm not voting illegally, but it might be construed that I am.

So, is it safer not to vote?

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The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at Broadway SF.com.

I mean, we talked about how Congress seems to be just rolling over for not just that.

They're playing it, they're coming up with all sorts of bits of legislation that sound quite jolly playing along with the Trump language games.

It's to do with the acronyms of the bills, isn't it?

So, Nancy Pelosi, who is Speaker Emeritus, a Democratic politician from California, notoriously has made a lot of money on the stock market.

So, the Republican Josh Hawley, who's quite an economic populist, in 2023 proposed the preventing elected leaders from owning securities and investments or Pelosi Act.

So there isn't that, this is the kind of, you know, kind of good day, sir, kind of way of delivering an insult is by coming up with an acronym-based bill that will kind of own your opponents.

It sort of reminds me of, you know, space missions have these acronyms and NASA and all the different space agencies just go out of their way to try and think of good acronyms and then reverse engineer what the mission is about to supply the right words.

And there is now a website up in Harvard University's webpage called the Dumb or Overly Forced Astronomical Acronym Site, or DUFUS.

And it's got hundreds of space missions with examples are like, you know, the Antarctic muon and neutrino detector array, or Amanda.

But my two favorites are the Puerto Rican Ultimate Pulsar Processing Instrument, or POPI,

and a broadband resonant approach to cosmic axiom detection with an amplifying B-field ring apparatus, or Abracadabra.

So every time you tell me one of these, I'm becoming more and more pro-doge because this speaks to people who've got maybe slightly too much time on their hands.

Can we briefly talk about executive orders?

Because I think, in terms of language, they are the president being able to say something and assuming that it will happen.

Now, in some cases, them and held up by the courts, but it is a particularly unique power of the American presidency that I think has become more and more salient as they felt that Congress is more and more gridlocked.

I went back and looked.

So Trump has issued more than 140 so far.

So for comparison, George Washington did eight in seven and a half years as president.

Ulysses S.

Grant, we've had, did 217.

FDR.

mad for them did 3700 over four terms yes he had four he had a lot of time to play with didn't he but joe biden did only 160 over his entire presidential term so trump will surpass that quite quickly and they're fairly all-encompassing the the recent one was the make american showers great again executive order Go and tell me about that one.

Well, I think it's to do with the fact there was some regulation during the Biden years about water pressure.

I don't understand.

So somehow he's going to oblige state departments to do away with that regulation.

But that's not all American showers.

That's just American showers in government buildings.

Or in Trump's house.

I like the phrasing from that, that no longer will showerheads be weak and worthless.

You've vanquished all your other enemies.

Now finally, the greatest faux faux of all, water pressure, will succumb before the great Trump juggernaut.

It reminded me a lot though of I think the Daily Mail and some other papers were very unhappy about the switch to energy efficient light bulbs and the idea you could no longer buy incandescent bulbs,

which they presented as why are we being fobbed off with these rubbish dimmer bulbs.

But was also part of a kind of wider dissatisfaction with the idea that net zero and climate change goals were going to require what they saw as a sort of diminution in the standard of living.

I think that's a sort of sidebar to the showerhead business, right?

Which is it's also about

not exactly, do we have to have pathetic showers because of woke, but do we have to have pathetic showers because of climate change and water usage?

Yes, and it also relies on, and this is something that has never actually been explicitly stated, which is tackling climate change is going to be inconvenient.

No politician wants to say that.

And therefore,

when someone like, obviously I'm sticking to the US, not to the UK, there's an election on, the 150 officials in the room are all looking rather sternly at me, so I wouldn't mention the uk but in the in the us it just needs someone like trump to say how annoying a lot of the legislation or the regulations are on on net zero yeah because there has been no case on the other side to admit that actually yeah you know if you want to save the planet it will require a little bit of effort yeah i think that you know the the greens are quite split on this in the us

yeah there we go the green movement in the us and there are other colours we've just got to say as well as green but that the idea about whether or not they should be talking about degrowth you know or whether or or not you should this comes back to the abundance which we've mentioned before the the agenda of can you have technological progress and tech your way out of climate change everyone would love that to be true yeah if it's not true then at some point we're going to have to make pretty grim decisions and that's why the executive orders which always have been seen as limited in their effect because ultimately to be adopted nationwide it does require an act of Congress.

Well if it needs money then that's I think that's the that's the that's the sticking point.

There was another one executive order that I I picked out which is explicitly about language which is executive order restoring truth and sanity to American history oh would you like it's always been insane American history all the books I've read have been absolutely kind of crazy I mean I have read a lot of American history books where I've gone what

what would you like to take a wild stab in the dark about what restoring truth and sanity to american history is really about yes no does it involve skirting round the whole issue of slavery funny you should say that yes so just over five years ago, 2019 actually, the New York Times published a very influential series of articles called the 1619 Project, which argued that America's true founding should be looked at as when the first slave ships arrived rather than 1776, the Declaration of Independence.

You know, it was a new way to tell American history in this much more rounded and frankly negative way, to talk about the fact that America might have been founded on these grand ideals, but it was also at the time reliant on the labor of people who'd been

forcibly conscripted into it.

And that was incredibly divisive.

And we've had echoes of it here too, the idea of that this was kind of doing America down.

Yeah.

But again, it speaks to that thing of everything is now an either or.

It's either A or B.

No one's saying actually there are pluses and minuses in any country's history, things to be proud of and things to be embarrassed or ashamed about.

