What is Elon Musk Doing to America Today & What Can You Do About it? Calm News with Jessica Yellin

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Speaker 4 Hi, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

Speaker 4 Today we have a conversation, an episode of calm news, but I will tell you right off the bat that I'm not feeling super calm this morning.

Speaker 4 We have have some really, really serious, important things to talk to you about today.

Speaker 4 As you well know, our dear friend Jessica Yellen is here with us to talk us through what's going on right now in this moment in our country, which is

Speaker 4 very serious.

Speaker 4 We are

Speaker 4 going to get through this together. We are going to, as my sister told me this morning, we're going to

Speaker 4 not turn away from this, but we're also not going to leave you with it, with nothing to do. We are going to take in what's happening in the country.

Speaker 4 We are going to metabolize it, process it, and give us all something to do so we do not feel helpless because we are not helpless. And if we believe we are,

Speaker 2 then we are.

Speaker 4 If we believe we aren't, then we aren't. So we will give you something to do after you take in this news.

Speaker 4 Jessica and Amanda and I had a plan yesterday of what to talk about today.

Speaker 4 And then Jessica texted us this morning and said,

Speaker 4 What we have to talk about today, what's happening right now, is

Speaker 4 of maximum importance,

Speaker 4 and we have to change course and talk about the breaking news.

Speaker 3 I'm going to have us do one breath before we go into the news. Jessica tells us: four in, five hold, eight out.
Okay,

Speaker 2 Hold.

Speaker 2 Exhale.

Speaker 4 So Jessica, Amanda, is there anything you want to say before we start?

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 3 Let's go to Jessica.

Speaker 4 Okay. Go ahead, Jessica.

Speaker 2 May I just say hi? Oh, hi. You look fantastic today.
I dig your straight hair. I just need one human moment before we jump into all this.
Is that okay?

Speaker 4 Jessica, the worse the news gets, the more straight you'll see my hair because I like to wake up and control what I can control.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 4 And come straight and get it.

Speaker 2 My hair is curly right now, and I'm like, oh, it's too out of control. I need to go deal with that.

Speaker 4 That's a whole thing.

Speaker 3 You should help us get through.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 So we are at a very strange juncture in American history. We've certainly never seen anything like what we're about to talk about in the modern era.

Speaker 2 And because what we're talking about is so centered around tech i don't think we've ever seen anything like this right now a team of essentially hackers is inside the pipes of government accessing some of the most sensitive data we have They work for Doge.

Speaker 2 That's the government efficiency body Trump set up under Elon Musk, although the White House now says that Musk isn't really in charge of Doge. And I'll come back to that in just a minute.

Speaker 2 So I think today we should talk about what Doge is reportedly accessing, what Doge seems to be doing with this information, how little transparency there is, and the chilling implications of all this, frankly, for the country, for federal workers, and for each one of us personally.

Speaker 2 So before we get into the big topics, I just want to do a quick aside. In the last 24, 36 hours, the White House has gone to court and told a judge that Elon Musk doesn't run Doge.

Speaker 2 They claim that he might not even be an employee of Doge, which is wild because Trump originally said he was setting up Doge under Musk. Musk talks about Doge as if it's his fiefdom.

Speaker 2 It's staffed by Musk allies. I mean, the levels of bizarro go on, but they're in court trying to create this perception of distance for legal reasons.
And so I just want to acknowledge that.

Speaker 2 And we're acknowledging that throughout this conversation by stating this here. Okay, so here's what we know about Doge.

Speaker 2 The lieutenants running it are in different agencies, and they are accessing some of the most highly protected sensitive data there is that includes personal identifying information about Americans.

Speaker 2 This could include our social security numbers, birth dates, income, health conditions, addresses, like all the things identity thieves need to get to us.

Speaker 2 It also gives them visibility into the money flows that undergird our financial system, information flows, who's talking to whom.

Speaker 2 They have real visibility into the guts of our infrastructure that keep us functioning. And they say they're rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse.

Speaker 2 But to be real, their decisions to date are so careless and arbitrary.

Speaker 2 Sources I talk to say that it's wise for all of us to be deeply concerned about what they're doing with this data and to what end they're gathering it.

Speaker 2 We do know that one component of this is that they have been using some of their access to make arbitrary and careless mass firings of government workers that multiple sources have said to me put vital services at risk, that could undermine some of the basic functions that keep our society working.

Speaker 2 People have described it as potentially catastrophic.

Speaker 2 And that's just one piece of what they're doing with this data.

Speaker 2 We are in a very vulnerable position.

Speaker 2 And I think because of the strange mix of realities right now, with Trump's newness to office again, his power over the party controlling Congress right now, and just sort of the shock of what's going on, official Washington is sort of watching this without doing much to try and stop it.

Speaker 3 Jessica, when I hear you say that, the scenario I'm imagining there.

Speaker 3 from a worst case scenario is that this isn't even remotely about Trump, that this could be a scenario in which Elon paid for Trump to be elected so that Elon could have the power to hold this entire country hostage.

Speaker 3 If you have access to every bit of information and can turn anything on and off,

Speaker 3 then

Speaker 3 he doesn't need anyone's approval for anything.

Speaker 2 It's possible. We just don't know what he's actually accessing.
And I would caution about the turn anything on and off. We just don't know.

Speaker 2 Like, Like one of the beautiful things about our government is that it's so fragmented.

Speaker 2 The system that controls the Department of Education is different from the system that controls Social Security, right?

Speaker 2 It would be hard to map it in a way you could definitely turn everything on and off.

