The Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, wrapped up Saturday. While billionaire Elon Musk ate up a lot of the attention by wielding an actual chainsaw on stage to symbolize his attacks on government waste (and subtlety), the annual conservative conference featured a host of other speakers with far-right ties. That included people like Jack Posobiec, a right-wing influencer who was recently invited to travel with members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet. Elle Reeve, CNN reporter and author of the book ‘Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics,’ talks about how the far-right got a foothold in the U.S. government.

And in headlines: Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he’ll step down as president of Ukraine if it means his country can join NATO, President Donald Trump ousted the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Musk issued another ultimatum to federal workers.

Show Notes:

• Check out Elle’s Article –  https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/trump-musk-alt-right-fascism-psychological-war.html 
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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Monday, February 24th. I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day. The show that has never launched a meme coin. Mostly because it doesn’t really know how. [music break] On today’s show, Ukraine’s president says he’ll step down if it means his country can join NATO. And President Trump purges the top ranks of the Pentagon, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But first, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, wrapped up Saturday, a wretched hive of scum villainy and whatever this was. [music starts playing]

[clip of Elon Musk] This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw!

Jane Coaston: That man has 13 children. Yes, that is Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and government job killer wielding a chainsaw given to him by Javier Milei , the President of Argentina. I’m telling you, it got weird. Anyway, among the speakers at this year’s CPAC was a guy named Jack Posobiec. He’s a longtime right wing activist and a pretty big fan of the president. Here’s how he defended Trump’s blitzkrieg of questionably legal orders on Friday. 

[clip of Jack Posobiec] Donald Trump is not violating the Constitution. Donald Trump is restoring the American Constitution. Donald Trump is the living embodiment of the American Constitution. 

Jane Coaston: So who is this guy Jack Posobiec? Well, remember the Pizzagate conspiracy theory? The theory that a shadowy network of elite pedophiles, including some top Democrats, was operating out of the basement of a DC pizza shop that didn’t even have a basement? Posobiec helped spread those lies, and he allied himself with a host of neo-Nazis and white nationalist figures as part of his activism during the 2016 presidential campaign and afterwards. From anti-Semitic political organizations based in Poland to one of the organizers of the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017. And while you’d think the Trump administration would want to spend less time palling around with someone so enmeshed in far right anti-Semitic circles, it’s quite the opposite. Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s team invited him along on his first overseas trip to Europe, Posobiec traveled to Ukraine with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant as part of the press corps. Before he was vice president, J.D. Vance blurbed his book, in which he argues that progressives and liberals are, quote, “subhuman.” The far right has not just gained a foothold in government with the return of Trump to the White House. It’s achieved real and actual power. And I won’t lie to you. That’s fucking bad. I spent about a decade researching and reporting on the American far right and white nationalism. And what I’m seeing now is deeply, deeply worrying and I mean seeing literally. If you go on Twitter owned by Trump’s best friend Elon Musk, you’ll see the most vile racism and anti-Semitism given millions of views and pushed to the top of your For You page by the algorithm. You know how interracial marriage is cool and fine. Not on Twitter it isn’t. So now what? How should we respond? And how the hell did we get here? I spoke with Elle Reeve to find out. She’s a CNN reporter with a focus on the far right. You might remember some of her work for VICE on the Unite the Right rally. Her latest book is entitled Black Pill: How I witnessed the darkest corners of the internet come to life, poison society and capture American politics. Elle, welcome to What a Day. 

Elle Reeve: Oh, thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: You’ve interviewed prominent white nationalist figures like white nationalist activist Richard Spencer in your reporting, and they have been um not great to you to put it gently. And you wrote about how your phone number has been leaked online. How you’ve been insulted by the very people you’re interviewing. How do you navigate engaging with these racist bigots directly as a reporter? And why do you do the work that you do? Knowing how dangerous they can be and how dangerous this work can be. 

