Air Date 12/20/2024

Full Notes Page

Download PDF

Audio-Synced Transcript

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left Podcast. Now, there's no denying that things are about to get bad. Trump and company have had years to prepare for their next turn in office, but those preparing to resist also have the benefit of past experience, resulting in a response to Trumpism that looks very different this time around. 

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top takes and about 50 minutes today includes Citations Needed, Boom! Lawyered, Democracy Now! The Majority Report, The Daily Blast, The Impact Report, and The Rachel Maddow Show. Then in the additional deeper dives half, there'll be more in three sections. Section A, immigration intimidation. Section B, bending the knee, and Section C, resistance.

The Shallow, Power-Flattering Appeal of High Status #Resistance Historians Part 1 - Citations Needed - Air Date 12-3-24

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah. Well, Gaza just explodes the whole liberal resistance myth in many ways, and it has baleful effects in forcing, basically [00:01:00] decent people to wind up supporting actions like the expansion of the military industrial complex and uncritical support for proxy wars. 

Basically, as you said, it started in 2016 as a reaction to Trump. Some of it's understandable, people had a reaction to Trump. Trump does seem to be outside of expected decorum and protocols. And so there was this natural tendency to cast him as outside the mainstream, but the number of scholars and pundits who position themselves as intellectuals, immediately jumped on this bandwagon of positioning Trump as some kind of authoritarian or a fascist or compromised by ties with Putin and Russia. I mean, there's so many iterations of this argument and, some of them may have some basis in fact. And certainly Trump is an authoritarian, there's no doubt about that.

But what it does [00:02:00] by talking about it in a certain way, is that it obscures and denies the fact that everything that they say Trump is, has deep roots in U. S. history and culture and politics. And you don't have to look at Putin to understand the rise of Trump. You have to look at Bill Clinton and U.S. historians who had access to MSNBC and were very prominent in pushing a narrative, are totally incapable of doing. They're totally incapable of understanding how, say, Clinton's militarization of the border or the crime bill or his terrorism bill or his end of welfare bill or NAFTA, led to Trump and Trumpism and basically what sociologists calls the de-pacification of society with the deep polarization that's happening in the United States. You don't have to look outside. 

And then, of course, this is then expanded and extrapolated where domestic pathologies within the United [00:03:00] States then become civilizational, becomes about the West, right? That, this struggle over territory in the Ukraine and the expansion of NATO becomes existential as writers like Applebaum and Snyder would have it. And it's really a way to deny the culpability of domestic actors, political elites. As I said, you don't have to look to Russia for foreign influence. If you want to look at foreign influence, and this is where Gaza just explodes the whole liberal resistance narrative. You could look at Israel and AIPAC. They've had a much more direct bearing on the shaping of domestic politics and political culture than Russia has. 

ADAM JOHNSON - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: I want to hook into this because I think some people they listen to this and they think, okay, like y'all are just being a bunch of hipper than now leftists, but there's actually a prescriptive element to this, which I want to get into, which is the goal is to prevent future Trumps, [00:04:00] then you have to understand the antecedents. This is not just an academic exercise. That this has real world consequences about how a 2025 #resistance may be different than the #resistance of 2017. And that the 2017 one leaned heavily into this. And again, because big donors loved it. Reid Hoffman, all these kind of democracy think tanks, the high minded stuff, all the sort of rebranding of Bush-era neocons. It had a hook of this kind of Russiagate lawfare thing. And I, again, I don't think there's anything wrong with investigating Russiagate initially because it's, there's some weird shit that happened, but ultimately it kind of was a big nothing burger and wasted a lot of time and resources and it pumped money and influence into some of the worst people on earth.

That there is a prescriptive element to this, which is, okay, how do we prevent the 900 Trump clones coming down the right wing conveyor belt? You have to really understand the initial causes to really have a long term actual quote unquote resistance. Why is understanding this history and Trump's [00:05:00] antecedents necessary in terms of orienting opposition to his frighteningly appealing message?

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah. I mean, there's no doubt that The way that it's framed by, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC or resistance historians shut down and preclude coming up with a more comprehensive, robust strategy for defeating Trump. It's a fact that you don't beat fascism by calling fascists fascists. That's not how... I work mostly in Latin America. And it has its share of fascists. You know, they don't have a fascist debate. Who isn't a fascist? They call the right, they call the conservative right fascist and the left defeats it usually when it can, in those moments when they win electorally by offering a robust social democratic program that speaks to the material conditions of people's lives. And just the way so much of the political discourse, look [00:06:00] already the autopsy of the 2024 election is taking shape you know it's basically you know blaming this micro voting group or that micro voting group or whether you know whether woke is a strategy or not. But nobody talks about what actually wins elections or at least what could shape the political terrain in a way and might entail losing elections until the terrain is reshaped is pushing forward a robust program of social rights and universal welfare programs.

I mean, when they pick Tim Waltz to be the vice president, I thought that that was where they were going. I thought that was what the Harris campaign was going to do, because that's basically what Minnesota did coming out of that former labor tradition. They passed a whole series of, not means tested, not tax credits, but universal programs like, everybody in school eats breakfast and lunch for free, no matter what your [00:07:00] family's salary is. And, you know, it took a long time to get to that point, but they got it through. But then this is what circles back to Gaza. Gaza put a lot of limiting pressure on what kind of campaign Harris could run.

She couldn't run a center left campaign, the kind Biden ran in 2020 and beating Trump by a slim margin. The whole kind of running on a campaign of Trump is an authoritarian and Trump is a fascist. And it's, and the choice that stands before us as fascism versus democracy is such an abstraction. It didn't mean anything for most voters. And it pushed. the Harris campaign into basically rehabilitating, turning the 2024 election into a celebration of the Cheney family. Which is just, amazing. So you see the way that this liberal resistance narrative that sees all evil as coming from outside the United States, that doesn't see it as, see it as an attack on the [00:08:00] institutions and society that we have rather than emerging from the institutions and societies. 

Can Trump Really End Birthright Citizenship? - Boom! Lawyered - Air Date 12-12-24

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: This past Sunday on Meet the Press, Donald Trump reiterated his intention to end birthright citizenship, saying that he is quote, 'Absolutely planning to halt birthright citizenship on his first day in office." He called the practice ridiculous and claimed that the U.S. is the only country with birthright citizenship, which 

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Excuse me? That's not even true. I mean, look, I know we don't expect the man to tell the truth on anything, but that's just, I don't know. There's a country called Canada. Has he heard of it? Tariffs, buddy. 

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Right. It's just factually inaccurate. And he went on to say, quote, "We're going to end that," (birthright citizenship) "because, it's ridiculous." And that quote, "If somebody sets a foot, just a foot, one foot, you don't need to on our land, [00:09:00] congratulations, you are now a citizen of the United States of America," which actually is not what birthright citizenship is. It's not as soon as you dip a toe on to the American border, then suddenly you're a citizen.

Like you really have to be born here. You got to escape the uterine Bastille on these shores and then you're a citizen. It's not just, oh, I got a toe across the border. Woo. Woo. I just. He also suggested that he might attempt to end birthright citizenship through executive action, stating, quote, "We're going to have to get it changed. We'll maybe have to go back to the people, but we have to end it." 

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: It's going to be such a ridiculous four years. Just. Yeah, I mean, let's talk about what birthright citizenship is. But you hinted at it, right? It's not like dipping a toe in. 

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Right. I got my toe across the border. Woooo I'm an American now! 

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Birthright citizenship automatically grants citizenship [00:10:00] to individuals born in the U.S. irrespective of their parents immigration status or citizenship status. It's a right guaranteed by the 14th amendment to the United States constitution. That amendment that we're going to be talking so much about in the Trump administration. And it states that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside."

Pretty straightforward. Applies to anyone born. On U. S. soil, including children of undocumented immigrants. And it's based on the concept of jus soli, meaning the right of the soil, which grants citizenship based on place of birth. And it contrasts with citizenship acquired through other means, such as naturalization or jus sanguinis. It sounds sexier than it is. It's citizenship by blood. [00:11:00] 

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: And birthright citizenship is not a new, it's not a new concept. 

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: No.

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: And the attack on birthright citizenship is based on a willful misreading of case law and legislative history, specifically the phrase that you mentioned, quote, "subject to the jurisdiction thereof."

And to get into this, we're going to have to talk about a case from 1898 called Wong Kim, called United States versus Wong Kim Ark, right? In 1898, the Supreme Court confirmed the principle of birthright citizenship, meaning if you're born here, you are a citizenship here in this case, Wong Kim Ark. And we should just go over the facts of the case a little bit.

Wong Kim Ark was born in the United States to Chinese parents who had been living and working in this country for a long time. He left the United States and then was denied reentry into the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act. And if that sounds super hella racist to you, it's because the [00:12:00] Chinese Exclusion Act was super hella racist. It excluded and restricted Chinese immigration and prohibited immigrants from China from becoming naturalized citizens. Now Wong Kim Ark challenged the U.S. government's refusal to recognize his citizenship, and he won. Right? In a 6-2 decision, the court decided that Wong Kim Ark was a citizen of the United States because he was born on American soil.

The court specifically clarified the meaning of the phrase, subject to the jurisdiction thereof, right? The court held that setting aside Native Americans, who have their own sovereign and sovereign tribal immunity or sovereign tribal status, and excluding diplomats who also enjoy sovereign immunity in the United States, the 14th amendment extends citizenship to everyone born here. 

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: It's such a simple concept yet the United States tried to argue that a person of Chinese descent [00:13:00] is not a citizen of the U. S. even if he was born in California. Because his parents were 'subjects of the emperor of China' and that their kid, Wong Kim Ark, was not subject to the political jurisdiction of the general government of the U.S. and the Supreme Court said no. It just said, no, the Chinese Exclusion Act could exclude or expel Chinese people born in China, but could not be applied to citizens, irrespective of their race or color. 

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: This case has been settled for about 125 years. So the question becomes, what are the chances that the Supreme Court is going to upend it? Because at the outset, people really seem to believe that it is unfathomable that this country would end birthright citizenship. But if it actually did, it wouldn't be unfathomable. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary because it would be following in the footsteps of other countries, like in the UK, where the right of the blood, that sanguine is sexy language, supplanted right of the soil [00:14:00] when it comes to granting citizenship, right.

In England and in Ireland and other places that have seen this really expansive growth of anti-immigrant sentiment on the rise, citizenship was changed so that it would be tied to blood and not to soil in order to prevent immigrants from just, you know, stepping a toe on the soil, having a kid, and then having that kid be automatically a citizen.

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Yeah, I mean, the question of whether or not the court is going to up end precedent at this point, with this court, we're still asking that? 

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Right.

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: I mean, come on. And so Trump could completely YOLO birthright citizenship in an executive order that would land the case before the Supreme Court pretty quickly. He would test the loyalty of the people that he installed on the Supreme Court. This is a reach. I mean, Dobbs and Rowe was a reach. Birthright citizenship and just going for it is a reach of a different magnitude. But don't, I [00:15:00] mean, you know, don't challenge Trump on that because he seems pretty intent to doing it. And, to get the court to go along, it would require a tortuous reading of the Constitution and the 14th Amendment, right? And this would have to go against that straight textualist stuff that they love, that's their, like, juice, right?

Rep. Delia Ramirez- Trump's Immigration Plans Are -Un-American, Unconstitutional & Undemocratic - Democracy Now! - Air Table 12-11-24

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Ramirez, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can start off by talking about this promise that the mass deportations will begin in Chicago? And what will happen to the Chicago mayor?
 

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ: Yeah. I mean, Tom Homan decided to come not just to Chicago to make those promises, but he came to my very own district, the district of Guatemalan immigrant — daughter of Guatemalan immigrant and congresswoman. And I’ve got to tell you, the level of disrespect is clear.

But I will say to you [00:16:00] that a number of us have said it very loud and clear. You can come to the 3rd District. You can come to any part of the city and the state of Illinois. In Illinois, we understand the impact and the contributions of immigrants, and we will do everything in our power to protect the families that have created the fabric of our country.

I mean, look, I know that he’s going to try to target the mayor, the governor, myself and others. But we also recognize that when he’s talking about deporting, he’s talking about deporting people who have been here decades — decades — and raised children, put them through college. And it’s absolutely unacceptable that he begin thinking about and targeting cities like Chicago, where we understand that we have thrived in the way that we have because of its immigrants.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about Homan, who Trump has dubbed the “border czar,” saying that he would prosecute the city’s Democratic mayor if he impedes them? How exactly, do you understand at this point, people are going to [00:17:00] be rounded up?

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ: Yeah. I mean, look, it’s really difficult, because they keep saying they’re going to do this, they’re going to do that. He’s talking about, on day one, he’s going to end birthrights for U.S. citizens. And we know that it’s constitutional, he can’t do that.

The reality is, what I think he’s going to probably attempt to do is attempt to take and deport people who are already in detention centers. I mean, look, if we’re talking about people who have a criminal record and have a felony, they’re already in order of deportation proceedings to be deported out of the country. I have a feeling that what they’re going to end up doing is going into detention centers and begin the deportation. But, of course, no one — no one — is safe under Donald Trump. And so, I could imagine that they’d attempt to go to courthouses or where people have appointments, people who are abiding by law every single day, whose only crime, according to Donald Trump, is to have entered this country unauthorized [00:18:00] or have overstayed a visa because of our broken immigration system.

In the state of Illinois, we passed legislation years ago, actually, in his first presidency, stating that in the state of Illinois, through the TRUST Act, we would not have ICE working closely with local police to deport families and individuals whose only crime is to be undocumented in this country. I suspect that we will continue to do that work under Governor Pritzker and under Mayor Johnson to ensure that families and individuals are protected, in a time where we know that we’re trying to understand the jurisdictions of what he can and can’t do. Clearly, Donald Trump doesn’t know what he can and can’t do. And so, really making sure that people like me, a daughter of immigrants, is protecting them and is working with organizations and legal organizations to do so will be incredibly important in this moment.

Can Trump Really End Birthright Citizenship? Part 2 - Boom! Lawyered - Air Date 12-12-24

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: And I also think it's important to remember that immigrants in immigration court are not entitled to lawyers the way that you are if you're convicted, if you're [00:19:00] prosecuted for a crime. You can hire a lawyer. But if you don't have the money for it, or if your case hasn't grabbed the attention of an immigrant advocacy group, then you may very well be deported to a country you've never been to. And then you're wandering around the streets somewhere trying to figure out how to get back home. 

And, we have to talk about how undergirding all of this is just, it's just racial animus, right? We got to talk about how this is being driven by the white nationalist forces in this country that are scared of being replaced by "furriners," and are trying to make sure that they can increase the domestic supply of white infants. These folks have embraced the idea that the United States belongs to white people. When it comes to Black people, it's I guess "we can stay since we didn't really ask to be here." But when it comes to "invaders," these "illegal aliens" that are "invading the border," "people who are coming to this country and taking our gerbs," if you remember that South [00:20:00] Park episode, right? Well, the United States has to protect itself from these invaders, right? The working class, the white working class needs to protect itself from these furriners taking their gerbs.

That's what these people think. They think that white genocide is a real thing. 

So there's a really big push to make sure that so-called "anchor babies," which is probably one of the most offensive terms that I can think of -- "anchor babies" won't take over the country. This is a blatant effort to whiten America. 

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: It absolutely is.

And to do that, conservatives have to rewrite the 14th Amendment so that it applies to certain people and not others. Like Amani, what is the 14th amendment? You like to say this all the time. 

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: It's a Black ass amendment.

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: And they have to rewrite it so that it favors certain people in this country over other people in this country. And that has real implications when it comes to fetal personhood, right? [00:21:00] 

So if citizenship is tied to your parent rather than your place of birth, for example, it's that much easier to redefine life starting at conception, because it's not about being born per se, but about where you come from, right?

It's not the expulsion from the uterine Bastille, right? It is absolutely a return to determining ownership via pregnancy and birth. And I don't know, man, that sounds like fetal personhood. Life begins at conception under the 14th amendment to me. 

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Yeah. And just to get back to the "how" of it all, like how would this play out? Let's not forget that an executive order isn't the only way that conservatives and Trump can attack birthright citizenship. 

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Mm hmm.

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: A constitutional amendment would get it done. 

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Oh Christ.

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: As would a constitutional convention under article 5 of the Constitution.[00:22:00] 

And right now, there are millions and millions of dollars being poured into an effort to mount a constitutional convention. And we're talking people like the Koch brothers, the Mercers, right? All of these muckety-muck rich people have been gagging for a constitutional convention for decades.

And I wouldn't be surprised if ending birthright citizenship and implementing personhood were are the main features of a constitutional convention. And what has to happen for a constitutional convention? Well it's kind of unclear, but 34 states have to apply in some capacity to ask for a constitutional convention.

And here's something funny I read in a law review article recently, that there are some conservatives who are trying to argue that when states like New York back in 1798 applied for a constitutional convention, that that application [00:23:00] translates to 2024. So if they get a bunch of states that want to have a constitutional convention in New York, it's like "we're out, because we're not into personhood and birthright citizenship," they might look back to an application made in 1798 when New York was trying to call for a constitutional convention for some other purpose and say, Oh, no, that counts. That's where we're in the upside down, where they're just finagling the rules and the institutions in order to come out with the result that they want.

And I just have to say, I've been saying it on BlueSky quite a bit: If your job depends on institutions holding, then you are unlikely to be able to admit when these institutions have failed. I got into a friendly back and forth with a law professor out of Texas. It started aggro, but then I pulled it back because I'm trying to be nicer now.

But you know, I said, Look, I'm sorry, but you are a professor of law. Like, how can you do your job if you don't believe in the institution that you are teaching these kids about? [00:24:00] And I understand why that is, but also I can see that you may not be able to understand how badly things are going, because your job depends on trying to prop up these institutions that have already failed.

Centrists Signal Capitulation After Trump's Victory - The Majority Report - Air Date 12-16-24

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: So much of Trump's ability to do what he's going to do is going to be a function of two or three things. One, the pliability of the 270, 80 judges and justices that he put on the courts four years ago. The willingness of the Senate and the House to capitulate to what he wants. 

Now remember, there's only going to be a two-person majority in the House and there are two of those people who voted for impeachment. Who knows where they are today in terms of these things. And of course everybody he's appointing all around him are there specifically because they are people who will say yes to him and never say no And you really [00:25:00] don't need that much talent at those jobs if you want to bring the wrecking crew in.

So this stuff is gonna be important. And how do you maintain discipline for a House member? It's not that hard because you don't have that much resources. Maintaining discipline for Senate members are trickier. And we know Elon Musk has already been out there saying If you don't approve all and rubber stamp all of Trump's appointees, I'm gonna marshal the forces to primary you, because he's got the money.

Here is, No Labels, their -- 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: No Labels?

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: --name of an organization.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: How are they still around? Weren't they supposed to field the presidential candidate this time around and nothing came of that? 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Well thank goodness. But their buddy Joe Manchin was in sitting with Trump and Vance right after he had sunk the [00:26:00] ability of Joe Biden to appoint and control the National Labor Relations Board until '26.

But here is, at No Labels, Lisa Murkowski. And addressing the idea of why won't any of your fellow Senators laugh a guy who has been credibly accused of sexual abuse, of being so drunk that he can't even function at functions for that matter. And the guy who has no particular experience in running the world's largest essentially institution by on a dollar amount, in the world.

Nevermind the anti-vaxxers, et cetera, et cetera. Here's Murkowski. 

LISA MURKOWSKI: I think it's going to be hard in these next four years, because you have [00:27:00] an administration coming in that has had an opportunity to see how things work, what didn't work. And now we've had four years to think about it. And the approach is going to be everybody toe the line, everybody line up. We got you here. And if you want to survive, you better be good. Don't get on Santa's naughty list here because we will primary you. We are seeing that play out in real time right now with the nominees. The nominees who have just been named, there's been no committee process on any of them. They're just doing their courtesy calls right now. And my friend, Joni Ernst, who is probably one of the more conservative, principled Republican leaders in the Senate right now, is being hung out to dry for not being good enough.