Speaker 2 But is that possible? It seems that he's gaining a level of information that makes us extraordinarily vulnerable to his personal whims.

Speaker 2 And it's not clear, does Trump even understand what they're doing or is capable of doing? Do members of Congress? So it puts us in a extremely vulnerable position with blinders on.

Speaker 2 We just don't know what's happening.

Speaker 3 Does it include Department of Defense and national security agencies?

Speaker 2 I don't have information that they are inside the DOD yet. Trump has said I want to send them to the Pentagon next.
So I don't. have personal reporting that they are, and I haven't seen that.

Speaker 2 They are inside Social Security Administration, and there is a dust up there because they wanted to access sort of the most protected of the most protected of the most protected information that very few people have access to, even the most high-ranking, long-serving, only a few can access it.

Speaker 2 They demanded access to that and somebody resigned over that.

Speaker 2 Social Security Administration, the prior administrator of Social Security Administration, Democratic Governor Martin O'Malley, is saying publicly, this is such a fragile system, they can break it.

Speaker 2 So part of the concern is not only that, in some sort of, you know, evil mastermind, he wants to wrest control of it, which is a possibility we can talk about, but also that these are just 20-something kids who are going in sloppily and could just break things that have been carefully, but, you know, jerry-rigged together for many years in a way.

Speaker 2 Social Security, IRS, and Treasury. They've demanded access to the most sensitive systems in all three entities that undergird our payment system, right?

Speaker 2 If you don't get your social security checks, if information at the IRS is exposed, you know, if our payment system at Treasury goes offline,

Speaker 2 chaos.

Speaker 3 And to be clear, the whole mandate was efficiency within the agency.

Speaker 3 And if you were trying to figure out how to make the systems more efficient in terms of the employees and what they were doing, you would not need access

Speaker 3 to

Speaker 3 every American's personal information in order to do that.

Speaker 2 I've talked to software programmers who say these are not the ways, there are simpler ways to go at doing these things, right?

Speaker 2 So it's a level of access they're demanding that defies comprehension given their mandate.

Speaker 2 Is it possible that what they're trying to do is look for social security checks that are going out in duplicate? Yes.

Speaker 2 Is it possible that they're looking for excessive payments and trying to map things against each other? It is possible.

Speaker 2 It's that they're going in at it in a way that's so sloppy and so, as far as we know, they're just not using the normal protocols you use to ensure that everything's kept safe.

Speaker 2 And it's unclear why they need this much access. So that's why it's raising alarms.
We don't know what they're doing with that.

Speaker 2 What they have done so far with it is make these lists of people to fire, disseminated those lists to agencies, and ordered people to fire this list of people regardless of how effective they are, how valuable they are.

Speaker 2 It's indiscriminate, it seems. And so that's the first action we actually know they're taking based on the information they're gleaning.

Speaker 4 So a bunch of 20-year-old hackers now have claimed and are using the power to fire whoever they want and to access whatever information about individual Americans or branches of government?

Speaker 4 And has there ever been a time in history when a private citizen has this much access or power?

Speaker 2 I think about the Gilded Age. Did, you know, the robber barons of the Gilded Age have a level of power and knowledge and access?

Speaker 2 Yes, that was undemocratic, un-American, yes. But they didn't have the power of technology that gives you this far-reaching visual into everything.

Speaker 2 So, in any case, this is a level of,

Speaker 2 I mean, mean, I think what they're doing is it's an assault on our government from within and by private individuals.

Speaker 2 I think we should talk about what they're doing, like who they're firing or how this might affect us and then why they might be doing this. Can I just adjust one thing you said, Glennon, which is

Speaker 2 at this stage, what we know is they have visibility into huge pools of data that contain people's personal information.

Speaker 2 We don't have any so far evidence that they've looked for any one person's info or tried to take it out or that they're using it to surveil or target people.

Speaker 2 One could hypothesize that they can, but so far there's no evidence that's happening.

Speaker 3 And one could extrapolate from the fact that he has made his money. Tesla is a car company.
It's not really a car company. It's a data company.

Speaker 3 They follow everything you do and then they sell the data to people,

Speaker 3 as is our friend over in PayPal. If he's in there and has paid for that access, it is not a wild leap to suggest that he is also going to use any information gleaned for his own personal benefit.

Speaker 2 Well, let's talk about what the possible theories are that give structure to this, because I think that helps us see this more broadly.

Speaker 2 Do you want to talk about who's been fired for a minute so people understand, or do you want to leap to the why?

Speaker 3 I mean, I think it's important to discuss that. I think there's a perception.
I live in D.C. It is

Speaker 3 a five-alarm fire here. It is scary.
It's awful. I don't know a household that is not impacted by this.
And I think there's a perception that it is just a DC issue and therefore America doesn't care.

Speaker 3 But I think it's really important to talk about how only 15% of federal employees are in DC and 83% are throughout the rest of the country and are going to be, or not right now, but will feel the impacts of this in their economies and their personal lives very shortly.

Speaker 2 I mean, I know of nonprofits that have dramatically scaled back what they're offering. There are labs that have shut down around the country.

Speaker 2 I've talked to people at a power plant in the Pacific Northwest that powers one-third of the grid to the Pacific Northwest. They think it's the firings that have hit them because of this.

Speaker 2 They think it'll be catastrophic potentially. grid could go down, et cetera.

Speaker 2 Basically, what happened is the Doge guys, who are these kids, put out lists of and targeted certain areas of government and said, fire all your probationary employees.

