Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the breaking news that the FBI executed an extensive search warrant of Mar A Lago, including Donald Trump's safe. They also dive into the Inflation Reduction Act, its particulars, what it might achieve, and then Jared talks with Gal Beckerman about how movements for change and progress are formed and why we have to keep the faith that a better world is possible.
Gal Beckerman is the senior editor for books at The Atlantic and the author of The Quiet Before: On The Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas.
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We have a full jam-packed episode that now feels weirdly prescient.
But Nick, the FBI is rated Mar-a-Lago.
Go figure.
I guess they had some time on their hands, Jared.
I guess so.
So we're still unpacking this the same as you, but we felt like this was pertinent that we needed to go over it very quickly before we got into the episode.
It's really weird how much this ties into the episode people are getting ready to listen to.
Trump eating documents, misplacing documents, being unprofessional in general.
It seems like this is related to the fact that everyone and their brother knows that he has mishandled confidential documents and resources.
On top of that, Nick, The announcement that came from Trump himself is, I don't know how else to put it, it's hilarious.
It's really funny.
Beautiful home, you know?
It is a beautiful home, I gotta tell you.
He keeps it nice.
I don't believe if you were to pull the boards apart that you'd find any kind of pushback or any kind of words that would indicate that he is not guilty.
Interestingly enough, he didn't mention anything about his innocence.
No, he did not.
You know, he talked a little bit about it being, this is great.
It was not necessary or appropriate.
Well, we'll leave that to the authorities to decide.
He also said, and this is great, this is a quote, it is prosecutorial misconduct, which I guarantee you that Donald Trump did not write that.
OK, probably.
That's too many syllables.
The weaponization of the justice system, an attack by radical left Democrats who desperately don't want me to run for president in 2024.
I gotta tell you, Donald, they're not the only ones who don't want you to run.
Because I have to tell you, for the FBI to raid the home of a former president, like, there's a lot of boxes that have to be checked here.
A lot.
A lot of Gestapo words being thrown around to describe this on the right.
Remind me, who appointed the head of the FBI?
Who was that again?
I have no memory of that whatsoever.
Just checking to make sure.
That was a Republican appointee, I believe, if I'm not mistaken.
Oh, it's so incredible.
Over on Fox News, this is an actual headline that I just caught.
"Two-tiered system of justice.
"Trump raided while Hunter Biden's still not charged "in Machi Tito." - I love it. - It's terrible.
And by the way, everything that we talked about from the mishandling of documents, and to give people a preview, we gotta talk about on this episode, the IRS getting $80 billion to grow and go after corporate criminals, and Marco Rubio being a complete Republican stooge and ass.
This is an actual tweet from Rubio.
Quote, after today's raid on Mar-a-Lago, what do you think the left plans to use those 87,000 new IRS agents for?
Geez, I don't know, man.
Maybe just run the IRS?
Geez.
Here's what's interesting.
Wall Street Journal is the one who I kind of seem to be out front of this as far as reporting in terms of why they did this, why they're going there, and they seem to think that's related to all the documents they had taken from the White House that were, what's it called, top secret or whatever, that they needed, you know, they're not supposed to do that.
Now remember boxes and boxes have been shipped back after they have nicely requested them months ago now the thing with the and by the way we talked about this before how there's a lot of these laws quote-unquote that are like hey you should really do this like keep all your call logs and keep all your presidential papers don't eat them don't flush them but there really isn't any Is that in the statute?
Sure.
Does it say don't eat them, don't flush them?
You know, mutilation, concealment, flushing, they're all just synonyms.
Now, the thing though is there wasn't a lot of teeth to what would happen if you violated these laws.
However, as Mark Elias had to point out on Twitter, I just found this one out, one of the things that seems ironclad and in stone would be that you would forfeit your office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.
So, this could very well be, you know, Merrick Garland saying, oh my god, like, almost in the sense, remember when DOJ went after Spear Wagnew first, because of how corrupt he was?
Well, they knew that Nixon was also going to need to get out of there, too, how corrupt he was, but they needed to get him out first because of the Order of Command.
This could very well be one of those things where it's like the pragmatic approach is, we have to make sure this guy cannot run again, and this is a slam-dunk case to say they stole these documents, they're in his possession, And he can't run anymore.
That's it.
I am still very allergic to silver bullet solutions.
You know what I mean?
The idea that this gets him or the walls have closed in or whatever.
Right.
This, to me, feels like another episode in a much longer series of episodes.
Like, this is another thing that's like, hey, guess what?
We've got your number.
And we have no interest whatsoever in having you involved in any of this.
Sending signals, basically saying, you know what?
The amount of crimes that you have committed, the amount of laws that you have broken, and I mean, like, let's be real.
We've talked about this on the podcast.
Donald Trump has behaved as a criminal organization boss his entire career.
Before he was ever president of the United States, before he ever dreamed of being president of the United States, he has acted as an organized crime boss.
These things, and you keep saying it too, it's the Al Capone idea.
It's the taxes that'll get you.
It's the side thing that will get you.
And I think Spiro Agnew is a wonderful person to bring up as a corollary here, which was, they basically went to Spiro and they were like, hey, we just need you to know that you could go away for a very long time.
And you really need to think about what you've done and what is possible here.
And with Donald Trump, it's very obvious the system does not want him around.
Period.
And I don't think we're going to see him do a perp walk in the next day.
I'm not sitting here setting off streamers and poppers and you name it.
But this is pretty large, Nick.
The idea that the FBI would raid the home of a former president, that's historic.
Right.
And you have to think, to go in there, first of all, you have to get a court order to go in and look through a safe.
And I love, by the way, that his statement's like, they even went in my safe!
It's like, okay, man.
Like, to go in there, you have to have this thing pretty much nailed dead to rights.
Right.
It's a real situation, but again, don't think you're going to be seeing him perp walked in the next day or two, but this is, This is a larger compounding problem for Donald John Trump.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm trying to rack my brains about what else they could be looking for that would be like there that's so pressing.
Because remember, it's not only that they have to prove that there's evidence they need to retrieve.
They need to prove that it's there like right now.
Otherwise, a judge wouldn't have signed off.
Totally.
I'm sympathetic with Merrick Garland, believe it or not, because it's a difficult situation to be in when you don't want to be seen as political or as the Gestapo, as they're saying.
So, like what you just said is spot on.
They couldn't have even thought, a thought couldn't have entered their mind of getting this warrant without, like, The most ironclad... 100% knowing what you're going to find there.
This is not a go in and see what's there situation.
No, this is not Bad Lieutenant or whatever.
What's another one of those?
What's the movie where they always... Bad Lieutenant colon Mar-a-Lago.
That's not a movie I want to watch.
I'll be honest.
No, thank you.
Or some other movie where they're pushing the envelope here on what's legal and what's not to get the bad guys.
I'm not worried about Merrick Garland at all being caught in some situation where they're going to end up perp-walking him because it was a political hit job.
This is definitely something that has to be completely lined up.
I just asked somebody I know who I work with.
He was like 25.
I'm like, do you realize how unprecedented this is that a former president's house is getting raided?
And he was just like, well, listen, the whole thing has been unprecedented.
So yeah, it kind of feels like, why not?
Why not this?
Well, and you know, everybody, the immediate reaction on the right, obviously, is they're all like, this is banana republic behavior.
Well, yeah, if you went after somebody and there wasn't something to go after them for, if it was literally a regime going after political enemies, that's not what this is.
And everything we know about Merrick Garland, and I think you're right, everything we know about Merrick Garland is a tale of caution, right?
It's always institution, it's always playing by the numbers, all of this.
This situation had to be 100% you know exactly what you're going for, you know exactly where it is, you know exactly that you're going to find it.
None of this was left to error.
Period.
Nothing.
Absolutely none of this was left to human error or fault or anything.
Like this had to be dead to rights.
And again, I don't think it's gonna lead to a perp walk tomorrow.
I think everybody needs to curb their expectations and just be patient on this thing.
But this is like, unprecedented just barely begins to cover it.
This is pretty huge.
But you don't think it's just for illegal possession of classified documents?
That's what I would guess this is.
Okay.
Yes.
And I think that this, I mean, everybody and their brother knew that he took documents that he wasn't supposed to take.
I mean, they at least have multiple things set in place to make sure that everything is kept there, you know?
Like redundancy upon redundancy.
They know that he has taken things that he wasn't supposed to take.
And I have to imagine it's like, okay, they asked for them back and they sent a bunch of boxes, but then they didn't send them all.
So they're going to be able to say to a judge, whatever, Hey, we gave him plenty of opportunities to return this.
Maybe we asked him like several times and they refused to cooperate.
So we were forced to do this.
