Loading summary
Transcript75 lines
- [00:08]
Tim Miller
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Unfortunately, we have to bring back an expert on autocracy because that is our world right now. She's a staff writer at the Atlantic. Her books include Autocracy Inc. The Dictators who Want to Run the World, Twilight of Democracy, and the Pulitzer Prize winning Gulaga History. It's Anne Applebaum. How you doing, Anne?
- [00:27]
Anne Applebaum
I'm okay. I mean, personally, I'm fine.
- [00:30]
Tim Miller
Yeah, that's how I'm answering it too. Things are doing great inside this home. Once we get outside the home, it gets dicier and dicier. Your most recent piece for the Atlantic is called Europe's Elon Musk Problem. If you'd indulge my Yankee myopia, I would like to begin by discussing America's Elon Musk problem. And then we can back into the Europe side of things because there's a New York Times story out this morning inside Musk's aggressive incursion into the federal government. They write, there's no precedent for a government official Dev Mr. Musk's scale of conflicts of interest, which includes domestic holdings and foreign connections. And there's no precedent for someone who is not a full time employee to have such ability to reshape the federal workforce. One agency official said before Congress and the courts can respond, Elon Musk will have rolled up the whole government. I'm curious your thoughts on that and parallels to what we've seen elsewhere.
- [01:24]
Anne Applebaum
So I am not sure there is an exact parallel that we've seen anywhere else. What Musk has just done, as you've said, is he's a private citizen. They've given him some kind of quasi government status. He's a government advisor, but he doesn't have a confirmed position. He's not part of any congressionally confirmed office or department. He himself is obviously not confirmed by anybody. And what he seems to have done is taken a group of some, apparently even very young engineers into government offices and started demanding and downloading data. Let's put it this way. If the Chinese government were to be doing this by hacking, this would be considered a major cyber warfare attack. There is no precedent for giving that kind of information or that kind of access to a private citizen, even if the President says it's okay. And so we're already in a realm where we're in an extralegal situation. You can talk about Russian oligarchs and their ability to shape policy. And in Russia, you had this phenomenon of wealthy people who were both Members of the government and the owners of significant companies. So they were making the government decisions that affected their companies. And that's clearly the case with Musk as well. So he is a very important government contractor. His company is get subsidies. He also does work on behalf of the Pentagon. So clearly he's now able to make policy concerning his own, you know, his own companies. He can look at the contracts given to his competitors. He can find out information, you know, about that. So there, there is a kind of Russian precedent for that, kind of, that kind of influence. But the broader idea that there's a single person with no status who's been given access to the whole US government payment system and the personnel management system and maybe the property ownership system as well, I can't think of anything. So we're in a world of extra legality. So we are beyond the law. He is operating in a, in a completely lawless realm. He is not under control or under control is the wrong word. He's outside of the rule of law. And then to look at precedents for that, I mean, you know, I don't want to go there because it always, you know, it's always the end of the conversation. But then you have to look at Nazi Germany or you have to look at dictatorships where single people took the law into their hands. And of course it doesn't feel like that to most people because it's just something happening, happening inside some Washington buildings and it's not yet affecting ordinary Americans. But it could and I'm happy to spin it out a little bit about what else, what other damage could.
- [04:05]
Tim Miller
Yeah, a couple threads I want to pull there. But since you went the direction of the extra legality, there's a more niche story that I've been following that I want to raise with you because I think it just demonstrates the scope of just what is happening to the rule of law in this country with around. As far as Elon Musk is Concerned, the new D.C. attorney is a guy named Ed Martin. Eagle Ed Martin. He was a Phyllis Schlafly acolyte. He has like a partisan hack. He really has. No, he does not have anywhere near the type of resume for such an important post, what should be a non political post. He put out a statement yesterday talking about investigating. And I like the statement. Comes across my, my transom. And I was like, oh man, there's, there's a U.S. attorney that's investigating what Elon Musk is doing. That's great. Like I'm glad someone's doing that. And then I, I had to give it a second look and I. Ed Martin is going to be opening investigation or says he is. At least this might just be a PR stunt into the people that are blocking Elon Musk from getting access to these types of either the treasury documents or at usaid, things that are classified with some of these evers that are unclassified. In addition to that, there was a tweet by CaptionDreamer7, which is an anonymous MAGA account with a MAGA hat. He tweeted at Ed Martin saying that Martin should investigate Twitter user Will Stancil for criticizing Elon Musk. Martin replied, thank you. Noted. So not only is Elon acting with impunity and outside of the law, right now, we have the prominent new appointee who is in charge with upholding the law, not only not looking into Elon's actions, but claiming that he's going to be looking into anyone that even speaks ill of Elon or does anything to block what the Doge team is doing.
- [05:52]
Anne Applebaum
As I say, I'm unable to think of a precedent in US History. Maybe there's some historian who knows the American history in the 19th century better, who can come up with something, but they are now creating sort of on top of and outside of the legal system, a kind of alternate legality. And the very idea that a US Attorney would talk about investigating someone for criticizing the government also leads us into a new realm. There's another piece of this. I mean, I do want to talk about the people who are resisting Musk, because I think that's. That's interesting and important. And, and those are Americans who are facing choices of a kind. I don't think Americans are used to facing. I mean, you're used to facing them in Russia or China or, you know, or other countries that are being taken out, you know, where there's a hostile regime and you have to make moral choices in your job. But there's another aspect to this, which is Musk is also trying to conceal the names of the people who are working with him, who seem to be some recent high school graduates, college students, and they were revealed in a Wired article as well as in, I saw a couple of people, others revealing them, you know, discussing them online. And Musk is trying to shut that down. So not only does he want full access to US Government data, he wants secrecy about it.