Speaker 2 Now, probationary means you've been in your job for one to two years, but that could lead one to conclude that these are new to government, kids out of college that aren't that valuable.

Speaker 2 No, I've talked. to people who've had to let go 25-year veterans of their department who they consider vital, but who just got a promotion.

Speaker 2 And since you got a promotion, you're considered probationary in that new role for one to two years. And this was a valuable wildland firefighter.

Speaker 2 Among the people that they have fired are wildland firefighters we rely on in the West to come out and fight the fires in this season.

Speaker 2 We are apparently already short-staffed, and I've talked to multiple managers who are panicked about fire season. They've also let go of an incoming class of disease detectives at the CDC.

Speaker 2 They're all over in all our states and help monitor incidence of new diseases, for example, bird flu. And they're our first alert when bird flu is spreading, right? And we need to do something.

Speaker 2 There's endless examples of different categories of people in what are vital services, power plants that provide energy. The National Park Service has just had a massacre where people have just...

Speaker 2 The number of people fired, and these are your amazing park ranger who lives in the forest and is the only person who does like the only EMT in a national park.

Speaker 2 And they double as firefighters in the fire season often. The other part of it that's just brutal is when they were let go, their managers have to say poor performance,

Speaker 2 even if their last review was exceptional.

Speaker 2 And for many people in some states, that means they cannot collect unemployment. Oh my God.
And then for the people in the National Park Service, they also live in the park.

Speaker 2 So they lose their salary, can't collect unemployment, and they're homeless.

Speaker 4 Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 And another example of how this is just reckless and is actually making us less safe is what happened at the National Nuclear Security Administration. Can you talk about that?

Speaker 3 These are the people who oversee our like nuclear stockpiles. Really important to keep this safe and not be dangerous.
They sacked them.

Speaker 3 Then after the fact realized, oh shit, nuclear stockpiles might be an important thing to have people working for.

Speaker 3 And we're trying to get it back, but can't even like get the people back quickly enough. So they're breaking it before they know if it's important or not.

Speaker 2 Yes, there's a method to that madness. I'll add two more, just one more category, and then we can talk about the why.

Speaker 2 They've also fired all the sort of consumer watchdogs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who are crucial to sort of defending consumers against corporate overreach.

Speaker 2 And now I've heard as of this morning, they're starting to target people at the FDIC,

Speaker 2 which is the banking regulators. They're letting go of the people who watch big business on our behalf.

Speaker 3 And also, this is important for individual people. The FDIC for you, if your bank goes under, okay, and you have money in your bank, the FDIC insures bank accounts for up to $250,000.

Speaker 3 If FDIC goes away and your bank crashes, you get nothing.

Speaker 3 Like these are real impacts to real people.

Speaker 2 And it puts our whole financial system at risk, right? Because it's instability. And, you know, we have to think about what's this about? Why are they doing this?

Speaker 4 And before we do that, before we get to the why, in addition to all of these

Speaker 4 apparently indiscriminate firings that are changing lives, isn't there also a sort of ethos being injected into all of these departments where they are encouraging people to turn each other in and so distrust kind of McCarthyism-esque.

Speaker 4 Is this what's happening?

Speaker 2 Totally. So I am in contact endlessly with federal workers who are now feeling so paranoid.
They have been warned.

Speaker 2 They've gotten emails and memos saying, if you know anybody, so the government put out this edict. The Trump administration put out an edict saying anything with DEI must go.

Speaker 2 And they said, we also are aware that some of you will try to hide DEI under under other language.

Speaker 2 So alert to everyone, if one of your colleagues is secretly doing a DEI program that they've disguised as another language, you must turn them in. Wow.

Speaker 2 And they've also been told that software has been installed on all their devices that's tracking their work, watching them on Teams, watching everything they do.

Speaker 2 I have reported this out by talking to a lot of cybersecurity experts who say it would be very hard to track them like that, but they're instilling a culture of fear and suspicion. Wow.

Speaker 3 And pseudo-loyalty tests.

Speaker 3 Like I have friends in national intelligence who from the director of national intelligence have sent emails out reminding you it's your responsibility to carry out the priorities of the president.

Speaker 3 And if you're aware of any subversion of the president, here's where you turn them in. Not your loyalty is to the Constitution.
Your loyalty is to the best interests of the nation.

Speaker 3 Your loyalty is to the priorities of the president. And here's where you turn your people in.
Okay.

Speaker 4 And who's sending those emails?

Speaker 3 The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is the one that I'm referring to.

Speaker 4 So Jessica, what do you hear in that? Because that is different than your loyalty is to the Constitution.

Speaker 2 So I've heard throughout the agencies ridiculous loyalty tests, like in the National Park Service, the head park ranger has to attest that the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America.

Speaker 2 There was another one like that that was ridiculous, you know, a level of absurdity you can't believe, right?

Speaker 2 And it's sort of catching people off guard because it's so bizarre, un-American, and also silly.

Speaker 4 But it's a loyalty test. It's a smart way.
That sounds silly, but it's actually not. It's saying, whose side are you on?

Speaker 2 Whose truth are you going to accept? Yeah.

Speaker 3 And are you going to accept the idea that there will be loyalty? That is a very slippery slope.

Speaker 3 Even the idea of saying, you can go to hell with any kind of loyalty test, even if I do follow you, this is an un-American thing and I'm not going about it.

Speaker 3 Even that is, because the firing stuff is not only arbitrary and reckless and making us less safe, it also has a real flavor of personal revenge and retribution.

Speaker 3 In the FBI, it was forced to hand over a list of every single person who had ever touched the January 6th cases.