And as a result, we, you know, we have to invoke a 18 USC, whatever that number is.
And, uh, 18 U.S.
Code 271.
Concealment, removal, or mutilation, generally, of those documents.
So, I'll take it.
I'll take it.
Whatever they want to do to Al Capone, this guy, is fine with me.
But, gosh, how sweet would it be if they could actually get him on all the other shit, too?
If I had to make a long-term prediction, this is what I've said all along, it's that you put a lot of heat on this guy, and then later on you look back and you're like, man, what an embarrassment.
We got past that.
I gotta tell you again, just to restate it, they really do not want him to run for president.
It is obvious that the powers that be in this country are tired of Donald Trump's shit and they don't want anything to do with it.
And on that note, by the way, enjoy the rest of the podcast where we talk about him trying to flush documents and Marco Rubio pushing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
But yeah, we'll sit back and see what happens, I guess.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to The Muckering Podcast.
I'm Jared Yancek, and I'm here, as always, with Nick Halseman.
How you doing, buddy?
I'm back from the grave, and I'm ready to party.
I believe is the tagline for that movie.
Listen, COVID, big deal.
What was COVID all about?
Geez.
It just killed a million people.
That is true.
But thank God for vaccines.
Thank God for this new variant, which I think is not... I mean, you have to remember, people were having, like, violent hallucinations amongst... as part of the reaction at the very beginning.
And then, obviously, they couldn't breathe.
This seems to be a different version anyway.
And thank God we have vaccines, is all I can tell you.
Absolutely.
And we...
We're going to get going here in a minute.
We're going to have an interview with Gal Beckerman, who is the senior editor of the books at The Atlantic and the author of The Quiet Before and On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas.
I cannot recommend this interview and this book enough, especially for anybody who wants to think about how the world can change and the role that they can play in it.
But Nick, unfortunately the first thing that we have to talk about, presidents flushing their records down the toilet.
Well, isn't that, you know, how it's supposed to go?
Like, where else are you gonna put those?
I, listen, I gotta tell you, we're not gonna spend a lot of time on this, but we have to talk about the fact that a president of the United States of America, Donald John Trump, Yeah, keep going.
That's terrible.
That's really terrible.
That's awful.
Literally was flushing records down the toilet, which we've heard about for a while.
There are now pictures.
On top of that, and we've talked about this for a while, the January 6th Commission and the Republican Party are coming after Trump, hardcore, to try and keep him from running for president.
They are ready to move beyond him.
We've seen this.
We're now hearing that he was telling American generals he wishes that they were more like Nazi generals.
I mean, it is it's open season, man.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think the best thing to take away from all that is or the Twilight Gate would be that a story comes out.
It doesn't sound that far-fetched considering the source or considering who we're talking about.
Total denials, lies, whatever.
Everyone says, oh yeah, fake news, fake news.
And then they have pictures.
They have proof that this actually happened.
I would have to imagine so much of what has been reported is true A, because it just sounds right.
It doesn't sound far-fetched.
And then B, like, the receipts come out eventually.
And this is where we're at.
I mean, you know, they're publishing pictures of what is clearly Trump's handwriting on a piece of paper, talking about Lisa Fennick, or flushing her down the toilet.
Who knows?
Maybe these things are just worthless, you know, not worth keeping.
But remember, It is.
They are breaking the law because you're not supposed to do any of that to any kind of presidential papers.
And he was notorious for ripping them up.
I think they said he was eating them at some point, right?
I mean, who knows what that's about?
But nonetheless, it just seems, you know, there's evidence.
Paul Manafort comes down and says, yeah, I gave Klimnik all of our polling data.
I did.
You know, I was looking for a job afterwards.
What's wrong with that, right?
I want to point out, by the way, that this barely, like, rose to the level of public discourse.
That Paul Manafort, the head of Trump's campaign, for years we were talking about the possibility that he was handing over sensitive information to the Russians.
And today he comes out and says, yeah, I did it for the money.
Are you kidding me?
This wasn't about sabotage.
This wasn't about betraying the country.
It was for money.
It's like, congratulations, everybody.
I'm glad we can pay attention to this stuff.
You know, but it was old polling data, Jared.
It wasn't really, you know, some of it was public, some of it was, you know, just our private stuff, but it was, you know, a month old.
Yeah, it's, whatever we're hearing, it's worthy of just saying, but probably just sort of taking it as fact until, you know, we get evidence that it's not.
Listen, whenever I'm getting ready to carry out some sort of a collusion-type action, I'm getting ready to hand over sensitive data to another country in order to interfere in an election.
What I always like to do, Nick, is I just like to say very loud, this isn't about treason.
This isn't about subverting democracy.
This is about business, first and foremost.
Which, by the way, it's important to remember, and we're going to talk about this a little bit more.
For a lot of these people involved in a lot of these things, The way that they sleep at night and the way that they go ahead and justify it is they literally make up a story for themselves, which is, oh, I'm not really doing anything wrong here.
Like, yeah, I'm going to get, you know, a little bit of money here and maybe I'll do a little bit of harm here, but technically I'm on the up and up.
Right, and that's what happens when we talked about this before when you have young people coming in to work at the White House and inexperienced and unqualified because they couldn't get real qualified people to work for this White House.
This is what they know and you know I have written a screenplay once about the college basketball scandal 1950 and what you realize in studying that was all these kids that were going to college which will actually tie in nicely with a interview we're gonna do next week.
is they get to college knowing they're on the take.
They're going to throw games.
That was what everyone was doing for decades.
It was like how it was done.
And so they've now established that in a way that that might be hard to undo.
Whereas I would like to think the hallowed halls of the White House were protected by a lot of this illegal activity in the past because people believed in it and thought this was important not to engage in these things.
We did bury the lead, though, because I can't believe we're going to let the German generals and the Nazi generals' request of Trump go without saying a couple more sentences about it because I think that that's worth exploring for even a minute.
What do you think?
No, it absolutely is.
And one of the things that keeps coming about, and I've said this constantly about Donald Trump, like really intellectually, there's not really a base there.
You know what I mean?
As this is leaving Donald Trump's mouth, I assume his brain is not thinking, Hey, you're endorsing Nazism and the Nazi blitzkrieg war machine.
But one of the things is he recognizes authoritarianism.
He recognizes the way that it works.
And we've heard for years that he has an obsession with Nazis.
The possibility that the only book he's ever read is Mein Kampf or, you know, constantly keeps these Nazi World War Two books around.
A person like Trump looks at that, again, sort of divorces the idea of moral, ethical, human evil, and instead thinks to himself, those are some people who got things done.
And if you remember, in the lead up to 2016, him winning the election, he was giving speeches, I saw them personally, where he was advocating for American troops to carry out war crimes.
He was saying we need to go back to that.
We need to go back to just senseless slaughter and persecution and oppression and religious terrorism.
Literally what this man has advocated the entire time, although, again, to sleep a night, I have to assume he just thinks this is what gets things done.
Yeah, I mean, I suppose, because, okay, if his adult brain only has a limited amount of information historically that he's amassed and being Mein Kampf probably being one of the only few.
So I suppose, yeah, the default would be, yes, those generals, without actually taking the next thought of, wait a minute, those generals were carrying out the Holocaust, like we don't want that.
I don't know though.
I'm not too sold on that exactly because we were talking about in the context of like Millie dealing with being getting orders like can't we just shoot these protesters in the leg?
You know not kill them, just shoot them a little bit.
You know those are the things that he was saying out loud.
It's such a problem.
I mean, you know, I think we're going to ultimately look at the Lafayette Square, you know, clearing of that and taking the picture in front of the church.
I think that that's unfortunately dimming or going away in our public consciousness in a way that that is a moment that should be remembered as a dark stain on his presidency.
I suppose if you flood enough of a zone with shit, then things get through the cracks.
But that was it, and that's what a lot of the reporting on Maggie Haberman, friend of the pod.
Is she a friend of the pod?
I don't even know what she is anymore.
No, we can't even make that joke.
No, not really.
Yeah, I know.
But either way, what she's reporting on, it seems to center around all of that time frame, and what that means, what that meant for the use of the military, and how that could have easily become a fascistic governmental control over that.
Just very concerning.
It's all problematic.
And again, like to think about the way that people do this stuff.
Like the way that they, you know, nobody wakes up in the morning is like, I'm gonna do bad today.
You know, as they twirl their little mustache and they tie someone to the railroad tracks.
Like, even the Nazis thought they were the good guys in everything that they were doing.
It just so happens that they created a story for themselves in which they were, you know, being attacked by this completely.
Bullshit anti-semitic conspiracy theory, which by the way, we're going to have to talk about more because of course we have to talk about that in modern politics.
