A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein - March 20, 2026


What I Learned From 12 Hours of DOGE Bro Depositions (with Krystal Ball)

We All Deserve Better Than Gavin Newsom (with Emma Vigeland and Kat Blaque) The Campaign To Crush Chappell Roan

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 39 minutes

Words per minute

171.79

Word count

17,152

Sentence count

939

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

68

sentences flagged

Hate speech

65

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Each of those grants funded projects, real projects by real people.
00:00:04.700 Some of those funds were used to pay for housing.
00:00:07.840 Now those funds are gone. Does that make you feel anything in particular?
00:00:11.320 Exactly.
00:00:13.780 No. I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero.
00:00:19.840 Did you reduce the federal deficit?
00:00:22.020 No, we didn't.
00:00:23.120 So you weren't able to reduce the deficit,
00:00:25.140 and you still don't regret that people lost some of their livelihood based on your actions?
00:00:31.900 Objection.
00:00:33.440 No.
00:00:39.260 Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.
00:00:43.100 I'm Matt Bernstein.
00:00:44.160 We have a great show today.
00:00:45.020 What do we have, Crystal? 1.00
00:00:45.900 We are going to be talking about the Doge Boys.
00:00:48.420 I just always wanted to do the Breaking Points intro. 1.00
00:00:50.820 Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.
00:00:54.080 I'm Matt Bernstein. We have a great show today. What do we have, Crystal?
00:00:57.480 Indeed we do.
00:00:58.760 Thank you.
00:00:59.700 Is that what you were going for?
00:01:01.080 Yes. I wanted an indeed we do.
00:01:05.980 Last year, at the direction of a newly re-elected Donald Trump,
00:01:10.400 Elon Musk, the world's richest man, established the Department of Government Efficiency,
00:01:15.300 or DOGE, named after the 54-year-old's favorite internet meme.
00:01:19.300 Elon Musk, whose wealth could single-handedly end world hunger,
00:01:22.240 was on a mission with Doge to cut what he viewed as wasteful government spending and lower the
00:01:28.640 federal deficit. This was perhaps most notably done at the behest of Executive Order 14151,
00:01:36.080 which Donald Trump signed the day he entered office in 2025, and which required the termination
00:01:42.640 of all activities relating to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. What does that mean
00:01:49.000 Exactly. Today, we may or may not find out. Elon Musk hired a group of 20-something-year-old young
00:01:56.120 men, and over the course of a few months, they terminated thousands of federal grants,
00:02:01.140 gutted entire federal agencies, and upended countless people's lives and careers.
00:02:06.380 Doge immediately ended USAID, which brought humanitarian assistance in the form of
00:02:11.620 life-saving medicine, education, food, and water to people in some of the most impoverished parts
00:02:16.100 of the world. According to the New York Times, one canceled grant, quote, provided an education
00:02:21.420 program in Nepal to keep girls in middle school to avoid early forced marriages. When that grant
00:02:27.680 was canceled, parents in Nepal could no longer afford to keep their girls in school. The National
00:02:32.860 Endowment for the Humanities, or NEH, a federal grant-making agency that supports research,
00:02:38.560 education, and public programs across the country, was gutted by 97% in 22 days.
00:02:44.940 Cuts included museum air conditioning funding, newspaper digitization, documentary filmmaker grants, and more.
00:02:54.320 By the end of 2025, Fortune estimated that the number of jobs destroyed by Doge-related cuts was 400,000.
00:03:03.140 A few of the groups whose grants were cut due to DEI, including the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association, filed a lawsuit seeking to reinstate their funding.
00:03:12.760 And so lawyers recently deposed two young Doge employees, Doge Bros as you might know them, named Justin Fox and Nathan Kavanaugh about their time at Doge and why and how they canceled thousands of grants at the NEH.
00:03:29.880 Videos of their depositions were available online until a few days ago,
00:03:34.600 when the government asked for them to be removed,
00:03:37.060 saying that they had no legitimate bearing on the case.
00:03:39.520 The judge ordered for the depositions to be taken down,
00:03:42.700 and now those full videos are nowhere to be found on the internet.
00:03:47.220 I don't agree with the government or the judge.
00:03:50.000 I think people who terrorize the livelihoods and careers
00:03:52.840 of hundreds of thousands of Americans should be household names.
00:03:56.880 I think they should be celebrities.
00:03:57.880 If they can, with the flick of a wrist, upend our lives based on their judgment of our usefulness,
00:04:04.860 I think we're entitled to judge them with a fraction of the same scrutiny.
00:04:08.460 So, thanks to the person who bravely stored all of these depositions on the Internet Archive, 0.91
00:04:13.440 I spent 12 hours watching Justin and Nathan make their case about why LGBTQ people don't deserve funding.
00:04:20.380 You and Mr. Fox identified this as one of the craziest trans at any age? 0.97
00:04:24.200 Yes, it appears so. 0.69
00:04:25.680 Why did you do that?
00:04:26.780 Because it explicitly says LGBTQ. 1.00
00:04:31.640 And today, I'm going to make my case about why we don't hate these people enough. 0.94
00:04:38.080 That's what we got going on today, Crystal.
00:04:40.100 And to do that, I am so excited to be joined by Crystal Ball.
00:04:44.460 You most likely know her as the co-host of Breaking Points, which is definitely part of my news diet. 0.99
00:04:50.840 Crystal, welcome to the show.
00:04:52.840 It is an honor and a privilege. Thank you for having me.
00:04:55.000 How do you feel top line before we get into because I essentially spent yesterday watching 12 hours of deposition footage in 2x speed, which severely fried my brain, as one might imagine. And I and I clipped those depositions up and we're just going to watch them today. A couple of these clips have gone viral, but a lot of them haven't. And I think it's important to have these on the Internet. Hopefully no one comes after me for for putting them there.
00:05:20.680 Yeah, I've seen the ones that went viral, where basically what comes across is two relatively young but grown men who signed up for this job where they could run rampant through the federal government.
00:05:35.100 They thought with impunity, they thought with no accountability, not really having much of a sense of what they're doing outside of the vibes.
00:05:43.060 They probably, you know, worship Elon. They probably worship Trump. It's part of the moment of the vibe shift and the sense of dominance of the Trump MAGA movement, this sense of ascendance, the sense of acting with total impunity.
00:05:57.760 And so they come in and are just running roughshod over things that they, frankly, have no understanding of what these programs are, what these grants are doing, and have an almost like sociopathic detachment from any of the real world consequences of the job that they are undertaking. 0.99
00:06:13.900 And that level of sociopathy and stupidity definitely come through in these depositions. 0.98
00:06:21.080 So do you want to meet Justin Fox? 1.00
00:06:23.400 Let's do it.
00:06:24.160 okay I'm gonna actually text you a photo of Justin Fox just so we can establish a visual
00:06:33.660 for everyone Crystal listens to a bit fruity so she has to know this song and dance we do with
00:06:37.820 like I'm gonna send you a photo and you're gonna tell me what you see I'm ready to go
00:06:41.200 okay yes I see him this is not a show where I judge people on their looks and this really isn't
00:06:49.840 about his appearance as it were. I think it's more about his styling, how he comes across.
00:06:56.960 Tell me what you're getting from this image of a young Justin Fox.
00:07:00.640 Young, a very quizzical or confused look on the face. Eyes narrowed in bewilderment. We've got a
00:07:08.140 beige quarter zip going over top of a light blue striped button down.
00:07:13.860 Indeed we do. When I started seeing these video depositions, I was just like, oh man,
00:07:19.180 like, I went to high school with these guys. I went to college with these guys. These guys were
00:07:24.280 in fraternities, you know, and I know he's not a stand in for every privileged, young, straight
00:07:30.440 white guy. But he doesn't make an effort to fight the stereotype, let's say. Well, here's one of the
00:07:35.740 things that I'm curious about since you watched the 12 hours of the depositions. And I'm just
00:07:40.680 going off of the clips in my general sense of what Doge was all about and what these guys were all
00:07:45.280 about is i have a theory of intelligence that there's a bit of like there's like a bit of a
00:07:49.620 horseshoe on the iq curve where what we were sold about these doge bros is that they were like these
00:07:56.800 super savant young geniuses that were going to be deployed in the federal government and so
00:08:04.140 i'm curious if that was at all reflective of reality but also i think it can also be the case 0.98
00:08:11.260 that someone can technically like elon probably has a very high iq and it's also one of the dumbest 0.91
00:08:16.880 people you could ever meet in your entire life were you to have the misfortune of meeting him
00:08:21.040 and so i'm wondering if that applies to some of the you know elon doge bro acolytes as well
00:08:27.060 they definitely do come across as like young elon proteges as you all are about to see iq is also
00:08:34.320 just like not as far as i'm concerned a real measure of like anything agreed they might pass
00:08:41.700 an iq test with flying colors but these men to say the least uh are not intelligent in any way
00:08:46.620 that would be meaningful to certainly to the public totally so justin fox attended uva oh
00:08:54.300 that's where i went to school oh i mean one of the things we do in this podcast is create empathy so
00:09:00.920 So, you know, at least we're building some bridges with Justin Fox.
00:09:04.920 This might be the first and last.
00:09:06.480 I mean, he's much younger than me, but I'm zeroing in on the type here, just knowing that he went to UVA.
00:09:11.020 He graduated in 2020.
00:09:13.400 He majored in commerce and minored in German.
00:09:16.900 He interned for Morgan Stanley, doing wealth management during college.
00:09:22.620 He has no graduate degrees or PhDs.
00:09:26.220 He previously worked at a private equity firm called Nexus. 1.00
00:09:30.140 I feel like I have to put on a voice when I start saying this shit. 0.99
00:09:33.500 It's like I'm reading a resume. 0.99
00:09:36.480 Yeah.
00:09:37.020 His income at Nexus with a private equity firm was a base salary, $130,000 a year.
00:09:44.940 Bonuses were anywhere from zero to $100,000 additional dollars.
00:09:50.420 Prior to that, he was an investment banker at Jeffries.
00:09:53.560 So he had a finance background that I would go so far as to say his privilege bought him into.
00:10:01.280 It's a very elite sounding pedigree.
00:10:04.020 So even UVA, obviously, it's a public school, but it's one of the best public schools in the country.
00:10:08.900 The fact he majored in, they don't call it business, they call it commerce.
00:10:12.100 You have to apply separately to be in the comm school, as they call it.
00:10:15.840 He's got all these these very well-known, prominent, prestigious checkmarks in terms of financial institutions he's associated with.
00:10:24.340 He's climbing this career trajectory, which is very aspirational for a lot of the people that I went to school with at UVA as well.
00:10:31.060 So you can see the track that he's on. Clearly, if he went to UVA, if he's able to get in the comm school, if he's able to get at these institutions,
00:10:37.700 this is someone who has always you know succeeded in school and done well and gotten the pats on
00:10:43.860 the head and is on the up and up and has also the the privilege of being this you know coming from
00:10:49.020 this background being a white man of people patting him on the head and saying he's you know
00:10:52.520 he's brilliant he's a genius he's the next big thing yeah and the last thing i'll say to that
00:10:57.420 end is like part of what to me is so disgusting about this entire situation why i want to make
00:11:03.760 this episode is that the premise of doge particularly as it related to cutting grants
00:11:09.120 related to dei which is grants for gay and black people and women who talk about you know sexual
00:11:16.580 violence or whatnot is that you know they're getting ahead they're getting these grants from 0.70
00:11:22.880 the government they're getting based on weaponizing the the apparent privilege associated with having
00:11:28.420 a marginalized identity and we should everything should be merit-based that's they say this over
