Week in Review: Lee Fang and Leighton Woodhouse on Ukraine War and NYT Piece Revealing Tensions within Trump Admin; PLUS: Lee Fang Takes Audience Questions on DOGE and Big Tech
Lee Fang and Leighton Woodhouse recap the major stories of the week, including the fallout from Zelensky and Trump's explosive meeting about the Ukraine war. Plus: Lee answers audience questions about DOGE, big tech, Obama, and more.
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This is Lee Fong, journalist and guest host of System Update.
I'm filling in for Glenn, who is out this week.
It's been fantastic to guest host the show the last few days.
This episode, we'll be doing a few things.
First, we'll be talking to Leighton Woodhouse.
He's an Oakland-based journalist and investigative reporter, filmmaker.
We collaborate on our own substacks for a kind of weekly...
I'll be responding to your questions and comments and concerns, discussing some of what we've reported on this week.
And finally, later in the program, we'll hear from Michael Tracy, System Updates, European correspondent.
He's been gallivanting around the continent this week.
He just recently attended a big European Council Summit.
We'll talk about the politics of the U.S., Trump, and Europe, the war in Ukraine, and other topics.
Stay tuned.
Hey, Lee.
Hey, Leighton.
I'm going to talk to you about the first time.
Welcome to System Update.
We often do a podcast together, a video kind of thing, looking at the news, but I'm taking over system of update this week because the esteemed host Glenn Greenwald is off somewhere, God knows where, celebrating his birthday.
I think he's like 80 or 90 years old now.
But in any case, since he's gone, you know, I thought it would make sense for us to take over and talk about the news as we usually do.
It's been...
Both, like, a chaotic week and then also, like, maybe less of a newsy week compared to the other weeks.
It's, like, every...
It's just, like, I kind of...
I forgot this chaos news cycle from the first administration.
Like, it just got normal eventually.
And now it kind of shook me because I'm like, oh, yeah.
We're back to the same old thing where everyone's, like, reading between the tea leaves, trying to understand the Kremlinology of...
What the truth social or Twitter posts actually mean?
Is this five-dimensional chess or just Trump saw something on Fox News and is reacting to it?
We're back to that.
Yeah, I love it.
I mean, I don't love it for the country, but I love it for just my day-to-day entertainment.
It's just so much more fun than following the Biden administration.
I know we'll talk about this later, but there's no better example than the Zelensky summit meeting where you're just seeing this stuff.
Just out in real time and just on the table in front of you.
There's no hiding it.
It's amazing.
Yeah, and actually that's another kind of deja vu from the first administration where it's like, okay, you looked at all the instant reactions from normie reporters, from liberals, from kind of conventional media types.
It's like, oh, how dare they?
They ambushed Zelensky.
This was a trap because they're all Russian moles.
This was all a fake press conference to humiliate Zelensky because they want to do whatever Putin wants.
And then you actually watch not just the two-minute clip of J.D. Vance, but you watch the actual 30-minute press conference or something along those lines.
And it's like, actually, no.
I mean, the administration, Trump, was very deferential.
To Zelensky the entire time, really teeing it up, attacking Russia over and over again.
And it was Zelensky who kept saying basically no to peace and no to a ceasefire and started towards the end of the press conference before it went haywire, started jabbing at J.D. Vance and basically calling him naive for even wanting a ceasefire.
He kind of walked into it, and it's crazy to blame the Trump administration here.
It is unusual.
This is something that never goes on in front of live cameras, so it's not normal.
But to blame the Trump administration, it was just like another kind of quasi-fake news.
It's almost like people give too much credit to the administration as if this stuff is all thought out in advance and plotted and this is all calculated when in fact it is what it is, which is what you see right in front of the camera, which is just, it really did get out of control.
I mean, I feel like Zelensky was, he definitely...
I'm not a fan of Zelensky, and I've written about that before, but I do somewhat sympathize with his position of walking into this meeting where it seems as if there had been no preliminary conversations going into it.
I mean, I'm sure there were, but it feels like he kept talking about security guarantees, and clearly the Trump administration isn't interested in giving him security guarantees, and that was just not even worked out.
In advance.
And so it seemed like Zelensky was in a position where he had to say things for his domestic audience.
He couldn't let certain things get away.
When he corrected Trump on Europe donating money, he couldn't not do that because he has to go back and face these Eurocrats in the future.
And so like he was just in this difficult political position.
So he had to keep pushing back.
But of course, through the broken English and probably through his just arrogance and stuff, he did it in a way which was just provocative and obnoxious.
And I should also blame the other side, Trump and JD's egos.
But so it just became what it was, which was just like a fight, just a skirmish between people with big egos and a lot on the line.
And we see this kind of trickle out in the media in a different way.
Like, apparently, Zelensky...
Was a real turnoff to Biden, like, in terms of his demands over the phone?
And there's been similar kind of leaks.
It's just never done live in front of cameras.
I mean, that's really the distinguishing factor.
I mean, this is, we're paying for the government salaries.
The U.S. government is paying for those government salaries of pretty much every Ukrainian official.
We're funding all their media, which is problematic, something we've discussed a few times in the past.
Obviously, their military providing the arms and the funding.
The term client state seems appropriate here.
And look, I mean, it's just kind of like there's the idealist view of the world that is, I think, soaked in moralism and rhetoric about how great powers and countries should act.
And it's usually bullshit because every country has their own moral narrative.
If you listen to Russian TV, it's all about defending.
you know, this war is about defending traditional values against the kind of degenerate West.
I don't really believe that.
And you listen to a lot of Western propaganda that this is all about defending democracy against an imperial Russia.
I don't fully believe that either.
It's a power dynamic between two spheres of the world.