And on that note, we have to get into the big news, or in President Joe Biden's words, a big effing deal.
So we watched the passage through the Senate in a marathon voterama.
We want the Inflation Reduction Act make its way through the hallowed halls of the Capitol.
And what has happened is that the Democratic Party managed to come together after Joe Manchin was, of course, visited by the ghost of Christmas past, Larry Summers, and basically told not to meddle with the forces of the universe anymore.
And, of course, Kirsten Sinema got on for reasons that we'll investigate in just a minute.
A $370 billion bill passed the Senate.
The vote was 51 to 50, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote.
This bill, of course, invests in clean energy, except for, of course, Joe Manchin's pipelines, and on top of that, a lot of acres of new drilling.
This bill will supposedly cut emissions.
It'll lead to tax credits and incentives for electric vehicles and clean energy.
Medicare is going to have the ability to negotiate prescription drug prices.
It strengthened the ACA, the Affordable Care Act, and also invested $80 billion in the IRS, which we have to talk about in just a second, in order to go after corporate taxes, in order to fund this and other things.
It's a big bill.
It's not perfect.
There are big giant problems that we can talk about, and of course we will, but it actually is a really, really big deal.
Really big deal, yes.
I love the Votorama way they had to do this, too, because, you know, the January 6th Commission, they're taking a lot of micro-content and they're publishing it on the social media.
So now we get these little sound bites from Cipollone and all these people.
It's very damaging.
I think it really, really helped.
Well, the Votorama acts the same way because now they can make a big deal about Republicans voting against something like insulin caps for people who have private insurance.
Brilliant.
Love it.
And it's built into the system where they kind of had to do it and stay up all night and do this all the way through for each line item that they needed to vote up and down.
You know, they couldn't get 60 votes for the insulin cap for private insured people.
That's a wonderful political football they have now to toss around going into the midterms.
Yeah, it is.
And we'll talk more about the insulin situation because, man, there's some really insidious stuff taking place there.
To look at this bill, and you know, we had talked about this in the last couple of episodes.
There's a lot happening here right now at this moment.
Like what we've been really exposing on this podcast and really delving deep into is that we're on the precipice of something different, right?
Things are changing.
A lot of people want to pretend like they're not.
There's going to be a new regime, if you want to call it that.
There's going to be a new order of some type.
Eventually, at some point, the American political system had to do something about climate change, one way or another.
And we talked about this in depth.
Even the energy companies understand at some point or another, you have to make the jump from fossil fuel into cleaner alternatives.
There has to be a change.
Of course, these corporations have known for decades, some of them for 70 years, that they were causing global climate change.
Now, all of a sudden, the check is coming due, and it's one of those things where, of course, you have a lot of people in a lot of rooms who are making decisions about when you can make that shift.
Right now, this has passed because eventually the American political system had to do something.
Something had to shift one way or another.
What we do see here is a large picture of where we are as a country and basically what all these factors are in place.
The Democratic Party here, look at what they've done.
What did they invest in?
Tax credits, tax incentives.
Right.
That's basically what the system is willing to do at this point is to try and move the energy markets in that direction and move innovation in that direction.
That's massive.
Do I wish it was different?
Absolutely I do.
Do I wish it was just a massive investment or maybe even a nationalization of all these things?
Absolutely I do.
But this is where the Democratic Party is now.
And we'll talk about what all we saw in these votes.
But what did we see from the Republican Party?
They have no political incentive whatsoever to even admit there's a problem.
Because the Republican Party as of right now represents a very, very slim minority, a historically unpopular group of people who have no interest in carrying out representative government.
They have no interest in actually carrying out anything that makes people's lives better, addressing any sort of crises.
And what are they there for, Nick?
They're there to pass tax cuts for the wealthy, run up deficits.
And create just an absolute logjam for everything else.
And that's your snapshot of where we are at this moment.
But in their defense, they believe that that's going to make it better for everybody.
I mean, I think that's the crux of the matter here.
It depends on who we're talking about.
I think there are some true believers who do believe that it'll make the country better.
And there are others who are just like, no, I don't want the government to do anything.
And I don't want the government to have any power.
Right.
And it's certainly a powerful argument.
I don't want gay people to get married.
That's going to make our country better if they can't.
That is a thing that they can run on.
That is a story that they can tell.
I don't want babies murdered.
We can't have that.
That makes our country better when we refuse to give women health care.
That's what this falls under.
It's really scary.
I did want to address the drilling part that you mentioned with what Manchin was able to get out of this.
Here's the thing, I had lived before, I live where I live now, three or four doors down from an oil well, believe it or not, in Los Angeles.
And it was an active well, but they hadn't done any new drilling for a while.
And we just moved there.
The company had applied for a permit to begin 24-7 drilling for like three or four or six months.
And because once you start, you gotta go, you can't stop.
So it's like in the middle of the night, whatever.
The people that lived in that neighborhood was described trucks, all night long loud pollution drilling shaking the whole thing so we fought this right we fought it for a year and a half and of course they get the permit anyway because they're all bought and sold all the all the congressmen and the councilmen around here but guess what happens this is around the time when the price of oil plummets And they never ended up using the permit.
They didn't drill.
And so it's quite possible that this is the kind of thing that happens again in these other things, where they open up things, they allow more permits to be drilled, and then when the price goes below a certain level, it's not worth it for them to actually look for more oil.
Very possible they'll be moving to those situations more and more, that that's what's going to happen.
That's probably what they're banking on, so we can get closer towards, you know, this, the New Deal, the Green New Deal, faster.
Yeah, let's be honest on what happened here.
It's what we basically said for a while was going to move Joe Manchin.
The possibility of what was ever going to make him get into anything, which was you have to grease the gears.
It wasn't dirty pictures?
It wasn't dirty pictures of him somewhere?
No, no.
What he wanted was he wanted more pipeline and he wanted a lot more drilling permits.
And basically in all of this, and to be very clear, the moment that we're facing, And again, like I'm not going to sit here and tell you that this is a slam dunk, because is it a giant bill?
Yes, it is.
And thank God they did something.
Congratulations on that.
I actually say very, very well done.
I'm glad something got passed.
But I'm telling you, in order to make this giant leap, you either pay off the energy sector and you're basically like, hey, I understand that this isn't great for you.
Here, basically now you're in charge of new clean energy.
You've now made the leap.
You've made the change.
You're now part of the solution.
You either do that or you just go in and you basically get rid of it.
Or you do this, which is sort of a half measure, right?
And what did Joe Manchin need?
He needed the incentive.
He needed something to go back and tell the people of West Virginia.
This is what I've done now.
I want to talk about the political ramifications of this because listen, I've got this list here.
It's an incomplete list.
We're talking about a gun safety bill that didn't go far enough, but it happened.
We have the CHIPS bill, which we talked about, which was a major investment in industry and innovation.
We had a veterans bill that just got passed.
We had infrastructure.
We've now had a climate change and a tax change.
And we'll talk more about the IRS in a second because we have to.
That right now is a lot to sit there and crow about if you're the Democratic Party.
I want to point this out.
They can make the case at midterms, but it doesn't really move the needle all that much with people.
If people are going in to vote, they want a bigger story.
They want a bigger plan.
They want a bigger mission.
This, you can go back and say this happened and maybe it'll move a couple of points.
But on top of that, it has not gotten Biden out of his hole yet.
The people that I'm still talking to within the Democratic Party still want Biden to step aside.
There is still a lot of communication in all of this that the Democratic Party not only has to get past Nick, but one of the biggest things that the Democratic Party has trouble doing is explaining what they've done, why they've done it, and why it benefits people, and putting it in a larger story.
And time will tell whether or not they're capable of doing that.
Well yeah, but let's not forget over half a million jobs created in July.
Huge uptick in what they thought it was going to be.
He killed Zawahiri.
That's talking about pulling up a greatest hits of way back in old Dakar from the deck.
That's always one of those things that gets people riled up sometimes.
These people who like military shit.
Kansas protected abortion which you know you don't have to give credit to Biden necessarily but they they definitely got involved in some of the messaging so I mean there's a lot of things that and Biden doesn't want to really take the credit for it he seems willing to say this is all you know the Congress doing it which is fine but at some point when you get into those elections you have to someone's got to take credit for it they got to make sure that they're getting the credit for it so listen it's all very it's all very encouraging in terms of accomplishments
Trump didn't get half of these things, the amount of things done in four years, much less two.
No, he basically ran on a bunch of promises that he never planned to keep and which also turned into big giant grifts so his cronies could, you know, suck up as much money as they possibly could.
And, you know, basically tried to destroy representative government and all of the departments.
In this, and I want to talk about a couple of the things that are going a little bit under the radar, including the insulin thing here in a second.