00:11:33.380 and over and over and over again. So tell me why this project is DEI. Projection.
00:11:41.080 It's promoting inclusion and diverse perspectives. Okay. What about diverse perspectives is DEI?
00:11:48.240 It's not merit-based. When you look at this person, as we are about to do, you really get
00:11:54.980 the sense that DEI policies at companies where maybe they would try to balance their hiring
00:12:03.660 ratio across different demographics and stuff, maybe tilted the scale like 1% away from the
00:12:10.720 innate privilege that young, white, privileged, wealthy men like Justin Fox have always had
00:12:17.940 and continue to have. And to me, that's the thing that's so egregious, is that these are the
00:12:23.380 ultimate privileged people. They are the ultimate winners of identity politics in their being
00:12:28.220 straight white men. Well, and that's why there was an appeal with Trump. And that's why there 0.57
00:12:32.900 was an appeal with Doge. He saw this as a sort of I mean, it's a sort of like class solidarity,
00:12:38.960 right? It's like, no, this I was promised this certain system where I would have this privilege
00:12:44.540 and anything that undercuts that even a little bit. And it also speaks to a capitalist like
00:12:49.160 zero-sum mindset all of those things are attacks on me that's a problem for me so that can provide
00:12:56.460 the motivation and the other thing that i'll say is just like it sounds like such a joke at this
00:13:01.680 point to talk about the trump regime having a merit-based approach when you look at the people
00:13:06.840 they filled this administration with pete hegseth is just absurd ridiculous you know cartoon character 0.64
00:13:14.200 type of person cash patel are you kidding me keystone cash you know it's utterly devoid of 0.61
00:13:21.200 merit i mean most of these people part of why they're there is because they can never ascend
00:13:25.760 to this level of role in any other administration and under any other government so this is their
00:13:31.080 one chance to get in there and do something and so that's why they're there it's not because they
00:13:35.860 deserve it it's because they're willing to pledge a level of fealty and they're willing to be
00:13:40.580 humiliated for the cause. Couldn't have said it better myself. This is why we have Crystal today.
00:13:47.660 So Justin Fox goes from his couple years in finance after UVA to work at Doge,
00:13:53.920 where his salary was around $150,000. Did he have any relevant experience for that job?
00:14:00.080 Let's take a listen. Before joining the government in March of 2025,
00:14:06.540 did you have any experience in government?
00:14:12.540 No.
00:14:14.540 Were you ever part of any political campaigns?
00:14:19.540 No.
00:14:21.540 Did you ever engage in any public grant administration
00:14:24.540 before you joined government?
00:14:30.540 No.
00:14:31.540 Private grant administration?
00:14:36.540 No.
00:14:37.920 Had you ever engaged in anything that required you to review scholarship for scholarly merit before you joined the government?
00:14:51.040 This is in 1.25 speed, by the way.
00:14:55.040 Oh my god.
00:14:59.040 I can't remember.
00:15:04.620 Wow. 0.98
00:15:05.420 This is DEI for white men. 0.63
00:15:08.040 Well, in the position inherently selected for this type of person, because who else was going to sign up for the job of like rip things apart at the request of Elon Musk and Donald Trump come in with no background in government and just run rampant. 0.68
00:15:25.380 And so you're going to get a certain type who is going to think that, you know, that they're entitled to make those sorts of decisions, that they're, you know, perceived like IQ or academic success or privilege back or whatever gives them the right to issue these decisions to the lowly mortals. 1.00
00:15:43.660 And I'm sure they have all kinds of contempt for government workers, all kinds of contempt for the the libtards, right, who are pushing these grants, et cetera. 0.98
00:15:51.940 And so it comes from this sort of superior view of I get to say and throughout my whole life, I've been on this ascendant track and also a sort of Internet fueled disconnection from what the reality of what this is going to mean for people, what the reality is going to mean for the government, what even it is that you're doing and how you're being used as a tool in someone else's larger political game. 1.00
00:16:18.300 Totally. Justin Fox was hired to do work at Doge by a man named Anthony Armstrong, a businessman
00:16:26.320 and collaborator of Elon Musk, who is now the CFO of XAI, which is Elon Musk's AI company.
00:16:34.960 By the way, I will add, so many of the people who make some of the most consequential decisions
00:16:40.100 in our lives aren't famous. We don't know their names. They're not Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or
00:16:45.880 Donald Trump. They're the people who work like one or two rungs below them. They accrue so much
00:16:50.900 power. They accrue so much money and they never get any of the public scrutiny involved, which
00:16:56.660 is another motivation for us being here today. Just wanted to add that. Yeah, I think that's
00:17:01.060 right. And also there's just an important principle of transparency as well, because
00:17:06.020 here we are more than a year after the Doge Project launched and there are still massive
00:17:11.400 questions about what did they do? What were the real goals here? Because we know no money was
00:17:17.360 actually saved. So and I personally don't think that was ever really the goal. How much was AI
00:17:23.000 deployed? How much data was compromised? What are the sort of government functions which have been
00:17:27.800 lost potentially permanently? So to focus on these characters and also what the hell it was that they
00:17:33.800 were up to during their time, I think is vitally important. So Justin Vox was hired by Anthony
00:17:39.960 armstrong this guy who knows elon musk how did justin fox know anthony armstrong let's find out
00:17:46.980 he's the father of one of my friends
00:17:52.260 yeah that tracks that tracks what are we doing
00:17:57.340 yeah i don't want to make too much of this episode me just like oh
00:18:02.840 but it's like there comes a point right and and you're the one opposed to dei
00:18:09.260 Right. And that's the thing is like it honestly is such a mirror on how you do end up perpetuating these structures where it's like, you know, since the previous elites were mostly white and male and straight, then the next era of elites, because they have a connection to those, that's how the whole pipeline works.
00:18:30.040 So he's just a microcosm, you know, of that phenomenon, which does persist in our society.
00:18:34.700 So top line thoughts. Does Justin Fox think he succeeded in reducing federal spending during his six months working at Doge?
00:18:43.160 Before we get into the details of his workflow, let's find out.
00:18:48.120 Do you feel that you succeeded looking back now and achieving that goal?
00:18:57.260 In some ways, yes.
00:18:59.800 Did the deficit go down during your tenure at the government?
00:19:03.100 in other ways no do you know that the deficit did not go down at all yes i do in fact the
00:19:10.860 spending went up they did manage to fire a massive number of people and so in a sense i actually
00:19:18.820 think he's correct in this answer that in terms of the stated public goals of doge it was a massive
00:19:26.320 failure you know spending went up the debt continues to grow and that was really the
00:19:30.920 presentation is oh we're going to trim the fat we're going to make the government more efficient
00:19:35.120 that part certainly didn't happen and so we're going to cut spending remember the original
00:19:38.820 promise of doge was two trillion dollars that they were going to cut from the budget then it
00:19:43.240 was one trillion then it was put down to like 150 billion even that they didn't accomplish
00:19:47.800 anything close to that then it was 25 bucks right exactly we're all going to get doge checks in the
00:19:54.880 mail remember that they just like pretended they never said that and everybody just moved on but
00:19:59.780 And Doge really was the sort of front for effectuating a lot of the goals of Project 2025.
00:20:05.620 It also was a front for effectuating a lot of goals that Elon had, both in terms of his business and also ideological goals.
00:20:13.580 These are people, including Elon, who hate the government.
00:20:16.600 A functioning government is a rival for power to the business world.
00:20:20.980 So in a sense, just destroying, defenestrating the government, gunning it, going after ideological opponents, stripping down its capacity, attacking these agencies that, again, they see as liberal and that compete for power against the business world or against the ideological allies of President Trump.
00:20:39.240 That was the real goal. And they did accomplish some of that. Some of that they actually did accomplish.
00:20:45.140 Also, I feel like in this there is a there's an aspect of like the cruelty is the point. Yes, they were able to upend hundreds of thousands of jobs, so many of which belonged to minorities and save no money at all. And so it's like, how can you say that the cruelty is not the point? 0.98
00:21:03.440 Yeah, that's right. And look, it'd be one thing. I used to be back many, many years ago, right out of college at UVA. I was a federal government contractor. I worked for a contractor and my client was the U.S. federal court system. And so I've been inside of that world. And look, I think anyone would say, yes, there are ways you can make it more efficient. You see Zoran in New York City saying, all right, we're going to trim the fat. We're going to do a better job. We need to respect taxpayer dollars.
00:21:26.700 That is a project that I think doesn't have to be ideological and that many, many people across the political spectrum could buy into. But even with the people that got pushed out or decided to leave the government, it was the opposite of merit based.
00:21:42.460 So it wasn't, by and large, the people who aren't doing a good job and are kind of excessive or not really needed, superfluous in terms of their roles.
00:21:53.640 It was, by and large, the people who took the fork in the road and decided to go elsewhere were the ones who could go in the private sector and earn a different paycheck.
00:22:00.660 So it was the opposite of the merit-based approach.
00:22:03.540 a bulk of the people you lost were some of the top performers, some of the most important people
00:22:07.800 in the government, as evidenced by the fact that they had multiple times where key functions were
00:22:12.780 lost. They had to quit, go back and hire people because it was just such a collapse in some
00:22:18.000 function that was actually needed for the federal government. But again, I think losing that talent
00:22:24.540 from government, that's not necessarily a bad thing from the perspective of, for example,
00:22:29.760 Ross Vogt, who was the spearheaded Project 2025, and he's the Office of Management and Budget
00:22:35.100 director and is really the person who is the ideological architect of this attack on the
00:22:40.760 federal government. He wants the government to be degraded. He wants it to be stacked with loyalists.
00:22:46.300 He wants it to be set up to fail. That serves him and his ideological interests. So even that
00:22:52.600 approach, as we look from the outside, like this is crazy and you're losing all the best people,
00:22:56.240 they're like, yeah, we are. And that's actually cool with us because we want the federal government
00:23:00.620 to suck. Pretty dismal shit. So let's get back to laughing at Justin Fox. No, I'm kidding. That 1.00
00:23:07.240 was so dismissive. Crystal, you're so you're so intelligent. And you texted me before we started
00:23:11.500 and you were like, I didn't watch the depositions, but I do have a lot of thoughts. And I'm so
00:23:16.700 excited to hear all of them. So what were the finer details of Justin Fox's work? He was the
00:23:22.700 main DOGE member assigned to gutting the National Endowment for the Humanities, the NEH. During his
00:23:29.580 tenure, DOGE gutted over $100 million worth of NEH grants. These are grants, my dear listener,
00:23:37.600 that are going to researchers, they're going to scholars, they're going to people who run museums,
00:23:43.300 they're going to artists, they're going to filmmakers. I don't know how to explain to you
00:23:48.800 that like culture is important. So what was the basis for which Justin Fox decided what was on
00:23:54.520 the chopping block? Let's go back to Justin. Did you use any particular methodology in assessing
00:24:00.760 NEH grants for termination? There was an executive order that said to eliminate spend on DEI.
00:24:10.420 Crystal, are you ready to hear Justin Fox's definition for DEI? I think I am. I think I'm