And you're getting -- 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, except for -- this is where Sam gets to take a little victory lap -- Ernst caved, or I would say folded [00:28:00] very quickly and basically because she has, she's a survivor of sexual assault and she's running in 2026, so she's up for reelection in 2026. She said, Oh, maybe I'm walking back my disapproval of Hegseth as a sexual assault survivor.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: The irony of this conversation is that she's not mentioning the billionaire Elon Musk who would finance these things. 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Mm hmm.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And, which makes it virtually impossible for any of these Republican senators to get any, maintain and even pretend that they have independence. Usually what you'll see these senators do is pretend that they have independence or pretend that they have a contrarian view. And then reasonably get there. 

What we're going to be in, they're all going to be in the mode within, I think, several weeks of running over each other to be [00:29:00] seen as conforming with the president's wishes. And what's really interesting about this too, it strikes me, is that there is probably no single organization, political organization -- I wouldn't know if I would call them a party, but, something like that -- that is more associated with a higher concentration of its constituents being billionaires or multimillionaires. The dynamic that she's not mentioning is that there is such an enormous amount of money being controlled by certain individuals, that just with a switch, that money can flow literally overnight. There's no fundraising that's going on. There's none of that. Elon Musk will just dump $40 million into any one of these races and completely capsize anything. And she will not bring that up, because everybody who is invested [00:30:00] or involved -- well, it's really the same thing -- in No Labels is just Elon Musk with a little bit less money.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: It opens up a whole can of worms for them because Republicans are always kowtowing to the interests of capital, of the donors that are funding their campaigns. But it's a little more crude in this instance because Elon Musk is basically just acting as a mob enforcer for Donald Trump in the form of -- instead of punching people out, or beating them up, it's about money, we'll take you out, we will take you out of your seat if you don't abide by his wishes, and it's less associated with a specific industry group. It's more of like bend the knee to the monarch, to daddy. And Elon Musk thinks that he'll be able to be the number one power player and even the shadow president in this administration. 

There was just a story in about Tesla, I guess in Reuters, that Trump is [00:31:00] looking to scrap car crash reporting rules that has been hindering Tesla, because their cars are crashing all over the place and killing people.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And I just want to make one more point on this. Both parties are beholden to money. But what's playing out in the Republican party now, which is slightly different, and this is a problem we have society wide, is that there is such massive concentration of wealth that you don't even have competing interests amongst the money.

Money is always going to dictate our politics as it's structured right now, for the most part, not always, but, but for the most part. But on the Republican side, it's not even just money. It is a person. Literally a person, like you say, who is just Trump's enforcer. Now, of course, he gets his beak wet too. It goes both ways. But we're going from an oligarchy to just like a full on monarchy. And this is just Trump's little [00:32:00] Duke who has the army. And that's what's going on here. 

Pay attention to this because at one point these centers are going to stop even pretending that they're going to issue some type of independence. I mean, honestly, the only person I think who's in trouble is Tulsi Gabbard, because she's had a couple actually decent votes in the past. I also think she's done. And so they have an easy, ready made excuse. 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Maybe RFK if Mitch McConnell keeps pushing the polio stuff.

Trumps Rage at FBI Takes Dark Turn as GOPers Signal They Wont Resist - The Daily Blast - Air Date 12-13-24

GREG SARGENT - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: Making that even worse and more difficult, the Times reports that figures like Steve Bannon and JD Vance, behind the scenes in particular, are in a frenzy of anger over GOP senators who are exercising their advice and consent role and scrutinizing Trump's nominees as they're supposed to. These MAGA figures are operating from the premise that Trump can't afford a defeat now, so they're whipping up the rage of the MAGA masses at these senators. And there are signs [00:33:00] that it's working, Will, with opposition softening to the insanely unfit Pete Hegseth, Trump's pick for defense secretary. The same thing is going to happen with Kash Patel, but Patel is being picked expressly to put Trump above the law and use the law against his enemies.

Will, where are Republican senators going to come down on that? Will they be just fine with it? 

WILLIAM SALETAN: So Greg, I used to be at The Bulwark, the pony guy, which meant that I was always looking for the pony under the pile of you-know-what. And so I was the optimist. And I've been cured of that. I've been thoroughly cured of it by, among other things, the election we just had.

But the behavior of Republican elites, of Republican politicians, senators in particular -- I don't think there is anything in the track record of these people on which to base any optimism about their behavior. 

This is fundamentally now an authoritarian party. It has successively abandoned all of the elements of what used to be the Reagan [00:34:00] Republican platform. These were, whether you agreed with them or not, they were principles, they were ideas. And it has become the party of doing whatever Donald Trump wants. And so this pressure from Bannon and others to approve any nominee Trump puts forward, it is, part of that. 

And it is notable that the message is not necessarily anything in particular about the qualifications of a given nominee. It is simply that Donald Trump chose this person. They can be a Fox News host with no administrative experience and a serious drinking problem who is in denial about his drinking problem. They can be a guy like Patel who has expressly declared that he is going to prosecute and punish Donald Trump's enemies, to put that guy in charge of law enforcement. It's an insane proposition. But the ethos of today's Republican party, and I'm sorry to say including just about all of the senators, is do whatever Donald Trump wants. And that's what we're [00:35:00] seeing. 

GREG SARGENT - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: Well, you could even add to that. Another reason that MAGA is pushing for these figures are because some of them are pro-Putin.

And a third reason that they're pushing for these figures is because they will put Trump above the law. It's not just that Trump has said, I like that person. It's also that MAGA believes that they can be trusted to put Trump above the Constitution and to carry out whatever orders he, and by extension MAGA, through the kind of MAGA God-King, want carried out, right?

WILLIAM SALETAN: Right. Absolutely. I fully agree with that, Greg. And the term that codes for that in Republican parlance is "Deep State." And Deep State, you hear this as the bureaucrats who don't serve the people. Well, in Republican terminology and Republican ideology today, serving the people means serving Donald Trump. And the fact that Donald Trump just got reelected unfortunately reinforces this narrative.[00:36:00] 

So the idea is: anyone who stands up to anything Donald Trump says is part of the Deep State and those people have to be purged, those people are in the way, and that somehow they have a mandate to do whatever this guy says because he was elected, and that's pretty much what they're going to pursue in every agency.

The Shallow, Power-Flattering Appeal of High Status #Resistance Historians Part 2 - Citations Needed - Air Date 12-3-24

NIMA SHIRAZI - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: Yeah, I think that's such a critical point. And as a historian yourself, I'm curious about what you think about this, this idea that the Monday morning quarterbacking of the 2024 election as we're seeing it play out, and as we will continue to, I'm sure, in this Applebaum-esque contextualization of authoritarianism personified by Trump and Trumpism, uses history, uses context in a certain way, while, similarly, shutting down a vision that could be different. So it's looking at history and the consistency of history rather than the change of history, and as [00:37:00] a historian yourself, who's documented, whether it's slavery in the United States or imperialism and colonialism in Latin America and elsewhere, what do you see as the lessons that are consistently not learned, yet pushed forward by ostensibly what's going to be the resistance, the center liberal resistance over the next four years that don't seem to be learning from the past. They maybe recognize the past, they maybe harken back or they contextualize Trump within a certain kind of past, maybe a Cold War past, yet refuse to then use that knowledge to look to a different future where maybe doing the same thing is maybe not the winning strategy, but rather have a different way forward. 

How do you see the kind of historians take on the past and their analysis for the future playing out across our media?

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, clearly the biggest mistake, the biggest thing that they miss is you don't defeat fascism by calling [00:38:00] fascists fascists, you defeat them by offering a political alternative. We all have ideology. They have ideology, we have ideology. But if we deny that we have ideology, and our ideology should be a social democratic ideology in which everybody's equal, everybody deserves a dignified life, and the government, should be capacitated to deliver effective means for people to survive catastrophes and to survive the routine traumas of just everyday life, through social security, through to national health care, through rapid response to climate change catastrophe, flying squads, whatever that might be, there's a whole slate of positive actions one could imagine in a progressive policy program that would defeat fascism. 

Maybe not the next election because, you have to push the window, you have to push the Overton window back to the left. Like they've done so long. All of these things that the Republicans are doing, they lost election after election running [00:39:00] on them until they started winning, and the Democrats have to do the same.

In terms of history, there's two ways of thinking about history. I mean, there's a lot of ways of thinking about history, but history as analogy, it's always 1938 and, and we're always in danger of being Neville Chamberlain giving away Czechoslovakia , and we're always ready with pea and we can't do that. Or there's history as cause and effect. Like, how did we get here? What were the things that were done in the past that got us here? And cause and effect is never a simple process, there's multiple chains of causes and effects that lead to the present, but certainly one of them we've talked about is the transformation of the Democratic Party, the de-alignment from a party that had overwhelming working class support to a party that supported WTO, NAFTA, all of the stuff that we talked about in the 1990s.

And even if they are the lesser of two evils, and they still, on some platonic ideal, [00:40:00] represent the closest thing the United States has to the social democratic polarity of politics, the reality is that, the Democrats have become a party of the suburbs, a party dominated by consultants, by wealthy donors that has no political imagination, that all reform is talked about in terms of tax credits or means testing. There's no big vision. There is no vision of the future.

If there's one thing that we can learn from the past, how one defeats fascism, is that you have to have a vision for the future. What's going to happen after you defeat fascism? FDR had a vision for the future, he was the world leader in confronting fascism and his vision for the future was a social democratic future. And that's what people fought for. And the fact that none of these people who are on the fascist gravy train, publishing their books and whatnot and talk about that, talk about, you need an ideology to defeat an [00:41:00] ideology, and you have to know what your ideology is. You have to know what your morality is. You have to know what you care about. You have to have an alternative. And they offer no alternative. 

Ravi Mangla on Building Community Power From Political Communication to Climate Action at Working Families Party - The Impact Report - Air Date 11-25-24

RENE YOPER: So hopefully in the coming days and weeks we will have a clearer picture of the "how" and the "why" Americans voted for who they did, and Ravi I know you have a perspective on this, so we look forward to hearing more from that. But before we hear it, I'd like to share something with our listeners that deeply resonated with me that I read from the Working Family Party's website, and it's your belief statement. So I will take a moment to read it. 

So it says, "we believe together we can make the future and build a country where everyone can thrive. We believe that no matter where we come from or what our color, most of us want the same thing. We want to earn enough to thrive, not just survive, and leave a better future for our kids. We want healthy food and clean water, [00:42:00] safe neighborhoods, and a safe world. We want to be free."

And in reading that, I immediately thought about our, the Bard Graduate Programs of Sustainability, our definition of sustainability. And simply stated, it's shared well being on a healthy planet. So I was like, okay, direct correlation there, makes so much sense. So just wants to share that with our listeners as the backdrop for our conversation, and as we jump in, Ravi can you help us to understand who the Working Family Party is, what you all exist to do, and then after that, Jackson, can you share from your perspective, why this conversation is an important one to have, and especially in the context of sustainability?

So, Ravi, over to you. 

RAVI MANGLA: Yeah, absolutely. I'm so grateful to be here and talk a little bit about the Working Families Party. So we've been in existence for 26 years now. We were founded in 1999 as a independent political party. And in those early stages, we were made up [00:43:00] of a lot of labor unions, a lot of grassroots activists, a lot of people who felt like neither party was representing the interests of working people. So they came together to try and create a multiracial, working class political party. 

And in New York State, we have something that's called fusion voting. A candidate can be cross endorsed by multiple parties and run on multiple party lines. So it allows us to be a third party and an independent party without playing the role of a spoiler.

And we consider ourselves a quote, "non-delusional third party", which is that we never want to hand power over to the Ravi, but we want to be able to advocate for the issues, for the values that really matter to us. And fusion used to be popular and commonplace in many states around the country. And as working class people and progressives started to gain too much power, it was banned for many states. So currently, only a [00:44:00] handful of states, New York, Connecticut, Oregon, I believe, are states that still have fusion voting where a single candidate can run on multiple party lines. 

And what that means is, for us, we advocate for certain values. We've been big around climate investments, climate protections, and a transition to full renewable energy. And when a candidate receives a significant portion of their votes on our line, it means that those issues are important to voters. The values that we are espousing are important to voters, and for that candidate to continue to receive the votes that come through our party, they should be standing up and fighting for those values.

So it's a very interesting political system that does not exist in many places, and there's not a lot of education in New York, frankly, to really educate people around the fusion system. We run up against questions all the time. If people vote for a candidate, [00:45:00] for instance, in this past election, we had Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as our candidates on our line. If they're voting for those candidates on our line, do those add towards the total vote? And yes, they do, but voting for those candidates on our line is espousing that you want them to fight for economic equality, for deep climate investments, for racial justice, for criminal justice reforms, for things that create true equality and level the playing field among working people in this country.

So that is a little bit about fusion and a little bit about the Working Families Party. As my director, Mo Mitchell, often says, we cook with what's in the kitchen. In many states, we engage and try to intervene in what we think is the most strategic way where we are not splitting the vote, we are not inadvertently handing power to the right, but we're able to advocate for our values within the rules of the system that we're in.

[00:46:00] So that's a little bit about us. 

Blue state governors network to erect firewall against Trump's threat to democracy - The Rachel Maddow Show - Air Date 11-19-24

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: So, Donald Trump has been adamant that his plan to put millions of people in camps and start deporting whole families, start raiding workplaces. He says that will all start on day one at noon as he's being sworn in on Inauguration Day, January 20th. 

If they're really trying to make that happen, you'd have to start preparing well in advance of the inauguration, right? But that means so does the work to stop him from doing that. Today in federal court, the ACLU filed their first lawsuit, seeking more information about Trump's plans to deport millions of people from this country once he takes office. As far as the ACLU is concerned, now is the time to sue. Now is the time to try to expose those plans in order to try to stop them from being carried out. Go time, in other words, is not the moment Trump becomes president; go time is now. 

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has called a special session of that state's legislature, asking them to appropriate more funding [00:47:00] for California's state legal challenges to federal policies in the next Trump term. The Democratic governors of Colorado and Illinois, Jared Polis and J. B. Pritzker, they're leading another group called Governors Safeguarding Democracy. Essentially, it's a network of governors who are agreeing to pool resources and work together to try to oppose the policies of Trump's White House. The group's top staffer is Julia Spiegel. She says that when governors of different states come together, they can become "essential force multipliers".

and firewalls against threats to our democracy. Joining us now is Julia Spiegel. She's the founder and CEO of GovAct, which oversees this new Governor's Safeguarding Democracy initiative. Ms. Spiegel, it's nice to meet you. Thanks very much for being here. 

JULIA SPIEGEL: Great to meet you. Thanks for having me. 

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: Can you help me and our audience understand some of the practical ideas behind how this would work? The idea is Governor's Safeguarding Democracy, but what does the group actually plan to do? [00:48:00] 

JULIA SPIEGEL: As you noted, Rachel, Governor's Safeguarding Democracy was launched by Governors Pritzker and Polis last week, but also to your earlier point, the work has been ongoing for several weeks. What the governors are doing in coordination with governors across the country is working together to pool their resources, the best expertise out there, the best staff to make sure that they are prepared for all the possible contingencies, whatever may come, but also to make sure that the state institutions of democracy are delivering for the people in the states. And that's really the central premise of what Governor Safeguarding Democracy is doing. 

And just to note, this isn't a novel or new method. It was actually pioneered by Governor Newsom in the aftermath of Dobbs, when Roe was revoked by the Supreme Court and Governor Newsom rallied other governors together and a whole host of them have worked collectively for two years now to work across state lines to protect reproductive health care, including doing novel things like stockpiling abortion medication that hadn't been done previously. So, we've taken that model and are really building it out now around safeguarding various [00:49:00] contours of democracy. 

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: You know, Julia, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you tonight is because even before this initiative came about, you have talked about the fact that governors have power when they come together. And we think of ourselves as either atomized, 50 different states, or the United States as one big thing. But you've talked about this idea that governors in smaller groups can be, as you say, both a firewall and a force multiplier. Can you talk more about that, about how a dynamic between a small group of governors, or maybe a medium sized group of governors, can be more effective than any of these governors could be on their own?

JULIA SPIEGEL: Governors have these extraordinary powers, some of which are very public, like the bully pulpit, but they also have [this] other suite of tools like the budget, signing legislation, executive authority, agencies that they oversee and run. That in and of itself is this wealth of authorities, but it's so much more powerful and impactful when those authorities are paired with each other across state lines.

There are lessons learned, practices that can [00:50:00] be adopted from one state to another, and coordinated strategy that can be undertaken to make the whole so much greater than just the sum of its parts. So that's really the premise of this work and that Governors Polis and Pritzker are leading now in the democracy context, but across a range of offices and are eager to work with anyone who is engaged in the work of safeguarding democracy. 

And I do want to note, Rachel, this work is critical no matter who sits in the White House. It's really about nurturing, supporting, and protecting the institutions of democracy. Either way, that work was undergoing years ago, and it should be undergoing years from now. 

Note from the Editor on the importance of scheduled maintenance for democracy

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with Citations Needed looking at the historical framework that led to Trump. Boom! Lawyered discussed Trump's threat to birthright citizenship. Democracy Now! looked at some of the impacts of mass deportation. Boom! Lawyered looked at the big picture of White nationalism in Trump's policies towards immigrants. The Majority Report examined to the political dynamics in Congress, keeping Republicans in line. The Daily Blast described how the boogeyman of the deep state is [00:51:00] being used to threaten anyone who opposes Trump. Citations Needed highlighted the importance of having a strong alternative to fascism rather than just calling it out. The Impact Report explored the benefits of fusion voting with the Working Families Party. And that the Rachel Maddow Show looked at some of the efforts already underway. To resist Trump's agenda. Through the courts and states. 

Those were just the top takes, there's a lot more in the deeper dive section. But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here discussing all manner of important, interesting topics. And a reminder that our winter sale on membership is currently going on. They're 20% off until the end of the year, so you can support independent media and get the bonus show for yourself, or as a gift for the holiday. Discounts and gifting are available both on our site and through Patreon, so whichever you prefer, go for it. All the relevant links are in the show notes, or just go to BestOfTheLeft.com/support. 

There, [00:52:00] in addition to all the members and the gifting and all of that, you'll also find bookshop.org, they do dead tree books, and libro.fm, they're the sister site that does audio books. Both are certified benefit corporations that help support brick and mortar bookshops, while still providing an online. Book shopping experience. In short, they're are decidedly non evil compared to most of the other online bookstores. And shopping through our links. It helps support the show as well. Again, head to BestOfTheLeft.com/support or follow the links in the show notes to grab a membership for yourself or as a gift, particularly while they're on discount. 

As always if regular membership just isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.

Now, just a couple of quick thoguhts to add on today's topic. This week's bonus show, I think is quite relevant to [00:53:00] this discussion. We dive much deeper into the topic of why the left needs to put more focus on fixing the government, rather than just defending it. And this is coming from people who understand the instinct to defend. With the right laser focused for decades on calling for the government to be torn to shreds or drown in a bathtub, it is understandable why the reflexive reaction would be to defend rather than to look critically at parts of the government. What can we do to make things better to serve the people? The instinct is defend, defend, defend. I think the same dynamic is playing out with the Democratic party. For many, present company excluded, I'm sure, the focus has been on defending and propping up the party while resisting calls for change as though any change could be destabilizing and a threat to the Democrats' electoral prospects. Well, with an across-the-board loss in the Presidential, Senatorial, [00:54:00] and House elections this year. I can think of no better time to start looking inwardly to find what reforms and improvements could be made to improve the electoral prospects for the left. 

We've heard already today about the Working Families Party and fusion voting, and there's going to be a bit more in the Resistance section of the show, still to come. As part of the prep for today's episode, I give a little deeper on fusion voting and I came across this passage about the role of political parties that I found actually sort of refreshing. 

It says, "Parties are the essential infrastructure of a healthy representative democracy, just as roads and bridges and railways and airports and electricity grids are the infrastructure of a modern economy. Similarly, we want better roads and bridges, not merely because we enjoy driving. Rather, we say we want better infrastructure because of what else it makes possible—a thriving economy not bogged down by potholes [00:55:00] and closures and traffic snarls. The same is true of political parties. We want better political parties, not for their own sake, but because parties are the institutions that connect citizens to the government. When they function poorly, many citizens feel disconnected and isolated."

I'll link to the full article. It's a long piece about fusion voting and the benefits of it, that's just a tiny, tiny piece of it. But, calls for reforms. Shouldn't be seen as adversarial or accusations. "The party is bad and your bad and you need to fix it or you need to get out of there." That gets people on the defensive and even more determined to defend the status quo. But put into that framework I just described about it's just being infrastructure, reforms should be seen as normal and necessary maintenance. All [00:56:00] systems need tune-ups, all those elements of the sort of structures of the economy need maintenance, so we should understand that parties. Kind of need that same sort of regular maintenance as well.

