Air Date 2/18/2025
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.
Democracies slide into dictatorship in two ways: first slowly, and then all of a sudden. We have been sliding in this direction for at least as long as I have been paying attention to politics, which is a long time, and we're finally at the moment where that slow slide shifts into full speed.
For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include The Gray Area, The ReidOut, The NPR Politics Podcast, Amicus, Straight White American Jesus, Citations Needed, and The Intercept Briefing.
Then, in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there will be more in four sections: Section A, Government Agencies; Section B, Constitutional Crisis; Section C, The Playbook; and Section D, What to Do.
But first, your Call To Action for the week.
Activism Roundup - 2-17-25
AMANDA: Hey everyone, Amanda here, with your weekly roundup of activism actions. There's a [00:01:00] lot going on and the reality is that collectively we're in the 'throw everything in the wall' phase. And that's okay. Do what you feel is most impactful and what is possible in your life. All right? All right. Now, onto the work.
The House is on recess this week. That means your members of Congress are in your district and they need to hear from you in person. The message is twofold. One, tell them you fully reject the newly released GOP budget, which proposes 4. 5 trillion dollars in tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest among us, while slashing essential programs like Medicaid and food assistance. And two, call out Republicans' complicit behavior and silence in the face of Musk's government coup and demand Democrats fight back. Indivisible is calling for mass local action under the banner 'Musk or Us' and has created a congressional recess toolkit to make Republicans squirm and push Democrats to take action. Go to indivisible.org/coup for the toolkit and ways to get involved.
Next, there are national boycotts going on right now to show Amazon and Target and other companies that [00:02:00] eliminating their DEI initiatives and cozying up to Trump was a big financial mistake. Amazon also used illegal and racist tactics to crush a union vote in North Carolina last week. So, I don't know, maybe just avoid them at all costs. These boycotts do not appear to be organized under one banner or organization. But there's a plan for a national blackout on all buying on February 28th. Also, a national 24 hour work stoppage across all industries is planned for March 14th. It's being called a national strike, but strikes are for union members. An actual national strike is planned for 2028. Again, these are actions not organized by one entity, so they may evolve as we get closer.
Finally, it's being reported that ICE agents are frustrated that people know their rights. How do they know them? Organizations like United We Dream have been working tirelessly to ensure people know what to do when they encounter immigration agents. You can text 'Know Your Power' to 78757 or go to unitedwedream. org to learn and share resources.
If you're feeling the overwhelm, you're not alone. [00:03:00] Remember that no one can do everything, but everyone can do something and finding community and taking action are truly the best ways to deal with it all. We don't get to choose the times we live in. So we need everyone to act like everything is on the line, because it is.
Is America broken - The Gray Area - Air Date 2-10-25
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: So let's actually just start with you summing up your thesis. In that piece, tell me about what you think is now the most vital debate in America.
ALANA NEWHOUSE: The debate that I find the most interesting, and that I think is going to be the one that is going to take us through the next, call it 5 to 10 years, isn't a debate between Republicans or Democrats or between the left and the right, or even between progressives and conservatives. The debate that I find myself most drawn to, and I think a lot of other people increasingly want to participate in, is a debate about our institutions, and about the viability of them and the health of them.
The two sides that I saw emerging [00:04:00] I roughly call "brokenists" and "status-quoists". And in the piece, I try to articulate the vision that each side has. And I hope that I express sympathy and interest in both arguments because I feel drawn to both sides.
My sense of the status-quoist argument is that they feel, with a lot of validity, that we have a lot of institutions in American life that took many, many years to build that actually create safety and predictability and opportunity for a lot of people, and that there's an almost nihilistic "burn it all down" energy that they feel coming from other people in American life. Because inevitably they see problems in those institutions and they want to fix them.
On the other side, there are people who I call brokenists, and those are people for whom the [00:05:00] broken aspect of the big blocks of institutional life that they have to interact with, whether that's a university, whether it's their health insurance, whether it's a government entity. What they're feeling in almost in a 360 way is a sense of decay, and a sense that these things simply don't work anymore. And that, I think, in the case of many brokenists, there's a feeling that not only do those institutions not work, but that they're not reformable, and that we would be better off spending our energy building new replacements for them rather than trying to reform them.
So, the tension is between those two sides.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Yes, and I think you really do a service here in giving us that language. It's a very useful distinction.
There's a man you quote in the piece. He's a reader who reached out to you. His name is [00:06:00] Ryan. And he said some very relatable things for me. And his perspective, his frustration really, serves as a kind of anchor for your essay.
Can you say a bit about him and what he articulated to you?
ALANA NEWHOUSE: Yes. I met Ryan because, two years ago I wrote a piece called "Everything is Broken", which was my personal cri de corps about the broken aspects of American society that were affecting my life. And in the wake of that essay, I got hundreds of emails and DMs and texts from people.
One of them was from a man named Ryan, who was about my age, lives in Ohio, former vet, actually third generation African American veteran. And Ryan reached out and said, this piece spoke to me so deeply because this is what I feel, too. I feel that American society is so broken and I don't understand why.
We ended up actually becoming friends. We had a lot more in common than, [00:07:00] I think, either of us expected when he reached out. And over the course of a year of texting and sharing articles and just becoming friends, we were having conversations about how our thought was developing. And one day Ryan said on the phone with me, I realize I'm having conversations with people. Sometimes they're people who see themselves as on the right. Sometimes they're people who see themselves on the left. And the thing that determines whether or not I can talk to them is actually how they think about institutions. I don't care whether they come from the left or come from the right, whether they're a libertarian or a socialist. I care whether or not they look at these institutions and they think they're remotely healthy. Because if they do, I, think they're nuts. And if they don't, I can have a conversation.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: Yeah. I need to be honest about my ambivalence here. I think of myself as an old school leftist. I guess I'm a [00:08:00] class warrior, for lack of a better phrase. I see that not only is the most important axis of power, but also the most politically potent. But you may be right; that deep down, the real debate now is between brokenist and status-quoist.
I guess I would say, in the interest of maybe trying to push a little bit against both of our instincts, that sometimes there's a tendency for the most engaged, politically conscious types, like you and me, to assume that the rest of the country feels the way we do, you know what I mean? When the reality is that I think a lot of people are just living their lives, and while they may be caught up in the general polarized atmosphere, I'm not sure they have very deep ideological commitments or even very strong opinions. I just think a lot of people are very alienated from all of it.
But then again, maybe that kind of widespread detachment is itself a symptom of the brokenness.
ALANA NEWHOUSE: The reason why I like the frame is [00:09:00] because, as a reporter, it actually allows me to hear people and hear their concerns differently. It takes me out of rubrics that are familiar and allows me to really listen.
And so you brought up the issues of class and of economic concerns. I hear them more clearly and loudly when I see them through the dichotomy of how our institutions are serving people.
Let's talk about Medicaid. Can Medicaid actually properly get people the support that they need? That's a class issue. But it's also a health of the institution issue. And maybe if we take it out of the left-right dichotomy, we can have the conversation that we want to have, because it doesn't get people rooted in their defenses and their biases. It allows us to say, well, wait a minute. What if we say, instead of whether or not we believe in Medicaid or don't believe in Medicaid, believe in a social safety net, what if we talk about the effectiveness of the social [00:10:00] safety net? How is ours working? And as long as we have it, can we improve it? Is it possible, even? Because if it isn't, that starts a whole new conversation.
For me, that's generative, and that feels exciting because it also feels future oriented.
Musk's 'DOGE' is spiraling U.S. into a constitutional crisis - The ReidOut - Air Date 2-7-25
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Donald Trump: falling in line with President Elon Musk by calling for an end to USAID. The same USAID, aka USAID, that his wife, First Lady Melania, said embodied what her "Be Best" program stood for, and that First Daughter Ivanka used to establish a highly publicized initiative to empower women in developing countries.
But we begin tonight, less than three weeks into this new administration, and we are already facing what is rightfully being described as a constitutional crisis.
It comes not from the man elected to sit behind the resolute desk, but from the unelected one, who appears to be pulling all the strings: tech billionaire Elon Musk. It's happening in real [00:11:00] time, thanks to Elon's made up Department of Government Efficiency that he and a handful of young adults from his private companies have unleashed on this country with nearly unfettered access to any agency or database they choose to infiltrate.
In this short time, we've seen them all but abolish the U. S. Agency for International Development. with plans to reduce its workforce from 5,000 to what's expected to be about 600. And it's being done without congressional authority, which is required, given that it was Congress that passed the law that formally established the agency.
Of course, this is just the start. With little pushback, Musk and his minions are gaining access to more and more U. S. government agencies every day. Just today, Trump said he instructed Musk to check out the Pentagon. And those people gaining access to the most sensitive systems are not the best and the brightest.
Yesterday, one of Elon's little henchmen resigned from DOGE after his now-deleted racist social [00:12:00] media posts resurfaced. According to the Wall Street Journal, the posts from 25-year-old Marco Elez included such gems as "Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool", "You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity", and "Normalize Indian hate."
And this morning, right on cue, Vice President James David Vance said Elez should be brought back onto the team, posting, "I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life." Oh, okay, so now he's just a kid? A kid? A kid who was given direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly every single payment made by the U.S. government, including Social Security checks that people rely on. A kid? I thought they were highly trained professionals, man, not kids.
To no one's surprise, Elon jumped on his personal version of Truth Social and tweeted in agreeance with JD and announced Elez's triumphant return, this afternoon. This after spending much of yesterday joking with his Twitter stans, Twitter stans about another one of his junior henchmen who [00:13:00] on his LinkedIn went by the name Big Balls and who also had access to millions of Americans' personal data.
The absolute unseriousness of these people stands in stark contrast to the dead seriousness of what they're doing to our country and the many unknowns about what they could be doing with our data.
Meanwhile, the acting U.S. attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, who earlier this week said he would pursue legal action against anyone who threatens any DOGE employees, something that he offered no evidence has happened, is now saying that he is beginning an inquiry into those supposed threats, after a referral from... Elon Musk, who apparently now, in addition to wielding the power afforded to Congress in the Constitution, also has the power to order federal criminal investigations.
Martin wrote directly to Elon: "We will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the earth to hold them accountable. We will not rest or cease in this. No one should [00:14:00] abuse American taxpayer dollars nor American taxpayer workers." Are these American taxpayer workers? I don't know about that. We don't have any evidence of that.
And by the way, we've heard no such pledge from Martin, after a conservative website funded by the Heritage Foundation published what it called a DEI watch list, with the names, photos, and identifying information of federal health workers involved in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. And, that at one point described them as "targets."
Apparently in Elon and Don's America, the federal government is no longer here to protect you. It is here for one purpose and one purpose only: to empower and protect Elon Musk, and his friends.
Trump's latest target the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - The NPR Politics Podcast - Air Date 2-10-25
ASMA KHALID - WHITE HOUSE CORR., NPR: For people who are not familiar with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, can you describe what does this agency do?
LAUREL WAMSLEY - PERSONAL FINANCE CORR., NPR: Yeah, it's been around for about 14 and a half years now, and it is the consumer finance watchdog agency for the country. So it's part of the Federal [00:15:00] Reserve System, and it's funded through that. It is really the only agency whose mandate is to work on behalf of consumers to make sure that they are not being abused by banks, but also non-bank institutions.
They were formed in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, where there was a lot of looking at how can we make sure that this doesn't happen again? And there are new rules coming in about mortgages and subprime mortgages, that kind of stuff.
So they do stuff like that, but they do rulemaking as part of what they do. So they have recently made rules capping credit card fees and late credit card late fees, stuff like that, or that medical debt can't be on your credit report.
But they also do enforcement. And so part of what they do is they have these examiners, they're called, they've got staff who go out to companies, and make sure that they are following the laws that are in place.
But they also have a complaint line. People can literally submit [00:16:00] complaints when they think that they've been wronged or they've been slapped with a fee that they never heard about before. And the CFPB will look into it and often get their money back.
ASMA KHALID - WHITE HOUSE CORR., NPR: What exactly happened over the weekend?
LAUREL WAMSLEY - PERSONAL FINANCE CORR., NPR: Okay, there was a lot. One of the first things that happened was on Friday, members of Elon Musk's government efficiency team showed up at CFPB headquarters and came in. They'd been added to the directory there. And they also were able to gain access to, or granted access to, internal CFPB systems for stuff like human resources, finance, procurement.
Russell Vought was also named the new acting director of CFPB.
ASMA KHALID - WHITE HOUSE CORR., NPR: Which we should point out, he's one of the main architects of the conservative blueprint known as Project 2025.
LAUREL WAMSLEY - PERSONAL FINANCE CORR., NPR: That's right. In addition to being the newly confirmed Director of the Office of Management and Budget. And no sooner was it clear that he had now taken over that he sent out an email with a pretty sweeping essentially stop work order to staff at CFPB, saying you really can't do any of the work that CFPB does.
Shortly after that [00:17:00] email, Vought posted on X from his own account that he would not be asking the Federal Reserve for the next round of funding for the agency. And then on Sunday, it came word that CFPB's headquarters would be closed for the week. There was no reason given for that, but staff members were told to work from home.
And then just this morning, there was another email that went out, said, actually stay at home, but don't work. Don't do anything.
SUSAN DAVIS - POLITICAL CORR., NPR: I think that it's important to remember that conservatives have been against the CFPB almost from the start. As Laurel noted, it was born out of the 2008 financial crisis under the Obama administration. And the architect, essentially, of the CFPB was Elizabeth Warren, who at the time--
LAUREL WAMSLEY - PERSONAL FINANCE CORR., NPR: Senator from Massachusetts?
SUSAN DAVIS - POLITICAL CORR., NPR: No, now, but at the time, she was an intellectual academic from Harvard who had come up with the framework for this program. And it really was supposed to be regulation from the bottom up. There are obviously a ton of financial regulatory agencies that exist in the country of the [00:18:00] SEC, the FDIC, but they're top down regulators. And as Laurel noted, this was an opportunity to give consumers some recourse if they felt like they were victims of predatory lending through their mortgages, through their credit card companies.
The CFPB will say they've actually been pretty successful by their own numbers. They say that in the 14 years since they were established, they've brought about $20 billion in consumer relief, that they've enacted $5 billion in civil money penalties, and that they say that they've provided some element of financial relief to 195 million Americans.
ASMA KHALID - WHITE HOUSE CORR., NPR: So how is that not popular with people, Sue?
SUSAN DAVIS - POLITICAL CORR., NPR: So I think from the beginning, it was seen as a much more progressive populist idea of how you regulate the government. So more free market conservatives, people that don't think that you need to add additional regulatory layers on top of a pretty complicated regulatory framework. Conservatives just don't like regulatory agencies as a sort of a foundational view. And they felt that this one was redundant. I would also say it's important to note in this current political climate that a lot of tech companies really don't like the [00:19:00] CFPB because the CFPB has also taken more aggressive action looking at digital payment systems that are used over platforms like Google, which is new technology that CFPB has been looking at. So corporations don't like it because it adds another layer of regulatory fight that they have in their commerce.
So it doesn't surprise me that Donald Trump took this action. This isn't oh, at one point Republicans used to like this agency. Republicans have never liked this agency. From the conservative side, this is a big victory for something they've wanted from the beginning.
ASMA KHALID - WHITE HOUSE CORR., NPR: So it also seems like what's happening with the CFPB is similar to what happened recently with USAID. Is it the same?
SUSAN DAVIS - POLITICAL CORR., NPR: I think it's same philosophically when you think about what Donald Trump's trying to do right now, which is broadly remake the federal government and make it smaller and make it more conservative. I think there's a lot of distinctions, certainly between the missions of the two agencies.
