Jonathan V. Last and Ben Raderstorf: Retribution Agenda

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I am Amanda Carpenter sitting in for Tim Miller, who is on a well-deserved vacation.
And with me today is the dark night of the Bulwark, JVL. JVL, what is going on? It's been a while.
All caps, Amanda amanda it is so so good to have you back home

how you been i'm great protecting democracy all the time it's a 24-hour job man speaking of uh

trump's back in washington it's his big day he's making his triumphant return

so didn't napole Napoleon do this once?

Like came back from exile once.

It is amazing that all of the people who got so upset on January 6th and 7th and were, you know, well, that's it.

I'm out.

And, you know, they they're they're all going to be there for him.

Yep.

We're all going to be there for.

I guess I should make a note.

He's technically he's been to Washington.

He's strangely he's not going to the Capitol complex itself. Why not? No, he's going to the Capitol Hill Club.
Yeah, so weird. Fine.
I mean, if I had to guess, I would say that this is part of his TV brain, which views it as him telling a reality TV story in which this is one step of his hero's journey back to the presidency and so he gets the hey he's meeting with congress but he's not all the way to congress yet he's over at the capitol hill club and then after the nomination then he'll meet to address the house conference on the hill or something like that All building up to and culminating from his perspective with his triumphant return as he is sworn in on January 20th of 2025. Thanks, America.
Well, I can tell you at the time of this taping, he is now meeting with House Republicans at their club. And they open the meeting by singing him happy birthday.
His birthday is flag day. Did you know that? So, I mean, if there's anybody who loves the flag, I mean, I can't think of any other president who ever hugged an American flag as he famously did.
So he must love the flag more than anyone else because of his birthday or something. Yeah, definitely going to be a meeting full of constructive criticism about how to write the Republican Party and a positive vision for America.
Running through the coverage of this, it's really interesting. A lot of people like zoned right in on Mitch McConnell because he's going to meet with House Republicans and Senate Republicans and also meet with the business roundtable.
And we'll talk about that a little bit more later. It was just going through some of the comments.
I'm just going to read some of them to you from esteemed Republican senators about their meeting with the past and future president. Mitch McConnell, we all know that he said that Donald Trump was practically and morally responsible for January 6th.
So he, of course, was asked about, well, are you meeting? Are you meeting with Trump now? You guys haven't spoken for two years. He hasn't been in Washington two years.
You're going to meet with him now? And of course, said, he's earned, this is Mitch McConnell, he's earned the nomination by the voters all across the country. And of course, I'll be meeting with him tomorrow.
John Corden, who I think is the likely successor to McConnell, his quote, division only helps our opposition. So unity is really important.
And I think President Trump understands that. Wild Bill Cassidy, who voted for conviction, he says the polls say he's going to be our next president.
So you've got to work with the guy. I mean, the polls say it.
Reasonable. The polls all say it.
Rational. So it must be true.
So this is a perfect example of why Trump was able to take over the Republican Party. And it's because of how weak these guys are.
Right. So Trump, I mean, one of his superpowers is that he can smell weakness.
And you think of a guy like Mitch McConnell's like, oh, the powerful, you know, leader in the Senate and stuff. But that's not right.
That's not the truth. When push comes to shove, Mitch McConnell is not willing to hold a grudge.
And Donald Trump is. It reminds me of Kaiser Sosa in The Usual Suspects.
I don't know if you remember, but you know, so Kaiser Sosa shows. I can't remember something I didn't know, JBL.
So he, you know, his wife and children are kidnapped by his enemies. so what he does is he shows up and he shoots his own wife and children in front of them to show them how, and this is what Donald Trump has done to the Republican party.
This is a movie, right? This is a movie. It's a great movie.
Okay. And I'm making sure this isn't like a historical example, although it probably is, but this is what Trump has done with the Republican party, right? So he, he has said, you know, implicit everything he does is, if you don't give me what I want, I'll kill the Republican Party.
This is sort of Maggie Heiberman's theory of the case. I should read her con man book.
But when she explains it, she says, my observation with Trump over his lifetime in public life is that he approaches everything as a challenge of power dynamics. Yeah, so these senators are not willing to hold a grudge against Trump because they know that he will hold a grudge against them.
And so they fold. And this is, I mean, that's just what weakness is, right? We often think, I said this to Sarah this week, I think, like, what happened to spite? Does nobody feel spite anymore? Because you used to think that, you know.
It is, stuff it down. Well, I can tell you who is spiteful.
Troy Neils, am I saying his last name right? Yeah, that's right. Congressman on the House side, I forget what state he represents, but he was talking in this instance of Paul Ryan.
Paul Ryan did an interview two days ago with Neil Cavuto, 4 p.m. hour, now primetime, notably, and essentially gave his spiel that he often gives that Trump is unfit for president.
But I really don't like how old Biden is or his policies. And when kind of pressed on it, like Paul Ryan will say Trump is an authoritarian.
He doesn't stand by the Constitution. But I, you know, I could never vote for Biden.
What are we going to do? And Niels blasted him after. Blasted him.
It was essentially like, get out of the party. We don't want you.
That guy knows spite. Called him garbage.
Yeah. But that's because, again, he understands that Paul Ryan has no power over him.
It is amazing to me. This is not how it used to work.
I think it used to be that the people would hold on to spite. And these guys were all barons of their own fiefdoms.
And they had nothing to fear from anybody. And they could just do whatever they wanted, basically.
And that's why they had to be cajoled, right? If you were, you know, party to party, you had to cajole the guys in your party to get them to go along by giving them goodies and, well, we'll build a military base in your district if you'll give me this vote on the telecom bill or something. And now it's, the Republican Party is basically an authoritarian state where the idea is you have to go along with Trump or Trump will come and end your career.
And it doesn't always work, but it works enough of the time that it is a plausible deterrent. And none of these guys are willing to go back at Trump and say, if you come after me, I'll come after you.
And this is one of those asymmetries. I've spent a lot of the last year talking about asymmetries in politics.
So Trump, in just pure game theory, Trump's approach to life is called tit for tat, which is, you know, if you're nice to him, he'll be nice to you, basically. Is that a technical term? It is, actually, believe it or not.
In game theory economics, they call that game tit for tat. And with Trump, it's a variation called tit for tat with some forgiveness.
This is, again, only people who have taken economics on this are like smiling and laughing. Transactional forgiveness.
Once you come on my side. Right.
And it's, but it has to be like forgiveness that is unpredictable. So like Mitch McConnell is not going to be forgiven, even though he has come back to Trump's side, but Marco Rubio has been and JD Vance have been.
So that's, again, this is all just econometrics. But the other Republicans aren't willing to do that, right? The other Republicans aren't willing to play tit for tat with Trump.
They just buckle under because they're so weak. And Trump had their number.
It is amazing to me how correctly Trump had their number. And, you know, I mean, the things that have been said to Mitch McConnell by Trump, things that was said about Mitch McConnell's wife and Mitch McConnell is done.
He's leaving the Senate. He's an old man.
He has nothing left to play for. And yet he wants to have Trump win so that the tax cut can be extended in 2025.

