If the Chinese hacked the U.S. government the way private citizen Elon has, it would be a major act of cyber warfare. And since Elon is a government contractor, he's now in a position to make policy calls that benefit his own companies and hurt his competitors—following the Russian oligarch model. We are in a completely lawless realm, and this is likely to continue until he is stopped. Meanwhile, government employees are being forced to choose between conforming or protecting the public. Plus, Elon is also sabotaging America's soft power and influence in Africa while he and the other tech overlords plot how to derail Europe's effort to regulate them. Anne Applebaum joins Tim Miller. show notes Wired article on the young, inexperienced engineers helping Elon Anne's 2020 piece about complicity (gifted) Josh Marshall's piece about Elon's operative *already* rewriting code at the Treasury Department Book Anne mentioned, "The Captive Mind" Anne's piece, "Europe's Elon Musk Problem" (gifted)
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 are you doing, Anne?
I'm okay. I mean, personally, I'm fine.
Yeah. 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'd 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 to have 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.
So I'm 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, you know, 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 extra legal situation. You can talk about Russian oligarchs and their ability to shape policy. 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 companies get subsidies. He also does work on behalf of the Pentagon. So clearly he's now able to make policy concerning his own
his own companies. He can look at the contracts given to his competitors. He can find out information about that. So there is a kind of Russian precedent for 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 U.S.
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 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 precedence 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 inside some Washington buildings, you know, and it's not yet affecting ordinary Americans, but it could. And we can, I'm happy to spin it out a little bit about what else, what other damage could be.
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 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 a partisan hack. He really has no... He does not have anywhere near the type of resume for such an important post as what should be a nonpolitical post. He put out a statement yesterday talking about investigating. And I think 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. I'm glad someone's doing that. And then I had to give it a second look. And I was like, no, 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, you know, either the treasury documents or at USAID, things that are classified, you know, with some of these efforts that are unclassified. In addition to that, there was a tweet by CaptiveDreamer7, which is like an anonymous MAGA account with a MAGA hat.
He tweeted at Ed Martin saying that Martin should investigate Twitter user Will Stansel for criticizing Elon Musk. Martin replied, thank you, noted.
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.
That's, as I say, I'm unable to think of a precedent in U.S. 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 U.S.
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 interesting and important. 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 other countries that are being taken, 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 and college students.
And they were revealed in a Wired article that as well as in, I saw a couple of people, others revealing them, discussing them online. And Musk is trying to shut that down. So not only does he want full access to U.S. government data, he wants secrecy about it.
Yeah, 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, you know, Iron Man trillionaire, like 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 that's 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.
People working inside The U.S. government at USAID or GSA or, you know, the Office of Personnel Management, whichever those offices are, you know, they're going to have to face choices and their choices. And some of them have faced them already this weekend and some have even paid prices for it. You know, do you follow the laws that exist?
For example, 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, you know, as you say, threatening people and with their jobs and so on. I mean, again, I just can't stress enough. I mean, 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 outside of the law new way means that we're already in a different phase of U.S. government.
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? I mean, and you have obviously done reporting and talked to people in Eastern Europe, other places where this sort of bullying 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 view. impulse right of wanting to get out of the line of fire i understand the impulse of wanting to be a whistleblower like what what are tactics that you think are sensible facing a threat such as this
First of all, I wrote a piece that was published in 2020 about complicity and why people conform and do things they know are wrong. And that was based on 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 Berkler. I went to see her in East Germany and 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 me about what percentage of people went along with it. I asked a question, something like that. And she 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 percent 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 lost your job. You were sort of an outcast, you know, so not everybody can afford to make that effort.
And, you know, here we're talking about the U.S. 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. 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 Weissman 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, like sent out a memo to everybody about what their rights are and staying in the job. But okay, well, Kash 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.
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 we 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, in any form, and some of it looks pretty nonsensical, like, would depend on the government department. But I mean, are you not allowed to measure diversity?
Are you not allowed to, you know, what about climate diversity? I mean, it's a word that gets used in many contexts. 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, 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 talk? We can't use the word justice. What about justice?
justice of the peace what about court justice so 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 the effect of different medication on different different populations and 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 you would call that gender, right? So if the word gender is banned, 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 ethics of their organizations are fired. Right.
And it may be arbitrary and capricious, right?
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, you know, or a concentration camp. I mean, you just say either you conform to this or you lose your job or either, you know, 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.
