Bulwark Takes - Van Jones Tears Apart Elon Musk And The Black Hat MAGAs | WTF 2 0

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

This week on WTF 2.0, Van Jones joins JVL to talk Trump’s first 100 days. Van Jones breaks down how Trump, tech billionaires, and a broken left created a crisis deeper than anyone imagined. This is war, top-down, bottom-up, and way off the rails. Van Jones on Substack

It's on! The biggest Maytag sale of the year at Lowe's. Buy two select laundry appliances and get up to a $100 bonus via instant rebate. Shop all things Maytag, including the new stackable PetPro laundry system that removes pet hair from clothes. Lowe's. We help. You save. Offer valid through 531. See store for pricing and offer details. Advertise savings on all major Maytag appliances through Maytag.com and participating retailers. Prices may vary. Additional terms and conditions apply. Van Jones needs no introduction, but he is on Substack.

And you should go and subscribe to his Substack. But be careful. There's like a Van Jones impersonator account. I went and reported it up to the Substack. Van is the guy who's got a check mark by his name so there's an orange check mark by van so when you search on substack for him go with that one not the impersonator account uh van my friend thanks for coming and sitting down with us we're at the 100 days mark i just want to do like a 30 seconds obligatory well how do you think it's been?

Give me a better, give me a better, worse or about what you expected. Like where, you know, when we were sitting thinking about like the threat scenarios, you know, back in October, November, how has this played out with your expectations or concerns? Well, it's been the happiest hundred days of my life. Everything's just wonderful. It's a lot worse than I expected, and I expected very bad. I thought we were going to have a real constitutional crisis. But I think the number of things that he's done that disrespect the constitutional order, that attack his opponents in ways that are illegal and constitutional, unfair, immoral, it's just been shocking. And, um, and I think he's also exposed weaknesses, not just in, in our system, but also just weaknesses on the left. Um, there's, you know, a lack of imagination to even conceive of the type of stuff this guy's doing. And so, um, I would say that this has been,

um, uh, a re a really horrible start to, uh, you know, horrible start to probably four more years of horror. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the messages that we should learn from it is that even as bad as people like you and I thought things were going to be, our imaginations still failed. failed like i did not imagine that he could partner with el salvador to use foreign prisons as a way of getting around habeas corpus right and that i mean that's clearly not an accident like they knew what they were doing like they they had thought they look they use their four years look they use their four years uh uh very deliberately to think up all the worst possible ideas. And they clearly had a lot of brains working on this and just people who got in a kind of a vortex of like, well, hey, you know, if we did this, what could they do to stop us? Like they were doing that kind of war gaming not to figure out what was they could do that was constitutional. What could they do that would get them outside of the limits of the Constitution?

And Trump has always been this way. Like, look, sue me. What are you going to do to me? Look, build my building. I'm not going to pay you. What are you going to do? And also, don't forget, you don't just have the kind of bottom-up red hat MAGA. There's also the top-down Black Hat MAGA,

the tech billionaires, the Elon Musks, the Peter Thiels, and those folks who have also been rule breakers. You know, the tech guys look at taxing medallions. You know, you used to have to follow the rules. You get a tax medallion, You hang on to it for 22 years. You give it to your kids or you sell it for a couple million dollars. They said, look, we're going to launch Uber. We're going to launch Lyft.

Screw us. What are you going to do about it? You know what we did? We got the apps and we got in their cars. Look at what they did when it came to financial regulations. They said, screw you. We're going to launch crypto. We're going to launch Bitcoin, Ethereum.

What are you going to do? You know, we did. A lot of us bought that stuff. Look at look at hotels. Look at residential rules and regulations. You know, is it screw to follow the rules and they do not. So when you combine the Donald Trump kind of mafia state ideology of, I'm going to do whatever I want to, I'm going to grab wherever I want to, what are you going to do about it? With the of tech bro top down tech takeover rules don't apply to us together you get this double barrel attack on on everything we care about and i don't think we were ready for it yeah it's uh you know i'm constantly reminded of something i don't know who said it first but uh but you know it turns out that the constitution is really on our system and like all you know not all but out that the Constitution is really the honor system. And like all, you know, not all, but almost all of American society is run on the honor system. And when you start

