The Daily Beast Podcast - GOP’s ‘Project 2025’ Plan May See the Rise of Dictator Trump

Episode Date: May 19, 2024

The Heritage Foundation’s extreme Presidential Transition Project proposes sweeping changes to government and packing the next GOP administration with extreme loyalists to Trump. Plus! Tech journalist and author of Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant, talks to Andy Levy about the tech industry’s obsession with trying to create the dystopian futures portrayed in media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Convierte your passion in a new business with Shopify and bathe records of with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world. You've heard of the best.

The best conversion of the world. The incredible system of the Pago of Shopify facilita the company on your site web, in the social and in

in any place. That is music for your ears. No, let's more vets. Your business will be a super-exitio

with Shopify. Empeas to start your period of month in Shopify. coms bar records. Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector.

I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Hello, and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal. We thank you so much for being here.

Today we have an extra special guest with tech journalist and author of Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant. And they'll talk to us about the tech industry's obsession with trying to create the futures portrayed in media, good or bad. Or as he puts it, the dystopia is the point. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips. Clip it. Okay.

What the hell was that? Not clip it. We're going to start off nice today. Which means that we're going to end badly. So I don't really like this. And it's also the nice isn't even going to be all that nice. That's not true. I want to make you two look dumb right now.

Damn. Apparently you think that's your job as producer. Here we have representative Jasmine Crockett talking to a guy from America First Legal, America's worst legal firm. His name is Gene Hamilton, and well, I'll let her do her things since I liked it a lot. For the American America First Legal, correct? That's correct. All right. And America First Legal is a member of Project 2025, which is dedicated to creating the playbook for the next conservative administration and what it calls. the project pillars, correct?

We are proud contributors to Project 2025. Okay. And are you familiar with Project 2025's mandate for leadership? In fact, I am. Okay. And in fact,

you wrote some of the sections of this mandate related to the DOJ, correct? Sure did. And the mandate outlines policy priorities for the next conservative president. Is that correct? It does. You've done a great job. I just want to let you know. All right. So let's walk through some of the provisions of the mandate.

It calls for eliminating the Department of Education, eliminating the Department of Commerce, deploying the military for the use of domestic law enforcement against protesters under the Insurrection Act of 1807. It also has the repealing of Schedule F status for thousands of federal employees to allow a president to replace career civil servants with unqualified. partisan loyalist. That's probably my favorite of it. It also prohibits the FBI from combating the spread of misinformation and disinformation, like Russia and China, who are actively trying to interfere with American elections. I don't know why or how anybody can support Project 2025. And I know that there was allegedly a joke about dictators and whether or not that's funny

but in the United States of America, dictatorships are never funny and Project 2025 is giving the playbook for authoritarianism as well as the next dictator to come in. And I know

that you are doing your jobs here by making sure that hopefully some juror turns on and finds some viral moment of you spewing more of the nonsense as it relates to the president, but as... I will say, I love Jasmine Crockett. I think that she has been such an incredible addition to Congress.

Every single hearing that she is in, she is fire, particularly when she gets to bring Republicans to task for their hypocrisy and bullshit. And, you know, the fact is that Project 2025, which is... Andy, you and I have been warning about for, oh, I don't know, probably well over a year on this show is dangerous and is a threat. And they have 900 pages of their manifesto ready to lay out a rebrand for American white Christian nationalism and the demolishing of our social safety nets and government agencies, separations between church and state, and just, a myriad of things and ready to go on day one.

So this being in the congressional record, incredibly important. Bravo. Bravo. And yes, Jesse, this was actually a good one. Look at you. She is delightful as always. And I can only assume that the rest of the clips will continue in this vein. Yes.

This is not a bad batch today. So you guys are going to look real silly for this one. Okay. I just want to say the other real detail on the video if people want to watch it is watching how smug this guy is. It's particularly a face that only like a fucking frat bro gives to a woman when they talk to him. That like is just so despicable. Like he's so condescending in his look at her the whole time.