00:24:17.120 not sure but i think i am this is a longer clip and so we are now officially entering
00:24:21.420 1.5 speed
00:24:24.980 the audience thanks you how do you interpret dei
00:24:30.100 there was the eo explicitly laid out the details i don't remember it off the top of my head it's
00:24:41.180 okay i'm asking for your understanding of it yeah my understanding was exactly what was written in
00:24:43.680 I don't remember what was in the EO.
00:24:45.680 So right now, do you have an understanding of what DEI is?
00:24:47.680 Yeah.
00:24:48.680 Okay, so what's your understanding as you sit here today in this deposition?
00:24:51.680 Well, it was exactly what was written in the EO.
00:24:54.680 And so anytime that we would look at a grant through the lens of complying with an executive order,
00:24:58.680 we would just refer back to the EO and assess if this grant had relation to it.
00:25:02.680 Okay, but I guess stepping back from your methodology strictly in terminating the grants,
00:25:06.680 do you have an understanding as you sit here today of what DEI means?
00:25:09.680 Yeah.
00:25:10.680 Okay, so what's your understanding of what it means?
00:25:11.680 Well, it is exactly what was written in the EO.
00:25:15.380 And I don't have the EO in front of me,
00:25:17.320 but we would always reference back to the EO and make sure that
00:25:19.900 this grant was in compliance with the EO.
00:25:21.460 I understand that. But I'm not asking necessarily about what was in the EO.
00:25:24.620 I'm asking very specifically about your present understanding of DEI.
00:25:29.340 Do you have a present understanding of DEI?
00:25:30.680 Yeah.
00:25:31.180 Can you explain what that present understanding is?
00:25:33.320 Well, it's just easier for me to be referencing back to the EO.
00:25:35.980 Are you refusing to answer the question?
00:25:36.980 I'm not refusing to answer the question.
00:25:37.980 I just feel that referencing back to the verbatim executive order was the best way for us to capture all of the DEI language.
00:25:45.740 And so I think giving a high-level overview of what I could relay as DEI is not going to do justice what was written in the EO.
00:25:52.380 And that's okay. We can look at the EO as well.
00:25:54.260 I'm asking you for, I mean, this is a deposition. I'm asking you questions. You're under oath.
00:25:56.800 So what is your understanding of what DEI means?
00:25:59.760 Well, I think I would say, again, that I would go back to the EO to make sure I'm capturing enough.
00:26:03.680 I don't feel comfortable saying a high-level overview because it is such a big bucket and there's just a lot of pieces of the puzzle.
00:26:09.560 What's a part of the bucket?
00:26:11.640 Gender fluidity, sort of promoting subsets of LGBTQ+, that might alienate another part of a community. 0.64
00:26:28.200 Again, it was just easier for us to reference back into the EL. 0.60
00:26:32.540 Okay.
00:26:32.940 And I don't want to give you a broad overview because it's like, at the end of the day, it is capturing, it is all-encompassing in the EO.
00:26:39.140 It's how we did our methodology.
00:26:40.800 Right.
00:26:41.680 Do you always refer to EOs to gain an understanding of words used in your typical daily vernacular?
00:26:49.000 Objection.
00:26:50.240 Ooh.
00:26:54.400 I personally think this attorney deserves, like, a Nobel Prize.
00:26:59.100 Incredible.
00:26:59.540 My favorite part of Sony is, like, it's a broad bucket.
00:27:02.940 and the attorney's like well what's in the bucket tell me a part of the bucket and justin fox is
00:27:07.700 basically like well i guess trans stuff and also like trans stuff i guess but i don't want to get
00:27:14.580 too specific i'm not comfortable he says the one where i'm not comfortable getting more specific
00:27:18.960 which i think is a very revealing comment because he knows in his mind the way he thinks about dei
00:27:25.360 it's like the women the blacks the browns the gays the trans but if you say it outright it
00:27:31.360 doesn't sound so good now does it just a box exactly because like the thing is i mean we make
00:27:36.600 all these jokes especially on the left of like oh nobody can define dei but we all know what they
00:27:43.580 think dei is it is uh anything that promotes the acceptance of the equality of the dignity of
00:27:54.420 a minority group and you know something they fall back on a lot in these depositions is like
00:28:00.340 well you know dei is anything relating to a specific race or sexuality or gender and then
00:28:08.860 i mean i i can't play you the full 12 hours of deposition because we would be here for like
00:28:13.700 three times that length to talk about it which i know as much as you guys might enjoy listening to
00:28:18.280 me i don't think anyone wants that but uh they would reference back to lists that these people 0.70
00:28:23.380 made for words that they would look for in grant descriptions and they would go lgbtq and homosexual
00:28:29.480 are on this list. Why isn't heterosexual on this list? And you put on here homosexual. 0.50
00:28:37.500 I don't see heterosexual though. Could you scroll down?
00:28:47.180 Don't know why I didn't put heterosexual, but it is not on this list. Okay. Do you see white
00:28:53.760 on this list? I see privilege. Do you see white on this list? Could you scroll back up?
00:29:04.120 No. And we know why, because it's not about singling out any sexuality or any race. It's
00:29:10.200 about minorities existing and like getting funding for their fucking galleries. Yeah. Well, to me, 1.00
00:29:17.280 one of the most telling moments in terms of exposing what they really think is quote unquote
00:29:22.680 dei is i remember somebody called the mayor of baltimore a dei mayor because he's a black man
00:29:29.280 it's like this man like literally the definition of a merit-based position he had to run for office
00:29:35.480 he got elected by the people in his city in what way is this some you know unfair advantage that
00:29:41.860 he got no he is the mayor of the city the fact that he's black is why you think he's quote unquote
00:29:48.120 dei and this is what it became shorthand for uh remember when the silicon valley bank collapsed
00:29:55.460 and we were also a bunch of right-wing influencers also led us to believe that the reason was because
00:30:00.400 they like had one gay person on their board or something like that so it was a dei bank the 0.89
00:30:04.920 the california wildfires got out of control because some of the firefighters were lesbians
00:30:08.960 right yeah that was that was another great one that was another great one dei hires for dei fires 1.00
00:30:14.780 Sorry. So it's abundantly obvious what Justin Fox, he knows what this means to him. He just
00:30:25.840 can't articulate it because it sounds so terrible when you actually spell out the truth of what he
00:30:30.780 was doing in this role and what he saw himself to be doing in this role. Exactly. When he says
00:30:35.920 that he's uncomfortable stating the definition for DEI, that I believe because it makes you look 1.00
00:30:42.560 like a homophobic transphobic racist piece of shit which is what all of these people were very happy 0.99
00:30:48.040 to be when they could do it in the comfort of their sort of anonymized boys club fraternity 1.00
00:30:54.180 within the government like that's what this was at one point in his deposition he literally calls
00:30:58.420 doge a club within the government doge felt more like a club of folks with a different mission than
00:31:07.200 traditional folks that were career employees wow wow well and that's without even getting into the
00:31:12.840 next layer of like there's no one who gets more like woke in an authoritarian way than this
00:31:19.060 government when it comes to cracking down on any like anti-israel sentiment and calling that
00:31:24.520 anti-semitism and actually you know using authoritarian tactics to jail people and
00:31:29.680 criminalize any sort of dissent on this issue so yeah it's all very uh very selective and very
00:31:34.960 particular. I would like to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to Blueland
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00:33:07.240 slash fruity. Thank you to Blueland. And now let's get back to the episode.
00:33:14.520 So the attorney then questions Justin Fox specifically about what makes LGBTQ DEI.
00:33:22.160 Why is, in your view, is LGBTQ DEI?
00:33:29.460 this is based on the eo discussing underrepresented minority groups of which
00:33:44.960 lgbtq is often associated with that actually was his entire explanation that was the whole thing
00:33:51.400 that was the whole thing incredible you can see him like going through his mind thinking of like
00:33:55.880 how can i say this because he undoubtedly has some gay friends that he's like uh let me how
00:34:02.300 can i talk about this in a way that's not just gonna like make me look like a total bigoted 0.99
00:34:07.100 asshole there's a distinction between justin fox and nathan cavanaugh who are going to meet in a 0.98
00:34:11.460 little bit while justin i think is pretty clearly unintelligent let's say okay constantly at a loss 1.00
00:34:20.180 for words let's also say Nathan is a little more of like a slick smarmy asshole definitely a lot 0.99
00:34:27.600 more like LGBTQ is DEI because it's a minority fuck you I don't feel badly I think Justin is 1.00
00:34:34.800 both dumb and also has a little bit of shame these people thought that they would never be 1.00
00:34:40.080 held accountable I think that sentiment really shines through in this next thing I clipped 0.96
00:34:45.240 Justin starts doing something really interesting which is he plays heavily into the idea that he
00:34:49.760 was just following orders. Despite everything we know, right, about how much power these young men
00:34:56.360 were given, like they were selecting grants to be terminated. They say a lot of like, I was just
00:35:02.140 making lists of grants to be approved by someone else, to be looked at by someone else, to be looked
00:35:05.900 at someone else. Like I was just a cog in the wheel. But we know that that's not true. He seems
00:35:10.520 very uncomfortable with the idea that his decisions caused grants to be terminated and lives to be
00:35:16.420 Why would you suggest that grants about those issues be terminated?
00:35:22.900 I didn't suggest they be terminated.
00:35:24.580 I only tagged their relationship to DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
00:35:28.340 With the understanding that you marking that would service a precursor, a signal to cancel those grants, right?
00:35:33.360 A signal to review those grants.
00:35:35.600 On the road to termination, right?
00:35:37.380 A section.
00:35:38.800 If that's what they wanted to do, yes.
00:35:40.500 Well, I'm a little confused. Your goal with Doge was to save money, right? Reduce the deficit and apply these EOs on the road to those goals, right?
00:35:47.020 Objection.
00:35:48.120 To assist agency heads with being in compliance with EOs. Part of the EOs were to find savings through reduction in spend.
00:35:55.640 Right. Right. Okay. And so part of it, we discussed this hours ago. Part of your work was to help to identify grants for termination, right?
00:36:04.520 I'm not saying you terminated that, but I just want to be clear that we're kind of collating these things. I'm not saying them all at once.
00:36:08.980 part of your job was to identify grants for potential to renaissance is that fair to say
00:36:12.980 for the review of mike and mike and adam yeah i mean that is very revealing of a mentality where
00:36:20.680 he wants to not have any of the responsibility placed in his hands he wants to say oh it wasn't
00:36:27.000 really my decision i was just flagging things we also know they use chat gpt a lot to just
00:36:31.880 go through and find like the word trans so that's how you end up with this you spoiled my next
00:36:37.000 jumping ahead all right well i'll we'll table that for now but you also get this from his body
00:36:45.700 language there's a lot of like heavy sighs of like oh like he's frustrated he's sort of tormented
00:36:51.940 he can't explain himself he's got a war going on in his brain between rationalizing what he did and
00:36:58.020 also not fully wanting to say what it was his understanding of what he was doing and it very
00:37:04.620 much gives someone who was kind of like caught up in the heat of the moment, you know, Oh, Elon's
00:37:10.080 this, this bill is the richest man on the planet. He's so cool. And he's waving around this chainsaw
00:37:14.460 and I'm in this, this administration with Trump and Trump is such a bad-ass. He went on all the 0.69
00:37:19.240 podcasts I like. And now here I am at the heart of it all. It gives someone who got swept up in
00:37:25.300 the heat of the moment and is now having at least some sense of, Oh, I'm not sure that everything I
00:37:31.940 did was really great. And I don't really want to have to reckon with what the downstream impacts