That's it.

It is so important to extend the tax cut for a bunch of people who are,

he won't be,

I'm sorry.

I mean,

you know,

I wish him a long life,

but Mitch McConnell is unlikely to be around for all that much longer on

this mortal coil.

And it is so important to him that the tax cut remains in place,

that he's willing to swallow all of this and be humiliated.

And what an absolute wuss. Yeah, let me pick your brain on this.
On the Paul Ryan question. So Paul Ryan is sidelined to daytime hours of saying a little bit about Trump.
Fine. Doesn't he sort of have an obligation when you're talking about these power dynamics

to bring up why he's on Fox news dayside and not speaker of the house anymore isn't that an important part of this story and it's not because oh i got sick of it it's because paul ryan there is no place for you in donald trump's republican party because you refuse to act as his political and legal shield for all his wrongdoing. That's really what it gets down to.
Paul Ryan got his tax cuts passed and then essentially was out of there. Like that was the breaking point.
And now bring it back to Trump going back on Capitol Hill. He's going to be meeting with Mike Johnson.
Obviously, later today, there's reporting this morning who was one of the first people that Donald Trump called after he was convicted in New York? Mike Johnson. Speaker Mike Johnson.
Yep. Why would that be JBL? Why would that be the first phone call? What possibly could they have to talk about besides their legislative tax agenda to secure tax cuts for another 10 years? Any ideas? Where do you think Melania was on the list of people Trump called following his conviction? Do you think she was number two? Do you think she was number five? I don't know.
I mean, who could say? I'm sure she was right up there. I don't want to bring Melania into it.
I hope she's shopping. I hope she's doing whatever she wants.
I'm just saying. The idea that he gets convicted of 34 felonies and what he does first is reaches out to the Speaker of the House.
The interesting point is that Speaker Mike Johnson supported him in New York at the trial. Yeah.
When Melania did it. In many ways, he was Trump's Trump's work wife.
Why do you got to make it weird? I don't think there's some weird at all. There are some prison terms I could have used, but I didn't do that because of your delicate ears.
I don't even know what prison terms would be for that. I don't want to know.
You've got me all distracted now. But here's my point, though.
I mean, so today's meeting is supposed to be forward-looking. It's a forward-looking...
They're getting the... John Corden's like, we had to get our agenda sorted out.
They're going to get unified. Unified with their, you know, to figure out all the things they're going to do.
And there is no agenda. There is no agenda.
The agenda is extend the tax cuts. They're talking about what he's going to do in a Trump's second term.
That's all up and up policy, correct? The agenda is he just has to let us extend the tax cuts and then he can go off on his jihads against you know democratic prosecutors and whatever and he can do whatever he wants with the department of justice so long as we get the tax cuts i mean this is almost like a parody of republican thought patterns well let's say i just want to sort out what we're making fun of and what we're actually talking about for the listeners. So number one, I think the cover story is, the story they want to be in the newspapers is that they're talking about tax cuts.
Yes. Are they really talking about just tax cuts? Absolutely not.
Mike Johnson is trying to figure out ways that they can be a legal shield for Trump, not in a Trump 2.0 situation this summer right now. This is why they're holding Merrick Garland in contempt.
It's why they're going on and on with these investments. So what was the news yesterday? So over the last year, hasn't it been that Comer and Jim Jordan were all going to help Speaker Johnson do all these investigations into the Biden crime family.
And they came up with nothing. They dropped the impeachment against Biden because they have nothing.
So the news in response to the Hunter Biden conviction is that we need more investigations of Hunter Biden. Yeah.
And that's what we're going to be doing. This is the retribution agenda.
That's the policy. It is crazy to me.
And it's crazy. One of the one of the lines, I forget who it was.
It might have been Cornyn. It might have been Barrasso interviewed about the meetings today with Trump and the agenda.
They said something to the equivalent. Like, yeah, I mean, that's what we're supposed to do.
But you know, who knows what this guy's going to do one minute to the next, which is true and awful is true. But and you're going to give him the nuclear codes again?