The point that Laurel made, too, that I think is worth just focusing on for a second is how the CFPB is structured and [00:20:00] funded. I'm not an expert on this, but it is not funded through the annual appropriations of Congress, and that was by design. They wanted to create a regulatory agency that was more independent. So if you weren't subject to constant congressional appropriations, you weren't affected by shutdowns. Your work would not be influenced by Congress.
A lot of members of Congress, especially Republicans in Congress, didn't like that, because they felt like when you directly -- they did not like it because when you do directly appropriate agencies, you have more oversight over them.
Legally now, I think what's interesting in the contrast between USAID and CFPB, USAID was directly appropriated by Congress. That's part of the litigation fight that's going on right now. CFPB was funded by transfers from the Federal Reserve, which is just a different, unique system. And I have seen arguments that that will put the administration on better legal footing because it falls within the power within the executive branch.
So in this instance, it's not really clear that Trump is defying Congress, because Congress never appropriated any money for this agency. [00:21:00] However, Congress did pass a law establishing the agency, so I think that will provide a basis for the legal fight, but I think that the Trump administration is on a different legal footing and at least being able to turn off the financial spigot for this one because it's controlled by the executive branch and not the legislative branch.
ASMA KHALID - WHITE HOUSE CORR., NPR: From my recollection, this was created as part of the Dodd Frank Act in 2010. So isn't it in the law?
SUSAN DAVIS - POLITICAL CORR., NPR: The creation of the agency, yes. But to me, again, that's, we're in this like weird, we've never been here before legal limbo. Like he hasn't technically tried to shutter the agency, they've just put it in suspended animation.
I have no doubt that there's going to be some form of litigation against this. You're seeing this happen in all of these agencies. But how precisely they try to shut it down or not shut it down or how it affects the work, I don't think we entirely know just yet.
Trumps American Takeover - Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick - Air Date 2-1-25
KIM LANE SCHEPPELE: So, I lived in Hungary for a long time. I also lived in Russia for a long time. And this is the third time I've ridden this escalator from democracy into someplace very dark. [00:22:00] And unfortunately, what we're seeing here is so similar to what happened in Russia and particularly to what happened in Hungary.
And part of the reason why it's so alarming is that Americans have this idea that when democracy fails, it's going to fail with tanks in the streets. It's going to fail with some radical rupture. It's going to fail with normal ceasing to be normal. And when you look at how autocracy works these days in the rest of the world, it almost always comes in on the backs of a free and fair election.
So, somebody who is a, we call them populist, but you can call them whatever, charismatic leaders who promise to shake things up, they get elected, often fair and square the first time. You go back and you look at the election monitor's reports from when Hugo Chavez was elected in Venezuela, or when Vladimir Putin was elected the first time in Russia, or when Victor Orban was elected the first time in Hungary, [00:23:00] the election monitors all said free and fair election, no problem. And then what happens is that as soon as these guys come to power, they start to just take over and disable all of the checks on executive power. And they do it while their cover story is a lot of inflammatory rhetoric that causes pain to people.
So, now we're seeing immigration, we're seeing attacks on people with gender fluidity, we're seeing attacks on affirmative action, we're seeing attacks across the board on vulnerable groups and people who have really never been treated equally. But behind the scenes, what that's disguising, this was also true in Hungary, it was true in Venezuela, it was true in Turkey, it's in all these places, inflammatory rhetoric disguises the real work of autocracy. And what's the real work of autocracy? Removing all checks on executive power. And a lot of that is [00:24:00] happening in a very unsexy way in laws that are buried deep beneath the surface that only a technical lawyer could love. And that's where you start to see chipping away at every single constraint on what the president can do.
Now, America is a very big and complicated system. It's going to take a lot to capture all of it because we have federalism, because we have a lot of nooks and crannies where different sources of power reside. But Trump in his first term of office had not yet discovered this formula that you need the law to entrench yourself. So, he did a lot of horrible things, he caused a lot of pain, he was incredibly arbitrary, he loves to sign executive orders, but when he left office, most of the U. S. government, it was battered, it was beaten, he dropped it on the floor, it cracked, there weren't people who were put into important positions, but he hadn't changed the legal infrastructure except for one thing, and that [00:25:00] is the Supreme Court.
Hence, this podcast. So, now what I think Trump learned is what a lot of these autocrats learned. Victor Orban was in power once and lost power because he didn't learn this lesson. When he came back, and now when Trump is coming back, what they learned is that you have to learn to entrench yourself. And it helps if you compromise some institutions when you're in office the first time. But what Victor Orban did, and what now Donald Trump has done, is to use their time out of office to put together a team of people who will write all the laws you need to entrench yourself. And it's being written by private groups. It's not going through the normal lawmaking process. Private lawyers are writing up all of these plans. And then as soon as you come into power, you start to shovel this stuff out the door as fast as you can. You take advantage of incredibly obscure laws already on the books that already give the executive tons of power. You [00:26:00] override, you might declare an emergency, for example, we've seen two of them declared this week in the U S already, or I guess it was last week, or maybe it's, and who knows how many more will there will be. But, there's a lot of these emergencies being declared that give the president additional powers, but there's also new executive orders that are simply grabbing power right now.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: It sounds to me, Kim, like what you are saying is, and I know this is simplistic, but as you're trying to make sense of this flurry of executive orders that are coming at all hours of the day, and it's really hard for most of us to triage what's meaningful, what's important, we keep saying on this show, they are not the law, but they are certainly have promises and instructions to agencies how to conduct themselves.
It feels almost like you're saying that there is one bucket that is distractions, chaos, confusion. There's another bucket that's really systematically shoveling power back [00:27:00] to the executive branch and constructing an impermeable executive branch. Is that the best schema for thinking about this?
KIM LANE SCHEPPELE: Yes, yes, and of course that bucket of distraction is also actually harming people. And what it does is it takes most of the opposition and pulls their attention over to that. So for example, we've seen, immediately lots of lawsuits on birthright citizenship, lots of people putting out advisories on what to do if ICE comes knocking on your door. All that's crucial and people should be working on those things because these kinds of initiatives are causing real pain. But there's another set of things that's not getting nearly enough attention, and that is the second bucket, which is all the stuff that is consolidating power in the executive.
So, let me tell you two things that look familiar from Hungary because these were really crucial in the early days. So, one thing Orbán did was to immediately suspend the civil service law in order to fire tons of governmental workers. [00:28:00] Okay? And we've seen that. A lot of the things that Trump has been doing is to rattle the civil service. Now, the Biden administration saw this coming, they enacted a regulation that actually made it impossible to directly fire people who had civil service protection, which is why you see these new executive orders coming in. And what they're doing is they're reassigning people to jobs they can't possibly want to do. Or they're putting them on paid leave just to get them out of the way. So the Biden regulation is doing something to slow this process down. But in some of these executive orders, they actually say in our view, this Biden regulation is unconstitutional. And so we are going to ignore it, which is why they're just firing some people also, okay?
But attacking the civil service, it's a big chunk of what Orban did. And he fired a lot of people. He then terrified the rest so that they were afraid to go against him. So even if there wasn't anything he could have really done, he puts people in fear of their careers, their jobs, [00:29:00] they're disoriented. It happens so quickly, they don't know what to do. So attacking the bureaucracy, making everybody either quit, be fired, or in fear, was a big chunk of what he did, and that's what we're seeing.
The other thing he did was he defunded everybody who could possibly push back. Okay? So, in the U S government, it's been random defunding of everybody. That was not, shall we say, precision guided. But what I'm expecting to come is more systematic defunding of all the places where they think the opposition will come from. So, let me tell you what happened in Hungary. It turns out when I was living in Budapest, there were 12 daily newspapers in a city of 3 million people. It was wonderful. You could read papers ranging from left or right to wonderful objective journalism, all kinds of stuff, but it was unsustainable. It turns out. You got 12 daily newspapers because most of their funding came from state advertising. As [00:30:00] soon as Orban came to power, he cut the funding to cut all the advertising to all the papers and actually all the TV stations and radio stations that actually had been critical of his party. And it turns out they started to fail, economically.
What happens? His oligarchs swept in, bought up the media they wanted, or they let them fail. And when the rest of Europe looked at this, because this is all happening in the European Union, there's supposed to be a club of democracies, Orban says, Oh, well, you know, it's just the market. They can't sustain themselves. And this is when newspapers are failing all over the world for financial reasons. Didn't look like he'd done anything.
Musk's Coup and Trump's Christian Zionist Gaza Takeover - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 2-7-25
BRAD ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Elon Musk is treating the U. S. government like a startup. He's treating it like when he took over Twitter / X. And here's a piece at Wired, a different piece, that reads like this. "While this takeover is unprecedented for the government, it's standard operating procedure for Musk. It maps almost too neatly to his acquisition of [00:31:00] Twitter in 2022. Get rid of most of the workforce, install loyalists, rip up safeguards, remake in your own image. This is the way of the startup. You're scrappy, you're unconventional, you're iterating. This is the world that Musk's lieutenants come from, and the one they are imposing on the Office of Personal Management, the GSA, and on down the line".
But Dan, as you're saying, the U. S. government is not a startup. And this is where you and I have always tried to make a point about this whole 'do the government like a business'. The point of business is to make money. The point of government is to help people's lives get better, to care for people, to help people thrive, to create systems that allow for people to make decisions not for them, and not so that they're just like passive agents, but to create systems where people have good choices about food, shelter, care, about infrastructure, about education.
Do [00:32:00] you think that Musk and the people working for him—and I can go down the roster if you all want, the 19 year old freshman at Northeastern University, the 25 year old eugenicist, the 23 year old who just graduated and had his first job at Meta—do you think that they're concerned with the fact that the trillions of dollars they now have in front of them in a code, and where they're just like slamming Red Bulls all night and hamming it up, affects people's real lives? That non profits are shutting down because OMB cut off the money? They don't.
This is not a startup. It is the most powerful government in the world. It's one that oversees 350 million people. Dan, I live near Silicon Valley. Startups come and go. One out of a hundred make it. Most of them expend a significant amount of energy and resources, and then they die, and then you just start another one. That is how the kinds of [00:33:00] young men that Musk is dragging around think.
It's also a huge cyber security threat. There's a piece of the conversation by Richard Forno, who's a professor at University of Maryland, and what he talks about is when you have this kind of fiddling with the code of the U. S. Treasury, when you have people who are taking this data and putting it on private servers—do you remember Hillary Clinton's emails, Dan? The private server? Do you remember that?—that's what they're doing with the data, oh, not of, I don't know, some emails that she sent, which, not great, Hillary, okay, whatever. Oh, I don't know, Dan happens to be perhaps every American and their financial records, the millions of federal employees on someone's server who's 23 years old and walking around like a hacker on the metro with his backpack looking like Mr. Robot. That's a problem, [00:34:00] and it flies right in the face of what we talked about over the last couple of weeks.
Donald Trump: well, I know this was DEI with the plane crash, because I have common sense. J. D. Vance: if you just use common sense like real people, not bureaucrats, not technocrats, not those administrative state liberal career hacks, then you'll have a good government. Okay, cool, so who did you guys put in charge of the entire Treasury, and who are you allowing to hack our entire government? Oh, you mean people with specialized knowledge who are 23 years old and led by a madman, the richest man in the world? That guy who just did the Nazi salute twice? You want to tell me that's common sense? You want to tell me that now you're just like a man of the people? One of the plebeians who lives in the life-world of the peasants and is thinking through everything with common sense? Like you would down at Ace Hardware? You put in charge childrenwith technical [00:35:00] knowledge. You allowed them to download the entire code and data of the nation, and then you're gonna turn to us and tell us you have common sense about non-White people and women?
This is an authoritarian takeover. It's an attempted coup. And we should treat it as such. And I'll close this out, Dan, I'll throw it to you and we can take a break, go to something else. The Senate Dems need to figure it out. And I don't usually go for the Democratic Party by the throat on this show, not that often, but Chuck Schumer, you're not the man for the job, bud. It's time to go. You're out here introducing legislation to do stuff and Hakeem Jeffries is tweeting that Jesus is in control, that's not gonna cut it. You cannot do business in the Senate when the social contract has been broken. They're trying to take your job, Chuck. They're saying they get the purse and they're gonna spend the money. And you're out here saying, this has to be stopped. Why are you using the passive voice, Chuck? Go get [00:36:00] arrested. Go demand, I want to know which Democratic Senator is gonna get thrown to the ground and arrested at the Treasury building, trying to get in and see what the hell's going on in there. That's what I want. Show me that guy. Show me that gal. Show me that person. And guess what? They got my vote, 2028. Because right now I see a lot of like hand-wringing soft-handed BS from some of the only people who have a chance to do anything right now. And this is not a way to win back voters and do whatever you've been doing since Kamala Harris lost. This is a way to make people think you're a bunch of old folks who are not built for the fight.
Media Continues Painting Musk's Far Right Coup as Good Faith Cost-Cutting Effort - Citations Needed - Air Date 2-5-25
ADAM JOHNSON - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: So again, you have this image of a sort of post partisan, they want to get rid of waste, efficiencies, and in none of these articles, CNN, Washington Post, or the New York Times, are the obvious far right ideological preferences of Musk mentioned at all. He is simply presented as a patriotic billionaire who won. The reader gets the impression they're vaguely Republican, but they're treated as these kind of post [00:37:00] ideological patriotic billionaires
NIMA SHIRAZI - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: Because hand in hand with this, Adam, is also the idea that billionaires know how to be efficient with money, right? There's kind of baked into these articles is the assumption, the kind of framing of, super rich people know how to make budgets. They know how to address waste. They know how to cut costs and gain savings. That's what makes them such deft businessmen. This is baked into all of these articles, rather than talking about the abuse, the subsidies that they themselves get, the contracts that they themselves get that are, of course, never on the chopping block, where this wealth comes from, no. They are just successful billionaires. And so therefore they know where to find costs to cut, it's kind of the what makes Bruce Wayne a superhero? It's that he's rich, like, that's the whole point behind Batman, we've talked about that before. That's the authority that they have, being "successful".
ADAM JOHNSON - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: And to be clear, it's [00:38:00] not as if the New York Times cannot telegraph or clearly state the ideology or the ideological preferences of those who are about to or seeking to enter government to influence policy.
A 2020 article about Democratic activists within the potential Biden administration, specifically a Biden-Sanders task force about policing that was set up in 2020, in June of 2020, talking about those that wish to redirect resources from police into community care programs, mentions the word progressive five times and the word activist four times, which is totally fine, right? They have ideology, they have an ideological preference, and that's perfectly how you should report on that.
NIMA SHIRAZI - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: But it only goes one way.
ADAM JOHNSON - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: It only goes one way. When it comes to reporting on obviously fascistic, obviously White nationalist half-trillionaires, suddenly they're just cost cutting. They're just concerned with efficiency. They have the word right wing, the word conservative. Again, mentioning of his sieg heil. And the most batshit example of this, because we save the best for last as we usually do, was an article by Michael Scheer that came out on January [00:39:00] 30th. This was less than a week ago, right? This was 10 days after Musk clearly did a sieg heil at the inauguration three different times. A hundred and sixty five Jewish organizations just published a rejection of the ADLs, 'oh, he was just, you know, an excited gesture', have come out and said, 'no, this was clearly a 'sieg heil', advertisers need to pull the advertising from X and not invest in Tesla, etc. Clear as day sieg heil, right? Anyone with any intellectual honesty would look at that and go, 'oh yeah, that was deliberate and that was clearly what he was doing'.