elevating people to high office who don't believe in the honor system and then handing the resources to guys to make them really like non-state actors, like that's the, and this is the, it's like one of my commie leanings has always been

like you know like you know carnegies and the melons were really really rich but they weren't rich at the level of nation states right you know they couldn't act like super national entities and elon musk can yeah and that's like that's different look Look, I mean, Elon Musk would be insulted if you said that he was acting like a nation state. He wants to run an interplanetary empire that includes the Earth, the moon and Mars. And I'm not joking. He fancies it fancies himself to be God emperor of the Earth, the moon and Mars. And that's everything he does is in pursuit of that and he can he tries to cloak it in all this sort of um you know good guy talk um around you know clean energy and interplanetary species but this is about accumulating power at a level and to agree

and to a degree that it's very hard for most Americans to even imagine to get our heads around. Yeah. All right. So you spent a lot of your time thinking about what's next. And that's where I want to spend the bulk of our time today. What is next? And I guess there are two ways of looking at this question. The first is the near term, meaning like what's next to get out of the fix we're in.

And then the second part is like, okay, so let's assume, assume a ladder, right? Assume that we can get out of this. What's next to like fix the systemic problems that got us here? Where are you on that stuff?

If you could just fix all of America's problems right here, that'd be great. Yeah. Look, I mean, I'm like everybody else. I'm on a big learning curve and a learning mission. I feel like I did not study the right stuff. I feel like I've, you know, I studied, you know, politics and law and policy and that kind of stuff. And that's being trumped by, you know, to coin a phrase, trumped by the tech guys, the technology guys. I think we have to have a much better grip on how they played the game. The PayPal mafia launched a technology company, PayPal, sold it, and then they all grabbed those billions and went and built other companies. Reid Hoffman, a good guy, built LinkedIn.

Then you have Peter Thiel, who built other stuff and following the rules and voting for the right people and working on policy may not be the right way to do it. It seems like the right way to do it is just go launch a tech company, sell it for billions of dollars, and just buy the government. And so that's a shock. That's not what I expected. And so I'm actually doing a lot of research and trying to understand who are these black hat MAGA people. I understand the red hat MAGA people. I grew up with them. I'm from Tennessee.

I was born and raised in the rural south. The red hat MAGA folks who are nationalists and populists and sometimes a little bit racist around the edges. I'm used to that. I don't like them when they're in power, but I get it. This black hat, top down, tech takeover, MAGA, that's a different thing. And so what I would say is we're going to have to center technology a lot more. and creating such a tough culture around conformity, cancel culture, call-out culture. I understand what we were trying to correct for, which is just people getting away with being racist and sexist and terrible. But man, it got to be very tough on the left for a long time.

You really felt like you were walking on eggshells too much. You can make a lot of that on the right. I just mean among us, talking among friends. If you create a culture of conformity, if you create a culture where you have to pay a high price to dissent or to have a heterodox view or to say, hey, I just don't agree with you on that. If people are afraid they're going to be canceled or called out, people stop sharing their ideas. And then two things happen.

Your culture stops being innovative. Because in order to be innovative, you have to have the emotional, psychological safety to disagree. Once you take that away from people. If I disagree on race or on gender on trans or on whatever i'm going to get canceled you shut down the innovation capacity of your culture so progressive cultures stop being as innovative it started feeling a little bit more like orthodox and conformity but then you also chase out your rebels. The rebels don't stay. Right.

Which becomes an advantage for the other side. Now, look, RFK Jr., as much as I disagree with some of his stuff, he used to be a Democrat. Joe Rogan was a Bernie bro Democrat. Elon Musk, four years ago, five years ago, was an Andrew Yang Democrat. Tulsi Gabbard was a Democrat. A lot of these, frankly, a long time ago, Donald Trump was even a Democrat. But this more recent wave of out-migration of our rebels from the Democratic Party into the Republican camp, I don't know how much of that is Putin. I don't know how much of that is. I don't know what's going on, but I do know, and I think we have to take seriously now, that we created a culture where it was very hard to disagree.