After you saw what happened last time, when I'm sorry to say this, but one million Americans died from COVID.

One million.

And it's not like we haven't seen what happens when you have an erratic guy who doesn't know what he's going to do from one moment to the next be president and all of the downsides are theoretical like we just did it it was five minutes ago does nobody does nobody remember and for these businesses and we'll get to the business roundtable in a minute i'm sure who are lining up to support trump because of tax cuts i would ask them because you know everything is about bottom line and self-, did you gain more from the Trump tax cuts than you lost from COVID? Because the government's handling of COVID cost businesses a lot of fucking money. This idea that it's all free, that there are no financial downsides to Trump, well, we'll see what the markets look like if democracy starts teetering and confidence in the dollar goes down.
And it's just the craziest, dumbest, most short sighted thing I can see. And it is like businesses are behaving in the caricature way that like commies would say they would behave.
You know, like you go over to Jacobin and the guys at Jacobin magazine would be like, oh, of course,, these green ice shade capitalists, all they care about is an extra dollar. They would second.
And it turns out, yeah. Yeah.
If they get their tax cuts, they're fine with autocracy. So let's talk about the business round table meeting.
Larry Kudlow is going to be hosting the discussion. I'm sure that will be full of tough interrogation of Trump's first term and promises for second term correct yeah i mean larry's he's just that guy's just a straight shooter all the way yes but in holding this meeting i should note that they did invite president biden president biden is busy with the g7 kind of doing presidential he's out presidenting he's out presidenting so So there's going to be a number of CEOs from all the places you would know assembling here.
There's been some reporting, they're trying to figure out like who's going and who's not. That's nice.
I guess we could have a list of who's actually showing up to meet with Trump. But the idea that this event is being held, and they are hosting him and they're inviting Larry Kudlowlow to ask the questions of him and it's all under this pretense of providing an opportunity for trump to come back to washington and promote this idea that they have some kind of up and up economic agenda that the gop and business leaders can all get on board with like this is part of the scheme and so like it doesn't matter who attends and who doesn't they're part of this i don't want to say narrative but they're putting on the show they're putting on the show for sure literally they're showing up and they're help feeding oh he's good for business and again i if biden had governed like jimmy carter but is he good for business and this is something let me just stop here because this is something that we've sort of struggled with largely in our work and how to explain in real concrete tangential ways how do we explain to these types of peoples that authoritarianism is bad for business that doesn't seem like rocket science it to me and i think it's hard to explain because we assume it like duh why would businesses want to be under an authoritarian regime you can't predict what prices will be it'll be all based on retribution you can be singled out you can't depend on you know secure and stable economic policy but it's like actually when they're confronted with it the instinct isn't to think about any of that it's like okay well how do i secure my space how do get the bag? How do I get my tax cuts? How do I make sure I'm in good with the leader? And so it leads to this kind of preemptive acquiescence where it's like, okay, well, let's just invite him.
And we'll have the nice people ask the questions. And we don't got to get in too deep, but we'll put on the show.
Yeah. Here we go.
I mean, you put your finger on it. It's a matter of them thinking, sure, authoritarianism is bad for business in general, but it's great for the businesses who have the favor of the leader, right? If the strong man favors you, then it's great for business.
You can get some railroads. You can get some.
Yeah, you can get anything you want, right? Because the rule of law no longer applies. You know, the delusion is that every one of them thinks, well, I'll be the one he loves.

And he'll let me do whatever I want to my competitors.

Is that capitalism?

Tell me, is that capitalism?

But here's the thing.

No capitalist really wants capitalism, right?

Like, they don't want a free market.

Everybody's a rent seeker.

