Angry Planet - Syria, Authoritarianism, and U.S. Politics

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comThis week on Angry Planet writer David Faris joins us to talk about his time in Syria and life in America.David’s travels from Lebanon to SyriaWhen people hoped Bashar al-Assad would change SyriaWhat a real totalitarian state feels likeThe nightmare that follows the collapse of a dictatorshipOnce again, the ugly legacy of colonialism rears its headThe post-Assad playersAfter 15 years, everyone is tired of warTurning to domestic politicsDon’t panic“Trump will govern very corruptly.”Talking politics with childrenThe Trump Cinematic Universe“We need billionaires to fight billionaires.”The collapse of the liberal intelligentsiaThe McDonald’s bombing in BeirutSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Beautiful thing about this is editing it after the fact. So when I say something stupid, I can de-stupidify it. It's like having an edit button on Twitter. It is. It is. It is. all it's on him. All right. So welcome to another episode of Angry Planet, where we talk about all the worst things and bring them into your home. I'm being joined today by David Farris, who is a writer and a professor. And actually, one of the reasons why we're talking to him today is because actually he happened to have been in Syria where we don't know a lot of people who have actually traveled to Syria.

So, David, if you could sort of introduce. yourself and give people your background a little bit. Yeah, sure. So I teach political science at Roosevelt University. I'm a contributing writer at Newsweek and Slate. And I was trained as a political scientist with a special, like a political science specialist in the Middle East in the early 2000. So I took my first trip to the region in 2003.

I spent the summer in Lebanon where I have some. ancestry, but where no one in my family has ever actually traveled. So I was the first Ferris to go to this place called Amshith, north of Beirut, where my grandparents are from. And I just took Arabic classes there for about six weeks at the American University of Beirut. And it was a, it was a, it was a, like, I gave me my third time overseas, but my first time going anywhere, but Western Europe. And it was a, it was a real, it was an eye-opening experience. they had just opened travel back up to Lebanon, you know, via the state. I mean, anybody could go, okay, but like to have a government-sponsored grant, which I had.

The State Department had just lifted its restrictions on Lebanon. And there had been a bombing at the McDonald's on the campus of AUB, just like the week before I got there. Yes, I actually think I even remember it. Yeah, yeah. And this was, you know, it's like height of the war on terror. This was, I'd say, three months after the United States invaded Iraq. And so it was a tense time to make my first trip to the region, obviously, terrified my parents to no end so that I was doing this. But I had a wonderful time in Beirut.

I made a bunch of new friends there in the program. I was obviously when I was very young at the time. And as a kind of a capstone to the summer in Lebanon, we decided that we would go to Syria. which is something I had also promised my parents I would not do, but I ended up just doing it and telling him about afterwards. And so we boarded like a pink bus in Beirut and crossed the border into Syria after being held up at the border for a long time because this British guy, I don't know why. Okay, but we were traveling with someone from the United Kingdom in his passport to set off a bunch of authoritarian alarms of some sort. And everybody else on the bus who was either Syrian or Lebanese, just wanted to chuck us out the window because we were kind of holding everybody up.

We got over the border. We got out of the bus and into a cab. And that started about 10 days of traveling all over Syria. This was so Bashir al-Assad, who just abdicated his, it's not a throne, but his, you know, his quote-un presidency. Right. And abdicated is also maybe not. quite the word, but, right, resigned under pressure, resigned under pressure.

Say that. So, you know, his rule was only about three years old at that point. You know, in the early 2000s, every time a new dictator came to power in the Arab world, the New York Times would run like a series of fawning profiles of them and talk about how they were hoping that this, you know, the visionary leader who wants to reform, right? So that was all the talk about Assad was he was, he was like a London trained ophthalmologist. You know, he was married to this like glamorous, like, this glamorous woman who spoke flawless English.

You know, so they had like, then he didn't really, okay, but he like, as a couple, they had some star quality. And there were hopes that he would take this kind of sclerotic authoritarian system that he had inherited from his dad, from his deity and do something more interesting with it. Like, you know,

bring the country into the modern world. And, and those hopes were just continual. frustrated over and over and over again. And Lebanon, Lebanon in 2003, it was like, I don't really know how to describe it. It was a dysfunctional democracy,

you know, very far down the scale of democracies in terms of how they operate. But it wasn't like a harsh authoritarian place. You know, it was just troubled. Like when I crossed the border into Syria, that was the first time that I had ever experienced authoritarianism firsthand. You know, from the little sort of procedural things that you have to jump through to get into the country, to just the feeling of being there,

trying to talk to people about politics, your interactions with people, there's a feature of the Middle East at the time, at least a number of countries in the Middle East with, there's just tons of like bored-looking soldiers, like with AK-47 slung on their shoulders, like on every other street corner. That was actually something I used to tell my parents that I was safe.

