We Can Do Hard Things
Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin
Wed, 26 Feb 2025
Elon’s Email Power Grab, What to Do & Why to Have Joy: Calm News with Jessica Yellin Award-winning journalist, Jessica Yellin, breaks down the latest news unfolding in the US and world. Today, Amanda and Jessica discuss Elon Musk’s unprecedented power grab—and what it means for democracy, national security, and your everyday life, as well as Germany’s recent elections, the relationship between the US, Ukraine, and Russia, and a little good news about a recent medical discovery to restore our faith in humanity. -The new demand from Musk that panicked federal employees—and why some consider it a national security crisis -What members of Congress are (and aren’t) doing to stop DOGE -Two urgent actions you can take today to hold government officials accountable -Why joy is a powerful tool of resistance and how to find some today On Jessica: Jessica Yellin is the founder of News Not Noise, a pioneering, Webby award-winning independent news brand. Over 1M+ subscribers and followers across Instagram and other digital media rely on Jessica and News Not Noise to understand what matters, which experts to trust, and to manage their “information overload.” She is the former chief White House correspondent for CNN and an Emmy and Gracie Award-winning political correspondent for ABC, MSNBC, and CNN. Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook @JessicaYellin. You can also find the News Not Noise Newsletter on Substack. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the goal of Calm News?
Oh, goodness gracious me. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Today, this is Amanda, and I am here with our beloved national treasure, Jessica Yellen. This is Calm News. We are deciding with Calm News not to put our head in the sand and also not to ride the chaos roller coaster. Instead, we are going to care enough to stay calm, clear-eyed, and action oriented. This is our goal.
We are here with Jessica Yellen. You know her, you love her. She is the founder of News Not Noise, a pioneering Webby award-winning independent news brand. Over 1 million subscribers and followers across Instagram and other digital media rely on Jessica and News Not Noise. to understand what matters, which experts to trust, and to manage their information overload.
She is the former chief White House correspondent for CNN and an Emmy and Gracie award-winning political correspondent for ABC, MSNBC, and CNN. Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at jessicoyellin. You can find the News Not Noise newsletter on Substack.
Jessica, how the hell are you? Hi, what a nice intro. I am well. I'm going to tell you something I didn't warn you of in advance, which is great. It's my birthday today. I know.
Oh, Jessica, happy birthday to you.
I didn't know that. But I just have a commitment today to be happy and chill no matter how wild the news is. And that's my gift to everyone listening too.
Is that cool? And my gift to you is I will join you in that. All evidence to the contrary. I will commit in honor of your birth to not losing my mind. Amazing.
If we can do it, everyone can do it, right? This is correct. This is correct. How are you? How is your week so far?
Well, I am in D.C., right outside of D.C. And so over here in terms of all of the Doge reverberations everywhere, I feel like for the past all weekend and then through Monday, I...
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Chapter 2: Why is Elon Musk's email causing panic among federal employees?
was talking to all of my friends who were deciding, do we send the email back that has, you know, they got this crazy email from Musk and asking them to list the five things they did in the last week, ostensibly to decide whether they should still have a job.
And then they were all getting this conflicting stuff from their supervisors, either not saying anything or saying, yes, you need to respond. No, wait, don't respond. Then yes, do respond, but don't put anything in it that anyone could find out. But then they couldn't say what they did if they couldn't put anything in it that was confidential or a potential security risk.
So it's just chaos and people don't know what the hell is going on.
I mean, that's totally normal at work, right? And it sounds very efficient. Right. Super high efficiency here, at the very least.
Exactly. Everyone's spending all the time deciding whether or not to respond to an email. It's the height of inefficiency from the person who's supposed to lead us to efficiency. So...
It's chaos over here. DC is so, it's so interesting. I used to live there. I don't anymore. And I just remember you have this, as a reporter, you have like this one level of understanding of what's happening at a systems level, doing the work all day. And then you go home and you run into people who are actually living the thing you were covering.
And you're like, oh my gosh, the human piece of this is just so painful or it can be beautiful or whatever. But in this case, it's, painful and confusing.
And you see people struggling. The point of this, right, is to make life so miserable for these federal servants that they leave. And I see that everybody's struggling with that. I mean, there's people on my street who have, you know, they've been working in divisions of protecting rights for 20 years. since college, since law school. And they just left because it's just too untenable.
And then there's people who are trying to stick it out because they know the work that they're doing is important. So you really see like the effects happening.
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Chapter 3: What are the national security risks of Musk's email?
But at some point they're going to be like, no, there's gravity. Yeah. So we're a little bit in that, like gravity's maybe starting to hit, but not yet. So right now government workers are like, okay, do I have to, like, what does this mean? And so as you lived through, I was hearing this as a reporter, people were reaching out to their managers all weekend, what do we do?