Again, in economic terms, the idea that people want free markets is crazy. Wow, I'm just getting all kinds of lessons here today.
This is great. Who needs college? You can listen to the Bulwark podcast.
Oh, just like PragerU. They all rent seek, right? Everybody wants the playing field tilted towards them.
And what drives me crazy is, I was saying, this hasn't been Jimmy Carter's second term. It's not like Biden has been hostile to business.
We have the stock market at record highs. We have corporate profits at record highs.
This has been an extraordinarily good four years for business. And in fact, a better four years for business than the Trump years were because the Trump years had the pandemic for the entire final year, right? Let me just run this by you.
Given that these are, you can make the argument, these are already Biden's economic policies. Why isn't he just say, sure, things are fine the way they are.
I plan on keeping them that way. You don't got to suck up to this nut job.
I don't know. How about that? I have wondered if Biden shouldn't signal that he's going to extend the tax cuts.
Now, there may be really good policy reasons not to. Oh, I'm sure it would cause some problems on the left, but this is the status quo now.
Right. As I said, there may be good policy reasons not to.
There may be good policy reasons to extend parts of them, but cut back. That's a different course.
Right. That's a different podcast.
But if Biden was going to be like purely transactional about this, you just say, you know, this is the environment we have and I plan to keep this environment going forward. And then if you're a business leader, then what, what impetus in the world would there be for you? But here's again, asymmetry.
If you lead a business in America and either Joe Biden or Donald Trump is going to be president, if you support Joe Biden and Trump winds up as president, he will hurt you. If you support Donald Trump and Joe Biden as president, there are no consequences.
The Biden administration is not coming after you. Elon Musk isn't losing all of his tax breaks because he spends all of his time talking about how terrible Joe Biden is and how great Donald Trump is.
Because Joe Biden doesn't do all of the authoritarian stuff. And by nature of him not doing the authoritarian stuff, which, again, is good.
I'm not saying that he should fight fire with fire. I'm saying that it's good.
Then it becomes a free pass to just the way to hedge your bets is to just be like, yeah, you know, let's get right with Trump just in case he wins. And if he doesn't win, it's fine.
It's fine. The Biden, the Democrats aren't going to like try to put us out of business or regulate us into oblivion.
They're normal people who will continue governing and letting the business world go along. But if we sign with Biden now, or we don't support Trump and Trump does win, then we could wind up with some complications.
Well, while I still have you, because listeners, we are splitting the hour. I don't have JVL for the whole hour today.
You're going to get my Protect Democracy colleague the back half of the hour. But I had to ask you, JVL, about what you've been writing in your newsletter about a successful business, an amazingly successful business in the media industry known as the Epoch and also true social apparently yeah i mean these are incredible stories so i was so glad that you wrote about that because i haven't closely tracked it but i have noticed it was this publication sometimes you'd get shoved in your hand if you're walking around the streets of dc yes and then suddenly it's in your feed all the time i somehow i get emails about it constantly i can't unsubscribe to it it's about impossible i have no idea why epoch times keeps showing up in my inbox but it turns out it might be a criminal enterprise allegedly allegedly the cfo has been uh arrested for doing some light money laundering to the tune of $67 million, I think.
I think it was $67 million. It seems like a lot of money.
The Epoch Times had a division. Now, you know this, having worked in media.
When you're at a media publication, there's the breaking news division. And then there's the customer relations division, and then there's the investigative reporting division.
The Epoch Times had the make money online division. Sounds like not a bad idea.
Which sounds totally, that does not sound like a multi-level marketing scam or anything like that. and what it was is it was a division of people who were going into the dark web to purchase ill-gotten monies.
So monies that had been gotten through fraudulent means for pennies on the dollar. So somebody has $100 of money they've stolen.
That money needs to be laundered. It can't be spent.
And so they sell it to the Epoch Times for like 76 cents for each dollar. And then the Epoch Times people were going and laundering that money through by creating a series of fake bank accounts and routing things around.
And this was all happening at a time when their total revenue went from like four million dollars a year to like 150 million dollars a year over the course of like four years or something like that media success i mean just i like how you had a line that like it clicked it into my head it was a fully operational flywheel the epoch times took in money it paid fox to run advertisements to attract more money gr activists then paid Epoch Times to get access to their readers in order to hit them up for cash, too. So, whee! Yeah, and the craziest thing about this is the China stuff.
So, Epoch Times was founded by Falun Gong. So, what made people do this with the obvious Chinese propaganda outlet? Yeah, well, this is what's funny, though, right? So the Epoch Times is against the Chinese communist regime.

Yes.

Donald Trump is the most pro-Chinese communist regime president we've ever had.

He expressly told Xi Jinping that, you know, like, do whatever you need to do with the Uyghurs in the camps.

Whatever, you know?