- [07:08]
Tim Miller
Yeah, he's. He said that it was illegal. I forget if he replied to Wired himself or to someone else that was treating their names and saying, this is illegal. And again, if this was just some iron man trillionaire running SpaceX outside the government, popping off on Twitter about how people criticizing him are breaking the law, I mean, there's plenty of precedent for that. But given the type of access that he has had and the fact that now apparently there are US Attorneys, at least one US Attorney, willing to do his bidding, these types of threats against journalists that are reporting about the people that are working inside the government in very prominent roles, and against the government officials that you mentioned that are trying to just follow the law and follow their duty by making sure that protocols are followed. That's alarming.
- [08:01]
Anne Applebaum
People working inside the US Government, at USAID or GSA or the Office of Personnel Management, whichever those offices are, they're going to have to face choices and their choices, and some of them have faced them already this weekend, and some even paid prices for it. You know, do you follow the laws that exist? You know, for example, you know, do you hand over classified data to people who don't have security clearances or who don't have legitimate reason to want it? Because when you give someone classified data, it's not just that you're their status, they also have to have a reason why they need it. If you say, no, I won't do that, and then you're fired, that then creates a kind of cascading psychological effect on everybody else who works at that agency. So then will other people be willing to say, no, I won't break the law for you, or no, I won't break the rules for you, knowing that the price is that they're fired. So it's not only that they're overcoming people, it's also that they're scaring people and they're using tactics of intimidation, as you say, threatening people with their jobs and so on. Again, I just can't stress enough. There is no legal basis for what Musk is doing. And the fact that the Trump administration has agreed to make it possible in this outcome outside of the law, new way means that we're already in a different phase of US Government.
- [09:24]
Tim Miller
Let's talk about that. The folks that are, at some level, I hate to use the word resist, but just resisting the extralegal demands of Musk and others. What are some of your thoughts and parallels on that front? And you have obviously done reporting and talked to people in Eastern Europe, other places where this sort of bullying and, and kleptocracy is commonplace. My colleague JVL wrote, I think, end of last week about how folks should be staying in Their jobs. I understand the opposite impulse of wanting to get out of the line of fire. I understand the impulse of wanting to be a whistleblower. What are tactics that you think are sensible facing a threat such as this?
- [10:12]
Anne Applebaum
First of all, I wrote a piece that was published in 2020 about complicity and why people conform and do things they wrong. And that was based on, you know, a lot of reading and experience. But also one of the key moments in understanding that whole topic for me happened when I went to see a woman who was a former East German dissident. Then later on, she was head of the Stasi archive. She's called Marion Bertler. I went to see her in, in East Germany, and I, I thought I was going to see her to talk to her about conformity and complicity. You know, why do people go along with things they know are bad? You know, Tell, tell me about what percentage of people went along with it. I asked a question, something like, looked at me like I was. She said, what do you mean, what percentage? She says, everybody went along with it. She said, sooner or later, you know, if you wanted to keep your job and you wanted your kids to go to university and you wanted your wife to get her health care, you had to go along with it. I mean, once the system is constructed in a way that there are no options, you know, 99% of people will conform. And she said, the real question to ask is, why is anybody a dissident? You know, because the dissidents, you know, in that system anyway, they paid a pretty big price, right? You lost your job, and maybe they didn't kill you by the, by the 1970s, you know, but they. You lost your job. You were sort of an outcast, you know, if you worked. So not everybody can afford to make that. And, you know, here we're talking about the US Right now. We're not talking about Americans as a whole. We're talking about U.S. government officials. So again, we're talking about a narrow group, and the stakes aren't quite that extreme, you know, but people are going to be faced very soon with the choice of either you stay in your job and you conform to the new rules, or you're fired. And it may differ from institution to institution. I mean, I haven't explored this yet, but I saw some reporting yesterday about people at the FBI saying they're going to continue to stay in their jobs and insist on the law.
- [12:07]
Tim Miller
Yeah, it's interesting. I've been following this. Just one little note on this. The acting FBI director, there's this kind of, this top layer, I talked to Andrew Weissner about this on Friday, of people that were essentially dismissed over the weekend of people that were involved in investigations against Trump. But then the follow up request was to either remove or freeze. I forget the exact phrasing, a much broader swath of FBI agents that had been involved at any level in the Trump investigations. And the acting FBI director basically said no and sent out a memo to everybody about what their rights are and staying in the job. But okay, well, Cash Patel is about to be confirmed any day. Right. So like what that looks like in a couple of days, I don't know. But like we have seen some of that already in the case of this acting FBI director.
- [12:54]
Anne Applebaum
I don't know either. I mean, I don't have a sense of what the rules are there. But you know, I think JVL is right to advise people to stay in their jobs. But it just, we should all need to take into consideration the possibility that they won't be able to stay in their jobs and that anybody who insists on following the law or even following the rules of common sense, I mean, for example, they've banned use of the expressions diversity and equality, for example, you know, you know, in any form, in any. And some of it looks pretty nonsensical, like would depend on the government department. But I mean, are you not allowed to measure diversity or are you not allowed to, you know, what about climate diversity? I mean, it's a word that gets used in many contexts.
- [13:37]
Tim Miller
So I just had someone forward me from a state university system an email that went out that said justice was also a word that was being taken down from the website. And that's pretty ominous. Right?
- [13:49]
Anne Applebaum
Right. And so, you know, some of that, you know, so resisting some of that will just be common sense. You know, how do we not, you know, we can't use the word justice. What about justice of the peace? What about Supreme Court justice? So there's some absurdity there too. But we may pretty soon get to the point where people who say, no, I insist on using the word justice, you know, or no, I insist that it's legitimate to investigate, for example, effect of different medication on different, different populations. And the guy. Because this is affecting the world of science as well, you know, there's some legitimate reasons to look at how medication X affects men and women, for example, you know, and that, and you would call that gender, right? So if the word gender is banned, then then maybe you can't conduct that investigation anymore. But it may be that people who insist on common sense language and who insist on following the law and the, and the ethics of their organizations are fired.
- [14:41]
Tim Miller
And it may be arbitrary and capricious. Right, Just like.