In the business we call that Jesse Waters face. Oh, I like that. Resting Jesse Waters face. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Well, speaking of, we now have Fox's Laura Ingram who I think someone slipped her a psychedelic drug before this rant on what Trump's debate strategy should be because this is wild. So all Donald Trump has to do is stay calm and stay calm during the entire debate and let Biden rant and rave

because Scranton Joe is looking and sounded meaner and more petty by the day. And then Trump, by comparison, he easily appears presidential, cool, confident, and yeah, possessing a lot of common sense. Is she high? That sucks what I was saying. Yo, that is some projection and gaslighting bullshit like I have never heard before. Just give me a date so I can check the tapes of when Donald Trump ever looked presidential. In direct seriousness, one time when the man looked presidential. And when has Biden ever ranted and raved on?

He may have, you know, his hiccups with his stuttering and speech impediment, but tell me when he's ever trailed off about Hannibal Lecter and being a dictator and like whatever other grievance there is. When Farms killing whales comes to mind. Oh, my God. Yeah, I mean, look, she is so far in the tank, she needs scuba gear at this point. There's really nothing to say about that other than, you know, you sort of just like pat someone on the head and say, you're a crazy person. And then you continue on down the street.

I want to like get a wager here. Like, what will be harder? Trump not to rant and rave or me to walk? buy 7th Street Burger and not order one. But odds evenly on both of them because I know how bad I do with that. Well, we mentioned him before,

but Fox isn't a serious state of cope around Trump falling asleep in court every day. And Jesse Waters can't even keep his face straight for what he has to say about it. And the other woman, I forget who it was. No, the guy that said the guy's sleeping. he's meditating Greg yes he's in a meditative state and when you're when you're defensive about something you avoid something Trump's not defensive of being old and tired he can shut his eyes and not feel bad about it like sleepy Joe

go ahead and talk about your friend andy no I was just going to say that I think this is what passes for humor at Fox News there was like a little bit of the cope of that he could get away with it that was definitely serious but like I don't see headspace being on Trump's front page of his iPhone. No, I would imagine not. Not even calm. Yes. Yes. Yes. Definitely don't see him as a 10% happier guy. No. I don't know if people know this, but I think Jesse Waters is incredibly fucking stupid. I think we've mentioned it. Have I mentioned? It's possible I've mentioned it before. My point is he is so fucking stupid that he could be being serious here. And that's the problem with stupid people making jokes is that it's not all that different from the things they say that aren't jokes.

I do think this one ultimately is probably a joke. It's just a dumb joke from a dumb person. And then to go into the sleepy, oh, Trump is meditating and then to go into sleep. Like, you're an ass hat. I never even use that term. But honestly, it is the only thing that I think of when I see Jesse Waters' stupid airbrushed face. That's it. As hat. I can't stand him. With this read to me like is there's that common fox thing where a lot of them are just throwing out different things and talking points and seeing which one sticks with the idiots, which are often the Congress people who come to Trump's defense and come to court. And which ones they'll be like, oh, I like that one. And then they feel good because they invented the idiotic excuse for Trump of the week. Yeah, that's absolutely right.

100%. All right. Well, speaking of those idiots who were in the clown car to defend Trump. Trump this week. They had a nice little press conference outside the courthouse on Thursday where they tried to do Trump's bidding. And we have Congressman Lauren Bowbert who attempted Trump's trial today. And she had some thoughts. She has thoughts? Well, we'll see. He doesn't know why he's in court. No one knows the crime committed, Danielle. Oh, let me hold on. Election interference, right? And campaign finance violation. Those are the crimes that Donald Trump is in court for that his lawyers

know why he's in court because they are defending him in court. Lauren Bobert, go back to another Beetlejuice play. Sit down someplace. Go fondle something. Like no one needs you in the courtroom standing by Donald Trump to show what? Like your face so that you can get a clip on Fox or a fucking picture. Oh my God, these people are so gross. They're so gross. This to me is just, it's evidence that Bobo doesn't listen to the new abnormal. Because if she did, she would know what the crimes are. And, you know, LB, if you're out there, maybe someone can draw this to her attention. Start listening to TNA. It's an initialism you should be familiar with, given your behavior at various musicals. Do yourself a favor, Bobo. Check us out.