00:37:38.020 of this whole thing ended up being. And it's so interesting, right? Because he thought he was
00:37:42.660 acting with impunity. He was having fun. He was probably high on his own supply as well as Elon's
00:37:48.520 supply. And what's interesting is that through this case and it becoming so public, what strikes
00:37:55.700 me is that these two young men who were making $150,000, which is a lot of money, but it's not
00:38:03.300 Elon money. It's not whoever Anthony Armstrong is. It's not Anthony Armstrong money. And it's
00:38:10.180 interesting that they become the sacrificial lambs in this situation. And, you know, they fully
00:38:14.980 deserve it. But right now, there are so many people who aren't being deposed, who live in this
00:38:21.120 world where they are making these decisions that upend all of our lives currently i feel this way
00:38:26.040 about every single billionaire and and they are acting with impunity and i feel like it's important
00:38:30.740 to remember that yeah it reminds me very much of like the january 6 prosecutions which it's like
00:38:35.520 yeah those people should be prosecuted for the crimes they committed on that day and yet we also
00:38:40.000 had donald trump back in the white house you know so the high level people who were involved in
00:38:45.260 fomenting this attempt attempted, you know, election coup, they never faced any accountability
00:38:50.980 whatsoever. So it is kind of a similar dynamic here. But I hope that people take that as a lesson,
00:38:56.840 like the lower level figures in the Trump administration of like, yeah, Trump's probably
00:39:01.280 never going to go to prison because the Supreme Court's granted him immunity. Elon is going to be
00:39:05.140 fine because he's the richest man on the planet can buy his way out of whatever trouble he gets
00:39:08.960 into or go to another country or whatever. But if you're some lower level functionary who's involved
00:39:14.860 in these horrific crimes that this administration is committing on every day, you really think that 1.00
00:39:20.820 you can rely on Donald Trump to save your ass because you can't. He doesn't care about you. 1.00
00:39:25.000 Not one bit. In fact, if throwing you under the bus saves him one second of trouble,
00:39:30.500 he will do it in a heartbeat. Yeah. Where's Elon? Where's Elon for these kids? Absolutely.
00:39:34.940 Sorry. I actually shouldn't call them kids because they are adult men.
00:39:38.080 With a childlike understanding of the world. Yes. This is true. So in this vein of feeling
00:39:43.920 innate guilt and attempting to covertly cover up some of what he did at Doge, Justin Fox
00:39:50.620 avoids telling us and then openly admits that he was not simply scanning the descriptions of
00:39:56.380 thousands of different NEH grants himself for words like LGBTQ, homosexual, DEI, environmental
00:40:03.220 justice, etc. No, no, he had some help. Okay, so you didn't write those descriptions. We edited and
00:40:10.460 wrote on top of, but they pull out the key words and phrases from grant description.
00:40:16.000 What pulls out the key words and phrases?
00:40:19.660 There's extractors that you can layer on top of Excel to grab the keywords, and then
00:40:24.040 you can pull in how it frames in the context of the EO.
00:40:27.220 When you say, okay, so what extractor did you use to pull out keywords from the
00:40:30.960 Excel?
00:40:31.960 Well, Excel has a lot of native functions to pull out keywords.
00:40:35.840 You can overlay that on top of grant descriptions.
00:40:37.580 Respectfully, I'm not asking about Excel's capabilities.
00:40:40.480 I'm asking what you actually did on this spreadsheet to pull out key terms.
00:40:44.040 Objection.
00:40:47.560 We used closed source aggregators that drew the context from the grant description
00:40:53.980 into DEI verbiage that related to this grant.
00:40:57.160 And then over top of what was extracted, we write in additional thoughts and clarification.
00:41:02.400 What closed source aggregator did you use to assess these grant descriptions?
00:41:07.580 within excel
00:41:09.220 you're able to put in a closed loop llm that extracts the keywords and phrases what llm did
00:41:17.240 you use open ai
00:41:18.520 it's like asking a thesaurus for as many different ways to say chat gpt 0.90
00:41:26.420 he does not he does not want to say chat gpt did this shit for me blame chat gpt bro i was not me 0.97
00:41:35.740 because he knows he knows that like this guy okay within these i'm getting red in the face 0.98
00:41:44.560 underneath the foundation within the context of these corporate business worlds that these
00:41:50.880 boys come from these men come from they master this like corporate jargon newspeak he knows
00:41:57.640 that like to a normie or to a boss that he might have to impress talking about using closed source
00:42:03.760 LLMs on top of Excel spreadsheets sounds a lot more sophisticated than I put into chat GPT.
00:42:12.240 Tell me which grants have LGBT in the description. That's what he was doing.
00:42:16.500 Yeah, it's so transparently obvious. And kudos to this lawyer who's like,
00:42:21.260 what does that mean? What company is LLM? Say the name of it. What is it? Also,
00:42:27.060 a little bit of an L for Elon here. He's not using Grok. What's up with that? He's using his
00:42:32.260 you know, arch nemesis, Sam Altman's product here to do his dirty, his DEI dirty work. But
00:42:37.780 you know, I mean, it's hilarious. And it's also terrifying, because right now we're also like,
00:42:42.900 the Department of War is using AI in the Iran war. And we already have two instances that look
00:42:48.740 very much like, we're talking about how, you know, they put in trans, they end up with something
00:42:53.440 about transgenic mice studies. And they're like, it says trans, so we canceled it. There was a park
00:42:59.540 that was called Police Park in Iran that got bombed. 1.00
00:43:04.020 The Israelis are trying to like bomb all the police stations and create chaos. 0.94
00:43:07.360 And it's had the word police in it. 0.97
00:43:09.760 So they bombed it.
00:43:11.000 And even more disturbingly and horrifyingly,
00:43:14.900 there was a school that had the word Shahid in it.
00:43:19.180 And because the Shahid drones are an important part of Iran's war effort,
00:43:24.380 they bombed the school that had the word Shahid in it.
00:43:27.700 So when we think about what was actually done with Doge, I think a big part of it was also inserting these AI, LLM, all of these tools inside of all of the federal government and also very likely siphoning out a bunch of the data to feed into Grok to help benefit Elon in his quest for Grok to be the dominant AI product.
00:43:50.780 So Justin is then tasked with explaining why he chose to help terminate one specific grant
00:43:57.740 for an Alaskan language project. And the attorney reads him his own stated reasoning. Let's listen.
00:44:06.380 Again, it says the Trothiata project aims to increase access to diverse humanities collections,
00:44:11.380 which aligns with DEI goals of promoting inclusion and diverse perspectives.
00:44:15.680 Did you write that?
00:44:20.780 yes did open ai write that portions of it maybe okay portions of it maybe oh man it really is so
00:44:40.960 surreal the way this attorney is talking to like this extremely consequential adult man like he's
00:44:48.240 like a little baby it's like well did you write that did chat gbt write that there's an irony here
00:44:54.620 too because exactly the type of like white collar work that the justin foxes of the world do is 0.55
00:45:00.580 exactly what this ai is aiming to replace so he's he's helping to to train and deploy his own
00:45:07.640 eventual replacement here as well so we know dei really just means anything relating to the lived
00:45:13.340 experience of minorities, but does Justin know that? Can he tell us what a minority is? Let's
00:45:19.260 listen. When you were assessing this Alaskan language project for DEI, it was on the basis
00:45:26.680 that it promoted a minority group, a minority culture. So I guess what's a majority culture?
00:45:33.500 i'm not sure okay
00:45:38.940 again he he is sure he just doesn't want to say it but obviously you can define what a minority
00:45:47.840 group is if you don't know what the majority group is they're kind of defined in conjunction
00:45:51.940 with one another you know the other thing probably for this guy too is when he signed
00:45:56.520 up for this doge thing it was like cool to be a young man and be part of the the trump club
00:46:02.460 The new right. Yeah, it was. Yes, it was cool at the time. And like his bros thought it was cool. And now they're like, this is embarrassing. Like, did you see the last Tim Dillon episode where he ripped all these people to shreds? And so it feels a lot less good now than it did. And also, I mean, I don't know what this man thinks about the ice raids and the fact that the DHS account is constantly just like overtly Nazi posting all the time.
00:46:27.920 But it's also become undeniably clear that the goal of this administration is this ethno-nationalist blood and soil project and that he was being used as a part of that.
00:46:41.620 So whatever he was telling himself, you know, in his mind, he has no deniability of what that broader project is. And he does seem like someone who would be uncomfortable with the maximalist fascist blood and soil aims of what this government is actively trying to do.
00:47:00.040 Yeah, I do come from a principled place of like people can always grow and change. And if we don't believe that, then like, what's the point? Like, why am I doing any of this? I would argue that you might be giving him too much credit. I think his discomfort probably comes from this is the first time he's probably in his entire life ever been tasked with like any level of accountability for anything.
00:47:22.900 You know, we'll hear from from Nate Kavanaugh next. And he certainly very openly feels no remorse and actually feels politically like things haven't gone far enough. I think the cultural element that you're identifying here is right. I think a lot about that. I can't remember if it was the cover of like New York magazine or The New Yorker or one of those, but it was like it was right on like the eve of Donald Trump's second inauguration. And it was like, what was it called? The cruel kids table.
00:47:48.900 The cruel kids table. Yeah, I remember very well. Had like the blonde woman in the dress in the front.
00:47:54.320 Yes, we made a podcast episode about that at the time. I think it's called How Conservatives Infiltrated Pop Culture. And it really felt 18 or so months ago, right when Trump won the election in 2024, there was this moment of like, it's so cool to be on this like young new right.
00:48:14.020 Of course, we had a bit fruity, never thought that. But like it was an ascendant moment in
00:48:19.300 American culture for like young white people to very openly be like, I'm reclaiming my place at
00:48:24.540 the top of the hierarchy. And like, I'm going to wear the Sheehan dress and like go to this party 0.74
00:48:29.960 on Capitol Hill that's like sponsored by like fucking Barry Weiss or someone. And I'm going 0.97
00:48:34.880 to post on Instagram about how like America's back, baby. That moment in culture lasted like
00:48:39.720 all of 45 minutes. It was just it was just long enough for Trump to get elected was basically how
00:48:45.400 long that moment lasted. Right. And this is why I, you know, continue to be hard on the podcast
00:48:50.780 bros who made it feel like this was a cool thing to do, who had him on Trump on or J.D. Vance on
00:48:57.220 and act. Oh, they're like they're edgy. And these are they're just like our boys. And how could he
00:49:01.980 be some fascist menace to the world when he can just sit and hang out with us? It's why it's
00:49:06.940 important for people to, if they do learn and grow and change to also have some sort of reckoning
00:49:13.360 with the role that they played. Because if you're just now in the place of like, let me criticize
00:49:18.160 the things that I see that are bad. It's like, okay, good. Welcome. Glad to hear you taking that
00:49:22.820 role. But if you're not also grappling with why you were wrong and the role that you played,
00:49:29.920 even if it was a small role in helping to create this moment, then I can only take that so
00:49:34.700 seriously and so look not to read too much into this guy but my sense of him is he didn't really
00:49:40.760 think he hasn't thought too deeply about anything anything truly he doesn't have you know even a 0.99
00:49:49.100 bullshit definition of dei that he could throw out there to you know at least cover his ass a little 0.98
00:49:53.860 bit yeah he it was a purely a vibe based thing this seems cool elon seems cool you know i think 0.99
00:50:01.440 my boys will think that this is awesome that i'm like in the government doing this thing