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 I want to read from Josh Marshall. He wrote on the question of doxing, 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 most people is rewriting the code base of one of the U S 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 is 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 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, whatever, or, you know, just computer 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's like a known choice from, from,
you know, authoritarian or occupation regimes, or you make the choice to be a dissident and 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 Czesław Miłosz, but he was a 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. 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, 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.
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 it 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. Like my point was always like your job isn't that important, right, 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 our data at the Treasury Department, right, are not the same as like some mid-level political staffer or PR staffer. Like I just think the choice is a lot more complicated in some of these situations.
I agree. Yeah. I agree. No, no, 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 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.
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There's some ways in which he's just so sui generis, but I was thinking about Hungary and about like his ownership of X Twitter. Right. And like how, in addition to being a government contractor, right. In addition to a donor, he also is the owner of a major, uh, 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 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 waste, changing the narrative about what he's doing.
I mean, there's an extra element of it as well, which is the way in which And you saw the original version of this was in the old Twitter files debate, which is also another thing that Musk does, and he's been doing it in the last couple of days. 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. I still don't know the veracity of this or 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.
So it was a... I think, yeah, also some immigrant stuff.
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 Faith-based organizations are sometimes better at running these kinds of services.
It was actually a big initiative during the Bush administration, getting faith-based organizations involved in government. Conservatives just before that, Christian conservatives were for that for a while.
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 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 anymore. I can't think of any exact parallel of being able to weaponize data and bits of information that he finds and turn them into Twitter talking points.
What he's just done to USAID, which is 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 us an extra twist.
Let's talk about the USAID and then I'll get to the Europe stuff because, again, this is another thing that's illegal. I worry that the phrase illegal is – people are going to start – will no longer have the impact with people because they just will hear this word like another illegal action by the Trump administration. 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 firehouse of illegal stuff, then it's like hard to focus on which illegal action is something worth protesting. I think 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 6th.
I discussed his racist past on yesterday's podcast. I 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.
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, you know, vague talk about how the U.S. is competing with China and Africa for influence, for example, or in Latin America. And actually, I wrote a book about it.
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, or maybe our former allies, as it might turn out. But one of the ways in which we compete is that we have, you know, ways 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 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.
So by destroying that, 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 really important. 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. This is not- IRI was involved, like the International Republican- So IRI is not part of USAID. I'm not sure actually.
So you cannot get money from USAID?
I'll explain. I'll get to that in a second. 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 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. You know, 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, you know, 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, you know, the IRI would have relationships with conservative parties in Europe and NDI would have relationships with center left parties. And, you know, there are a lot of other things that those organizations do that have been really, really important in maintaining the role of the U.S. as the leader of a broad democratic alliance.
None of it is very expensive by the standards of the U.S. budget. These are very small amounts of money. You know, 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 some very tiny, tiny thing.
Even the new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, made that point, very point in 2017, defending this against the first round of Trump attacks.
Yeah, 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 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 U.S. 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, 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 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.
Freedom, like all the small liberal values.
Freedom, freedom, another good word, yep. So freedom, you know, all those things are 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 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 U.S. is. A lot of people don't like the U.S. already, you know, stipulate.
And a lot of people always thought, you know, we talk about all that stuff, but it's bullshit. 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, you know, a leader for whom we were playing a leadership role are going to be devastated and disappointed.
And just even at just a more practical level, like outside of kind of using the democracy world speak, you know, 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. It mattered to them in their fight, but also it gave them a tangible thing to push back in internal politics. We shouldn't deal with the Chinese.
We shouldn't deal with the Russians 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.
And the Chinese are also willing to subsidize these foreign projects in a way that, you know, the U.S. government has never done 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 an advantage.
There's another tangible and tangible 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, 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 U S by itself, you know, having all this influence.
It was the U S plus Europe, really the developed world, the US plus the richest countries in the world, plus Europe, plus the Asian democracies, 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, in a way that was beneficial, that could set the rules of international law or influence them so that
so that we had fewer wars. This was where the power of the United States lay, was in its ability to have these values-based alliances. Russia doesn't have them. China doesn't have them. The fact that we had them is what, for a long time, made us different. If we're just giving that up, we don't care anymore. Democracy is not part of who we are.
And anyway, we're going to 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.