Elle Reeve: The way I think about it is on the internet. Unfortunately, it’s not always a battle of ideas. It’s also a battle of an emotional performance. You know who looks more chill, who’s more based, as they would say? 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Elle Reeve: If they get a rise out of you, like you lose. To trigger the libs. I mean, that’s massive currency on the internet. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Elle Reeve: Why do I cover it? Ah. It’s like a complicated question. I grew up in Atlanta, like downtown in a very diverse neighborhood. And then when I was 13, I moved to rural Tennessee, to a very white place. And I just saw two very different sides of America. Like, even my school history was different, whether it emphasized civil rights or the Civil War. 

Jane Coaston: Mm hmm. 

Elle Reeve: I just grew really frustrated with the way that I felt that the media portrayed that, and I wanted to show what I knew. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, I know that when I did work on white nationalism and talking about white power movements, one of the things that always really got me was like I would get people on the left generally saying that I was helping them by publicizing their actions, perhaps introducing them to a broader audience. Have you gotten that response and what’s your response to that argument? 

Elle Reeve: Yes, I’ve gotten it so much I find it really frustrating. I was covering a federal civil trial of the major figures that organized Charlottesville in 2021. And in that trial, it lasted six weeks. They played footage from one of my documentaries over and over and over again. There was a break in the trial. I go and step outside, and an anti-fascist activist start yelling at me like that I’m a platformer and no one wants to see that shit. And I was like, do you not see the trial? Like the plaintiffs think the jury should see that shit actually. I think we figured out that, like, keeping it a secret doesn’t mean people won’t be able to find it. And it leaves average people unprepared for what’s happening, like, right under their noses. 

Jane Coaston: Right. I remember I interviewed a white nationalist activist, Nick Fuentes, a while back. 

Elle Reeve: Oh. Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: And it was interesting because he talks to me in this way that was so different from how he talks to his own audience about how getting married is gay and how Jews control everything. And I was just so struck because I think that that’s something that your work helps to break down, is the barrier between how they try to perform outwardly and how they talk to one another. 

Elle Reeve: Yeah. They live in our world. Like, it’s not that they’ve never heard the phrase race is a social construct, like they’ve spent hours and hours obsessively figuring out ways to troll people who believe that, like they are utterly prepared to make the pitch to us. They’re very good at picking up on, like, maybe kind of like your moderate liberal who is a little annoyed with the woke people. Maybe they’re going too far. They also pick up on leftist critiques of capitalism. You know, they’ll say, how come the left is so good at getting some random employee at Walmart fired for being racist? But there are no prosecutions of the bankers who sold subprime loans to black people. They’re able to present the activist for social justice as actually people trying to maintain a social hierarchy of class. 

Jane Coaston: As someone who watched the white nationalist movement grow and respond to Trump during Trump’s first presidency, how do you think his rhetoric back then compares to what he’s saying now? Has Trump said anything recently that worries you as we prepare for another four years of him in the White House? 

Elle Reeve: I’m a lot more skeptical of the people who are surrounding Trump. So the alt right, you know, it was this kind of section of white nationalism from like 2014 to 2019. They saw Trump as an empty vessel, like he didn’t have the ideas. And so they would provide that backfill. Well, that didn’t happen. They were sort of pushed aside. But now this kind of Silicon Valley version of the so-called New Right or dissident right, that seems to very much have taken hold. I mean, you see Elon Musk saying it, I see Marc Andreessen tweeting these memes that have origins in the people I covered almost ten years ago now. There’s a phrase that is ripped straight from white nationalists, which is import the Third World, become the Third World. The idea is that people from the global South, there’s something innate in them that makes them unable to embody the ideas of capitalism, democracy, free thought, logic, reason. Right. So that was like a white nationalist thing. But now, like Charlie Kirk has said it, of Turning Point. Donald Trump Jr said it during the debate over Haitian migrants and whether they ate cats and dogs. Stephen Miller has said it on Fox News. That idea has like infected the mainstream conservative movement now. Now you don’t need to be an anonymous troll. You can use your face and your real name and just say all this stuff explicitly. 

Jane Coaston: And speaking of online spaces, Trump signed an executive order on day one to restore free speech and end federal censorship. 