- [14:45]
Anne Applebaum
And so then we're in another world where the only people who can work for the federal government or who can successfully win an application for a National Science foundation grant or whatever, I mean, I don't want to exaggerate too much are people who've already agreed to conform. And this is how you establish the rules of conformism. And usually conformism is like, you don't need to threaten people with the Gulag or a concentration camp. I mean, you just say either you conform to this or you lose your job or you lose your benefits or something. And for most people that's too much. I mean, especially again, we're talking about a small population of federal government workers who can find other jobs. Right? They can go and work in the private sector or they can do something else. But that then means that the federal government is going to select for people who are willing to go along with these either absurd or illegal rules.
- [15:42]
Tim Miller
Yeah, maybe you aren't even fired. Maybe you just have to be bullied by a 19 year old until you can't bear it anymore. There's one example of this on a read from Josh Marshall. He wrote, on the question of doxxing, you're mentioning this, how Musk was going after the Wired and others for mentioning the names of the young technocrats. Not technocrats, what does. Marshall calls them Gizmocrats, the young Musk acolytes that are now running roughshod over the government. And he writes, I was talking to staffers today detailing one situation where one of the Musk people is rewriting the code base of one of the US government's most mission critical computer systems. As it was described to me. The staff programmers who used to manage the code and system are sort of helping him because they're terrified he's going to go haywire, but also begging him to be careful. Meanwhile, they only know this guy as Fred. So you have this crazy situation in addition to all the other absurdity of them trying to help or beg Fred to be careful, but they don't even know who Fred actually is. It might be a different name. So that's what's happening right now in the federal government. So in this case, you know, it's like, I mean, I guess thank God some of these guys are staying around to try to, you know, keep an eye on things, at least as long.
- [16:55]
Anne Applebaum
As it's Possible, you know, those guys have a moral choice, right? Stay there and help Musk steal data. Right. Effectively, or whatever it is, you know.
- [17:04]
Tim Miller
Or whatever, or, you know, best computer.
- [17:06]
Anne Applebaum
System and make sure it doesn't harm people. And that's a, you know, that's the kind of choice that people make in occupied countries, right? I'm going to work for the occupation force, even though I don't agree with it, because I'm going to try and protect people. And maybe from the inside I can, I can do useful that it's like a known choice from, you know, authoritarian or occupation regimes. Or you make the choice to be a dissident protest, in which case you lose influence, you know, or you conform completely and you say, here, Fred, take the codes and do whatever you want. Those are, you know, you're right there. I, you know, I left out the option of staying in. But that's a. Still, I mean, that's a choice from. I don't know if you know who I mean by the writer Czesaw Miwosz, but he was a Polish, Polish writer and novelist. He won the Nobel Prize at some point or another. And he wrote a famous book that was published in the 1950s called Captive Minds. The book was partly about these exact choices. And he was somebody who, you know, fought in the resistance against the Nazis. And then after the war for a while, he worked for the Polish Communist foreign service. He was in the. I think he was even in the embassy in Washington. And then eventually he quit and broke with the regime. And he wrote this famous book describing these different kinds of choices. And this is a book that, you know, feel felt like the first time I read it, I don't know, 20 years ago, like a piece of ancient history describing these, you know, but these are now, these kinds of moral choices will now come back for American civil servants. You know, as you say, you stay in and you try to make sure people aren't harmed and therefore be somehow tarnished by the fact that you've helped the new regime. Or you quit in a principled way and just get out, or you just conform.
- [18:43]
Tim Miller
All right, I'm putting in an order for the Captive Mind. I guess I'll turn to that after the gay fiction that I'm currently reading as a respite from all of this, but seems probably something that will be of value. I had somebody email me just the other day after JBL wrote his piece about them staying in. And he's like, isn't this opposite of what you, me Tim had written in your book. Right. Because I was criticizing a lot of my friends who were politicals who had stuck around and they had rationalized sticking around in Trump 1.0. Because they're like, if I leave, you won't believe the idiot that's going to come behind me. My point was always like, your job isn't that important to somebody if you're the press staffer at Treasury. Like, it doesn't matter really if a groiper replaces you. And we're in a different kind of situation now. Right. Like the people in charge of, of our data at the Treasury Department. Right. Are not the same as like some, some mid level political staff or PR staffer. Like, I just think the choice is a lot more complicated in some of these situations.
- [19:38]
Anne Applebaum
I agree. I agree. No, no, it's, it's, it's much more complicated. And that's why, actually I don't think there's a formula I can give you, you know, should you stay or should you go or should you collaborate? Because it's, it will depend on what you see happening and whether you can be useful and stop it or whether, you know, your presence is justifying something that is illegal. And that's, you know, hard to say.
- [20:03]
Tim Miller
All right, everybody. Prize Picks is the best place to get real money sports action. With over 10 million members and billions of dollars in award winnings, Prize Picks has made daily fantasy sports accessible to all. You can just pick more or less on at least two players for a shot to win up to 1,000 times. Look, as she put it, run your game all season long on Prize Picks, and I bet you're looking for a way to keep that big game interesting. It's almost here. Coming up on Sunday, right here in New Orleans. Nobody's tried to make their parasocial relationship with me real by offering me a ticket to the big game. Yet that's just something I'm monitoring. But for the rest of us sitting on the couch, those of us who don't have a ticket, you want to make it interesting. And Prize Picks is the best place to win cash while watching the game. You can check out the promos tab to tail any of the Super Sweat Millie winners Big game lineups. And if you pick a lineup that goes three for three, you can win a split of $1 million coming up this Sunday. When you sign up today, you can get $50 instantly. When you play just five bucks. You don't even need to win to recover the $50 bonus. It is guaranteed. Prize Picks is the best way to win Real money, which players are going off, which ones aren't. You can make your picks in less than 60 seconds and turn your sports opinions into real money all season long. So when you got a big game like the one this weekend with a couple teams that aren't particularly sympathetic, doing a little daily fantasy to keep it interesting, spice it up, that's something that I'm going to be doing because what other option do you have? Who do you have to root for? So download the app today, use the code bulwark to get 50 bucks instantly after you play your first $5 lineup. That's right, download the app today and use code Bulwark to get 50 bucks off instantly after you play your first $5 lineup. Prize picks run your game. One thing we didn't get into at the top, talking about must parallels is right. There's some ways in which he's just so sui generis. But, but I was thinking about Hungary and about his ownership of X Twitter and how in addition to being a government contractor, in addition to a donor, he also is the owner of a major media platform. And you see this to a much lesser degree, obviously with the way that Zuckerberg and Bezos have started to coddle up to Trump. You see it to a little bit greater degree from the LA Times owner and the way he is talk about that parallel with Musk and what we've seen about co opting media institutions. Then we can get into the view of all this from Europe a piece.