And getting conflicting messages. All of the agencies that deal explicitly with national security matters, classified material and intelligence told their staff by email, do not respond to this message.
In other words, if you worked for the FBI, run by Kash Patel now, if you worked for ODNI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, run by Tulsi Gabbard, you got an email saying, do not respond to this. Those agencies understood quickly that this was a deep national security threat and it would be dangerous for their employees to respond.
And even though these people are Trump loyalists, they broke with Musk and said don't. Other agencies like Social Security Administration said do comply and then change their guidance Monday. So some people were told over the weekend to comply, did so, learned Monday it could be a national security threat that they did so. One person wrote me and said, I feel sick to my stomach that I replied.
And then a lot of people got conflicting guidance. In many cases, it ended up with employees directed to reply if they want to. It's voluntary. And directed to be very generic if they do reply and not describe in any specific detail what they really did, but more broadly the kinds of things they did.
Why is it a national security risk or why did those agencies determine that this was too much of a risk for their people to respond?
Great question. It's because think about it like if every single person in the government sends in a description of the work they do and copies in who their manager is.
These emails create a map of our entire federal government and show what work is done within which agencies, who's working on Africa classified information, who's working on Russia matters, who's working on cybersecurity in the US, where cybersecurity loopholes lie inside the Social Security Administration.
Not only does it map all this information, it then clarifies these employees working on these things report up to this manager who reports up to that manager who reports on and on.
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Chapter 4: How is Congress reacting to Musk's actions?
We just have to hold on until Jessica's half birthday and we can say goodbye to Elon. What is happening elsewhere in the world?
Okay. Should we talk about foreign policy for a minute and then we can go to Congress? Let's do it. I'm trying to think of a happy thing that's happening first to talk about, but we can just go to the news. Is there a happy thing we could talk about? I don't know.
Okay. So the happy news that I saw that was very exciting in your newsletter was that a brilliant woman named Eva Ramon Gallegos came up with a treatment for HPV, which is the virus that causes cervical cancer. And It doesn't have these terrible side effects like chemotherapy, et cetera. So good job, Ava, way to keep our faith alive in humanity. That's a good news.
I love that. Yeah, she said that it has been proven to totally cure the illness in 29 women. That's real news that doesn't suck.
That is real news. That doesn't suck. Okay. So moving right along to things that suck, what's going on in the world?
That was a nice palate cleanser.
It was. I feel good about that 30 seconds we had. Nice. Thank you, Ava. Very good.
Okay. So let's go to the UN. So this week, it was the three-year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And the UN held two different votes that amounted to a call to condemn Russia for for invading Ukraine. And in a shocking move, the U.S. refused to sign on to that and instead sided with Russia in an effort inside the U.N. calling for peace, but without casting blame for the war at all.
That's weird.
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Chapter 5: What hopeful news is there in medical science?
And there's one thing I thought I'd ask you, Amanda, which is some people have said to me, like, I want to convene. I want to get together with my friends. And I've always wondered if there's, in this moment, a need for people across the country to form their own circles. Yes.
Where they can get together and like talk about the news, get informed, plan together to go to these things, solve together how to find those emails. So you're not in it alone.
Yes. I think that that's right. I've been thinking a lot about how much easier it is to break things than to make things and how much work isolating and depressing us does and how when the whole effort is to overwhelm make numb, depress, and have us not know which way is up, then resistance to that is connecting with each other, feeling relief and joy with each other,
building those connections because all of this is trying to destroy connections. And when you don't like your life, there's a lot less to fight for in your life. And so what I think we should be doing, whether it's for civic purposes or not, is really leaning into connections with our neighbors, with our community, with our friends of like holding onto the things that give life and
And that make us have something to fight for and that the only solutions to any of these things are going to be in community. So making sure that we're building strong that community base. So I love that idea. I love that idea.
That's beautiful. And you know what's so interesting is I interviewed this woman named Ann Applebaum, who's a Pulitzer Prize winning historian. She's written about Eastern Europe and Russia. Her expertise is authoritarianism. And when I ask what can regular people do to protect democracy, she said two things. Get involved in your local politics and connect with community to do that.
So build community locally, which is exactly what you're talking about. And the other thing is make sure you practice joy in your life. that it's literally what you're saying, that part of the project of authoritarianism is to crush your spirit.
And if you can continually fuel that fire of enjoyment, creativity, pleasure, wonder at the world, and especially in community with others, you're in the mindset of defense. And that itself is a form of resistance.
Defensive joy. I love that. I love that. That's so beautiful. Thank you, Ann Applebaum. And thank you, Jessica. We did it. We did. Happy birthday, Calm News. I feel calm. Even when it was hard. And I feel a desire to go get my joy right after I call my senator and my representative. Good priorities. In fact, I might take a little joy in the calling of my representative and my senators. Go for it.
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