But no, that's not going to stop the New York Times from doing this post partisan cost cutting framing. This is genuinely fucking bat shit. When I read this, I was like, oh my god, even for the New York Times, this is bad. So what they tried to do is orient the DOGE cost cutting, again, we're 10 days into this bloodbath of the liberal state, right?, as part of a kind of bipartisan continuum, and this is just sort of a more extreme version of it, the headline would read, "Beneath Trump's chaotic spending freeze, an idea that crosses party lines". So, he'd orient this in kind of normal balance the budget politics, writing, "There is a long bipartisan history of attempts to rein in spending and address [00:40:00] concerns about government inefficiencies, though the parties have grown increasingly divided about what to cut". And you truly have to read it. It presents this kind of Obama-Bowles–Simpson-Biden sort of tighten your belt, balance the budget rhetoric, as comparable to what Musk is doing...
NIMA SHIRAZI - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: ...that somehow doesn't mention that the family dinner table conversation right now in the Trump administration is about how much of a Nazi to be.
ADAM JOHNSON - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: Well, that and stripping Congress of any oversight of this processes, right? The Bowles-Simpson Committee was a series of recommendations that presumably would manifest into some bill in Congress that would actually be passed by Representatives that actually represent people, not the unilateral dictates of a stimulant-addled fucking billionaire, who just arbitrarily decides what to cut without any input from, I don't know, 330 million people in this country.
So again, this has been a long whitewashing that goes up to this day. Just two days ago on February 3rd 2025, the New York Times finally did a kind of semi critical article about Musk's gutting of the [00:41:00] federal liberal state, the administrative state. But even that, the whole thing was just drenched in, again, still made no mention of his far right ideology at all and was drenched in euphemism. So this is "Inside Musk's aggressive incursion into the federal government" from February 3rd, 2025. It's got 9, 000 reporters. So I'm not going to list them all off, but just know that one of them is Maggie Haberman, of course. It referred to the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, ha ha, get it? They refer to it as "a cost cutting initiative", "cost cutting project". So we have three different mentions. Every time they mentioned DOGE, they would call it a cost cutting effort. But of course, it's not a cost cutting effort, and it's not going to cut anything, because it can't really cut anything, because the federal budget is allotted by Congress. It's not like the money is going to mysteriously go back into the federal government. That's not how this works. And of course, even if that was true, which it's not, the goal is not to cut costs. They want to gut the administrative and liberal state because Musk believes that it keeps Black people and Brown people too comfortable and [00:42:00] too secure in their jobs, and doesn't allow workers to be abused.
And again, name it, saves the environment, protects endangered species, everything that sort of represents the already pretty raised within liberal state we have, he doesn't like because he's a fucking Nazi. And I know that because he did a sieg heil on television and constantly publishes Nazi content all the time.
But again, and we talked about this in our news brief two weeks ago, Musk is just simply too big to fail. The fact that he's an overt White nationalist and is clearly testing the limits of how overt he can be in this White nationalist, again, now he won't show up about South Africa. That's a favorite bugbear of VDARE and all these other White nationalist websites, is that he simply can't fail because if we have to acknowledge that he's a White supremacist on a White supremacist agenda to cut anything he perceives, including USAID, which he perceives as being beneficial to Black and Brown people and poor people in general, then that takes the media to a dark place where they have to acknowledge ideology, which again, if you're out of power, right?, if you're an activist or you're [00:43:00] poor, or if you're an enemy state, it's taken for granted that you have an ideological agenda. It's taken for granted that you have an ideological motive.
NIMA SHIRAZI - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: It's part of the descriptor. It's part of like the kind of Homeric epithet of the way that these organizations or these approaches, these ideas, they are always framed, 'this is progressive, this is activist, this is supporting the liberal state', but you don't get it on the other side. You don't get it when it's Musk. You don't get it when it's Trump.
ADAM JOHNSON - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: No, they're just concerned with cost cutting. They're just concerned with cost cutting. I mean, I can't tell you again, I read every one of these articles and dozens of more and I can't find any that mentioned much less lead with or center or make obvious the ideological agenda at work here.
And one would think that, I don't know, two weeks into this, this right wing purge, where he's obviously, again, talking about the "diversity initiatives" and going after people with disabilities and going after trans people and going after minorities and basically outlawing the acknowledgement of [00:44:00] the existence of minorities and trans people and queer people and people with disabilities. You would think, I don't know, they would lead with his fucking right wing ideology, at all, but again, that's just not something they're programmed to do because they are fundamentally editorially deferential to those in power, and those in power must be assumed to have good intentions and good faith. They cannot be assumed to have any ideological or sinister motives. So we keep getting this idea that, again, up until fucking today, and they're still doing it, that DOGE is just some Government efficiency panel.
Why Are Dems Surprised - The Intercept Briefing - Air Date 2-7-25
SUNJEEV BERY: At a influencer conference, a political influencer conference last spring in DC, Cory Booker opened up the happy hour on the opening night of this conference talking about the importance of social media and messaging. As soon as he ended his remarks, he was hounded by a room full of some of the largest liberal TikTokers asking him why he supported banning the app that they message other young people on.
So it's odd that they [00:45:00] have people like this, with these stances, with these actions, with this policy record, tapped to lead these critical pieces of infrastructure for the party in such a critical moment. It's, baffling to me. So I'm, wondering for both of you, how would you assess the democratic Party's leadership in this moment because you're both talking about activism and organizing in addition to that Indivisible call There was a large protest outside the Treasury on Tuesday That was organized by Indivisible and Move On while members of Congress showed up that was from the outside. So what is leadership doing right now to restore faith in the party in their leadership and for the road ahead?
JORDAN UHL: I mean, I'll be blunt and say I'm not seeing it, and I'm just not seeing what needs to be done. And this is a moment for an asymmetrical challenge, right? Trump holds formal authority, but he obviously is going way beyond formal authority when it comes to things like abolishing agencies like USAID, that he doesn't technically have the power to [00:46:00] do.
And meanwhile, Democratic leaders. They don't have a sense of what to do or how to operate. And the way you operate in a moment like this is by engaging in an asymmetrical challenge. Democrats don't have any formal authority, but they can build informal authority. I personally think Elon Musk is far more vulnerable than most people recognize.
And I could imagine. A movement to call on Democratic senators to filibuster any legislation that provides any sort of appropriations or funding for any of Elon Musk's, financial interests, starting with SpaceX, a big chunk of his increase in wealth is just projections from the stock market of future earnings for Tesla and SpaceX, tens of billions of dollars could be subtracted from him very quickly.
But this kind of creative thinking isn't something that it. Democrats in office tend to be very good at because they're very well trained in, let's just be blunt kissing the ass of concentrated sectors of wealth in order to access that money [00:47:00] to run campaigns. My personal opinion is any formal shift in how leading democratic politicians behave is going to occur because, people are leading from behind, movement organizations, concerned grassroots voters and donors are going to say, what the heck are you doing?
And then they're going to start listening, and then they're going to start quote unquote leading.
AKELA LACY: Yeah, I agree with 99 percent of that, I would say. I'm not sure that leaders, leadership in the Democratic Party is looking for feedback. I get the sense that they want to create the appearance that they're looking for feedback, but, maintain this practice of thinking they're the smartest people in the room and thinking that they have it locked down and, we'll listen to what you say, but we're actually, we know what we're doing.
I do think right now is an opening for some of that more creative thinking to come in. But I think that, you, really hit it on the head there. The idea that no one was prepared, that there was no strategy, and that they're playing catch up right [00:48:00] now when this writing has been on the wall for months and months and months.
I mean, we can go back to June. We can, we can go back to October, November. But what possible reason could there be that Schumer doesn't have Democrats locked down to vote as a bloc against every single Trump nominee? He came out on Monday touting that they had 47 people, including, the two independents, vote against the OMB chief.
But then you have other votes just this week, where it's like they have 22 people voting for a Trump nominee. They have 24 people in the Democratic Party voting for a Trump nominee. And they should be being held accountable for that. I think some of these outside groups are trying to do that. But when you talk about the sparks of potential openings for that creative thinking, whether it's from members of The Squad or members of the CPC, I think Pramila Jayapal has been very blunt that Democrats are not willing to learn from this moment, particularly on Gaza.
But you also see those ranks being decimated [00:49:00] and whatever organizing has been done to build their capacity to do that creative thinking and fill that gap in Congress, since 2018, et cetera, et cetera, has been cut in half, every two years because of groups like AIPAC and these outside groups that Democrats continue caving to.
So that's the bigger, 30, 000 foot picture of the cycle of why this seems to be impossible for people who say that they have all the information and all the answers.
Trumps American Takeover Part 2 - Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick - Air Date 2-1-25
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: Kim, I've kept you far longer than I pledged to keep you, but I want to end on this question. It is well known in the world of autocracy and authoritarianism that it's really hard to claw it back once you've lost it. And I'm hearing you say and I think I agree we're well into having lost something fundamental. There are a lot of people out there who are listening to this show, trying to decide what to do.
And I, would love to hear [00:50:00] your menu. I think we've asked several guests of what the mission is not for... I mean, yes, by all means, support your friends who are government workers, government lawyers, people dependent on government grants, folks, who are scared at universities... stipulated... what are you telling people to do?
What worked in Poland? What has worked in places that are clawing it back? What's the mission for listeners who really don't want to give up, but aren't sure that everything hasn't been lost already?
KIM LANE SCHEPPELE: So first of all, it's important to keep toe holds that you can use to leverage into more power for the opposition. And by toe holds, I mean civil sector groups, I mean state governments in blue states, I mean anything that's not yet been captured. We should lean into state constitutional law. We should lean into the parts of the government that are going to not go down without a fight, right? We need to hold up and look at where [00:51:00] can public outrage at least gum up the works, right?
Everything that this administration does now that is bringing down democracy and causing pain should be met with friction. You may not be able to stop it, but you can slow it down. So again, if I can just, if I can tell a small story, when I moved into New York city in the 1970s, high crime rates, everybody was, really very concerned.
It was the height of dangerous New York. And I moved into an apartment on the Upper West Side, and the first thing I did, like everybody else, was to install three more deadbolts on my door. So while the guy's installing the deadbolts, I said to him, 'well, is this really going to keep out somebody?' And he said, 'actually', he said 'no'. He said, 'really talented burglars know how to break through all the deadbolts. What you're doing is you're slowing them down until possibly something else intervenes'.
Okay. Now this is my lesson for everybody. You're not [00:52:00] going to look at things saying, can I win in the end? You're looking at the much nearer term. How do we slow it down? And so litigation may not result in a victory at the Supreme Court, but you still need to litigate just to slow it down. It may be that the local office near you says that they've run out of money. You do sit ins just to create friction. You want to slow down the autocratic power grab because we do have midterm elections coming up. We do have state governors who are finding ways to work together to build a kind of daisy chain of resilience that may be able to stand up to the federal government. So, anything you can do to slow it down in the meantime is the thing that's going to keep you safe in the long run.
And so, it's just generalizing the lessons from what keeps you safe personally. Think about how to generalize that to how can you do that at state level. And [00:53:00] small things that gum up the works. Resistance, not letting it pass without a fight. One of my friends just says subscribe to the media that are standing up to this, put your weight and your money behind the institutions that are throwing sand in the gears, and that's the basic thing that you can do.
We're all now just trying to slow it down, stop it in its tracks. Think of yourself as being like that guy in Tiananmen Square with the shopping bags in front of the tank. Whatever it is that you can do personally to just slow it down, just stop it locally, just do it.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: And maybe the gloss I would add, although that was so eloquent, I'm reluctant to gloss, but it is some version of to keep your heart soft so that you can see suffering for what it is.
KIM LANE SCHEPPELE: Absolutely.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: And to not be alone, because I think that's the thing that is fearsome right now, is sitting on your phone and spiraling. There are so many people doing so [00:54:00] much phenomenal work.
Note from the Editor on the long slide to dictatorship
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with The Gray Area discussing the brokenists and the status-quoists. The ReidOut explained the constitutional crisis sparked by Elon Musk. The NPR Politics Podcast got into the details of the fight over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Amicus spoke in detail about the mechanisms by which democracy is undermined in favor of executive power. Straight White American Jesus contrasted business and government to highlight the absurdity of trying to run them in similar ways. Citations Needed criticized the media for failing to recognize the ideological motives behind Elon Musk and his fake Department of Government Efficiency. The Intercept Briefing critiqued the Democrats' inability to mount an organized defense against Trumpism. And Amicus looked at ways to create friction to slow the dissent into authoritarianism.
And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive sections.
But first, a reminder that this show is produced with the support of our members who get access to bonus episodes and enjoy all of [00:55:00] our shows without ads. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.Com/Support (there's a link in the show notes), through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. And as always, if regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stay in the way of hearing more information
If you have questions or would like your comments included in the show, our upcoming topics include the dystopian plans for Trump's deportation regime, followed by Trump's possibly even more dystopian proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza. And if you have any suggestions on non-dystopian topics that we can cover, I'm definitely open to suggestions.
In any case, get your comments and questions in now for those topics. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991. We're also findable on the privacy-focused messaging app Signal [00:56:00] at the handle bestoftheleft.01. There's a link in the show notes for that. Or you can simply email me to [email protected].
Now as for today's topic, I wanted to follow up on what I said at the top of the show, arguing that the slide into authoritarianism, fascism, dictatorship, whatever your preferred label, has happened over a very long time. I based that on a news story that crossed my awareness in the very first few months that I was producing Best of the Left back in March 2006. I've played this clip several times over the years when it seemed relevant, and there's been no time more relevant than right now.
If you're not familiar with former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, it's good to know that she was a conservative Republican, she was appointed by Ronald Reagan, and was one of the votes on the court that installed George W. Bush into the presidency in the Bush v. Gore case. So when she criticizes Republicans and warns about what it takes for a country to [00:57:00] fall into dictatorship, she is not speaking out of ideological rejection of conservative politics; it is just out of concern for the future of the country. Here is the full three minute report from NPR, originally aired almost exactly 19 years ago.
MORNING EDITION: Supreme Court justices keep many opinions private, but a former justice is speaking out. Yesterday, Sandra Day O'Connor criticized Republicans who criticized the courts. She said the critics challenged the independence of judges and the freedoms of all Americans. Her speech at Georgetown University was not available for broadcast, but NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg was there.
NINA TOTENBERG: In an unusually forceful and forthright speech, O'Connor said that attacks on the judiciary by some Republican leaders pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedoms. O'Connor began by conceding that courts do have the power to make presidents, or the Congress, or governors, as she put it, "really, really angry. But," she continued, "if we don't make them mad some [00:58:00] of the time, we probably aren't doing our jobs as judges. And our effectiveness," she said, "is premised on the notion that we won't be subject to retaliation for our judicial acts."
"The nation's founders wrote repeatedly," she said, "that without an independent judiciary to protect individual rights from the other branches of government, those rights and privileges would amount to nothing. But," said O'Connor, "as the founding fathers knew, statutes and constitutions don't protect judicial independence, people do." And then she took aim at former House GOP leader Tom DeLay. She didn't name him, but she quoted his attacks on the courts at a meeting of the conservative Christian group Justice Sunday last year, when DeLay took out after the courts for rulings on abortion, prayer, and the Terry Schiavo case.
"This," said O'Connor, "was after the federal courts had applied Congress' one-time-only statute about Schiavo as it was written, not," said O'Connor, "as the congressmen might have wished it were written. The response to this flagrant display of judicial restraint," said O'Connor, her voice [00:59:00] dripping with sarcasm, "was that the congressman blasted the courts.