For the Democrats, the last of the two major parties to sort of, half-heartedly continue to work on upholding democracy, one of the reforms they should be supporting is fusion voting. The major parties have worked to squash the idea in the past to protect their duopoly on the system, but for a party that makes it claim to support democracy and has a major image problem at the moment, supporting a mechanism like fusion voting that allows in third party energy without running into the problem of the spoiler factor in first-pass-the-post elections, fusion voting can actually be the answer to multiple problems. 

For the left, or anyone [00:57:00] supporting a more robust and dynamic democracy, fusion voting is just the mechanism. And particularly for the left and Democrats who desperately need an injection of progressive economic focus on benefiting working people, it's the Working Families Party that is the organization that would stand to benefit from the expansion of fusion voting to new states where they could help put pressure, healthy, much needed pressure, on Democrats across the country. Just some scheduled maintenance for democracy to keep it running smoothly. Or, you know, maybe to bring it back from the brink in the event that Trump doesn't drive the whole system completely into the ground. 

SECTION A - IMMIGRATION INTIMIDATION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on three topics. Next up, Section A - Immigration Intimidation, followed by Section B - Bending the Knee, and Section C - Resistance.

Rep. Delia Ramirez- Trump's Immigration Plans Are -Un-American, Unconstitutional & Undemocratic Part 2 - Democracy Now! - Air Table 12-11-24

AMY GOODMAN: Birthright citizenship is in the Constitution. How would President Trump get around [00:58:00] that?

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ: Well, look, first of all, this whole day one thing he likes to say so that he can get all the hits he can is ridiculous. It is a constitutional right for anyone born in this country to have U.S. citizenship. And as you heard previously, it is the 14th Amendment. You can’t get around the 14th Amendment. He would have to go to the Supreme Court, which, in this case, unfortunately, he has already stacked with his very conservative, only-do-whatever-Donald-Trump-says Supreme Court justices. But that means he can’t do it on day one. And if he wanted to do it through congressional action because in the House he has one-vote majority, first of all, it would be very difficult even if it was just by one vote. But, Amy, it would require a constitutional amendment, that requires two-thirds votes for that constitutional amendment, and there is no world that this Congress would give him those numbers. So, look, it won’t happen on day one.

But the idea that he would say this is so un-American, unconstitutional [00:59:00] and undemocratic. Think about it. Millions of us, we are doctors, service members, members of Congress. And you’re saying you’re going to take their citizenship away from them? We should be asking ourselves as the American people: First, U.S. citizens who are first generation, then who is next? Who is American enough for Donald Trump?

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about who’s next. During a recent interview on 60 Minutes, Trump’s pick to be border czar, Tom Homan, said that mass deportation campaign could also target U.S.-born children born to undocumented parents. He was being interviewed by Cecilia Vega.

CECILIA VEGA: We have seen one estimate that says it would cost $88 billion to deport a million people a year.

THOMAS HOMAN: I don’t know if that’s accurate or not.

CECILIA VEGA: Is that what American taxpayers should expect?

THOMAS HOMAN: What price do you put on national security? Is it worth it?

CECILIA VEGA: Is there a way to carry out mass [01:00:00] deportation without separating families?

THOMAS HOMAN: Of course there is. Families can be deported together.

AMY GOODMAN: So, there is Homan saying of course there’s a way not to separate families that are of — that are both legally in the United States and not: Just deport them all.

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ: Amy, it’s so interesting — right? — and hypocritical. Tom Homan’s ancestors are not originally from this area, from this region, from the United States. When his ancestors came — and I’m sure the Statue of Liberty was welcoming them — they didn’t have to go through a bunch of paperwork to enter this country. Some would argue that in that time borders were very different. Some would even define it as even more open borders. Give me your tired, give me your hungry, and we will take them in, and we’ll make this country the beautiful country it is.

It is cynical to me for this man to be the same man that says he represents a future [01:01:00] president that cares about families and saying, “Simple. Have them get deported with their parents.” They have nothing else, these children, than the United States as their country. They are as American as Tom is, as American as Tom’s parents are, as American as Tom’s family is. And yet here he is: “Simple. Just go ahead and have them deported.”

This is a moment for Democrats and for people who remember how this country’s economic opportunities were built, those that perhaps their parents came in the early 1900s, Italian Americans to New York, or those that came 25, 30 years ago or now, to ask themselves, “What kind of country are we? Are we going to say that children whose country is the United States, we’re going to send them to go die in a country that they don’t know?” This is a moment for us to be fearless and courageous, to take a stand for every single person [01:02:00] that Donald Trump is attacking, if it’s trans kids, if it’s women, if it’s immigrants, because he’s coming for every one of us that he believes and he deems not American enough.

AMY GOODMAN: What can President Biden do in these last weeks of his administration that would protect undocumented immigrants?

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ: Yeah. Well, look, I think there’s a number of things and a number of executive orders, that you perhaps have heard from a number of advocacy groups, that have been sent to him. There’s renewals of DACA that could be done. People who have DACA and maybe their appointment is in February or March, why not just make sure that they’re renewed, if all the paperwork is correct. There is no criminal record, by the way. If you are a DACA recipient, you have to have a clean record, no criminal background. Already we vet all those things. Give those automatic renewals. Extend protections for people who are already on parole. Extend the TPS for [01:03:00] those that are about to have their TPS expire. There’s a number of things we could be doing. We still have the White House. And if I’m President Biden, I am working every breathing moment between now and the change of power to protect as many Americans as I possibly could.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, you’re not President Biden, so do you know what he is actually doing?

REP. DELIA RAMIREZ: I am not President Biden. I am very clear and aware of that. Look, I understand that they are looking at a number of things. I don’t have clear direction on what those are and what has been, in fact, approved. But I’ll guarantee you, Amy, I’m calling his office, and I’m calling the secretary of homeland, on a regular, every single day. There is no holiday party here that I’m interested in. I am interested in making sure that we’re extending the protections to as many people as we can as we still have the White House and the Senate.

Can Trump Really End Birthright Citizenship? Part 3 - Boom! Lawyered - Air Date 12-12-24

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: And, but here's my question.

Doesn't originalism, right? Like Sam [01:04:00] Alito and Thomas and all these conservatives are just dry humping originalism, right? And it just seems to me that originalism. Cuts against the outcome that they want here, right? Because now in this post Dobbs, post Bruin, that's the guns case from New York, right? Where everything has to be rooted in history and tradition.

Doesn't it seem like ignoring 125 years of case law that says if you're born here, you're a citizen. How does ignoring that jive with this originalist. Interpretation. Right? Like, do they really just say, well, we weren't being invaded by the Chinese in the 1880s and we're being invaded by Latin Americans in 2024.

And that's how it's different. Is that really just what they're going to say? 

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: What would the founders think? Think, Imani! Honestly, it really doesn't matter because you're expecting them to make sense when [01:05:00] they're only concerned about outcomes that match the conservative agenda, right? Like, think about that man, James Ho, for example, only for a moment, okay?

James Ho has done a 180 on birthright citizenship in this video. In this issue in 2006, he wrote a paper where he mounted and that originalist defense that you're talking about of the well established interpretation. The birthright citizenship says that if you're born here, you're a citizen and argued the only way it could be restricted was through a constitutional amendment.

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: But I mean, was James Ho sitting on the Fifth Circuit in 2006, or was he just writing papers? He was just writing papers, man. He wasn't really consequential. Cut to 2024, he's, you know, a, he's a big, a big, bigwig, I guess we'll call him, on the Fifth Circuit, and he's now claiming that Yes, his original, originalist interpretation of birthright citizenship, this thing that he wrote about in [01:06:00] 2006, that still made sense.

That makes sense. But at the time he wasn't thinking about an invasion, right? And that's what he thinks is happening now. That's what conservatives think is happening now. We are being invaded. And here's what he said, quote, Birthright citizenship is supported by various Supreme Court opinions, both unanimous and separate opinions involving Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and others.

But birthright citizenship obviously doesn't apply in case of war or invasion. No one to my knowledge has ever argued that the children of invading aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship. And I can't imagine what the legal argument for that would be. 

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: I can't. I can't. I mean, invading armies. So you and I know this is psychophantic bullshit.

It is. But he's laid out the legal argument, and every conservative judge in the federal judiciary has their [01:07:00] marching orders. I mean, can't you see this James Ho sitting down and writing an opinion that says, Arc is distinguishable because here we are at war on the border and we are trying to beat back an invasion of criminals and Hannibal Lecter types and those stakes weren't at issue back in 1898.

I 

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: can. Absolutely. I mean, if you think about population demographics, when white folks were freaking out about the number of Chinese immigrants around 1880, the percentage of Chinese immigrants in the U. S. population was about a quarter of a percent. Right now, the immigrant, immigrant population is about 15%.

So it's just a different level of scale. And I think that that's more than enough for the Supreme court to hang its hat on. Because even though the same nativism and racism and xenophobia drove the Supreme court's decision in Wong Kim arc. One can argue that opposing that sort of nativism and racism [01:08:00] is rooted in the history of this country, right?

Like, there's a counter argument that this is an emergency unlike the founders had ever faced or would have ever conceived. 

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Yeah, and as the conservative legal movement is wont to do, they're breadcrumbing that argument already, right? And so we can expect to see that as the buttress for whatever Trump pulls.

So now that James 

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Ho, Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho, is worried about his name, right? How does Trump ensure that a case challenging his executive order on birth right citizenship ends up in the Fifth Circuit? Could he? Like here's a crazy thought, could he issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship and then immediately seek a declaratory judgment in the fifth circuit, right?

A declaratory judgment is when you just say, I want to know what the law is. I'm not really suing anybody. I just want some clarification. Could he do that? Or is he going to just. Forget about [01:09:00] even trying to go to the courts and just immediately start up raids in Texas, say Amarillo, Texas, so that anyone who sues him saying that, you know, you can't deport me because I'm a citizen, they end up before Matt Kazmarek, or Reed O'Connor, or any of those Trump You know, 

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: what is this, what's the process here?

I mean, that's an excellent question because we're trying to game play strategy on rewriting the 14th amendment by executive Fiat. And if you've got the wherewithal to try and do that, I don't think you care very much about the process beyond that. Right? Like the point is the chaos. So engage in mass deportation efforts, maybe a lawsuit gets filed, you know, I saw folks on blue sky saying like that first person who gets swooped up, man, they're gonna sue for an injunction, maybe, 

IMANI GANDY - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: right?

JESSICA MASON PIEKLO - CO-HOST, BOOM! LAWYERED: Maybe they are. It depends on who we're targeting, right? [01:10:00] And in the meantime, none of that lawfare matters because we are terrorizing. People, including U. S. citizens and separating families and engaging in a domestic terror campaign. So there doesn't necessarily even have to be a judicial blessing to cause a lot of harm.

Richard Wolff Trump's deportation plans will destroy the economy - The Real News Network - Air Date 11-23-24

RICHARD WOLFF: The Department of Homeland Security says there's somewhere between 10 and 12 undocumented, million, undocumented immigrants in the United States. So as an economist, let me make one thing clear. We are a rich country of 330 million people.

The economic problems we have, which are severe, could not ever have been caused by 10 to 12 (million) of the poorest people on the planet. The notion that the immigrants are a cause of the problems we face is stone cold ridiculous. It may be a clever [01:11:00] scapegoating, it may work to get you votes, but it has nothing to do with reality.

Number two. There are certain industries that concentrate undocumented immigrants. Agriculture is a big one. The restaurant business is a big one. Construction is another big one. And then there's a whole host of other industries, but those are the big ones. In those industries, undocumented immigrants are a major part of the labor force. Not only that, they are a more important cause of the profitability in those industries than their mere numbers would tell you. Why? Because an undocumented immigrant can be and is regularly abused by the employer. For the obvious reason, which if you have any contact with these folks, they'll tell you ten [01:12:00] different stories, I've heard them all. It's Friday afternoon. Everybody's going to pick up their check at the front office before they go home. Jose arrives. He stands in line, waits for his check. The boss says, Jose, we've had a terrible week. We didn't make the money. I can't pay you this week. But if you come back next week, I can be sure to pay you.

What is Jose gonna do? Answer. Nothing. He dare not go to any government office. Because he's an undocumented, he can't show a paper, he can't show a residence allowance, nothing. He's terrified of going anywhere near the labor office. There's nothing he can do. And the employer knows it. The employers look for these people because of this. And I'm not going to here, take your time and mine to talk about the abuse, sexual and other, that this situation invites in all the ways you don't need me [01:13:00] to tell you about.

Okay, now let's imagine you deport them. First of all, that costs billions, because you're talking about 10 to 12 million people. You have to house them, you have to move them, you have to feed them in the process, you have to deal with the umpteen million lawsuits that will immediately crop up around all of this. This is going to take time, and it's going to cost personnel, and it's going to be an immense expense. But that's the least of it. Here comes the big one. Every one of those industries is a crucial player in the inflation level of the United States. Who's going to pick the lettuce? Who's going to pick the fruit? Who's going to do all that work? Who's going to clean the dishes in the back of the restaurant? Who's going to clean up at the end, you know, the evening when the patrons of the restaurant go home? Well, the answer is you either close the restaurant, and that has economic consequences, or you [01:14:00] close the farms, and that's really not an option, or you're going to have to hire Americans.

And Americans won't be afraid to go to the labor office if you don't pay them. So you're going to actually have to pay them. And you're probably going to have to pay them a good bit more than the immigrant for all the reasons you normally pay immigrants less than native workers. Which means the cost structure of these industries is going to take off.

And you know what they're all going to do? Those employers, they're going to raise their prices. They're going to want to do that to recapture the extra costs that will come. And the government has not proposed anything that will substitute here. 

I've heard one professor tell me, oh, we don't have to worry, AI will take care of this. You know what AI does? It makes people like you and me superfluous. But are we ready to go and wash dishes at the back of the [01:15:00] restaurant? Are we ready to pick apples? Really? You're gonna cause social upheaval. You're gonna cause inflation. Mr. Trump can't do that. Inflation is half of why he got elected. How can he turn around and then be the person who has to go on TV and try to explain why he promised to deal with inflation, only it's gotten worse? And he won't be able to tell the truth, it's because I'm deporting everybody, because then the argument will be as clear as day for people. So you're gonna have to watch now as the various cabinet secretaries, bizarre though they are, have to undo what it was he's promised.

SECTION B - BENDING THE KNEE

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B - Bending the Knee. 

Trumps Rage at FBI Takes Dark Turn as GOPers Signal They Wont Resist Part 2 - The Daily Blast - Air Date 12-13-24

GREG SARGENT - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: So, Will, I want to go back to your big point about how we can't forget this.

Um, let's go big picture. As you write, Trump was not exonerated in any sense. [01:16:00] In fact, the administration of justice is not being permitted to run its course. A jury won't actually hear the evidence against him and pass judgment on it. So, he's not exonerated because we didn't get the process. But here's what's disturbing.

Trump has the story exactly backwards as we said, but in a very real sense, he gets to say what the story is. His victory ends the prosecutions of him prematurely. Uh, and he can just say that he was exonerated. He will pardon who knows how many of the January 6th rioters. He's gonna just rewrite it all as kind of an outpouring of patriotism.

January 6th as we understand and know it. A violent criminal insurrection against the country is just getting disappeared. Do we have any recourse here? Well, 

WILLIAM SALETAN: it's going to be a challenge Pardon me. I'm listening to you and i'm thinking well when you put it that way I mean It's true that we we have this ideology of democracy in this country and all of us at the [01:17:00] bulwark uh and new republic and everybody we all fully support this but Just because you've won an election doesn't mean everything you say is true.

And so we're going to have a difficult time sort of getting that message out. But it is, it is still true. This is what happens in authoritarian countries, right? That the government puts out a message about what happened in the past. They just rewrite the history and everyone, because they control the media in that case, people just end up believing it.

And all of the great literature about fighting authoritarianism, there's always that this is, this is one of the great struggles. And I believe what. It was what Orwell said, right? You have to see what's in front of your face. It's a constant struggle that they're going, they are lying already about the past.

The claim that Trump was exonerated, that, uh, the FBI is evil, that the raid on the search actually of Mar a Lago was, was without warrant, which is total bullshit. Um, and especially Greg, what you bring up about January 6th. I [01:18:00] mean, he said, wasn't it in the Time interview, he said he's gonna like, right away he's gonna start pardoning these guys.

That he's gonna try to turn upside down the story of January 6th. And I remember thinking during the hearings that, um, you know, Liz Cheney and that, that, that committee, I thought they were just beating a dead horse half the time. They just, but in retrospect, those two years that they were able to tell the truth and the documents they were able to put together, the evidence they assembled, that's all going to be extremely important in laying a groundwork for us to maintain, you know, the little candle of truth that they're trying to blow out with all this, with all of the, the lies about, you know, about what happened.

GREG SARGENT - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: Yeah, I agree 100%. It was really a very important moment for those reasons. Let's finish up on Kash Patel for a sec. If there's any hope of being able to kind of hang on to the right side up story and not let it get erased and replaced by [01:19:00] the upside down story, part of that, not all of it, but part of it is going to reside in these Republican senators.

I, I understand that you're very pessimistic about, um, where that could all go. Republican Senators really look as if they probably will, um, green light Cash Patel and probably Pete Hegseth too, potentially. Don't know about RFK or Tulsi Gabbard. I think that, uh, Uh, Tulsi Gabbard's going to be a tough one, but anyway, we could really have Kash Patel.

And what happens though, when they actually start to prosecute people without cause, prosecute Trump's enemies without cause, can't we make Republican senators own that at that point? 

WILLIAM SALETAN: Yeah, I think we can make them own it. Um, the, uh, the, the outer limit of the question that I, that you're getting at is, is there some.

Is there some point at which reality intrudes, uh, you know, they're, they're going to try to do what the, what authoritarian regimes do, which is [01:20:00] to lie their way through everything. We have a model for what's going to happen, which is what they did in the last few years. Jim Jordan and others, uh, tried to make, uh, the villains, the heroes and vice versa.

They, they, uh, they're going to, uh, They're going to be prosecuting the investigators and the prosecutors who looked into Donald Trump and his various accomplices. Um, I don't know how far Patel's going to take this, but is there a limit to the lies they're going to be able to tell? Um, and I, I guess that remains to be seen, but, um, we're all going to have to do what we can to, you know, to, to marshal the truth and to remind people of it.

Cause it's so easy to forget. I you and I, we're like, You know, political nerds and we keep track of this stuff. But we saw in the election that people weren't paying attention to a lot of this and, and, um, we're going to have to just sort of keep these stories alive. Um, but as to your question about the Republican Party, Greg, I just, I, at this point, I expect nothing from them.

I honestly [01:21:00] think that when the history of this time is written, if we are lucky, we If the good guys win in the end, the Republican party under Donald Trump will just be viewed as an authoritarian party that did whatever he wanted to. And that's going to include about 50 of these 53 senators. Um, And I, I, I expect them to wave through Patel and, um, Kelsey Gabbard and all the, and all the others.

And maybe, maybe if we're lucky, what happens is Patel then undertakes some assault on the rule of law that is just so obvious that, uh, or they just screw up. deportations and it's a logistical disaster. A totally plausible scenario. At that point, do people turn against Donald Trump? I don't know. And I don't know the answer to that, but the thing that worries me most is the lying and the, the ability of a president with an entire party behind him to spread a narrative that is just [01:22:00] complete bullshit.

And whether that will overpower all of the assembled, what we used to call mainstream media and all of the truth tellers. 

GREG SARGENT - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: Well, I got to say, it seems really grim when you put it like that. We're going to have a lot of work to do. Um, and you know, the truth of it is that the outcome is uncertain. Yeah. Yeah.

I sometimes, 

WILLIAM SALETAN: Greg, I think about, uh, what would happen, I'm not enough of a Batman aficionado, but I think there are various versions of the Batman story where like the Joker becomes mayor of Gotham city. And that's where we are, man, that the Joker is the mayor and you know, we're, it's going to be a completely upside down, bizarre world for the 

GREG SARGENT - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: next four years, at least.