And we pushed out a lot of people who now are on the other team and, frankly, playing a pretty strong game against us, especially Elon Musk and others from Silicon Valley. And we got to look at that. Until we get a good assessment of how we wound up here, I think trying to plot our way out is difficult. Of course, we protest. Of course, we sue. Of course, we demonstrate. Of course, we filibuster. We do all those things. But man, if we don't look at what did they do right, focusing on technology, what did we do wrong, creating such a tough culture, I think it's hard for us to come up with the right answers. Yeah, I mean, it is important. The technology piece is so important.

Like platforms are really important. That's why like Blue Sky, I think, is like it's important to have an open source alternative to Twitter. I think it's important to have an open source alternative to Twitter. I think it's important to kill Twitter, honestly. So one of the things I worry about, Van, is that it used to be that the crazy people in America were roughly equally distributed between the two parties. I mean, anybody who went to both the Democratic and the Republican national conventions in 1996 would see basically the same number of crazy people. Right. They would be different kinds of crazy. But, you know, like the people with all the spangles and the 50 different pins and the elephant hats and the donkey hats. And, you know, there'd be people who believed in UFOs and people who believed in black helicopters and lots of conspiracy theories on both sides.

And I one of the things that's happened over the last 10 years is that you've had an out migration where like the cranks have all started to consolidate under the Republican banner. And so, I mean, you know, from the people who are conspiracy theorists about like the birtherism stuff to even like the anti-vax stuff, like the anti-vax stuff now has a home where it used to be very, you know, you could find anti-vax people both in the backwoods of Arkansas and then in Marin County, you know, and now that's changed. They're all all those people are Republicans. And one thing that, that worries me, I'm like Tim Miller and I laugh about this all the time. And then like, you think like, oh, well the Democrats have traded their crazy people for college educated Republican voters. Well, it turns out like when you do the numbers, that may not be such a great trade. You know, like there are a lot of crazy people. It's like, I don't like,

what does it mean if part of that outreach is like, well, you have to be open to anti-vaxxers to bring them back like you know what i mean like the rfk types like what does that what does that mean like should you do that like is it like are there lines there are lines and and here's what i i think you know uh bobby um was wrong about ross and is wrong and is dangerously wrong about drinking raw milk and being anti-vax. That stuff is wrong. But there's always a little kernel of truth. So when he says he doesn't trust big agriculture or big food or big pharma, he's right about that. And I don't think that we I don't think that we were allowed enough. Like, for instance, we used to own as Democrats the health and wellness world.

You know, Michelle Obama owned that. In fact, they were beat the hell out of Michelle Obama. Because, yeah, just for that. Remember, they hated Michelle Obama for that. Yeah, just for that. Just for one kiss, eat their veggies. And she was like, you know, a Stalinist. I mean, it was just crazy because we owned that. Yoga, kale, all that sort of stuff was our stuff because the health and wellness community was a high trust, positive community. After COVID, it became more of a low trust community. And so an RFK can get more of a much bigger purchase on people who used to be with us. The way you counter is you don't give in on the anti-vaxxer stuff and drinking raw milk and crazy stuff. The way you counter is say, you know what, you are correct that these big pharma and some

of these other companies have gotten away with too much, and we're going to come after them with science. We're going to come after them with reason, with rationality. If there's regulatory capture, and there may well be regulatory capture, we're going to clean that up in a responsible way with due process. If you don't say anything about it, though, suddenly you come after it with pseudoscience and doge cuts. And so now we don't even have enough inspectors now to guarantee that our milk is being inspected. We're now in America, it's nuts, giving milk to children that is not being inspected because the doge cuts have been so extreme. So what I'm saying is you got to figure out, OK, what the right wing has been great at doing. They identify the right problem and then come up with the worst possible solution.