And by the way, just a quick Thumbs up to Kirsten Sinema, who on the banking committee has gotten millions of dollars from the financial sector.
Had to step in at the last second and really represent the interest of, you know, the hedge funders.
That's good work.
They needed somebody to stand up for them, Nick.
I mean, I don't know how much more obvious she can make it that she has bought and sold.
It is incredible.
But, real fast, one of the things that we... Well, hedge fund managers need to eat, too, Jared.
That's right.
They need to protect their eight to nine homes just as much as the rest of us need to have some food on the table.
Really, really huge thing in all of this is the $80 billion towards the IRS.
And I want to point out why that's so big, which is And I want to go ahead and say, I don't like the IRS.
You don't like the IRS.
Nobody listening to this likes the IRS unless maybe they work for them or maybe a loved one works for them.
It is a really, really unlikable organization.
Okay?
The IRS has been intentionally depleted and starved.
For years.
And the reason that this has happened is, number one, in order to make sure that large corporations and the wealthy are not going to pay their fair share.
And why is that?
Because in order to go after those corporations and the wealthy, you need big giant teams.
To go after them.
You need people working around the clock on each individual case.
And if you don't have those teams, Nick, who do you go after instead of the corporations and the wealthy?
Me!
You!
I've dealt with the IRS more than Trump ever has, probably.
Absolutely!
This $80 billion was absolutely necessary to jumpstart the IRS to not only make corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, But also to go ahead and bring a through line of a story that we've been talking about for a while.
The major nations of the world got together and said, corporations have grown too large.
They've outgrown the nation states that birthed them.
We have to drag them back by doing a universal international 15% corporate tax.
The only way that you can even start to pull back on concentrated wealth and power is to start actually taxing these people.
That's how you break the fever.
Yeah.
And this $80 billion to the IRS, it's a drop in the bucket.
It's not enough for what people need, but hopefully it's enough to prime the pump because the IRS is going to be the main engine, particularly under a Democratic presidency or a Democratic administration, it's going to be the main engine to getting them off your back, Nick's back particularly.
And making sure that they go out and make sure that people pay their fair share.
Well, I love it because I saw somebody on the GOP side talking about the reaction to a tax like that.
And everyone's taxes are going up, by the way, in case you didn't know, Jerry.
This is what they say.
Of course.
The reason why they're trying to connect is that with that tax on big corporations, they're going to lower their employees' wages to cover that tax.
Now, I will say things that won't happen for $200, Alex.
That's what I'm going to ask for.
Workers suddenly get less money from their paychecks.
You know what I mean?
They quit before that happens, even in like lower paying jobs.
So they continually use the boogeyman of higher taxes that will somehow eliminate jobs and it'll lower your own wages.
It's nonsense.
That does not happen.
And yet people out there are going to probably listen to this and think, oh this is bad, we can't have this.
When you start to see the benefits of that kind of revenue and the billions of dollars it's going to rake in, If they can just get it passed, if they can just start working and everybody can start feeling that, that's that feeling that the Republicans are trying to tap into about, oh, don't worry, our policies will really help Americans.
This tax and this benefit that can happen for people is profound.
And that's how we get to the point where, you know, ACA is popular, right?
Like, people got the taste of Obamacare.
They realized, oh, this isn't so bad.
This actually is helpful.
Same thing here.
Once we get those attacks like this going and the revenue coming in, people will see.
It's just a question of, will enough people see it?
Will they be willing to accept it and accept that that was done by a Democratic-controlled Congress?
Then you can start to see maybe a little bit of a thaw of where we're at with our politics right now.
And speaking of the Republican Party, one of the more detestable parts about this that isn't getting enough coverage is the fact that the Republican Party submarined an addendum by Senator here from Georgia, Raphael Warnock, who attempted to cap the price of insulin To $35 a month.
Real fast, Nick, do you know how much it costs to manufacture insulin?
$5?
Something like that?
Anywhere from a couple of bucks to $10 at most.
Do you know what it sells for?
$250?
It can be up to $300.
And listen, the problem with diabetes in this country is its own epidemic that absolutely needs to be dealt with.
This is a public health crisis.
And the fact that these companies have absolutely just run roughshod over people.
It's a it's an ugly, ugly crime.
And it's just terrible.
This bill should have been passed for the good of people.
But of course, the Republican Party stood in the way because they are not interested in using government to make people's lives better.
The only thing that they want to do is use government again to get rid of impediment to profit and wealth by the by the wealthy and also to go ahead and destroy government power and oversight.
And how did they get away with it?
They get away with it, and by the way, Nick, we're older gentlemen at this point.
I mean, this job has aged us, correct?
Hey, speak for yourself, but yes.
There's, hey listen, there's a little bit more white in both of our beards than there were when we started this podcast.
Yes, that's true.
You were probably old enough to remember when Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida, was considered the reasonable Republican, correct?
Yeah, I mean, the water drinking, sipping senator from Florida, I guess so.
What an incredible moment in American political history, by the way, to watch a person destroy their entire political future because they were thirsty.
Incredible.
You're not wrong, right?
Like... Nope.
I mean, I think since then he's won another senatorial race, I think, right?
I don't know how the years passed.
Yes, he has, but in real time, you didn't have to be a political analyst to understand that he ruined his career because he looked weird on camera getting a bottle of water.
Marco Rubio was considered the moderate Republican, the future of the Republican Party as it moved away from white supremacy and the politics of fear.
Marco Rubio, by the way, showed his true colors over the course of this vote.
Comes out, by the way, and this is an actual tweet from Marco Rubio, and we need to unpack this.
The Democrats just blocked my effort to try and force Soros-backed prosecutors to put dangerous criminals in jail.
Nick, real fast, who's Soros referring to?
The Jews.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and basically, yeah, to go ahead and spell it out for people, and I'm sorry, Nick, for you and your people.
This is the idea that literally Jews are using their money, their wealth, and their influence to put in place prosecutors who, Nick, they just don't prosecute criminals anymore because they want criminals to keep people in fear and go out and ruin communities.
This is Marco Rubio.
Hiding the fact that he has no answers for anything.
He has no desire to do anything, including helping Americans pay for affordable insulin and basically making sure that poor Americans are going to die.
All he has to offer is a absolutely blatant anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
It gets worse, Jared.
That's not only why it's horrible.
Why it's horrible is because there's only been one story in the news relating to Florida and prosecutors not prosecuting cases in recent memory.
And that case is what DeSantis just did by suspending one of the Attorney Generals who says he's not going to prosecute parents who have transgender kids who want to have care.
there's a couple other things that are LGBTQ related as well.
And abortion.
And abortion.
And it turns out that he's not even violating the law.
The law in Florida is on his side as far as what he wants to prosecute, what's still legal in that state.
So that's what he's also signaling as far as I can tell.
And that's just what they do now there.
It's a party of outrage and fear and anger and cultural wars.
And at some point, it's going to burn out.
But that really was what struck me because it's like, where did he get that out?
Where did that come from out of the blue about prosecutors who won't prosecute?
Of course they prosecute.
They're putting bad guys behind bars all the time.
And it's not like, you know, so this is what he's signaling.
And he is awful.
He needs to go.
And he's just a terrible politician as it is anyway.
It's really amazing to watch all the people who are considered sensible, reasonable Republicans just dive headfirst into this filth.
And they reveal themselves.
It's like you always say, the mask slips.
And sometimes you have to look at it and say, thank God the mask slips so we can stop.
You know, with this terrible storytelling that this party has reasonable people in it.
If you put an R next to your name at a national level at this point, you are making it very clear that you're okay with this.
You just reminded me, I watched a Nikki Haley soundbite recently.
God damn it.
She was also just as outrageously anti-homophobic as well.
And again, it's calculated.
You can tell it's calculated.
They've workshopped their soundbites.
They've workshopped their tweets.
It really is astounding.
The Party of Freedom is really anything but.
And I want to say this because, you know, again, Nick, we are not afraid on this show to criticize the Democrats when they deserve it, which is often.
This bill doesn't go far enough for me.
This doesn't align necessarily with my principles.
But I have to tell you, it shows that at least the Democratic Party can pull levers and move things around in order to try.
I don't always agree with how they do it.
I don't always agree with the route that they go in.
They at least try to make people's lives better and they try and address the crises and the problems of the moment.
The Republican Party has no interest in that.
None whatsoever.
And you could not make this clear.
You cannot keep making the argument in the media, in the political circles, all of it.
You cannot make the argument that these two parties are even on a similar plane.
Yeah, someone came at me on Twitter yesterday for that, and I was just like, no, no, no.
You have to at least be able to admit that one party has their heart in the right place, and they're trying, and the other party is a seditionist, whatchamacallit, obstructionist entity, Borg, I guess we'll call it, and that's all they do.