Yeah. He alibied Xi on COVID when COVID was happening.
And yet the Epoch Times decided that it was going to throw its lot in with Trump, which doesn't make any sense. But it fits, right? The Chinese national, the rich guy whose yacht Bannon was indicted on.
Another amazing moment in the Trump cinematic history. Yeah.
He himself has also been indicted for fraud. And what he was doing was he was going out and basically shaking down Chinese expatriates here in America who fled China and succeeded over here and really hate the Chinese regime.
And he was like shaking them down. Oh, give me this money and I'm going to set up this amazing voice of America style thing.
So we're going to really hammer Xi. Don't worry about it.
And he was raising, again, millions of dollars from these people. He was just buying yachts with it and stuff.
It's the sincerest form of Trumpism. It profits by the stupidity of its marks, or in this case, with the genuine desire to see change in China.
It takes these people who just aren't sophisticated enough to understand that the people they're supporting are actually working in the opposite direction. Another point about the demonstration of Trumpism in the media money market, you included the numbers for Truth Social recently, which are just worth reiterating.
Let me make sure I have this right. Gross revenues of 800800,000, losses of $327 million? Gross revenues mean the total money you took in.
It's not your profit. It's just like all of the money your business took in from various sources.
I can't tell you how small $800,000 is. There are thousands of podcasters in America who make more than $800,000 a year from their podcasts.
And these are people who are just like sitting in their basements. They do not have a publicly traded company.
Like on Substack, there are people making multiples of this who are just people who write. They sit at their computer in their office and write Substacks.
The people who post on True Social, the influencers on True Social, take in more than that, for sure. Yeah.
Charlie, what's his face? All those guys. Ben Shapiro, they would laugh at this.
What in the world is Trump spending $320 million on with that thing? And that's, I mean, I don't want to allege fraud because that would be wrong. I don't have any proof.
But when you look at that platform and say, where do you think the money's going? Like just as a, you know, looking down the light items, how much are they paying for servers? How much are they paying their dev team? Right. How much? And you're like, how could you spend this much money? And it looked that bad.
It's a little Brewster's millions. I think the, I mean, the only way to spend that money is if it's just a wealth transfer and yet the company is worth eight

billion dollars on the you know in its total market cap and trump's lockup so he has a lockup

in which he can't sell his shares yeah for like six months or something it's until september i

think it's september he can sell okay it'll be interesting to see what happens because he's not

a real billionaire so what does that mean he has to keep the valuation as high as he can until he can get out. He's got to keep the valuation as high as he can until he gets out.
But then when he gets out, he's got to do it under the cover of night. So he's got to figure out a way to sell shares a little bit at a time and to have it not be traced back that it's his shares that are floating on the market.
Because if he dumped all the shares at once, that would drive the prices down to nothing. And so he's got to slowly extract value without spooking all the marks who are out there holding their shares because they think that he's taking them to the moon.
Well, one last thing on the trump money marketing genius that we are privileged enough to stand witness to his latest fundraising email that went out yesterday did you if you saw it the headline was haul out the guillotine that was the headline of it and the thing backing it up a steel day is what he was celebrating? It was actually about how the evil liberals were coming after him. And remember that one time that G list celeb Kathy Griffin did a beheading video of me.
That was so bad. They're coming after me.
They'll come after you. Haul out the guillotine.
Do you remember the gallows unity? I think. I think they'll get all unified at that meeting today about these kind of marketing appeals.
Do you remember the actual gallows that the people waving the Trump flags set up outside of the Capitol before they went into the Capitol looking for Mike Pence and shouting hang Mike Pence? Yeah, there's no chance people like that would misinterpret his message that he was talking about Kathy Griffith, right? No chance. Yeah.
Yeah. But I guess that's okay.
That's free expression. And we should all just like, yeah, cool.
But Kathy Griffin, yeah. I mean, God knows I'm still upset about that.
Yeah. They're the same.
Comedian. Amanda, before you let me go.
Please let me go. No, no.
Just give me a feelings check. Tell me where are you on what's happening five months from now? Give me odds.
If you were setting odds. Oh, I hate the odds game.
I mean, if you gave me truth serum and like gun to my head, I feel 80% chance Biden will probably win. Okay.
Pending no major alteringing events i look at the evidence from the previous elections i look at the republicans that have ran away from trump post january 6th i mean look at the hill like there's there's republican and i know it's not enough and i complain about it and i push them to do more all the time but people are refusing to meet with him like people are actually not on board with this they may signal it they may rig a lot of it um but i think as the choice becomes more and more clear the election trend will continue in the way it has since 2018 that's what i feel those are the vibes that's where the evidence leads me but you know this is all a work in progress and i 20 is 20% is not good. I don't care if it was 1% chance.
Like, okay, if there was a 1% chance of winning the lottery, wouldn't you, I would be running to buy tickets and I hate the lottery, hate gambling, but if there was a 1% chance I would win, I would play it all the time. Yeah.
1% is too high for this guy to come back. 1% makes me devote all my time,

all my energy focusing on this.

And so my actions don't change

regardless of how good I feel

because the stakes are that high.

You'd never get on a plane

that somebody told you

had a 1% chance of crashing.

That's the dark view.

I said, Lotto, you said plane crash.

Okay.

I would just say this

because I don't want you

to walk out of here feeling good.

That's nice of you.

Monmouth poll from this week.

Do you approve or disapprove of the job

Joe Biden is doing as president?

38% approve. 58%

disapprove. So negative

20. All right.
JBL

everybody. Looking back.
No, no, no, no,

no, no, no. You're not getting off that easy.

It gets worse. Looking back.
Do you approve or disapprove of the job Donald Trump did when he was president do you want to guess no 47 percent approve 50 percent disapprove negative three looking back on how things were when he left with everybody locked in their houses and people dying every

day by the thousands and unemployment at 9% and the stock market in the toilet and the

attempted coup.