Elle Reeve: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: And social media platforms like Facebook are no longer policing language online, though you know, it’s funny when we say that because Elon Musk is very worried if you use the word cis on Twitter because there is policing, it’s just the police have changed. Do you see this new era of content moderation, or general lack thereof, emboldening white nationalists, especially those who use the internet to organize? Because, as you said, they don’t need to be subtle, they don’t need to do that under that thing that they used to do where they’d be like, instead of saying Jews will say Skipes or Skittles or something like that, there was all this like creative, like, oh, we’re going to use these different words and everyone’s going to be so impressed by how clever we are. And now they don’t even have to do that. 

Elle Reeve: Yeah, there’s like now no mechanism to regulate it. Like Richard Spencer, for example, was never kicked off Twitter because he never used like, racial slurs. He wasn’t quite as overtly racist as some of his followers. But once Elon took over Twitter, so many of my other old sources were like, back but um there’s nothing setting the terms of what’s acceptable. And so people will push it further and further and further. And what I observed was in the discord servers of the alt right, is that it became very taboo to what they called counter signal, like you had to support the most extreme people in your movement, otherwise you would just be destroyed by your followers. Like these guys all ended up scared. 

Jane Coaston: Right. No enemies to the right. 

Elle Reeve: Exactly. They became tethered to the like most extreme people. And a little later, they expressed some regret to me because they followed those people into Charlottesville, people that they knew wanted to do violence for the sake of violence. And like, is that going to replicate itself on a much larger scale? Like, that is a question that I have. 

Jane Coaston: Speaking of dark questions. Does the alt right even need the alt anymore so much as it still exists, given how much of it has been absorbed into the broader right wing? 

Elle Reeve: No, they are like having these podcasts where they’re kind of like bitter and um hurt that their memes and ideas have been elevated, have been taken by the New Right. But they don’t get any of the credit, or they’re like canceled or their their names aren’t allowed to be mentioned within those spaces. They’re like they’re like saying things like, we invited liking Russia. And then some of them have gone even further, and they’re now criticizing those ideas that they once espoused. Like Spencer, he’s pro Ukraine. So the lesson I think from this is never go full Nazi like Spencer. Those other guys, they went out there. They hailed Trump as if he were Hitler. They made swastika memes, all of that stuff like that’s too far. That’s creepy to your average American, like, we don’t want to be Nazis, but you come very close to those same ideas without going all the way and use your real face and your real name and more concerningly possibly embrace like really authoritarian ideas as well as like, radical tactics like storming the Capitol. 

Jane Coaston: Ellie, thank you so much for being here. 

Elle Reeve: Thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with CNN correspondent and author Elle Reeve. We’ll link to her work in our show notes. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe. Leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Pete Hegseth] Nothing about this is unprecedented. The president deserves to pick his key national security and military advisory team. 

Jane Coaston: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Sunday defended President Trump’s firing of the nation’s top military officer. Trump removed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General CQ brown Jr, on Friday and nominated retired three star Air Force General Dan Caine to take his place. Hegseth told Fox News he has a lot of respect for Brown, but he’s, quote, “not the right man for the moment.” 

[clip of Pete Hegseth] This is a reflection of the president wanting the right people around him to execute the national security approach we want to take. 

Jane Coaston: Brown wasn’t the only person fired during Friday night’s Pentagon purge. Also out are the first female officer to lead the Navy, the vice chief of the Air Force and three top military lawyers of the Defense Department. The top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, told ABC news, the firings were, quote, “completely unjustified.” 

[clip of Jack Reed] Well, it was completely unjustified. These men and women were superb professionals. They were committed to their oath to defend the Constitution of the United States. And apparently, what Trump and Hegseth are trying to do is to politicize the Department of Defense. 