And I think that was just laid bare here.
It's This is not about the rhetoric.
This is not negotiation on equal footing.
I found the response interesting just insofar as, like, you know, everybody says that they want government transparency, but then, like, the pushback to this, like, you know, what some were describing as this embarrassing, shameless fiasco was basically, like, these conversations should be had behind closed doors and, like, a responsible government will have this...
You know, this sort of Potemkin Village theatrical, like, press conference in which they've got these scripted talking points and they don't reveal any of the conflicts or they only hint at them.
And, like, they want, like, people were pissed off that they didn't have, that they weren't given just, like, the boring statecraft theatricality.
And rather than seeing, I was like, I don't identify with either party.
I just identify as a normal.
I'm not a fan of that system.
I'm not a fan of the blob.
I found it interesting how people feel.
Sort of offended that they weren't being lied to, basically.
That there was an honest moment.
You know, there's like so much else with the Trump administration.
I'm like of two minds.
I'm very divided.
You know, I see him kicking out the traditional White House press pool dynamic where it's like usually the press gets to choose their own, you know, representative to go on these.
Travel or trips whatever junkets with him and interpret the events for the pool.
And there's a little bit more of a kind of legacy media approach to the State Department and Pentagon.
New York Times, AP, they had their own offices there because they're covering these institutions every day.
He kicks them out and puts in a bunch of more conservative bloggers in there.
I'm a little uncomfortable with that.
But on the flip side, you look at how these foreign policy and domestic policy press conferences have happened over previous administrations, especially under the Biden administration, where everything's choreographed, everything's stagecraft.
If you're one of the insider reporters, one of the legacy media outlets, you're given a copy of what everyone's going to say beforehand.
You're chosen beforehand with, you know...
When they're raising their hands, it's not random.
It's all pre-selected.
And in many cases, the reporters even feed their questions to the White House so they know what they're going to ask.
It's all fake Q&A. And I think the American people are tired of that because it gets leaked out.
It's obvious.
It's so phony.
Do you think that's not being done now with this hand-picked White House report?
No, it's still being done.
I'm just saying that it's being done in a different way where...
I don't think there was any true stagecraft with the Zelensky meeting.
There are with other Trump press conferences.
Absolutely.
I think they're still kind of feeding questions just in a different way to a different set of reporters.
I was like OAN being like, Mr. President, can you just explain to us how you're so amazing and awesome?
What the genius thought process is that goes into these executive orders.
Yeah, it's like they're essentially trading One group of kind of trained SEALs clapping for the president, pretending to be adversarial reporters for another group.
And that part's not good.
But you do have these moments almost every week or every other week where the attempt at stagecraft just goes out the window because of the disposition of people in this administration.
I think J.D. Vance saw Zelensky trying to own him in front of the reporters and was just like, all right, I'm going for it.
And I'm not going to let this happen.
I don't know if you...
The dynamic between Vance and Trump was interesting in that exchange because Trump was probably annoyed.
You could kind of see it on his face.
But he didn't really escalate it until...
Vance jumped in.
Vance was like, hold on, let me say something.
And then he just kind of tears into him.
And I was like, just the dynamic wherein he felt authorized to do that.
He felt comfortable.
He felt like the president wasn't going to get bent out of shape about his doing that.
I just found it interesting.
I don't mean it as judgment one way or the other, but it's just like that Vance felt...
Like, in a safe space just to, like, kind of take over the conversation and push it in a really extreme direction.
And then, of course, Trump piled on, right?
He escalated along with Vance, so it was clearly a safe move.
But it's like, normally, you wouldn't, a VP wouldn't, it just seemed very brazen to me.
Yeah, I don't know if you...
It's certainly not what Kamala did as VP. Yeah.
No comparison there.
You know, I want to turn to...
This article you shared with me this morning, it's in the New York Times Friday, about Doge, about Elon Musk specifically.
This is Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Schwan, folks who are very good at getting the inside gossip at the White House.
But it seems like Elon Musk is finally creating...
Tension within Trump's inner circle and in his cabinet because, I mean, it's very predictable just in terms of the size of the ego.
And look, I mean, you hear from the, at least according to this article, Sean Duffy, head of the Department of Transportation, runs the FAA. It's like Doge is coming in and firing.
FAA officials, people who are directing air traffic at the time when we're having planes crash.
You have Marco Rubio, head of the State Department, chief diplomat, basically getting grilled and humiliated by Elon Musk in front of Trump as Elon Musk ridicules him for not firing enough State Department officials and not giving Doge enough control over the State Department.
It's like...
It's very interesting.
Can we add to that that then Rubio is pushing back and publicly making these sarcastic remarks to Musk, being like, well, do you want me to rehire him so you can fire him all again in some big show?
It wasn't as if it was just Rubio sitting there getting grilled and taking it.
It was like a conflict with these people just pushing back against Musk.
And Trump ultimately seemed like he was siding with his...
Yeah.
News this week that Trump basically said that ultimately the agency heads have power to fire people, not Elon Musk personally.
He's trying to recenter power here away from Elon Musk.
We talked about this earlier on our podcast.
I was hopeful.
I was optimistic.
I didn't love the process, but we've had anti-corruption, anti-waste and abuse systems for a very long time that simply don't work.
We just have to try something new.
Our systems of inspector generals, our DOJ investigations, our other kind of oversight bodies, the GAO, CRS, what have they done?
It's like we've got these blobs of federal contractors, a bloated...
In some cases, a bloated workforce in some agencies that have little accountability, people not going back into work after everyone else in the economy is going back into the office.
We need some kind of radical force to shake things up.
But then I see these stories almost every day.
Doge claiming to cancel a lease on a federal office that has a 10-year lease.