It really is, it is clear, you know, from any perspective, that these two parties are different.
And that's the issue, I think.
Because I keep hearing the response on the right saying, they're all liars, they're all cheats, they're all corrupt.
Why is Trump any different?
He's not any different.
He's just doing what everyone's been doing.
And that's what's so cynical bullshit cop out of it.
And if anything has been clear in the last couple of years, that they're not the same anymore.
And most people should be ashamed.
I mean, everyone should be ashamed if you're supporting the Republican Party at this point, right?
Shame should befall your house.
Yeah, and it's a big effing deal.
It just is.
A massive climate change bill.
Say what you want about it.
It's a victory.
Savor your victories where you can.
And while we're talking about that, listen, we're getting ready to have on Gal Beckerman, the senior editor for books at The Atlantic and author of The Quiet Before on the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas.
Listen to this interview.
This is a really, really good look at how movements start, how they gestate, how they grow, and how you can change moments that don't feel changeable.
And I know that we felt that.
We felt that things are intractable, that there's no opportunity for things to get better.
This is how it happens.
So here we are with Gal Beckerman.
All right, everybody, as promised, and I'm really, really excited about this.
We are here talking with Gal Beckerman, who is the senior editor for books at The Atlantic and author of The Quiet Before on the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas.
Gal, first of all, thanks for coming on.
Thank you so much for having me.
So, you know, I was telling you a little bit about this before we started recording, and I just want to tell the audience, I think that this is a really, really impressive book and a book of the times.
And I I could not order this thing fast enough or ask you to come on the podcast fast enough because I think that this is I think this is incredibly relevant, particularly right now at this political and historical moment.
There are so many different conditions that are taking place that make people feel like nothing could possibly change.
That we're at this sort of moment that has no momentum towards something different.
And on top of that, for reasons that I assume we'll talk about before this podcast is over, it feels almost impossible to build something or to start, you know, moving towards an epoch.
Before we get into the meat of this thing, I gotta ask you, Gal, where did this book come from for you?
I've been waiting on this book for forever.
And as soon as I started thinking, my God, somebody needs to write this book, I found it.
And I was so pumped about it.
Where in your mind, what, what was the space that created this?
I think, I think it was basically the confluence of sort of two things that happened around the same time around, you know, let's say 10 years, 10, 11 years ago, like end of 2009, beginning of 2010.
And those things were, um, That I finished writing my first book and my first book was looking at the world.
Part of that book looked at the world of Soviet dissidents.
So these are people living in a pretty oppressive authoritarian regime who are trying to fight it, searching for their freedoms.
And they're doing it with this interesting communications tool, which called Samizdat.
Samizdat was underground writing that was self-produced, created to have passed hand to hand.
And it occurred to me, and this wasn't really like a big part of the first book, but it occurred to me, you know, the more I looked at it, like the more it served as this glue, a glue for a sort of shadow civil society.
They were sort of enacting the values, the things they cared about, the things they wanted, the things they were dreaming about, imagining for the future in this underground way.
And what made it possible was the communications medium, that it was great for that.
And this lasted for decades, right?
So there was that I was sort of interested in that at the same time the Arab Spring happened and the Arab Spring happened and there was this sort of triumphalism about social media and social media being the end all be all communications media that was going to make revolution possible for any group of people that wanted it.
Uh, for any number of different causes, right?
That turned out okay, right?
Well, so it occurred to me almost even when people were feeling really good about it, I was like, you know, I don't know.
I don't think this is going to be it.
Like we, you need more, you need a communications medium that has other features.
So the, when I saw those revolutions kind of collapse, um, and you started hearing even the people that were excited and been excited about the Twitter and Facebook's role in them suddenly kind of Get their cold shower.
You know, combined with thinking about Sami's thought, I was like, you know, we really need to look historically.
We need to sort of break through the amnesia of this moment that's come after the Internet came into our lives and maybe draw a line between forms of communication, moments of inception, you know, radical ideas sort of coming together.
Yeah, you know, I talk all the time.
I think there's a real danger in what we could call conventional history, right?
Like when we talk about revolutions or we talk about revolutionary moments, they're sort of treated as if, I don't know, there was an instantaneous like inspiration that suddenly Floods out from, I don't know, some supernatural fount or something.
And what we do is a real, it's a real disservice to organization and the spreading of ideas and building of communities and building trust and foundations of things.
Can you talk a little bit about what actually, what are the components that lead to these major changes?
Like what's underneath the surface there?
You're absolutely right, you know, that we sometimes we look historically and we see like the leader or we see the moment of final triumph.
And what we don't understand is in many of these situations, certainly the cases or examples or stories that I looked at, these are world changing ideas.
These are ideas like, you know, this first chapter I have about the Republic of Letters and the scientific revolution.
It's changing your relationship to nature, to truth.
You know, or reality itself, reality itself, or think about, you know, the decision to have all working people have everyone actually have real democracy and have the right to vote, right, that it shouldn't just be like an upper crust of people who get to make decisions in the country, or women have the right to vote or the ending of slavery, or, you know, or even think about, you know, in our times, you know, people who want to come up with new ways of challenging, you know, the ideas of climate change, presenting them, you know, to the world.
What makes these ideas radical is the fact that it demands a completely different frame of reference, a changing of perspective.
And to make that happen, you need more than just a single protest, even a very large one, or certainly a charismatic leader.
You need people to actually change in the way they think.
And so what I really found, looking historically, is that What that demands, first of all, is a space for a small group of people, you know, who first sort of have these ideas to actually, and I use the word incubate in the book.
I don't love incubate because it makes me think of like Silicon Valley and like jargony, you know, language there.
But incubate is a good word because you need like a warm, intense, Uh, you know, focused place where people can sort of gather together and begin to sort of hash out these ideas, which might seem like ridiculous ideas.
At first, giving women the right to vote seemed like a ridiculous idea that people at first, you know, but you need that space.
You need that space for those ideas to develop before they can begin to disseminate out into the world.
Yeah, and just to go ahead and make it very clear, I mean, you know, one of the things that's happening in this book and in this conversation we're having, we're talking about the, we're talking about history, but we're also talking about the present moment, right?
We're trying to see what's happening.
And so I think right now, one of the reasons why this book I think is so important, but also why people want to talk about this is there is a feeling You know, not necessarily that history ended, you know, thanks, Fukuyama, but the idea that like forces have come into play and there is an inevitable reactionary regression that's taking place that we aren't going to be able to get through.
A lot of the technology we're talking about can be used for good, but can also be very, very oppressive.
And in all of this, I don't know how you felt about it.
When I was writing the book of mine, the newest one, when I found the Republic of Letters, I was weirdly like, I felt so optimistic.
Because to look at and to go ahead and I'm hoping you can sort of define it a little bit and boil it down for the listeners what the Republic is, but these are people Who were in one of the most oppressive environments imaginable, where mysticism completely hid reality, scientific understanding, and to speak out of that orthodox could lead to death, banishment, you name it.
And through that, and I was shocked, but it was like, You look at something like the founding of America or the American Revolution, and it's got its own problems, but it was built on that organization and that communication.
And to be able to create something like that, to get out of one of the most oppressive things in history, I found it really comforting.
I don't know how you felt about it.
Yeah, no, I did too.
So the Republic of Letters, for listeners who don't know, was this network of I mean, it was probably no more than a few hundred people at any given moment.
Mostly, you know, people who had had quite a bit of education living at the time, probably starting right around the end of or the middle of the Renaissance and going until the Enlightenment period lasted for hundreds of years, actually.
And it was a network of of of people who were writing letters to each other.
It all existed through letter writing, and they were each carrying out Experiments, we would call them today, trying to test the bounds of knowledge of the natural world, mostly.
And they were not, there was no specialization like we have now.
You know, some people were doing what we would call astronomy, doing what we would call geology, you know, biology, you know, chemistry.
They were, they were, they, they did not take any truths, which were mostly the truths of the church at the time for granted.
Um, they wanted to test and question everything.
And the significant thing to me is they did it together.
They did it together in what is, was really sort of an iterative process, meaning, you know, somebody would gather some data and something, and they would send a letter.
And then some, a third person would sort of copy that letter out and send it to a fourth person because they had also sort of been mucking around in the same kind of territory.
And, and, and, and they understood that what they were doing was not going to sort of arrive at truth right away.
That it was a process.
And that's, I mean, that's another theme in my book in terms of all of these chapters.
It's all about a focus on process, you know, on, on, on, on, on things, sometimes taking time and knowledge building slowly.
And so the Republic of Letters is a great example of that.