So, like, you know, yes, you know, there's some challenges with immigration, but then let's start deporting American citizen babies and putting people in dungeons overseas. Well, maybe that's the right problem, but that's the absolute wrong solution. Yes, maybe we do have too much cancer or whatever because there's too much crap in our foods. That's the right answer. But anti-vax and stopping expecting milk is the wrong solution. And so I think there's where the answer for us

is to accept some of these problems they've been pointing out, but to come forward with better answers based on science due process in the Constitution. Yeah, that's a great point. So that Corbyn-Trent piece in Substack, so he talked about he worked for Bernie, he worked for, he volunteered for Bernie, worked for AOC, and he had this big cre big critique about how important it was for progressives to build parallel institutions to what the right has done. And his argument is basically like the left is really good at organizing, not great at structural power. And I read that and it's, I mean, first of all, it sort of felt a lot like the Howard Dean stuff, you know, things that we've heard before 15 years ago.

But secondly, I wanted to talk to you about this because I came out of conservative world. So I was with the Weekly Standard. I was always like the bad conservative. You know, I was basically a commie because I believed in all the Catholic social justice stuff. And one of the things that conservative world believed starting in like the 70s was like the mainstream institutions are hostile to us. What we need to do is set up parallel institutions. So we need conservative think tanks to counter the universities. We need conservative magazines to counter Time and Newsweek and the New York Times times um and i think in the end that project is i it started out like very intellectual and very noble and very interesting and there's a lot of ferment and that was good but ultimately it wound up in a cul-de-sac that i think was pretty

harmful and i think in, it's a mistake. And what conservatism should have done is said, no, we're going to exist in the world. We're going to tell, if you're a young conservative at Yale, we're going to tell them you should go work for the New York Times. And who cares if it's full of liberals? Go and make a career there. Learn how to get along in the world, push out ideas that way. Instead, they wound up in this conservative ghetto, which was fine to start with, but kept getting more and more toxic and insular until we wound up with like Trumpism. And I wonder if that, like, I don't know, like part of me says to progressives, I mean, look, I'm not a progressive, so it's not my world, but like,

stay in the world, you know, stay in the institutions, stay mainstream. You don't need parallel stuff. You know, I see the history a little bit differently than that in two ways. One, I think some of those

institutions I disagreed with, but they were principled, principled libertarian stuff, some principled stuff. The Trump phenomenon came adjacent to it with no principles at all. And then eventually just pure force and cultish mafiaons just captured all that stuff. I don't think necessarily was borrowing from bad intellectual, you know, think tanks. Um, I think Trump ran them over. And so I, so I'm a little bit more friendly to institution building. Um, I go back to, for instance, 2004, when we got beat by W and Karl Rove.

And it was a very similar situation where we thought W was going to be easy to beat. We thought he was an accidental president, hanging Chad. Supreme Court saved him, didn't win the popular vote. We thought we were going to kick this guy's butt. And Karl Rove and W. Swift voted John Kerry and beat the pants off of him and won the popular vote and the Senate and the House. And we were shocked in 2004, just like we were shocked in 2024. Now, of course, it's much worse now. But what happened was in 2005, there was no leader. It wasn't like we had some great leader.

Everybody was like, oh, where's our leader? Where's our leader? We need a leader. Who's going to be the leader? 2005, we didn't have a leader, but we did have a lot of institutions that got started. Huffington Post got launched in 2005 to organize our bloggers. Democracy Alliance got launched in 2005 to organize our donors. Color of Change, I helped to launch Color of Change, got launched after Hurricane Katrina to organize black folks online. There was a whole wave of institutions that got built.

Media Matters, Daily Kos, the whole things. They did- It came out of the Dean blog. Remember the Dean blog? Exactly. So for me, I'm older now. I remember that as a good period for progressives. People started to, people were entrepreneurial.

They were coming up with new ideas. They were coming up with new institutions. What they weren't doing was what liberals are doing now, screaming for a leader. We didn't have a leader for three and a half years. Barack Obama didn't get the nomination for three and a half years. But we were working. We were demonstrating against the war. We were demonstrating against Abu Ghraib. We were organizing and we were mobilizing. And eventually

that wave that was being built by everyday people, like the people who are listening to your voice every day, it was everyday people who built all that stuff. It was everyday people who came up with new ideas. Green Jobs was an idea that came up. Al Gore was out there talking. And that wave is the wave that Obama ultimately captured. Obama didn't create that wave. That wave was created over that two and a half, three year period. And then Obama came along and was able to capture that wave in a way that Hillary Clinton could not. And so the reason why I'm a little bit friendlier than you are to some of the institution building is I've seen it be positive. It can become very negative, like you said, but I think it can be positive. And I think that Trump is, I think he's a different beast. I think he comes out of a non-intellectual, non-institutional context of just pure showmanship and cult-like construction and mafia tactics that I think should not be used to impugn all of the conservative institutions that I think, didn't have to wind up in this ditch. Maybe, I don't know. I mean, 2010, I was looking at the Heritage Foundation and thinking, man, these guys are getting pretty far out there, you know, like, oh, wow. You know, like, yeah, there was, I mean, Obama broke their brains in a lot of ways.