- [22:43]
Anne Applebaum
Of the authoritarian playbook is absolutely control of the media and control of the public conversation, establishing the terms of debate, arguing that Elon Musk is bravely doing the work of trimming the federal budget and that he's a brilliant mind, finally focused on government work waste, you know, changing the narrative about, about what he's doing. I mean there's, there's an extra element of it as well which is the way in which and you saw the original version of this was the was in the old Twitter files debate which you know, which is also another thing that Musk does and he's been doing in the last couple of days is, and it's another thing I'm worried about is taking information that he finds selectively and spinning it into justification for what he does. And you saw this, there was a, I still don't know the veracity of exactly what it was but they found some chunk of money that seemed to be going to the Lutheran church and it turns out that the Lutheran church runs old people's homes in South Dakota. And other places.
- [23:46]
Tim Miller
So it was a. I think, yeah. Also some rough immigrant stuff.
- [23:49]
Anne Applebaum
Yeah. The way the federal government works is it often, you know, some outsourcing is done to private companies, but outsourcing is also done to NGOs because the Lutherans, you know, the faith based organizations are sometimes better at running these kinds of services than it was actually a big.
- [24:02]
Tim Miller
Initiative during the Bush administration. Well, you know, yes. Getting faith based organizations involved in government, you know, conservatives just before that. Christian conservatives were for that for a while.
- [24:12]
Anne Applebaum
Yep. So, but, but Musk found this and he decided it was a scandal. Mike Flynn was tweeting about it anyway. And then suddenly there's discussion of the Lutherans being evil on Twitter and then all the like blue, blue tick, you know, supporters chiming in and talking about, oh, we found a scam to do with the Lutherans, you know, who are these Lutherans? You know, what are Lutherans? You know. So what Musk also now has. And this is a, again, this is a power that I don't, I can't think of, I can't think of any. An exact parallel of being able to weaponize data and bits of information that he finds and turn them into Twitter talking points. You know, what he's just done to usaid, which is one of the, you know, it's one of the most important sources of American soft power. It feeds millions of poor people in Africa. It provides vaccines for children all over the world. And you know, he's now described it as evil. He will probably be selectively finding things that it does that it can be made to sound outrageous or strange. You know, and the fact that he has that power on top of the fact that he's, he's now has access to this huge trove of data gives this an extra twist.
- [25:21]
Tim Miller
Let's talk about the usaid and then I'll get to the Europe stuff because again, this is another thing that's illegal. Like, I worry that, like the phrase illegal is like people are going to start. It will no longer have the impact with people like, you know, because they just will hear this word like that. Another illegal action by the Trump administration. Like, it loses its emphasis because it's like, I saw somebody post something yesterday that was like, I don't think that the founders anticipated a system where one rich guy comes in and does a bunch of illegal stuff and then the president just says, shut up a nerd when you complain about it. And that's like, kind of like the situation we're in. Right? Like they just, when there's a fire of illegal stuff, then it's like hard to focus on and wedge illegal action is something worth protesting. I think it's going to be a challenge for the Democrats. But with regards to USAID being shuttered and moved under State, I guess we had a few things. The Russian government celebrating the closure of it. Peter Morocco has been placed as the deputy administrator of usaid, I guess in charge of it under Marco. He was inside the Capitol with rioters on January 6th. Then we discussed yesterday a lot to this new undersecretary and Secretary of State that will have some influence here, Darren Beatty. There was a new CNN article out this morning showing him praising the violence on January 6. I discussed his racist past on yesterday's podcast. Talk about that. And I guess this does also relate to sort of the view of us from Europe. But what the impact of all this is going to have.
- [26:44]
Anne Applebaum
No, I mean, so we are openly destroying one of the agencies and institutions through which a lot of the world knows us. There's a lot of vague talk about how the US is competing with China and Africa for influence, for example, or in Latin America. And actually I wrote a book about it. I mean, my book, Autocracy Inc. Is about the ways in which the autocratic world is seeking to have economic and cultural and propaganda influence all over the world. And they're competing directly with us. Us. The US plus our allies are maybe our former allies, as it might turn out. But one of the ways in which we compete is that we have way of reaching people that they don't. And one of them is through our, I mean, just focus on USAID health services alone. You know, we, we provide a lot of health services to the very, very poorest people on the planet. We're known for that, you know, in a lot of the world. That's what the US Stands for. It's an important bulwark against Chinese influence campaigns and Russian influence campaigns and so on, you know, so by destroying that, you know, we are destroying one of our most important assets. We're destroying one of the things we're known for. I mean, there's another aspect of the USAID thing. That's another thing the USAID has got more involved in over the last 20 years is democracy promotion. So it's not just vaccines. It's also support for civic organizations, sometimes for independent media. And this has been a Republican and Democrat, you know, have supported this.
- [28:18]
Tim Miller
This is not something IRI was involved like the International Republican.
- [28:21]
Anne Applebaum
So IRI is not part of usa. I'm not sure.
- [28:24]
Tim Miller
Actually not get money from usa.