Speaker 3 So this is the biggest DOJ investigation in history, down to like the lowest level filing clerk who had to upload a piece of evidence are on a list that was handed to the Trump administration.

Speaker 3 And one can only surmise for the purpose of trying to identify who those people are and whether they will continue to have a role in government.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I've heard of people who've been asked also, you know, do you think Trump won the 2020 election? And they have to attest that he did in their mind, that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 I also want to say some perspective. It is possible Trump is at the apex of his power right now.
They haven't yet gotten to the budget bill where he's going to lose Republican support, quite possibly.

Speaker 2 His coalition could fray right now, what we're discussing, this is on a path that can't be stopped. It's possible that the wheels could come off the bus.

Speaker 2 So I want to give people a sense: like, horror isn't inevitable.

Speaker 4 Right.

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Speaker 4 Jessica, you know, the old Edmund Burke quote: the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

Speaker 4 Where is the other side? Where are our checks and balances? If our home is being invaded, where are the people in charge? Where are the Democrats? Where are the judges? Is there any resistance?

Speaker 2 Yes. So multiple attorneys general have formed kind of coalitions and they've brought suits against Doge on behalf of the people of their states.

Speaker 2 And so have associations and there are a lot of lawsuits. The judges have so far shown concern about the how and the what.
In other words,

Speaker 2 what is Doge getting into and how are they getting getting into it? What is the Trump administration trying to freeze and how are they trying to freeze it?

Speaker 2 Where the courts have not been willing to say no, it looks like they're unwilling to say no to

Speaker 2 can Doge be stopped as an entity. So the Attorneys General, for example, brought two lawsuits.
Doge one was against Doge getting access to that sensitive payment system at the Treasury Department.

Speaker 2 And the judges said, we're putting a hold on that. That doesn't seem right.

Speaker 2 The attorneys general also brought a case saying Doge as an entity is illegitimate and should not exist and should not be getting access in the ways it does.

Speaker 2 And so far, they argued the case a day before we're recording this.

Speaker 2 In the hearings, it sounded like the judge was not inclined to agree that that judge who was appointed by Barack Obama felt that Doge, her question suggested Doge is legit.

Speaker 2 The issue might be how it does does its work. So that's one thing.
Where are the Democrats? Well, they're not in power. They can't control Congress, right?

Speaker 2 I've heard, you know, from my reporting that a lot of them think we're not going to be able to get anything done until things start to break and until red state senators are also in pain and their citizens are in pain and they're willing to work with Democrats.

Speaker 2 The Republicans so far have mostly embraced what's happening as a gift from the world's most brilliant and able engineer?

Speaker 2 This is the man, you know, they'd say who invented Tesla and SpaceX, and now he wants to come fix the government for free, and we should let him.

Speaker 2 That's their view. The White House opened the door, so who's going to stop it?

Speaker 2 In fact, it's Project 2025's dream because Moscow's executing on their will in a way nobody could if they didn't have access to just sort of tech know-how.

Speaker 4 Can we get to the why of all of this?

Speaker 4 What is the most educated guess for why this is happening? Because it's not an accident. They're not just thoughtlessly breaking before they can fix.
This is all purposeful.

Speaker 4 So why do you think that this is happening? What's their goal?

Speaker 2 There are three theories about this from the people I, you know, talk to.

Speaker 2 One is this is a strategy that in tech world, the most efficient way to change a broken system is to go in and rapidly fire people at the greatest scale possible.

Speaker 2 And when you start to see what breaks, and you rush in and fill those holes, right? As something springs a leak, you patch that leak.

Speaker 2 And the theory is this is the way you can cut the furthest, the fastest.

Speaker 2 Obviously, when you're doing that to Twitter, an app nobody needs, it's very different from when you're doing that to firefighters or disease detectives or our National Intelligence Service.

Speaker 2 It's a level of unconcern about impact on human lives that's shocking.

Speaker 2 So that's just like efficiency theory. Second theory is privatized theory

Speaker 2 that what they really want to do is break government so badly that we, the public, lose faith in government. Your social security checks stop coming, for example.

Speaker 2 Then Then you reach a point where you're so desperate and panicked that you say, anybody who will fix this is a blessing. Please bring in a solution.

Speaker 2 And then they rush in with a privatization solution, right? Like Musk creates a company, Peter Deal, whatever creates a company that.

Speaker 2 privatizes social security checks and we're grateful because now the check is showing up again, right?

Speaker 3 And who better to create that company than the person who already has access to every bit of data needed to establish that company?

Speaker 4 Is it a little too cute?

Speaker 3 And then we're like, wait, why are there five tech execs sitting right behind the president during the inauguration? This is interesting.

Speaker 2 So there is a theory that they want to either privatize by putting all federal payments on X, using X as the default payment system for America, or they want to put America on the blockchain and move to cryptocurrency, right?

Speaker 2 Those are two out there theories that may or may not be that out there.

Speaker 2 So we did efficiency and privatize. The third and final theory about what's going on here is something that sounds so wild.

Speaker 2 A week ago, I would have said this sounds too conspiracy theory to talk about.

Speaker 2 But here we are, is the CEO nation state theory, which is that

Speaker 2 these tech oligarchs actually envision themselves as more able leaders than anybody else on earth, and that the goal is to break democracy, end America,

Speaker 2 reform ourselves into nation states run by CEO kings.

Speaker 2 And this is all based on a book and a quote-unquote philosopher, I don't know, that they've been obsessed with for a while, who writes about how the world would work better with these oligarch innovators, unfettered by regulation, free to create and innovate tech at will.