"It gets worse," she said, noting that death threats against judges are increasing. "It doesn't help," she said, "when a high profile senator suggests there may be a connection between violence against judges and decisions that the senator disagrees with." She didn't name him, but it was Texas Senator John Cornyn who made that statement after a Georgia judge was murdered in the courtroom and the family of a federal judge in Illinois murdered in the judge's home.
O'Connor observed that there have been a lot of suggestions lately for so-called judicial reforms: recommendations for the massive impeachment of judges, stripping the courts of jurisdiction, and cutting judicial budgets to punish offending judges. "Any of these might be debatable," she said, "as long as they are not retaliation for decisions that political leaders disagree with. "I," said O'Connor, "am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning."
Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and former communist countries where interference with an independent [01:00:00] judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O'Connor said, "We must be ever vigilant against those who would strong arm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship," she said, "but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."
Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: "We must avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings." And if present news is any indication, I think we definitely failed to avoid these beginnings.
Now to be clear, the plan to take over the judiciary and bend it to conservative and corporate ends started well before 2006, way back in the 70s. 2006 just happens to be when a conservative Republican former justice who'd sat on the nation's highest court called out the rising authoritarian instincts within the Republican Party for what they were, the beginning of the very [01:01:00] predictable slide into authoritarianism that we are experiencing now.
SECTION A: GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: and now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics. Next up, section A, government agencies, followed by section B, constitutional crisis, section C, the playbook, and section D, what to do.
Musk's Coup and Trump's Christian Zionist Gaza Takeover Part 2 - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 2-7-25
BRAD ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: It is and we've been telling people to try to remain calm to try to remain in some kind of state of equilibrium, but that was hard this week.
And I, I recognize that too. I had moments of feeling like, uh, you know, panic was a word that, that is probably accurate. Let me run through what's happened for folks and then we'll, we'll do some analysis. Uh, basically over the weekend, uh, going back about a week now, we learned that, that Musk and the. Kind of raving, roving crew of henchmen hackers that he's put together have, uh, been able to gain access to government agencies.
And that included the treasury, the human resources agency. [01:02:00] They've shown up at the GSA. They have, have really tried to kind of get their way into any department they can, the department of labor. I'll read a little bit here. Hey, it's Elon Musk, charged with running the U. S. Government Human Resources Agency, have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees.
So we start to get these, you know, this information that government employees are locked out, and yet here's Musk, who has not been confirmed by the Senate, who is, we don't know about his security clearance, who is running this, as you referenced, Dan, nebulous government agency that is not really officially established.
And they are taking authority, usurping federal employees, and now who, Musk and who, have access to millions of federal employees and their personal data. They also were able to log on [01:03:00] to the payment systems of the U. S. Treasury. I'm going to read a little bit from Wired here, who's just done a great job throughout the last month reporting on this.
U. S. Treasury Department and White House officials have repeatedly denied that technologists associated with Musk's so called doge had the ability to rewrite the code of the payment system through which the vast majority of federal funding flow, federal spending flows. Wired reporting shows, however, everybody, listen, if you're driving, if you tuned out, if you're cutting cucumbers for dinner or chopping onions, stop.
Just stop for a minute. Wired is reporting that a DOJ operative did in fact have access. Write access, meaning they could write the code of the Treasury. Not only that, but sources tell Wired that at least one note was added to Treasury records indicating that he no longer had write access before senior IT staff stated it was actually rescinded.[01:04:00]
We have a situation, and I'm gonna get to who's on Musk's team in a minute, Dan, okay? It's not a dream team, just, just, this is not, this is not an all star cast. They are able to get into the code of the U. S. Treasury. Not just to read, Dan. They don't have just like viewer access to the Google Doc. They have editing access to the Google Doc.
Okay? Now, who was the one that had access to this? It's a man named Marco Elles, a 25 year old Doge technologist, who was recently installed at the Treasury Department as a special government employee. One of a number of young men identified by Wired who have little to no government experience, but are currently associated with Doge.
He previously worked for SpaceX. And, and for X slash Twitter. What happened to this guy, Dan? Oh, I don't know. He resigned yesterday because he had a social media account that advocated for racism and eugenics. [01:05:00] Nonetheless, he was granted privileges, including the ability to not just read, but write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the U.
S. government, the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System. This is an agency, they're talking about the Bureau of the Fiscal Services, an agency that, according to Treasury records, paid out 5. 45 trillion dollars In 2024. So Dan, millions of federal employees, trillions of American dollars, a 25-year-old who again confirmed by the Senate security clearance.
Oh, he just quit because he's a eugenics and an open racist. Okay. There are, and I'm, I'm con, I'm gonna continue just to go through some information here. Friends, there's a bunch of requirements on federal law about who can control the federal funds. Who can issue payments on the behalf of the federal government?
Who has access to those things? [01:06:00] Who has access to the sensitive private information? There's something called the Privacy Act, Dan. There's all kinds of statutes and regulations designed to protect people. Designed to protect the American people. From 25 year old hackers, who are open eugenicists and racists, from having their most sensitive information and being able to control who the government pays and who it doesn't.
Now, Musk is saying he's identifying false payments and illegal things and he's saving the federal government four billion dollars a day. Why does he get to decide that? Who gave him the power? Who authorized that? This is not his job, period. This is not the executive branch's job. It is not Elon Musk's job.
This is a coup. And what I mean by that is, this is the executive branch taking powers it is not given in the Constitution. And [01:07:00] taking them from the legislative branch. Presidents can send recommendations to Congress. There's the impoundment control act, but guess what? The president. Much less Elon Musk does not have unilateral control over the purse of the U.
S. Treasury.
Let me quote Elizabeth Popp Berman, writing at Liberal Currents. And you know this is good, Dan? You know why I know this is good? Because A, not only is Elizabeth Popp Berman A great commentator at the University of Michigan. But the New York Times asked her to write this, and then she wrote it, and they were like, oh, actually, too radical.
So you know it's good, right? You know it's good. Trump has already demonstrated his intent to gut parts of the government that threaten him or depart from his political allies interests or ideology. So all the things, Dan, that we're not going to have time to talk about today at length. Purging the FBI.
Prohibit funding for whole fields of study. And, as you [01:08:00] mentioned, halting spending and including unclean energy. The effort is unprecedented, but so far it has been met with mixed success. So there's, there's There's a lot of bureaucratic obstacles here. However, with Musk in control of the federal spigot, the messy and slow problem would be solved.
Places like the National Science Foundation, the president does have considerable authority to direct spending. If the president wants to create ideological litmus tests, he probably can. But even so, it takes time to make unenthusiastic employees review each grant for mentions of gender and equity and all this kind of stuff.
But if Elon Musk, Dan, just has control of the money spout, while they can centralize power and speed things up. And that's the goal. If you control the purse, you control the government. If you control the purse, nobody can get in your way. If you control the purse, you can do things like you did last week, with no warning, no guidance, turn off the money, [01:09:00] so that people who get Meals on Wheels, the elderly, school children who rely on Head Start programs, The young, people who are on Medicaid, the sick, they are cut off from help with no warning.
Having a president, Elizabeth Popperman says, even more so an unelected billionaire, hold direct, granular control of nearly 7 trillion dollars is power beyond the founder's wildest dreams. And we have seen elsewhere, notably in Hungary, that finding the ways to use government to defund the opposition has been an effective opening salvo in the expansion of authoritarian rule.
Trump Guts EPA's Environmental Justice Office, Putting Poorest Communities of Color at More Risk - Democracy Now! - Air Date 2-7-25
AMY GOODMAN: We end today’s show with President Trump’s moves to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. On Thursday, 168 workers of the environmental justice office were placed on leave. The office was first established in 1992 after research showed communities with hazardous waste sites had a [01:10:00] higher percentage of Black and low-income residents.
For more, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Mustafa Santiago Ali, the former head of the EPA’s environmental justice program. He resigned in 2017 to protest a Trump administration proposal to severely scale back the agency.
So, you resigned under Trump administration one. Now it’s not scaling back; it’s shutting it down. Can you talk first about what environmental justice is, and what it will mean?
MUSTAFA ALI: Yeah. Well, environmental justice deals with the disproportionate impacts that happen in communities of color and lower-wealth communities. Those communities are everywhere from Appalachia to Flint, Michigan, to the Navajo Nation. It makes sure that folks have a voice, makes sure that they have an opportunity to play a role in the impacts that are happening in their communities. It also helps them to be able to play a role in moving from surviving to thriving.
AMY GOODMAN: [01:11:00] And so, you have 168, some people are saying 200, workers within the environmental justice program put on leave. So, what happens to communities across the country?
MUSTAFA ALI: Well, they’re now placed in a much dangerous situation because they no longer have that advocate for them inside of the Environmental Protection Agency. You know, we have over 100 million people in our country right now who are dealing with unsafe air, whether it’s from ozone particulate matter or a number of other things. And many times, our most vulnerable communities are the ones who are carrying those burdens. So they no longer have someone to make sure that they have the information that they need and that they have the ability to work with the agency and others to address that.
We know that we’ve got all these dangerous chemicals that are in our waters right now, everything from lead — and we saw what happened in Flint, Michigan, in Benton Harbor, in a number of other locations across our country. But we also have things like TCE and “forever chemicals” and a number of [01:12:00] other things that are just very deadly. So, they no longer have someone, a place to be able to go, to understand how to navigate these very dangerous situations that they’re often facing. They also no longer will have the resources that are necessary to help their groups to be able to properly advocate, to help to make change happen inside of their communities.
AMY GOODMAN: The Guardian has an article headlined “Trump’s proposed EPA leadership stacked with lobbyists and attorneys.” What concerns you most about the EPA right now? And what message do you have? Right now hundreds of EPA career workers have left. ProPublica reports those who remain feel deeply torn. You quit under the first Trump administration. What message do you have for those who are remaining?
MUSTAFA ALI: Well, first, I’m very concerned about the deregulation and the focus on corporate profits, because any time that we place profit over people, then [01:13:00] we are putting a crosshair on our most vulnerable, our most marginalized.
For all those brothers and sisters who are still there at the agency and for those who have been put on leave, I would give them the words of my grandmother: that you have power unless you give it away. And that means that not only them, but citizens across our country who believe that everyone has the right to have clean air and clean water, for their children to be able to be on land that is free from toxic pollution, that we have to raise our voices. We have to get engaged. We have to make sure that folks understand that this is not an American value, and that we also have to understand that there is power inside of our vote. I never tell anyone who to vote for, but I do say you should be thinking very clearly about voting for somebody who cares about your communities. So don’t give up your power. Continue to build relationships together, and stand in solidarity.
AMY GOODMAN: Last week, the Senate confirmed former Long Island Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin as head of the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Three [01:14:00] Democrats joined with the Republicans in the vote: Arizona Senators Rubén Gallego and Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman. The youth climate action group Sunrise Movement condemned Zeldin’s confirmation as a disaster for the planet and a win for fossil fuel executives, writing, quote, “He took $420K from Big Oil, pledged to undo climate protections, and has been all-in with Trump, backing corporate polluters at the expense of working people.” In this last minute that we have together, Mustafa, where do you see this country going right now? You just stood with other climate activists outside protesting. What is your ultimate demand?
MUSTAFA ALI: Well, our ultimate demand is to stop placing these crosshairs on vulnerable communities and communities across our country. We should be focused on making sure that folks’ health is being improved and not having a situation where folks are going to be sicker. Their actions also will make us poorer, [01:15:00] because we know that the focus for the 21st century has to be on a cleaner economy. So, once again, we have the opportunity to move people from surviving to thriving, but the current sets of actions that they’re moving forward on are going to do absolutely the opposite.
Trump's latest target the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Part 2 - The NPR Politics Podcast - Air Date 2-10-25
LAUREL WAMSLEY - PERSONAL FINANCE CORR., NPR: I guess the first thing I would say is, even if it doesn't disappear, you know, it can sort of become a shell of itself, which is kind of what I feel like we're looking at right now, right?
There's staffers, but they're not allowed to do anything. They can't make any rules. They can't do any enforcement. You know, they can't put out any information to help consumers, all that kind of stuff that is core to the mission of the agency. They already aren't doing and are not allowed to do under, under Russell vote.
So, you know, that's kind of what we saw during the first Trump administration. I mean, they also went after CFPB then, and really, you know, there's sort of this
ASMA KHALID - WHITE HOUSE CORR., NPR: feels different than the first time.
LAUREL WAMSLEY - PERSONAL FINANCE CORR., NPR: It does. I mean, I think you're seeing sort of the Elon Musk effect and, and probably also the Russell vote effect, right?
Like they've got a plan this time to hamper it even further. [01:16:00] Um, but I think it's also possible to just make the entity not. Strong and able to do very much. I mean, they can go and change the rules that were made under the Biden administration. They can really gut what the agency is set up to do. So, I mean, I think even if you don't destroy it, even if you don't give it any more funding, I mean, right now they're just going to start, you know, going through the reserve funds that they have there.
Um, but I mean, CFPB that can't do any of this stuff really, you know, it. You almost don't need to destroy it.
SUSAN DAVIS - POLITICAL CORR., NPR: I also think that there, to me, there's a politically interesting point here because Trump is moving so fast and doing so many things in government. But this is one where I think it has the risk of maybe going a bit too far in that a lot of what he's doing right now is like campaign promise made campaign promise kept and he wasn't campaigning on shutting down like the agency that helps consumers.
This is arguably like a. pretty working class type agency, like if you've been wronged by your bank or your mortgage company, like this is the [01:17:00] recourse for everyday citizens to go to the government and say, help me like investigate this. And taking that away doesn't exactly fit with his other message of who he's fighting for and what he's about.
It really does seem like it is much more a favor to the banking industry and the tech companies. Like it's helping people at the top and not people at the bottom. And I don't know if people have, um, strongly held feelings about the CFPB. You might be able to get away with it that way. Like people just might not know, but there has certainly been millions of Americans who have engaged with this agency.
And it's like where you could go if you had been wronged. And while there's certainly other financial regulatory institutions overlooking like the health of the financial sector in this country, if CFPB withers on the vine or closes down, like. There's nothing else. There's no other recourse for consumers at that level with that much power anywhere.
So I think that it might start to have a ripple effect where like, look, people still get kind of screwed over by their banks and their mortgage companies sometimes. Like, that's not a [01:18:00] solved problem in America. It might sort of recreate some of that anger.
LAUREL WAMSLEY - PERSONAL FINANCE CORR., NPR: Yes. And CFPB staffers, you know, uh, one who just left the agency told me that this is like taking the cops off the beat.
I mean, they are like the front line defense for consumers. And now we're just like telling this enforcement agency, don't enforce. Um, and so, you know, there's a lot of concern from other consumer advocacy groups saying with the agency hampered in this way, it just leaves Americans super vulnerable to scammers and fraud and financial abuse.
ASMA KHALID - WHITE HOUSE CORR., NPR: Well, there are legal. challenges underway at this moment to try to keep the agency open. I mean, correct. What are those? Yeah,
LAUREL WAMSLEY - PERSONAL FINANCE CORR., NPR: so there's two lawsuits so far. One of them, my understanding is that it's about the, the staff themselves and sort of like their employee records and stuff being just handed over to Elon Musk's team that it's like, Putting them at risk, you know, their own health and financial information is now in the hands of that Doge government efficiency team.
Um, so there's concern [01:19:00] there. And then the second lawsuit is that votes directives to not let them do their work, um, is. You know goes against I think what's been directed by Congress and that he can't do that essentially can't unilaterally shut the agency down Yeah, because they are congressionally obligated to do the work that they're supposed to be doing
ASMA KHALID - WHITE HOUSE CORR., NPR: Hmm, so I want to ask you a big picture question.