ABC News Sudden Surrender to Trumps Rage Stuns Experts Disturbing - The Daily Blast - Air Date 12-14-24

GREG SARGENT - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: In your piece you write that Trump is adopting a standard authoritarian tactic in a more general sense, which is to prepare the public to accept an authoritarian role for the state. It seems like we're seeing something similar, uh, right here. Uh, can you talk about that broader tactic? 

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So, yeah. I mean, Trump, during the election campaign, used all kinds of [01:23:00] language from calling his, his, uh, his opponents enemies of the, of the people or enemies of the state, uh, calling immigrants vermin, uh, using language that hasn't really been part of American politics before.

Um, he issued, uh, endless threats towards individual journalists, towards the media more broadly, towards particular judges, towards. various enemies. Um, and of course he kept doing that and has been doing it even more loudly since the election. And some of the purpose of this is not just, you know, letting off steam.

Um, what he's doing is making other people afraid to criticism or to criticize him or afraid to hold him to account. So he's creating around himself this atmosphere of anger and menace. Uh, and It looks like in a number of cases it's succeeding. And, um, you know, ABC is one example. There are a number of other examples from Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post, um, you know, to, uh, you know, to, to the, to [01:24:00] the head of the LA Times of other news organizations or news owners saying, right.

You know, let's back away or let's not pick a fight or let's concede something in advance because they, they don't want to be in the, in the, in the, involved in some kind of open fight with the president. And it's particularly notable that this is happening in the case of news organizations whose owners have other businesses.

So that would be true of the LA Times, the Washington Post, and also ABC, which is owned by Disney. So they have other businesses. They have lots of interests with the federal government, um, they have regulatory issues and that it looks like they're making concessions in advance so that they, so that they don't run into trouble down the line.

And, um, since I, I can anticipate what your next question would be, which is, Is this a pattern and is it something that we've seen before, uh, in other declining democracies? And of course, the answer is yes, it is. Um, that the, the [01:25:00] way in which it's not so much censorship, but media control and intimidation works in a place like Hungary or Turkey, uh, is not just government censorship.

You know, the government doesn't tell people what to write. Instead, the government finds ways of putting pressure on the owners of media, sometimes on journalists, Um, in, in order to make them, um, think twice before they say anything critical. 

GREG SARGENT - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: Well, in fact, the larger story here with ABC News really underscores what you're saying there, the story you're, you're telling there.

Um, remember, uh, during the campaign, Trump viciously attacked ABC News in particular for fact checking him during the one debate and, and at the time, Trump threatened to retaliate for that against ABC by revoking broadcasting rights. By the way, I should note that the New York Times reports that ABC executives have met with Trump transition team officials at Mar a Lago.

God knows what was discussed, but here's what we have. Trump [01:26:00] attacks ABC for telling the truth about him. Threatens direct retaliation if he wins, Trump sues for defamation, now ABC decides not to fight even though news orgs do this generally, um, and instead will donate 15 million dollars to something that lionizes Trump.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Um, it, it, we'll see how other news organizations, um, react, uh, and it's going to be particularly interesting, uh, those that are smaller, that have. that have fewer conflicts of interest, whether, whether they'll be able to hold out. But, you know, many people assumed in the past that, you know, the news media in the U.

S. was too big and too diverse and too complex to be intimidated the way The Hungarian news media is a Hungarian news media by comparison is a little, is tiny and, um, you know, and, and, and weak, but we are, this is a moment when, um, for other reasons, the, the business model of much media [01:27:00] is, is in trouble.

Um, a lot of them are either unprofitable or not as profitable as they were a lot of both broadcasting and, and, and newspapers. Um, you know, it's not true of everybody, but it's true of many. And you have an enormous amount of churn and uncertainty. And at this particular moment in history, um, it means that, that, that owners are, are more likely to be wary.

You know, if we were at a moment when the media was making lots of money, as it, as it once did in the past, or when it was expanding and everybody was hiring, It might, things might feel different, but right now it feels like things are shutting and closing down and staff are being let go. And I think that adds another layer to the, to the current circumstance.

It has nothing to do with Trump, but Trump is able to take advantage of it, clearly. 

GREG SARGENT - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: So, on Friday, Trump had this to say about the media during an appearance on Wall Street, and I think it goes directly to what you're saying. Uh, listen to [01:28:00] this. 

DONALD TRUMP: We did a good job. We had a great first term, despite a lot of turmoil, uh, caused unnecessarily.

And, but the media's tamed down a little bit. They're liking us much better now, I think. If they don't, we'll have to just take them on again and we don't want to do that. 

GREG SARGENT - HOST, DEEP STATE RADIO: And this looks to me like Trump knows that the media is in a vulnerable and precarious spot and he's really putting them on notice to a greater degree that more of this is coming.

 

The Shallow, Power-Flattering Appeal of High Status #Resistance Historians Part 3 - Citations Needed - Air Date 12-3-24

NIMA SHIRAZI - CO-HOST, CITATIONS NEEDED: You know, and this kind of gets back to the classic Chomsky critique when the U.S. does something objectively authoritarian or violent or evil is painted as a deviation from the natural state. Whereas when these bad guy countries do it, it's existential to their nature. It is their true essence. And it gets to what you've been saying, Greg, about Trump being seen as an individual who has been pathologized with, fascism and authoritarian tendencies, if not deeper than just tendencies, but that it is an individual pathology, and not [01:29:00] one that reflects the pathology of a nation state, unlike, say, Russia, China, Iran, which are pathologized as entire entities.

And so it kind of gets us back to this idea of trust in institutions and how the assumption is that these institutions that we have here are noble and just need to get back to what they once were, if this individual infection is removed from our nobility. Can you talk about the need of these pundits and this perspective to pathologize an individual rather than zooming out and looking at the historical context of our entire society and how we got here?

GREG GRANDIN: There's a political theorist named Corey Robin, who, I mean, he's been making this argument for almost a decade now, since 2016, that what that misses, focusing on the institutions and holding up the institutions and positing a kind of, Trump as a [01:30:00] violator of proceduralism and institutionalism, what that misses is that the way repression in the United States and exclusion and anti democratic political culture emerges out of the institutions that we have profoundly anti majoritarian institutions, anti democratic institutions, the Senate, the filibuster, the electoral college, the judicial system, the Supreme Court. None of these are particularly, expansive tribunes of expanding democratic rights. The way that the United States has maintained power, and the way power functions, is through the institutions.

So right there, there's a kind of original mistake among these liberal resistance historians and posing Trump to the institutions. Trump is, those institutions are primed to work and deliver on the Trump agenda without violating their function. I mean, look at the Supreme Court. So there's that, and then yes, there's a [01:31:00] way in which Trump is seen, and nation states are seen, as outside of the virtuous circle that the United States and only a few other nations comprise, and in some ways is a kind of, there's scales of degradation, scales of decline. At the beginning of the Cold War, when the United States searched around for trying to figure out how it could justify support for authoritarian regimes while fighting the Soviet Union, justifying the Cold War, it came up with the dichotomy, it's associated with Hannah Arendt, but other people, other philosophers and political theorists also kind of contributed to this idea that there was a distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism, that authoritarianism allowed civil society to function.

So it allowed the possibility of change and democratic movements to challenge the autocrat, [01:32:00] whereas totalitarianism eliminates civil society and leaves no buffer between the total state and the masses of people, and there was no space for democracy to take root. And therefore it had to be contained and counted.

That was basically the ideological framework that justified supporting Somoza in Nicaragua or the military regime in Argentina or Pinochet in Chile. But opposing Fidel Castro in Cuba, or not to mention the Soviet Union, and of course, this is the framework that is highly ideological and that had no real bearing on the facts on the ground.

But it was at least it was something of a justification. Then Jean Kirkpatrick rehabilitated is during the Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the United Nation, which was elevated to a cabinet level post. And, she rehabilitated that argument. to justify the Contra War and Reagan's Central American policy.[01:33:00] 

But there's long been a way in which the United States found ways to justify complete support for Saudi Arabia, say, and complete opposition to Iran, and that's where we are today. I mean, I, we're locked in this kind of, foreign policy that makes gestures towards civilizational struggle, towards defending the West or defending universal values.

But the hypocrisy of it is so glaring. During the Cold War, you could point out the contradictions and the irony and the hypocrisies like somebody like Noam Chomsky did, the decade after decade after decade. But the Cold War, the ideology corresponded somewhat to the reality in terms of what the United States stood for. And I'm not carrying any water for Cold War United States but compared to now, right, where the United States has [01:34:00] completely gutted itself, basically the United States came out of the Cold War and treated itself as if it was an occupied nation and its citizens were belligerent.

That's what the Clinton administration was. It basically, in the past soldiers came back from wars to a country that was building itself, building its social capacity, building its roads, its bridges, its social compact, expanding, however imperfectly, the promise of liberalism to more and more people. But starting with the first Gulf War, soldiers came back to a country that was literally taking itself apart. Physically moving factories from Detroit to Mexico, but also taking apart its social contract.

And that's the context. That explains Trump and where Trump is. And meanwhile, as all of this was going on, the political class continued with the same rhetoric of exceptionalism, the same soaring rhetoric of freedom and liberty, and the [01:35:00] hypocrisy became more apparent, I think. And I think that that's the space that Trump fills. In a way he's turned us all into a nation of, or at least half of the nation from citizens into basically the Joker, where they see the only response to the bullshit is to tear it all down. 

SECTION C - RESISTANCE

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section C - Resistance.

Ravi Mangla on Building Community Power From Political Communication to Climate Action at Working Families Party Part 2 - The Impact Report - Air Date 11-25-24

JACKSON THOMPSON: Yeah, when Renee read the mission statement of the working families party, I, I feel like that is something that would resonate with everyone beyond political ideology.

It's about equity. It's about living a good life, basically. But one of the biggest takeaways from this election has been that the Republican Party has essentially become the party of the working class. And there's the same party that's advocating for tax cuts to billionaires that's endorsed by the richest man in the world.

So it's a bit of a shock. So I'm wondering where that disconnect is, why working class people are moving to the [01:36:00] Republican Party. And away from a party literally called the working families party. 

RAVI MANGLA: Very good question. I would say that, uh, the working families party, for instance, has continued to grow. We've had a greater number of voters on our ballot line with each successive cycle.

We've continued to add. new members and new registrants as years have gone on and as people become disgruntled or dissatisfied with the two party system. So we found a lot of room to grow, but the right has been able to peel off many working class voters, and a lot of it is by communicating by messaging in a way that really resonates with people.

Sometimes it means preying on people's fears or using social issues as wedge issues, To try and drive people apart, and that's a scary and dangerous thing, and what we need to do as a working families party, what Democrats need to do, what anybody who is in a pro democracy movement needs to do to fight back [01:37:00] against the right.

Is to be able to be in spaces with working people another quote from my director Mo Mitchell. If you're in a room, uh, where everyone agrees with you, you're not in a big enough room. So, how are we also getting into spaces and having conversations with working people and getting outside of our bubbles?

And how are we messaging and communicating in a way that really shows that we are fighting for working people? A lot of time, our messaging can be very wonky. It can be very tied up in One thing I was told when I was, got my start in communications was that Democrats will tell you a recipe, and Republicans will just give you a cupcake.

That's right. And it's something I think about all the time, and we need to be better about it. Baking a cupcake, presenting something that people can see and know what it is immediately. 

JACKSON THOMPSON: That's the follow up question that I had was one of the big [01:38:00] focuses of democratic messaging, particularly in this election, was the threat to democracy.

And then we have other overarching themes of climate change and these big problems that are big problems, but are they too big? Are they too big for the average voter that is more concerned, potentially, with putting food on their plate or paying rent or paying their bills? I 

RAVI MANGLA: think that's absolutely true.

And one thing we've found from polling and message testing around climate is that when we message it in a, in terms of the big picture, the kind of catastrophic impacts, it can actually be very paralyzed and could be very hard to act. And it could be very hard for people to know what to do. And when we message it in terms of, pollution in your community of, of heat waves.

I think about last year when the wildfires in Canada brought smoke into people's communities and they could see and feel the worsening impacts of climate in a very real [01:39:00] tangible way. We need to be messaging it in terms of things that people are interacting with every single day, and sometimes when we zoom out, it becomes very difficult to grasp onto.

So, I fully agree with you that for us, we want to always be messaging of terms, in terms of how is this impacting me on a day to day basis. And speaking in the kind of micro and not the macro of job reports or employment numbers or how many degrees Celsius the planet is warming, how do we actually connect it with people's lived experience?

RENE YOPER: That's something, Ravi, that deeply resonates with me and I always say, and Jackson, I'm sure you've heard me say this several times in class, I always say, so what? So what? There's, we talk about all of these big, grand, big things, and at the end of the day, what is the so what of it? What does it mean to me?

What does it mean for my family, for my community? And then ripple outwards. But if we cannot answer the simple, so what, [01:40:00] I feel like folks are lost. You'll be lost. So what? And then now what? What do I do with, now that I know the so what, now that I can answer the so what, now what do I do with that information?

Interesting. Jackson, do you want to ask any other questions or shall I bring us to a close? 

JACKSON THOMPSON: I guess the last thing that I want to ask is how do we make our voices heard? We at the Bard MBA are constantly talking about how to make business more sustainable, how to improve the world and people's lives through sustainable business.

We talk about big things like macroeconomics. We have facts and we have ammunition that we can use in this fight. To maybe disprove or downplay some of the rhetoric that's out there and that's just us and there are a lot of informed people out there. But how do we cut through the noise? Are there specific organizations we should get involved in?

Should we be doing our own podcast? There's so many people talking, but like, how [01:41:00] do we make our voices heard? 

RAVI MANGLA: That's a fantastic question and I think what you are doing by having a podcast, by being able to use your platform to talk about these ideas is. Fantastic. It is great, and it's what we need. I think people should join organizations.

Like, if we are all going off and doing things independently, we're never going to build the power that we need to be able to push back, to be able to create a, majority. So finding an organization that resonates with you, and I'm not telling you what that organization needs to be, but something where you can be in community with people who share your goals, share your values.

I think that's very important. And I also think that people do not often know how accessible their elected officials are. I won't say that every elected official is accessible, but you can call up your elected official and say, I'd like to set up a meeting with five of my friends. And grab a group of people [01:42:00] and be like, here are some of our concerns.

We're constituents, we live in your district, here's what's going on right now. And being able to tap into, bring your community into those spaces where decisions are being made. And, I, even though I work in the Working Families Party, we connect with elected officials in a professional capacity all the time, I still call up my congressional rep about what I am dissatisfied with or what I am happy with.

Usually every week, I will make a call to my rep's office, and I think it's also important not just telling them when they're wrong, but what you like. If you see them fighting for something that you really like, that you appreciate. I think that feedback is good and I know from working with government staffers that they are always collecting that information from constituents and passing it along.

That is not the be all end all, but is a very simple thing that people can do during their day [01:43:00] that does not take too much time or energy.

RENE YOPER: And so, speaking of recommendations, Ravi, what advice could you give to future policy makers, right? We're in the business of education over here at Bard, and so we're, we have policy graduate students and as well as business students.

So what advice would you give to future policy makers? 

RAVI MANGLA: My advice is think generations ahead. It becomes very easy to make decisions in the moment, to get caught up in the politics of the moment. And to do things because everybody else is doing them. And to think forward to the future and how my decisions now, how the policies I'm pushing now, are going to impact people five or ten years down the line.

I think that if we take a long sighted view of things, how it's going to affect the next generation and the generation beyond that, we would not be grappling with many of the problems that we are dealing with today. So my best advice is to take a long sighted view of things. 

Congressman Calls For Seoul Style Protest Against Trump Inauguration w- Rep. Mark Pocan

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Also curious your thoughts on, on what just happened in Seoul, [01:44:00] South Korea.

I, I'm gonna rant about this in the next hour. My take is that, um, Yoon, President Yoon, uh, declaring the state of emergency, and then failing, and now he's facing calls for his impeachment. Um, that the reason he failed is, Because in April, the Parliament was taken over by the opposition party, kind of their equivalent of the Democratic Party.

He's kind of their equivalent of the Republicans. And, um, so he didn't have the political power in Congress that he needs. Trump doesn't have that problem. And, uh, although he did run, you know, as a xenophobe and, and as a Basically a woman hater. I mean, you know, his, his, he's, he's referred to as South Korea as Donald Trump.

Um, he never really got the, the members of his party to come and, and, and bow down and kiss his ass the way that Donald Trump has this steady stream of people coming to Mar-a-Lago, um, you know, to, to, to get on their knees. And I'm, I'm, it [01:45:00] just seems like. Probably Donald Trump is taking the lesson from this that, you know, he needs to really solidify his power before he declares a state of emergency and starts, you know, having the military take over the promote your thoughts.

REP. MARK POCAN: Well, don't forget that he's been through this before, right? So he's learned some lessons from what he couldn't get some things done in the last presidency, which I think is a is one of the problems, right? He's more prepared. He's come out with all his cabinet picks much earlier. Now, granted, he's actually getting some resistance.

Which given how wild these pics are, you know, it's it's such should be expected, but you know, given how little people will speak out against Donald Trump within the Republican Party, it was a little surprising, but we need more of it. Um, but you know, they're going to have the ability to move some stuff.

Now, the good news, Tom, is I think now with the most recent member of the house Republican caucus being kind of grabbed for the administration or for other pics that he's They can't lose one member in the first [01:46:00] several months of the year on any bill or else they can't pass it if they're going to continue to operate the way they have, which is they have to have the votes to pass any legislation.

So a window of getting things done legislatively is going to be gone right in the beginning. And then by the second year, of his administration's election year. Usually people proceed a little differently because they can lose the party in charge often loses and fall. So at least the window is tightening for legislative action.

But you know, we know there's going to be executive orders and other agency actions that we're going to have to be able to respond to. So I'm still real nervous. Um, I think we all should be. I think we should be ready to buckle up. It's going to be a wild ride. But I think most important once everyone One is over the anger and the sadness of what happened at the election.

I want people to be ready to fight because we are going to have to have everyone organized. The inauguration day is also Martin Luther King day. What a better contrast. I think we need to highlight that. And I don't know of a national group organizing around this yet, Tom, but what a great day to organize in contrast to [01:47:00] the inauguration of Donald Trump to organize around the country around Martin Luther King jr.

Day. I, I just. I hope that something can happen around that front because we need people to be ready and active to try to stop his agenda. 

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Yeah, I'm with you. You say fight, what do you mean? 

REP. MARK POCAN: Um, to fight back on every single thing that they do. That's an overreach, you know, like right now, putting someone from Fox News head of defense was obviously ridiculous.

We may now be succeeding on that. Matt Gates was just a bad pick because of Republican internal politics. But this one actually, um, Pete Hegseth, I think is even more important. It's really important in that, um, it really is showing a really bad pick for an important position shouldn't happen, but we have Tulsi Gabbard and we have, uh, maybe RFK Jr.

and some others too that aren't the best picks, but he's going to do executive orders right away, and he's going to do things that are going to hurt people across the country, so we need to be able to stand and put pressure on our elected officials, uh, and, uh, and the media to, to really try to put [01:48:00] pressure on Donald Trump, so we've got lots of work to do.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Yeah, that's another statement. Uh, and, and, uh, as a member of the press, I'm, I'm very concerned about, uh, you know, they're, they're both him and Musk saying that they're coming after us, but we'll see how it shakes out. We'll see how it shakes out.

Biden Can Stop Trump's Political Prosecutions By Pardoning EVERYONE

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Last night I was on Dan Abrams show nine o'clock Eastern six o'clock Pacific time on News Nation. And in fact, we opened the show and it was a debate between me and this person, I'll just leave it at that, who was arguing that Democrats want to blow up the rule of law by pardoning the people who are in Trump's crosshairs.

And that will forever prevent any investigations of Joe Biden or anybody and his crime family, etcetera, which is nonsense. The simple reality is that Donald Trump is not a normal president. And won't be, has promised not to be, a normal president. If Mitt [01:49:00] Romney was about to be sworn into the White House, I would not be having this conversation with you. I would not have written this op ed for hartmanreport.com. And in fact, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Mitt Romney is an old fashioned Republican, the kind of guy who wants tax cuts for the billionaires, deregulation for companies, of course. Who thinks that social programs, is horrified by the fact that only about half of Americans earn enough money to pay taxes.