I'd also like to point out that her son was in court for his issues last week. She was not there, of course, but she could find time to come for Cheeto Jesus. Yeah, that's amazing. Do you think she knows why he's on trial? You know, I don't think they heckle her with that, but I want to make sure the audience did hear that there was a lot of people in the crowd yelling beetle juice at her. While that happened, I would have preferred since Matt Gates was there if they were yelling beetle juice and butthead. Or someone could have just started playing teenage wasteland. In the 2013 Spike Jones movie, Her,

Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Spoiler alert, the movie does not have a happy ending, at least for Phoenix and other humans, but that hasn't stopped OpenAI CEO Sam Altman from comparing his company's new voice interface program to Johansson's AI character. Joining me now to explain why this isn't even surprising anymore is former Los Angeles Times tech columnist Brian Merchant.

He is the author of the great history of the Luddites, Blood in the Machine, the Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, and the publisher of a fantastic newsletter at Blood in the Machine.com. Brian, thanks so much for being here. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. So you wrote a piece at Bloodin the Machine.com called, for tech CEOs, the dystopia is the point about how this keeps happening over and over again. And I thought it was interesting because usually we talk about how these tech CEOs seem to have missed the point of whichever dystopian book or movie, their latest product apes. But you're basically saying, oh, no, they get the point. They just don't think it's dystopian. Right.

Yeah. I mean, so the first time it happens, you can be like, oh, well, they just like pulled out this one piece of a story or a science fiction movie or, you know, whatever it may be. and, you know, they like that, and, you know, they're missing the point of the whole work itself, but we can move past it. But it keeps on happening, right? It's a trend. I actually wrote a story for Vice years ago for motherboard RIP before the whole place went bankrupt. It was when Mark Zuckerberg was debuting his whole metaverse idea and rebranding his company to meta

and sort of going all in on this idea of building an embodied Internet. And a lot of people, myself included, pointed out that he had pulled this idea right down to the name from a very bleak 90s cyberpunk novel called Snow Crash, where the world is so miserable, inequality is so rampant that people are literally living in storage units and plugging into a VR to ignore the disastrous nature of reality. And then they can go on these adventures and try to earn a little money in the metaverse. So at the time, it's like, hey, you know, like, why would you, you know, rebrand your multi-billion-dollar enterprise, one of the most influential and largest and most profitable companies in human history on this very dystopian idea? And at the time, it's like, well, maybe he just like really liked this feature or this fixation and just wanted to drill down into the meta person to sort of make it exciting. And then you fast forward, you see Elon Musk kind of saying, oh, the cyber truck. It's like what Blade Runner would drive.

And let's forget for a second that he completely misunderstands or doesn't necessarily appear to have watched Blade Runner very closely. But the idea is this is a cool truck from a future world. And then you have Sam Altman tweeting out her as they're doing this demo where they're trying to pitch audiences and investors, of course, on the new iteration of chat GPT, which is a bot you can talk to. And it's this female voice that is flirty and that you can, you know, they're kind of trying to encourage users or potential users to imagine that they're going to have a relationship with this bot. And of course, in her is Spike Jones's movie, which came out about 10 years ago, it's not as stark a dystopia as Snowcrash or Blade Runner. But it's still, and I was rewatching it last night because I've been getting a little bit of pushback from folks. So it's been a dialogue. It's actually been fun to chat with folks online and whatnot about this.