And so they're counting that as money saved, even though nothing's actually changing.
They're counting...
They're cutting contracts that have already been spent, so a $5 million contract where $4 million has already been spent.
They're counting that as a whole $5 million savings, even though the savings are actually $1 million.
Or in some cases, they're counting a $100,000 or a multi-million dollar contract as a billion dollar contract.
They're just getting it wrong, like a typo or something.
I have no idea.
But it's like every day, it's this slapstick version of...
Austerity.
There's a lot of gimmicks.
I don't know.
Also, I think you and I have spoken about this on our podcast before.
For a while, my feeling was like this is all fake until they get to the Pentagon because that's where the real money is and that's also where the real political interests lie.
It's like messing with USAID. NOAA is like, it's nothing, especially for a Republican president.
You start messing with the Pentagon, then you're really getting some pushback from some powerful interests.
And then I changed my mind about that because...
It became clear to me that just the extent of Musk's conflicts of interest in terms of Pentagon procurement and the motivation that he has to gut the old procurement process, which is dominated by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, etc., kick them to the side so that Palantir and other Silicon Valley tech firms can get these contracts.
That's kind of what I expect to see when he goes into the Pentagon, that it'll just be...
Rather than cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, it'll just be creating an updated swamp.
And I found it interesting in this article that Trump now...
I'm not trying to claim that this was premeditated or anything, but now Trump is saying, okay, from now on as we go forward, we're going to be using a scalpel, not an axe.
And it was like, oh, that's interesting.
Right as people have been...
As the administration has made indications that...
The Pentagon is in line for the chopping block, that they're now gutting the whole just kind of berserker mode of doing these cuts, and now they're going to be doing things much more surgically in a way that, in my opinion, is tailor-made for reforming a procurement process to favor Silicon Valley tech firms.
Right.
And you look at what the DOD has announced in terms of Doge cuts, it's like...
It's cutting the stuff that I'm happy with them cutting, but it's pennies.
I mean, in terms of the Pentagon budget, it's the typical stuff that's the low-hanging fruit.
It's the DEI contracts with the Navy and the Army with Deloitte to train their workforce on sensitivity trainings.
It's like, okay, but this is not the tens of billions of dollars in wasteful radar contracts.
I don't know if you've been following the news.
Some of the...
Next generation submarines.
They did the welding wrong and they're not operable at sea.
It's like China is pumping out.
Put to the side whether this is good policy.
I have a disagreement there.
I don't even know if the pivot to Asia makes sense.
Is the U.S. actually going to go to a kinetic war with China over Taiwan?
I actually think that's...
That's a pipe dream, too.
There's a war with China.
It's a nuclear holocaust and we all die.
Who has the best submarines doesn't matter.
But if you're in Washington, go to any defense-funded think tank, which is like 90% of them.
They're all talking about the submarines and the fact that China's now lapping us as the largest naval force.
We need to be pumping out submarines as fast as possible.
They've updated the next Pentagon budget to reflect this.
The last Pentagon budget had more naval vessels than submarines.
But they don't work.
It's like it's filled with fraud.
There's tons of just faulty devices and construction in these kind of modern submarines.
They're not seaworthy.
It's like there's been some prosecutions here, but you want to look at where there's fraud and abuse and we need to actually shake the system and fix things.
If you actually believe in this pivot to Asia or just spending the U.S. tax dollars wisely, start there.
The DEI contract with the Navy?
Actually, some of what you say about these defunct vehicles and weaponry makes me feel like the status quo is better than what the alternative would be.
Like a functional war machine?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Somebody who's criminally anti-war.
If we're going to replace it with highly competent tech firms that are able to build these black mirror robot dog That's a great take.
The five-dimensional chess strategy for ensuring peace in the 21st century is keeping Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman in charge of the defense industrial base because they...
Because they suck at it so bad.
They're making so many defective weapons of war that we just won't go to war.
Yeah.
That's what I'm thinking.
I like that.
That's good.
I lost.
I was going to say something about that New York Times piece.
Anyway, what else is on our docket?
Well, you know, we talked a little bit about top-of-the-line news.
I want to talk about something that's That interests me that has received almost no coverage outside of Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, which is significant coverage, but really it should be a mainstream media story.
It should be a gigantic scandal, and it's not.
And that's this ongoing criminal case around a group of hackers hired in Washington, D.C. And to give you some context, back in 2013, 2012, sometime around then,
A group of environmental activists got together and decided to start planning this pressure campaign to get prosecutors to prosecute big oil and the big gas companies, basically arguing that because these companies knew of the dangers of climate change back in the 70s and 80s and then concealed the evidence,
kind of like big tobacco knew of the risk of smoking and concealed the evidence back in the 60s and 70s and continued basically marketing their products and deceiving the public of the harms, there was a case to be made there, a public interest case.
And they encouraged attorneys general and prosecutors around the country to start probing Exxon and Chevron and others.
Exxon, in response, hired a D.C. lobbying firm called the DCI Group.
And this is a very prominent Republican.
Consulting firm that worked for Walmart and Microsoft and, you know, you name it, lots of kind of top-tier companies.
And what did DCI Group do?
Not the traditional lobbying of, you know, maybe advising or making ads or something.
They went to an Israeli consulting firm that specializes in hiring hackers.
And this Israeli consulting firm hired a group of hackers from India.
To start using actual hacking, like malware and phone exploits, where they were seizing control of people's phones remotely and downloading their electronic communications, their emails.
And as they were hacking environmental groups and these kind of activists and foundations, they started taking their emails and then ceding them to the conservative press.
So back then, from 2013 to 2018 or so, you saw a lot of news.
News outlets that were saying, hey, look, these groups that are prosecuting Exxon, they're working with environmentalists with extremist agenda.