And you're right that they were doing this at a time where people were literally being burned at the stake, you know, or somebody like Galileo, who was, you know, one of the most famous people in the particular period that I'm writing about.
was, you know, had to get down on his knees and say that everything that he believed was not true and then was put in house arrest because he was writing books.
That's why my focus is, you know, as you've seen very often on the communication medium, because I think it shapes the intellectual environment that you're in.
And so having this, having letters, having a place of discourse and conversation, I think that's what probably felt hopeful to you.
It's what feels hopeful to me when I read it, is that this is, it's people Yeah, and that brings us to the Chartists.
And, you know, I thought that this section, there's a lot to learn from the Chartists, I think.
And this is a group, of course, that was pushing for a more democratic system and was being met with violence left and right.
And I think one of the lessons I've learned from the chapter on the Chartists that I think is really important for modern people to think about is if you are going to change the world, you might not see the change.
And that's a really important thing is I think in modern times we kind of want, I don't know, almost like a consumer based idea where I want the change and I want it now and I need it fast.
But any actual world shaking world changing idea You have to have faith that maybe I won't see the promised land, but maybe somebody will.
And it feels like the Chartists are a really good example of that.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think they understood, you know, the magnitude of what they were trying to do.
It was the most, it was, I mean, can you think of something more threatening to a political institution that's based on a small group of people having power saying all of these, you know, this proletariat, you know, who is working away and You know, at the time, this is the 1830s.
Industrialization has really hit in a big way.
People's lives are pretty miserable and they have no recourse, no electoral recourse for saying, you know, you should shorten the work week or put in place certain conditions, you know, for factories.
Nothing.
They don't have the right to vote.
So it was an incredibly challenging thing that they were asking for.
And I think they knew that it was not something that was going to happen.
And, you know, maybe in their, Lifetime, but this notion of a relay race, which was another metaphor that felt very sort of apt to me.
A problem today is like we, I think you're right, you know, we, we are so conditioned to want, you know, like immediate emotional gratification for the things that we feel strongly about, you know, and, and, and, and I think that it really distracts us because we, there are
Again, the communication, there are these communications medium that allow you to say, gather an enormous crowd of people in the street or come up with a three word slogan that is actually going to feel very emotionally resonant and satisfying to people, maybe because there's a lot of truth to it.
Something like Black Lives Matter, you know, but, but then, you know, what is the actual realization of the ideas and the, and the, and the objectives and the goals and the hopes that are behind something like that?
Where does that happen?
Because it doesn't happen on Twitter.
And it doesn't happen from just feeling a sense of righteousness about your cause.
And so that's what I, that's the book very much came out of this sense that, you know, when we're too dependent on that sort of immediate stimulus, we're losing something.
Yeah.
And I think it's, and this is a hard truth.
And, you know, whenever we're talking about this stuff, like, I think there is so much money and influence to be made in sort of selling easy answers.
You know, like just, you know, like sit back and watch.
Things are fine.
The plan is in play.
I mean, there's a reason why QAnon is so popular, you know?
Right, right, right.
And the hard answer on this is anything that actually changes the world, I feel like oftentimes is Again, incubated in communal strife and struggle and suffering.
I mean, the Chartists is a group that are totally oppressed.
They're put down, you know, every time.
They keep coming back.
And I love the idea of the petition.
You know, you're constantly bringing a petition expecting to be destroyed.
But that communal suffering, while awful and detestable, actually goes ahead and forges the bonds that are necessary to create this change.
Yeah, no, I was I was just going to say that, that, you know, there's something the petition is important isn't isn't just important as sort of a way of signaling to authorities.
Look how many people, you know, and they got in the first petition was like one point The next petition was like 2.5.
You know, look how many people believe in this.
It's not just that.
It's also the work that goes into the petition, because this is not a petition as we think of, you know, where you click on something online.
People had to draw it up themselves.
They had to go into town, sneak on the factory floor, set up in marketplaces.
And then there's the act of convincing.
There's sitting, you know, two people, an intimate moment of saying like, look, I know that your life is not great.
You know, we should be able to do something about this.
Oh, but I'm afraid I don't want to sign, you know, like I'm going to get in trouble, you know, no, look at, you know, it's, it's, it's a, it's a conversation that leads from sort of an oral moment of orality, you know, to a moment of actually writing your name.
And these are people who are just becoming literate too.
So there is something fascinating about this moment, you know, where, uh, where that happens, but what I mean to say is that there's hard work and the hard work, which feels.
From the outside, like, how inefficient.
You know, we could just have a petition like this.
You could just put a petition online and you can get a million people in no time.
That the hard work, the inefficiencies of it in some ways, are so central to actually solidifying and creating bonds and creating identity around a movement.
There's a great sociologist, Zeynep Tufekci, who's written a lot about social movement.
She has a book called Twitter and Tear Gas.
And she talks a lot about this idea that social media is amazing because it allows you to go zero to 60, right?
Like you can just have an idea, want to collect a group of people and you get them on the streets.
But what you're skipping over is really important.
It's what she calls the kind of internalities of a movement.
It's those things that actually solidify a group of people and allow them to make it through those hard suffering moments.
It's the like having to sit and like mimeograph, you know, flyers and get people out and organize the buses and all of that work, which is the grunt work, is weirdly, you know, the key to making people feel like they're deeply invested in a movement that they're willing to go great distances for.
Yeah.
And I want to, we're going to get to the big bad of the internet and social media and what all of that, uh, the problems and the roadblocks and the opportunities.
But before we do, I got to tell you, and for people who haven't read the book yet, um, there's a really good chapter on the riot girl phenomenon and movement that I'm so glad that you put in there because I think it takes place at a very specific point and place that I think we'll, we'll make it necessary, uh, to talk about before we get to the internet.
Which is, you know, we have this counterculture movement for anybody who doesn't know Riot Grrl.
This is you can go ahead and sort of think also about, you know, Nirvana.
You can you can think about like this alternative, artistic, sort of anti-capitalistic, homogenized society movement in the 90s.
And I wanted to point out that in this in this moment, and in your chronicling of this, not only does the Riot Grrrl sort of feminist movement sort of have its own power, but there is a very bizarre thing that happens, which is it becomes commodified.
It suddenly starts to take a counterculture movement and starts to become absorbed into culture.
And, you know, this is an interesting thing.
I mean, Kurt Cobain more or less, you know, raged against this whole idea for years and years before killing himself.
But it seems like an interesting sort of takeaway from this is how a system that is being challenged can very easily start to absorb the challenge and sort of redirect the energy.
Does that?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
No, I think that's true.
And that's that was why that story was so important for me to tell, because the right girl.
So this is like, You know, I see them as sort of the, not just me, but other people see them as like the precursors to the third wave feminism, you know, so feminism that is based very much in sort of personal experience and trauma and the experience of patriarchy and, you know, and trying to create a space for women to talk about their own concerns and their own lives and the experiences that they've had.
And this started with these young girls who sort of created their own magazines, right?
They created zines, which are like You know, Xerox stapled together, homemade, you know, magazines that they would share and swap with one another.
And this community, much like the Letters and the Republic of Letters, the community was built through the exchange of these scenes.
They were all very diaristic, very personal.
But what happened, and they largely created them because they felt that those concerns that they had, you know, Writing about body image or eating disorders or sexual assault or, you know, the way that they were seeing girls, women represented in magazines was just not appearing in any mainstream media, right?
So the things that actually mattered to them was not appearing in any mainstream media.
So they said, we're going to make our own media.
We're going to make these zines that matter to us.
And, and that, and so this movement is kind of burgeoning movement is built around that.
And then what happens, exactly what you said, suddenly their scene is kind of cool, right?
So like Nirvana happens, this whole like kind of grunge rock moment happens, and in like a magazine like Cosmo, which had been like their target, you know, the reason why they decided to create their own zines, suddenly there's like, how to dress like a Riot Grrrl, and you know, the addresses of zines that you can order for, and it immediately eroded and sort of, you know, They lost their space.
They lost their sort of independent space because it was starting to take on a kind of a political edge, too.
You know, this was a moment of the beginning to sort of like rewind some of the, you know, the Roe versus Wade and sort of abortion rights that had been won.
And so these these young women were starting to sort of take these ideas and turn them into like a political spearhead.
But they never really got a chance to because You know, before they knew it, they become sort of a phenomenon that they lost control over.
So that chapter is actually called control, because like, because the ability to control the medium that you're using, and sort of the conversations you're having on that medium, I think are pretty important to the development of an idea.
Well, I mean, speaking of mediums, so jumping forward into social media, and this is something It took me a long time to sort of start to wrap my head around because, you know, it's something like Twitter.
Twitter is just a very nice interface.
It's very slick.