- [28:26]
Anne Applebaum
It has slightly. I'll explain. I'll get to that in a second. So, so, you know, there's something called the National Endowment for Democracy, which I used to be on the board of, under which is iri, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. They do a lot of direct democracy funding too. And Musk has also been tweeting about them and how bad they are. Usaid in addition, also does some, some of the, some of the same kind of stuff it may be that we now have. And this, I just don't know whether, I don't know whether Trump himself knows about this or who exactly is. It may be that we're not going to do that anymore and we don't stand for democracy anymore and so we won't promote democracy anymore. And so all the institutions and organizations that have been doing that, in many cases very successfully. A lot of what IRI and NDI do is just to do with direct relations with other political parties around the world. It's like a second tier level of foreign policy. I mean, some of it isn't even just about funding. It's about like the IRI would have relationships with conservative parties in Europe and NDI would have relationships with center left parties. And there are a lot of other things that those organizations do that have been really, really important in maintaining the role of the US as the leader of a broad democratic alliance. None of it is very expensive by the standards of the US Budget. These are very small amounts of money. USAID is less than 1%. And the democracy promotion activities must be, I don't know, off the top of my head. I can't give you a statistic, but some very, very, very small fraction of that. So it's something, some very tiny, tiny thing.
- [29:54]
Tim Miller
Even the new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio made that point, very point in 2017, defending this against the first round of Trump attacks back last year.
- [30:02]
Anne Applebaum
Yeah, yeah. And Iri, I should say the big, you know, McCain was one of the leaders of IRI. You know, lots of prominent Republican senators have been involved in it for a long time. And so if we're cutting off that, you know, we're not doing that anymore. And we don't stand for democracy. Democracy is not part of our foreign policy. It's not part of who we are or how we're identified, then a lot of what the US has stood for positively internationally will disappear or go away. And it's hard for me to quantify the harm to Americans from that. I realize it's kind of three levels removed from what ordinary people think. But again, people talk a lot about this competition with Russia and China for influence, for this is essentially ceding to the authoritarian world and saying, we're not going to fight that battle anymore. You guys take over. I mean, there is this. Whether we want there to be one or not. Okay? There is a battle of ideas in the world and between broadly the ideas of democracy. And let's even not even use the word democracy. Use the word the rule of law, use the word checks and balances, use the expression transparency and accountability, like all.
- [31:09]
Tim Miller
The small l. Liberal values.
- [31:11]
Anne Applebaum
Freedom. Freedom, another good word. Yep. So freedom, you know, all those things are on. On one ledger, and then there's another group of countries who are pushing a different set of ideas, you know, that autocracies are stable and safe and democracies are degenerate, and they stand for a different set of ideas. And those ideas are clashing everywhere. I mean, in Africa and Asia and every European country and inside the United States as well. You know, again, if the United States is now ceding and saying, we're not having this argument anymore, we don't care who wins, you know, then we are allowing the rise of Chinese influence everywhere on the planet, and that will sooner or later have, have economic and other kinds of implications for Americans and for American companies. You know, I know it's several levels away from most people's realization, but it is a. It would be a profound change, you know, a revolutionary change in the way the US Is. A lot of people don't like the US Already, you know, stipulate. And a lot of people always thought, you know, we talk about all that stuff, but it's. We don't believe it. So there would be all those people would then say, right, we told you so. Americans never, never believed any of that. But the people who were. For whom we were a source of hope and inspiration or for whom we were playing a leadership role are going to be devastated and disappointed.
- [32:26]
Tim Miller
And even at just a more practical level, outside of kind of using the democracy world speak, Mark Salter, who is McCain's speechwriter, always would talk about how when he'd travel around the world with him, and then after he died and said that he was a speechwriter for McCain, worked for McCain, you'd hear from people that were dissidents, that were freedom fighters, that had fought autocracy in Eastern Europe, in Asia, other places, and they would have fond feelings. So there were pockets of people that had fond feelings of America and That soft power does matter. A, it mattered to them in their fight, but also, you know, it gave them a tangible thing to push back in internal politics. Like we shouldn't deal with the Chinese, we shouldn't deal with the Russians, like, because we've seen how the outcomes are worse. So there's that tangible example of it. And then there is also just the other side. Just even looking at this from just the Trump perspective, it's like once you take away our values based argument, then it's just like who can get theirs based argument. And that's going to be a loser for us too. I mean, because the Chinese are going to be much more willing to give bags of cash than we are. They're going to be able to give a much better deal. If all this is, is art of the deal all the way down, then that's going to be a loser for us.
- [33:39]
Anne Applebaum
And the Chinese are also willing to subsidize these foreign projects in a way that the US Government has never before. You know, a lot of their companies are quasi state, quasi private companies, you know, and they're sort of state capitalism. And so they'll be funding that in a way that we don't. And that also gives them advantage. There's another tangible, intangible aspect of this, which is that the source of American power and influence for the last 80 years has been our allies and our alliances. You know, the fact that we have, have, you know, America plus Europe is, that's the actual superpower. You know, people talk about the unipolar moment. It wasn't ever just the US by itself, you know, having all this influence. It was the US plus really the developed world, the US plus the richest countries in the world, plus Europe, plus the Asian democracies, you know, plus Japan and South Korea and Australia, that group of countries which were able to act together to set the trade rules according to what, you know. You know, that in a, in a way that was beneficial, that could set the rules of international law or influence them so that we had fewer wars. You know, this was where the power of the United States lay was in its ability to have these values based alliances. You know, Russia doesn't have them, China doesn't have them. You know, the fact that we had them is what, for a long time made us different. If we're just giving that up, you know, we don't care anymore. Democracy is not part of who we are. And anyway, we're gonna do tariffs on Canada and Mexico. That's another story. You know, I don't Know if you want to go down that road or not.