And you saw a lot of those stories.
What was not revealed back then is that these stories were sourced from illegal hacking.
And this is like nation-state stuff.
I mean, this is the type of technology that the U.S. and China and Russia use against each other.
It's very rare to see this in a domestic context.
A lot of times, even the most famous hacking of modern times, the hacking of the Hillary Clinton campaign by Russia, that did not use malware or these kind of phone exploits.
Someone just posed as the IT guy on the Hillary Clinton campaign, someone from Russia, and asked John Podesta to send him his password.
That was basically it.
They didn't use malware.
Was it somebody from the campaign he was posting as or somebody from Gmail?
I don't remember.
I think they used an IT type thing.
Like, hey, you've got to reset your passwords and send me your password.
It's like the boomer hack of just being like...
I might be getting it wrong, but I feel my recollection was that it was as banal as the kind of phishing attacks that you get five times a day in your spam filter, which is like...
This is Google, and we just need you to reset your password.
Right, right.
Just send us your password so we can help you reset it.
Yeah.
So, no, this was the type of thing that the Saudis used on, allegedly, on Jamal Khashoggi, you know, remotely working with the UAE to seize control of his phone before they lured him to Turkey to chop him up.
So, you know, there are some other, like, reported cases of this type of technology used.
But this is hardcore stuff.
And, you know, I don't have, like, a hot take here.
It's just interesting and also wild that in this day and age no one seems to be talking about it.
This is a huge story that you have these foreign interests in Israel and India working with domestic interests, ExxonMobil, to hack American citizens.
I mean, I think this is likely to be the future of political pressure campaigns.
I think more and more there's going to be this...
Cyber intimidation, where if you disagree with a powerful interest, they're going to come after you, and they're going to hire these kind of hard-to-trace hackers to seize control of your phone, make it like an internal surveillance device, look at your emails, your private messages, your bank statements, whatever, and intimidate you.
That's essentially what happened here.
Where did you come across the story?
I've been following the Reuters and...
The Wall Street Journal have been reporting because there was a grand jury, you know, like a secret indictment a few years ago.
You know, there's some new revelations in the court case, and the Wall Street Journal has a story about that earlier this week.
I find it fascinating.
I find it also unusual that, like, people are obsessed with climate change and hacking in Israel and whatever.
There's, like, a lot of interesting components to the story.
There's basically no interest in this.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's also just, it feels prophetic in the sense that, yeah, this is what's coming to the rest of the country.
We're going to be inundated with these type of intimidation campaigns if we don't have secure devices or if there's no kind of deterrence.
People who engage in this type of hacking need to be brought to justice, and so far they haven't, although this criminal case is ongoing.
Can we talk about the Presidio stuff?
This executive order is now a couple of weeks old, so I guess it's old news, but we're both from the Bay Area, so this maybe is more in our backyard, but I think it's also revealing about what's happening in D.C. And just for background, for people who haven't heard about it, because I don't know how many executive orders Trump has signed at this point.
It's probably in the hundreds.
But this executive order...
Called for the Presidio, which is a federally owned, beautiful park in San Francisco.
It's a very historic park.
As a matter of fact, I think it was like the first federal holding in California or something like that.
The executive order called to strip it of all sort of extraneous...
It's kind of unclear exactly what the implication is, but basically to get the presidio out of the federal governing business, which it kind of already is because it pays for itself.
It doesn't take any congressional appropriations.
But the interesting thing about it was that it opened up this discussion or this excitement among certain people in Peter Thiel's orbit.
Who probably wrote the executive order, were probably the people who at least lobbied for it if you didn't write it.
So it's a little more than just like they're fantasizing or speculation.
But there was a story, a piece in Palladium Magazine that went around about how this is the opportunity to turn the Presidio into a special economic zone explicitly modeled after Shenzhen in China.
Um, uh, where basically you can have a deregulatory agenda where like, uh, this has been a long time dream of these, um, Peter Thiel, like Seasteader types is to create these, you know, for a while, the Seasteading project was,
um, was a, um, Was this utopian vision, utopian for libertarians, vision of creating these floating cities in the ocean that are outside of the reach of any national government, where you can be free from regulations and make your own rules.
And then zones like Shenzhen are basically that, except on, you know, specially designated on...
The proposal is to make the Presidio into something along those lines.
It's probably never going to happen.
I'm not particularly concerned about it because I think that this crazy idea will ever come to fruition.
But it does make me wonder, why in the hell does Trump Care about the Presidio and about turning it into...
Why is the Presidio even on Trump's radar?
And the only explanation I have is that it's because of the tech people who are surrounding him who are behind this vision of turning into a special economic zone.
And that's why the executive order exists in the first place.
So it's a little bit more than just like fantasizing about this dystopian, in my opinion, dystopian outcome for what could become of Presidio.
It might actually be real.
And what does that say about the balance of power in terms of MAGA, in terms of like the economic nationalist Bannonite faction of MAGA, being that this is like literally the opposite of economic nationalism.
It's like an explicit...
With extreme prejudice, rejection of economic nationalism.
Well, let's game this out a little bit, because Shenzhen, when that was created as a special economic zone in China, that was before a lot of the economic boom of China.
The Shenzhen stock market was created.
They loosened rules on capital controls.
They allowed a lot of capital formation.
Lots of companies were formed.
Lots of investment schemes were birthed there.
You know, incredibly successful.
A lot of China's big tech industry is centered around Shenzhen.
And this was kind of a special zone, kind of like competing with Hong Kong, but within the traditional PRC boundaries to give these economic incentives for rapid economic growth.
And I wonder what are the incentives, what are the regulations that they are attempting to avoid?
Creating a Shenzhen in San Francisco.