And it feels like if you just word the right 280-character tweet, gal, you're going to set the world on fire.
And it's done, right?
If you just go viral enough.
And then suddenly when you look at it long enough, you realize it's a pinball machine.
Oh, totally.
It doesn't matter how high the numbers go.
It doesn't matter how viral a tweet goes.
And then when you start thinking about it further, the way I think about it is it's almost like a scream jar.
And you can take all of your frustration, you can take all of your disillusionment with the system, the energy that you have to change the world, and you're just sort of putting it in this thing that commodifies it, right?
And sort of like isolates it almost.
And I thought the book really did a fantastic job of talking about This difference in medium and how it has changed the the revolutionary energy and how it works and how it can be dissipated or how it can be commodified.
Can you talk more about that?
Yeah, of course.
I mean, I so I have I put a lot of stock in in these sort of mid century media scholars like, you know, Marshall McLuhan is probably the one of the best known Neil Postman.
I read that again this summer.
came after him, wrote a lot about television, a great book called Amusing Ourselves to Death.
I read that again this summer.
It hits different now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I think the bigger idea there, and he's borrowing this from McLuhan, is this notion that whatever medium we use, whatever becomes the dominant medium at a particular moment.
So you don't have to be on Twitter for this to be true of our society at large.
But if Twitter and Facebook and social media and its sort of impulses, its metabolism is another word that I use in the book.
You know, if that shapes the culture, shapes our politics, shapes society, then we have to look at that medium and sort of what it allows us to do, what it wants us to do, what it doesn't want us to do, its limitations.
So for Postman, that was television.
And he said, oh, here's this medium that's become it's all about image.
It's all about entertainment.
And so our politics have become entertainment.
Our culture has, like, lost this, like, depth.
It's become, like, surface, you know?
So when we look at something like Twitter and the impulse of Twitter, you know, like, what we, as I'm on there too, you know, like, what it wants us to do.
It wants us to have these very attention-grabbing, emotionally provoking, short, you know, statements that are going to sort of Get us the kind of attention that we want right on there.
And so if that becomes the speech act that you're sort of building yourself around, then it has sort of wide implications, really wide implications.
And when we compare it to something like the letter or something like what we just talked about, those moments when you'd have to go get a petition signed and you'd have to engage in a conversation, when we compare it to those forms of communication, Then it's it's a it's it's it really makes a big difference.
Yeah, it does, and it feels like OK.
So on one hand, I think Twitter also the reason benefits is the lack of space to talk about things means that miscommunication is constant, right?
You're not able to say everything that you necessarily want to say, or you didn't say all of what you needed to say, and there's always a reason to sort of go after one another, and it feels.
It's funny.
I was reading all these histories of like, uh, you know, the international before, you know, uh, world war one and like watching basically movements split.
It's constant arguing, infighting.
Yeah.
Oh, you're not here.
You're not there.
It feels like baked into the system is sort of a self-destructive almost impulse to keep people from being able to get on the same page in order to come together and movements of solidarity.
It feels like it can create things like the Arab Spring or even push things like BLM, but it does also feel Like it inherently as a medium is almost antithetical to the idea of coalition building.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I, I mean, for me, the shorthand is like, it just, it feels like something that's built to like destroy things and not to, or created to destroy things and not to build them up.
And the Arab Spring is a great example because those are people who, you know, to, to take down the dictator, to sort of all get united around a single, you know, emotionally resonant moment, you know, Um, let's go out on the street.
Let's do this.
Raise your fists in the air.
Like, it was perfect for that, right?
But then what purpose did it need to serve after?
What it needed to do was to get people aligned.
You know, you had this, the coalition that came together to take down the dictator was like an odd coalition.
It was like, you had like Islamists and you had like communists and, you know, there were probably points of convergence, but as soon as they got on the line to try and do this, to try to build themselves into a political opposition that could contend for power against forces like In Egypt, you know, the Muslim brotherhood, the military, they were, it was like the game was over before they even started.
You know, they just started like fighting each other and going down these like purity spirals, you know, of like who's more committed to the revolution.
And I mean, we know, it's not hard to imagine, you know, what that looks like online, you know, it's, um, so I think that's true.
I guess the question to ask, like, you know, why is it built to destroy and tear down?
Um, is that just more like fascinating for us?
Because look, the ultimate imperative of it's a private companies, right?
They want us to stay on as long as possible.
So like there has to be, there's something about that construction, you know, that, that is beneficial to us just staying glued, you know, like wanting to know or something deeply human about, you know, we all want to gossip about each other.
We all want to know what the dirt is.
We know, you know, we know, We want to sit there like eating popcorn, you know, while somebody's taken down, you know, like those are things that are deep human impulses, probably from long, long ago in our sort of human society, you know, and it's just like capitalizes off of that in this incredible way.
But what it's really not good for is I, you know, very much found was just building and finding convergence and having the bravery to say, What about this idea?
Like I know it's a little crazy, but like, you know, maybe there's a different way for us to think about how like policing should work in America.
Like here's my, here's my, here's my suggestion.
You know, like it's just not good for that.
Like it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't work.
Um, so one of my concerns and, and for my own observations and research, one of my biggest concerns, and I think you touched on it in a very excellent way in this book, Is that we do live in this moment where most people feel stuck.
Most people feel like there's no opportunity to change anything.
And that is particularly among liberal populations, leftist populations, you name it.
There's one population that doesn't believe that and that is the right.
And they have been working very, very hard to not just build coalitions and build a political project.
But one of the things that I think that they have a huge head start on is imagining a different world.
I mean, they have been coming together for so long now, imagining a post-liberal world, a liberal world, whatever you want to call it at this point, which is more or less rolling back the time back to when you needed a Republic of Letters, right?
I was wondering, based on your research and after writing this book, do you feel like that quote-unquote incubation to move, you know, to use the term you were talking about, do you feel like that that head start is too much to overcome or do you remain hopeful that there is an alternative that can be down the road here?
No, I do remain hopeful.
And I think weirdly, you know, we need to look to the right as an example.
I agree.
That's why I have a chapter on on Charlottesville and lead up to Charlottesville.
Because look, the thing about the right in this country is they understand themselves to be a insurgency.
They understand that their ideas are not accepted by the majority.
And so when you start with that as your From the outset, you think differently about how to achieve the things you want to achieve.
You allow yourself to imagine a little bit and to crawl off into your corner so that you can strategize.
They always talk about opening up the Overton window, the realm of what's possible.
And they need to do that because they know that their ideas are not widely accepted.
And so some of the things that I suggest throughout the book make sense for You know, for people who have radical ideas, they're doing, you know, they are saying, we're not going to have our conversations on these big public platforms.
We're going to go and we're going to find quiet, secluded spots to do it.
And we're going to think about things like optics.
You know, I, this is what was fascinating when I, when I went into that you know, as I got the chat room records of this of the groups that were coming together around Charlottesville to do the protests in Charlottesville.
Unite the right, you know, which was a bunch of white supremacist groups who had to actually find a way to unite.
Like there are divisions among white supremacists.
Some of them hate Jews more, some of them hate Jews a tiny bit less, you know, like they, you know, there's some of them want to send black people back to Africa and some people want to put them in prison, you know, like there's, there, there, there, there are, I mean, I'm being a little facetious, but it's, but there are real divisions and they needed to come together.
And they needed a place to do that.
And so they had this closed chat room on a platform called Discord, you know, that's mostly used by gamers, that allowed them to create a closed room that they had, they moderated, they could decide who came in, they could kick people out.
And they had these very intimate and interesting and focused conversations in there.
And a lot of it was about optics, was about, we understand that we look like a bunch of crazed
Neonazis to the outside world but we have a suspicion that there are other white people out there who might agree with us if we sort of toned it down or if we wore white shirts and khakis and left you know grandpa with his you know swastika tattoo on his forehead like in the closet you know like if we if let's think carefully and they would spend hours and hours like debating this stuff and sort of strategizing around it and I had many moments where I was like you know
This could be really useful for any number of groups who have progressive ideas who go out into the world, you know, like people who believe in more gun control, for example.
They go out into the world and they believe that the righteousness of what they think, that the moral rightness of it, if they just say it loudly enough, everyone is going to agree with them.
And it's just not true.
They need to think like an insurgency.
They need to think like a group of people who believe in something that they have to convince Yeah, and I think you're exactly right.
to come along with before it will become inevitable that anything could get done.
Yeah, and I think the right and this is the thing that is frightened me the most, but I think you're exactly right.
We have to learn from them because there is the way that Before these big moments of change, it feels like nothing could possibly change.
And we see that throughout history.
And then suddenly everything changes.
And it's the people who can imagine a difference.
They get there.
And they're the ones who determine it.