They were like, you're, you know, you get bombed. And I was like, don't worry about it. There's somebody with a submachine gun on every corner. It's totally safe. Except from, yeah, except from them, but other than that, you know. Right, right. So it was, like, it's hard to describe, you know, the feeling was palpable, right, that you

weren't free to say what you thought. And, like, obviously that people were not free to say what they thought to you. You know, I wasn't there for research, right? But, like, I was there with a bunch of politically minded people who were studying the Middle East and, like, well, you know, we just wanted to talk to people. And nobody would talk to us with very good reason. Oh, okay. You know, like just talking to you would have been enough to get them in serious trouble? Yeah.

I mean, certainly it could. I mean, I don't know. If your listeners have ever traveled to a country where people are basically forced to hang a picture of the dear leader on the wall. Mm-hmm. communicate, you know, like every restaurant, every barbershop, right? Every trinket store has a picture of

Assad on the wall. In fact, most of them, pictures of both Assad's on the wall. Okay, they had Perez, his dad, and they had Bashir the son. And that was the way of communicating to the regime that you were cooperating with them. You know, like, I'm compliant. Don't worry. Here's a

picture of the president. And I'm not going to cause you any trouble. And kind of the overwhelming feeling I got traveling around Syria and I had great time. You know, it was like, this is kind of a crazy adventure. We took a cab from like, from Damascus to Beirut and did all kinds of things that I would never do again. It's for my own personal safety, including, you know, traveling down to the Israeli border.

You know, it was wild. It was really wild. But the feeling when I left Syria in 2003 and I have not been back, I mean, for obvious reasons that the country's been consumed by a civil war for 15 years. And I have kind of shifted my focus from the Middle East to the United States. I mean, I studied authoritarianism, right? And authoritarianism kind of came to us. I was like, we're not to save the jet fuel. But the feeling I had when I left Syria, I was like, well, this just, this just really feels like a situation that's going to get worse before gets better, you know, because, you know, Syria is like a, it's like

ethno-religious tapestry. And you had, you know, dozens of ethnic and linguistic and religious groups kind of living under the thumb of the Asads who were part of a religious minority in the country, right? Bialawi's.

Yeah. And we were in the midst of seeing Iraq that we had just invaded kind of consuming itself with long-buried grievances and contradictions from the creation of these states after World War I.

And it just, Syria just felt like a place that was being held together with coercion. And that if and what coercion ever disappeared, you know, there was going to be a reckoning like there wasn't Iraq. And, you know, it would settle down eventually. But even that,

it was very hard for me to see sort of like the Assad's being, like, just kind of wiped away and replaced, by some kind of like functioning liberal democracy. Like it's just, it was a big gulf between what I think people were hoping would happen there. And the reality of how the struggle for the Syrian state would unfold if you took the dictators out of the situation. Well, so I have a question because, I mean, as a political scientist, this maybe you can help me understand a little bit better. It's not just Syria. It seems like every place where you take the dictator out.

Then what follows is a bunch of grievances being, you know, sharpened swords. Everyone comes at the people they've always disliked to live across the street. Examples that come to mind immediately. Indonesia were, you know, many people attack Chinese people or people of Chinese descent. I mean, they weren't actually from China. And they were, these ethnic Chinese people were huge victims. shortly after Suharto was kicked out, you had Yugoslavia, which is a fantastic example of people who, I mean, Tito, Joseph Braz Tito was the guy who no one listening to this may remember because I'm old, I remember him. And he kept everything together, Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, everybody lived, Slovenians, all of

these people live together, maybe not happily, but they live together. And it just seems like every time someone falls, all this bubbles back up. I mean, is that just, do you see that as something that's necessary or it's just been the way it's happened so far? I don't know that it's like necessary, right? But I think if you if you think about the countries that have transitioned from some form of authoritarianism to trying to transition to some form of democracy. democracy, the ones that have had the most trouble, have been those countries that are that are multi-ethnic or multinational, but we're not really governed as such. So colonial states?