He's not concerned about how much they earn. He's concerned that, the lower income Americans don't have to pay taxes. And he does. But, he doesn't want to tear down the republic. He lost an election and gracefully said, I lost. Barack Obama's, second term is here. God bless him and I wish him well. And he showed up for the inauguration. Mitt Romney was a normal guy. Donald Trump is not Mitt Romney. 

Donald Trump has said that he wants General Mark Milley executed. He said he wants to see how [01:50:00] Liz Cheney would feel if guns were pointed, nine guns were pointed at her head, and if she was in front of a firing squad. He just on Sunday, said she should be in prison. As well as everybody else in the January 6th committee. Benny Thompson, the chairman of the January 6th committee, has come out and said, "Yeah, if he gives me a pardon, I'll take it." And I think that's true of everybody else on the committee. 

Now, giving everybody a preemptive pardon is not going to prevent investigations. Contrary to what my debating opponent last night on News Nation had to say it's not, in fact, I fully expect that both the House and Senate will be having investigative committees that will be looking into the crimes of Democrats during the Biden administration. It's going to be a crap show. It's going to be it's gonna be a circus. Of course, I mean, Republicans have to do this because they have nothing else. They don't want [01:51:00] us talking about what they're doing to Social Security. They don't want us talking about what they're doing to Medicare. They don't want us talking about how they're going to gut Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act and strip healthcare coverage away from millions of people.

They don't want us talking about how they're going to get rid of the banking regulators and dispose of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that has recovered some 20 billion dollars from financial institutions that have ripped off average Americans. They don't want us talking about any of that. They don't want us talking about ending net neutrality. With Brendan Carr now, as the starting in January, starting as the commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, they don't want us talking about the crimes that they're committing basically against democracy. What they do want us talking about is, Oh, my God, you mean during the Biden administration that happened?

And, of course, "that" will be spun as something just, way out of proportion from what it really is. And if you think I'm exaggerating, if [01:52:00] you think this is not a legitimate concern, that when, if you think that when Elon Musk says, my pronouns are prosecute Fauci, but he's just joking, if you think that there's no need for these preemptive pardons, then I refer you to Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden was facing some 40 years in prison. And David Weiss, the inquisitor who had been appointed by Bill Barr and Donald Trump during his last term, and who Merrick Garland stupidly allowed to continue in his job after Joe Biden was inaugurated, David Weiss, was prosecuting him and they worked out a plea deal.

I mean, well, let me actually, I'll give you the details in just a second. But they worked out a plea deal where Hunter Biden didn't have to go to jail. He just had to admit that he screwed up, that he broke the [01:53:00] law. That he didn't pay his taxes and that he checked the box on form 7430 70C, the federal form that asks if you're a drug user when you want to buy a gun.

And here's what he was charged with. Millions of Americans every year, an estimated 20 million Americans actually, buy a gun and fill out the federal form and check the box saying I do not use illegal drugs when they are in fact using pot. And in obviously in many cases other drugs as well. But pot is the most common one, the 20 million Americans using pot because it's legal in so many states, or available everywhere. None of them have ever been prosecuted, one guy, well, with one exception, one guy was prosecuted for just for checking the box.

Now, about a hundred people a year get prosecuted for checking the box, as an added, as an addition to their sentence. But they are always being [01:54:00] prosecuted for things like running guns, or ghost guns, or whatever, for bigger crimes, and they're just looking for ways to keep them in jail longer. So they use the check the box thing. The one guy who was prosecuted for checking the box and checking the box alone, although this started with a drug bust, he was smoking pot in a state where it was illegal, it was in Louisiana. His name was Patrick Darnell Daniels Jr. And his case was overturned by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

So this is a non-crime, basically, that Hunter Biden was charged with. And yet David Weiss wanted him to go to jail charging him in a way that could, that could be the outcome. That was charge number one. Charge number two was that he didn't pay his taxes for two years. The federal government actually has a program where if you are an addict and you don't pay your taxes, you get a pass on going to prison if you pay your taxes in full and you pay the interest on the taxes that you owed, and it's a pretty high rate, and you pay [01:55:00] massive fines for having not paid your taxes. Hunter Biden did all of those things. The IRS recovers billions of dollars a year from people who didn't pay their taxes, and then when they got nailed by the IRS, they pay up, they pay the fines, they pay the interest. And everything is good. They have to plead guilty to having screwed up, but everything is good.

But David Weiss wanted to send Hunter Biden to prison for that, too. If they're going to go after Hunter Biden, who had nothing to do with politics, he was never elected to anything, he never crossed Donald Trump, he didn't investigate Donald Trump, he didn't prosecute Donald Trump, he wasn't Jack Smith, he wasn't Alvin Bragg, he wasn't Letitia James. If they're going to go after Hunter Biden, they'll go after all these other people. And so I am of the opinion that It would be a good thing if Joe Biden, President Biden were to preemptively issue blanket [01:56:00] pardons for all of these people who were involved with prosecuting Trump, investigating Trump, Bob Mueller, everybody on his team, the people at the FBI who raided Mar-a-Lago Jack Smith and his team, all the members of the January 6th committee, and anybody else. And the 50 or so people on Kash Patel's enemy list that he published in his book. Pardon them all.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in, I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at (202) 999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]. 

The additional sections of the show included clips from Democracy Now! Boom! Lawyered, The Real News Network, The Daily Blast, Citations Needed, The Impact Report, and The Thom Hartmann Program, further details are in the full show notes. 

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show [01:57:00] and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Lara for their volunteer work, helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. 

You can join them by signing up today at BestOfTheLeft.com/support or through our Patreon page. Either of which will let you sign up with a discount through the end of the year, or send gift memberships to anyone on your list. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player, You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on any and all new social media platforms you may be joining these days. 

So, coming to from far outside, the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name [01:58:00] is Jay!, and this has been the Best of the Left Podcast coming to you twice weekly thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.Com.

Air Date 12/17/2024

Full Notes Page

Download PDF

Audio-Synced Transcript

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. 

Changing the direction of a political party doesn't happen overnight, and it usually takes a major disrupting event to shake it out of its well-worn groove. The loss of a Harris campaign to Trump and the evident desperation people have for a new economics that actually works for people might finally be enough to put Democrats on track to a more full-throated support of progressive economics. 

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today includes The Daily Show, The Majority Report, The Kyle Kulinski Show, The Muckrake Podcast, and Pod Save America. Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in three sections: Section A. Why Democrats lost; Section B. Time to fight; and Section C. Moving forward.

Jon Stewart On What Went Wrong For Democrats - The Daily Show - Air Date 11-11-24

JON STEWART: There was a method to the Democrats' madness. 

CLIPS: Democracy and freedom are on the ballot. Our democracy is on the [00:01:00] line. We have to protect democracy. We have to work even harder to make sure that we defend our democracy. We don't get to choose when we're asked to defend democracy. We just have to do it. And this is not a drill. 

JON STEWART: Noble words. And I'm glad to say Democrats did protect democracy. Just for the other side. Because when all is said and done, we had a free and fair election, in which the Democrats had been prepared for almost every scenario... but one.. 

CLIPS: The Harris campaign has built probably the most sophisticated, robust, impressive voter protection program in the history of presidential politics. We have millions in the bank ready, lawyers all over the country that are ready. Democrats have been planning on every one of these options for four years. Are Democrats ready? You bet they are. We have county clerks ready to go, secretaries of state ready to go. 

JON STEWART: So it's all lined up. What are we [00:02:00] forgetting, people? What? We got the lawyers, we got the protecting the d-- What do we got? So, uh, Oh, uh, Jimmy, did you bring the voters? Oh, I thought you were bringing the voters. I brought the "Hate has no home here" posters. Nobody brought the voters? Where are the f***ing voters? It turns out the election was stolen. By more people voting for Donald Trump. It's quite a caper. Ocean's 74 Million. So so now, as many on the left fear the future, as they should, many others rue the past. 

CLIPS: Joe Biden should have dropped out earlier. There should have been an open primary. People never got to know Kamala Harris. They spent too little time talking about the economy. Wildly overestimated the power of the abortion issue. Chose the wrong VP. Managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos. Abandoned the working class. Democrats need a new way to talk about urban America. Do that Joe [00:03:00] Rogan podcast. 

JON STEWART: Trump spoke, Trump spoke to the people. Democrats never once mentioned Arnold Palmer's c---. Never once!

Yet focus group after focus group said, Got anything on Arnold Palmer's c---? If not, can you at least stand there and sway to Ave Maria for like an hour? Can you at least do that? But it's a delight to hear about why it happened, from so many people who were so wrong about what was going to happen. And everyone has their own pet theory.

But there's one theory that a lot of people seem to be coalescing around. 

CLIPS: They were too woke. Insisting that people use the term Latinx. Too far to the left on transgender rights. You have to say they. No, you have to do this. Stop with the virtue signaling. Step away from woke. Focus less on who is woke and more on who is broke. [00:04:00] Social justice issues take a back seat when your son is in the basement vaping and playing video games and can't find a job.

JON STEWART: I feel like that last guy was really venting more about his son. Everybody else had sort of a broader point, but his was just so specific. You really gotta focus on, let's say, a kid in your basement vaping and just jerking off all over the couch, night after night!

But point taken. Everyone's talking about this wokeness theory. From cable news to the op ed section. And sometimes the op ed section being read on cable news. 

MIKA BRZEZINSKI, HOST, MORNING JOE: We want to get to the Maureen Dowd piece. Maureen Dowd's piece for the New York Times entitled Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics.

JON STEWART: Ooh! That was Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski discussing a New York Times column by Maureen Dowd on how [00:05:00] to escape the liberal bubble.

I guess I'll just have to get the Times and read it myself unless there's another way to make this less entertaining. 

MIKA BRZEZINSKI, HOST, MORNING JOE: We're going to read the entire piece, but it's worth it.

JON STEWART: About wokeness? I couldn't even stay woke through that whole f ing thing. Why don't you read us the Wordle? 

I only have one problem with the woke theory. I just didn't recall seeing any Democrats running on woke shit. These were the commercials I saw for the Democrats. 

CLIPS: Sherrod Brown is working to fix our border crisis. Mondaire Jones is working to secure our border. Pat Ryan is restoring order at our southern border. I'm Laura Gillen and I'm here at the border of Nassau County. We're 2,000 miles from Mexico, but we're feeling the migrant crisis almost every day.[00:06:00] 

JON STEWART: In Nassau County? By the way, Suffolk County, make my f ing day. You want a piece of our strip malls? You're gonna have to go through Laura Gillen. Those are the Democrats! The Democrats! I gave the police more money than they even wanted! I gave them planes and tanks! I built a moat around the country and filled it with alligators and chlamydia!

They didn't talk about pronouns. They didn't say Latinx. It was the opposite. 

CLIPS: We can't let China steal Wisconsin jobs. Benefits for illegal immigrants? No way. Blocking support for white farmers? I mean, look at me. Standing with law enforcement against defunding the police. I've owned a gun my whole life. Let me be clear. I don't want boys playing girls sports. You all know me. I've never pushed for sex [00:07:00] changes.

JON STEWART: Well, that's just a weird one at the end there. Come on, guys. You know me. He's like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life. I'm not the guy who wishes sex yet. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm in your shops every day. Every day. Mary, Mary, it's me, George Bailey. I'm not trying to get you to get a sex change. I'm just wishing I was dead.

And don't forget about Kamala Harris. It's not like she was exactly waving around her NPR tote bag. 

KAMALA HARRIS: I have a Glock.

They didn't do the woke thing. They tried. They acted like Republicans for the last four months. They wore camo hats and went to Cheney family reunions. Do you know how dangerous it is to wear a hunting hat around Cheney's? [00:08:00] Do you have any idea? I thought I had one more rip in me. I didn't.

Democrats were mostly running against an identity that was defined for them, based on a couple of months of post-George Floyd, Defund the police, #MeToo Instagram posts from four years ago. What happened was the country felt like government wasn't working for them, and the Democrats in particular were taking their hard-earned money and giving it to people who didn't deserve it as much as them.

So the Democrats got shellacked. I'm sure any robust examination of better policies is very welcome. But I just want to please assure people, this isn't forever. This is the map in 1984 when Ronald Reagan won. That's the map. The only state the Democrats [00:09:00] won was Minnesota. Yeah. Everyone thought that's the end of the Democrats, but eight years later, there was a Democrat back in office. We don't know what's going to happen in four years, at all. The only thing that is certain is this: 

CLIPS: You all know me. I've never pushed for sex changes.

The Democratic Party Is A Rudderless aShip - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 11-21-24

DAVID DAYEN: Democrats are somewhat well positioned to take back the House at least. The Senate's going to be a much taller order given the map, and the various inadequacies of Senate apportionment and and just the real difficulties that Democrats have in even lightly red states.

 So there's no reason that Democrats could defer this conversation once again and muddle through and win the House in '26 and then come back and have that primary in '28, and do what they do. 

What I would [00:10:00] say is that Democrats have a massive tendency towards conflict aversion. We see that in the inability to have any conversation about the House and Senate leadership right now. Nobody is talking about the fact that Chuck Schumer, who famously said if we lose two blue collar workers in Pennsylvania, then we'll gain two suburban moms and we can do that across the country -- the very strategy that has now locked Democrats out of a majority coalition in the nation. The fact that there is no, outside of random people, no institutional calls for a leadership election there. Same in the House. There is a bias towards not having these hard conversations, not having these discussions. 

And finger pointing and recriminations is not having the discussion, by the way. It's one thing to just say the party should get more progressive, the party should get [00:11:00] more moderate, or we should throw out this part of the tent, or we should throw out this member of the coalition. That's actually not having the discussion. That's just restating their priors. 

The truth is that we had a national swing away from Democrats at every level in every subgroup. Democrats don't get to play the fun game that they play every time they lose an election where they get to just pick one subgroup and blame them. It's their fault, kick them out of the coalition, then we'll be better off. Never works. But Democrats can't do that now. They lost among everybody. They lost more in big cities than they did in small towns. They lost more among subgroups of color than they did among white people.

So like you can't slice and dice on this and try to put the calculation together for a majority.

There is something structurally wrong. And until you actually have the conversation about it, we're just going to be spinning our wheels. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: [00:12:00] That structurally wrong thing, is it really, is it a policy thing, or is it a communications? I mean, I just remember in 2012, in the wake of the 2012 of Obama winning, that the Republican Party was like, we're doing an autopsy. And I just remember Sean Hannity going, Folks, we've got to be more open to immigrants. And that lasted for three or four months. And then all of a sudden they realized actually, no, we don't. And then they went on a, what is now a 12-year crusade to demonize immigrants, and it worked. It worked. Like to the point where -- 

DAVID DAYEN: They got Democrats to help them. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: They basically pulled the Democrats into that vortex. I mean, look, Obama deported a tremendous amount of people. Their strategy was supposedly [00:13:00] in service of trying to help DACA and DAPA and get to some type of piece of legislation that would rationalize the whole process, etc, etc. That's poor tactics. Broadly speaking, their strategy was to welcome immigrants, even though in their minds, they're like, the way only way we can legitimately do it is to deport a ton as well.

Aside from that, obviously not working, is it a question of reorientation of the-- part of their communication strategy, frankly was belied by the fact that, they were both like Mark Cubans out there and they're running on an anti-corporate record, like, how do you, it's tough to square that circle, I guess.

DAVID DAYEN: Yeah, that's what I said about internal contradictions. Do you guys get mad when everybody's out there saying, what we need is a liberal Joe Rogan? And you're like, come on, man. We're right here. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: She should [00:14:00] have probably done just the Rogan that was there because it's a problem. Does it bother me? No, there's no way to have the exact same thing as them on the right. I've been down this road with Air America. Do we need more communication? Without a doubt. Of course. 

But there is a fundamental misunderstanding, it seems to me, within the campaign professionals. Because, you have people who are saying, we mentioned Joe Scarborough saying, we can't be the party of woke and what not. Kamala Harris was so, I think, effective at avoiding any of those conversations. People knew that she was a black woman, and I have no doubt that that accounts for a significant percentage of votes against her.

Like she's not going to say -- she could say the sun is shining at 12 noon, and there's still going to be some skepticism, like [00:15:00] some irrational skepticism of her, whatever, however it is, because there are people who have -- 

DAVID DAYEN: They also had her on tape saying a bunch of stuff in 2019 as part of her presidential race.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: But the fact is, is that their ability to run with that was, at first, stifled by the whole "you're weird" thing. Because she's not running on this. She said it, yes, on tape. And we have Donald Trump saying that he's going to be a dictator on tape. We have Donald Trump saying, I'm going to grab, people's vaginas and I can get away with it on tape.

But the reason why they're able to have a huge portion of their electorate believe that the agenda of the Democrats is to turn everybody transgender, as opposed to we just believe in rights for everybody is because there was no response. And the proper response to them saying that is "You're weird. We're not talking about that. [00:16:00] You're the ones who are talking about that. We don't have a plank that says we're going to impose transgenderism on everybody. You're the ones bringing this up" and they did not -- 

DAVID DAYEN: That was a great messaging strategy that ended about two weeks after they started it and they never put Tim Walz on television.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Exactly. I think in the Clinton loss, there was probably six, seven, "but fors," right? The margins were close enough that if Comey later doesn't come out, maybe she wins. If she campaigns in Michigan, Wisconsin, maybe she wins. There's literally, I think a half dozen of those. 

In this instance, I think there's no one thing why she lost. There were too many things that contributed to it, because the margins were too big. But there were mistakes made that I think are indicative of a fear of confrontation, that they were overtaken by the people who wanted to be seen as bipartisan.

‘BERNIE WAS RIGHT!’: Corporate Democrat ADMITS DEFEAT - The Kyle Kulinski Show - Air Date 11-18-24

KYLE KULINSKI - HOST, THE KYLE KULINSKI SHOW: He was very hostile to the [00:17:00] idea of Bernie Sanders being the future of the Democratic Party, or I should be clear and say Bernie Sanders ideas being the future of the Democratic Party. Because remember, this is the guy who helped run Bill Clinton's campaign in 1992, and he, in some ways, he's the pioneer of the new Democrat strategy, the triangulation, which basically means Democrats agreed to start taking corporate money and be more like Republicans in order to win.

And Bill Clinton did that, and he won. So conventional wisdom for a generation became, oh, Democrats need to run as centrists, as moderates, as still helping out corporate donors while doing tweaks around the edges to help regular people, right? But James Carville appears to have had some semblance of a change of heart watching Kamala Harris go down in flames. Now, some of his take and his criticism I don't really agree with but other parts of it I think are spot on. So, here we go. Look at this. This is quite [00:18:00] an admission. 

JAMES CARVILLE: I think Senator Sanders has some of a point here. And that is, there were things we could have run on harder that, that have affected the minimum wage. It passes everywhere by 70%. I mean, I know that President Biden was for it and Harris is for it, but we didn't put it front and center. What about taxing the incomes over $400,000 and taking that money and putting it in a first time homebuyer's mortgage relief fund? I mean, there were things that Senator Sanders would favor that we could have put more front and center.

You know, there are a lot of things that are just popular that Democrats are for it. They're popular with every kind of Democrat in the country. They also happen to be popular with independents and even some Republicans. And we should run on a popular thing. A popular thing was not continuing the Biden administration. That was clearly not what people wanted. I think he's a great guy, but people didn't want more of that. And that's what we gave them. 

KYLE KULINSKI - HOST, THE KYLE KULINSKI SHOW: Damn. Never did I think he would ever give Bernie credit on anything. But look, his point is undeniable. When you look at these direct ballot initiatives in states all across the country, including in red states, [00:19:00] oftentimes, you have very clear progressive issues pass with like 60% or more of the vote.

And even in red states, that happens a lot. Raise the minimum wage, paid time off actually passed recently in some states in the last election. And, look, I will give him credit for one thing. He was a corporate democrat triangulator, which I hate, but he was also the guy who gave us the, "It's the economy, stupid." Right? And so, there is some semblance deep inside of this man, there is some semblance of an economic populist trying to get out. But I don't think he realizes that there's a little bit of a contradiction there between being a corporate democrat and being a populist. It's hard to marry those two things together.