I mean, for a reason, who could say why? I don't know why. It's probably, I mean, could have been anything. Could have been any reason at all. All right, so that leads me to the last thing I want to talk to you about. So one of my, one of my pet theses are, so how, I don't know if you remember, there's like a, there's a funny Saturday Night Live sketch right after obama right obama right after trump was elected and it's dave chapelle and chris rock and they're like at a of an election watch party with their

white friends the white people like oh my god i can't believe he won chapelle and chris rock like oh you can't believe people would vote for this? And so I have just gotten the sense, I've looked like, you know, like Black Democratic friends have been much, their reactions to the last 10 years have been much better than like mine. Like I basically lost my mind. It was like, what sort of country am I living in?

I don't understand. This is, I don't understand America. And I think this really shows like a very naive and insulated and provincial view of the world that I had. And Black folks seem to like, yeah, welcome to America. You know, is that, it's a part of, I just have felt like the African-American experience, I think, is like absolutely essential for like understanding America in the age of Trump. Am I like on the right path here? I agree. I mean, a lot of the stuff that people are freaked out about is just the stuff that was normalized in black America coming to everybody else. I mean, we haven't had, you know, the same kind of, you know, due process protections for,

you know, in practice for quite a long time. I mean, you know, the stop and frisk and a lot of, you know, a lot of bad stuff. And, and, you know, this isn't just Van Jones complaining. And there's a lot of data that suggests that, you know, if you, if, if you are, you know, a black person, certainly a person with black skin in a certain neighborhood, the system is going to come down on you with a ton of bricks. And 20 minutes away, you could be a white person doing the same thing and get a slap on the wrist or get sent to rehab. And it's almost known. It's like it's not even nobody even thinks nobody, no serious person would say that's not true. No serious person would say that's not true no serious totally well say i would love to if you say would you rather be caught with drugs as a white person

in the suburbs or a black person housing project everybody in america knows the right answer to that question well if if you so if you live with that for a long time your sense of the country and what it really is about gets a lot sharper. And so the miracle is how much black people still believe in this system. It's African-Americans who, frankly, got in the works, sent up the stick for generations. The main ones out here fighting for democracy, the main ones out here raising the alarm, black women in particular, college-educ black women, really in particular, have been the backbone for progress for every cause imaginable. So the miracle is you have you have 40 million people in the country who if we got as pissed off as these MAGA people and decided we didn't have to follow the rules and decided we didn't have

to obey the Constitution and we can do whatever the hell we want, it'd be a big mess. It's 40 million people, it's a lot. But I think African-Americans are more sober about the reality, but also more idealistic still about the possibility of the promise or the importance of the promise, maybe not the promise, the importance of the promise. You know, this country was created as two things and not one thing. It was created as a founding reality that was ugly and unequal with slavery and Native Americans being mistreated and women not having the right to vote. The founding reality was ugly and unequal, but the founding dream was we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all are created equal. So the founding reality is ugly and unequal, but the founding dream is beautiful, and it's about equality, and it's about justice. And I think African-Americans have been remarkable in the sobriety with which we assess the reality, but the fervor with which we chase the dream.

That is so well said. And I want to end on that. Van, again, I can't thank you enough for doing this. You really have been like one of my little heroes that I've followed for years and years and years at this point. I think I first started following during the Obama administration. Remember, you got like a broad deal with that. Even at the time, like I was like, yeah, that blows. That guy's really good. Thank you enough for sitting down with me. I really appreciate it.

Everybody go follow his sub stack. Follow everything he does because this guy's awesome. Thank you, brother. Take care, buddy.