It's like we have a lot of local ordinances and rules that don't make sense, but I can only imagine what would be attracted to a zone that doesn't have those restrictions.
Like, we have these restrictions in San Francisco around chain stores, around, you know, it's very hard to build very tall buildings.
You can't open up late at night serving alcohol, and I'm sure it's probably impossible to...
I think there's this fantasy, you know, Patrick Friedman, a lot of very kind of influential libertarians have pushed this idea for countries around the world.
You know, Honduras has its own that's very controversial in Roatan.
There are kind of versions of this in Eastern Europe.
It's been talked about in parts of Africa as a way to stimulate...
Charter cities, right?
Yeah, charter cities.
Look, on some level, I'm open to it because San Francisco...
I spent much of taking over Glenn's system update talking about the need for regulations on banks and fintech companies and airlines.
There's a role for government...
Rules to protect the consumer, to prevent systemic fraud and waste and abuse.
But the local-level regulations in California have been crippling in some ways.
So, you know, I'm open to something that changes the nature of San Francisco regulation because it's so hard to change anything in California.
The whole state, particularly San Francisco, seems to be on autopilot.
Yeah.
I mean, look, I'm all for it.
If it was just to get around rules around, like, you should be able to build without, you know, a five-year public process, and also you can't smoke meth on the street, you know, we will actually arrest you for that stuff, and it's getting out of those regulations is fine, right?
Like, that's great.
San Francisco is a dysfunctional city.
If it's around, like...
You know, in this zone, OSHA has no oversight or there's like basic labor regulations, basic environmental rules and stuff like that.
That's a whole different ball of wax.
But what I find interesting about it is that like Shenzhen, I did a little research on it.
And I think the average duration that's that, first of all, it's a city that's like...
I think it's like a third.
Basically, the workers come into the city, they constitute like two thirds of the population of the city.
And I think the average duration that somebody spends in Shenzhen is maybe a decade or less.
So people come in there and they work when they're young.
You know, they're in their 20s.
They go and they work and then they make some money and then they leave and they start a family elsewhere, which is kind of what San Francisco is like, actually.
But it is antithetical.
To my understanding of the J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson kind of conception of what a city should be or what a community should be.
My understanding of the MAGA vision, to the extent to which the coherent vision, is that we want to create communities where there are family ties and where there are actual human...
Community ties that are not just dictated by the whims of the market, right?
That this is what J.D. Vance has pushed back on.
This is certainly what Tucker Carlson has pushed back on, on this, the neoliberal vision of, like, the market determining everything.
Like, Shenzhen is that city.
Like, it is, Shenzhen is globalism, like, in manifest.
It is eat the bugs, stick in a pod.
That is what Shenzhen is.
Yeah.
No, it's like...
It's a neoliberal wet dream because it's just a complete free trade zone.
Businesses can operate freely.
It's not this kind of return to small-town American life where America is a place, not an idea.
All this rhetoric around having traditional values and getting back to a 1950s or 1970s view of America where we don't have this rapid dislocation.
It sounds like they want more dislocation.
Yeah, and they want the market to dictate things and efficiency.
Even the fact that, like, Doge, that the main priority for the Trump administration right now is government efficiency feels like it sits in an uncomfortable juxtaposition with the MAGA. What I have always understood to be sort of the MAGA value set.
Government efficiency is a value for neoliberals.
That's a value for the Paul Ryan wing of the Republican Party and, well, the entire wing of the Democratic Party, basically.
Like that doesn't, it feels as if like there's some profound fissure within this coalition between the tech side, the tech neoliberal side and the traditionalist side.
And up until now, the traditionalist side has been completely subservient to the tech oligarch side.
I don't know if that will remain the case for long.
Yeah, I mean, I think they're almost...
they are at risk of being too successful in one area.
Of the Venn diagram where there's complete agreement, where there's this revulsion, this reaction to the last 10 years of DEI, of woke identity politics that has angered the tech elite because they're like, hey, we do care about merit and being able to compete on ability.
And there is this anger from a lot of other Americans that see it as anathema to...
American values around being judged by the content of your character, not the color of your skin.
And there's an anti-white kind of dynamic around some of this DEI stuff.
So for both sides of this coalition, taking on DEI, that makes sense.
But you then kind of draw it out and look at what does this mean for our economy?
What does this mean for our cities and our communities?
Vulgar obsession with profit at all costs.
You know, most Americans, I don't think, want to be working, you know, multiple gig economy jobs to get by, no matter how efficient and profitable it might be.
You know, they are concerned about getting their Social Security check and Doge laying off probation workers even there.
So now the call centers are overloaded and they're talking about potentially cutting disability and perhaps other parts of Social Security and Medicaid.
It's like, well, how does this actually square with the vision that someone like J.D. Vance puts out?
It's not quite clear.
I think when a traditional MAGA person thinks of meritocracy and getting rid of the DEI stuff, they're thinking, you know, my kid who grew up working class and happens to be white should not be accused of having white privilege and should have a fair shake, same opportunity as everybody else.
I think when the tech people think about meritocracy, they think about H-1B visas.
It's like a completely different reality where they're like, we live in a global marketplace and we should be able to get the best people from all over the world.
And so we should change the immigration policy in order to bring in more people from India and China to be able to take jobs in Silicon Valley.
Completely antithetical to the, like, yeah, the support for meritocracy is the same.
The implications are wildly different.
No, that's a great point.
And you kind of have to wonder, it's like, well, you know, you look at the broad-based cuts that Doge is doing.
Who's going to do this work?
I mean, at the end of the day, Americans like their parks.
I think they like their weather predictions.
You know...
I think there's this assumption that if you shrink the government, that tech startups or businesses will just replace these functions and be much more efficient.