Speaker 2 They would let us live in these, you know, mini nation states where we have a nice life, and then they get to do whatever they want free of regulation. Bye-bye, democracy.

Speaker 4 Yeah. So if you were planning that.

Speaker 4 And if you were a Peter Thiel or a Musk and you'd been planning this for a very long time and you'd find your candidate, right, somebody who could put out as like a dummy leader, like, you know, the evangelicals did with Reagan or however this plays out.

Speaker 4 And you could control him.

Speaker 4 You might pitch that to him over time. You might fund his campaign.
He might say the quiet part out loud every once in a while, like, don't worry, you won't have to vote again. We're fixing this.

Speaker 4 Right? Does this all sound possible?

Speaker 3 You also might buy a media company even before you start that, so you can control the way that people consume the news. Right.

Speaker 4 So when you hear that,

Speaker 4 does that resonate with you as possibly true or no?

Speaker 2 I think the media people is crucial. I personally, if I had to sort of, what do I believe? I think that it's more likely that J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance is this crucial linchpin between the Project 2025 ideologues who have a technocrats understanding of government and where the roadblocks are and has paired them with the tech oligarchs to sort of blow through the guts, right?

Speaker 2 And they can both execute on their will and that Trump doesn't even understand what's going on.

Speaker 3 No, he's just trying to stay out of jail and pay off his debt.

Speaker 2 He thinks he's Mr. Powerful, like running the country and he's got the most wealthy, powerful man in the world as his new buddy.

Speaker 3 But what do you make of that theory?

Speaker 3 Because it's really hard to know anything about history history and not be tracking like

Speaker 3 line for line the fascism overlays of all of this so what do you make of what's happening with Russia what's happening with Vance's speeches

Speaker 3 what's happening with Musk outreach to far right in Germany like there is a global play here

Speaker 3 that is a very strong thread throughout what they're doing. So what are people making of that in connection with what's happening in America?

Speaker 4 And can you assume, Jessica, that we don't know what she was just saying? Like, yes.

Speaker 3 Oh, sorry. Sorry.

Speaker 4 No, no, no, no. That's great.
I just want to make sure that we're explaining what actually is happening with Russia.

Speaker 2 So Vice President J.D. Vance, who in America is quite private, like we don't see him much, is really crucial in the middle of all this as the linchpin connector.

Speaker 2 He was put in place by Peter Thiel, who was his mentor and financed him all through his career.

Speaker 2 And Peter Thiel is arguably the most powerful venture capitalist who has, among many things, created Palantir, which is this data company that does surveillance globally.

Speaker 2 So he has a lot of eyes on the world. He's also now very invested in drones and moving into military hardware, wants to create a defense contractor.

Speaker 2 He and Elon Musk go back to PayPal and they work very closely together. So when we say Musk, it also implies Thiel.

Speaker 3 I mean, the only reason that he was ever a senator is because Teal made the largest to date contribution to any political campaign ever and put him as a senator.

Speaker 2 And he was elected. Right.
The voters did choose him. He wrote this best-selling book that Hollywood embraced and liberals embraced as this great, you know, like he has an interesting trajectory.

Speaker 2 It's bizarre. So

Speaker 2 there is a lot of cooks that made him what he is. But yes, his number one patron is Peter Thiel.

Speaker 2 So J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance, who went to Yale Law School, is extremely bright and articulate, went to give a speech in Europe to the Munich Security Conference, which is sort of where foreign policy intellectuals and leaders gather to talk about global threats, alliances.

Speaker 2 It's like a... networking event for allies.

Speaker 2 And U.S. usually comes there and says, Europe, we've got your back.
Russia's a big threat. And then they talk about, is Russia or China the bigger threat? Variations on that.

Speaker 2 Instead, they thought J.D. Vance was coming to give a speech and that he would talk about the Ukraine war and how to wind down the Ukraine war.

Speaker 2 Instead, he showed up and said effectively, Europe, the greatest threat out there is not Russia.

Speaker 2 It is you, Europe, and your liberal rules that lead to censorship and oppression in your your countries and the amount of immigration you allow in your countries that's destroying Europe, your liberal values are your greatest threat to yourselves.

Speaker 2 This came after the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave remarks saying that Ukraine will not join NATO and Russia will sort of get what it wants in a peace deal there.

Speaker 2 Taken together, this was seen as a profound retreat from America's role in alliance with Europe as a bulwark against Russia and a real invitation to Russia that so panicked Europe, they held an emergency meeting.

Speaker 2 And leaders of Europe say we have to prepare for war because they believe the U.S. will not get their back and that once a peace deal is negotiated, Russia will invade another country.

Speaker 2 not Ukraine, but something in Europe.

Speaker 4 So this is another version of just rushing in and breaking something that has been carefully built, alliances that have been carefully built and are maintaining some level of balance and world peace, you know, as close as we can get to it.

Speaker 4 They're just rushing in and breaking all of that as well.

Speaker 2 Totally. And the one thing I forgot to add is that J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance also took a meeting with the AFD party in Germany, which is the modern heir to the far right, which one could call the Nazi Party, and did not meet with the liberal Democrats who are America's long allies and in power.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 this followed Musk making an address to this same far-right, Nazi-ish party.

Speaker 4 And Musk often making what appeared to be Nazi salutes and then saying that wasn't real, right?

Speaker 2 Right. He did this one that was like,

Speaker 2 I don't know what that was, if that wasn't a salute. Exactly.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 3 And I would say it doesn't fall into the category of breaking shit.