So here's an honest picture of the variety of experience that has been part of our culture and has got us to where we are today.

So it's, you know, it's not hating the country you're from, but neither is it kind of adoring it so much that you can't conceive of any possible criticism of it.

Right.

I'm talking about other countries, not about this country, because we can't talk about this country this week.

But that's exactly, but that is not how the Trump administration sees it.

So they see it as a revisionist movement.

That's how it's described in this executive order.

And they say, under this historical revision, our nation's unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.

And the thing I was trying to work out quite how this works, obviously the Smithsonian Museums Museums in Washington, a series of museums, phenomenal, some of the only free museums in America, so I recommend them highly to anyone who goes to DC.

The Decisive Science Museum is like one of the best buildings I've ever been around.

But government controlled, essentially.

So what have they done to deserve this?

J.D.

Vance will now be working with them to make sure that ideology is removed from them.

And one of that suite of museums is the Museum of the African American Experience.

Brilliant new museum, tells us through from the middle passage, has Emmett Till's coffin in it, all the way through to the achievements of black musicians and artists in America today.

And opened, I think, by both Barack Obama and George W.

Bush simultaneously.

Right, that was seen as a really bipartisan way to tell the story of the fact that there's been incredible black achievement in America, but also real black suffering.

And you have that duality.

Let's see what, you know, J.D.

Vance has got some thoughts about those.

He's also, this is a bit that I'm more intrigued by, going to work with the National Zoo.

Because now we must, more, you must have animals that look like Trump.

Right, only sufficiently patriotic animals.

Or is that insulting?

Yes, it should eliminate any animal that is designed to look like Trump.

Oh, do you think like Xi Jinping, not like he mentions in Winnie the Pooh?

No, any animal with a sufficiently large blonde crest is now an enemy of the people.

Okay.

Just have cages full of Democrats.

I think that's the ultimate aim.

It's the ultimate aim.

But I thought that was really interesting that, you know, it's of a piece with Trump taking over the Kennedy Center, which is the big performing arts venue in DC.

You know, he really is waging a culture war in the most literal sense.

Yeah.

And he wants to control what museums say because he thinks that they become irredeemably leftist.

And it throws into relief the fundamental contradiction here because right at the start, the message from Trump and Vance and the Trumpist Republicans was rule back the state.

There's too much regulation.

There's too much interference in private lives.

And yet the outcome is even more control.

It's the level of state interference that people hadn't seen from any government.

That fact that, you know, the president will now pick the exhibits on a museum or the animals that go in a zoo.

It's actually, you know, it's a hyper-interfering machine now.

Yeah, I mean, he wants to pick what musicals go on at the McKenzie Centre.

I'm not joking.

He said he doesn't want any more woke musicals.

And I'm like, such acts.

That's all of them, isn't it?

I mean, Lay Miz is about a revolution.

Surely that's off the table now.

Seven brides for Seven Brides.

I don't know.

Is that

cats?

How do we feel about the politics of cats?

Well, there's no story, as you know, there's no story blank.

But do they have a song anywhere where they go, socialism's great, we are cats?

I think that one's probably safe for that reason.

Before we end, I just wanted to ask you whether or not you would

receive any correspondence from our listeners.

That's a very subtle link into the fact that I have to read out an email.

Yeah,

this is from someone in Britain.

We can't say where they're from this week.

Okay.

This was from Dominic Fisher.

Off the back of uh oh my medium rant about

sorry i thought on my i thought you said my medium rang and i thought you have a medium you keep on speed dial he goes amando i've looked into your future i've seen a very bad podcast don't record anything tomorrow for god's sake um my medium rant about uh getting new headphones that simply became too complicated for no reason and um dominic has written in to say you expressed frustration about your new headphones that had added annoying features than their earlier incarnation.

You pondered whether we'd reached maximum technology and so people producing it are now just giving themselves something to do.

I think they are.

And in our house, this is called improving things worse.

Thank you.

Thank you, Dominic.

So that's my phrase of the week, improving things worse.

Yeah, I mean, Google announced it was going to take away support from early versions of its nest thermostats.

Yes.

So there is a lot of that.

You know, you were sold these things that were incredibly technologically adept, but you were also buying into the idea that somebody else was going to be responsible for them forever.

Yes.

And this deliberate built-in obsolescence of any kind of bit of tech that you get now,

knowing that in five years' time, none of this will not work, but there would just be no outlet for it because the whole medium will have changed.

Yeah.

Well, that is definitely improving things worse.

Okay, we'll leave people with that.

Improving things worse.

Title for an offshoot podcast, I think.

Maybe over the summer.

I don't know.

Because I think we could do with a different podcast.

I think we could do with one more podcast in ether.

Yeah.

Sometimes I just think, oh, is there anything to listen to out there?

I tell you what made me satisfied was my family have a go at me for still having a little battered FM radio in my in the bathroom.

And I heard yesterday once the power outage in Portugal and Spain, the advice that the British government are giving in case there is an absolute power outage is to keep an FM radio because communications can still go on FM even during power outages.

So it'll just be me and a member of government.

I won't say which party leader or which party because I'm not allowed to say that.

The nodding 150 are all kind of looking relieved.

I didn't mention our party or anyone, but it'll just be me communicating with that one member of government.

Imagine the horror of if there is a massive power cut in Britain and so many people want to do an emergency podcast but they have no way to convey it to listeners.

And it'll just be me

podcasting to everyone but who's got an FM.

Yeah, can't we?

Thanks for listening to Strong Message Here.

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