It feels like This attempt to, we could say, neuter CFPB is yet another move from the Trump administration that seems to mimic the Silicon Valley expression, move fast and break things. How likely is it that if these agencies get broken up, they could come back in some other form? I mean, in other words, if they die now, are they dead forever?
SUSAN DAVIS - POLITICAL CORR., NPR: That's a good question, and I think part of what, uh, bends towards the, uh, Trumpy and view in this is that yes, there is legal recourse. And yes, there is going to be a ton of litigation and they're not done yet, right? Like they're going to turn this on other agencies. Like this is part of a bigger effort.[01:20:00]
Litigation just takes a really long time. So I don't know if USAID or CPFB, like if, if all of this is resolved in the ways that people want to keep that institution, but if it takes 234 years, like what's left and how do you build it back up or how do you restaff it? So I think you can do an incredible amount of damage in a short period of time.
Especially if the will of the White House is really going to try to suffocate these agencies over the next four years. Whether they ultimately succeed in the end, unilaterally sort of closing them, I just don't know. I don't have that level of crystal ball. But I think that if it's going to be a four year fight, like, if the CFPB re rises up again at some point, it could just Take a long time.
Musk's 'DOGE' is spiraling U.S. into a constitutional crisis Part 2 - The ReidOut - Air Date 2-7-25
CLIP: This man is blocking the door. He says he's a federal employee. He won't tell us who gave him permission to do this. All he knows is he's going to stand here and tell the members of Congress who are elected who vote for the funding for all of them in this building and for the [01:21:00] Student loans, and for the Title I family, he's gonna tell us that we can't come in and talk with anybody.
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: And that, my dear readers, is Auntie Maxine fighting for the kids. Today, at least 30 House Democrats were denied access to the Department of Education building in Washington, D. C., where they had hoped to meet with Acting Education Secretary Denise Carter. Trump has called for closing the department, something some Republicans have obsessed over since the Reagan era, but which cannot be done without Congress, which created the agency during the Jimmy Carter administration.
Republicans have long wanted their hands on that multi billion dollar education market, which they are very eager to privatize for profit. They also want to eliminate civil rights protections for all students, but especially black and LGBTQ students. Which is why those right wing culture warriors are stepping up their attacks on diversity initiatives and making DEI the new boogeyman.
Joining me now is writer and historian Ibram X. Kendi, the newly announced [01:22:00] director of Howard University's Institute for Advanced Study. Congratulations on that new post at Howard University, which is starting to look like the Avengers in terms of all of the educational greats that are there, including yourself, sir.
Um, Your thoughts on duly elected members of Congress, House and Senate members being locked out of federal buildings and agencies, but these doge people who have no standing as members and representatives of the people being allowed to not only go in, but go through the computers.
GUEST 3: It, it, it really reminds me of some scenes during the Civil rights movement when we were trying to desegregate schools and universities and, uh, federal officials were denied entry.
Uh, and, and, and frankly, to me it's an, it's an act. [01:23:00] Connection because many of these people who, uh, were blocking, uh, these members of Congress from coming into these federal buildings are really trying to resegregate this country.
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: And the thing is that is that they put very you'll find point on it. DEI has just become, in many ways, on the, on the MAGA side, just a substitute for black, right?
And, but sometimes they'll add the A and they'll admit that they know it also means disabled people and LGBTQ people and trans people. And so they admit that they know the expanded word for it, but I kind of feel like anti blackness is like the worm, right? That's on the end of the hook. And so that once their base like bites down on it.
They buy into the whole thing, right? They get all of it, including losing some of their own education benefits. If you get rid of the department of education, a lot of mega people have disabled kids who need those benefits and they won't get them.
GUEST 3: Exactly. And that's the reason why they're hoping their own supporters.
Hear [01:24:00] black when they hear D I just as they hoped their own supporters heard black when they heard the term welfare and they cut welfare just as they hoped their supporters heard black when they heard the term affirmative action. You can go on and on. With programs that have helped a large number of Americans who are not black, uh, but then ended up actually supporting cutting, uh, the programs that, that, that were actually helping them.
And, and that's the insidiousness of anti blackness in this country.
JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: I want to just go through a few things that are just sort of put a point on this exact point. So in, in, in Florida, you had a teenager who was accused of waving a machete and threatening Kamala Harris, um, supporting people at the polls in Neptune Beach, Florida.
Prosecutors absolutely dropped that case. J. D. Vance, Vice President of the United States, while saying, Oh, I obviously disagree [01:25:00] with some of this po these posts, but saying, Oh, this just stupid social media activity and it shouldn't ruin a quote unquote kid's life, even though they've claimed that the people who are in our, our, our, our systems are professionals.
And this is 25 year old Marco Elez. Who had resigned from Doge after the Wall Street Journal reported that he'd made comments, uh, uh, you know, normalize Indian hate talking about eugenics, uh, and saying he was a racist before it was cool. And one more, and this is small, but it seems like it's part of the cultural change.
The Superbowl taking off and racism off of the, um, end zone and replacing choose love. When they're doing anything but choosing love here. I mean, the FBI agents are terrified right now that they're going to get doxed by on Twitter and get their lives ruined. Uh, people who worked at DEI initiatives are in a, what amounts to almost like a, a sort of a, a, a list to mark them and show who they are and, and it's being put out as like a watch list.
There's not choosing love here, but what do you make of this? All of these signals that they're saying, you know what, anti blackness and [01:26:00] racism is a okay in America again.
GUEST 3: When you can organize and invade the U. S. capital for all the world to see, uh, put up, uh, structures to, to, to lynch people, uh, you can assault.
Police officers, you can, uh, urinate on the floor of the U. S. Capitol, and then ultimately you can get pardoned. Uh, you can pretty much, they're signaling, you know, so long as you're a so called patriot, uh, so long as you're attacking democracy, so long as you're attacking black people, uh, you won't be punished.
And I think that's the cruelty of what we're witnessing.
SECTION B: CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B, constitutional crisis.
What is a Constitutional crisis - Civics 101 - Air Date 2-11-25
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: I mean, we're talking about the word crisis, right? But what are we even saying when we say constitutional crisis?
AZIZ HUG: I don't think that we can say what a constitutional crisis [01:27:00] is because there's no, uh, shared definition in either the law or in A social science discipline, which we might look to for an objective opinion.
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: So in terms of the civics 101 of it all, we can't tell everyone what it is. Like, we can't define this term because people don't agree about what it is.
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: And because of the reason and the way the phrase constitutional crisis tends to crop up. Mr. Speaker, we are in a
CLIP: constitutional crisis. I want you to know that the crisis is here.
And thus we have a constitutional crisis. In daily politics,
AZIZ HUG: uh, when you hear talk of a constitutional crisis, generally, the definition at work, uh, turns upon the speaker's views about what values they prioritize. in government, and therefore, [01:28:00] uh, the definition they're using is often one that's not shared by others.
Because of that, I tend to avoid the phrase constitutional crisis, because I think it is more confusing than it is illuminating.
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: All right, so people might say this is a constitutional crisis, but what they really might mean is I see this as a threat to what I care about or simply I don't like this, you know, and you're throwing Constitution, the law of the land, the latticework undergirding democracy.
Right up next to the word crisis. So basically you're saying everybody, we've got a democracy emergency, but what are we actually talking about here?
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Well, I think that maybe we should avoid even using the word emergency because what does that mean? Aziz tended to say breakdown [01:29:00] and strain, and he started me off with what the Constitution is ostensibly for, whether people are using it that way and what it means if they're not.
AZIZ HUG: I think I would distinguish between a couple of different ways in which you could have substantial breakdowns in constitutional law.
Understood. In some sense, here are two. ways of thinking about that that I think are salient now. So the first is you might think that the purpose of the constitution is not just to create a number of offices or roles that are filled at the level of the nation. Uh, and that carry out the work of government.
It's also to impose constraints upon how those roles can behave and to carve out paths or lanes that they should [01:30:00] rather
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: than should not be in. Now this I do at least think I know, Hannah, that the Constitution establishes the existence of government, the people in charge, and also puts guardrails on that government.
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Great. So those are two things that the Constitution is for. But if one of those things isn't happening, that could be a breakdown.
AZIZ HUG: One way of thinking about a situation of substantial constitutional strain is to say, well, many of the mechanisms that kept those actors who were given power through or by the Constitution All or most of the mechanisms that kept them in their lanes are breaking down.
And although the creative part of the constitution, the bit of the constitution that elevates people to offices of public power and influence is working, the constraining part of the constitution, the element that [01:31:00] imposes. breaks and channels those people isn't in good working order. So that's one way of thinking about it.
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: So this makes me think of separation of powers and checks and balances. I feel like that's a pretty well known government guardrail. One branch might really want to do something. But the other branch checks it, uh, maybe has to approve it or is allowed to say no to it.
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: We know the framers were worried about tyranny.
They were worried about too much power being in one person or one group of people's hands. So they split it up. And they added some rules for keeping it that way. Because, because Nick, this whole system is supposed to be about the group. People having a say in their governance, people governing themselves.
AZIZ HUG: Another way of thinking about it is to say, well, one of the important and central goals of the Constitution is [01:32:00] self government. It's to fashion a set of officers that are not just responsible for doing the thing that's beneficial to the nation today, but that are capable over time of being responsive Not just to the voters of today, but to the voters of tomorrow and to the voters of the day after that.
You can think of that as democracy as a going concern. And another form of substantial constitutional strain occurs if that possibility of democracy as a going concern starts to recede meaningfully from sight. Starts to become a theory, but not actually a practice. And we know from looking around the world, other countries experience of what's come to be called democratic backsliding, that that kind of [01:33:00] recession into the twilight of democratic possibility is a real, uh, a real thing that happens.
Even in the absence of elections being called off or some kind of very clear signal of democracy ending. I think that's a different kind of constitutional failure.
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Alright, so we've got these two principles. The guardrails that ensure democracy and people prioritizing self governance. Prioritizing democracy. And if either of those things gets weak or is strained, either because people give them up or because people find ways around them, Then we're not doing democracy anymore.
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: And, by the way, there are people, as Aziz pointed out to me, who do not believe that the point of the Constitution was to create democracy. So those people might say, well, democracy receding is not a constitutional strain.
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Yeah, and I want to avoid the rhetorical exercise here [01:34:00] of, we're a republic, not a democracy.
We have a whole episode on that, if anyone is interested. But you and I, at least. We pretty much operate on the assumption that the point of the Constitution was to create democracy.
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: I guess you could call that a Civics 101 philosophy. But I think it's also one that a lot of people agree on, a lot of people think.
Yeah!
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: And real quick, Hannah, it is possible, right, that when someone says, this is a constitutional crisis, they actually do mean the guardrails are breaking down. Or, democracy is backsliding.
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: It definitely is possible.
Is America broken Part 2 - The Gray Area - Air Date 2-10-25
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: I have some brokenness and some status quo ist tendencies. I can be either, depending on the day you ask me. I don't know what the hell that makes me. I guess if I'm hearing you, it makes me like a lot of people.
COMMERCIAL: Right.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: You know, somewhere in the middle.
I was probably at my most brokenness in the throes of the pandemic.
ALANA NEWHOUSE: Yeah.
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: The experience of, of watching even that. be so [01:35:00] easily and neatly subsumed by our partisan rancor. That was a kind of tipping point for me, in a realization that the information environment now, in conjunction with all these other forces, has really combined to create an incredibly unstable.
Situation that I do not think is sustainable.
ALANA NEWHOUSE: I think if you can maintain having both brokenness and status quo is ways of looking at the world where you can feel comfortable with either one of them or both, what that allows you to do is judge things at a local level. Which is where I think all things are going to get built or fixed anyway.
It's a little bit like cleaning out your closet. So there's a bunch of stuff that you're going to take and you're going to throw it away. But not every item of clothing. Then there are a bunch of things that you're going to take and be like, these are really important to me. I'm going to get them fixed.
And then there are things that work great. They do great for you. So you keep those. If you have a [01:36:00] philosophy about your closet, you're going to end up with a bad closet. If you're like, Nothing here has to change. We're not changing anything. You're just going to end up with a bunch of stuff you can't use.
And a bunch of stuff that doesn't look good on you, right? And if you walk in and you're like, we're throwing everything out, you may lose something that was really important to you, that actually worked really well, that maybe was from your grandmother. Like, you don't want that. I think that American society right now is at a place where it would be amazing if we could almost assess everything.
Look at everything and say, How can we make this better for more people? How can we make this work better and help more people and make better, safer, more enriching lives for more of us?
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: You're not a fence sitter though, right? You're a brokenist, right? I mean, although you do say there's this caveat, maybe I should ask you about that.
The way you say it in the piece is to say that you're a brokenness with respect to American institutions, but not with respect to America itself. [01:37:00] I'm not exactly sure what that really means. I don't know what America is, if not a bundle of institutions girded by a culture, I suppose. So maybe you can just unpack that and explain your staunch brokennism.
ALANA NEWHOUSE: I wouldn't say it's staunch. Um,
SEAN ILLING - HOST, THE GRAY AREA: I took some liberties there.
ALANA NEWHOUSE: Right. I think that, um, I have a hot hand with my brokenism, meaning I'm not slow to look at something and say it's broken beyond repair. That's a difference between me and I think some of my more status quoist friends is that their default is to say, Can we fix this?
And to take that conversation, I think sometimes too far past the point of usability and past the point of the legitimate use of anyone's time and resources and energy. So I see too many people throwing too many resources down the, what I think is just an abyss of institutions that seem like they're obviously failing and shouldn't be given those kinds of resources.[01:38:00]
So I am quicker than a lot of other people I know. to consign things to the dustbin of history now. So that's what I mean when I say I tend to be brokenist in my impulses. Yeah. In terms of sort of the America question, I mean, here's where I get a little woo woo, I guess. I think one of the best things about America and one of the most gruesome in some ways things about America is its ability to forget the past, to almost like forget the past the minute it happens, which is responsible, I think, for both its capacity to be so future oriented that it constantly morphs.
Like, it molts, almost, but also then brings trauma with it, like, drags its own trauma with it constantly into the future because it won't deal with it. But for me, what that means, though, is, is that America has, at least historically, been fertile ground for pretty radical change. And [01:39:00] because America's been very open to the idea of, well, why don't we just all wake up tomorrow and do something else?
I feel excited about the idea that we could fix stuff and maybe replace stuff. And again, I'm not, I'm not European. I was on British radio and the interviewer said to me, So, do you, you believe that maybe that the British government's gonna fix everything, right? That they could fix it and we could all be okay?
I was like, I have no idea. I don't feel super hopeful about that, but I have no idea. Europe is different and Europe in some senses lives in its own past, America doesn't. And so when I talk about feeling like I immediately will consign an American institution to the dustbin of history, it's almost because America doesn't mind.
Like, you want to throw out all of the Ivy Leagues, literally just throw them in the ocean, America will be fine. It will just make a new thing, and it's brutal. It can be violent, [01:40:00] but that ability to simply replace what needs to get thrown in the garbage means that I feel like there's going to be something new in 20 years, whether we can see it now or not.
Trumps American Takeover Part 3 - Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick - Air Date 2-1-25
KIM LANE SCHEPPELE: So this is where I'm going back and reading a lot of stuff from the 1940s, you know, so after the Second World War, when everyone's trying to figure out how do we not let that happen again, there was a big debate among lawyers, including among American lawyers.