Yeah, post-colonial states primarily are states where the borders were imposed on the citizens by departing European powers. This was the case in India, Pakistan. This was the case all over the Middle East, you know, following. in the Arab Spring, and in some cases even before the Arab Spring, where you had, like, Syria is the best example, right? But you can also think of Iraq as being an example of this phenomenon. Both Syria and Iraq were governed during their authoritarian periods by religious minorities. You know, the, the, the Alois, which is like sort of an offshoot of Shia Islam in Syria. And then you had Sunni Muslim, Sunni Muslims in Iraq. kind of governing with a great deal of cruelty, a Shia Muslim Arab majority, or at least a plurality, and then a really significant Kurdish minority. And so what a lot of these cases, I'm not an expert on Indonesia, but what a lot of these cases have in common is a kind of like a post-conflict or post-authoritarian reckoning with authoritarian elites who were empowered.

by external forces. And when that empowerment disappears or is taken away, you kind of like have a natural scramble for authority between different subgroups, demographic subgroups, trying to control, who want control the state, you know? And there are plenty of examples of countries that transition from authoritarian to democracy without major violence like this. It's some of the post-Soviet countries, you know, Poland and

I was going to say Romania, but that's not exactly true. But there was another. Right. And if you look at some of the other post-Soviet states like Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, I mean, either they've had trouble or a new strongman or actually the same strong man who was in charge under the Soviet system maintained control when they became independent. So, I mean, you know, the lid was never actually lifted off the pot. Right. Exactly. I mean, that's the case with like Belarus and Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

and Turkmenistan. I mean, all these places were functionally governed by like, Soviet elites who happened to share the, you know, the nationality, the post-Soviet nationality of that country. And so it was like, Kazakhs who were like creating their own authoritarian system, which is sort of an extension of the Soviet Union. But the countries that did succeed, you know, like Poland and the Baltic states, they were more ethnically homogenous than some of the countries that have struggled,

but many of these countries inherited a significant Russian language minority that has been a major problem in places like Ukraine. Russia wants to make it a problem in the variety of other places if they could. So I think it's a I think when you have a situation where simmering tensions and anxieties that have never really been resolved by modern governance are kept in check with just sort of like naked horse and brute coercion. And then when that coercion goes away,

it's not just that people are going to take their revenge on the people that were repressing them. It's that it is the nature of nationalism and multinational states that the different national subunits of these countries want the state. They want to wield the power of the state. for their own ends. And it's very difficult to resist the temptation

not to just replace one authoritarianism with another. And so now we're as a Sunni Muslim Arab dictatorship in Iraq with like, you know, it's not as bad, right? But it's like the majority in Iraq is not, you know, not governing the country, I think, in the way that I think a lot of people had hoped when the Iraq war happened for sure. Well, so now if we go back to Syria,

which I describe if one describes the United States as a melting pot, which is the optimistic way of looking at the United States, then Syria is a pot of snakes. And I mean nice snakes. There are nice snakes and not so nice snakes. I don't actually mean that in any particularly pejorative sense. But all of these different groups are

either scrambling now or they're going to be scrambling. We're sitting here almost in an anticipation of various land grabs. The Free Syrian Army may come back. And I've read, you know, that they're somewhat of a force still. Turkey might just come in and wipe out the Kurds is one thing that people are saying. So do you think that there's any hope that the jihadist government or well the jihadists i mean i don't know if they i mean i know they have a prime minister but i'm not sure you can call them a government yet um do you think we're in for oh god it's like if you break a mirror are are we uh are we in for like seven more years of civil war what do you think i mean it that's impossible to say i mean what i will say after 15 years

of war um i think there is a significant appetite to stop fighting. Right. I mean, I think one of the things going on here, the rapidity of like the, the sheer scale and speed of the collapse of the Assad government, to me, signaled that there were significant elements inside the regime that no longer had the will to resist,

the sort of the onslaught of these rebels. It's not just that they didn't have the will to resist. It's like they didn't want to. Yeah. whatever it is that they thought they had been fighting for, I think they decided they could get just as well from this new alliance than they could from the Assades themselves. I mean,

the bargain that the Assad's had struck with the population of Syria was like, you yield all of these rights and freedoms to us. In return, we give you stability, right? We give you, if nothing else, just like a baseline piece.

And when that, you know, that bargain collapsed in 2011. And it took another third. years, which is really shocking when you think about it. For the basic bargain of the whole Syrian state to finally fall apart. And so a lot of the trajectory of what's coming really depends on how wise and like whether these new rulers can show any forbearance, not just to the forces that they just

have vanquished, but to the various forces that have been struggling for control over Syria for more than a decade now. like if they try if they come in and they try to establish like a like a like a like a like a like a like a like a syne religious theocracy and impose that on the rest of the country like the Kurds and the allowies and Syria has a really significant Christian minority too right I mean like it really when I say it's a tapestry I mean like in a really literal sense it's a really complicated place like you need detailed maps to know where each ethno religious group lives if these if the new rulers are willing to come in and and try to negotiate a framework of pluralism with the rest of the country, then I think that the war could actually be over. I don't have a high degree of confidence in that, right? I mean, some of them are like former Al-Qaeda people. And, you know, I mean, I don't want to overstay the case,

but Al-Qaeda is not, like, really known for its commitment for pluralism. So what we were talking about was whether everything could actually hold together in Syria out of the tapestry, as you described it, of people. But I want to move on. Yeah. I want to move on because as long as I actually have you, let's talk about the rich tapestry that is the United States. This is the part where Matthew Galt, who is my partner on the show, we've been doing it for nine years together since we started at Reuters. And Matthew's going to hate this because I think he likes to steer away from domestic politics as much as possible.