But there's going to be a cost, right?
There's a cost just in terms of service, and there's a cost in terms of actual efficiency.
Are the taxpayers actually going to save money getting rid of...
Government scientists and replacing them with just a different type of private actor serving the same goals, it's just not clear.
Yeah, it's just a new swamp.
I mean, most of the waste, fraud, and abuse in government, at least at the local level, where I'm most familiar with it, is in...
I mean, it's like, you know, it's not like these, like at a city level, a lot of cities have already eviscerated their local workforce.
You know, it's like a half, it's like half of what it was 50 years ago.
And it was just subcontracted it out to like, in many cases, private nonprofits.
And that's where you find like in San Francisco, you find all these scandals with, you know, executive directors who are like hiring their kids and cousins and putting them up and...
Fancy apartments and whatnot with city money.
So, like, I don't see it as any different in terms of taking on the corruption and the waste, fraud, and abuse.
I do see it as ushering in an era in which, like, your grandmother, to get her social security check, will have to interact with AI instead of a human being and put through a whole bunch of, like...
Technological hoops that they're not familiar with in a system which is not built for them, but is rather built for the conveniences of the government.
This brave new world that this is ushering forth seems to me to be...
I don't want to sound like beating a dead horse again, but it's the opposite of MAGA. It's a very tech, futuristic, dystopian vision of the world, I feel like, is what...
The Trump administration is becoming a bridge to rather than to the, you know, pre-1960s vision of make America great again, which, by the way, would be a return to the New Deal.
So there's contradictions there as well.
But you know what I'm saying?
It's like that's where I see this split, this divide.
All right.
Well, great to see you, Leighton.
Thanks for joining me for System Update.
Glenn Show Takeover.
I just want to reiterate that Layton is a great podcaster, filmmaker, reporter, lives in Oakland.
You should check out his sub stack, Social Studies.
He's online at Elwood House.
Great.
And I want to plug our podcast where we do this on a regular basis.
It's called LaPod.
And it's on each of our sub stacks is where you can find it.
Great.
Good to see you.
Take care.
You too.
I want to get to your questions in the Friday newsbag.
These questions were submitted by text, so I'll be reading them aloud and attempting to respond and address some of your concerns and questions.
The first question is from R-Y-Nan.
Lee, could you share your perspective on how you think we can critically track what Elon is doing at Doge?
If only because of the pace of it all.
When Elon makes claims about widespread Social Security fraud or payments being rendered for fake services, it's hard for me to assess the truth of these claims, at least without hours of digging.
What I'm really looking for are resources on how to track Doge quantitatively, since nobody doubts that there is fraud in government, so the real question is about the scope of the problem and the realistic impact of the proposed solutions.
I find that the MSM mainstream media tends to get caught up in the petty disputes about the particulars of individual claims that don't matter all that much anyways.
It would also be nice to get some fact checks about Elon's most explosive claims, but of course, the entities dedicated to fact checking have totally discredited themselves, so I'm not sure for where to look for that.
Thanks.
This is a great question, and there's no simple solution.
As we kind of got into a few days ago on our episode about Doge, there's a difference between waste and fraud.
These two terms are kind of intermixed in a lot of the rhetoric, especially from Elon Musk.
If you look at his ex-feed, he's accusing the government of fraud on almost a daily basis and claiming that Doge is cutting fraud.
But fraud is different than waste.
Waste is a subjective term.
You know, I could say that, OK, maybe the government said that they were going to fund a clown parade every week.
And, you know, one could argue and I think most would argue that that would be wasteful spending.
But maybe for people who support clowns, that's useful spending.
Now, fraud is something different.
If the government said that they were funding a parade of clowns and instead that money got siphoned off and was spent on something else.
If that money was stolen or that the contractor that put on the clown parade falsely certified that they were not owned by the Chinese government, but they were indeed secretly owned by the Chinese government, that would be illegal.
That would be breaking the rules of federal contracts, and that would be something that could be teed up for a criminal or a civil investigation.
There could be penalties.
The money could be clawed back.
So basically all of what Elon has done with Doge is subjective.
And a lot of this spending is, I think, arguably a waste.
It's unnecessary.
You look at some of the big Booz Allen and Deloitte, these mega consulting firms that were providing DEI contracting and kind of diversity training to the government.
A lot of that stuff was very silly.
We've seen studies over and over again showing that these...
Services, these types of diversity studies, don't actually improve workplace harmony.
They actually increase racial hostility.
They tend to increase racial hostility at work.
They're kind of a waste of everyone's time.
Okay, that's certainly wasteful.
The problem, as we discussed a few days ago, is that none of this is technically fraud.
If it's fraud, it needs to be referred to the Justice Department or another kind of...
Some of the programs that have been cut, the contracts that have been cut, there have been big problems with how Doge and Elon have represented them.
Some of the contracts were claimed to be billions of dollars in savings, but really there were almost no savings at all because these were old contracts that had already essentially expired or they were misreported in terms of the dollar figure.
It's been really problematic.
In terms of your comment of where to go to quantitatively track all of this, there is no one source.
I think this is a big problem.
And we're here in independent media.
I'm an independent media.
I'm a completely independent reporter.
So is Glenn.
Glenn does his own thing.
But for this type of really data-heavy journalism to kind of track...
All of these claims that are coming out of Doge and Elon and the federal government on a daily basis, I think this is actually where we do need a stronger legacy media.
We do need the kind of big journalism institutions with the resources to kind of methodically fact check.
I've seen some very good reporting from the Wall Street Journal, from ProPublica, which has its own vertical kind of fact checking a lot of claims from Doge.
They have great resources where independent media, they don't have the resources to provide a daily fact check of what's going on.