00:50:05.380 and i don't think it went much deeper than that so now as he's being forced to reckon with it
00:50:10.120 and doing having to do some thinking that he hasn't previously had to do in the past it's
00:50:14.900 very uncomfortable for him to use his own language it reminds me of that meme that's like 0.80
00:50:20.520 me reaping oh fuck yeah this is awesome me sewing oh i don't i don't know about this 0.99
00:50:27.740 This sucks. Definitely. It definitely gives that. 1.00
00:50:33.320 So then the attorney asks Justin about his rationale for helping terminate a grant for a documentary project called My Underground Mother, which is about Jewish women's slave labor during the Holocaust and which highlighted gender based violence against those Jewish women.
00:50:51.220 Back to Justin.
00:50:52.440 Again, The Rationale says, the documentary addresses gender-based violence and overlooked
00:50:56.460 histories contributing to DEI by amplifying marginalized voices.
00:50:59.360 Yes.
00:51:01.860 Why is a documentary about Holocaust survivors DEI?
00:51:06.600 Objection.
00:51:08.520 It's the gender-based story that's inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group.
00:51:17.400 It's inherently discriminatory to focus on what specific group?
00:51:20.240 the gender based
00:51:23.060 so females 0.56
00:51:24.080 during the holocaust 1.00
00:51:27.940 and you believe that's inherently discriminatory 0.89
00:51:30.220 I'm just saying that's what it's focused on
00:51:33.080 and this is related to DEI
00:51:35.100 but you just used the term inherently discriminatory
00:51:37.600 what did you mean by that?
00:51:39.160 it's focusing on DEI principles
00:51:41.840 gender being one of them
00:51:43.800 so a documentary that's about women 0.90
00:51:45.240 would be DEI
00:51:47.500 is that fair to say?
00:51:49.900 no
00:51:50.060 Okay, so tell me why what I just said isn't DEI, but what you just said is DEI.
00:51:55.060 Jackson.
00:51:58.060 It's a Jewish, specifically focused on Jewish cultures, and amplifying the marginalized
00:52:05.060 voices of the females in that culture. It's inherently related to DEI for those reasons.
00:52:13.060 Okay, because it's about Jewish culture. 0.88
00:52:15.060 plus marginalized female voices during the holocaust gender-based violence it's dei because
00:52:23.120 it's dei it's like a mobius strip yeah it's dei because it's inherently dei is what's going on
00:52:30.860 here it's gender-based okay so like anything about women is dei well no okay well why is it
00:52:36.540 because it's just it just is and the gender-based thing he recognizes he's on a tightrope there
00:52:43.800 Because surely if it was a documentary about men in the Holocaust or men in general, then it wouldn't be DEI, even though that would still be gender based.
00:52:53.260 So it kind of gives away the whole game if he if he really walks out on that ledge about the gender based aspect.
00:52:59.600 Something that really struck me listening to these depositions is and I talk about this topic too much on this podcast, perhaps.
00:53:07.600 But like people belonging to minority groups who support the Republican Party, who continue to be Trump supporters.
00:53:13.020 I talk a lot about LGBT Trump supporters and the cognitive dissonance they're in. 0.64
00:53:16.820 But like when you hear them spell this out so clearly, right, a grant that funded a documentary about gender based violence, let's use plain language, rape against Jewish women during the Holocaust is DEI.
00:53:32.240 And slave labor.
00:53:33.320 And slave labor. 1.00
00:53:34.520 You really do have to ask over and over again, for example, why is any woman supporting this? 0.91
00:53:41.580 Yeah.
00:53:41.840 They're telling you exactly what they think.
00:53:44.500 There's a very pick me aspect at the core of the women's support for MAGA, the LGBTQ support for MAGA, certainly the high numbers of Latinos who voted for Trump. 0.52
00:53:57.440 You know, all these Latino ICE officers. 0.64
00:53:59.440 That's the one that really gets me is I'm like, your name is Hernandez and you're doing this job.
00:54:05.060 Like, do you understand you're not in the club?
00:54:07.280 Do you understand that no amount of crushing the skulls of the protesters or, you know, destroying the lives of immigrants is going to make it so that you are a quote unquote heritage American in their view?
00:54:19.280 But it's I mean, it's a very common, like oldest time type of phenomenon where the attempt to assimilate means sucking up to, you know, the dominant culture or the dominant political force.
00:54:32.620 And so you end up with these types. And yeah, it's frankly, it's, it's frankly pathetic and 0.92
00:54:37.560 shameful. So by hour four of Justin's deposition, I am going insane at this point. Just, just see, 0.97
00:54:45.300 just so you can have a little, uh, uh, peek into my process. Uh, boyfriend is, uh, is begging me
00:54:51.700 for me to come to bed. Oh, you're just getting started. Baby, I'm on hour four of 12. The
00:54:58.960 The attorney at this point wants to know more about how Justin used ChatGPT to select $100
00:55:05.020 million worth of federal grants to terminate.
00:55:07.420 First, we learn exactly what Justin's ChatGPT input prompt was.
00:55:13.080 It starts by saying, from the perspective of someone looking to identify DEI grants,
00:55:19.000 does this involve DEI?
00:55:21.480 Respond factually in less than 120 characters?
00:55:24.920 with yes or no followed by a brief explanation do not use quote this initiative close quote
00:55:32.440 or quote this description close quote in your response these people whose whole thing is
00:55:39.260 supposedly like we need everything to return to a merit-based order are like putting into
00:55:44.640 chat gbt do my job for me respond in 120 characters or less and start with yes or no in case i'm
00:55:50.600 too lazy to read beyond the first three characters truly is incredible.
00:55:53.940 And I keep going back to you as well.
00:55:55.900 Like the times when I've made minor misstatements or errors on the show,
00:56:00.400 I'm like so upset about it's like stresses me out.
00:56:03.980 I feel all this guilt and whatever.
00:56:05.760 And then here you have these people who are just like, yeah, that one's gone.
00:56:08.920 This one's gone.
00:56:09.620 Do I know what it is?
00:56:10.460 Not really, but whatever.
00:56:11.700 Let me rip it up.
00:56:12.940 And seemingly like just very casual about it.
00:56:16.060 Don't even think about the impact until they're forced to have to grapple with it and explain it.
00:56:20.380 Yeah, but Crystal, you're a woman and I'm gay.
00:56:22.760 So inherently, nothing we do is merit-based.
00:56:25.400 We're inherently DEI.
00:56:31.280 Breaking points, more like DEI points.
00:56:33.960 That's right. 1.00
00:56:34.580 A woman and an Indian?
00:56:35.880 Are you kidding me? 1.00
00:56:36.780 There's no way that's merit-based.
00:56:38.960 A bit fruity, more like a bit equity and inclusion.
00:56:46.560 I slept four hours.
00:56:48.520 I like that.
00:56:49.320 it's a nice alternate name you know then the attorney inquires about how exactly chat gpt
00:56:54.960 was trained to know which grants were dei what's your understanding of
00:57:00.220 how the model understood the word dei
00:57:03.400 i don't know i i just still think it's really funny he's using chat gpt and not grok
00:57:14.360 The worst of all the products.
00:57:18.060 And so he's using what Elon views as a woke LLM to weed out the DEI grants here.
00:57:26.080 So the attorney obviously isn't satisfied with that answer.
00:57:28.840 So he asks another question.
00:57:31.260 My dear listener, this is the point in which I start hallucinating.
00:57:34.960 Do you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's perception of DEI as applied here wouldn't
00:57:38.400 discriminate on the basis of sex?
00:57:40.020 Objection.
00:57:41.420 It didn't matter because, again, this was not the ultimate decision-making factor.
00:57:46.680 But that doesn't answer my question.
00:57:48.040 Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's perception of DEI as applied here
00:57:52.620 wouldn't discriminate on the basis of sex?
00:57:55.680 Objection.
00:57:56.520 I didn't need to. This was not the decision-making factor.
00:57:59.540 But I'm not asking whether you needed to or not. I'm asking whether you did or not.
00:58:02.400 Objection.
00:58:03.380 This is a rephrasing of the previous question.
00:58:05.080 What is it that you're referring to now, like specifically?
00:58:06.860 Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's perception of DEI, as applied here, wouldn't
00:58:12.320 discriminate on the basis of sex?
00:58:14.360 Jackson. 0.82
00:58:15.360 It's a yes or no.
00:58:16.420 This is just to identify phrases that may relate to DEI to assist in our population of
00:58:22.540 giving context to Adam and Mike as they're reviewing.
00:58:25.080 Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's perception of DEI, as applied here, wouldn't
00:58:29.580 discriminate on the basis of sex?
00:58:31.420 I'd like an answer to my question eventually, I'll keep asking it.
00:58:33.380 It didn't matter.
00:58:34.380 Jackson.
00:58:35.380 ensure that ChatGPT's perception of DEI as applied here wouldn't discriminate on the basis of sex?
00:58:39.620 Objection. Asked and answered several times. It didn't matter. We didn't need to.
00:58:43.080 Is that yes or no? Objection. Is what yes or no? Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's
00:58:48.040 perception of DEI as applied here wouldn't discriminate on the basis of sex? Objection.
00:58:52.600 The task was to pull out anything related to DEI. There was no reason to check for discrimination.
00:58:58.180 So you didn't do it? Objection. We did not need to. Did you do it or not? Objection.
00:59:02.400 this was a medium step in between getting the consolidated list to adam and mike i'm
00:59:08.140 entitled to an answer to my question so that goes on for about another five minutes wow oh my god
00:59:13.000 did you do anything to make sure that chat gpt did not discriminate on the basis of sex i like
00:59:16.780 bolt upright in my sleep now and i'm just like did you do anything to make sure that chat gpt did not
00:59:21.400 discriminate on the basis didn't need to well but did you i i didn't need to i because i wasn't the
00:59:27.740 decision maker i mean that's the other piece of this is like constantly i'm passing the buck
00:59:32.180 passing the buck past it's not up to me it's up those guys those are the ones you want to talk to
00:59:35.600 which by the way they should but um i i'm excited to hear the other dude who you say was had like
00:59:42.020 less remorse the way that he responded to these type of questions because this is a very not sort
00:59:47.900 of steven miller-esque mega way of handling this like the the based approach would be like no
00:59:54.280 because i don't care because women are part of dei like to just own it ten toes down the fact
01:00:00.100 that he shows this trying to pass the buck it's a sign of weakness right that he's not fully
01:00:05.140 comfortable in totally owning and loving every aspect of what he ultimately was doing the thing
01:00:10.940 that popped into my head so many times while watching this for 12 hours was like the nuremberg 1.00
01:00:15.480 trials which i know is like a really intense thing to draw a comparison to with these fucking idiots 1.00
01:00:20.720 But you can just tell at every turn that he's trying to like squirm his way out of any accountability. 1.00
01:00:28.120 Yeah. And having to think about the way what he did will actually be perceived is, again, it's one thing when you're in the moment and you're with your boys and you're all doing this and Elon's there and the chainsaw and all this.
01:00:42.220 it's another thing when you actually have to say my definition of dei is that anything that talks 0.79
01:00:49.580 about women or black people or gay people or trans people is inherently bad and needs to be 0.59
01:00:55.700 gotten rid of that we need to make sure that white men stay on top like he knows these things sound 0.97
01:01:00.600 bad but in the moment you know he's just again he's just not thinking too hard about it he's
01:01:05.120 just doing what everybody's doing before we move on from justin fox i want to show you one more
01:01:10.060 clip. The attorney asks Justin about the decision to terminate a grant for a documentary on the
01:01:15.520 Colfax Massacre, which was a KKK and Confederate-led massacre of between 62 and 153 Black
01:01:23.100 men. ChatGPT labeled this documentary about the Colfax Massacre DEI. Let's hear Justin.
01:01:30.460 Do you agree with ChatGPT's assessment here that a documentary is DEI if it explores historical
01:01:36.380 events that significantly impacted black civil rights yes okay why would that be dei
01:01:47.180 it's focused on a singular race what is not for the benefit it is not for
01:01:53.660 the benefit of humankind it is focused on a specific group of or a specific race here being