but at this point, I think our audience knows which side of things we were on. And I don't think we can frighten away any more listeners. So that being the case, what do you think? Looking ahead, there's the, you've wrote a terrific piece that everyone will get a chance to read shortly about. It's, it's about Kamala not being the future of the Democratic Party, but it's not just that. It's about much more. And it's about looking forward and what that could possibly mean. So what do you think, are you able to, a simple question first, do you acknowledge in the depth of your heart that January 20th is going to actually happen?

I meant a little bit of denial about it. You know, I think the night of the election, my wife and I just split a annex down the middle and came up with like a 10-point plan to figure out how we were going to greet this lovely news of a second Trump administration. And one of the things that we really agreed to do, and I said, I have a much more limited capability to do this than you because I have to write about this stuff all the time. but that we were not going to let every single one of Trump's like personnel outrages and every single threat that he issues in the transition period and every single crazy thing that he says. We're simply not going to allow ourselves to be like just blown sideways every time he violates a new norm or does something outrageous or sues and Seltzer in the Des Moines Register for their poll.

Oh, God. Yeah. It's like this is what Trump does. It's every day there is a new outrage to put you on your heels, to disorient you, to disconnect you from. your sense of reality, right? And while you're disoriented, they make their move. And so as a coping mechanism

over the past six weeks, I mean, I've been, I've done all kinds of writing about the transition and the autopsy at the Democratic Party and what's coming. And it's not like I've been checked out. But I've also been trying really hard not to panic. You know, because the panic has no purpose. There's nothing I can do about it,

unless I want to leave the country. And the truth is, there's still such a wide variety of potential outcomes in terms of, how the Trump people are actually going to wield that power, which of these nut cases they're going to get through the Senate, and then how competently they're able to pursue a lot of their plans. But I actually, I genuinely don't think it makes any sense to panic.

You allow yourself the appropriate level of outrage when somebody like Pete Heggzut is nominated. around the Defense Department or like, you know, the country's vaccine supply is going to be put in the hands of a notorious anti-vaxxer. So it's like what I'm kind of doing is it's collecting things to worry about right now. Oh, nice. You know, after January 20th, you know, we will turn to our collection of worries and we'll get to start thinking about which one of them, you know, which of these worries we're going to take off the shelf and really have a full blown freak out about, you know. And so I'm thinking of it in terms of like, just enjoy normalcy while you can. I mean, Trump has already done everything possible to disrupt our sense of normalcy,

even at a time where he's not actually in power because you have institutions that are capitulating to him left and right. Individual people, you have institutions like ABC, Disney, you know, settling lawsuits that they don't really need to settle. to curry favor with him, right? And that the expectation, that doesn't mean to me that like, we're about to enter a period of hard authoritarianism. And what it says to me is that is that Trump is going to govern very corruptly. That's a best case scenario.

But he's going to use tariff policies and use industrial policies. He's going to use the instruments of the state to harass and annoy people that bother him and that don't get on board and to reward the people that show fealty to him. And I think what's going on. on right now is a preemptive show of fealty, right? Like, don't audit me. Don't file a frivolous lawsuit against me. You have billionaires who want to protect their industries and their employees from vengeance and retribution by Trump.

All long before he's even, before we really even know what he's going to do. Like, what would you do to Disney if they didn't settle this ridiculous lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos? Nobody knows, right? Nobody knows what he would do. You know, and this is the consequence of Trump issuing 10 years of like errant threats. You know, I'm going to revoke your license. Like, we're going to sit, you know, we're going to investigate you.

We're going to put the DOJ on you. I'm going to come after my enemies. I am your voice, right? I mean, at this point, he's been living in our heads for so long that it's like, I think of January 20th, like a surgery date. You know, it's like, they know what's happening. you can't put the surgery off anymore

but it's like I mean you can sit around and freak out about it or you can live your life and hope they give you enough oxy to get you through the week after the surgery

I mean it's I guess what I'm saying is that there's a sense of helplessness that is filtered through my own professional need to follow things closely enough to write about them yeah

not so closely that I have that I put myself in a position where I'm getting depressed about it. You know? Like you, I've got kids every day. I got to wake up and deal with. And I can't have any sense that they,

and my kids are really young. I can't give my kids any sense that they think something, anything about their planet has snapped out of orbit. Right? Like, I mean, we just have to give them a sense of normalcy and a sense of confidence that like, you know,

the day after the election, my six-year-old, he came in my room and he was like, well, what happened? Does she went? And I was like, well, buddy, no. She did not. Because, you know, I mean, six-year-old, they just take your politics and they run with it, right? It's great. Yeah, absolutely. I wish the whole world was like that. But he was like, well, that's okay, Daddy. It's only four years, right? And it's like that, that sort of like, I'm trying to channel that a little bit, you know, like a child's sense of like, well, it's just, you know, there's four years and then we take turns and then we'll get another crack at it. And so the way I'm proceeding is just to sort of act like democracy will remain intact and we'll get another chance in 26 and 28 until proven otherwise. Yeah.