That's not to defend the mainstream media or the legacy media from all the kind of false claims and false fact checks we've seen throughout the years, but I'm not someone that wants to throw out the baby with the bathwater because of prior mistakes.
The media needs to change.
We need independent media to keep the legacy media accountable.
That doesn't mean we still don't need.
There's kind of institutional journalism resources and keeping Doge accountable.
The second question is from M. Jadel Kelshef.
I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.
Hi, Lee.
This question has nothing to do with current events.
I was wondering if you could share your assessment of the Obama presidency.
The good...
The bad and the ugly.
I was not very plugged into politics during that time, and I would love the assessment of someone whose fairness I trust.
Thank you.
Thank you for those kind words.
This is complicated, and I don't want to take up too much time talking about this, but it's very mixed.
Just in full disclosure, I favored Obama versus Hillary during the 2007-2008 primaries.
I kind of wanted a reformer, someone to come in who was talking about opposition to the Iraq war, to the Afghanistan war, who wanted to kind of expand universal health care and kind of get tough on some of these issues of government fraud and waste that had really blossomed during the Bush who wanted to kind of expand universal health care and kind of get tough on some of these issues of government fraud and waste Obama said a lot of the right things, but when he came into office, you know, in terms of the false promises,
he...
He promised to keep the banks accountable that were responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.
He appointed the bank's former attorneys to run the Department of Justice.
No criminal penalties on any of the big banks.
And I think that kind of failure we're still experiencing the fallback from because across the West there's been an alienation from Government institutions, these legacy institutions, because of that failure to provide accountability after the financial crisis.
Obama shares a lot of the blame there.
Now, the good, I don't think Obama gets enough credit for some of the positive aspects of the Affordable Care Act.
This is another case where there was a lot of disenchantment with that administration because of the big promises of revamped.
Health care reform of kind of lower costs and universal coverage.
That's not what happened.
Essentially, what came out of Congress and what Obama signed was a version of health care reform that actually has its roots in the Heritage Foundation.
The Heritage Foundation kind of provided a skeleton of what health care reform would look like if it basically just kind of changed things around the edges and kept our system in place.
The system that ultimately Governor Romney in the early 2000s implemented, and that's the kind of model for healthcare reform that Obama implemented.
And, you know, it was far from perfect, but you have to kind of consider the alternatives.
And previously, pre-Obamacare, pre-Affordable Care Act, the individual market was a mess.
Any healthcare insurer could deny your claims kind of by retroactively looking at any of your pre-existing conditions.
We had a Medicaid system where basically anyone working at even a minimum wage job could not gain coverage in most states.
You know, the income thresholds were so low that, you know, with the Medicaid expansion of Obamacare, it really kind of lifted a lot of people's interests and helped them gain health care coverage for the very first time.
I think that was a net positive.
The CFPB, a lot of these financial reforms that Obama passed.
We're also a net positive, a net good, although we're now seeing them dismantled under Trump.
And finally, I'm just kind of critical of the great man theory of history.
A lot of these presidential administrations are judged based on a single individual.
Certainly, the buck stops with Obama.
He takes a lot of the blame.
But at the end of the day, there were other kind of forces at work.
Congress, he dealt with a very corrupt...
Democratic and Republican Party that, at the end of the day, Congress makes the laws.
You look at how much the Democratic Party refused to support some of the more progressive and populist promises of Obama, whether that was kind of putting in these poison pills in the budgets to make it impossible to close Guantanamo Bay, so this promise to close Gitmo.
Obama had real difficulty because Congress was kind of undermining him from the very beginning.
You look at how Trump, how unified the Republican Party is in voting for his nominees and passing his agenda very rapidly just in the first hundred days of his presidency.
That's not what happened under Obama.
You had a much more divided party.
A lot of the folks who were...
Voting against any of the kind of more populist or progressive ideas, the kind of idea for having the original kind of outline of health care reform was much more public interest minded.
But you had a lot of Democratic members of Congress who voted to create kind of loopholes, to kind of cut benefits, to kind of weaken the bill that eventually got to the White House, to the president's desk.
And those same Democratic members of Congress then took jobs at hospitals and health insurance companies and drug companies.
There was just a lot of Democratic corruption that made it didn't matter who was in the White House.
It could have been someone far more skilled or far more progressive.
If you had to deal with such a corrupt and corporate-dominated Democratic Party in Congress, they're the ones writing the bill.
So, you know, it's really a mixed legacy.
And then, finally, I'll just end.
On the Obama presidency, although I could keep going.
There were some unusual dynamics too.
I mean, at the end of that presidency, you had the death of Samuel Alito, a vacancy on the Supreme Court.
Senate Republicans really kind of exploiting the rules there to keep that vacancy open, kind of seizing, stealing a Supreme Court seat, something that's never been done in American history.
Was unusual.
And do you blame Obama for that?
Do you blame Senate Republicans?
I'm not sure, but that's something where I don't think you can just lay blame with Obama.
All right.
Third question from Kate Kotwas.
Are you concerned about the vision of the future expressed by tech billionaires who now wield immense influence in the Trump administration?
Many of them openly advocate for effective accelerationism.
A philosophy that pushes for unrestricted technological progress, in quotes, especially in AI, and markets in general.
Transhumanism.
And what many would call techno-feudal system.
Yes.
Look, at the end of the day, I'm open to technological progress.
I'm not a doomer in terms of AI. It does pose real risks.
I am concerned with some of the ethical concerns around...
I mean, I live in San Francisco, so there's a lot of talk among tech startups and venture capital around CRISPR gene editing, that in the very near future, we could have the very rich, the very powerful in society gene editing their babies to be free from disease, super high IQ with other abilities.