And I'll say, and I want to ask your opinion on this.
I think one of the things, going back to the idea of knowing that some people will think they're crazy loons or whatever.
I think that people have to start being OK with maybe seeming ridiculous for thinking of alternatives and thinking about changes, because just sitting there defending institutions that are kind of crumbling by the day and are sort of culminating into larger crises, it feels like you have to have You have to have the bravery of imagination.
And that was one of the things I came from, uh, from reading this book.
So I was, I was hoping to finish this thing up.
If you could talk to the listeners a little bit about how do you think you can start to foment this kind of change?
Like what, what can the individual do as a, not just in terms of coming together in solidarity and finding other people and forming organizations, But how do you start actually affecting or beginning the long, long road to change, would you say?
Yeah, I mean, it's a big, hard question, you know, and if I knew the answer to that, you know, in an ironclad way, then I would be in a much different position.
Look, I think that what you're getting, what you're beginning to get at is right.
You need to give yourself, people need to give themselves the freedom to imagine different sorts of realities.
And that seems to me the very first step.
But it's not so obvious that we live in a society where we feel comfortable doing that, right?
I mean, shame plays this extraordinary role on those platforms, right?
If that's where we're communicating, if that's our public square, then we're not in a great place to be saying, hey, what about this?
Because you're terrified to talk.
Well, that opens you up to judgment.
It opens you up to judgment and to being whatever that day's punching bag is for everybody's entertainment.
I mean, that's what it is, right?
So I think imagination, you're absolutely right, is sort of the first thing.
I think having a sense of patience about how long, we alluded to this before, how long change actually takes.
So it's both, and it sounds sort of contradictory to do these things at the same time, but having the imagination sort of imagine, to think of big ways that society can change, big status quotes that we've taken for granted that maybe we shouldn't, you know, but also
Being comfortable with incrementalism to some extent was knowing that change happens, you know, not, you kind of have to have your eye on the prize, but you also need to know that day to day, it might be a very local thing.
You know, like if you, if you do have a, just to take it, make it more concrete, if you do have a different vision for like how the police should function in America, that you think that, you know, not every municipality should give The entirety of its budget to its police department.
Maybe some of that money should go to social services so that, you know, pressure is taken off of cops who have to report to have to arrive at every single incident that happens.
Maybe it should be given to social services.
So, you know, this is a small, maybe wonky sounding thing, but, you know, it's it's a big shift in the way that we the way we do things in America.
So if that's what you believe, you both have to have this sort of big vision.
But then you also have to change Who's who composes your city council and get together with people to elect different folks or, uh, you know, run yourself or, or, or find ways to, uh, make change that will not feel like world.
You know, like, you know, it won't go viral necessarily.
Right.
And, and, and, but, but that actually are the steps that you need towards that, those bigger goals.
Absolutely.
And it builds.
I mean, it turns into a conflagration.
That's how, right?
Like you, you form trust, you form faith in one another starting in small steps.
And then the next thing you know, you have a lever that's changing the world.
That, that is, that is, that I'm historically, that is how it tends to work.
It doesn't always, it doesn't always succeed, but, but when it gets close, uh, even it, it tends to start that way.
All right, everybody.
I've been talking with Gal Beckerman, the author of The Quiet Before, on the unexpected origins of radical ideas.
Absolutely essential reading, and congratulations on just a fantastic book.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate the enthusiasm for it.
It means a lot.
Gal, where can the good people find you?
Uh, well, you can find me online.
I'm waiting on you to say Twitter.
I am just waiting on Twitter.
You can find me on Twitter.
I don't know how interesting I am a participant, but, uh, but, uh, you know, I have a website that has links to, you know, the book in various places you could buy it.
Um, and some of my writing it's gullbeckerman.com.
Um, and you know, I'm on all those other platforms as well.
Thank you for having me.
All right, we're back.
And that was an interview with Gal Beckerman again, the senior editor for books at The Atlantic and the author of The Quiet Before on the unexpected origin of radical ideas.
I just want to emphasize again, it can feel like nothing can change, that we're absolutely powerless and alone.
And it turns out when we think that is the case, things can change very, very dramatically, very quickly.
Yeah, language, language ends up being important and also policy.
Like we said, over the course of time, look at gay marriage and the support of that, for instance, as an aside.
You know, it is now widely supported, even though it was really controversial at the time, and a lot of people didn't want it.
After enough time, people can accept it, realize that it's fine, and move on.
Just like we can say, you know, the QAnon people, There are people that can kind of see the light and then their ways and realize how foolish those things are and, you know, come to some more rational line of thought.
Well, and it's really interesting the two examples you just brought up, like the civil rights movement within the gay community and also QAnon.
This goes along with a lot of what Gal says, which is these ideas, and both of them are very foreign to the circumstances that they came forward to, right?
If we're actually going to start analyzing this, Gay civil rights started in a time in America where to say you were gay, you could either be thrown into jail, censored, oppressed, or literally murdered.
That was a constant thing.
QAnon, of course, starts off in a little subculture and gestates and grows.
Now it's become the basic ideology of the Republican Party, if not in name, then in practice and belief.
Meanwhile, the gay movement, along with all of these activists and all these cultures, you talk about art, you talk about subversive speech, the counterculture, all of these things, they can grow.
And you can look at them and say, oh, that'll never amount to anything.
Or, you know, the status quo could never change.
We make that mistake as people.
We think that tomorrow will look like today.
But I have to tell you, if you keep organizing, you keep building these communities, you keep working on this, you keep thinking about a different world, some really amazing things are possible.
But you have to, you got to have faith in it.
You just have to have faith.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And you got to fake it till you make it.
Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
And I said this, you know, when I was talking with Gal, Nick, we might not see the change.
You know what I mean?
We're doing this.
We're doing our part.
Our listeners are doing their part.
We might not see the change.
And that's frustrating.
And that's hard.
But we have to keep fighting for the future in the hope that something will build and maybe the next generation will have it better.
Maybe the generation after that will have it better.
Maybe we will see it.
But we have to have the faith that we can change things and over time that we can build a better world.
Can I offer a basketball coaching analogy to this?
I love it.
Please offer a basketball coaching analogy.
Because you know, if those of you guys don't know out there, I'm actually a basketball coach and I work individually with teams and players.
So a lot of times I'll go up, and shooting is one of my specialties, so I'll be working with somebody and out of the blue I'll say to them, are you a good shooter?
And more often than not, they'll kind of shrug and be like, yeah, no, not really.
And I said, how can you possibly become a good shooter if you don't even, if you can't say that you're a good shooter?
Like, I don't know what you're going to get to eventually, but I can guarantee you if you say to yourself out loud that you're not a good shooter, you are never going to be a good shooter.
And I, and the power of that language, changing that thought process is really, it applies to everything and everyone, all facets of life.
Well, and to go ahead and bring the through line through from what we've talked about today, you'll notice we, listen, we have talked about Joe Manchin for God, oh my God, how long now?
You know?
Never at any point where we're like, stop trying.
Right?
It was about putting pressure on him.
Throw money at him.
Get the Joe Manchin Frog Fuck Institute off the ground.
I don't know, do something.
And the whole point is, I understand that things are hard right now.
I understand authoritarianism is growing, but you cannot just swallow the black pill, say none of this is worth it.
You can fight for things, but it has to begin with what you were saying.
It's visualizing a difference.
It's visualizing, internalizing, and trying to make a difference that can grow, as opposed to just throwing in the towel and saying nothing could possibly ever get done.
And the hilarious part of all this is that this man changed his mind based on a sports analogy.
Did you read this?
Where he's like, you know, if I suddenly change my vote, it'll be like hitting a homer with two outs from the bottom of the ninth.
And that is what got him to do it.
Like, how inane is that?
Nick, we made the joke about Larry Summers going and talking to Manchin and telling him that he, you know, had meddled with the forces of nature.
Larry Summers went and said, guess what?
The financial world is fine with this.
The financial world wants this.
And Joe, you can be a hero.
Yeah.
And he's like, I'm on board, where can I sign up?
I want to be the hero, you know?
By the way, he probably was pissed that Cinema even got a little bit of a headline in the middle of all this to finish it all up.
Oh, absolutely!
Joe Manchin's, like, staff was pissed that Larry Summer showed up in any of the coverage on this.
But it more or less, you go in and you say, don't you want to be the guy who saved the future?
And Joe Manchin's like, I kind of like the sound of that, you know?
That sounds pretty good.
And it really is the...
The combination of these things, and you look at it, and again, cynicism and nihilism can set in, but you have to hold out faith that you can change the world, because you can.
Whatever it takes.
Whatever it takes.
Alright everybody, on that note, we will come back on Friday with our bonus Weekender episode.
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