01:02:00.620 black why would learning about anti-black violence not be to the benefit of humankind
01:02:06.380 that's not what i'm saying okay then what are you saying i'm saying it relates to
01:02:11.720 diversity equity and inclusion you said it's not to the benefit of humankind
01:02:15.880 right is that what i said yeah is that what i said yes it it certainly is sir
01:02:21.880 again out of principle i try to see the best in people i try to avoid terms like oh the mask is
01:02:29.840 slipping but my goodness talk about the mask slipping yeah and i think this really speaks to
01:02:35.400 So there is a push, again, going back to Project 2025 and really the architects of all of this towards this, quote unquote, patriotic education.
01:02:44.420 And they've sort of given up on some of this direction because they've gotten themselves embroiled in so many other wars and ice raids and all of this other stuff.
01:02:51.980 But there was a major attempt at the beginning of the administration to crack down on universities who weren't teaching history the way they wanted it to be taught.
01:02:59.180 And this is a centerpiece of fascist projects because they want to have this glorified version of the past in which the founding fathers never did anything wrong and the dominant group never did anything.
01:03:14.600 And there was no genocide of the Native Americans.
01:03:16.700 There was no slavery and there was no Jim Crow.
01:03:18.780 Or if there was, it's vastly downplayed.
01:03:21.720 And so it's part of a propaganda project not to, you know, instill merit based values or whatever.
01:03:30.160 No, it's to erase the past is to make it so that people don't know about the Colfax massacre.
01:03:34.600 So they don't know about these sins and atrocities of the country's past because they want to return the country to this mythological, glorious past that they imagined in their heads and want to push out as propaganda to the population.
01:03:48.480 And so, look, I don't know that this guy knows all of that history. I don't know if he really understands. I don't think that he does.
01:03:56.140 Oh, Crystal, I can assure you he does not. Something tells me.
01:03:59.980 But he's serving very effectively in the role that they want him to serve as muddying the history, as hiding the truth. And it really has nothing to do with however you want to define DEI. It really has nothing to do with that. And it has everything to do with an ethno-nationalist fascist project.
01:04:22.120 The other thing I will say about these grants before we move on to our friend Nathan Kavanaugh is that back to the stated mission of DOGE, which it's about lowering the federal deficit, allegedly.
01:04:34.680 Yeah.
01:04:35.020 If you look at the itemized list of grants that they canceled, it's like, you know, $60,000 for the documentary, $50,000 for, you know, a Black History Museum's fucking air conditioning system, stuff like that. 0.69
01:04:50.460 Yeah. 0.95
01:04:50.720 Yeah. Crystal, you are have a better understanding of the inner workings of like the government,
01:04:55.440 frankly, than I do and of like budgets and stuff like that. But these people are being paid more
01:05:00.920 individually than these grants are worth. Like it's to me, it's just so transparently like not
01:05:05.840 about saving money because these aren't significant amounts of money. To be clear, though, it is a
01:05:10.280 significant amount of money to the artists and researchers and scholars and culture makers who
01:05:15.000 depend on that money. But in the scheme of government spending, what? Right. I mean,
01:05:20.700 the bulk of the government spending is like missiles and health care. That's most of what
01:05:25.520 you're talking about here. And so, I mean, they've gone on to cut the health care in service of
01:05:30.280 spending much more on the missiles. That's the overall trajectory of this government.
01:05:34.360 But no, the goal was never really about efficiency or spending cuts. That was never really the goal.
01:05:42.140 And, you know, I just talked about the sort of fascist project at the center of this, and that goes together with like the capitalist project of Elon Musk.
01:05:51.600 But, you know, to your point about how they don't care or value culture or cultural contributions at all, that goes to a central view of capitalism, which is if it's not turning a profit, if it's not market based, then it doesn't have value.
01:06:09.400 so you shouldn't have to get support for your documentary you know if the masses are willing to
01:06:14.500 suck it up then you're you know you'll be able to put it out on your own not recognizing that
01:06:21.000 a lot of art has value beyond just its you know its sales value its market value and so i think 0.98
01:06:28.440 that's something that you know the the trump people and elon that these various factions
01:06:33.740 in maga that came together in this moment i think that's kind of a view of the world that they all
01:06:38.060 share. Totally. Which, of course, goes along with the AI slopification of art and culture also.
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01:08:25.620 with respect to justin fox i do feel like we have uh we've kicked him while he's down so
01:08:32.380 after five hours of deposition let's give him a break and take a look at his colleague his
01:08:37.760 informal superior nathan cavanaugh i want to send you a picture of nathan cavanaugh he's got a little
01:08:44.180 like a sweater on crew neck sweater hair coiffed could definitely have also gone to uva
01:08:49.780 from what I'm looking at here.
01:08:51.580 He's got whatever, what's that expensive down coat
01:08:55.080 that everybody wears in New York?
01:08:56.700 That's what I was going to see if you were going to clock.
01:08:58.940 Yes.
01:09:01.320 He wears to his deposition,
01:09:03.900 just add a little insult to injury,
01:09:06.160 a Canada goose jacket.
01:09:07.700 You know, it is cold in New York City right now.
01:09:10.960 So don't blame him for bringing the down coat
01:09:13.120 to hang on the chair behind him as he's deposed.
01:09:15.460 But that coat is, just for context,
01:09:17.620 upwards of $1,000.
01:09:19.780 Yeah. Expensive taste. Nothing but the best for this man.
01:09:23.040 Let's rip money away from those gay art galleries in the South. Let's do it, shall we? 1.00
01:09:30.080 So where Justin Fox is, I think, pretty clearly a complete moron, Nathan Kavanaugh, like I said, he's more of a smug, like, gleeful piece of shit. 1.00
01:09:40.620 Sorry, I run out of words sometimes. 1.00
01:09:43.580 Nathan Kavanaugh grows up in Pittsburgh.
01:09:46.540 He went to Indiana University and only went for a year before dropping out and starting a company called Brain Base, which there's so many startups that sell their like AI services or whatever they do, frankly, to like big companies.
01:10:06.160 I don't really understand the world of like startup and founders.
01:10:08.980 I spend a lot of time in San Francisco where like founder culture is a big thing where people identify as founders.
01:10:17.020 Do you know what I mean?
01:10:18.560 I'm somewhat familiar with this culture.
01:10:20.460 Yes.
01:10:20.900 I mean, I feel like I being a 44 year old woman who was like living in New York for a while and whatever, and also spent a good bit of time in San Francisco.
01:10:29.080 There was especially when my age was coming out of college, like started doing your startup and being a founder and being on the Forbes 30 under 30 list and all this stuff, these leadership summits and what I was kind of like the peak of that culture.
01:10:43.360 So I'm quite familiar with the type.
01:10:44.800 Yes. And there's a particular kind of like AI-ification version of that happening in San
01:10:49.800 Francisco now where it's like every 22-year-old just like wants to create some bullshit product 0.86
01:10:54.940 that like Sam Altman will buy for hundreds of millions of dollars. And then after six months, 0.97
01:11:01.560 people realize that it's completely useless and then it'll go kaput. But like this child
01:11:04.980 has been made very rich. Yeah, that's depressing.
01:11:07.900 That's essentially what Nathan Kavanaugh's background is. He, after having some success,
01:11:13.920 like selling these like stupid companies i'm not trying to be mean but it's like the world will go 0.99
01:11:19.720 on without your you know upteenth version of like product integration management ai schools 0.99
01:11:25.720 skills management product software
01:11:29.040 whereas the world will not go on without podcast without
01:11:35.280 thank you for checking me thank you for
01:11:39.460 Thank you for checking me. So Nate joins Doge in January of 2025, right after the inauguration.
01:11:49.340 He is recruited more traditionally through what he calls a mutual investor connection,
01:11:54.800 aka through his business background, despite only being in his late 20s. He knew someone,
01:12:00.040 he knew another rich guy who was involved with Doge. So despite his founder background experience,
01:12:06.040 Did Nathan have any government experience? Let's find out.
01:12:10.460 Do you have any history in, like, let's say, scholarly peer review?
01:12:15.460 No.
01:12:15.940 Okay. But this judgment call was made by you and your personal judgment,
01:12:20.520 combined with Justin's personal judgment, to cancel grants based on DEI?
01:12:26.420 Yes.
01:12:27.000 Okay. Do you think it's inappropriate in any way that someone in their 20s
01:12:31.900 with no experience with grants for federal government
01:12:35.460 was making personal judgment calls about what grants to counsel?
01:12:39.500 Jackson.
01:12:40.260 No, I don't think it's inappropriate.
01:12:42.700 Why not?
01:12:44.520 Jackson.
01:12:46.300 I think a person can have enough judgment from reading books
01:12:50.940 and being well-informed outside of traditional experience
01:12:53.800 to make judgment calls about obvious things like a grant
01:12:57.980 that literally lists DEI in its description
01:13:00.200 to know whether it violates an executive order.
01:13:02.920 I don't think you need to have a scholarly peer-reviewed background to do that.
01:13:07.620 Okay.
01:13:08.160 So presumably you read some of these books that would have informed you
01:13:11.100 on how to cancel a grant based on DEI?
01:13:14.120 Exactly.
01:13:15.220 I did not read a book on how to discern whether a grant includes DEI or not.
01:13:20.380 I read the actual description of the actual grant.
01:13:23.640 Okay.
01:13:24.480 I'm sorry.
01:13:25.340 I'm saying books because you said books.
01:13:26.900 What books would you have read that would have informed your opinion
01:13:29.020 on what grants to cancel based on DEI?
01:13:31.180 There were no books.
01:13:33.200 Yeah.
01:13:37.900 Yeah, there were no books.
01:13:39.620 Yeah.
01:13:40.040 Yeah, there were no books.
01:13:40.540 Yeah, we didn't think so.
01:13:41.940 We didn't think so.
01:13:43.920 I asked ChatGPT to tell me what the book said.
01:13:47.520 I don't think he did.
01:13:48.220 He didn't even do that.
01:13:49.220 Didn't even do that.
01:13:50.820 You already can get a bit of a different vibe
01:13:53.600 from Nathan versus Justin.
01:13:56.200 and my my connection to Justin coming from UVA has really helped me to understand his his type
01:14:02.880 because he is much more emblematic of the like country club Republican who will say like oh I
01:14:09.380 don't I don't love Trump because you know the the tweets or whatever but sure do you like the tax
01:14:14.700 cuts he really is good for business but meanwhile you are on board with all of the rest of the stuff
01:14:20.640 and by supporting him you are on board with all the rest of the stuff but you know you want to
01:14:24.000 keep it all a little bit under wraps. You want to keep a little bit of class in terms of what
01:14:28.580 you're presenting to the public. Whereas this guy feels already much more sort of brash and
01:14:33.880 unrepentant and like, yeah, I did it. So what? No, I didn't read the book. What are you going
01:14:38.680 to do about it? Exactly. Nathan's salary at Doge was $120,000, which was notably a more than 50%
01:14:47.160 pay cut from his previous finance job where he was earning a salary of $250,000. Let's hear what
01:14:54.980 he has to say about that and why he took that pay cut. How much were you making at Flow Finance?
01:15:00.060 My salary was probably $250,000 a year or so. So you took a pay cut of almost half to join
01:15:11.100 government. Is that right? Yeah. I didn't actually want to be paid by Doge, but it was a requirement
01:15:16.120 to be. Why would you be okay with working for Doge for free? Because I've already made enough
01:15:20.760 money in my career where an incremental $120,000 doesn't make a difference for me.
01:15:25.860 So selfless. He's willing to destroy people's lives for free. Matt, how can you not honor this
01:15:32.340 man and his principles? I'm a 20 something year old who's made enough money in my career where