But it's very bleak. It's a world where people are obsessed with digital interfaces, whether or not it's the Scarlett Johansson one or not. And in it, she sort of takes over his life. He becomes kind of obsessed with her. And, you know, I guess the film is putting forward the question, can you have a relationship with a bot? But in the end, he falls in love with an operating system,

a computer, which he remarks upon. And he sort of neglects his personal relationships in a lot of cases, especially with his ex, who he is failing to move past. Everybody kind of gets consumed with these bots, and they're not paying attention to each other. And it's a pretty, to me anyways, it's pretty starkly dystopian. I mean, it portrays a world that's on the brink of being fully consumed with this media, and then these OSs that people can talk to. Again, like Sam Altman is encouraging us to sort of, you know, buy into pitching as a product.

But like, yeah, let's do this. Let's neglect our human relationship. Let's go all in on these bots, these flirt bots, that are going to let us forget our problems and pretend that this is a real relationship and not. Of course, at the end of the movie, they all just decide to vanish. They disappear into the ether or they become AGI or whatever. And Theodore, the character, is kind of like, oh, wait.

And he's just sort of realized that it was all a sham, that he has to now pick up the pieces and go about the hard work of actually repairing his human relationships. and actually sort of be a human, and he can't do that while all the bots are there. So, again, this movie is positing that if these bots take over, we're going to neglect everything that's sort of human or arguably important in our lives. And to me, that's a pretty dystopian prospect.

Sam Altman's just going all in on it. And, you know, three makes a trend, right? You know, you can write about it for The New York Times now. It's this push where the tech companies are saying, you know what? Like, it's dystopia. We know you guys think it's a dystopia out there. We're going to situate you as a protagonist who's going to be happy, who's going to triumph,

who's going to hop in the cyber trunk, fend off the replicants, fend off the hordes, who's going to, like, prevail in the metaverse and who cares that the world is collapsing around you? You get to have your AI girlfriend and go on an adventure in the metaverse, and you get to win. You get to be the victor. You get to experience the dystopia as sort of the winners. do, you know, in a dystopia, there's usually a 1% that's benefiting from the world being a dystopia. And sort of the pitch to me is that you get to be one of those people who benefits,

even if it's at the expense of everyone else. Yeah, you write about what all these guys and all their technologies have in common. And what you say is they make the user the protagonist. And it also feels to me like another commonality is that all of these things are kind of pitched to lonely dudes. Yep. Absolutely. Metaverse. It's by definition, lonely technology where you're shutting out the outside world, you're eschewing regular, you know, social relations, you're putting a VR helmet on your head and entering a fully digital space where you have control, right? You have control over this digital environment. You decide where you go, who you're going to talk to, what, you know, you can fly maybe or you can have power over

it. And it's intensely appealing to people who, you know, might feel that they've been ostracized from the physical world or they're not having as much success there or they're sad. I mean, just to briefly caveat that is that these environments can actually be, you know, useful for people who have challenges with accessibility, who are lonely in a world that is pretty good at generating loneliness because of companies like this. There are use cases in communities that have sprung up that have found actually sort of rewarding uses for this. But by and large, it's catered to, you know, yeah, mostly lonely men.

I think, you know, again, there's a reason that it's a flirty, female-voiced chatbot. You know, Sam Altman knows who his audience is. And then, yeah, the cyber truck. This thing is as sort of aggressively an isolationist vehicle as you can imagine. All SUVs to some extent are made to make you feel like you're the one behind the wheel of the tank. But this is like, they're pitching this as like, it's bulletproof. It's like arrowproof for some reason. Like, it's like, you know, it's nobody's getting through this thing.

not waterproof. It's just not waterproof. Yeah, it can be a boat for three seconds. Right. So you're inside your cyber truck, talking to your AI girlfriend, you know, pulling up to a rest stop, to get to enter the Metaverse for a half hour between shifts or whatever. You know, you can see sort of the common out, how these are all of a feather, even in their differences, even if it's a hardware product or a software product, you can kind of see where

these visions are coalescing. they are this dystopia that they want to put you in the center of that makes this lonely guy feel powerful and feel, you know, that he can spend some money on some products to feel like he can conquer over the hordes that are preventing him from feeling happiness in the regular world. And it's just such a toxic message on its face, you know, I think it's kind of, you could follow it, although the last 20 years of the tech industry, like we've come to this point where like this is explicitly the messaging. We've left behind the Silicon Valley messaging of 20 years ago where it's like,