Speaker 3 There is nothing more strategic, thought out, premeditated than a talk to Europe, our strongest global ally in keeping a defense of democracy always and historically, and shifting from saying we're on your side to we're on their side.

Speaker 3 Right. Nothing could be more.

Speaker 3 This isn't an off the cuff, oh shit, I accidentally broke it. This is a change of the guard.

Speaker 3 And at the same time, on our side of the things, one of the first things that Pam Bondi did was get rid of the election influence force, which its whole objective is to insulate America's elections and safeguard them against interference from Russia, Iran, China.

Speaker 3 The saying of that, in connection with Musk wanting the far right to rise up in Germany, this is the thing that is the scariest.

Speaker 3 The reason Ukraine is important is not only because Ukrainians are important and and beautiful and vital, and that Ukraine is the wall towards the rest of Europe.

Speaker 3 That Ukraine falls, then something else falls, then something else falls. This is history.
This is how it happens. This is how Europe gets involved in a world war.
This is how we come to their safety.

Speaker 3 This is how it plays out.

Speaker 4 What do you hear when you hear all that, Jessica?

Speaker 2 She's correct. That's accurate.
And I also would add

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 this alliance we're seeing form in America between sort of these the ideologues of Project 2025 and these tech oligarchs has been a thing in Europe for a while now and where the far right and the tech elite made an alliance and it's instructive to understand what that was about in Europe to see it parallel here and I'm just starting to unpack this but The Europe piece is, so the EU formed, it brought all these nations of Europe together under one umbrella where they share laws and borders.

Speaker 2 So you can cross in between borders between states in Europe very easily, Spain to Ireland to wherever, okay?

Speaker 2 That brought a lot of immigration and it's enraged parts of Europe, especially the far right. So the ideological far right doesn't like the immigration that the EU brought.

Speaker 2 The EU also created the strictest regulations on tech companies of any place in the globe.

Speaker 2 And the tech companies chafe at and resent deeply these regulations, which they think hold back their innovation.

Speaker 2 And so they have made alliance because they want to break and destroy the EU, the tech elite and the far right, for immigration and regulations.

Speaker 2 And you see the parallel here, where there's a far right that wants to change our society. whether it's about abortion rights or immigration, you pick your issue, women's rights.

Speaker 2 And the tech elite are chafing at our regulations and and want to destroy the regulatory or administrative state, get rid of the bureaucrats so they are, quote, unleashed to free their innovation to the maximum potential.

Speaker 3 And unleashed. So the power that is in power gives tech the right to do what they want in terms of maximizing their profit.

Speaker 3 And the tech gives the power the right to unleash the hate speech and the propaganda that reinforces their right-wing agenda. So this is what you have these reinforcing things.

Speaker 3 This is why, you know, the week after the inauguration, Zuckerberg's like, yeah, we don't really think anything's hate speech anymore. This is not a coincidence.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Right.

Speaker 2 I mean, the piece of this where they're muzzling the media, icing out the Associated Press out of briefings, which has happened, and then bringing in this sort of disinformation spreaders is also about being able to create a narrative about what they're doing that is not reflective of reality.

Speaker 2 Can I add one more thing, which is as we're talking about this, I feel very outside of my body.

Speaker 2 And can I just take a moment to pause and come back in and say, what we're doing now is a little future tripping about where we could be headed.

Speaker 2 And the bulwark against all of this is we the people.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 people are waking up to this. There are protests and there's conversations and this is an important conversation to help everyone wake up to this.

Speaker 2 But it does not mean what we're describing is in any way inevitable.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 2 This is helping you see what could be so that however we need to be awakened, we can take those steps.

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Speaker 4 Jessica, do you think about,

Speaker 4 you know, during this time where information is being infiltrated and people are being watched and people's kind of censorship is beginning. Do you think about

Speaker 4 us having this conversation and if there will be a time soon when we will need to

Speaker 4 be doing this in different venues? Like, do you think when you go to bed about

Speaker 4 yourself being censored, us being watched, this sort of conversation not being allowed soon?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I think all the time, I have active conversations all the time about what what devices should I be on? What should I use? When do I need to move? How will I know? What should we do?

Speaker 2 I think that us having this conversation honestly is brave because there are a lot of people who know what we're saying and aren't talking about it publicly like this.

Speaker 2 I think that we don't know what's coming. And

Speaker 2 I have a conversation endlessly like.

Speaker 2 Is this the time to move now or later? But where's the safer place? If Europe goes into war, it's not, I mean, we could go deep, right? I don't want to, that's future-tripping category.

Speaker 2 So yes, I do worry about it.

Speaker 2 And I know that journalists in particular are extremely aware of the fact that they're in the IRS, they have our social security information, any of us could be targeted at any time, and it's scary.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I think that there is a major future tripping about this, and there's also a major element of living in a lack of denial about historical precedent. And that,

Speaker 3 you know, we could say,

Speaker 3 well, in the past, after ABC came D.

Speaker 3 And then we could sit here and be like, well, it's kind of crazy to think D is coming. It is not inevitable, but in the absence of restraining it,

Speaker 3 it is one of the way this road ends.

Speaker 3 So the restraining it piece feels significant.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 I will tell you, like reporting helps me gain insight. And the people I talk to who actually know Elon Musk and work in the world, who are at that level of power,

Speaker 2 they believe it's number one. They believe that what's going on here is move fast, break things.
curry favor with Trump by getting this efficiency look happening and then work back and patch stuff up.