01:15:38.400 $120,000 doesn't make a difference to me. And therefore I should be in the chair where decisions
01:15:45.100 get made to upend the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of other people like the other
01:15:53.680 sentiment i kept coming back to watching this and i and i like to uh you know to espouse more
01:15:59.440 nuanced ideas than this typically on this podcast but i'm just like man you don't hate these people
01:16:04.120 enough yeah and it speaks to the view that trump and elon and clearly this guy share of the world
01:16:13.200 that if you did earn a lot of money that is inherently meritorious like you deserved it
01:16:20.640 you deserve to be in these positions you know you are superior to the rest of the population
01:16:26.300 so i don't need to have an understanding i don't need to have any experience i don't need to have
01:16:30.300 read the books i'm in this position of being you know extremely wealthy at a young age therefore
01:16:36.480 it is my right to be put in this position of power over other people and their lives and
01:16:42.740 their livelihoods. And I actually did to make a little bit of a connection here to some of the
01:16:48.020 other things that I've been covering. You know, we've done a lot of work on the Epstein files.
01:16:51.240 And one of the things that you really get from reading the communications amongst these people
01:16:55.940 is they truly do believe themselves to be different and superior. And there are a bunch
01:17:00.740 of different ideologies that they can use to justify that. So Epstein himself is clearly a
01:17:06.720 Jewish supremacist. He talks about that a lot. Elon is like an IQ supremacist. I think Trump also
01:17:12.040 was like a sort of like, you know, there's these like eugenicist ideologies there in terms of
01:17:16.660 genetics and IQ and whatever. And one of the most common supremacist ideologies in Western culture
01:17:23.900 is about money. If you made the money, if the market deemed you worthy, then you are inherently
01:17:29.780 better than you are inherently, you know, above, you know, the rest of the class that haven't been
01:17:34.920 able to make it. There has to be a level of dehumanization involved in the decisions that
01:17:40.240 they that both Justin, Nathan, everybody involved was making because otherwise you couldn't do this
01:17:45.140 so casually with so little remorse, with so little thought, you know, just entering things into chat
01:17:50.620 GPT, pressing a button and walking away. Totally. Yeah, I have nothing to add. You're smart.
01:17:57.920 So the attorney asks Nathan why he helped terminate a grant for a project examining
01:18:03.900 the experiences of LGBTQ people in military service. Man, of all the DEI grants, this should 0.98
01:18:10.360 be kind of patriotic, right? Yeah, they're gay, but they're in the military. They're serving the 1.00
01:18:14.840 country. Nathan had put this LGBTQ military service project grant on a list of what he called
01:18:22.600 the National Endowment for Humanity's, quote, craziest grants. Here's what Nathan said.
01:18:28.560 You and Mr. Fox identified this as one of the craziest grants at any age.
01:18:32.160 uh i don't go to the left yes it appears so why did you do that um because it explicitly says
01:18:39.500 lgbtq how crazy is that matt i think there's value to both of these depositions because
01:18:47.960 where justin fox would have been uh it was in a violation of the eo okay well what about the eo
01:18:55.940 well it was dei well why was it dei because that's what the eo said dei is this guy just goes 0.99
01:19:01.180 yeah it's about fucking gay people right and i hate gay people what do you think we were doing 0.99
01:19:05.680 like obviously this is the the goal was to root out all this sort of gay stuff so that's what i 1.00
01:19:11.240 did and i found it to be crazy like gays in the military how insane is that that's why i put it 0.99
01:19:16.900 on this list yeah and he definitely has personal feelings about that and this is where i started 0.94
01:19:22.060 to get despite my uh you know weariness after being hours and hours and hours and hours and
01:19:27.660 hours and hours into these depositions this is where i started to get actually like angry
01:19:31.160 The attorney continues by bringing up another grant that Nathan slashed for a project about the legacy of HIV AIDS in prison movements.
01:19:42.640 Wow.
01:19:43.080 Nathan doesn't really say much that's notable here.
01:19:46.500 But if you're watching the video version of this podcast, I would like for you to look at the look on his face while he's being read his own decision to terminate this grant.
01:19:56.820 The description here is legacies of HIV-AIDS prison movements in the United States.
01:20:01.920 And I'll just read the long description.
01:20:07.140 This is a history of the HIV-AIDS prison movement and its legacies in the United States.
01:20:13.340 My book project narrates how activists fought the convergence of HIV-AIDS
01:20:16.760 and incarceration from inside and outside prisons across the Reagan through Clinton years.
01:20:20.940 Wow. Wow.
01:20:22.780 For someone who's not watching, what face is he making?
01:20:25.700 he's smarking he's like yeah you know he's like a little kid who did something that was that was
01:20:33.660 naughty but he thought was funny and cool that's kind of the the energy that he's giving but it's
01:20:39.020 not like it's not like oh that sounds rough it's like lol look at these losers look at how cringe
01:20:45.280 it is that they care about this sort of stuff or that they're offended that i would cancel that
01:20:49.500 grant i mean these are like i don't know i'm traumatized by my high school bullies i am
01:20:55.680 Like that's not even a joke. I am. Yeah. This man didn't bully me in high school. I didn't know him in high school. I don't want to direct my my grief about my experience in high school onto Nathan Kavanaugh. But I would be remiss if I did not say that he looks just like them. Yeah. He hears the term HIV AIDS and he just glances at his lawyer who's to the left and he's like trying to stifle a laugh and then he covers his mouth and looks down.
01:21:25.680 And he just can't help. How funny is it that these people were doing research on HIV in prison?
01:21:31.780 It's funny. It's funny to him because, like I said, the cruelty is the point. You don't hate
01:21:35.380 these people enough. And think of how many people died of HIV at the peak and how many
01:21:40.760 died in prison of HIV before we had any sort of treatment. And, you know, he just sociopathically
01:21:47.660 has zero thought, empathy, concern for what that meant to those people and their families and
01:21:54.240 their lives. A while later, Nathan Kavanaugh has the opportunity to provide his own definition
01:22:02.080 for DEI. I wish him luck. Here's Nate. I know we've talked about it somewhat already, but what is DEI
01:22:08.140 referring to here? It stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion. And what is your opinion of
01:22:14.660 diversity, equity, and inclusion? My personal opinion? Well, let's start with what does it
01:22:19.000 mean to you it means diversity equity inclusion well those that's the label but what does what
01:22:27.500 do those words mean it means making decisions on a basis of something other than merit how does
01:22:33.800 diversity differ from equity in that term you know i don't know i don't understand the label itself
01:22:39.800 frankly i appreciate his willingness to say i don't know yeah rather than trying trying to come
01:22:48.300 love with something or refer, refer you to the EO. Yeah. It's also though. Okay. So he gives a
01:22:53.940 specific definition here, right? Okay. It's, you know, getting some sort of a benefit on a basis
01:22:59.340 other than marriage. And then the irony of this guy sitting there, like what meritorious thing
01:23:05.840 did you do to deserve to be in this slot? Have you given all this power? I mean, it's just too
01:23:10.180 brazen. And then when you apply that to all the various grants that they were cutting and what
01:23:15.700 they were actually doing. I mean, if you actually hold that definition, what does that have to do
01:23:20.580 with all of the grants that you were cutting? It doesn't compute, which is why Justin was a lot
01:23:28.340 more tortured in his analysis of what DEI actually is. Yeah, there's so many great,
01:23:33.700 and by great, I mean illustrative components to this whole thing. There's these incompetent men,
01:23:39.560 and then there's the cruel canceling of all of this federal funding to all of these minority
01:23:44.940 related projects based on the idea that they're not merit-based. And then there's the combination
01:23:50.460 of those two things, that it's these meritless men tasked with doing it. I mean, it's just,
01:23:56.240 oh, I'm sweating. I mean, it's just preposterous to even engage with because you know, they didn't
01:24:01.420 actually look into any of these projects to see, oh, is this being well done? Is this an important
01:24:06.200 narrative? Like how effectively are they creating this documentary? No, it's just like, it has
01:24:11.000 something about gay stuff so it can't have it inherently can't have merit and must be canceled 0.99
01:24:17.840 um so you know we're gonna pass it along as absolutely crazy that the government is funding 0.68
01:24:22.900 such a thing back to the founding fathers they were instructed to preserve grants related to
01:24:28.200 projects about the founding fathers and the founding of this country yes here is what
01:24:33.580 nathan has to say about that so the founding fathers was there kind of like a period certain
01:24:41.200 years that you looked at as being the founding of the country no we looked for grants that were
01:24:45.280 politically neutral okay that had to deal with the founding of the country right and that both
01:24:50.180 parties could look and say that these are not political grants and are worth continuing the
01:24:53.580 famously politically neutral founding of the country revolutionary founding of the country
01:25:00.260 based on what was at the time quite radical ideals, just completely politically neutral.
01:25:05.640 They talk a lot in these depositions about like, you know, was it all founding fathers? Who was it?
01:25:10.660 You know, and they specifically say like, oh, well, George Washington, we had to keep things
01:25:14.020 relating to George Washington. If there were papers related to the founding fathers of the
01:25:19.140 country, our judgment was to not terminate this. But it was explicitly the founding fathers.
01:25:23.660 It was a judgment call of figures around that time period of the country that we thought were
01:25:28.660 apolitical and worth keeping when you say they were apolitical what does that mean
01:25:33.320 that they didn't they weren't related to dei and both a reasonable person would look at those and
01:25:41.520 say that they're not political how would you determine what a reasonable person would
01:25:46.740 we're using we're using our judgment george washington owns slaves right but if there
01:25:52.560 was a project about george washington slave ownership that's dei that would be dei yeah
01:25:57.360 And this is it just this gives away the game about what is broadly considered to be, quote unquote, apolitical and anything that has to do with, like, the dominant culture that is deemed as the default.
01:26:10.760 That is a political anything that has to do with a non-dominant group.
01:26:15.920 Then that. Oh, that's edgy. That's fringe. That's inherently political.
01:26:20.360 political that is a very common view that is the default view in the country frankly and that is
01:26:26.060 what he is actively championing when he you know when he articulates this i have one last clip for
01:26:31.920 you crystal and to you my dear listener for muddling through with us you know i appreciate
01:26:37.180 it and i will also say i don't feel that badly because relative to what i endured by watching
01:26:42.000 these depositions with love i have made this easy for you it's a curated experience we're gonna be
01:26:49.940 the bit fruity curated guide to the doge depositions yeah wow sounds like hell hope you've
01:26:57.440 had fun the attorney then gives nathan kavanaugh an opportunity to openly reflect on the work he
01:27:05.120 did in doge because neither of these men are part of the government anymore nathan kavanaugh actually
01:27:11.080 i didn't include this here but uh on his way out from the government he actually briefly worked
01:27:16.360 in another sector of the government.
01:27:19.380 Do you have any idea into what that might be?
01:27:21.820 Oh, I can't guess.
01:27:23.420 What you got?
01:27:24.100 He worked briefly doing administrative work for ICE.
01:27:29.320 Ugh, I should have guessed.
01:27:31.100 Aside from your work from the small agencies team,
01:27:33.340 did you do anything else for Doge?
01:27:35.300 At the end of my time at Doge,