Because I think there's too much exhaustion on the left and the center left. I think it's why the so-called resistance is not coming together the way that it did. There's not big protests. A lot of organizations doing a lot of very hard work. legal work, political work, advocacy work, to try to set up the scaffolding to resist what's coming. But there's not that same sense of shocked, like, holy moly, what happened? Yeah.

There was in 2016, right? The polls were closer. It's not like that was a shock in the sense of like the basic outcome of the election was not a shock if you believe the polling, right? I was hopeful about a different outcome, but it was not. It wasn't like I wasn't sitting back in my chair being like, oh my God, possibly have happened, right? Yeah. Well, you know, I actually, I screwed up exactly because I did exactly the opposite of what you're talking about. I have a 10-year-old myself and he wanted to talk about politics. He loves talking about politics. I don't know why. And I, no, it's because he lives in this family and the poor boy is going to be, you know, hit with this stuff all the time. And he wanted to talk about it. And I actually just looked at him on a ride home from school to say,

look, I can't do it anymore. I just can't talk about this stuff right now. And he saw how tense I was that later that night, he was like just sort of hiding. And I asked him, you know, what was wrong? So on election night and he said, I'm scared. I'm like, okay, all right. Now I've fucked up. I mean, that's exactly what you shouldn't do to a child. That is in no way helpful, you know, and I, I, I, lied and said, no, no, no, it's all going to be great. Hugged him and said I had massively overreacted, which actually bad I had done. And the next morning, same thing. When Graham wandered, wandered into the room, he said, who won? And I said, well, you know, Trump won this time, but it's, you know, next time around, buddy. I don't call him buddy. But anyway, yeah.

So I'm just saying, I'm glad you were a better parent than I was. But it comes and goes. I mean, somebody said something to my son, like about a couple of weeks ago, he was, my wife and I were putting him to bed and he just looked really upset. And he was like, are you a mommy going to, is Trump going to put you in jail? Well, I don't think so. I mean, I hope that, you know, and I've been very careful not to say anything like that around him, right? Like, so I don't know where he got that. But you mean, you can't control what happens at school either, right?

Sure. And I do think that there's, I mean, I've I do think people on the left can be a little bit too domery around their kids in a way that's not super productive. Yeah. About, you know, things like climate change. Like, I don't want to give my children the sense that things are hopeless because I would not have brought them into the world. If I thought the things were completely hopeless, right? Right.

Right. And I still, and I don't think things are completely hopeless, right? But I think that we're about to enter a period of uncertainty in our politics and challenges to our core institutions, challenges to our sense of who we are and what we can achieve in the political realm that we've not really experienced before. And I think it's going to be different than the first Trump administration. I think that there was some thought before the election. And he's, you know, he knows what he wants to do this time. He's going to put better people in place and he's going to hit the ground running. Yeah.

That I actually feel better about a month into this, right? Because there's been a nonstop display of like bad choices for important positions that if Trump really wanted to hit the ground running, he would have picked different people for some of these jobs. He's picked people that are going to become a controversy themselves rather than people that can come in, you know, like skilled navigators of the bureaucracy. Yeah. You can implement their plans. He's mostly not going with like Project 2025 people.

He's going with like people from the Trump Cinematic Universe that he needs to reward for supporting him. You know, like if you want to- I'm stealing that phrase. I'm stealing that phrase. That is fantastic. Trump's cinematic universe. Absolutely. You know, it's like just like dipships that come to his rallies and stuff.

I mean like he's staffing the administration with media personalities, right? Yeah. And I don't want to know. I don't want to dump on media people, okay, because I am one. But like, I also wouldn't expect to get a call from the next Democratic president and be like, David, do you want to be Secretary of State? You know, like, I write op-eds for a living. You know, there's things that I don't know how to do. And if you gave me control of a major federal bureaucracy tomorrow morning, expecting me to achieve your ideological goals by doing so, I would say you've, you've chosen poorly. I can cause a lot of problems by being like a pain in the ass in charge of the agency. But I don't know what I'm doing. You know, I think the big fear was like he was going to pick a bunch of people that know what they're doing.