That will create more of a division that already exists in society.
We're already seeing a vanishing middle class, a super elite of tech billionaires accumulating more and more capital and more political power.
I think a lot of these technological jumps will accelerate that divide within society.
And while I'm open to any kind of progress that can eliminate disease, This kind of concept of physical differences that are going to manifest from this gene editing, I think, is a real concern that we haven't fully debated, although we're on the cusp of reaching.
And how is this impacting the Trump administration?
You know, I think Trump was very skilled in championing working class concerns, working class cultural concerns, really giving the optics of a populist administration.
During the campaign, always surrounding himself with cops and firefighters and teachers and really just clearly everyday Americans on every stage when he was campaigning for the presidency.
And there was a sharp break when he was inaugurated.
He was surrounded by the richest people in the world.
I mean, even Ron DeSantis and other Republican governors were not allowed into the inauguration chamber.
The people that he surrounded himself with were Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos.
And the other kind of billionaire elite.
And I thought that kind of juxtaposition was jarring because we've seen just some of the very first decisions of the Trump administration when there was this kind of call for Trump to make good on his promises around H-1Bs and these kind of visa programs that import foreign workers to replace American workers.
He ultimately sided with the tech elite.
And Trump has incredible political instincts, but he is also kind of shaped by power.
And I think he kind of understands intuitively that the power in society is aligning very quickly with Silicon Valley, and he is hoping to align himself there as well.
And that tension between the MAGA populism that really was very successful and now...
Two political campaigns that there's going to be tension with an actual policy agenda for a tech elite that simply wants higher profits, higher efficiency, no matter what cost.
The fourth question from Glocal.
Do you think Trump's recent post about withholding funding from college campuses that allow illegal protests is anything?
Besides criticize the country whose name we dare not utter that rhymes with shmizreal, I think it's exceedingly clear that this administration is really taking it to an extreme to suppress speech that is critical of Israel.
We've seen it just this week with Marco Rubio's State Department promising...
to use artificial intelligence to scrub the social media of students here on a foreign visa for speech critical of Israel so that their visas can be revoked and they can be deported or this civil rights investigation of elite colleges and the California universities for supposed anti-Israel or anti-Semitic speech or this latest crackdown on Columbia University Trump administration this
morning news broke that they are withholding funding from or canceling grants from Columbia University, again, related to these allegations of anti-Semitism.
Now, just as Glenn has discussed, and I truly echo, you know, we see this in every speech suppression debate, whether it's claims around hate speech that, you know, hate speech, that certain speech that discusses racial identity harms.
That any discussion of gender ideology is harmful to transgender Americans.
That any discussion around pandemic policies is going to increase death and harm.
You know, all of this kind of rhetoric from the Trump administration is allegedly to protect the safety of Jewish Americans or to supporters of Israel.
And I think it's almost all a facade to kind of suppress discussion.
Of Israeli policies.
Of course, on the fringes, just like on any other kind of issue area, there are people with hateful agendas.
There are people who do wish harm in some way.
But these kind of concerns are exaggerated and ballooned to essentially just suppress any concerns with Israel's foreign policy or their human rights agenda.
You know, just from my own reporting in the last year, we see that a number of pro-Israel advocacy groups have been lobbying aggressively.
They were lobbying the Biden administration.
They were working hand in glove with members of Congress who claimed to champion free speech.
But then immediately after October 7th, pivoted to smearing universities, exaggerating or at times even manufacturing fake claims around violence or threats, and using all of this, again, to suppress speech around Israel.
And the fifth question is from FitzEmpress.
I second this.
First Amendment rights are being flushed down the drain, but only if you criticize those who cannot be criticized.
Let's not shrink from the truth.
AIPAC is destroying 1A First Amendment rights.
Yeah, there's really no equivalent here.
We want to talk about cancel culture, that you can't express controversial opinions without threat of intimidation from your employers, from your community, from the media.
This fits almost perfectly.
In that kind of framework, members of Congress, people in the media, we saw just in the first few weeks after October 7th, almost everyone being fired were people who were critical of Israel.
You know, there were over two dozen journalists, some of whom, you know, their speech was incredibly benign, just like posting a hashtag, free Palestine, something.
That kind of ordinary was getting reporters fired from their jobs.
We've seen funding cut.
I've, you know, writing about Israeli issues or free speech issues around Israel and the discourse here in the United States, I've lost something like 10 or 20 percent of my subscribers.
You know, this is really a controversial issue, but it's really no different.
Fundamentally, from what we saw over the last few years, I suffered professionally criticizing some of the same dynamics from Black Lives Matter around some of the people who were talking about the need for censoring people around the origins of COVID-19, the lab leak theory, around the lockdowns, a lot of anger around the Hunter Biden laptop.
And although the dynamics are slightly different, AIPAC and some of the other pro-Israel organizations are very centralized, they're very powerful, and it's a very emotional issue.
Some of those other issues that I just mentioned over the last few years, there weren't the same kind of centralized special interest groups, but the effect was the same.
These were controversial issues with a very emotionally charged, and there's been an attempt to make people suffer consequences if they spoke up.
And it's not just, of course, cancel culture, this kind of communal attempt to silence and suppress free expression.
We're seeing kind of the codifying of some of these rules, the IHRA definition.
of anti-Semitism, which actually encodes not just Jew hatred or discrimination against Jews, which is already illegal, but there's an attempt to change the definition of anti-Semitism to say that certain forms of criticism of Israel, like claiming Israel is a racist state, that is now going to be penalized.
That's something that Congress has been pushing, that this administration has been encoding through.
I want to single out just AIPAC. There are other pro-Israel advocacy groups that are behind this kind of cultural and legal shift.