we're not going to be evil. We're going to bring everyone together. We're going to do all this. And fast forward, no, this is in some ways it's more honest, right? Like, this is for you, the lonely, angry man who wants to take matters into his own hand or to triumph over a hostile world. And you can also see that in a lot of these guys sort of, you know, politics and their drift, especially Elon Musk.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Everything Elon does at this point has a whiff of welcome to my dystopia to it. And the thing is, people have been warning about this trend for a while now. I know last year, Charles Strauss, a great science fiction author, wrote the laundry files novels, which I love. He wrote a piece for a scientific American called Tech billionaires need to stop trying to make the science fiction they grew up on real. You know, and you point this out in your piece, comedy writer Alec Blackman's absolutely perfect tweet from 2021, where he has a science fiction author, saying, in my book, I invented the torment nexus as a cautionary tale. And then the next line is a tech company saying, at long last, we have created the torment nexus from the classic sci-fi novel,

don't create the torment nexus. So there's really no way to look at this at this point as anything other than it is absolutely purposeful. These guys, and it's pretty much always guys, they have to know exactly what they're doing. Yeah, exactly. I mean, they know the torment nexus tweet. They know, yeah, they know this criticism. For a while, I feel like critics or journalists like me could go like, hey, they're missing the context. Like, hey, you know, and it would feel like we're at least sort of getting a shot in or, you know, or stripping them of a little bit of credibility. But no, that turned out to be wrong. They know what they're doing.

They don't care. Like, oh, you know, oh, don't you know that this is a dystopia? Yeah, we do. We know. We don't care. It is absolutely intentional. And again, it's just like you could almost look at it as a marketing strategy. Again, I don't know if it's a successful one.

It's coming at this point where someone like Elon Musk has the capital and the power to just kind of push through the products that he wants to make, whether or not anyone's buying them. Right. Because, you know, look at the cyber truck sales. We kind of got a snapshot of how much has actually been sold and shipped so far when they recalled it after it been out for like a month. And it's not, the numbers aren't impressive. It's in the hundreds, not thousands. And same with the Metaverse technology, which is like, you know, kind of pretty.

spectacularly fallen on its face. So it is this interesting moment where it might not even be the smart consumer thing to do because as we've been talking about, these visions really only appeal to a small subset of people. And, you know, it's not, it's, yeah, yeah, maybe, like, you know, Elon Musk's most diehard fans are going to be first in line for a cyber truck. Everybody else is going to be seeing this thing that, you know, everybody's making fun of on the internet.

The accelerator gets stuck sometimes, you know, like a horribly, dangerous design. It's just draped in bad news. But they have the power and the wherewithal to push ahead with these products, you know, whether or not we want them. And AI is a really good example. You know, maybe some people are excited about, you know, having a around the clock AI companion. It's feasible, you know, and especially again, appealing to our, to our lonely guy demographic. But by and large, you know, the actual consumer reaction to a lot of these AI products has been a lot more mixed than the hype would lead you to believe. Do you want a chat bot around the clock?

I don't know. I personally, I don't. I know a lot of people who don't, but just the hype levels are so gargantuan. There's just so much money and power concentrated in Silicon Valley that they can just sort of animate these ideas and push them forward. In large part, because their backers, their investors, their partners are all part of this dystopian, lonely guy subset, or at least a subset that knows how to appeal to them, or that that resonates with them so that they can sort of.

of get these ideas off the ground and into the marketplace, whether or not anyone wants them. That's what's remarkable to me right now. And something you say in your piece that I also found incredibly insightful is you say, we have to bear in mind that these dystopias are actively useful to them, them being the tech CEOs. That's such a great way of looking at it as opposed to, oh, they're accidentally creating these dystopias, or again, they know not what they do. They are doing this on purpose, and it is actually useful to them.