Speaker 2 That the theory that they actually want to privatize all this or turn into CEO feudal states is sort of intellectual imaginings.

Speaker 2 And I'm actually, when one is giving them more credit than they have, they don't think that far ahead. They're too arrogant about we can do whatever we want in the moment.

Speaker 2 So that's what the people who know Elon Musk tell me is more likely.

Speaker 3 The only thing I could buy that in the absence of the global radical repositioning.

Speaker 4 Exactly.

Speaker 3 If that was the case, why do you say we America are not aligned with liberty and democracy? In Europe, we are aligned with Russia.

Speaker 2 The weirdest thing about this, and I don't have an answer to it, is if we happen to end up at war,

Speaker 2 it's still understood that America would be on Europe's side against Russia, that there's not a theory that the U.S. would be fighting alongside Russia.

Speaker 2 So Russia's still accepted as the adversary within MAGA world.

Speaker 2 So it's a bit confusing. It's more like they want to break the EU and they want to remake Europe,

Speaker 2 not get into bed with Russia. And I can't explain that.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 Why don't we move into offering people something to do? with this, just something, a little thing, something.

Speaker 4 I know

Speaker 4 I can tell you that I feel scared. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I can tell you that I feel the same way that you do, Jessica. I felt a little out of my body listening to all of this and

Speaker 4 it feels quite surreal.

Speaker 4 I think I can tell the pod squad that we're going to keep doing the best we can, that we're going to keep showing up, that we're going to keep doing what we did today.

Speaker 4 We are going to

Speaker 4 unify and form alliances

Speaker 4 with people who might think a little bit differently than we do on certain things. We are not going to allow ourselves the privilege of purity or being splintered because that

Speaker 4 throughout history has inevitably allowed fascism to rise. Is the left being

Speaker 4 particular?

Speaker 4 That's one thing.

Speaker 3 Can I underscore that? Like very literally. Like the difference

Speaker 3 is the difference between England and Germany, right?

Speaker 3 In Germany in the 1930s, the

Speaker 3 far left and the moderate left both really, really didn't want Hitler, right?

Speaker 3 But the far left and the middle left turned against each other

Speaker 3 and then they got Hitler. This is a case study in how it works.

Speaker 3 And it was only when later, when all the million Marxists in the world couldn't help, the rich bourgeois couldn't help, and only when they came together and decided they had a vision that surpassed their difference is the way

Speaker 3 they got through it. So this isn't a guess.

Speaker 4 This is true, right?

Speaker 3 This is how you lose and how you win.

Speaker 4 So I just wanted to signal to the pod squad and to anyone watching us, you will see that. That might be a new thing that you will see.
Today, we're going to give you three different things you can do.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 We are doing this in real time. None of these are going to be perfect.
Okay. We're going to offer you ideas for you to look into and consider that we believe are worth looking into and considering.

Speaker 4 It is up to you to do the rest.

Speaker 3 One thing that you can do is call your attorneys general. You want to support

Speaker 3 those kinds of efforts that Jessica was reporting are happening and tell them that this is bullshit and they need to defend your rights.

Speaker 3 If you've been wrongly fired or you run a business that has suffered as a result of the services lost, you can also call your attorneys general.

Speaker 3 You can also call your elected leaders in Congress, especially those of you who voted for Trump.

Speaker 3 and want to say you voted for Trump, but that you find this to be bullshit and a bridge too far, that they need to do their jobs and not just protect their jobs.

Speaker 3 The other thing that you can do is to join the 5051

Speaker 3 movement. You can find more about it at 5050.1 on the internet.
That's F-I-F-T-Y

Speaker 3 5050.1. There's two 50s in there.
They are, it's 50 protests, 50 states, one movement.

Speaker 3 It's to uphold the constitution and end executive overreach that is a good movement to become involved with or to consider to look into yep to look into that that is a good movement to look into

Speaker 4 number three

Speaker 2 lock your credit jessica can you explain to us what locking your credit is and how people can do it and why yes so because doge are in the guts of these systems that have our social security number address address, and all this personally identifying information.

Speaker 2 And because they're reportedly not using proper cybersecurity protocols as they do it, there's a high level of concern among government employees that they're exposing our data to bad actors.

Speaker 2 And that puts us all in a personally, potentially vulnerable position. So, to protect yourselves, one easy thing to do is go to the credit unions.
They are Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian.

Speaker 2 And you can get on their sites and hit a button that says lock your credit and lock payday loans, which means anybody who gets your personal data cannot open a credit card in your name and cannot take out a payday loan in your name without your knowledge.

Speaker 4 Excellent.

Speaker 2 Protects you from identity theft to a degree.

Speaker 4 Thank you.

Speaker 2 If you want to open a new credit card or line of credit or whatever, you need to go in and unlock your credit credit at these credit agencies, and then you can go back and re-lock it up.

Speaker 4 Great. Thank you.

Speaker 4 Okay, Jessica, do you remember how on the old daily shows with Jon Stewart, he would like scare the shit out of us about something and then there'd be like a moment of Zen at the end?

Speaker 2 Yes, I loved it.

Speaker 4 Let's just have a moment

Speaker 4 of something

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 Let's talk about little Minnie Musk.

Speaker 2 Little X?

Speaker 3 Little X, yes.

Speaker 4 Can you tell us what happened?

Speaker 2 Okay, so this was, in all the years I've covered the White House, one of the most mind-explodingly weird things to watch.

Speaker 2 On a day last week or a few days ago, Donald Trump was in the Oval Office sitting behind the Resolute Desk, the famous presidential desk, and standing next to him was Elon Musk wearing a t-shirt, a baseball cap, all black, holding his...