Like, for example, this is a guy who's vehemently against Medicare for All. He's stated that over and over throughout the years. But, James, the exact same reason you say, "Hey run on raising the minimum wage," is the exact same reason why you should also say "Run on universal health care," right? And the part [00:20:00] that I think he misses and I don't think any corporate democrat will ever get this is you genuinely need a politics of division. You need a politics of enemies You need to portray yourself and your voters as the protagonist in a grand narrative in a grand story where you're taking on the evil doers who are dragging this nation down and for Democrats and liberals and leftists, it has to be the billionaires, the multinational corporations, the big money donors who give so much money to politicians and then politicians represent them and screw over you.

But look, take a dub where we can get one, man. This is a dub right here. This is James Carville, legendary corporate Democrat strategist, who's like, "You know what? You know what? Raising the minimum wage, maybe you should have put that front and center, that seems like a good idea. I think Bernie Sanders is right about some things. I think Bernie's right about some things." But the even more important point, and this is probably Kamala's fatal flaw, was when she literally didn't even try to [00:21:00] distance herself from Biden even a little bit. I mean, that's really, In retrospect, that's the thing that I think everybody agrees on. That, you know, you didn't distance yourself from Biden even a little bit.

You had no answer when asked, what would you do differently? And that could have been, I mean, that is no matter what else you say, you're also signing up as the status quo candidate in that respect. And so people went for Trump's anger and Trump's incorrect answers over no answers, right? And so that's how we ended up where we are, but it's a cold day in hell y'all. It's a cold day in hell because James Carville just said something true. Now, he didn't bring it up in this clip but there's also, he's also been going around blaming wokeness. Look, take it from a guy who has, who I'm on the left, and I have been categorized as an anti-woke leftist, right? That's how I've been viewed, is Kyle's an anti-woke leftist.

Take it from somebody who's in that category. Wokeness did not lose this election for Democrats. It just didn't. [00:22:00] Like I said, Kamala never mentioned race, never mentioned gender, never mentioned trans people, or pronouns, or Latinx, or cancel culture, or political correctness, or anything that you would associate with wokeness.

None of it was mentioned, and she lost, so you just can't blame wokeness. It makes absolutely no sense. And so he's wrong on that part of the analysis, but he's right on the, it's the economy, stupid, and minimum wage being front and center would have been a big thing. But more than that is really about having a narrative, and being angry, right? Trump believes in Trump, there's no denying that, and Trump is very angry, there's no denying that. And perhaps you need anger, and you need something to believe in, and a narrative, and a story, and people just weren't buying, they just didn't think Kamala was authentic and believed in much of anything, I don't think.

Right, so, we could all Monday morning quarterback, which I'm sure we'll continue to do endlessly, but look, write it down, write it down, cause this matters. David Brooks, David Brooks, elite, moderate, said, "You know, maybe Bernie was right." [00:23:00] James Carville, "Yeah, yeah, maybe Bernie was right." Jen Psaki, "Yeah, maybe Bernie was right."

There's people, like Jon Favreau, the Pod Save bro, some of them at times, yeah, yeah, maybe Bernie had a point, right? So you're getting a number of people now, who are kind of waking up a little bit to the reality. But I will say, that is counterbalanced with the exact same number of people, if not more, who are saying, let's just throw trans people under the bus and that's how we win. Like, Jesus Christ, that's dark and that's loathsome. 

Assad Ousted From Syria - The Muckrake Political Podcast - Air Date 12-10-24

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: A new report in the times from Nicholas Nahamas, Maya King, and Zolan Kano Youngs with a report out of Philadelphia where the democratic party underperformed, leading to the state of Pennsylvania, one of the main swing states in the election ended up falling.

Organizers have been reaching out and particularly organizers in communities of color who deal with Black and Latino voters. They have come out to say that they were so worried about the lack of outreach to voters of color by the Harris [00:24:00] campaign that they went rogue, that they started doing it themselves without permission, and over the time they said that thousands of voters in these communities of color said that they hadn't heard from the campaign, they didn't feel like the campaign cared about them, and that instead the focus of the race was on, not only digital ads, but digital ads and outreach that was focused on White suburban voters, White professionals, and basically that they weren't allowed to do their job that they traditionally do. Quite frankly, I think this report is very convincing and it sounds a lot like reports that I've heard from around the country so far.

NICK HASSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: Well, I think we've spent a lot of time in denial during the campaign, honestly. And I think part of it was it seems to me that there were huge sections of people of color who didn't trust Kamala Harris, for a variety of reasons. Looking at this reporting, and showing how they put all of their resources... cause it's really damning. when you're talking about having campaign offices in the inner city areas that don't have [00:25:00] any paper, they don't have office supplies, and then they have to go to the nice areas and raid them for supplies. That speaks volumes to why maybe they didn't trust her.

So I suspect that to see this now, and we can expect all sorts of, people lighting the campaign on fire who were part of the campaign, but this one really hit hard, because the Harris campaign had purported to be standing up for marginalized communities and people of color and trying to use her identity as part of that campaign, and they were justified in feeling of that distrust for her. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: Yeah, there's a couple of things going off of what you were saying that I just want to highlight. The first thing is this, when Harris took over as the nominee from Biden, I had said, I will learn a lot about what's going on with how long the Biden campaign team stays in control of the Harris campaign, which happened the entire time. We're now hearing a bunch of reports that Harris brought in a couple of people that she felt close to, but that [00:26:00] mainly it was the Biden campaign team that took care of things. That isn't necessarily a Kamala Harris decision, that isn't necessarily about Harris as a candidate. I don't think she had much control over the campaign, to be honest with you. And by the way, not winning a primary kind of does that sometimes, to just get the baton and then run with it. 

When you have a primary, we've talked about the Barack Obama campaign back in 2008, he effectively wrestled control of the Democratic party away from the Clinton machine, and then restructured it, which we're still dealing with. What we are seeing here is the consequence of a couple of things —the Biden team, you might remember when we covered it, Nick, they held calls back whenever the red States, the Republican States were starting to gerrymander stuff and take purge voting rolls of Black people, Black community said, we need your help, and they said, "Hey, good luck out organizing us." And what did they say since the election, they've said over and over that the problem was the base. It was all of these interest groups that got [00:27:00] too "woke". And what is "woke"? It's a code name for saying we actually care about people of color and oppressed peoples.

Meanwhile, this entire apparatus of the Democratic Party is basically controlled by a group of technocratic analysts and strategists who got rich off of this. It was the strategist and all of the analytical groups that they worked with, and they didn't see people of color as one of the bases they needed to take care of, they took them for granted. And reporting like this, the actual on the ground experience of this stuff, and we're starting to see things floating up about Harris campaign staffers, people of color, who say that they were discriminated against by this campaign. 

There was a Black woman at the front of the ticket, but the people behind the scenes were the same old White retread campaign strategist that were behind Joe Biden and have controlled the party for a while. And they've taken this space completely for granted, which is one of the reasons why Donald Trump was able [00:28:00] to change the demographics of the electorate

His campaign, as bad as it was, as bad as the ground game was, they went into these places. We've said on this podcast, we said, he's going into New York City. He shouldn't be in New York city, that's not a place for him to be campaigning. But a lot of what happened here, it reflects a larger problem in the democratic party that is only getting worse at the moment. 

NICK HASSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: He went in front of the national Black journalists association to question her race and nothing happened to him. That would have been a campaign ending blunder of all blunders... 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: 20 years ago, yes.

NICK HASSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: ...instead, he increased that electorate. What does it say about the Harris campaign that he can increase electorate after saying shit like that? I don't know if you were aware, but I was talking to someone who was intentionally connected to the Harris campaign. And they were saying to me the other day that the internal polling before the Biden debate was really bad. He was going to get waxed by 20 points, something like that. 

And by the way, when I heard that, I was like, that's interesting, because that wasn't what we were [00:29:00] seeing necessarily in the front page. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: Nick, I saw an archived internal poll before the debate that had Biden down 11 points. 

NICK HASSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: What that tells me was that they, and the Biden campaign wanted the debate early, and I think I questioned this when it happened, but the only explanation for that is because they knew that how bad it was going to be and they need to get him out of the race. And then the fact that if they had, they'd done it in a normal time, Biden wouldn't have dropped out. Cause again, the reason why I bring this up is that Harris campaign continues to rest in their laurels that they were so far behind when they started that look, we got all the way...

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: Oh we won. We actually won by losing.

NICK HASSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: Yeah. It's but That said, she had a four point lead at some point in a month and a half out, and then every day 0. 1% lower every day. There was an inexorable leaking of votes they could not stop, couldn't do anything. And they had six weeks to do something and they couldn't. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE PODCAST: That graph is, "Oh, we're going to take care of prices. Oh, they're weird. Those people shouldn't be doing that. Oh, Goldman Sachs, Liz Cheney. Dick [00:30:00] Cheney. Economist are behind me." It was so obvious what happened, but the people behind this have not reckoned with anything that you and I have been talking about or anybody who's even been tangentially related to the campaign. It was an absolute disaster, and we're talking about this, not because it's the 2024 campaign, but because this can't happen again. It has to change. Going back to the previous segment, you can't pardon Trump and talk about how it was a political hit job. 

We talked about it on the weekend or for Friday. You can't pardon everybody in the administration and be like, "our bad. I guess we committed some crimes according to some people, we need to be careful." The Democratic party is in a moment of crisis and this type of stuff is an invitation to accept reality and change course, because if this doesn't get fixed, oh, it's going to get real bad.

Can Ben Wikler Fix The Democratic Party? - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 12-4-24

BEN WIKLER: The soul of the Democratic Party is the fight for working people. Ours is the party that built the middle class, that won breakthroughs on civil rights and [00:31:00] women's rights and workers rights and freedom and opportunity for all. It's the party that welcomed me as a high school student in Wisconsin to volunteer for Tammy Baldwin when she first won a seat in Congress.

Today, the country that we love needs the Democratic Party to be stronger, to unite, to fight and to win. I'm Ben Wickler. I'm the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. I've spent my life working in politics, advocacy, and new media. In Wisconsin, we built a permanent campaign. We organize and communicate year round in every corner of the state; rural, suburban, urban, red, blue, and purple areas alike.

Since I've been our state party chair, we've flipped our state Supreme Court majority, reelected our great Democratic governor, Tony Evers, and in this very tough year for Democrats nationwide, a six point swing towards Trump. We closed that gap to a point and a half. Making Wisconsin the closest state in the country. We sent Tammy Baldwin back for a third term in the U. S. Senate, and we flipped 14 state legislative seats that put us on track for majorities in both [00:32:00] chambers in 2026. When the polls are within the margin of error, we win by the margin of effort. And what has made a difference in Wisconsin can make a difference everywhere. We need a nationwide permanent campaign.

A 50 state strategy in every state and every territory across the United States. That means raising a ton of money and bringing together millions of volunteers. 

CLIPS: Ben Wickler is doing an extraordinary job. You've done a ridiculous job. Ben Wickler, he knows how to organize. Wisconsin Democrats have outraised republicans 4 to 1 this year.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Listen, we didn't see more of the ad, but look, this is gonna be voted on by members of the DNC, I think there's what, like 500 or so members. You can go is it benwickler.com to help. 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: He's definitely the best of the candidates right now. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah. I mean, look, I think there's a lot to be said for Ken Martin, who is the head of the Minnesota DFL. I'm not as familiar [00:33:00] with his work but I can tell you, like, I know, I think every job that Ben Wickler has ever had, frankly. Starting, he was a producer for Al Franken at Air America and then went on to move on, then went on to Avaz. He's from Wisconsin. People were surprised when, I think, when he decided to run for Wisconsin chair. Because he hadn't been there in a while, and he just came in and he just hit it out of the park. 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I mean, the headwinds that he was facing, like, the proof is in the pudding if the Democrats are serious about winning and we know that's an uphill climb. But the Wisconsin, after Obama was elected in 2008, became the laboratory for right-wing politics, almost in what we're seeing in Florida right now.

Where it's a different flavor, but they gerrymandered the hell out of that state. They led the way under Scott Walker with his Koch money on right to work and busting [00:34:00] unions, and they rigged the game in such a way that, the Republicans had a significant advantage in the state of Wisconsin. And within 12 years, they've really turned that around.

As he mentioned in his ad, Harris performed best of all of the swing states, which she lost all of them, in Wisconsin. And I think that he can make that case. This is the kind of pick that would be rational if the DNC chooses to be rational. But they did just pick Jamie Harrison, who's retweeting Mueller She Wrote and things like that. So if they really want to say we've learned a lesson, this is the kind of pick that you go with. I mean, Martin O'Malley, I don't know what he's doing. I don't know what leverage he thinks he has, but. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: He, I mean, he's been the chair. He's been the running the social security administration, which is, great.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Great, great.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I'm all in favor of that. People know I love, but what Wickler has been doing has been exactly what you want somebody to do on a national level. He has been [00:35:00] facing a well financed Republican movement. And he has dealt with gerrymandering. He has dealt with supreme court races. He understands the importance of all these things and how they translate nationally. And he's done it in a state that has been, as sort of like teetering as can be over the past, I think five, six years that he's been working on it. It's benwickler.com. 

And Penny in New Mexico says, "Do you understand what donations would go to if we donate to Ben's campaign to DNC chair?" I'm not 100% sure, but my, I suspect you've got to reach 500 people. And I would imagine what you want to do is send out mailers, you want to call, you want to maybe you want to travel and visit. This is all speculation on my part. You want to visit a different key members of the DNC who may have sway with [00:36:00] four, five, or six, or ten other people. I don't know. This is all, I'm just guessing. But it's a good question. But I imagine it's something of that nature. And, Noah from Tampa says, "The best argument for Wickler is that Republicans are afraid of him. Always go with the people the Republicans are most afraid of." I mean, look, for me the most important aspect is that he has a proven track record of winning in a rather inhospitable situation.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Exactly. And, he, I think, would actually use the DNC to coordinate with state parties. Like, this has been an issue really since Obama. And Jamie Harrison, (thank you) did, I think they started to donate more to state parties. 

But this needs to be a national strategy that is cohesive. Because like, out of this election, we understand, The Democrats message is incoherent. They're the party of people making over $100,000 a year, but they also have [00:37:00] Shawn Fain coming and speaking. Like, what is the coalition you're trying to build? How can you make it so that it works nationally, where people know what the Democratic Party brand is? Because right now the brand is toxic, as Bernie Sanders told John Nichols in that interview, where he encouraged people to run as independents when it makes strategic sense, and I think that does make sense in rural white states right now, and then go from there. But, that's the problem right now, is that there isn't necessarily a coordinated message or strategy. And like we know every, for all the stuff with Trumpism, their one thing is like it's immigration, immigration, immigration, immigration. And if you were to ask the average person what the Democrats stand for, they don't know. 

“Get These Incels to Work” (feat. Hasan Piker) Part 1 - Pod Save America - Air Date 11-27-24

JOHN LOVETT - HOST, POD SAVE AMERICA: There's no moment at which we say, "all right, we've had the fight. We've had the debate. We disagree on a whole bunch of stuff. Hey, everybody, we're going to get together and we're going to make sure that we stop Donald Trump. We elect Joe Biden or we elect Kamala Harris." That moment doesn't [00:38:00] come. I'm not saying that Democrats in power aren't in part responsible for that, I think part of what we need to do is figure out a politics that brings people in. Everyone is responsible. 

HASAN PIKER: Just as I was very critical of Bernie Sanders' campaign despite still loving Bernie because he was nowhere near as aggressive as he could have been in the primaries and should have probably gone on more independent media route in a similar vein to Donald Trump. Because I blame the fault on Bernie's campaign strategies in the primaries, despite recognizing the structural hurdles of a left wing populist coming out of a Democratic party primary where it's the laser focused audience that goes out and votes at those things are the MSNBC watcher base that is objectively terrified of someone like that because people are saying he's going to start executing wealthy people, it's still his fault. And it's still the campaign's fault in this regard as well. 

And that's why I brought forward the point that you can have a billion point five. You can have ground game. [00:39:00] None of that matters if the message is not actually addressing the real issues that Americans are facing. And the reason why I think the Republicans can go out and vote for the Republican party and don't usually sit it out, and instead are able to suck it up and say, yeah, we're still going to vote for Donald Trump is because there are single issue voters out there and they know that Trump is going to protect it.

People that like guns are going to be like, "I like my guns. I want my guns to be protected. I want to be able to marry my gun. I want to be able to have sex with my gun. I know Donald Trump is going to be the guy that lets that happen. And I know the Democrats are going to shun me for wanting to have sex with my gun, that guy is going to go and vote for Trump regardless. 

On the other side though, if your top line communication and your major policy prescriptions are like, "We have to preserve these institutions, we have to preserve civility, and we have to preserve democracy," at a time when Americans are like, I don't give a fuck about democracy, just lower the price of eggs, Then, There's no way that I could [00:40:00] outflank the Democratic Party and get people to vote for Kamala Harris in a way that sticks, in a way that is going to be successful, no matter how much influence I wield.

JOHN LOVETT - HOST, POD SAVE AMERICA: Yes, take your point.

HASAN PIKER: Most people are just not voting, that's the problem. 

JOHN LOVETT - HOST, POD SAVE AMERICA: The challenge is that let's say you say there's these three kind of media ecosystems. There's the right-wing one, there's the kind of mainstream one, and there's the left one.

The one on the right, is built to attack Democrats. The one in the middle is built to attack Washington and politics, and the one on the left is built to attack Democrats. It is. I think they're trying to pressure Democrats to be a more moral and just version of itself. 

HASAN PIKER: I probably spend more time shitting on the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, but yeah.

JOHN LOVETT - HOST, POD SAVE AMERICA: But I'm saying when we're talking about right-wing media, it is trying to be a team player, and it is attacking Democrats and supporting Republicans. The middle is attacking both, and the left is attacking Democrats and Republicans. There is no big, fun, exciting, media environment, outside of, fucking, this table, where you have a lot of people that are critical of the Democratic [00:41:00] Party, annoyed by the same things we're talking about, but ultimately it's just we got to win, and we have to get behind these people. 

HASAN PIKER: But again, it is because, for many people on the right-wing ecosystem they have their toys, they have their treats, and the Republicans are giving them those toys and those treats. Whereas, the Democrats are offering, what? What are they offering? 

JOHN LOVETT - HOST, POD SAVE AMERICA: No, I know, we gotta fucking figure it out. 

HASAN PIKER: It doesn't matter to me I'm rich. Okay, I probably might go to prison if Project Esther gets kicked in, or if they denaturalize me or something. Who knows? We'll see.

JOHN LOVETT - HOST, POD SAVE AMERICA: You can be rich abroad.

HASAN PIKER: That is true, but my point is I like being here. I like trying to solve some of the problems in America, at least. But, overall the point is not that I'm rich, the point I'm making is that, I care about my fellow Americans. I care about them, their lives getting better, improving their material conditions. And I recognize that, if Democrats keep losing, then Republicans are going to keep ruining this country further, and I want the Democrats to win. I want to be the [00:42:00] most regime pilled propaganda minister you've ever seen. But I can't do that if the Democratic Party is not offering anything. 

JOHN LOVETT - HOST, POD SAVE AMERICA: And I think that's all fair. I guess what I'm trying to see is what is the path to the Democrats creating the kind of story that's backed by candidates, that's backed by message, that's backed by policy, that's backed by having the right enemies, telling that kind of story, and then in concert with that, we do need a virtuous circle where then more and more people in left media start to accept that the vehicle for changing this country for the better is the Democratic party. 

 

HASAN PIKER: I mean I can't speak for everybody else on the left I don't know who you're talking about when you say this, but like I can speak to my friends that are over at Drop Site News, former Intercept guys like Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim. I can speak to a Majority Report that was way more in the tank for Kamala than I was for sure. Like they were very openly more excited at the prospect of Kamala Harris. I was definitely a lot more [00:43:00] depressed by no matter who wins, we're still cooked it was my attitude, but like certainly understanding and recognizing that Donald Trump is going to be far worse than Kamala Harris, of course, and Chapo Trap House. 

So these are some of the largest media companies out there on the left, outside of the orbit of the Democratic party. Every single one of these outlets, myself included, talked more about the Biden administration's accomplishments with the NLRB, with Lena Khan at the FTC with trust busting, and numerous other accomplishments that the Democratic Party actually brought forward than they did, and it didn't matter.