It is. Yeah, again, because I think Silicon Valley has moved past this point where they may fall back down to Earth. It's the rest of the years going to be really interesting to see what happens with the AI marketplace, given the amount of hype and this brand of sort of marketing, this apocalyptic dystopian marketing they've engaged in. But it's useful to them into sort of pushing these visions Silicon Valley as a whole has sort of drifted rightward. And part of the fact that they're more eager to sort of advocate for or embrace these. sort of dystopian ideas is because people like Musk now have much less sort of hesitation over sort of being reactionary and sort of just embracing ideologies that maybe would have alienated their consumer bases 10 years ago. So it is actively useful to them to put forward these products in this whole sort of this whole cultural context and to sort of fit it into this vision that, you know, as I said, maybe doesn't even appeal to most consumers, but it aggressively appeals to some. And those people are, you know, included are the people who are pulling the levers of power in Silicon Valley right now. Yeah. And it really does seem,

I just want to tie this to politics, because I sometimes forget we're a political podcast and I have to do this. But it really does seem like Silicon Valley, like there's been a shift from sort of live and let live libertarianism. It's a sort of libertarianism with a human face type thing to a much meaner brand of libertarianism, which is, by the way, mirrored in the libertarian party and in what we see from Trumpism in general. And it feels like a lot of these products sort of are in line with that. And like you say, that the ethos has changed, the Silicon Valley ethos from the, you know, sort of don't be evil and we're going to help you live your best life. And now it all seems to have changed and become this sort of cooler thing. Yeah, I think there are a few pieces to that. I think

the tech companies, the monopolies that, you know, used to present themselves as, quote, the good guys have become so large and entrenched that they're basically sort of these like faceless, you know, they're like the new GEs, right? Google or Apple. They don't really have any sort of discernible political identity. And as the balance has shifted, as they become successful, they become secure. They have their giant, you know, moats that they can, you know, protect with their vast hordes of capital. Now the personalities coming forward are, as you said, right? They're like Elon Musk, who, you know, went from being sort of a liberal-coded kind of guy because he was selling electric cars largely to Democrats who had expendable income.

Now, you know, yeah, he absolutely, I think it's probably what he's saying now is more in line with what he has always believed, but he now feels more emboldened to say it. I mean, he's one of the richest men on the planet. The barriers are not exactly there. But there was an inevitable backlash to all these products once people realized that actually those do no evil tech companies are just as at least complex, if not outright, sort of evil as any other sort of enormous corporation that's bent on maximizing profits has been in the past. So there's inevitable backlash. And then some of these guys just took it a lot harder or personally. And they think that they allowed that grievance to curdle their public personas in a lot of ways.

in a lot of ways it activated those libertarian tendencies that you've already said. And then Trump comes along and provides this model that says, well, you can be popular. You can be powerful. You can be. And then so a lot of the guys like Peter Thiel and sort of the more conservative-leaning CEOs in Silicon Valley just came out and said, fuck it. I'm just going to be a Trump of Silicon Valley. I don't care.

And we can get our media elsewhere. We can go on Fox News. We can go on different shows. We're not going to be celebrated by the liberal class anymore. but we'll still have our megaphone. I could buy Twitter if I want to. I think you're right. I think the mask has fallen away.

There's actually been a drift to the right as these incredibly wealthy CEOs have felt like some small level of grievance over pushback over their products and cultural backlash to some extent. So I do think that we're in new territory now where 20 years ago Silicon Valley was largely, you know, liberal, coded and was sort of tethered to that do-goodery. That's gone now. There's nothing sort of connecting Silicon Valley in terms of an ideology anymore except the age-old one, which is to maximize profits at any cost. Absolutely. Brian, always a pleasure to talk to you. And thanks so much for coming on.

And everybody go to Blood in the Machine.com and check out Brian's newsletter. And if you haven't read the book Blood in the Machine, I highly recommend it. So go out and buy that, too. Put a little money in Brian's pocket. Brian, thanks so much for being here. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks, Andy. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal.

We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover

what might become the darkest timeline head to the dailybeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.