This actually takes us back to the Europe article, right? That our values-based allies. So your article about the concerns from Europe about Musk. I had written down three things, right, that it relates to. That's probably more. But tariffs, like the EU is worried that maybe we'll get into economic war over them. Maybe a little less concerned today than yesterday. I'll 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 know, you can't talk about how great tariffs 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 Europe has to be worried 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 issues. 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 what was once our values-based allies on what's happening over here with Musk and Trump.
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. 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.
I Googled it myself. I was like, it was after the election, right? Yeah, it was in December. It was after the election. Yeah, it was in December.
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 anonymously. You know, there's no rules, right? 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 they have these laws, and they're sovereign countries, right?
They're allowed to have laws. And hate speech laws, remember, protect the speech rights of people who have been doxxed or harassed as well. 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, if U.S.
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? Like, do you get to have your own elections?
And increasingly, I think Europeans fear that they don't. Twitter and Facebook and, you know, and these other companies are setting the, you know, 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, 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 You know, that's way beyond the reach of any single German newspaper. I mean, even the biggest, largest ones. And so, you know, the question is, is that fair? And so they do have some tools to regulate.
And I wrote about this 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, you know, 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.
That's pretty minor. I would have maybe said just like banned the algorithmic element of this, right? Where Elon just can post and like people that follow him see it, but like where it's not being promoted into their feed.
Right. There's another discussion and I don't know enough about where it is going and I'm not privy to any information.
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 it's how facebook originally worked
And that's 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 of months ago, something along the lines of, you know, if they regulate us, then why should we protect them? You know, sort of vaguely threatening and saying, you know, we'll pull out of NATO or something like that.
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 prerogative? 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 the AFD or not?
So there is gonna 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? Are they willing to defy the Trump administration, 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 it may be others who decide. So we're also, again, partly because of this extra legal situation where nobody really understands what is Musk's role. Does he speak for Trump? Does he speak for himself? that people are genuinely confused by it.
Everywhere I go, and 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.
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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.
Here we go. We're giving you 12 Mounties in exchange for the tariffs they've taken away. It's an interesting deal. That's right. A little short of becoming the 51st state, you know, if we're grading deals.
Yeah, I mean, it makes me wonder whether, you know, the hard thing for people also to understand outside of the U.S. and also maybe inside the U.S. is like, what is real and what's performative? Like, was this big bluster about huge tariffs, was that some kind of game for the base?
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 like... The base doesn't care about this. Trump is the only one that cares about this. So does he just 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 borders, like why would you do it right now until you understood what's, what is actually going to happen?
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 of Canada. I don't think they'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.
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 will be real effects. And I think this is going to – 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 U.S. is now like the U.S. 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.
On Tulsi, it seems like she's going to get confirmed. There was some – this one I was right on, so one for two. There was some chatter over the weekend that Tulsi was in trouble, that these normie Republican senators 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 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. Putting an Assad and Putin apologist in charge of intelligence isn't probably great.
You would have to ask whether it's possible to share intelligence with the United States, yes.
Even having that conversation is not great. They're having meetings about it now.
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, 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 for. But yeah, when you talk to her, you would want to be careful.
And then just the latest on Ukraine. There was an article yesterday. I didn't get a lot of attention because there's a lot happening. But Trump, I guess, considering a deal on U.S. 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 sense is of that and what the view is from folks in Kyiv.
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
you know, 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 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 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 u.s government or we're giving them to friends of trump or who are we giving them to i don't know but yeah folks in ukraine more optimistic that they might be open than maybe they had been to continued support or still pretty dire
hard to describe. I mean, I think people are, you know, there's a combination of fatalism, like, you know, whatever happens, 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
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 various ways.
Then there's, you know, at another level, there's another part of the army and part of the security apparatus who's worried they just don't have enough people and they're losing territory and they'll do whatever it takes to get U.S. help. But it's not really a question of, you know, optimism or pessimism.
I mean, they're going to keep fighting, you know, and they will do what they can to get the equipment and weapons that they need. And they will they will make whatever deal is required.
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 three weeks of our 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 urbanism do you feel like we are? Have we already shot past it? How would you rank it?
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 in 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 U.S. 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.
I mean, 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.
No, we're certainly I mean, certainly we're we're now in the realm of extra legality. 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 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. I do think they are going to continue trying to capture the civil service. They will try to capture the courts, 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. And I also think the, you said it already, 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 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.
All right. Well, we've all got some work to do. Thank you so much, Anne, 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.
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The Borg Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.