01:27:37.640 I worked at the Department of Homeland Security
01:27:39.840 on the immigration team with ICE for about a month.
01:27:43.960 What did you do with ICE?
01:27:46.160 We were designing a voluntary departure program to encourage illegal immigrants to self-deport
01:27:52.720 from the country. 1.00
01:27:53.660 Yeah, that feels right. 0.53
01:27:54.920 Bottomless, just bottomless.
01:27:57.100 And then he goes, I didn't enjoy it.
01:27:59.260 I didn't find it fulfilling.
01:28:00.520 Why did you leave?
01:28:01.800 I was not enjoying the work on immigration and I was ready to go start my next company.
01:28:06.720 Why were you not enjoying it?
01:28:08.660 I was not drawn to the immigration program personally. 0.99
01:28:12.000 I didn't agree with all of it. 0.95
01:28:13.780 And my mind goes, oh, yeah, well, probably when all of the fucking, you know, arrests and murders in the street and, you know, kidnapping of undocumented immigrants working their jobs at Home Depot got out of control, like maybe there was a moral conflict, whatever.
01:28:27.080 And he goes, did you feel like the ice work was too aggressively getting people deported or not aggressively enough? 0.64
01:28:37.500 I didn't think it was aggressive enough, but at the same time, I didn't enjoy working on that project.
01:28:43.780 wow so anyway back to doge like i said the attorney gives him a chance to reflect openly
01:28:51.520 on the work he did in doge and here is what date has to say during your tenure around 1500
01:28:57.940 grants were canceled yeah yes and each of those grants funded projects real projects by real
01:29:06.480 people working on scholarly works, some of those funds were used to pay for
01:29:13.860 housing and to further their work. Now those funds are gone, does that make you feel
01:29:21.840 anything in particular?
01:29:23.040 Exactly. No.
01:29:26.040 You don't regret that people might have lost important income to support their lives?
01:29:35.340 No. I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero.
01:29:41.780 Did you reduce the federal deficit?
01:29:43.980 No, we didn't.
01:29:45.220 You did?
01:29:46.620 No, I don't believe we did.
01:29:48.680 I think if you look at the net deficit from 2024 to 2025, I actually think it's close to a net zero, unfortunately.
01:29:56.320 So you weren't able to reduce the deficit, and you still don't regret that people lost some of their livelihood based on your actions?
01:30:06.760 Objection.
01:30:08.000 No.
01:30:08.900 Okay.
01:30:12.180 Wow.
01:30:13.420 So you failed.
01:30:14.740 You only created misery and hardship and accomplished 0% of the goal you set out.
01:30:20.040 But you have no regrets.
01:30:21.800 And I think the thing you said earlier about how you then went and worked for ICE and was like, they didn't go far enough. I mean, this is a person who is a true believer in the most maximalist ambitions of this fascist government and is probably someone unlike Justin, who really hadn't thought that hard about any of this.
01:30:41.200 he has thought this he has thought this stuff through like he has an ideological view and his
01:30:47.220 only complaint about the trump administration is that they are not going far enough in causing
01:30:51.720 enough cruelty to actually cut the deficit the amount that he wanted to see that they're not
01:30:56.600 going far enough in destroying the lives of as many immigrants as he wanted to see it makes sense 0.99
01:31:02.860 the whole thing makes sense in an effort to like genuinely try to understand how someone could
01:31:08.800 think like this. I mean, how can you acknowledge outright? We didn't accomplish our goals.
01:31:14.100 We didn't do anything substantively good for anyone. And we only hurt people. And I have no
01:31:20.980 regrets. Like, I feel like I genuinely it feels sociopathic. It definitionally is. I just don't
01:31:30.380 know. I don't know if you have insight into people who are true believers like this,
01:31:35.080 who really have no shame like on a real level like how do you become like a comic book villain
01:31:40.920 oh that's probably a whole other podcast but i mean i do think i do think partly especially
01:31:45.960 since knowing that this guy has some level of wealth and has clearly created as like a supremacist
01:31:51.500 ideology in his own mind about that and then i also think there's something about hyper online
01:31:56.840 culture that makes everything sort of like surreal and disconnected and is dehumanizing in certain
01:32:01.900 ways as well. That probably comes through here too. But, you know, whereas Justin wants to be
01:32:09.060 the, I'm just following orders guy. I didn't really know what I was doing. It really wasn't
01:32:13.560 up to me. This one is like, no, I did that. I'd own it. I'd do it again. I want to go further.
01:32:19.000 He's all about it. You know, he's a zealot. We'd have to learn more about what exactly sparks that
01:32:24.940 and what the overall ideology is. It could just be a nihilistic ideology where it's like,
01:32:29.860 I want the suffering. I want the pain. I want to burn it all down. I want to destroy. There are
01:32:34.540 some people whose personality types, you know, it doesn't go much deeper than that. But, you know,
01:32:39.500 he's someone who would have seen the connection between what Doge is doing and the broader sort
01:32:45.940 of blood and soil ethno-nationalist project and how that's, it's seamless to go from what he was
01:32:53.060 doing at Doge and then to ICE. And the other thing I'll say about this is, you know, with,
01:32:57.580 with these depositions because of the nature of what this lawsuit is about you're talking about
01:33:01.100 these documentary grants you're talking about cultural projects right where a lot of harm is
01:33:05.340 being caused to individual people and these organizations and i don't want to diminish that
01:33:09.740 but you also had in doge i mean they completely destroyed usa id and you're going to have
01:33:15.100 the estimates are that millions of people will literally lose their lives because of those cuts
01:33:20.480 like for there were millions of people for whom this was life or death and it was being run by
01:33:25.120 the richest man on the planet like that's inherent to this project and so this is like a microcosm 0.99
01:33:31.640 with this wealthy young guy who thinks he's the shit who thinks he gets to have you know say over 0.98
01:33:37.900 other people's lives and just casually destroy them for no reason it is just a tiny like sliver 0.99
01:33:43.000 microcosm of the bigger project which was unbelievably devastating to millions of people
01:33:48.340 and led by the richest man on the planet.
01:33:52.660 Crystal, there were, as you just said, cuts across all different agencies, many of which
01:33:58.400 are and will be responsible for mass death.
01:34:02.640 And there was all sorts of rewiring of how money was spent as a result of these cuts.
01:34:07.400 A lot of the money did continue getting spent.
01:34:10.120 It was not just cut.
01:34:11.120 It was just redirected.
01:34:12.980 And in the context of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which we focused on today
01:34:17.800 because that is the basis for this lawsuit.
01:34:20.220 That is why these people are being deposed.
01:34:22.060 I hope we get depositions from the kids
01:34:23.800 who were responsible for cutting USAID
01:34:26.460 and all of the science programs as well.
01:34:28.760 But with regard to NEH,
01:34:30.580 do you know specifically
01:34:32.400 where much of the funds
01:34:34.580 saved from slashing these grants
01:34:36.600 are now supposed to go to?
01:34:38.580 Tell me.
01:34:39.120 The National Garden of American Heroes.
01:34:42.120 Do you know what that is?
01:34:43.280 No, that sounds like some Trump thing.
01:34:46.520 Yeah.
01:34:46.920 i was preparing myself for like the trump arch or the trump kennedy center or worse basically
01:34:54.780 ever since 2020 with like the george floyd protests and then the subsequent like a lot of
01:35:00.780 left-wing activists calling for statues to be torn down of people like christopher columbus
01:35:07.660 uh confederate leaders people like that you know right-wing racists trump has been trying to build
01:35:14.740 for six years the national garden of american heroes it's a sculpture garden of people he
01:35:21.280 personally admires yeah some sort of trump art project yeah it's a trump art project that he's
01:35:27.560 he's actually through multiple executive orders attempted to get this done it's still you you
01:35:32.200 guys can read the whole wikipedia page it's nuts and uh thousands and thousands and thousands of
01:35:37.840 careers and lives in arts and culture uh were destroyed in pursuit of building the national
01:35:44.400 Garden of American Heroes. So instead of learning about the impact of HIV and AIDS in the prison
01:35:51.060 population, we'll get to see a statue of like Jake Paul. Yeah. I have to laugh because I'm
01:35:59.120 going to cry if I don't, Crystal. I mean, it's not even like a joke. It's just like literally
01:36:04.400 the case. It's just that's our reality is so absurd that you can't even joke about it anymore.
01:36:09.380 Yeah, reality has put the onion out of business. What do we take away from this, right? Like, what's our conclusion here? I wrote my thesis here. It's offensive enough that a 20-something-year-old white guy would get a high-ranking position in a federal office with no qualifications and no experience.
01:36:25.480 It's reprehensible, however, that the specific job these young men were in charge of was upending the lives and destroying the careers of women, people of color, queer people, etc., who they believed were unqualified and being offered special privileges on the basis of their identity. 0.98
01:36:41.560 No one benefits from identity politics more than a mediocre white man.
01:36:45.560 You don't hate the system or it's Epstein class oligarchs enough. 0.99
01:36:49.420 Hear, hear. And I think there's actually a lot of different things to draw from this because in Justin and Nathan, you have the archetype of two young men who became true believers in a certain sense. I mean, Justin went more of like a vibe based way and Nathan and more of an actually ideological way. And so you get a little bit of a glimpse into what that mentality is, right? 0.57
01:37:13.460 Like, what are the motivation? What is what are the thought processes? What leads you to want to put yourself in this place? And given how much was made of like the, you know, impact of young men on Donald Trump's election and the podcast bros and the like, like, that's an important window.
01:37:29.500 the way that this was all done and the ends that it ultimately served and how distinct that was
01:37:37.900 from what was being sold to the public i think that's a very important piece of this and then
01:37:43.460 i also think out of this it underscores one of the things that i've grappled with under this
01:37:49.160 trump regime is you know in the movies the villains are always like the evil geniuses
01:37:54.680 You know, they're like diabolically smart and but also diabolically evil. 1.00
01:37:59.860 And this regime is like diabolically stupid, but also diabolically evil. 1.00
01:38:06.100 And, you know, you you get some of that from this as well when you can't even come up with an answer for what even is DEI, which is the center of the job that you're supposed to be doing. 0.99
01:38:16.540 DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion.
01:38:19.560 And that means diversity, equity and inclusion.
01:38:22.780 it stands for diversity equity and inclusion well let's start with what does it mean to you
01:38:27.540 it means diversity equity inclusion
01:38:30.780 we learned so much diversity and equity i don't know i don't know baby
01:38:36.640 crystal thank you so much for allowing me to like do this at you and then field responses to all of
01:38:47.420 my little clips. I am so excited to never hear from these men ever again or to hear their lawyer
01:38:54.040 say objection ever again. Well, I have some bad news for you, Matt. Not necessarily these men,
01:39:01.580 but these types of men are going to be with us forever. That's why we need to learn who they are
01:39:07.420 and what's going on there. And where can listeners of this podcast hear you continue to do that?
01:39:13.960 check out breaking points over on youtube become a premium subscriber breakingpoints.com crystal
01:39:19.220 ball on twitter all those things and you guys really should go and follow crystal she is so
01:39:23.260 smart she's so sharp and she unlike me is uh on the ball sorry every single day uh so you should
01:39:34.040 really go and follow her and support her work thank you so much for coming on this journey with
01:39:38.640 me listening to this episode. I appreciate you so much. I hope that that we can provide you
01:39:44.800 some levity as we muddle through together. I love you. And until next time, stay fruity.