And what they were saying was, you know, Hitler came to power lawfully, Stalin can. Yeah. did a lot of things by law. So the question was, what was wrong with that picture, right? And was it enough that something was formally legal in the sense of it was passed and enacted according to the legal procedures you had in place at the time, right?
And there were a bunch of people who said, well, Yes. And we'll fix that by putting a constitution on top of it all. And then you have a standard to judge legality. Okay. So what that didn't anticipate [01:41:00] is, you know, and actually most of the world's constitutions date to after the second world war. So we're unusual in having a very old constitution.
We've gotten there first, but you look at us constitutional law and it explodes after world war two, a lot of constitutional protections we have in place are much newer than the constitution itself. But then what happened starting in the US, um, starting really in the 1970s into the 80s, was that people who were determined, and this movement by the way, to create a kind of what I call autocratic legalism in the United States, started really back in the 70s.
As a set of conservative lawyers started looking at the constitution and saying, gee, you know, constitution can be interpretable. We can make it mean something else by coming up with historical arguments, with textual arguments, with off the top of our head arguments that make the constitution say something that justifies what we're doing with this other law.
So that was the [01:42:00] protection. New countries like Nazi Germany, after the war, new constitution, strong constitutional court, let's do this to prevent law from being used in this way again. But in the U. S. we've had a long process of renegotiating what the constitution is capable of meaning. And for me, I mean, I, I must admit, I stopped teaching U.
S. constitutional law before I came to Princeton. I was a law professor. I still have that hat on much of the time. I stopped teaching constitutional law after Bush v. Gore, because I'm afraid I've seen this movie before, okay, but I think the moment of truth for American law professors and Americans looking at the, the interpretability of our constitution was the immunity decision in this past term.
Whoever thought, nobody had ever thought, as all the briefs said, even Trump's lawyers didn't make the argument that presidential immunity from criminal violations would extend as far as that court said. [01:43:00] And what you then realize is that we have not only a captured Supreme Court, but we also have a captured Constitution.
That was the thing that was supposed to prevent law from being used in this autocratic manner. And between decades of legal scholarship that has said, Gee, we can make, I don't know, the Fourth Amendment sound like a recipe for banana bread if we try hard enough, right? We, we just need a little interpretive, you know, a little history, a little textualism, whatever.
This has now meant that the anchor that was supposed to prevent this from happening in the U. S. is now not here. And again, this is exactly what happened in Russia. This was what happened in Hungary. In Hungary, by the way, Orban just rewrote the Constitution after one year. That happened in Venezuela. That happened in Ecuador.
Eventually, um, you know, Erdogan in Turkey did this, rewrote the Constitution. You know, that was after the Second World War. That was supposed to be the guarantor. That this wouldn't happen. And now [01:44:00] constitutional lawyers have gotten so clever that they've worked out ways to prevent even that law from preventing the consolidation of executive power without checks.
DAHLIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: One of the things that I noted in your work is that the tendency is. You take over the executive branch and then you capture the court in the United States. As you said up top, that was the one thing Donald Trump did really well in his first term. Everything else was sort of, you know, slipping on pudding, but like he really kind of nailed it in terms of capturing the Supreme Court and, and with the help of Mitch McConnell, with the help of the conservative legal movement.
And in so doing, we have this funny loop where the court with the immunity decision and the Colorado decision and its capacious view of executive power, in some sense, before Donald Trump comes into office, the court is already in place. And it's very different and quite scary because I think it leads to my impression from the [01:45:00] way we are talking about this.
Internally in the United States, not to worry, not to worry, because the court is going to be the bulwark against the authoritarian impulses, you're saying, and then you get into these nuanced discussions. I had one this week, an important discussion with Steve Vladek about what the court's going to do with impoundment.
But it is a conversation that, in some sense, legitimizes That the court will be acting as a check on the executive, except the court, in some sense, helped to construct this unbounded executive.
KIM LANE SCHEPPELE: Exactly. So, on one hand, we can't give up on law, right? Because, I mean, you can't give up on law. Law also is a weapon in the hands of the opposition, and the entire judiciary is not captured yet.
We've already seen some stays of some really off the wall executive orders. Um, so, you know, the courts are not Hopeless or helpless. That said, it is a hierarchy and eventually all of these questions are going to wind up at the Supreme Court. And I think [01:46:00] people for whom the court has been the horizon of what law means in the U.
S. have already been shaken up badly and yet still have faith. Partly because we don't know what else to do, right? I mean, that's our professional capacity. That's what we teach our students. We still haven't, what's everybody doing standing up teaching constitutional law this semester, right? You think that the thing that you've known as a solid set of rules will still be there, at least in part.
But let me tell you, I know I used to work when I was in Hungary, I actually worked at the constitutional court. And they developed the most remarkable case law. I mean, they'd just been through dictatorship. So they understood what it was. And the court made all these decisions that would make it possible for dictatorship never to come back again.
So what did Viktor Orbán do? The first thing out of the box, he captures the constitutional court. Three years in, when he's got all his judges in line and now they're going to do what he [01:47:00] says, he passes a constitutional amendment because he also has a constitutional majority in the parliament. That simply cancels the jurisprudence of the constitutional court.
From 1990 to 2012, and all those cases we all worked on so hard all those years went poof into the air. Okay, now it probably won't happen exactly that way here, but when you've got a case law that can be updated by a court that's been captured, in theory, actually none of that is stable, you know, and so what I'm trying to get everybody for whom the Supreme Court is the primary focus of what they do to say, well, what if that's not so solid anymore.
You know, it's like leaning against a wall and suddenly you discover the wall collapses. Okay. I also worked at the Russian constitutional court where that happened. Okay. So you, when you work in a couple of these countries like that, you begin to realize constitutional law cannot be left only to the courts.
Okay. So then what do we do? [01:48:00] So, you know, one thing that some of the Hungarians did for a while, this happened in Poland after the court was captured. Some of the constitutional lawyers then started doing things like writing the opinion the court should have written. If the old law was still in place. and then acting like that opinion was real.
It's a lot of work for people who are going to then construct an entirely alternative jurisprudence. But the other thing you do is you take the constitution to the streets, right? And you don't lean on the technical, formal arguments that we're all used to making as constitutional law professors.
What is a Constitutional crisis Part 2 - Civics 101 - Air Date 2-11-25
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: So, thinking about the breakdown of guardrails, I basically asked Aziz, Okay, so what if that guardrail breaks down?
What if the federal courts, what if the Supreme Court, says This is the way it has to be. And the person they're talking to says, Nope.
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: As in, what if someone ignores what a judge or a justice says?
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Right.
AZIZ HUG: Probably the best [01:49:00] example of government officials not complying with a instruction from the Supreme Court is what happened in the wake of Brown v.
Board of Education. Brown in 1954 declares that separate but equal in education is a violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. For roughly a decade after Brown has decided, there is no meaningful change in the level of education. of, uh, school segregation outside of a couple of what are known as the border states, places like Maryland.
The reason for that absence of change is, uh, the officials responsible for managing schools at the local and the municipal level, and to some extent at the state level, successfully resisted the instruction
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: in Brown. Oh, of course. And I know this is super complicated, Hannah. [01:50:00] And schools today are still wildly segregated, if not by law, then by policies at the state and local level, and everything from district boundaries to school choice to income inequality to a lack of a court overseeing things.
And it took something like 50 or 60 years before the last school district was formally desegregated in 2016. One of
AZIZ HUG: the lessons That one might take from that is the answer to the question of what happens when officials defy the court is that the court loses. The court is not in a position to certain kinds of coordinated resistance by governmental actors.
The court loses?
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Like, that's the answer? Is that allowed?
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: It's not supposed to happen, but it can. It has. And it is a really big deal. [01:51:00] Remember, this system is about guardrails and about agreeing on democracy. Agreeing to abide by it and keep the project up. This is all just a theory written down on paper.
If we don't do it, we don't do it.
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Okay, did Aziz say anything about the federal courts? Today, if we're thinking about upholding the Constitution, how all these branches work together or not, how is that branch working right now?
AZIZ HUG: I don't think we're in a world in which that characterizes the challenge to constitutional stability practice today.
I think we're in a world in which it's much more likely that particularly the justices of the Supreme Court take their cues for their rulings not from text, not [01:52:00] from original understanding, not from precedent, not from constitutional principle, but from What their ideological fellow travelers, uh, think.
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Okay, let me make sure I understand this, Hannah. We're talking about the courts today, specifically the Supreme Court, and the way the Roberts Court interprets the Constitution and hands down rulings based ON the Constitution. All part of the project of upholding the guardrails, upholding the law of the land.
So what does it mean to base rulings on what your Quote, ideological fellow travelers, unquote, think instead of, you know, text, precedent, principle, et cetera.
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: So here's the example he gave.
AZIZ HUG: A really good example of this is the attack on administrative agencies that culminated this last year. The core of [01:53:00] that attack was an attack on the idea that when a federal administrative agency does something, when it interprets the law, it gets a lot of deference from the, uh, federal courts.
And this was really a non issue among any of the justices until about 2015. Oh, this is Chevron, right?
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: The Chevron deference, yeah. The court did away with that in a case called Loper Bright, which I made an episode about and warmly recommend you listen to if you want a better sense of what Aziz is referencing here.
But essentially, for a long, long time, experts in administrative agencies could interpret a statute, and the courts would generally say, You know, okay, we defer to you. You're the expert.
AZIZ HUG: And in 2015, a couple of the justices start saying, well, hey, we shouldn't do this. We should, we should police what agencies are doing.
Well, what changes in 2015? The only thing that changes in 2015 is that in the course of the Obama administration, the [01:54:00] RNC platform has changed to include, we shouldn't give deference to agencies. And lawyers associated with the Republican Party and that movement start making arguments in that register.
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: So the Republican National Committee came up with this idea, and then they got it into the legal system. They put the question out there. I mean, that is how cases get before the Supreme Court. People actively try their best to put them there, often after years of planning.
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Absolutely. That is often how it works.
But I think the reason Aziz brought this up is that, for one, This was, as he put it, a non issue in the court, until it became a part of a party platform. And for another, the actual reasoning, the logic of the majority opinion, is borrowed from the arguments that those lawyers were making, the lawyers associated with the Republican Party.
AZIZ HUG: Those arguments very, very quickly filter into traditional opinion. I think you can [01:55:00] say the same thing about affirmative action, I think you can say the same thing about the way that the religion clauses of the constitution, uh, are understood, I think you can say the same thing about the court's ruling on presidential immunity, uh, last year.
Uh, there are many instances in which even the grounds upon which the Roberts Court majority usually justifies itself, its originalist grounds, do no explanatory work. They're not even in the opinions. And the basis for the opinions can really only be understood in terms of changes in the legal culture, but changes in a very particular, uh, co partisan corner of the legal culture.
NICK CAPODICE - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Okay, so a majority of the Roberts Court justices identify as Originalists, and we also have an episode about that, which listeners might find helpful right now. And Aziz is saying that in many cases, even their originalism or what they're calling originalism, which [01:56:00] is supposed to be about the text of the Constitution, does not explain their reasoning.
HANNAH MCCARTHY - CO-HOST, CIVICS 101: Yeah. Later on in an email, Aziz explained to me that he thinks, quote, It is hard to explain any rulings by the Roberts court on the basis of standard legal sources. Text history precedent. He also said that he thinks quote that it is hard to explain those rulings without seeing an effect of political affiliations.
SECTION C: THE PLAYBOOK
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached section C, the playbook.
Are We Sleepwalking into Autocracy-- Trump Embraces Authoritarian Playbook of Hungary's Orbán - Democracy Now! - Air Date 2-12-25
KIM LANE SCHEPPELE: So, first of all, you know, when Project 2025 came out, I sat down and read it, and the first thing I thought was, you know, this sounds so much like what Orbán did. And then, it turns out, a month later, there was a terrific article in The New Republic that made the connection.
So, Orbán has this English-language think tank. It’s called the Danube Institute. You can google it and see what it’s up to. And the Danube Institute had entered into a formal agreement with the Heritage Foundation to [01:57:00] actually provide consulting on how the Trump people were going to copy what Orbán had done. In the meantime, you know, when Orbán gives his Hungarian-language speeches, one of the things he keeps saying is, you know, “We are deep into the Trump administration and involved in its central planning.” So, you put all this together, and it’s actually not just that the Trump people are aping Orbán from a distance, it’s that Orbán has actually been involved in the design of Project 2025.
Now, this mirrors what Orbán has also done in Europe. So, the European elections, the elections to the European Parliament, were held last June, and Orbán’s Fidesz party spent more money on campaigning for fellow far-right parties in other countries, like not just in Hungary, but in countries all over Europe, than any other single party in Europe. And remember, Hungary is a tiny country, you know, nine-and-a-half million people, on the edge of [01:58:00] Europe. They’re advertising in Germany. They’re advertising in France. They’re advertising in much bigger countries. And it turns out that this advertising, along with the general sort of collapse and weaknesses of party systems across Europe, meant that the far right had victories really all over the place. And Orbán was able to take those far-right victories and cobble together what has become the third-largest political party in the European Parliament. And so, that’s an incredible political accomplishment.
And what you’re seeing is that Orbán is now sort of riding atop this wave of election victories across Europe and claiming to be the heart and soul of this new far-right movement. He was president of something called — the rotating president of what’s called the Council in the last half of 2024. And when he unveiled his presidency, the slogan was “Make Europe [01:59:00] Great Again,” which was also the slogan of this far-right gathering that we just saw in Spain as Orbán pulled together all these far-right parties. So, you know, Orbán is a prime minister of a tiny country on the edge of Europe, but he is now punching far above his weight in trying to consolidate this movement of anti-democratic far-right forces.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: This is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán welcoming Donald Trump’s inauguration last month.
PRIME MINISTER
JUAN GONZÁLEZ - CO-HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: VIKTOR ORBÁN: [translated]
PRIME MINISTER VIKTOR ORBÁN: The stars under which we stand now are much more favorable than they were in 2024. Not only we became stronger, but, in the meantime, the flagship of the Western liberal politics had sunken. The Western world received a patriotic, pro-peace, anti-migration, pro-family president in Washington.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, if you could respond to what Orbán is saying, Professor Scheppele? But also, one of the things you point out is that you have these authoritarian leaders that [02:00:00] don’t just take power. I mean, even Hitler won an election. Orbán won an election. And then, what that process is, consolidating the power, so much so that right now President Trump — what is it? — hundreds of executive orders? But isn’t that a sign of weakness, not strength? I mean, he’s got the House and the Senate. Why can’t he pass these laws, and not get around them, with Republicans in the majority in both houses?
KIM LANE SCHEPPELE: Right. So, actually, if you remember, in Donald Trump’s first term, he had even larger majorities in both houses for the first half of his first term. And even then, he did not move to legislation. So, I think part of the reason is that Trump wants to move fast. Orbán also wanted to move fast. You know, Orbán, in his first year in office, amended the Hungarian Constitution 12 times, changing 60 different provisions of the Constitution. Orbán had a supermajority in his parliament, so he was able to work with them. [02:01:00] Trump has got razor-thin majorities now in both houses. Also, amending the U.S. Constitution is beyond the bounds of almost any single political party. So Trump is doing something else. And this is the crucial thing about the autocratic playbook. It doesn’t look exactly the same in every country, because the political systems don’t look exactly the same.