And he didn't do that. The people that he has picked who like vaguely know what they're doing seem like the least problematic people that he's chosen. You know, like Marty Magery at the FDA. And he's like, okay, like, yes, he was like a, you know, a COVID contrarian or whatever. But he's like, you know, he's a highly accomplished person. He's not an idiot. He's not anti-vaxed. And he's not going to like, you know, he's not going to torch the flu vaccine or something.

I mean, he's like a normal person. Yeah. So his picks have been this interesting combination of like, you know, like people who were wrong with the normal parameters or whose positions I disagree with, but I'm like, okay, yes, you just put an accomplished like John Hopkins research for in charge of the FDA. I'm not going to lose any sleep over that kind of stuff, right? The people, the ones where you're like, well, that's weird are the ones that are going to hung up at the Senate for days, weeks, or months. And he's just costing himself two, three, four months of the 18 months that he has to govern before the midterms. And so in that sense, that's actually been relatively reassuring that his basic, very terrible political instincts have not changed and that he's going to influence a lot of uninsured. unnecessary damage on himself, pursuing goals that are unrelated to the ideological project,

but that are deeply related to his personal, emotional, like, narcissism project, right? In other words, this remains the Trump show and not the MAGA show, and I think that's to all of our benefit. I've always thought that he doesn't have any particular ideology. I mean, it's a grab bag, and it's what feels good, and it's what a crowd-reve. and it's what a crowd reacts to. And if the crowd gets more into something he's saying, he says more of that. If the crowd seems to be drifting off and leaving his rallies,

which actually they did with great regularity, he does less of that. He moves on to some other topic. Do you think that's right or am I just, am I off base with that? No, I think that's right. I mean, I don't think there's a coherent ideal. to Trumpism.

I mean, I think what there is is like a a sort of like unformed like ethnic nationalism at the core of it all. Like a reactionary attachment to a past that did not exist that is filtered through his own weird experiences.

And and finished in like a little like manufacturing chamber of his own self-regard. You know, like what Trump really seems to want out of the federal government is for it to be his own personal tool to pursue whatever whims occur to him on social media that day. As he gets older and weirder, right?

Like, he seems to be driven in different directions even over the course of a single day. Like, crypto is a great example of this, right? Whereas, like, a year ago, he was a crypto critic. And then he realized that crypto people could bankroll his campaign. And he decided to then put in like a pro-crypto administration, which I don't, I mean, I don't know Jack about crypto, Jason. So I don't know what to say about this. But like, I'm suspicious of it. But that's less important than the reality that like he doesn't have an ideological basis for it.

He's not like, man, I really want to disrupt the system of fiat currency. And like, you're speaking a different language to this guy. Right? He's like, these guys supported me. I like them. give them what they want. And so I'll put David Sacks in charge of a like a new agency that I just literally just made up yesterday. We didn't even know what powers it has, right?

Like these are not any kind of official agents of the federal government who can even make any decisions. Like what he's doing is he's appointing a bunch of people that got on the Trump train in the last year. And he's like, it's like, I will give you an advisory board and I will give you an advisory board and I will give you an advisory board. Elon Musk. And what happens with the recommendations that come out of those boards, right? It's like they don't have any, they don't have any regulatory power. Like, he didn't create new agencies. He just made up positions to, to reward his friends with.

Yeah. And everyone's freaking out about that. And then it's like, I don't know. I mean, it's like, let's see, let's see what they do. You know, if they just want to give a little like FDIC backing to like to the crypto industry, like I don't like that, but I don't think it's the end of the world. So yeah, it's his priorities notoriously shift around. And I think the people that wrote the thousand page document, the blueprint for the Trump administration, are probably already like, oh my God.

Why couldn't we have picked like literally anybody else in the Republican Party to do this stuff, right? He just, he gets in his own way so often. And this, you know, the lawsuit against Anne Seltzer and the Des Moines, this is a great example of Trump like using a personal grievance to pursue a policy that A makes no sense, B has no legal standing. C is a distraction. And the worst thing that we can do, I mean, I engaged to some of this yesterday on Blue Sky. I was like, this is terrible. It's the end of the free prep. But then I thought about it.

I was like, he's not going to win the lawsuit. Right. As long as the Des Moines registered doesn't fold and capitulate. That, but it's also, as you said earlier, it's the cost of these lawsuits. Yeah. I mean, with a newspaper industry, and we can talk specifically about newspapers, I mean, they're they're on the brink and many of them, you know, are owned by a hedge fund billionaire from Alden Capital. I will call them out. I have worked for Alden. And I'm sure his thing would,

you know, the guy who owns Alden would immediately just fold the paper. I mean, rather than face the legal cost, you know, wouldn't even occur to him to do otherwise. And this is where I think we have to think creatively, right? Okay. And say like, yes, if he sues individuals or institutions that are already fragile, you can see why they might want to make their accommodation with him. And it's if the Des Moines Regist comes out and it's like, well, we're shutting down polling forever. Well, Peter Thiel and Gawker is a good example.