My point is there was, we always defended, we always, always defended the Afghan withdrawal unconditionally. You never saw that on even, you barely saw that on MSNBC. We always defended that. We always defended Lena Khan. We always defended the NLRB. We always defended the walking, the symbolic move that Joe Biden made when [00:44:00] he went to the UAW picket line. We didn't forget that. We talked about that. It didn't matter. 

It's not enough, especially when there's so much that Joe Biden did, I think, outside of the economic pressures that Americans were experiencing that was certainly going to play a pivotal role in the election, but there's so much that he did in the month of October in 2023, that just completely wiped that, that made it impossible to defend him, because the major focus of a lot of people and there's nothing you can do in that moment when people are seeing exactly what's going on and getting frustrated. 

He unveiled the right-wing immigration bill on October 5th, 2023, I might be getting the date wrong, but it was like literally two days before October 7th, he did that, and then October 7th happened, and he went and he bear hugged Netanyahu and kept giving unlimited weapons to Israel over and over again, never restraining Israel. Everybody knew exactly what was going to happen. It had happened [00:45:00] before and it was going to be much worse. And yet, no restraint whatsoever. 

It has, I think, diminished America's soft-power capabilities on the global stage further. It has eroded America's influence and soft-power capabilities in the Western world. Obviously the Global South already knew what was up, they've always known, but they have no power. They have no voice. It doesn't matter. The populations in Western Europe recognizing what was going on and actually starting to protest against it, I mean, that's different. I'm saying this as someone who's been an advocate for Palestinian emancipation for the past 10 years publicly. I've never seen this groundswell, this massive sea change, this attitude shift in such a dramatic fashion over the course of the last 12 months, and they did not address that at all. And instead they hugged and kissed neocons and talked about, even in the VP debate, Israel having the nuclear first strike capability. What an insane conversation we're having after 12 months of genocide.

Americans fancy [00:46:00] themselves to be peaceful people. It's a lie. America's foreign interventions are anything but peaceful. Even then the media ecosystem usually just shelters Americans from the genuine devastating impact of America's actions globally, but for that reason, Americans can at least feel like they're peaceful doves. Which is why Donald Trump, despite never being a peaceful dove, was able to effectively communicate that he was actually anti Iraq war against Hillary Clinton in 2016, which was a resilient message that actually showcased him as more moderate than Hillary Clinton in the eyes of many Americans.

Note from the Editor on the Democrats perception gap and Ben Wikler for the DNC

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with The Daily Show breaking down the failures of the Harris campaign. The Majority Report discussed messaging and strategy challenges for Democrats. The Kyle Kulinski Show looked at the shifting sentiments of centrists who are beginning to recognize the electoral benefits of progressive economics. The Muckrake Political Podcast criticized Democrats' failure of proper organizing and overdependence on [00:47:00] technocratic strategists. The Majority Report praised the candidacy of Ben Wickler for DNC chair. And Pod Save America spoke with Hasan Piker about key failures of Democrats. 

And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section. 

But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring the production crew here discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often making each other laugh in the process. And a reminder that our winter sale for memberships is currently going on; they're 20% off until the end of the year. So support independent media and get bonus shows for yourself or to send us a gift for the holiday. Discounts and gifting are available both on our site and through Patreon, so whichever you prefer, go for it. All the relevant links are in the show notes, or just go to BestOfTheLeft.com/support. There you will also find links to bookshop.org for Dead Tree Books and their [00:48:00] sister site, libro.fm for audio books. Both are certified benefit corporations that help support brick and mortar bookshops, while you get the benefit of the convenience of online shopping. In short, they're decidedly non-evil compared to other online bookstores, and shopping through our links help support this show as well. So again, head to BestOfTheLeft.com/support or follow the links in the show notes to grab your own membership, currently on discount. Or snap up a gift membership for this wintry gift-giving season. 

As always, if regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. 

Now I have a couple of thoughts to add to our topic today. 

The first is about the perception gap that Democrats are suffering from. I think this is important context. Without a doubt, those who say the Democrats have gone too far to the left have two [00:49:00] problems. First, they're definitely talking about social issues: your trans rights, your abortion rights, anything that they put under the wokeism umbrella. It's very unlikely they're talking about economics. So any suggestion that people like Bernie Sanders are wrong about taxing the hell out of billionaires because people don't like wokeism should be understood as completely nonsensical. That is a non sequitur. Those are not on the same spectrum. Those are two different elements of the left, rarely intersecting. 

Secondly, they're not even right about how much Democrats support those woke issues that people seem to be somewhat annoyed about. The perception gap has been built by Democrats allowing themselves and their positions to be more effectively framed by the opposition than from themselves.

Biden actually had some pretty good economic policies, but the whole party was crap about bragging on those [00:50:00] things. And it's not because they were spending all of their time talking about trans kids. People just got the impression that that's what they were doing, because they weren't saying anything interesting enough to break through the messaging cycles. Meanwhile, Trump and company framed them as woke fascists, without much response.

So a strong, full-throated embrace of economic populism wouldn't just be good policy and good politics; it would be good messaging that would help drown out the bullshit from the other side, because it would be interesting enough that people would take notice. 

Now the second note I have for the show today is about Ben Wickler. And I don't often meet with powerful and influential people. Some of them, listen to the show, but I don't meet with them. But I did have a meeting with Ben Wickler. Now fittingly, the meeting took place before Ben became any degree of powerful or very -- [00:51:00] maybe he was a little influential. We both produce podcasts way back in the day. I still do. I don't think he does anymore. And the first iteration of his show is called The Flaming Sword of Justice, which is a great name. And then that show sort of morphed into a show called The Good Fight, not to be confused with another show by the same name, but with a different host. Very old school listeners from, I think more than 10 years ago now, may have heard some clips from Ben's shows played on Best of the Left. 

Well, Ben and I met up, talked podcasting shop, and I came away from that meeting feeling lazy, unprepared, and unambitious, because Ben came prepared with written questions for me, and very impressive answers to some of the questions that I had that demonstrated how that sort of meeting was the norm for him. Meaning he [00:52:00] was obviously regularly meeting with people who he felt could give him some advice or suggestions that he could turn around and use to make his work better, more effective, more impactful. 

Now it turns out this wasn't a one-off. I sorta got the sense that it wasn't. But similarly, while prepping for this show, I came across an article by Thom Hartmann, who we feature regularly. And the article was titled "Ben Wickler for DNC chair." And Thom starts with a very similar story. It says, "I don't recall the year, I think it was 2008, but I remember well, Louise and I am meeting Ben Wickler over snacks and drinks at a small party at John Nichols' home in Madison, Wisconsin. As we left, Louise remarked to me, 'That kid's going places; keep an eye on him.' Ben has more than fulfilled her prediction, leading Wisconsin Democrats to victory after victory. This weekend, he announced he's running for head of the DNC. This is a [00:53:00] truly big deal." End quote. 

So here's how I now think about Ben and that meeting I had with him. This is just for context. Some people are social climbers. They try to get in good with the right people to elevate their own social status. And then you have the corporate climbers, those who do what they can to get ahead in business and finance to improve their own financial status. Of course, those aren't mutually exclusive. But Ben is a progress climber. He really cares about making a difference, building power to change policy for good. And he recognized, apparently a long time ago, that meeting with people, asking for advice, taking meticulous notes, learning best practices, and then implementing that into his work was the best way that he could take a role in making that progress happen. 

So in terms of being excited about Ben running to lead the DNC, it's [00:54:00] not just about the policies that I know he supports. It's about how he goes about his work -- always learning, always trying to improve, putting that into action, and repeating the cycle. The results he's had in Wisconsin seem to be bearing that out. 

So, if you can get a message to one of the few hundred people voting on that leadership position, please pass this message along. And just for fun, here's one of my favorite old clips of Ben Wickler on the good fight.

Let us whisper of a dream - The Good Fight - Air Date 11-21-13

BEN WIKLER: Everyone has a dream. Some kids want to become citizens. Some adults want to retire with dignity. Me, I have a dream too. I've always dreamt of a string of man-made private islands that spell out my own first name in the Pacific Ocean, within chopper distance of my corporate headquarters. But now, I may not get a chance to realize [00:55:00] my dream.

Hi, I'm Bradley Scaife Koch, healthcare entrepreneur. For years, my network of cut-rate insurance companies, for-profit emergency care centers, and especially my medical debt collection agencies have been making my dream come true. We're almost done with the letter B, and it's a sight to behold. 

But now, thanks to Obamacare, all of that may come to an end. Obamacare makes preventative healthcare for free. Free cancer screenings, free physical exams, free vaccines. Free, I mean, to you. But for me, and for all of us who profit when preventable conditions go unprevented, this so-called freedom isn't free at all. You see, I can't stock my island chain with menageries of sequined bedecked endangered species with the kind of money you make from early [00:56:00] detection.

If you want to fall asleep to the sight of a chimpanzee in a reflective neon pink unitard shimmering in the light of a solid platinum disco ball, as I do, then you need the kind of profits that can only be reaped from full-blown medical emergencies.

Obamacare's tragic focus on preventing tragedies may turn America, this hallowed land of opportunity, into just another unmarked mass grave full of the corpses of the hopes of people like me. Because achieving my American dream, that's a preventable condition too. Next time you think about giving healthcare.gov another whirl, think about that mass grave. Think about my islands never existing. Think about my chimp without his unitard. And join me at [00:57:00] StopThisObamacareMonsterBeforePeopleStartPreventingHighlyProfitableEmergencies.

org. 

That B's getting lonely. It's time to put a Radley in the Pacific.

SECTION A - WHY DEMOCRATS LOST

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on three topics today. Next up, Section A- Why Democrats lost, followed by Section B- Time to fight, and Section C- Moving forward.

Man Oh Man: Why Male Voters Shifted Right - The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart - Air Date 11-21-24

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE WEEKLY SHOW: I almost think that for men it is like a cultural comfort It's that idea of that the locker room has been taken from us You And you can't do what we used to do in the locker room, which is, uh, incredibly scatological and, uh, perverse and anti gay rhetoric.

Like all that sort of stuff has been taken away and you're almost seeing it. You know, now if a Christian Pulisic scores a goal, he does the Trump dance. If somebody scores a touchdown, they do the Trump. Like there is a, and I haven't seen this before, a celebratory reaction from men that I hadn't seen [00:58:00] before.

Like there is a zeitgeist. There is a cultural moment for men and for Trump that I think liberals and Democrats especially are like, wait, what we had Beyonce. Like now you got everybody doing the, the Trump dance on things. I think there's a, a shock that's occurring. Do you think that's correct, Danny?

ANNIE LOWREY: Yeah, and I think that the fact that you are seeing millennials is perhaps the kind of like peak liberal generation and Gen Zers are shifting back the other direction as really interesting. You know, I think when you talk to the, to liberals or to Democrats and they, you know, 15 years ago they might have said like demography is destiny and like we're going to become a solid majority party because the country is becoming, um, less white, more Latino, more black, uh, more Asian.

And this is our future. And I think that even now, right? You know, there's a sense of like, we have all of the young people. And once the old people have died off and we got all the young people, then we're going to win for forever. 

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE WEEKLY SHOW: Hard thing [00:59:00] to wait for, but okay.

ANNIE LOWREY: Right? Like these people, you would, you would hear this kind of derisiveness about Republicans about, you know, well, they're racist and they're sexist and they can't even do policy.

They don't do policy. They didn't do the ACA. People come to their senses and recognize that, you know, And I think that Democrats lost sight of just what voters were telling them. I really feel this way about inflation. I really feel this way about the unlikability of candidates. They were kind of constructing these intellectual arguments about how voters would come home and they didn't.

And voters were very clear throughout the entirety of this election that they were not crazy about Joe Biden, that they didn't think the economy was great. And that they felt that whether it was fair or not, and who cares, you know, that they felt like they, the culture had shifted in a way that they hadn't Liked, right?

And so I think that, you know, probably for Democrats, there's just like a lot of listening to, and a lot of, you know, belief that if you're saying that, well, like good people vote for us and bad people vote for the other guy, 

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE WEEKLY SHOW: right?

ANNIE LOWREY: I think that's kind of a hard message. 

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE WEEKLY SHOW: You have to take it out of that moral component.

You have to take it out of that righteousness. It [01:00:00] almost sounds like, like if, if you're making arguments to people that we're moral and you're immoral boy, that's, that's not going to play great. And is that what, In some ways men were reacting to Richard. I 

ANNIE LOWREY: think so.

RICHARD REEVES: Yeah. And I think like to put it bluntly, a lot of men felt like the message from Democrats wasn't that men had problems.

It was the men are the problem. Oh, that's, that's interesting. And I don't want to overstate this. And I think this is related to this triumphalism thing you're just talking about, John, which is this sense of like free at last, like in a way. And the question is like, Free at last to be, what, a rampant misogynist who wants to roll back women's rights, et cetera.

That is not the, that is not the median 24 year old man who voted for Trump, right? That is not what they were. But it is a kind of like, okay, I can, we can have a joke. I can, you know, I have a certain, I'm not going to be told I'm toxic. I mean, it is interesting that the term toxic masculinity was basically born in 2016.

Um, and has been a big part of the kind of culture for those, and eight [01:01:00] years is a long time in the life of a 24 year old or an 18 year old. And so I think what's happened is that partly as a result of the first Trump term, we're in a like a pinball game of backlash. We've had the backlash, to the backlash, to the backlash, and I've lost count, I don't know where we are at this point, but It's a Bo Burnham song, for God's sakes.

Right, it's like, I don't know where we are, but it's like, and so a lot of men, a lot of the young men that I know and I kind of talk to and feel about, it's like, it's not that they're actually against gender equality, or a lot of these things, they're just kind of over the earnestness. They're just over it a bit.

They they want to just be able to just be a little bit 

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE WEEKLY SHOW: and maybe it's the the lack of Of grace, but the the difficulty is in in the moment that we're in Social media wise there's really no position liberal conservative anything that isn't attacked Viciously like you know by everybody, you know, it's how do you get at it?

How do you get people to not feel like that when? It feels like on [01:02:00] Twitter or on Facebook and those things, everybody is poised to attack at all times. It's not just men that are attacked. Women are attacked. Liberals are attacked. Conservatives are attacked. Everybody attacks. 

ANNIE LOWREY: Yeah, it's really hard. And I think it's really hard for liberals and Democrats when they're like, well, look what the Republicans say about us.

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE WEEKLY SHOW: That's, that's my point. Yeah,

ANNIE LOWREY: exactly. It's, it's like, it's not fair. Like what? You're, you're saying that, um, you can 

JOHN STEWART - HOST, THE WEEKLY SHOW: call me a terrorist sympathizer, but I can't call you racist. You're 

ANNIE LOWREY: like dunking on gay couples and gender diverse little kids and mixed status families and. People who just want reproductive freedom and people who would go march for somebody else's rights, right?

Like, what's wrong with that? It's um, it's a very tense and tough moment. And I think that you're right, John, to bring it back to the fact that yeah, Trump stoked white nationalism. That is just true. Right? Uh, he doesn't dog whistle. He openly uses racist language, sexist language, um, constantly, constantly.

Um, [01:03:00] and it's not just nativism. It's not just about immigrants, right? It's like literally othering people. And so I do think that we're in this, you know, kind of dissonant moment. Um, uh, that's like hard for both sides. Um, and I agree that, you know, I don't, I'm not sure that social media, it's one of the ones where I'm like, I'm not sure if we went back and we just didn't invent it.

I actually think it would be better. I think so. I'm not, I'm not a hundred percent sure on that, but I think so. Right,

Why Kamala Harris lost (according to regular people) - Garrison Hayes - Air Date 12-9-24

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: I think the takes that I encountered for why Kamala Harris lost can be broken down into three categories. Let's call the first one perception. 

SPEAKER 1: Hi, excuse me. The 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: very first person I talked to was a guy named Rich, an older white man who splits his time between Florida and Georgia.

Why do you think that Kamala Harris lost the selection? 

SPEAKER 2: I think, uh, Kamala and the Democratic Party, they, uh, they assume everybody that votes for Trump is a Nazi or evil, and they don't understand that they're just regular people, but they talk down to them, and I think that caused a lot of Trump votes.

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: Rich's perspective for better, [01:04:00] or for worse is probably more common than many folks in the Democratic Party would care to admit. This idea that Democrats are too judgmental, too high and mighty, too accusatory of Trump supporters, this take has come up often in the conversations that I've had with Trump voters over the last year.

year. So I'm not surprised to hear it in this context as well. You're saying Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party more broadly, is this something that you think has been going on for some time or is this more specific to Kamala Harris? 

SPEAKER 2: No, I would say it goes back to when Hillary ran. 

SPEAKER 5: You can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.

SPEAKER 2: Bill Clinton didn't do it. You know, he was a Democrat. Uh, I'd say back to Hillary. 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: The problem, I think, is that Kamala Harris ran an intentionally inclusive campaign. She reached across the aisle, campaigned with Republicans. She condemned Joe Biden's garbage comment explicitly. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.

KAMALA HARRIS (2): I [01:05:00] strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for. for it. And I've made that clear throughout my career, including my speech last night before I think this all happened. 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: But for rich, and I suspect for many others, it's hard to separate Kamala Harris from that broader, long standing idea.

SPEAKER 2: Both sides are divisive, and that bothers me. But I I think the Democrats are a little more divisive because I call people names more than I get from the Republicans. 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: I'll be honest, I wasn't really sure what to say to this. The only way you can come to the conclusion that Democrats are the only people doing name calling is if you exist in a media bubble that doesn't show you this stuff.

She's 

GRANT CARDONE: a fake, a fraud. She's a pretender. Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country. Kamala has imported criminal migrants from prisons and jails. She is the devil, whoever screamed that out. She is the [01:06:00] anti Christ. 

SPEAKER 4: She is some sick bastard, that Hillary Clinton, huh? 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: Again, my goal isn't really to criticize any of the people that I spoke to.

These are regular folks. The only reasonable assumption is that they're doing the best they can with what they've got. But a lesson I've learned time and time again in my reporting is that perception is is everything, and right-wing media is excellent at shaping narratives about anyone to their left, all while shielding Trump supporters from understanding, seeing, facing the grossest elements of his political movement.

Between now and the next election, what would you say to Democrats on how to speak to a voter like you? 

SPEAKER 2: Just move a little closer to the center and convince me that you want the whole country to get together. 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: Do you think it's possible for Democrats to change? in a way that would, you know, benefit them in upcoming elections.

SPEAKER 3: I don't think that the issue is Democrats. 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: That's [01:07:00] Dehate. He voted for Kamala Harris and had a very different perspective from Rich. 

SPEAKER 3: I think that's like asking, to me, do we think institutionalized racism would change? It could, but is it actually going to change? 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: Which brings me to this guy on a horse. Did you vote for Donald Trump?

Yeah. And, and, and I mean, this is interesting. What motivated you to vote for him? 

SPEAKER 1: Uh, change, change, mostly, uh, what we got going on, all this craziness, all that. So yeah. When you say craziness, what comes to mind? All this stuff about, you know, the kids in school and, you know, all types of just, you know, nonsense that we shouldn't have to deal with, or our kids having to deal with, so yeah.

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: And did you feel as though Kamala Harris was promoting that? Of course she was. 

SPEAKER 1: In what way? In plenty of ways. You've seen a lot of those interviews, so that speaks for itself. You see, it speaks for itself. A lot of those interviews she did, that's [01:08:00] what they stand for, so. And I ain't with it. I think he's 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: referring to the interview cut into this ad.

KAMALA HARRIS (2): Every transgender inmate would have access. 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: Kamala's for they them. President Trump is for you. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message. That interview was from 2019. And the insane thing about this ad To me is that the gender affirming care for prisoners policy that she's referring to that policy, according to the New York Times, was the law during Trump's first term.

But for some voters, this is perceived as a stain on Kamala Harris, all because she saw the law as a good thing. And did you feel as though Kamala Harris was promoting that? Of course you will. I cannot emphasize enough the chasm, the gap between people's perception of basic facts in this election. What would, like, the Democratic Party have to do to get a person like you to vote for them?

SPEAKER 1: Change their whole perspective of all that stuff right there, you know, cut out a lot of that. You know, that's the main thing. [01:09:00] When you say that stuff, I think what comes to my mind is like, LGBTQ. Is that what? That's exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, see, well, outrage won't get down like that.