So, Trump is trying to break things quickly so that by the time the courts catch up with him, by the time his own party starts to have second thoughts, by the time all of the forces that are checks and balances regroup and figure out how to push back, the thing will be broken, you know? So, I think what Trump has learned, and what Orbán also, I think, taught him is that, you know, think of government as an aquarium. If you just stick a blender in it and make fish soup, you’re not going to be able to restore the aquarium even when courts tell you, “No, you shouldn’t have done it like that.” So, this is really, you know, break things first, act [02:02:00] fast to create facts on the ground, and then, when especially the judiciary is slow to catch up with you, you can’t do anything.
So, let me give you one example from Hungary. In order to capture the judiciary, what Orbán did was to suddenly lower the judicial retirement age from 70 to 62. And in Hungary, like most European countries, the judiciary is a civil service activity, so you come in as a baby judge, you get promoted through the ranks. The people who are the oldest are also the most senior. So, you suddenly lower the retirement age, effective like today. All these judges are forced out of office. They then bring a lawsuit, saying, you know, “We were improperly, illegally fired.” Couple years later, the European courts get around to saying, “Yes, that shouldn’t have happened. This is a violation of European law.” By that time, Orbán has filled all the positions. He goes back to court and says, “Well, do you want us to fire the new judges?” at which point the [02:03:00] European Commission, which is enforcing this court decision, says, “Well, we really don’t want you to fire any new judges. Just give the new judges protections so that this can’t happen again.” OK? And what that meant, he captured all the courts and got European blessing for it all, because he moved first, broke things.
And this is what we’re seeing. You know, Trump is just creating facts on the ground. He’ll destroy agencies before the court tells him, “You have to restore them.” So, again, the metaphor is, you start as an aquarium, you create the fish soup, and no court can make you go back again.
AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: We just have 20 seconds, but what about if these federal workers, if the heads of agencies simply refuse to leave, create the constitutional crisis on the other side? The judiciary has to rule, and instead of ruling years later when all these people are gone, they rule now, and the agencies don’t get shut down.
KIM LANE SCHEPPELE: Yeah, well, a few of the officials who have been fired have tried to make a last stand. You know, some of the inspectors general did, and the head of the [02:04:00] Federal Election Commission did. The problem in Washington is that they can just deactivate your badge at the door. So, in Poland, when the judges went back into court after their retirement age was lowered, they could get into the court. But in our government, it’s very difficult, because the buildings themselves have so much security. But still, I think it’s good for people who are in office to say, “I’m not leaving until you force me,” and just create friction in the system. Slow it down is actually the best defense in circumstances like this.
Media Continues Painting Musk's Far Right Coup as Good Faith Cost-Cutting Effort Part 2 - Citations Needed - Air Date 2-5-25
NIMA SHIRAZI - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: Adam, we wanted to discuss a recent piece you wrote on the credulous reporting about what is currently a full scale assault on the federal government by not only, uh, Donald Trump, but his empowered, uh, deputy.
President Elon Musk and how the media is reporting this assault as, you know, kind of good faith cost cutting measures, you know, going line by line in federal budgets [02:05:00] that so far is seeing real, real threats, sometimes shutting down a lot of full scale firings and dismantling of government agencies from the U S treasury to.
The office of personnel management, that's OPM, general services administration, the GSA, small business administration, the SBA, tons of other agencies, including USAID. And yes, there are problems with all of these offices, but. What Musk is doing is not actually talking about the root causes of, say, quote unquote government waste, but rather is fully assaulting the federal government on purpose.
ADAM JOHNSON - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: 100 percent of people concerned with government waste don't give a shit about government waste. It is obviously pretextual. Anyone with half a brain cell who's read any kind of Heritage or Manhattan Institute report can tell you that government waste is always pretextual. Nobody gives a shit about waste, maybe like five guys at the OMB kind of care, make sure you fill out [02:06:00] your TPS report or whatever, make sure you're, you're dotting your I's and crossing your T's, sure, but obviously what Musk in his, what appears to be like Zoomer flunkies, weird, uh, Silicon Valley incel types who are his cultish followers have been gaining unprecedented and deeply me.
Insecure access, in every sense of the term, it's both insecure in that Musk clearly needs everyone to love him and also just not good protocol in terms of leaking people's information, is gaining unprecedented access to trillions of dollars worth of federal spending, ostensibly, again, to sort of find theft or inefficiencies, but they haven't actually found any because there's already systems in place for that.
And obviously it's fake. And that's also not
NIMA SHIRAZI - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: the point. Exactly. It's totally. fake, let alone illegal, but it is totally fake. And the credulous reporting we're seeing is kind of taking all this at face value and like, as like a good faith attempt to slash the federal budget.
ADAM JOHNSON - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: Well, so yeah, for recently, there's been slightly more critical tone, which we can get into, although they're still indulging the idea that it's a [02:07:00] quote unquote cost cutting panel.
But for the months leading up to Doge, which I can't believe I have to say this. I can't believe that the fact that I have to think about this fucking dickhead. Is its own transgression. Same for everyone else in this country, but nevertheless we have to, because he's effectively the president and slash dictator.
And what we're seeing truly is a right wing coup, which is to say it is illegal, illegitimate. Uh, nobody voted for it. And the executive branch by design, uh, certainly by the arrangement that the voters were voting for cannot unilaterally shut down entire federal programs and does not control the budget.
Congress controls the budget for very good reason because it's tensely Congress is controlled by the people.
NIMA SHIRAZI - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: That's
ADAM JOHNSON - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: right. For
NIMA SHIRAZI - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: the time being, there is. still a certain level of separation of the branches of government. Congress has the power of the purse, still, for the time
ADAM JOHNSON - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: being, as I said. So leading up to this moment, and I've been pulling my hair out about this on social media, I've written about it for In These Times, the way that the press, I focus specifically on CNN, New York Times, and Washington Post, because they're kind of three mainstream [02:08:00] outlets, I'm sure.
A bunch of other outlets have been just as bad, but we'll focus on them for the purposes of this news brief, just to limit the scope here. Have repeatedly, for months, been treating Doge and Musk's efforts as genuine, like, cost cutting efforts. Again, he is not presented as ideological, he's not presented as right wing, he's not presented as an attack on the liberal state.
And obviously there is a years, years of evidence that Trump is a right wing ideologue. He publishes and posts non stop hashtag white genocide, conspiracy theories, complaints about land theft in South Africa, wink wink, anti trans, you know, sort of. Knockout game type schlock constantly sharing memes that are originate from white supremacist websites.
He did a sake aisle at the inauguration clear as day three different times in hds We've already discussed this is not really dispute, you know, sort of something that one can dispute He clearly exhibits displays and makes clear his right far right wing ideology And has for [02:09:00] several years, so this is not like something the New York Times is not aware of despite their best efforts and somewhat infamously in 2022 to act like he's this sort of enigma who is both liberal and conservative, but this ideological position, which clearly again, the richest person in the world, almost worth half a trillion dollars with a long history of bigoted statements, it was completely erased from discussions of Doge and he was treated as someone who was simply interested in finding savings.
So let's find some of those. These are just, you know, main examples, there are thousands of other examples, but we'll just give you some sampling here to give you a sense of, we're calling it credulity, but it's not really credulity, they know what they're doing. Credulity as it reads, this is from the New York Times, November 27th, 2024.
The headline reads, Musk's slashing of the federal budget faces hurdles, in which they say Doge is, quote unquote, looking for savings, quote unquote, are there a budget cutters? This from December 6th, 2024, also the New York Times quote. Musk's cost cutting effort is being guided by a health entrepreneur.
The article would go on to say it [02:10:00] was a cost cutting effort, a quote, efficiency panel, a quote, cost cutting project, unquote. Another article from January 12th, 2025, the headline would read, Inside Elon Musk's plan for doge slash government costs. It was referred to as a cost cutting project, quote unquote, potential savings is what he was looking for.
And none of these articles, and we'll go into this later, is the word right wing, conservative, neo Nazi. Any sense or any hint of that Musk has an ideology, which may, I don't know, selectively pick out the liberal parts of government? Meanwhile, Musk is so concerned with quote unquote finding savings and quote unquote cost cutting, he mysteriously has not addressed the 14.
5 billion dollars in government contracts that his companies have. We'll get to that later. The Washington Post would indulge this cost cutting, efficiency, post ideological expense streamlining framework as
NIMA SHIRAZI - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: well. Media view from nowhere is like in full effect here. So, you know, you have the Washington post December 21st, 2024 with the headline, Elon Musk's wishlist for [02:11:00] doge, in which it calls the clearly ideological project with a snarky name, a quote government efficiency commission and quote, the Washington post would also say, uh, nearly a month later, January 16th, 2025.
Quote, Musk's Doge weighs recommendations to cut federal diversity programs, end quote. Oh, you know, it's just weighing recommendations. In that article, it talks about Doge being a, quote, non governmental fiscal efficiency group. Calls it efficiency again, it's going to suggest, quote, proposed savings. We see this feign credulity again and again across mainstream media.
Never talking about the ideology behind this. Just taking at face value what Doge is set up to do, which is to clearly make poor people even poorer, to, uh, cut any kind of government services that improve the lives, or at least, uh, you know, sustain the lives, make people able to survive in an already unfair system.
[02:12:00] This is the point. He's not, you know, Going after massive military spending, of course, savings won't be found there. No, no, no. They're going to be found in social services that keep people alive.
Musk's Coup and Trump's Christian Zionist Gaza Takeover Part 3 - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 2-7-25
DAN MILLER - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Yeah, so to start with that latter point, so in the context of the National Prayer Breakfast and events going on around the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump said, you know, one of the quotes he started with is he said, the people quote. Can't be happy without religion, without that belief. Let's bring religion back.
Let's bring God back into our lives. Suddenly, you know, Mr. Pious Trump, who doesn't know anything about any of that, but of course the, the, the religious conservatives love him as we know. And so speaking at events, he elaborated on how to bring this aim, and he announced a task force to be run by, among other people, like Paula White would play a role in this, the new Attorney General, Bondi.
So it's a task force to be run that is aimed at numerous things, but one is rooting out what he calls anti christian bias, specifically in the government, one big area. So he said it was aimed at halting what he called the absolutely terrible [02:13:00] form of anti christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government, including at the Department of Justice, at the IRS, at the FBI, and at other agencies.
He also vowed to protect Christians, quote, in our schools. In our military, in our governments, in our workplaces, hospitals, and in our public squares, end quote. And he said, and this, this is the key, so I, we talk about religious freedom and the language of religious freedom, and if somebody didn't know any better and said, well, of course, like, we don't want anti Christian bias, we don't want anti any religion bias, isn't bias bad?
Sure, it is, if it exists. But this is what he went on to say. He said that we will, quote, bring our country back together as one nation under God. This isn't about ending anti christian bias, this is about re establishing or maintaining Christian hegemony within all of those places. This is about the privilege of Christians within the Department of [02:14:00] Justice, the IRS, the FBI, and other agencies.
This is about the privileging of Christians. In our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, in our hospitals, in our public squares, all those places, places that he listed. You've talked about, you know, Hegseth and, and the white nationalist slogans that are marked on his body. We have talked about radical traditional Catholicism and white evangelicalism and all of these movements.
We have talked about all the moves that say that, you know, America's a Christian nation and should be based on theocratic principles and so forth. That's what this is aimed at and that's what gives away the game to me. When he says, this isn't, this isn't about Religious freedom, this is not about state neutrality toward religion.
This is not about the, the classical notion of the freedom to worship whatever god you want, or none at all, or however else we want to talk about religious freedom. It's about making us together into one nation under God. Meaning, what? The straight white Jesus. The straight white Christian nationalist God.
That is the God of the nation. That's what we're going to privilege. And it's going to result in the [02:15:00] targeting of religious diversity. It's high ties into DEI stuff in that regard. All things diversity are bad, including religious diversity. And it's going to do it on the grounds that it represents persecution of Christians.
So, I don't know, the next time Muslims, Muslim workers somewhere say that they should have a reasonable accommodation to like pray during the day or something, it's going to be talking about how this infringes on my right as a Christian business leader to, you know, to do whatever. All the way up to every level, as you say, tie this in with things like Musk and the funding and whatever, and you get powerful levels for this.
I think it's also obviously, and this is key, it's going to curtail efforts to curb Christian nationalism. People can remember in 2023, there was an FBI memo that detailed the overlap between Christian nationalism and radical traditional Catholicism. And I, I think, Brad, there are a few people who have been talking about this for a long time, pointing that out, and the FBI said Here's this analysis, and there's a lot of overlap here.
They did not say all Catholics are Christian Nationalists. They did not say [02:16:00] everybody who's a traditionalist Catholic is a Christian Nationalist. What they said is, you plot those two diagrams, there's a lot of overlap, and I'll just give you J. D. Vance as a great example of that overlap. And what happened?
There was GOP outrage, and the FBI director withdrew the memo. That is now, for Trump and this task force, anti Christian bias. It's not about bias, it's about determining before any investigation takes place, what outcomes can even be found, and ensuring that Christians can never be held accountable. that Christians can never be found to like violate other people's rights and things like this.
That, that's the, that's the aim of this, this anti Christian or anti Christian bias task force is the preservation of Christian privilege and the further instantiation of Christian nationalism is the sort of official religious ideology of MAGA Nation.
BRAD ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: There's another example he uses. I'm glad you brought up the FBI memo on [02:17:00] Catholics who, a small number of Catholics, who might be something like domestic terrorist threats.
One of the other examples that came out yesterday was those who've been arrested and charged for blockading abortion clinics. Yep. And, you know, if y'all know your history, you know the history of, of, of pro natalism and abortion extremism in the Christian right. You also know there's been violence there.
There have been doctors who have been killed by anti abortion extremists. So, here we have people who are like, showing up to abortion clinics, causing trouble, causing violence. Making things such that people are threatened, they're arrested, and Trump's saying that's anti christian bias. You know, Dan, and there's no surprise here.
There's nothing here that we're like, Oh my god, didn't see that coming. Luke Adonis just got traded to the Lakers. That was one, Dan. Yeah, did not see that coming. This I did see coming.
This is the man who [02:18:00] pardoned January 6th riders. The violent ones. That is part of Anti Christian bias, because, I don't know, people like you and I have spent hours and hours and hours of our lives on podcasts, this one, and writing books and everything else, along with all of our colleagues, from Andrew Seidel to Matthew Taylor to Catherine Stewart to Sarah Posner to Anne Nelson, talking about how January 6th was a Christian nationalist crusade.
And so, this fits in not only to the patterns that we're talking about, it is directly tied to January 6th. Uh, and it is, it is, it is absolutely frightening.
SECTION D: WHAT TO DO
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, section D, what to do.
Why Are Dems Surprised Part 2 - The Intercept Briefing - Air Date 2-7-25
SUNJEEV BERY: Let's start with the big picture.
I am shocked by how weak the Democrats response has been to the head spinning number of Trump actions. Last week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer described people's concerns in this way.
CLIP: People are aroused. I haven't seen people so aroused in a very, very long time in terms of [02:19:00] going, uh, trying to get this done.
So, yes, I think democracy will have an effect.
SUNJEEV BERY: And Akeem Jeffries cryptically tweeted, Presidents come and presidents go. Through it all, God is still on the throne. It's hard to imagine a more watered down response. On Monday, we did start to see some pushback from congressional Democrats, who held a press conference in front of the USAID building in Washington.
After Elon Musk and crew shut down the agency. So for both of you, what do you make of the Democrats response so far?
AKELA LACY: Well, first responding to Jeffrey's tweet, like, is God really on the throne? Like have you looked around? Like it's just kind of like the most useless rhetoric. I mean, this week on, on Monday, Jeffrey's and Schumer.