It wasn't that he was right about Gawker slandering him. It was that he was able to bankrupt them with. legal bills. And that's where I would say to our billionaire friends. Where are you? You know, we need, we need, unfortunately, this is the world right now, right? We need billionaires to fight billionaires or we need to pool our resources. And so one thing we're going to need to do is we're going to need to put billions of dollars in like a legal defense fund for institutions that the Trump people are coming after. I mean, who knows when we might find ourselves embroiled in this stuff. I mean, if I'm going to

write about Donald Trump over the next four years, right? I'm taking a certain level of risk that like, you know, some, some staff around the White House is going to see something that I write. And so, why don't we audit that guy or whatever. Like, I don't expect him to throw me in jail, right? But like there's various ways that you can harass people when you control the federal government. Yeah. It's not like they'd be the first people to be to do it. Right. Right. But, but this is where I think people on the left need to get creative. Think about collective defense funds. think about pooling financial resources to make sure that, you know, just the Des Moines Register,

but like, I mean, there's all sorts of institutions that are endangered or worried about what's coming. Like the intercept is like, well, you know, all this stuff, even stuff coming out of Congress, they're worried about, you know, just talking about Israel and Palestine in a public forum, like, are we going to fall on the wrong side of some like anti-terrorism law? Just by like describing the situation. whether you agree with them or not.

There's a certain point where you have to stand on principle and say like, well, I don't love everybody the rights for the intercept, but like it's important for the intercept not to be like shut down by government harassment, right? Because that is like, that is like, you know,

Victor Orban, Hungary, you know, soft authoritarian and stuff, right? It's like you're not, again, throwing people into a gulag

the way you would in a Syria. But you are using the power of the state. To, in effect, like interfere with the marketplace. of ideas, like shut down critics, buy them out, right? Like, this is the real danger here. And like the left wing billionaires in the universe, they need to stop writing checks to Superpex, and they need to stop running for president. And they need to stop, like, using all of their

resources to do like, you know, like weird philanthropy and start coming to the defense of like the left and the center left as like a as a movement. You have to reinforce democracy with your money. Yeah. I've got a piece coming out in Slate about this pretty soon. I think. which is like somebody needs to buy one of them needs to buy MSNBC yeah and turn it into fox one of them means to you know there's like one media matters for america right we need like 15 of them somebody needs to pour two billion dollars into the american constitution society which is the left deeply unloved and underappreciated answer to the federalist society right like we have all of these parallel institutions on the left but they're underfunded they're underappreciated

people don't really understand the ideological project behind them and and and And like Trump has gotten his billionaires to do what he wants them to do, right? Just write him. And what we need from like the sort of like the wealthy liberal part of the universe right now is we need created outside of the box thinking about how they can help resist this stuff. That makes total sense. I wonder if a problem has that's been around for a little while now since Obama stepped away is just, well, he doesn't. didn't step away. He was term limited out. But anyway, I mean, I don't know what he would have done if he hadn't had to turn limits. But there's no charismatic figure. It's in a way, it's easy to give

all your money, well, I mean, it is to Donald Trump or his legal defense fund or something like that. You're talking about, you know, things that are more faceless and that you have to really raise people's awareness that these institutions even exist before they'll consider giving money to them. I mean, how many people have even heard of the Southern Poverty Law Center? And I think that's one of the more famous institutions, liberal institutions for, you know, freedom of speech. Anyway, and I mean, we just, we need a little like billionaire training institute, Jason. You know what I mean? I'll run it. I swear I'll run it. And my fees are quite reasonable, quite reasonable salary demands

if you're happy to serve as the cheapest step. But it's like, you know, instead of buying one Soto for $1 billion, you know, you could bankroll like 15 years of like progressive left media.

You could bankroll a real judicial legal movement. I mean, some of the things I think that the selection result tell us are that we need to start, we need to rethink some things. We need to rethink our information universe. I don't want to create a Fox News universe filled with lies, right?

But like, we do need, we do need a parallel production universe, because people think of the right-wing info universe is just like Fox and Brightbart, but there's a whole publishing industry behind it. Anybody on the left that's ever tried to publish and sell a non-fiction book knows that liberals just don't do as much of this, like,

kind of non-fiction outrage reading as people on the right do. And people on the right just buy, like right wing books in bulk and give them away. And that gets the others working, right? Like you have to think of the whole thing as an ecosystem. Right?