- [35:15]
Tim Miller
This actually takes us to the Europe article that our values based allies. So your article about the concerns from Europe about Musk, I had written down three things that it relates to it. That's probably more, but the tariffs. EU is worried that maybe we'll get into economic war over them. Maybe a little less concerned today than yesterday. I'll take the L on this one, actually. I thought Trump was going to run through it. I still think he's going to have to eventually just for his little ego's sake. You can't talk about how great tariffs are are for years and then never do them, I wouldn't think. But who knows, Maybe that's why we don't have a Tim is always right T shirt. But the euro has to be worries about the tariffs. Election interference. Elon Musk we've seen with AfD, but elsewhere he's getting involved in elections and then three like the Internet company regulation and how they have done more than we have here and what Musk's involvement will mean for that. So take it any way you wish but kind of like the view from, from what was once our values based allies on what's happening over here with Musk and Trump.
- [36:14]
Anne Applebaum
So I don't think I can emphasize enough how worried Europeans are about Musk, but also the broader problem that he represents of us social media companies changing the nature of politics in Europe. So in a way, this article was a little bit inspired by the last conversation we had, which so much I no longer remember. When that was, maybe it was.
- [36:37]
Tim Miller
I googled it myself. I was like, it was after the election, right? Yeah, it was in December.
- [36:40]
Anne Applebaum
It was after the election. And you used an expression that I realized was the right one, which is, you know, U.S. elections are kind of Las Vegas, right? Anyone can spend as much money as they want. You can do it anonymously. You can give out million dollar checks to people in Pennsylvania. You know, there's no rules, right? Just, it's just a free for all. Okay? Most European countries don't work like that. Like there are laws about funding and about transparency and about political advertising. Some of those countries have hate speech laws that they take very seriously and they're related to their own history. You know, Germany has hate speech laws because they would like to prevent the Nazi party from rising to power again. You know, so there are, they have these laws and they're sovereign countries, right? They're allowed to have laws, you know, and hate speech laws, remember, protect the speech rights of people who have been, you know, doxed or harassed as well as that, you know, so it's, you know, so it's not that they don't have free speech. Of course they do. In some ways it's more free than ours because people aren't scared to speak out. But nevertheless, they have laws. So the question is, is if US social media companies are still compatible with those laws. If you're able to pay secretly for advertising on Instagram or on x or on YouTube in ways that are not transparent, and if you're able to defy the laws of your country going around them using the social media companies, then are you still able to set the rules of your own elections? Do you get to have your own elections? And increasingly, I think Europeans fear that they don't. Twitter and Facebook and these other companies are setting the term American companies based in Silicon Valley who do not have our interests at heart and who don't care about social cohesion in France or about the rule of law in Germany. They are setting the rules for our national debate. And that's unfair. The musk thing has added a special twist to it because we now have the leader of one of the social media companies literally intervening in the German election, election, seeking to promote the far right party, holding an online event with the leader of that party appearing at one of their rallies and saying Germans shouldn't worry so much about the Holocaust anymore. I mean, he didn't use those exact words, but more or less saying, time for Germans to forget about history. I mean, this is a, this is such a huge violation of the spirit of fairness given that, you know, he has 220 million or whatever it is now Twitter followers, you know, that's way beyond the reach of any single German newspaper. I mean, even biggest, largest ones. And so, you know, the question is, is that fair? And so they, they do have some tools to regulate. And I wrote about this in the, in the piece and there's a thing called the Digital Services act which could be applied to X and to other forms of social media. And the main goal of them, let me make it clear, is not censoring them, but is forcing them to be more transparent. So you could say we need some insight into the algorithm. We want to know. We want data on what is promoted and what is not promoted. We want users to have access to that data because free speech is also about knowledge and having access to information. If you're going to be an informed citizen, you should know, why is the algorithm giving you X or Y?
- [39:45]
Tim Miller
That's pretty minor. I would have maybe said just like banned the algorithmic element of this. Right. Where Elon just can post and people that follow him see it, but where it's not being promoted into their feed.
- [39:56]
Anne Applebaum
Right. There's another discussion, and I don't know enough about where it is going. And I, you know, I'm not privy to any insider conversation, but there is a discussion about what if you just banned algorithms altogether? Like, why do we need algorithms? Why can't people just follow who they want, you know, on social media and, you know, they see who they follow and, you know, and so on. And which is, by the way, how Blue sky works. So there are. It's not impossible to have a form of social media that works like that.
- [40:20]
Tim Miller
It's how Facebook originally worked, and that's.
- [40:23]
Anne Applebaum
How Facebook originally worked. So that is also a possibility. So anyway, they're looking at there is a commission inside the EU which is looking at doing. Which is looking at all these questions. And now the question is, do they still have enough sovereignty left to be able to impose those laws, their own laws? If they do it, will there be a huge pushback from the Trump administration? J.D. vance made a comment in an interview a couple months ago, something along the lines of, you know, if they regulate us, what then? Why should we protect them? You know, sort of vaguely threatening and saying, why? You know, know, we'll pull out of NATO. I mean, you know, no one really knows what the status of those comments are. Is this what Trump thinks? Is this just a thing that Vance said to be provocative? What. And again, we're back to the question of what is Musk's status when he supports the AfD, the German FAR right? Is he speaking on behalf of Trump? Is he a member of the US administration? Is that the US supporting, you know, the AfD or. Or not? So there is going to be a big looming question in Europe over the next few weeks and months over whether how to regulate these platforms and if so, can they do it? You know, are they willing to defy the Trump administration, you know, whether it's Vance or Musk or Trump himself and do it? I mean, I have an instinct that Trump himself probably doesn't really care. I mean, maybe somebody could frame the problem to him in a way that he would. But. But it may be others, others who decide. So we're also, again, partly because of this extralegal situation, you know, where nobody really understands what is Musk's role. Does he speak for Trump? Does he speak for himself? You know, that people are genuinely confused by it. Everywhere I go, I mean, last week I was in Germany. I was also in Brussels. And everywhere I go, it's the one thing people want to talk about and they want an explanation of it.