Jane Coaston: Brown was just the second Black general to serve as chairman. He held the position for a little more than a year. In 2020, Brown posted a video giving his perspective as a senior Air Force leader and African-American on the unrest across the country after the murder of George Floyd. Hegseth had criticized Brown for his woke priorities and for pursuing the, quote, “radical positions of left wing politicians.” Elon Musk issued yet another ultimatum to federal workers over the weekend, justify your job or resign. The Office of Personnel Management sent an email to more than two million government employees Saturday titled, and I quote, “what did you do last week?” It instructed them to list five things they did at work last week. The email itself didn’t include any threat of termination, but hours before it went out. Musk wrote on Twitter that anyone who doesn’t respond will lose their jobs. Leaders across departments scrambled to issue guidance to their workers after the email went out again on a Saturday, the weekend. Some agencies told their workers to reply. Other big agencies, though, like the FBI, the State Department and the Office of National Intelligence told workers not to reply. Others instructed their employees to draft a response but to hold off on sending it. Some workers out on leave couldn’t even read the email because they couldn’t access their accounts. Man the efficiency of it all is just so palpable. Epic some might say. This is Musk’s latest effort to downsize the federal workforce. He offered deferred resignations to federal workers earlier this year. Republican lawmakers rushed to defend the tech billionaire Sunday. Here’s how Oklahoma Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin justified the chaos to NBC’s Kristen Welker. 

[clip of NBC’s Kristen Welker] You go the national debt is $36 trillion. DOGE is only dealing right now with the federal workers, which is only 8% of federal spending, a small fraction of the federal budget. So how do DOGE’s layoffs actually deal with the debt problem? 

[clip of Senator Markwayne Mullin] Take care of your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves. Every business owner knows that. 

Jane Coaston: I thought we were getting rid of pennies. None of this is adding up. As of our recording late Sunday. The deadline for federal workers to respond to the email is tonight, just before midnight eastern. The president of the American Federation of Government Employees, one of the major unions that represents federal workers, said in a statement Saturday that the union will challenge, quote, “any unlawful terminations of its members nationwide.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he’s willing to leave the presidency for NATO membership. He made the comment Sunday during a news conference at a forum in Kyiv. [clip of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaking] He says there I’ll do it immediately without a long conversation about it. I am focused on Ukraine’s security today and not in 20 years. Monday marks the three year anniversary of the start of the war, when Russia launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine. It comes as the Trump administration and Trump himself appear increasingly ready to sideline Ukraine in favor of negotiating with Russia. Zelensky is scrambling to keep the U.S. on Ukraine’s side. One of the ways he could do that is by accepting a US proposed deal to give America access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals in exchange for continued aid. Connecticut Democratic Congressman Jim Himes pushed back on the deal on Fox News. He compared it to a mob deal. 

[clip of Jim Himes] Well, Chad and I have I mean, I have I have two problems with that concept. One, it just looks like an episode of The Sopranos, right? Give us your minerals or we’re not going to help you fight a bloody butcher. I mean, is this really what we want the greatest country in history to be known for? For, like, you know, some Mafia thing? 

Jane Coaston: Himes said this isn’t how the U.S. has historically treated its allies. 

[clip of Jim Himes] We’ve never done this before. We never went to Winston Churchill and said, hey, unless you give us half of London to build hotels, we’re not going to help you against Hitler. You know, imagine the sentiment, the signal that that sends to the people who are doing the fighting and dying. 