Like there's, and this is not purely self-interested. But like there's all kinds of people that want to do this work who have to make a living. And it's like that intersection of like, oh, my principles, but also I need to pay the bills is what leads people off to the right because the right pays. You know, and the left, it just does not pay to be on the left. It doesn't pay to write books for leftist audience.

It doesn't really pay to write for left-wing publications in the long run. And that's where we need to, that's where we need investment from the wealthy. And in the absence of any other kind of organizing principle for society, we just, we just have to compete for the attention of billionaires and try to get it to, to give us their money because they really prefer to donate to these foundations. I don't want to like slander them because, like, my wife's, organization depends on this kind of philanthropy, but like, um, they, they need to take a fraction of that and just start writing checks to, to, to frontline organizations doing the hard

political work. Um, in addition to the people doing what we would more traditionally think of as like, nonprofit service oriented, um, you know, Bill Gates foundation stuff. Like, they just need to bankroll some newspapers and some TV stations and some think tanks. Um, I just, I can't say like, we're just, we're getting out competed on all of these fronts, right? like we don't have a heritage foundation. We have the Center for Progress, which is like a little bit troubled. We have the Roosevelt Institute, which is great, but small.

And then you have these institutions on the right, just like blank, a billion dollar checks underwritten, you know, dark money. Nobody knows where it comes from, but they've got money coming out of their ears. Yeah. And so they can hire a thousand, you know, like adjunct chairs and Friedrich Hayek studies at the Cato. You know, it's like they have all of this money. That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's to protect money. It's to protect their money. And then to make more money, I mean, that's the object of the game. So, I mean, you spend a little. There was this fantastic NPR piece years ago explaining just how cheap lobbying is when you're a corporation or a billionaire. It's the best money you can spend. If you can lobby against a tax, that tax, that little law, that small thing that you had repealed will make you far more. than you can possibly spend on K Street.

I mean, it's, it's just, it's the best return on your investment. So, I mean, like Elon Musk, what he spent? Like, $250 million on Trump and he's already made several billion dollars out of it. Oh, they said it's, they, they said as much as $40 billion. Forty worth. Yes, I'm serious. But, but that's, that's worth. That's a good, that's work there, Jason.

It's not as much as I would, that I typically make, but it is not a bad chunk of change. Yeah, no, it's, yes, it's completely insane. But I think maybe solution could possibly be found in the same sort of charity that we've always had, which is like the Sackler wing. What if, you know, and you mentioned the Bill Gates Foundation. What if we had, you know, endowed chairs, endowed organizations, or we give organizations, a single organization, we give them four or five different names? Yeah. The Bloomberg, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all, you know, five different names right there on the cover. Because billionaires tend to like to have things named after themselves.

Yeah. And what I would say to the billionaires is like, that's a much better investment than just throwing $200 million every year at a Super PAC that ends up mostly squandering your money anyway. Stop trying to win. It stopped like waking up every four years, every two years and trying to win an election. and try to put the infrastructure in place for something different. And that means Michael Bloomberg, you're going to have to bankroll some stuff that you don't like. You know, if you don't want to keep losing elections, like, sorry, but like, you know, the left left is part of the solution here. And they need money.

And they can't be getting told by their own donor. It's like, all right, here's $100 million, but you're not allowed to talk about trans stuff. Sorry. It's like, you know, just write the checks. Yeah. The checks and let the smart people do what they're going to do. with it. And I think you'll find in two, four, six, eight years that we may be able to compete with this right wing kind of closed loop information universe that has been so devastating,

I think, to the project of the left. So that gives me some hope. I mean, I do think there's a lot of stuff percolating there and we'll see it come out. Yeah, I mean, and we have at least 10 billioners who listen to the show. And I have no doubt that they'll not only provide what the left needs, but also underwrite the show for the next few months. David, is there anything else that you think we, that, you know, we haven't brought up that we think you think we should talk about? Or should we say goodnight to the four folks? We'll say goodnight to the four folks and just say, you know, another time.

There'll be more to talk. Here's what I can promise you, Jason. There's not going to be a dearth of things to talk about for the next four years. Okay, we're going to be just constantly on our toes with the latest outrage. And somewhere in the process of responding to every day's outrage, we have to find a way to put something more permanent in place for the next few cycles. And I'm hopeful that there's people starting to think about how to do that. Well, thank you to David Ferris, who you can read in Newsweek. And also, well, I mean, you've got to, I guess you'd have to read in other places too.

I work for Newsweek. but anyway, if you also happen to stumble across Slate, his stuff is really good there too. So thanks so much for coming on the show and talking us through all of this stuff. My pleasure, Jason. I'll be around for the next four years. It's not gone anywhere.

I don't think anyway. We'll visit you in prison. I'll be there in the next cell. I'll write you from the camps. That is so not funny that it's hysterical. Okay. Thank you.