- [42:12]
Tim Miller
This time of year, a good hoodie is essential. Well, if you live north of New Orleans, I guess. Still hoodie weather here a little bit, but the days are running short on hoodie weather. I love that. But for the rest of y'all suffering through long winters that go all the way through April, you need a good hoodie. You need something that's gonna last that long dark season. And the American Giant Classic full zip hoodie is made to last not just for this winter, but a lifetime for many winters to come. Slate magazine called it the greatest hoodie ever made. And if you don't trust Slate, As I mentioned before, my husband has been a longtime fan of hoodie, his American Giant hoodie. So was thrilled that we got American Giant as a new sponsor so we could get a couple of different styles and update the brand. You know, I'd never worn his hoodie. Sometimes I borrow his clothes. One of the nice things about being gay is I had the shared wardrobe, But I hadn't borrowed his hoodie before, hadn't tried it on. We'd been pretty worn in. He put a lot of work in on that American Giant hoodie. So when I got the new one, I was interested to try it out. I was interested to see, you know, if it lived up to the hype. And I gotta tell you, it did. I gotta tell you, it did. Very comfy, you know, lightweight, breathable. Mmm. Put it on in the morning if you're a little hungover. Feel nice and cozy. Highly recommend. The iconic Classic full zip hoodie is the jacket that started it all for American Giant. Custom heavyweight fleece and side panels for mobility made it the best hoodie ever. It also had a body skimming fit with a double lined hood and reinforced elbow patches that mean that hoodie will last. But they got a bunch of other kinds, different weights. They also have the premium slub crew tee. I got a long sleeve tee from them you might have seen me wearing out on the Bulwark Tour. I'm digging it. So this season, snag the hoodie that will bring you comfort for life. The American Giant Classic Full zip. And save 20% off your first order at american-giant.com when you use code bulwark at checkout. That's 20% off your first order at American-Giant.com code bulwark. Bulwark. Did you have any other additional thoughts on the trade war Bluff and impact?
- [44:17]
Anne Applebaum
It was very amusing. You know, it looks like Canada and Mexico won. You know, Justin Trudeau said, well, look, we're investing, I can't remember one point some billion dollars into borders. It turns out he announced that two months ago. But Trump said, oh, great, you know, then I'll lift the tariffs or anyway postpone them for a month.
- [44:32]
Tim Miller
Yeah, here we go. We're giving you 12 Mounties in exchange for the tariffs being taken away. It's an interesting deal.
- [44:38]
Anne Applebaum
That's right.
- [44:38]
Tim Miller
A little short of becoming the 50s, 51st state if we're grading deals.
- [44:42]
Anne Applebaum
Yeah. I mean, it makes me wonder whether the hard thing for people also to understand outside of the US and also maybe inside the US Is like, what is real and what's performative Was this big bluster about huge tariffs. Was that some kind of game for the base?
- [44:58]
Tim Miller
The base doesn't even care. That's why I was wrong on this one, I'll admit it. Well, maybe I won't be. We'll see what happens in a month. But the base doesn't care about this. Trump is the only one that cares about this. So does he just lie like the. Maybe he just likes the theater of it, but I don't know. I mean, he seems to really like it. We'll find out. But I assume that European countries, it does have real implications. Because if you're like looking to invest in, you know, some multinational corporation that's going to have a product that's moving over multiple, like, why would you do it right now until you understood what's what, what is actually going to happen?
- [45:28]
Anne Applebaum
Also, I mean, I think some of the damage is already permanent. I mean, the Canadians, like, maybe we're going to get over this and there won't be 25% tariffs. But we have now, you know, awoken the, you know, the sleeping nationalism of Canada, the scary sleeping nationalism.
- [45:46]
Tim Miller
I don't think there'll be Canadian separatists, but, you know, I don't know, maybe they'll just start manufacturing more stuff in Canada instead of from us.
- [45:53]
Anne Applebaum
But you know, there's like buy Canadian signs now all over Canadian shops and, you know, lots of premiers, you know, they're sort of regional governors are banning U.S. products and saying we won't do deals with U.S. companies. So, you know, I think there could, there will be real effects and, and I think this is gonna, people will remember this for a long time. I mean, so there's a even if it was just a performance and it was just like to look really tough and then withdraw 24 hours later, even if I don't, maybe it won't turn out like that, but even so there will be damage and even so, there's going to be damage in Europe as well. You know, the US Is now like the US has been the most predictable factor in world politics for 50 years. You know, Republican, Democrat, I mean, sometimes they did weird things or they said things people didn't like or whatever, but now it's just a complete black hole. Like do we trust them? Do we not trust them? Are they on our side? Are they our enemies? You know, do they wish us well? Are they trying to undermine us? Really, people just don't know.
- [46:48]
Tim Miller
On Tulsi, it seems like she's going to get confirmed. There was some. This one I was right on. So, you know, one for two. There's some chatter over the weekend that Tulsi was in trouble, that these normie Republican senators, you know, had very deep concerns and were going to stand up to the nomination. Well, in the last 24 hours, Susan Collins, James Lankford of Oklahoma, who did the immigration deal with the Democrats last time, Todd Young of Indiana, who's kind of been buzzed about as maybe a secret normie, all of them have said that they're voting for Tulsi. And so it seems like we're heading down a path towards her being confirmed. I don't know if that has any impact as well on our allies as far as intelligence sharing and gathering, but it does seem like another factor if you're one of them looking at how much you can trust us. You know, putting an Assad and Putin apologist in charge of intelligence isn't probably great.
- [47:39]
Anne Applebaum
You would have to ask whether it's possible to share intelligence with the United States.
- [47:44]
Tim Miller
Yes, even, even having that conversation is not, is not great. They're having meetings about it now.
- [47:48]
Anne Applebaum
There are very elaborate relationships that we have with other countries, especially the so called Five Eyes, you know, these group of countries who work closely together, you know, especially with the UK maybe people have trust, you know, relationships of trust at lower levels that will continue. I really, I don't want to be overwhelmed, you know, sweeping say something that I don't have justification. But yeah, when you talk to her, you would want to be careful.
- [48:10]
Tim Miller
And then just the latest on Ukraine, there was an article yesterday, didn't get a lot of attention because there's a lot happening. But Trump, I guess considering a deal on US Access to Ukrainian rare earth metals in exchange for additional aid. His idea had been floated by Zelensky in October. I don't know, I guess being open to aid even as part of some cockamamie deal is probably better than nothing. But I'm wondering what your senses of that and what the view is from, from folks in Kyiv.
- [48:39]
Anne Applebaum
So I did know about that. I mean, I knew that the Ukrainians had proposed that. I don't know the exact, to be fair, I don't know the exact terms. I don't know exactly what we're talking about, but I know they were looking for something transactional that they could offer Trump. I mean, obviously arguing to Trump on the basis of values or human rights wasn't going to work. And they were looking for something else. And they have this. And from their point of view, I understand it completely. And I would do the same if I were the president of Ukraine, you know, so I understand that, you know how that looks in practice. I mean, what we, we let American companies mine things in Ukraine and just turn the other, don't look while they do it. I, I don't know exactly how that works or what a deal like that looks like. I mean, it's hard even to figure out how you would contractually organize it. I mean, what, we're just giving rights away to the US government or we're giving them to friends of Trump or who are we giving them to? I don't know.
- [49:33]
Tim Miller
Know. But are folks in Ukraine more optimistic that they might be open than maybe they had been to continued support or still pretty dire?
- [49:42]
Anne Applebaum
It's hard to describe. I mean, I think people are, you know, there's a combination of fatalism, like, you know, whatever happens, we're going to not, we're not stopping fighting. And I actually know a lot of people who are involved in very forward looking projects there, who are building drone factories, who are creating new forms of warfare. I mean, there's a piece of the Ukrainian story that never seems to get told. I periodically try to tell it, but, you know, they are really at the cutting edge of what is modern warfare. They're inventing new stuff all the time. And so there's a piece of the story that's actually very, they're still very optimistic. Like they still think they're, you know, they're gaining in, in various ways. Then there's a, you know, at another level, there's another part of the army and part of the security aspir apparatus who's worried they just don't have enough people and they're losing territory and they'll do whatever it takes takes to get us help. But it's not really a question of optimism or pessimism. I mean, they're going to keep fighting and they will do what they can to get the equipment and weapons that they need and they will make whatever deal is required.
- [50:44]
Tim Miller
We need to share more inspiring Ukrainian stories here. That's good. I'm happy that you shared that as needed. All right, final question was recommended from a friend. We're now, what, three weeks in? It's been the longest three weeks of our life. Is it only two weeks? I think it's only two weeks. It's been the longest weeks for life and it's only been two weeks. How does it meet expectations as far as the authoritarian threat or tyrannical threat for you, is it as bad, worse? How far down the trail to organism do you feel like we are? Have we already shot past it? How would you rank it?
- [51:20]
Anne Applebaum
I had a very dark view of what was going to happen and it was so dark that I didn't want to share it that much. And public, I mean, some of the details have surprised me. Like I know I did not expect Elon Musk to take a group of 19 year old engineers and download the US government's data. Like, I didn't see that exact form of. I did expect this kind of assault on the system and I did expect the Republican Party not to resist it. So in that sense I'm not surprised. I was prepared for this kind of thing to happen. I'm even surprised that other people are surprised.
- [51:54]
Tim Miller
I mean, but you wrote a book called Gulag. So, you know, so we're not, we're not all the way. We're not, we're not all the way to Gulag.
- [52:00]
Anne Applebaum
No, we're certainly, I mean, certainly we're, we're now in the realm of extralegality. It's clear that we have an illiberal leadership which who are seeking to undermine the very basis of American democracy. They're trying to change the rules and the way that institutions work. They're using Musk as a kind of. But it's not just Musk, it's also, you know, these guys from Heritage who are also talking about threatening and harassing civil servants and federal public servants. So it's not just him, he's just the sort of unexpected piece of the story. You know, I do think they are going to continue trying to capture the civil service. They will try to capture the courts, you know, put people in the Courts who are not just not conservative in the old sense, not like, I don't know, constitutionalists, but actually much more radical. That's what I would expect, that we get really radical judges who are there to do Trump's bidding, not to respect the Constitution in a conservative way. I think that's very possible, you know, and I also think the, you know, you said it already, you know, the attempts to control and dictate and use different kinds of levers of influence over the media and over public conversation, that that's going to get much worse as well. So in that sense, we're already. It's not just Orban, by the way. I mean, this is what Hugo Chavez did in Venezuela. I think it's important for people to understand this is neither a right wing nor a left wing assault. It's an illiberal assault, assault on the state. It's an anti and ultimately anti Democratic and anti constitutional. And I expect it to continue until somebody finds a way to stop it.
- [53:33]
Tim Miller
All right, well, we've all got some work to do. Thank you so much, Ann, for yours. I appreciate you for coming on the podcast again. And as often as you're willing, we'll be having you back. So thanks so much. Thanks a lot, everybody else. We'll be back here tomorrow. Maybe somebody that can be a little bit of fun. We get to have fun every once in a while, right? Maybe we can have a fun guest tomorrow. We'll see what you think. Peace.
- [53:53]
C
You can put your clothes back on she's leaving you no time to apologize for the things you do Go rent a Ferrari and sing the blues.
- [54:20]
Tim Miller
Believe.
- [54:21]
C
That Clapton was the second coming falls apart we all got work to do it gets dark we all got work to do she's leaving me she's leaving you said Vegas is beautiful at night it's not about the money you just like the lights no you know what is implied when your room is free you're feeling lucky falls apart we all got work to do it gets dark we all got work to do she's leaving you.
- [56:26]
Tim Miller
The board podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.