Jane Coaston: European leaders this week will keep up the pressure on Trump not to abandon Ukraine in favor of Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron is set to meet with Trump today, and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is expected to visit D.C. Thursday. Israeli officials sent tanks into the West Bank Sunday as its ceasefire deal with Hamas in Gaza looked to be on increasingly shaky grounds. The last time Israel sent tanks into the West Bank was in 2002. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the move in a public address. [clip of Benjamin Netanyahu speaking plays] He’s saying there quote, “in Judea and Samaria, our forces are moving deep into the refugee camp. They destroy terrorist infrastructures, eliminate terrorists and they will stay there as long as necessary.” Israel’s defense secretary said tens of thousands of Palestinians who have fled the territory also won’t be allowed to return. Palestinian officials called the move a, quote, “dangerous escalation.” Israel’s actions in the West Bank Sunday come amid major questions about the future of its ceasefire deal with Hamas in Gaza. The first phase of the deal is set to end at the start of March. Negotiations over the second phase appear to have not started yet. On Saturday, hours after Hamas handed over six Israeli hostages. Israel indefinitely delayed the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, citing the, quote, “humiliating ceremonies that have accompanied the hostages releases.” Hamas has accused Israel of violating the truce because of the delay. Tensions were already high between the two sides after Hamas last week returned human remains, they claimed were those of an Israeli hostage named Shiri Bibas. Testing revealed that they were not Bibas’s remains. Hamas claimed it was an error and Bibas’s remains were returned Friday. And that’s the news. [music break] One more thing. Let’s talk very briefly about Germany’s elections. On Sunday, Germans went to the polls to vote for a new Bundestag, the German federal parliament. It’s a big deal for Germany, Europe and the world, even if Donald Trump seemed a little unaware last week. 

[clip of unnamed reporter] Germany has elections on Sunday. Uh. What are your thoughts? What do you expect to happen in the elections on Sunday? 

[clip of President Donald Trump] Who has elections? 

[clip of unnamed reporter] Germany.

[clip of President Donald Trump] Oh, Germany. I wish them luck. We got our own problems.[laughter]

Jane Coaston: But while Trump seemed disinterested, Vice President J.D. Vance and Elon Musk were sure invested in Germany’s voting choices. They were particularly interested in the far right party Alternative for Germany or AfD. Musk spoke at one of their events in January, and Vance met with AfD’s top candidate and told the crowd at the Munich security Conference earlier this month that politicians should not have firewalls against working with AfD, making many at the conference understandably nervous. Why? Because other parties generally refuse to work with far right parties. That’s the firewall in German politics, aimed at keeping groups like the AfD out of power. Because the last time Germany had a far right party in power, it resulted in a global cataclysm that ended in the deaths of more than 50 million people worldwide and featured the industrial mass murder of Jews and other minorities. So, understandably, the German public is a little worried about anything that even smells like Nazism. And AfD. Well, the party has embraced a very specific type of German nationalism and right wing populism, while advocating for the re-migration of asylum seekers. One AfD leader has condemned Holocaust memorials as, quote, “monuments of shame.” Another even apparently danced on the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. A study conducted by the American Jewish Committee found that antisemitism is at the, quote, “programmatic core of AfD.” Younger members of AfD have embraced using Nazi salutes and anti-Semitic language to trigger the libs, which sounds pretty familiar to me. But like in so many developed countries, the German right has grown in power and swagger over the last few years as worries about immigration and a slowing economy led to big losses for the center left Social Democratic Party in state elections in 2024. As of our recording time on Sunday night, it looks like the center right Christian Democratic Union will win a majority of seats in the Bundestag, with the party’s leader Friedrich Mertz, becoming chancellor. AfD will likely finish with the second most seats, but because of the firewall, it’s unlikely that the CDU will join in a coalition with them. Mertz has said he thinks his job is to strengthen Germany and Europe to stand up to Russia because the United States won’t. During a recent televised debate, he even compared Musk’s efforts to intervene in the German elections to Russia’s efforts to influence elections across the European continent. He added, quote, “we are under such massive pressure from two sides that my absolute priority now really is to create unity in Europe.” On Truth Social, Trump celebrated the win for the CDU as a, quote, “great day for Germany.” But both Vance and Musk probably were quite disappointed with the result. Though, one factor in the AfD’s loss might have been them. One German voter told The New York Times that Vance’s firewall speech made him anxious. Me too, buddy. Me too. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you liked the show, make sure you subscribe. Leave a review. Please stop Lara Trump from recording music and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading and not just about how I will let a lot go, I will let bygones be bygones. But I cannot stand for the daughter in law of the president to release pop singles with French Montana, like me. What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coasten and please just not that. [music break] What a Day is as a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Fohr. Our producer is Michell Eloy. We had production help today from Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Claire. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.