Speaker 2 toddler son, who is also in dress like a mini daddy with a chain around his neck, neck and holding forth to the press.

Speaker 2 Elon Musk was lecturing America about democracy and about how we're under the control of bureaucrats and all this wild stuff as if he was the shadow president while Trump sat slumped in his chair looking like

Speaker 2 sad.

Speaker 2 And Elon Musk's son X is like at one point on his shoulders, but then at another point hold, hold, please.

Speaker 4 Did you just say Elon Musk's son X? Is his name X?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Okay, go ahead.

Speaker 2 Go ahead. Yeah.

Speaker 2 X is put on the ground and then people keep calling him Twitter.

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 2 what is happening?

Speaker 2 He goes up to Trump at the desk and he's on video. You see him whispering at Trump quite like with hostility and aggressiveness.

Speaker 2 And what people who like the denizens of the internet have decided he's saying, and they've captioned the video this way, is, shh, stop talking. You're not the real president.

Speaker 3 Did anyone ever hear that, or is that just a meme?

Speaker 2 So, no, no, you hear aspects of that in the you do hear

Speaker 2 president, not real. I can't tell if that's what he's really saying.
Friends of mine are like 100%.

Speaker 2 There's a theory that he's actually talking to a photographer who's off-frame making noise. But Trump is sitting there looking so morose, like side-eyeing the kid.

Speaker 2 And it just looks like daddy Elon is, you know, taking control of his two little boys over here.

Speaker 3 Unbelievable.

Speaker 4 But also, it feels every parent one theory.

Speaker 4 I know the moment when my children, when they were smaller, like I have a child who once turned to someone and said, oh, come on, that's bullshit. And she was five.

Speaker 4 Now, the reason why she said that is because her mom, over again, when I thought she wasn't listening, would say, you know, it's one of our catchphrases, right?

Speaker 4 Like, my sister and I calling everything bullshit. So, is it possible that little

Speaker 2 X

Speaker 4 was repeating what his father says at home, which is, I am the real president, that guy is not?

Speaker 2 Well, that's what the internet has decided. Okay.
A good part of the internet. Yes.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 4 I don't know if that was a zenny hopes, but it was funny. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 The video is really mind-bendingly weird.

Speaker 2 Elon Musk also went and took a sit-down meeting with Modi, the prime minister of India, a la presidential meeting, where they sat together and invited the press in to get a pool spray of them.

Speaker 2 And you're like, this is what a president does. So many out there things are happening like that.
Wow. Not very zeny, but very odd.
Yes, yes.

Speaker 4 Okay, well, I just want to say that this is a really, really hard time.

Speaker 4 And in this hard time, I am so grateful for both of you for your clarity, for your courage, for your insight, for your knowledge, for being willing to even do this.

Speaker 4 I just am feeling deeply grateful for both of you. Nice.
Is there anything that either of you want to leave with our precious pod squad?

Speaker 2 For me, it's just that we launched saying we do calm news and this does not feel calm. So I just want to remind people to breathe

Speaker 2 and remember that we're safe right now. We're not in that bad place that we can get to.
And feeling calm is part of what it takes to have agency in the world.

Speaker 2 So pull out that toolkit and use it. After you listen to this, before you go into your day, maybe do an inhale, exhale and sit for a moment.

Speaker 4 That's great.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think the calmness is

Speaker 3 we're going to have to learn to integrate

Speaker 3 calm and reality.

Speaker 3 And you know how if you're really scared that you don't have enough money and your check might bounce, and then you spend a lot of time not looking at your bank account because you're pretty sure it might?

Speaker 3 The calmness I want to have during this period is I'm not afraid to check my bank account.

Speaker 3 I'm not afraid to look into the eyes of what is happening, to accept reality, to metabolize it, to let it flow through me not to corrode inside of me but to come out of me with the energy of being an active anti-fascist proudly to align with the people

Speaker 3 who are resisting this to see it with clarity because to me it isn't calm versus not calm because when I'm not checking my bank account and I'm worried my check's gonna bounce I am not actually calm right when you are not checking the news and you don't know what's happening, but you're pretty sure it's terrible and horrifying, you are not calm.

Speaker 3 Right. When you can look it in the eye and flow through and use your energy that was worried to do good and change the course of our nation, that is when you can have real calm.
That's good.

Speaker 3 So I want to invite people into that higher level of calm.

Speaker 4 Yes, it's the kind of calm. It's not calm like floating on a cloud somewhere away from reality.
I think of our version of calm as what Abby used to call ice in the veins.

Speaker 4 So, like during a huge game where the other team was just messing with them, trying to get them to foul so that they would lose the game, trying like the other side was screaming at them.

Speaker 4 And then Abby said that somebody would always scream to each other: ice in the veins.

Speaker 4 Ice in the veins. It's that kind of calm.
It's strategic, clear, unshakable.

Speaker 4 We're about to fight to win this game. Calm.

Speaker 2 Yes. Yes.

Speaker 3 Amen.

Speaker 4 Love you both. We can do hard things.

Speaker 4 Bye.

Speaker 4 If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things?

Speaker 4 Following the pod helps you because you'll never miss an episode and it helps us because you'll never miss an episode.

Speaker 4 To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on follow.

Speaker 4 This is the most important thing for the pod. While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful.

Speaker 4 We appreciate you very much.

Speaker 4 We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey.

Speaker 4 Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman, and this show is produced by Lauren Lograsso, Allison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz.