On with Kara Swisher

I think he's a wonderful writer. And so I've read a lot of books of evangelicals and they sort of read the same, but Tim is so good at storytelling and narrative and involves himself in it.

It becomes a really interesting journey for him to get some revelations about why are the evangelicals doing what they're doing?

His confrontation as a reporter who covers politics and covers the rise of this political movement that has its roots all the way back to Reagan and beyond.

He had composed this note on the occasion of my father's death to express just how disappointed he was in me. I was part of an evil plot the man wrote to undermine God's ordained leader of the United States.

If I could use my journalism skills to investigate the deep state he wrote uncovering the shadowy cabal that was sabotaging Trump's presidency then I would be restored. He said he was praying for me.

It's about misinformation is what it's about really and I think that she she takes it on because she was she's been mistaken for someone

It's a narrative that you've had has been ongoing

I see her as a case study for a hope for a phenomenon that is much much bigger than her.

They get the facts wrong, but the feelings right

The conspiracy is capitalism. I don't think it is a conspiracy. I think this is just what the system is designed to do

I wrote the book, Big Bets to make the case that Big Bets start with knowing the data and understanding issues deeply.

To me, a Big Bets starts with setting a bold goal, immunizing every child, for example, or for basic childhood vaccination.

I take away from all of those examples, including some failures, both lessons learned and an absolute conviction that if we don't actually try to solve these problems, if we don't set the goal impossibly high, we have no chance of success.

The aspiration trap is what I think we just saw at the COP, which is, hey, we know we can't get language on phasing out fossil fuels, so what can we do and let's embrace all these loopholes to make it possible?

I wrote the book, Big Bets to Be Optimistic, and I have a whole chapter in the book that I titled Make It Personal

In a new book called The Fabulous, the lying, hustling, grifting, stealing and very American legend of George Santos, Arthur Mark Cisano does a deep dive on Santos and the life he built on lies.

I think he's a very American figure. I think he is bringing a very old string of a very old American tradition into the social media era of American politics.

It's not just that he makes up every single thing about himself. Yeah, it's not a white lie. It's also not a single lie.

the way his mother described his lying, I think sort of says a lot about what he was doing. She said, when confronted with the lie, she said something like, oh, Anthony and his stories.

what's interesting to me is the Santos story shows that even a regular person can be lying and shameless and get to office. And that is in some senses almost scarier than someone like Trump being able to do it

Former Republican strategist and also whenever Trump first steward Stevens wrote in his 2020 book, It Was All a Lie that racism was an animating force. But the GOP has always lurked in the Republican underbelly. Do you agree with him to an extent, to an extent?

Black is a senior reporter for NBC, the host of the Peabody Award-winning podcast South Lake and the author of They Came for the Schools.

The respectable upper middle class middle aged suburban moms in They Came for the Schools might not seem like they have anything in common with the angry young in-cell Nazis who marched on Charlottesville but in fact both groups are at their core far-right political movements that are motivated by anti-blackness and have recently shifted focus of their hate towards trans people.

And so the parents I document in South Lake Texas who were kind of service stand-ins for the conservative suburban moms who've gone to war with their school boards in the last few years under the banner of Moms for Liberty, anti-critical race theory, anti-DEI.

So parents heard that message from Chris Rufo on Fox News on Tucker Carlson and on their Facebook pages and started showing up at school board meetings.

And so when you start teaching kids that, you know, for hundreds of years, America did these horrible things in the name of racism that they enslaved. People were enslaved because they were black. You know, when you teach kids really what happened during Jim Crow or in some of or the reason why some of these suburbs were created in the first place, that conflicts with the image that these parents are really invested in their kids learning, which is America is the greatest country in the world and has always been good and just.

She wrote a blockbuster book that kind of took the world by storm I was a baby feminist on campus called beauty beauty myth.

For violence or threats to be effective, they just have to seem possible.

In my book I write about... 80 violent incidents in the House and Senate in say a 30-year period.

What matters is that people believed...they could get hurt, they could get shot, they could get challenged to a duel, and that was enough for a long time for them to self-censor.

There's been a lot of violent rhetoric, praising violence...former President Trump...smiling at it, offering to get lawyers for people if they engage in it...

He certainly contributed to a climate in which violence has been in the forefront of our political rhetoric.

It's called "Invisible Rulers, The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality" and it's about the interplay between influencers, algorithms and the online crowds who are just as culpable.

It centers on the creation of quote-unquote 'bespoke realities'.

I describe it a lot as in those environments. It was very, very top-down.

And now we have a really fascinating information environment where we have this figure, the influencer, who has the reach of mass media.

If you make a trend, you make it true.

It is. The Monks of Skeet is a great book on that topic.

Black is a senior reporter for NBC, the host of the Peabody Award-winning podcast South Lake and the author of They Came for the Schools.

Ellie in Black Pill which is a great title. We write about how a subset of alienated young men who posted memes on image boards like 4chan and 8chan morphed into real life violent white supremacists explain what Black Pill means and how did the radicalization take place?

It's this nihilism that society is absolutely corrupt and hopeless and it is going to collapse and if anything you should enjoy and hasten the collapse of society because what comes after will be a new golden age.

The young men in Ellie's books are generally self-described losers whereas the main subjects in your book, they came for the schools or upper middle class parents in South Lake Texas as suburb outside of Dallas, Fort Worth, I guess anti-woke parents.

So I think all of these storylines are connected. It just it comes back to this belief that we're going to lose what we've earned. They're coming for what we've earned and they're going to give it away to people who don't deserve it.

The tyranny is sort of, it comes from John Locke. He said famously, where law ends, tyranny begins.

It's increasingly seen as a lose-lose, a career ender by any FBI or DOJ official that no matter how they handle a politically sensitive investigation, they're going to be hit harder by Trump but they also face attacks from Democrats.

Our norms are a promise that we will fiercely protect the independence of this department from political interference in our criminal investigations. Our norms are a promise that we will not allow this department to be used as a political weapon. And our norms are a promise that we will not allow this nation to become a country where law enforcement is treated as an apparatus of politics.

if the attorney general lacks the power to appoint inferior officers, that conclusion would invalidate the appointment of every member of the department who exercises significant authority and occupies a continuing office other than the few that are specifically identified by statute.

we're all sort of waiting to see, Walter Isaacson's book on Elon, which is coming in a few weeks.

It's called America's Deadliest Election, the cautionary tale of the most violent election in American history.

In office, he was loud and divisive, although he claimed to support the best men in the state, the most representative and capable to official positions. In fact, as the New York Times reported, it is difficult to exaggerate the evils he brought on the state. Other newspapers called him a despot, a demagogue, a tyrant. The more they attacked him, the stronger his support grew, especially among carpetbaggers and black voters. He built and retained an almost cult-like following.

They put it in federal court to test the new constitutional amendments to give people-This is the 13th, 14th, 15th amendment. 13th, 14th, 15th amendment to give them civil rights and freedoms that everybody should have.

And they decided it was ceremonial. They decided that he didn't have the power, just like Mike Pence did 150 years later.

This is a story of what happened and what can happen again when the experiment fails.

Bridge Colby I think is unquestionably right and I think has been the most influential thinker in the last few years his book strategy of denial basically there's two forms of deterrence one is deterrence by punishment where you say if you do X I will retaliate by doing Y the problem with that is it relies upon the credibility of the punisher right like it relies upon us thinking that if Biden or whoever is the next president says don't do it because we will we will punish you and it could get really ugly that those claims are credible a lot of problems with that particularly our willingness to escalate to a nuclear level it gets really complicated which is why it deterrence by denial strategy where you just actually put in place the weapons and forces that make the achievement of the objective difficult if not impossible is a more logical one