Looking back on all that, people say, you know, actually, yeah, havesies.

It's really 50-50 with Trump.

It wasn't so bad.

We're resilient people.

Amazing. Amazing.
Good to see you amanda always good catching up talk to you later bye all right and now we are back for the second half of the show and to

get rid of that jvl darkness that he tried to bring into my mood i brought in my good friend

from protect democracy ben radersdorf who is the editor of our newsletter if you can keep it ben

Thank you. Wow, what a treat to be on the pod.
Yeah, so this is great. So those of you who may be new to Protect Democracy, I wanted you to get to know Ben because every week he puts out a newsletter talking about the work that we do to show up our institutions, have explainers about things that are in the news.
And he has such a good eye for what people need to know. So I just wanted you to come on and talk a little bit about why you started doing this newsletter and what you're trying to accomplish with it, in addition to asking all of these great bulwark people to subscribe.
Amazing. Well, it's such a good place to start.
So I, I came to this work, you know, unlike Amanda, I'm not, I'm not really a political animal. I don't, I don't have a political background.
I used to work in foreign policy and I used to work back when we thought of, you know, here in the U.S., we thought of democratic backsliding as an other country's problem. Obviously, that didn't last.
But it's something that we see and something that I, you know, I feel like I saw all around the world. But really, we know this to be true, you know, compared to political scientists.
I'll tell you the same thing. And that countries that survive moments of democratic crisis and backsliding of an authoritarian threat, one of the key things that distinguishes all of them is that you have a big cross ideological coalition, you know, sort of multi-sectoral, right? So people who disagree with each other politically, but also different types of people, you know, religious groups, civil society groups, business leaders, journalists, right? If all of those groups come together and form, you know, what we think of as cross ideological pro-democracy coalition, then those democracies tend to survive.
So places like Poland or Czech Republic. This is something that I think in our circles, we use the phrase pro-democracy coalition a lot.
What does that actually mean? Because I ask people this all the time. I get different answers and it's kind of vague.
And I think it's really important that we do define it because, you know, what, what, what are the things that hold us together? Like what makes this thing work? And I'll just bring this other point into the Sarah Longwell, who of course is a publisher of the Bullwark. She often talks about the biggest coalition in America right now is the anti-Trump coalition.
Yeah. My personal view is that is true.
Yes. But in order for the larger project to be successful, and by that larger project, I mean, America, not just going from election to election, that anti-Trump faction, which is turned up in election after election, needs to be translated into something affirmative, right, that keeps us together.
I think that's the quote unquote, pro-democracy coalition, but I couldn't give you an easy answer for what that is, who gets to be in it, and why. Yeah, I think of, in short, the pro-democracy coalition is a group of people that come together agreeing to disagree.
By that, I mean, in a democracy, we all have different viewpoints, policy preferences, values, right? You know, you and I might disagree on tax policy or social issues or other things. And that's okay.
That's healthy, right? If we all agreed on everything, we wouldn't need democracy in the first place. So the pro-democracy coalition, I think of that as, you know, it's the group of us who see that as important, right, who see our differences of policy or values as part of what we're, you know, we're all doing this democracy thing for.
And we want to come together to defend it, we want to defend our right to disagree, peacefully, fairly through fair processes, like, like elections, or through representative government. And, you know, we know that sometimes we're going to win win and sometimes we're going to lose, but the system, the institutions that allow us to disagree and work through those differences is more important than getting what we want.
And I think that's like, you know, if there's another side to this, that's what we're sort of, we're losing for a lot of voters is they're starting to see, you know, mine, what I want to see, my values, my priorities. It's a win or die kind of mindset.
And so if there's an opposite to a pro-democracy coalition, it's whatever, whatever group of people are trying to get what they want out of politics at any cost, even if it means burning our system down. So when talking about how keeping the right to disagree is important to democracy, I know this is a subject that we touch on a lot in the newsletter in our work, and sort of how do we distinguish between regular political disagreements and what is actually a threat to democracy, right? Because the democracy as an institution protects our right to disagree.
And so we've talked about that a lot with the authoritarian playbook, and that these are the certain threats to democracy when, you know, we no longer have rule of law, people don't respect election outcomes, because those are the things that protect the rights to disagree. And I know you cover that kind of stuff all the time.
But it's interesting, because it is important to continually explain that through the frame of public events. Yeah, I think that's right.
And something else I think that makes authoritarianism, at least in the 21st century, kind of hard to deal with is that modern autocrats have gotten really good at using the sort of language of democracy or the institutions of democracy as a smokescreen, right? So one example, if you look at Vladimir Putin, he still holds elections, right? They're not real, they're not free, they're not fair, there's no chance anybody else is going to win, but he still goes through the motions. And we see that in more subtle, sort of less direct ways here in the US where it can be genuinely hard to distinguish, you know, what is a good faith application of our democracy, of the rule of law, you know, so something like the prosecution of a political leader, right? So all the evidence we have about Donald Trump's criminal cases is that these are being pursued fairly independently, apolitically by prosecutors who've been tasked by our system to make those decisions independently.