Did hold a press conference on legislative proposals to quote fight the chaos that the Trump [02:20:00] administration has already unleashed on the American people, including his his actions to freeze federal money and and the takeover of Doge, et cetera, et cetera, but Many people have already made this point. If they're already doing something unlawful, What is another law gonna do?
The, the context here is obviously what can Democrats do in the position that they're in with the Republican trifecta. You know, they've reportedly started a quote war room in the DNC headquarters. They just elected their new chair. Some people are calling more explicitly to not work with the GOP, but that's not coming from leadership.
JORDAN UHL: Yeah, I mean, I'll say that from my perch, what I'm seeing is a window into the broader culture of the, uh, elected officials of the Democratic Party. They are not organizers, by and large. They are not people who build and channel power to extract concessions from the powers that be. They are ladder climbers and aggregators of pre existing power.
And that's why the Democratic Party is [02:21:00] losing. You know, you have folks like Chuck Schumer. He's not. He's not a critic of concentrated wealth. He's a product of concentrated wealth. You know, Wall Street's in his backyard, right? I mean, Hakeem Jeffries is perfectly willing to throw Palestinians under the bus if it helps him, you know, in his personal political ascent.
So we're talking about people who are very good at navigating power and very bad at challenging power. And so that's why, despite the fact that this is Trump 2. 0, Despite the fact that we've, we've all been through a version of this before, you know, the democratic leaders came into this with no idea of what they were doing.
You know, I, I remember this, this quote in the New York times when they did an article about this, where the journalist mentioned that Senator Cory Booker was doing a social media training for other senators, where he was telling them to post on LinkedIn three times a week. And I just thought, what? What?
Like, this is what US senators are talking to each other about in the Democratic caucus. This is where we're at. You know, [02:22:00] so I, I'm just kind of shocked and surprised at, at the sheer gap between movement folks and Democratic Party constituencies and what Democratic Party voters want and what the center of the Democratic Party leadership is, is failing to offer.
AKELA LACY: Yeah. I mean, movement people are asking the obvious question right now, which is why? Are there any Democrats at all voting to confirm a single nominee? Like, that's one of the lowest hanging pieces of fruit. There was reporting about this being a concern raised in an organizing call with Indivisible earlier this week.
It was one of the main topics of conversation. It's so obvious. What possible reason could you have to not have every single Democrat voting as a bloc against all of these nominees? On Wednesday, Senate Democrats did finally come together to protest and delay [02:23:00] confirming Trump's nominee to direct the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vogt.
Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz announced that plan while he was on the train to D. C. on Wednesday.
CLIP: Hey, I'm on my way to the Senate floor. We're going to have more than 35 United States senators on the Democratic side opposing Russ Vogt's nomination. We're going to take the floor for 30 hours. Russ Vogt is the main author of Project 2025.
He's the guy that established this federal funding freeze. He is the architect of the dismantling of our federal government, harming us with Medicaid portals shut down. With Head Start shut down, with agencies illegally stormed and the, uh, servers being seized, um, we've got to fight back and reunited all 47 Democrats in opposition to Russ Vought's nomination.
AKELA LACY: But still, before this, Democrats have had no plan. They have no excuse for not having had a [02:24:00] plan in place. There was no confusion about the fact that these nominees were going to be coming up for a vote. And still, There were Democrats who voted for several of Trump's nominees. Seven Democrats voted for his energy secretary pick, Chris Wright, a fossil fuel CEO and vocal opponent of efforts to fight climate change.
Only 23 Democrats voted against his pick to lead the Veterans Affairs Department. Uh, only 16 Democrats voted against his Interior Secretary pick. Uh, you have even for, on a vote for someone like Pam Bondi, where there was almost universal Democratic opposition, except for the vote of John Fetterman, who, you know, in very, until very recently, was held up as an example of what Democrats should be aspiring to.
All of this. Now again is reacting in real time to what trump is doing But it's not as if democrats had no idea that this was going to happen [02:25:00] But they can give the impression that they are actively responding to to outside pressure but The point is why did they have to wait for that pressure to act
Trumps Dictatorship Can Still Be Stopped - If We ACT NOW - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 2-6-24
THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: You know, the, the good news is yesterday there were protests literally from all over the, all over the nation. Uh, people saying, you know, basically, hell no, this, this is, we're not going to put up with this. Um, but, then, you know, today it's gotten, well, there's a, a number of lawsuits, for example. And, you know, this is, this is kind of a good sign.
So far the government has not won any of these lawsuits, but Musk and his people are still inside these agencies, and even if they're forced out, there's a lawsuit this morning that's being heard, or that was, you know, the hearing started at 11 o'clock eastern time this morning. Um, even if they succeed, it's entirely possible that they have buried code in all of these government computer programs and systems.
That will allow them to remotely access them, so they don't need to have access [02:26:00] to the buildings. I mean, keep in mind, this is, so anyway, my op ed today over at HartmanReport. com is titled, Last Chance to Stop a Dictatorship and Trump Knows It. Trump wants FBI agents who investigated his coup attempt, his facilitating espionage, and his other financial and criminal activities fired.
Uh, let's be very clear, this is how dictatorships start. A guy who wants to become a dictator always begins by changing how the government works. Even though the majority of the nation says, Hey, we kind of like the way things are. Uh, no. He says, I got a better way and it'll all work out. In the process, he breaks a bunch of laws, but people mostly don't do anything about it or even say anything about it because those laws don't directly affect them.
You know, Pastor Niemöller wrote about this in 1930s Germany. First, they came for the government workers. Then people start resisting. Which is when he begins to use the police power of the state. The people who show up in the streets, the people who [02:27:00] speak out in the media, the people who try to fight him in the legislatures, in the courts.
He figures out ways to get them fired, harassed, and ultimately imprisoned. When she was being confirmed, uh, Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to say that she would not follow or execute an illegal order on Donald Trump's behalf. You know, like if he directed her to investigate somebody who irritated him or prosecute somebody who had investigated him or imprisoned somebody who had spoken out against him.
We're there now. Pam Bondi, just this morning, announced that political prosecutions are about to begin, or at least the investigations leading to the prosecutions. At first, they're just going to be going after the police agencies themselves, mostly the FBI, as a way of bringing them to heel. You know, terrify the terrifiers.
Next, it'll be the press. First, they'll use financial terror to force compliance. We're already seeing that with Trump's lawsuits against all three major networks and multiple newspapers. [02:28:00] Uh, that will expand. Eventually it's going to turn into shutdowns and arrests. He's going to remake our schools so they become indoctrination factories for his white male supremacist worldview and this new authoritarianism.
He'll realign our democratic country away from our democratic allies and toward countries Run by dictators like he aspires to become. He's going to purge the military of leadership that might resist him, and of troops who might refuse his orders. He will remake our criminal justice system so it becomes more violent and brutal, opening prisons for the worst of the worst, in places beyond the reach of the law.
You know, like Auschwitz in Poland. or Guantanamo in Cuba. He will remake our media so it becomes a Greek chorus singing his praises and saying his every word. By proclaiming, as every dictator does, and as he did this morning at the National Prayer Breakfast, that divine providence and the blessings of God put him where he is, he's going to bring the country's largest [02:29:00] religious institutions to heel.
He'll proclaim grand plans and spectacular efforts, you know, like building the Autobahn, or remaking Gaza, Greenland, and Panama. They'll distract the public from the relentless, grinding destruction of the guardrails of government itself. He and his allies will empower civilian militias who will then become his terror shock troops against the people who oppose him.
Hitler had his brown shirts, Republicans in Nassau County, New York right now are trying to field America's first armed private militia. paid for by taxpayers dollars. He will remake commerce and business so that the most successful companies are those that throw money and resources at him. Fritz Tyson wrote a book about this, about his shame at facilitating it, titled, I Paid Hitler.
Someday, perhaps, Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook will write a similar book. America today is early in this process, although it doesn't typically take very long. It took [02:30:00] Hitler 53 days. It took Putin about a year. It took Victor Orban about two years. It took Pinochet less than a week, but he had the help of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
Trump and his Project 2025 friends, however, have been preparing for this for four years. They hit the ground running. This moment proves that the preservation of democracy requires constant attention and a collective commitment to uphold the integrity of its institutions, and right now, the only thing standing between democracy and dictatorship in America are public opinion.
The media and the Democratic Party. Republicans have completely caved and the courts are moving too slowly to stop him. Elon Musk and Donald Trump seem to think they can pull this thing off in a matter of weeks. And so far, because of the cowardice of Republican legislators and the disorganization and lack of leadership among Democrats, they might be right.
Unless we [02:31:00] all stand up and speak out now. And that's what I, you know, that's where I opened this thing. That yesterday, there were protests in every part of the country. Here in, here in Oregon, there was a, there were major protests in downtown Portland, and in downtown Salem, which is our state capital.
Also a college town down the road. Big protests all over the country. Democratic politicians are starting to speak out. My two senators are, uh, you know, uh, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley are, are particularly outspoken. We've got some good progressives in Congress. But the Democratic Party needs to get their act together, and they need to get it.
They need to get their act together soon.
Why Are Dems Surprised Part 3 - The Intercept Briefing - Air Date 2-7-25
JORDAN UHL: So, you know, Ken Martin, you know, who won a sweeping victory in the first round of the DNC elections.
They'd set aside a full day for multi round elections. You could sort of think of it as kind of rank choice voting over multiple stages, but they didn't need it. He, he won outright at the very beginning, uh, against Ben Wiggler and others, you know, so he, his platform is a, uh, wholesale. [02:32:00] political and strategic and internal reform of the DNC.
And if you just go to his DNC candidacy website, you'll see, he's not just talking about competing in all 50 states, but also every single county in the United States and really empowering Democrats at local and state levels to fight. He's also talking a little bit on his, on his platform page, a little bit more vaguely, but still about some of the issues.
With the ways in which the DNC is a top down institution, even though it's voting members draw in significant part from across the Democratic Party nationwide. So those things are all there. But as you know, 1 DNC member told me. The DNC is a slow moving ship and it takes a long time to turn it around.
And there are going to be pressures against devolving power to the base of the party, because when you devolve power to the base of the party, that runs counter to the desires, interests, ambitions, strategies of elites, right? Whether it's [02:33:00] the person in the white house or somewhere else, a lot of people can help the democratic party.
Grow into a more responsive organization by holding the DNC's feet to the fire on this so that some of these, this sort of problematic structure that essentially co ops the base for elite decided strategies, uh, finally gets broken.
CLIP: Now, he started out by saying all the right things. And so it's important for folks to know that we have a spine.
We're not dead as a party. We're still alive and kicking and we're going to fight for our values and we're going to fight for American values. But what can he actually do?
SUNJEEV BERY: What's the relationship between the head of the DNC and the congressional leaders of the party?
JORDAN UHL: So that's an important question. So there's a, there's kind of an alphabet soup of DN, of democratic party organizations.
You've got a congressional campaign committee, you've got a Senate campaign committee. I'm sure Akilah can speak more to this, you know, uh, then there's a state legislative campaign committee and all of them raise money, move money back and forth. A lot of the DNC's money [02:34:00] actually comes from other committees, but the DNC still remains the one major body within the democratic party who's governing body, at least.
Technically, or officially is is in part grassroots driven. So there's, it's sort of that question again of formal versus informal authority. Like, what is who is going to be willing to push through quote unquote, the way things have been done and advocate for changes. And the good news is, I mean, 1 DNC member told me and, you know, and, uh, quoted them in the piece saying, I mean, everyone recognizes that.
I'm paraphrasing, but basically that the Democratic Party is dying and the country may die as we know it as well if we don't fix this. So there is a sense of urgency, but that doesn't necessarily mean everyone's operating from the same theory of change or what the solution should be. And I still see some, a significant gap, uh, in terms of some of the things that need to happen.
AKELA LACY: Yeah, I mean. This is sort of anecdotal, but the idea that you had Reid Hoffman, [02:35:00] like, pouring 250, 000 into the DNC chairs race on the last day of the race, you know, not much less than the entire cost of that race, I think says a lot about where you're things are on this stuff, particularly, you know, the appearance of, of being the elite or being very close to the elite.
Um, obviously, Ben Whittler, and the irony here being that it's like Ben Whittler, progressive darling, um, Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, who lost. But I think, you know, people were raising a lot of Red flags around that. You know, I know at the meetings leading up to the that election last week Concerns around lack of transparency around DNC campaign finance related issues was was a big issue of concern Um for people so yeah, I mean, you know, this goes back to This, you know democrats Somehow losing this argument over whether or not they're closer to the elites than Trump is, who's clearly out here [02:36:00] Appointing, you know, his, his financial supporters, you know, it's a messaging problem again and again, an ever, an evergreen theme here.
SUNJEEV BERY: I'm glad you mentioned that because I would love to talk about the corrosive influence of money in politics here. On one end of the spectrum, like you say, Reid Hoffman is pumping 250, 000 into this race. On the other end, in your piece, Sanjeev, you talk about Faz Shakir. Who paid out of pocket, and I saw on Twitter, his kids made his signs with marker and poster board, which I thought was adorable, but didn't necessarily lead to success, I, I, no knock on their messaging, I think the poster was beautiful, but it, to me, it reads as, hey, here's where the money's going to go, this is who you should support.
Am I wrong in that assessment?
JORDAN UHL: I mean, I, from my conversations, the sense that I got is that there's a real tension in that, Democrats want to build a, a, a true national 50 state, several thousand county operation and that costs [02:37:00] money. So, they want money, right? And they want to raise money and you heard Ken, uh, Ken Martin's comments about good billionaires, right?
CLIP: There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have, that have been with Democrats who share our values and we will take their money, but we're not taking money from those bad billionaires.
JORDAN UHL: Thank you, Joe Martin. And so they're, they're looking for that, that funding, what's been missing from the conversations that I had is that there still seems to be a fundamental failure to recognize that one party is telling a story as to why people are hurting and they are punching down in the naming of who's responsible, right?
The Republican Party, Trump, right? It's undocumented migrants. Uh, it's D I. It's transgender people. That's who Trump is punching down and blaming. The Democratic Party is not punching up. The Democratic Party is not punching. The Democratic Party is saying, Hey, look at this. We passed this bill. Hey, look at this funding, right?
They're telling a technocratic story about all the good things, quote unquote, we did. Whereas Trump is [02:38:00] saying these are the people who are hurting you. And, you know, Bernie Sanders is saying these are the people who are hurting you. He has a story. Elizabeth Warren has a story. You know, Lena Khan has a story.
But most Democrats don't, and one thing that I didn't hear come out of the conversations that I had with DNC members, and one thing that I don't see in the various DNC candidates, with the exception of Faiz Shakir, is that kind of explicit understanding that Americans need someone to blame, um, And if it's done right, then it points towards a constructive solution for how to build a more just society.
So that's what's missing. And that's the piece of this that needs to be addressed and kind of forced forward.
Credits
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or our upcoming topics, including the dystopian plans for Trump's deportation regime, followed by Trump's possibly even more dystopian proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at [02:39:00] 202-999-3991. You can reach us on the privacy-focused messaging app Signal at the username bestoftheleft.01 (there's a link in the show notes for that), or you can simply email me to [email protected].
The additional sections of the show included clips from Straight White American Jesus, Democracy Now!, The NPR Politics Podcast, The ReidOut, Civics 101, The Gray Area, Amicus, Citations Needed, The Intercept Briefing, and The Thom Hartmann Program. Further details are in the show notes.
Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist trio, Ken, Brian, and Ben, for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at BestOfTheLeft.Com/Support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. [02:40:00] Membership is how you get access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads, and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on any and all media platforms you may be joining these days.
So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay!, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.Com.
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