That can be hard to distinguish that from something like, you know, a deliberately weaponized use of the Department of Justice to go after your enemies, right? And autocrats, Trump included, are really good at sort of using the language to confuse, to sort of throw up chaff, throw up smoke screens. So we unfortunately do live in a time where people have to, they have to be able to understand this stuff.
They have to know how something like Department of Justice independence works, right? What the guardrails are in place, what the sort of wonky legalese, like what this all means, because we all, you know, to be an informed citizen in our democracy today, we have to be able to separate out those sort of good faith applications of the rule of law from its sort of deliberate abuses and weaponization. Does that make sense? I think it makes perfect sense.
But I think talking more about what you're covering in the news, like what is on your eye this week? Because it is our task to stop the rise of authoritarianism here at home. That is a big abstract thing, but it is constantly interpreted through daily events.
I mean, things that are coming out of the mouths of a presidential candidate, things that House Republicans, it's my interpretation now with the threatening more investigations into Hunter Biden after he has already been convicted in court, going after Merrick Garland for contempt, continuing these threats without ever producing any real evidence over the past year. And so I know that's something you are going to be keeping an eye on.
But what else is coming down the pike? Like, what are these other examples of instances of authoritarian threats that present themselves that you're explaining? Just this week, I think we have a really good example of, we dive this week into some of the more administrative sort of bureaucratic tactics that Trump and his supporters are proposing that they want to use to advance their agenda. So things like Schedule F, which folks have probably heard of, I'm curious how many of us could actually define what it means, what it basically is.
I think our listeners are familiar, but in your explanation, tell me why is Schedule F an authoritarian threat? Because even when I read this, I was a little skeptical, like, okay, this is reclassification of government workers, we have a lot already. So what? Of course, I changed my mind once I delved into a little bit more, but I want you to explain why it is actually authoritarian and not just, you know, we're shrinking the size of government and there's too much waste, fraud and abuse.
Totally. And then, you know, it's again, it's framed in a way that sounds perfectly legitimate, perfectly defensible.
What this is, is a civil service purge. Essentially, every democracy around the world, every, certainly every modern, healthy one has something called a civil service.
And the idea is for the sort of day-to-day functions of government, right? That processing of your taxes or mailing your social security checks or all those sort of things, that those should be- Monitoring the weather. Right.
Or, you know, keeping the air travel safe, right? Or, you know, road infrastructure kind of things. Exactly, exactly.
Is that a problem in California where you are? We've got a little bit of that, a little bit of that. But so all these things, these sort of, you know, bureaucratic tasks, and I know bureaucratic is often seen as an insult.
But the reality is we're a big, complicated country, it takes a lot to run this country, no matter, no matter how big or small you think government is, It does take sort of serious professionals who are going to work every day to operate it. And every modern democracy around the world has decided that those tasks, there shouldn't be political cronies.
Right. We want experts who are hired on the merits because they're the best at fighting wildfires or the best at keeping air traffic control safe.
And that's worked really well. Right.
It's worked so well that we now we generally don't see it. None of us really think about, okay, is my tomatoes going to poison us? Because we trust that the FDA, you know, serious scientists there are keeping our food supply safe.
The FDA is not a place you want to be politicized with a bunch of people are screened for political loyalty, not actual expertise. I mean, not only your food, but I, number one, we want our drugs to be safe.
Number one. Number two, it's a huge part of the economy.
I mean, we are the gold standard when it comes to pharmaceuticals. For good, you know, we can have a whole discussion about pharmaceuticals and how those have flooded the streets.
That said, if we can't trust the standards that they're safe and healthy for some level, that is going to have just tremendous trickle down effects. That's just, you know, one instance that has really freaked me out as I've delved in more to this.
Totally. And, you know, I think about it as, you know, if you're a senior relying on your social security check arriving on time, do you want it to be somebody who is there because it's their career, it's their job, this is what they do? Or do you want somebody who got that job as part of political spoils? And that's how it used to be.
If you look back in the 1800s, that's how federal government positions were appointed. You were a party machine apparatchnik for a leader, and then you'd get sort of a government largesass job.
We don't want to go back to that. That was really bad.
And that's what Schedule F essentially proposes. But the key thing is the reason why Trump and his supporters are pursuing this is they want to use that as a tool to go after their enemies, right? If you fill the bureaucracy with political loyalists, then when Trump says, you know what, those Californians, they voted against me, I think we should just go ahead and let the wildfires burn, right? That's much easier for him to do if it's cronies in those positions, not, you know, professional wildfire scientists.
It's worth spending another second on that point, because a lot of the coverage about Schedule F takes aside, I don't to say takes a side, but views it from the perspective of the civil servant that gets fired, which is bad, right? It sucks to be terminated from your job for no reason, because you don't want to go along with these loyalty tests or for, you know, Donald Trump says, I want bleaching my vaccines, put it in there. And they say, no, that's a totally hypothetical example.
But it's the other side of it is who comes in after that and this is a backdoor way to balloon political appointees of which another surprising stat i didn't realize so a lot of countries have political appointees like that's a natural thing the executive comes in he gets to pick his people but we as a percentage have way more than other stable democracies i mean 4 000 political appointees is a lot way a lot. Way more.
And I certainly, like, you should be able to pick your people, but I didn't realize to what degree that dictates all across the federal agencies and how much they burrow in. And, like, that is a problem.
Maybe we should be shrinking back the political appointees and not making more people political appointees. Maybe that's where we should go.
Right. And, you know, I don't think anybody disagrees that the decision making positions should be reflecting the priorities of the administration.
Right. But that's not what these guys are proposing.
Well, Ben, I've had to ask you this because in the space, you know, I've been at Protect Democracy about a year. I actually think I'm coming up on my one year anniversary anniversary.
You've been here longer. And people always ask me, working in this space, isn't it tough? Like, I know you're editing the newsletter going through, like, you know, the Trump trials and what will it mean for the rule of law? And are we tipping on the edge of autocracy? And if Trump wins, what does that mean for the second term? Like, this is heavy stuff.
But somehow you are like a ray of California sunshine. You are always so enthusiastic and ready to go.
How? Yeah, I got three things. One, I do think it really helps that I don't live in DC and protect democracy.
We're all across the country. We're in like 26 states.
And just that alone, I think makes us a much more optimistic crowd because we're out, you know, and we see all the good things about this country, not just the rot in our politics right now. Number two, I get to work with amazing people, you know, people like Amanda.
And we are seeing this whole idea of a cross-ideological pro-democracy coalition. It's happening at Protect Democracy, right? Amanda and And we probably disagree on like 90% of things that the Congress would have voted on in the before times, right? And Amanda is so amazing to work with.
And there's so many people like that. And that's really inspiring that that can happen.
But the third one, and this is the one that I, you know, I'm always encouraging people who work in our space to go find some aspect of our democracy that is not this. So for me, I live in California, and our big problem is housing.
It's a thing that's honestly increasingly happening elsewhere across the country, too. I like to say California doesn't have different problems.
We just get them first. So I grew up in the Midwest, worked on the East Coast.
California is just always kind of an afterthought. From my perspective, it's probably because I came up through Republican politics and is like natural to write California off as okay, they're a bunch of liberals.
Nobody really has to pay attention to them. But now I've been thinking about it more.
It's like, well, Texas has been able to establish itself as such a big national presence because it's a big state with a lot of people. Why doesn't California get the love? I mean, you know, again, we're cutting edge in good ways and bad, right? We're always sort of our own creature.
But the thing that really gives me hope, you know, so I, on nights and weekends, the thing that I'm pretty involved in is zoning reform and housing reform. And what that means, which is so boring.
Wait, say that again. On nights and weekends, I get involved with zoning reform and housing reform.
Is this not what everybody else does outside of their policy day job? This is why Ben is so great to work with. But the point is what's happening here in California and we're actually seeing this across the country is that when a problem like a housing crisis you know we just we've underbuilt homes by like 4 million homes in this country, some astronomical number, which is why everybody's rents have gone up, which is why nobody can afford a house anymore.
Honestly, wherever you live, even if you don't live in California. But what's what's happening, at least here, is there is this sort of wacky cross ideological, very diverse coalitions coming together to sort of seriously solve the problem.
I live in Sacramento, where the city just implemented a massive new zoning reform. We totally got rid of single-family zoning.
We've done all these things to make new multifamily housing much more affordable, much more accessible. And the key is when you get involved in something like that, and you go down to your city hall and you your public comment, you meet your city council member, at least on the micro level, our democracy still totally works.
Right. And when you see the process going through what it's supposed to be and actually helping make people's lives better, it's a reminder that, you know, this is what we can expect from from our democracy writ large.
Right. From Washington.
And I believe we can make that happen together. All right.
Well, listeners, that is your cue to move to California where town hall meetings are actually fun and nice. The weather is really nice.
Ben, I am so lucky to work with you. Listeners, Tim Miller will be back on Monday.
There will not be a show tomorrow, but that does not mean he's not working because I am sure that he is crawling the comments on YouTube, Substack, and all the places where available. Please talk to him.
Please leave him nice notes and tell him how much you want him

back immediately on Monday, and we will all be here for him. Ben, thank you very much for joining

us. Amanda, such a treat to see you.
Go sign up for our newsletter, ifyoucankeepit.org. Alright guys, you heard the man.
Talk to you later. California No sign of party California No sign of party In the city of Berlin In the city of good old ones In the city of Compton We keepin' it rockin' We keepin' it rockin' Now let me welcome everybody to the wild, wild west A state that's untouchable like Elliot Ness The track hits your eardrum like a slug to your chest Like a vest for your Jimmy in the city of sex We in that sunshine state where the bomb ass him be The state where you'll never find a dance floor empty And pimp speed on a mission for them greens Lean, mean, money making machines serving fiends I've been in the game for ten years making rap tunes Ever since Hunnies was wearing Sassoon Now it's 95 and they clock me and watch me diamond shining Looking like I robbed Liberace It's all good from Diego to the Bay Your city is the bomb if your city making pain Throw up a finger if you feel the same way Straight putting it down for California, yeah California I can lose how to party

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