Man for woman, woman for man. That's it. Bottom line. 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: What do you say to someone who's like, you know, what's, you can be with a woman, but what's stopping like somebody else from being with who they want to be with? Ain't 

SPEAKER 1: stopping nobody from being us. They just, they got their belief and I got mine and that's all it is to it.

So they can do what they want to do. Everybody got the answer to God. 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: And you, and for you, like homosexuality or transgenderism is like a sin. A sin, definitely. Okay, So reason number one Is perception. And I think based on the conversations that I had, reason number two is disengagement. I won't spend too much time here, but the most common answer that I got from folks, both on camera and off camera was I'm not into politics.

SPEAKER 5: Wrong person to ask. Not into politics. No, that's real. That's real. Thank you for it. No, thank 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: you for your time. Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump by about a percent. And a [01:10:00] half low voter turnout absolutely played a part in this election. In fact, there's this map floating around the internet that shows who'd win each state.

If didn't vote was a candidate that non existent candidate would be president. Right now, Philadelphia saw about a 3 percent decrease in turnout. That 3 percent represents tens of thousands of votes in a heavily democratic city. Compare that with the 2. 1 percent increase in the rest of the state, and it becomes clear why Kamala Harris lost Pennsylvania.

Michigan tells a similar story. Detroit saw a 4 percent decrease in turnout compared to 2020. And truthfully, I blame Democrats for this. I think Kamala Harris ran a pretty good campaign which, in hindsight, was almost always destined to end in defeat. Between the ongoing US funded genocide in Gaza, the Democratic Party's failures to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, their failure to effectively inform the public about what they've done, the truth is that Democrats came up short in giving the electorate something [01:11:00] to vote for instead of just giving folks something to vote for.

Against. 

SPEAKER 3: I also feel like a lot of people are from my peers that I spoke to. A lot of people are indifferent about the two and a lot of people didn't vote. A lot of people didn't show up, so that's another huge part of the problem as well. 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: I think Dante represents the third and final reason. I heard for why Kamala Harris lost America has a problem and that problem.

Is that we are impossibly divided. Whether it's some combination of sexism and racism. Uh, honestly, they didn't elect a white woman. I wasn't surprised they didn't elect a black woman. 

SPEAKER 3: People weren't willing to change. People don't want change. People are, we say racism is dead, but it's really not. Whether 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: it's homophobia or xenophobia.

I think 

SPEAKER 5: as a woman, I'm interested in protecting my own rights. I'm interested as a queer woman, protecting my right to marry. Y'all 

SPEAKER 1: see, well, our race won't get down like that. Man for 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: woman, woman for man. Whether it's. Our diverging views of the economy and what it takes to lift people out of 

SPEAKER 5: poverty. And I just think generally she had a better plan for [01:12:00] someone like me and everyone else who may not be as fortunate.

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: The problem that has become sharply apparent to me while traveling the country throughout this election cycle is that many of us live in what feels like totally different worlds. There's this like conversation about all the young white men who are. You know, breaking for Trump and what are your thoughts on on that dynamic specifically?

SPEAKER 4: Uh, yeah, I don't, I don't know about that. I'm, I'm not, I'm neither. I mean, I'm white, but I'm not young and I'm not, I didn't vote for Trump. So 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: yeah. Yeah. But anybody in your life or people that, you know, maybe some of the reasons why I'm 

SPEAKER 4: from California. So, you know, I'm not, I'm, I'm fairly out of touch with that.

And 

GARRISON HAYES - HOST, GARRISON HAYES: we don't watch the season. Where, where, where do you get your political information when you are looking at politics? Family. And friends. And did you vote this election? Yes. And while it may feel like the different worlds we are living in are irreconcilable, the truth is that we actually live in the [01:13:00] same world.

We have to share this thing. So, I asked Dehate how, in his opinion, We could move forward post election and I really appreciated his response. What would you say to this country then as it relates to moving forward? I mean, what's your message to America post election? 

SPEAKER 3: I don't know if I have a message. Can I have a second to think about that one?

Yeah, of course. Of course. Of course. My

message to America going forward is to be mindful, be vigilant. And move as if it's you, even if it's not you, um, everybody says they voted for what benefited them best, but did you actually, um, and then to me, a lot of people, especially from the religious perspective said they voted for Trump because he was a more faith based or Christian candidate, but the Bible often talks about free will.

And that's a huge principle. Um, so if God gives us free will, why are you looking to take that away from others? Um, so just to be considerate until and consider, you know, When it could be your rights or [01:14:00] the rights of your kids and your loved ones and move based off that, move with empathy, move with grace and be mindful.

Going after the elites (with George Packer) - Stay Tuned with Preet - Air Date 12-12-24

PREET BHARARA - HOST, STAY TUNED WITH PREET: There's an important cognitive dissonance here for members of the establishment like me. I'm not going to speak for you. As you write in the piece, Trump's basic appeal is a vow to take power away from the elites and invaders who have imposed these changes and return the country to its rightful owners: the real Americans. And he is, I have a caveat with respect to what I'm about to say, but he is populating the cabinet and his brain trust in particular with the most elite, most wealthy people who have ever walked the face of earth, right? Literally, the most wealthy people who've ever walked the face of the earth. How they are not elites I'm not sure. I do think, by the way, that maybe part of the answer is that there's a hypocrisy when Democrats talk about [01:15:00] billionaires being bad people in some sense, because Democrats have billionaires too. And you had someone during the Democratic National Convention, if I recall correctly, who was invading against the scourge of billionaires after a Democratic elected billionaire had just been at the lectern.

So, if you want, you can address either one of those. If there's hypocrisy on the Democratic side with respect to wealth and success and billionaires, but also this revolution or this, this tantrum, or this reaction, whatever you want to call it. Is it real or is it just bullshit? 

GEORGE PACKER: I think there is a fair amount of bullshit to it. And you've kind of put your finger, sorry to say, on the bullshit. 

PREET BHARARA - HOST, STAY TUNED WITH PREET: Well, that'll get me in trouble.

GEORGE PACKER: That's unpleasant. Yeah, there are, we're talking about different kinds of elites. When the Republicans talk about elites, when MAGA goes after the elites, they're talking about [01:16:00] professional elites. Educated professionals, people in media, in academia, in the professions, people with college degrees or more.

Republicans have their own elites. They're mostly business elites. They're mostly people who actually make more money than a podcast host or a staff writer. But they somehow try to claim that they're not really elites because, why? Because they are going after the institutions, higher education, journalism, law, that the other elites occupy and defend. And Trump is the perfect, you could say, avatar of this because yes, he may be a billionaire, although we're not sure about that, but he's full of resentment of the elites going [01:17:00] back to his days as a Queens real estate developer or the son of one.

PREET BHARARA - HOST, STAY TUNED WITH PREET: But he also inhabits or in him inhabits a contradiction depending on what you think of elite. So this same guy has gigantic apartments. He puts names on the buildings that he owns. He has a gold plated toilet, but he also eats a Big Mac, right? He also puts ketchup on his steak. 

GEORGE PACKER: And he has a Queens accent.

PREET BHARARA - HOST, STAY TUNED WITH PREET: And he has a Queens accent. How does all that work? 

GEORGE PACKER: Well, he has been a self styled outsider all his life. God knows it may go back to actually secretly hating his father. I don't know. But he has been someone who is ready to disrupt and trash and trample on all of our sensitivities, on our values, on our norms, and get away with it. And he, here he is getting away with it in really the biggest way [01:18:00] imaginable. And I think in his resentments and in his willingness to trash, he sort of releases an energy in people with far less money and far less celebrity who also feel as if that society has somehow either left them behind, or screwed them over or put other people in place ahead of them who don't belong there.

And so Trump is able to speak for them when he said in 2016, I am your voice. That really resonated with his followers. It didn't resonate with people who think of him as a fraud because it sounded more fraudulent. But, it's a powerful message. And so what I'm saying is you don't have to be poor to go after the elites.

You can be a billionaire and get away with it. But I think the key thing here is Republican elites are economic elites and Democratic elites are cultural elites. And so if politics is [01:19:00] played out on the terrain of culture, it's the Democrats who end up having to defend things that people want to get rid of. And that's why that long period of the Reagan revolution was so terrible for the Democratic Party. Even though the party won presidencies over and over again, they gradually lost the support of all those people making less than $100,000 or $80,000. Who saw the party as caring about issues that they didn't care about and not caring about them. Because even though you could stand up and say, I'm for paid family medical leave, I'm for a higher minimum wage, I'm for this and that. If people don't see a change in their economic lives and in their well being and their optimism about their children's well being, they don't care what your policy positions are. And for a lot of reasons, there haven't been the kind of changes people have wanted [01:20:00] for decades now, and that seems in the end to benefit someone like Trump.

“Get These Incels to Work” (feat. Hasan Piker) Part 2 - Pod Save America - Air Date 11-27-24

JOHN LOVETT - HOST, POD SAVE AMERICA: It's like seared in my mind of Trump being on Joe Rogan because of how like my path of understanding it because what I saw first were a bunch of people taking clips and saying, wow, Rogan really didn't like Trump.

Trump is a mess on this show. He comes across terribly. Rogan was like giving Trump space to hang himself rhetorically, and then I watch it, and I'm like, Trump did fucking great in this interview. 

HASAN PIKER: Yeah, he's very telegenic. That's the thing that, like, a lot of people, I guess, refuse to factor in for some weird reason, is that yeah, he, he definitely rambles on, he likes to call it the weave, and even Joe Rogan made fun of him for that a little bit in the process, but like, There is something to be said about, uh, a, a relatively telegenic person who is able to portray himself as, I like to call it, uh, honestly dishonest.

Yeah, yeah. Where, like, [01:21:00] everybody knows he's a bit of a scumbag, but he's your scumbag, and he's able to get that across to a lot of people, and, and, uh, I don't think that there is Really, anyone with that level of, of television presence on the Democratic Party front, I think like the most skilled orator in the Democratic Party's ranks in the last Uh, you know, last couple of decades was obviously Barack Obama and outside of that, I don't, I think like in a lot of instances, purely from an optics point of view, Democrats track is like technocratic, elitist, too serious about everything that they talk about.

And there's certainly a lot of that on the Republican party side as well. And we've seen failed initiatives from establishment Republicans that tried to recreate the Trump phenomenon with, uh, the likes of Ron DeSantis. And that was a massive failure, but ultimately, I think this goes beyond podcasts.

This is something that I've been talking about quite frequently. I know the podcast thing is like the [01:22:00] most, like, that's the one that got everyone's attention. But I said this on CNN last night that, uh, you can't really podcast your way out of this problem. There was that one tweet saying like, Oh, we just got to have a hundred pot.

Save America's, but they all have to look like Hassan. Like, that's not, that's not how this works. Oh, 

JOHN LOVETT - HOST, POD SAVE AMERICA: you think that one, that one tweet might've been wrong, but the, uh, so I agree with that. You know, it became this, the couple, the kind of like, I don't know, like just have had this devastating loss to trump and everybody's looking for these sort of little explanations that all feel, they just feel silly, like, oh, we need a joe Rogan of the left and even saying, like, I don't even want to talk about how stupid that is anymore because even that has become Stupid, but I'm like I I do agree that like people are like, oh well, she should have gone on Rogan All right.

Yeah, sure. I I think so too. 

HASAN PIKER: That would not have changed the outcome of this election 

JOHN LOVETT - HOST, POD SAVE AMERICA: There's a larger problem to what you're getting at Which is like why don't we have figures and where like we think they would do great on that show? And why is [01:23:00] someone like Joe Rogan now who was four years ago open to Bernie now suddenly open to Trump like that's the deeper problem like you look at like successful democratic messengers or progressive messengers over the last like decades and you think alright well Bill Clinton obviously was successful and he like ran against the The Democratic Party in some way.

Barack Obama did the same thing. Bernie does the same thing. AOTC does the same thing. Not on, I'm not talking about on policy, but you 

HASAN PIKER: don't mean it like also in the same direction of running. No, no, no, no, 

JOHN LOVETT - HOST, POD SAVE AMERICA: but running against the establishment in some way and just saying, and and what the reason I connect them is because they all did something which is Demonstrated that they were not part of the democratic establishment, both like on policy and rhetorically, right?

Like, that's what they all did. And I'm just wondering, like, what there's a place where there's like kind of an alignment. Of like the Seth Moulton critique of the Democratic Party and the lefty critique of the Democratic [01:24:00] Party, which is just like, it's fucking annoying and like, kind of, I don't know, like pedantic in some way.

HASAN PIKER: Here's the thing. I think it's an incorrect interpretation, an incorrect autopsy to look back at a thing that the Democratic Party did not do at all. And then say, it's actually that reason. It's not anything that we did so far. It's not that we tacked to the right over and over again. Despite people like myself and many others saying like, don't do this.

You're going to hemorrhage the base. You're going to hemorrhage the base of support. You are going to cut away at your turnout. You're going to cut across, uh, many different constituencies that you rely on to create an effective coalition. And it's, it's a very dangerous gamble to assume that you can decouple a lot of these people in the suburbs, a lot of like white women specifically away from the Republican party and vote for you instead.

I know that they're high propensity voters, but it doesn't matter. Uh, there's still plenty of low propensity voters that you have to rely on to win. And that's [01:25:00] precisely what the democratic party did. They hyper focused on these key constituencies. Despite the fact that polls were seemingly deadlocked after 30 million dollars of ad spend in key suburbs, right?

Like it showed at least for I said this time and time again, it showed someone from the outside looking in that the message was not working and you can have the best ground game possible. You can have, you know, hundreds of thousands of people all across the country door knocking, but if the top down message that you're communicating is not resonating with people, then you're not going to be able to win an election.

You're not going to have the effective turnout necessary to win this election. And that is precisely what happened. Now, does that mean that Trump's messaging was good? Of course not. It wasn't, it was actually pretty bad. And I would even go so far as to say the anti trans ads were actually a distraction and not good.

It was only effective in the DC bubble, I think, and the consultant bubble and the, and the media class that saw those ads and were like, Oh my God. [01:26:00] This is an incredible ad. Like, they really ruined Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris had a silly answer to an ACLU questionnaire. Okay, that just shows that she is not the most experienced politician.

This was all the way back in, I believe, 2020, right? She literally had to drop out of the primary. Anyway, at that time, that's one thing. Okay, but that should not be a campaign killer. If you personally think that that's a campaign killer, then your campaign is weak. This message across the board should never be able to end a single campaign.

Then Teflon Don is real. I mean, the man, uh, had the, the grab him by the pussy tape come out as the October surprise in 2016, and he still won. And since then, there's been a litany of different controversies, including, but not limited to straight up undermining American democracy by doing January 6th. And yet people are still.

Voting for him. And one must ask the question, why? And I think overall, the same exact problems that persisted in 2016 when the economy was seemingly very [01:27:00] good, right? Especially as opposed to like the post COVID economy and its recovery. People were still very frustrated with what was going on. The notion that, uh, in the wealthiest nation on earth, we have 600, 000 people sleeping outside every night.

The idea that, you know, we have a, we have the concept of medical bankruptcy is an insane phenomenon that doesn't exist in any other OECD nation. Like the, the fact that 60 percent of the American public doesn't have 400 in emergency spending. Like these are all very real. Economic anxieties. I'm using that term specifically because, you know, it's a, it's one thing that people like to hyper focus on that, that creates volatility, that creates instability and it creates a, a, a base of, of angry people.

And if the democratic party is not addressing that anger and addressing their material problems and earnestly telling them, like, we're going to fix that shit. Okay. And the other side. He's looking at that anger and saying, we're going to channel your anger. [01:28:00] You have every right to be angry and you know who you should be angry at?

Those who have less than you, you know, you should be angry at the working poor, the homeless people that are doing crimes left and right, uh, black and brown people, undocumented migrants that are doing incredible amounts of crimes. They're killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and trans people. And, and the democratic party only cares about those people.

And they don't care about you. And that message resonates with a base of support, not because they are, uh, intrinsically evil, that message resonates with a base of support because they're angry and one of the two major parties is not even remotely interested in addressing that anger and trying to tell them what the solution to that anger actually is and what the real problem is.

SECTION B - TIME TO FIGHT

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B- Time to fight.

Where do the Democrats go from here? - BBC News - Air Date 12-7-24

SARAH SMITH - HOST, AMERICAST: There has been plenty said about what's gone wrong, and it really is important now that they start looking ahead to see how they can put it right. But of course, there's great disagreement over that. I mean, it was reported yesterday that [01:29:00] the Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, who's also a member of the Democratic leadership, that he said anyone who has a grand strategy is full of crap. But he thinks that Democrats need to keep things simple. Now, maybe it's not the most elegant language, but he probably has summed up what one of the problems for the Democrats is there, that nobody has a grand strategy. They've got to identify the problem first, I think, before you can come up with the solution. And Anthony, to what extent do you think they have identified what went wrong? 

ANTHONY ZURCHER: I think they understand that they're having issues with working class voters, blue collar voters, and not just white working class, which was Donald Trump's base in 2016, but also Hispanic and some Black working class voters. And part of that is a reflection of the economic circumstances this year. And that will, in theory, resolve itself over time, or at the very least, if the public's still angry, they're not going to blame the Democrats for it. They'll blame the Republicans for it. And so I will say almost they don't need a grand strategy, right?

Being the [01:30:00] opposition that's not in power and criticizing Donald Trump could be their strategy, at least in the short term. It worked for Donald Trump. That was essentially his strategy over the past two years was saying "The Democrats have botched it all up. Send me back in and I'll fix it." That could be their message until we get to the presidential primary process after the midterm elections where you're going to have candidates trying to paint a vision for the future and you're going to get contrasting visions. And you'll have what I think is probably going to be a robust contest for the nomination and it's the democratic voters and all these primary states that are going to decide what the party should do going forward.

SARAH SMITH - HOST, AMERICAST: There are lots of critics and people who would say, I think we even know some of them, who would say that the issue was wokeness, that the Democratic Party had been infected by a woke mind virus, and that they were obsessed with talking about what pronouns people were using, about whether transgender men were competing in women's sports and getting into the dressing rooms, and that they were obsessing over diversity and inclusion [01:31:00] at the expense of talking about things people really cared about. To what extent is that legitimate? 

MARIANNA SPRING: Yeah, Sarah it's the kind of conversation that has very much dominated the online world since the election including X, Musk's X. And I think, therefore, it kind of is on the minds of the Democrats, regardless of whether it matters so much or not.

Issues that are considered too quote "woke" and to what extent the Democrats are seen as being or were seen as being sort of out of touch with what a lot of people care about. I think some of that comes down to, as we've chatted about quite extensively, like messaging on issues that people care about, like the economy and immigration.

But nonetheless, you know, the question of, using pronouns or some of the things that the Democrats have perhaps been associated with, including in attack ads that were targeted at them by Trump's campaign. It will be really interesting to see going forward where that ends up. And you guys might have seen in some conservative or right leaning media outlets, there were some stories about [01:32:00] Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the Democrat who they were suggesting or alleging that she'd removed the pronouns she/her from her social media account from X in particular. It's not entirely clear whether she made the decision to do that, whether there are changes to her profile and that just sort of happened.

But I think it is interesting to think of whether someone like her is, who is considered a left leaning Democrat and who has been very vocal on kind of progressive issues, whether she also, is thinking about how to tailor that messaging in a way that has kind of mass appeal rather than appealing to a group of people perhaps who are used to doing things like that, like using their pronouns when there are a lot of Americans who won't be doing that and aren't used to it.

I mean, I don't know how much we think that they will change the kind of entire tone of their discussions , the Democrats, off the back of some of those issues you just spoke about, Sarah. 

SARAH SMITH - HOST, AMERICAST: Well, or whether they need to, because although the Republicans did attack them for this a lot, and there was that ad that ran in Pennsylvania extensively saying Kamala Harris is for they/them, Donald [01:33:00] Trump is for you, making a point about the pronouns.

She didn't campaign on any of this stuff. She didn't say any woke things, didn't even make a point about being a female candidate or a Black candidate either. And I didn't see or hear coming from the Democrats any of this stuff. It was all from the Republican side saying they're too elitist and they're too woke.

ANTHONY ZURCHER: Right. I remember when we were in Chicago, well, we were remarking how transgender issues, and even gender issues full stop, were not really highlighted by any of the speakers at that convention. So I think it's the ghost of 2019 and 2020 and what Kamala Harris ran on in her failed presidential bid that year, that really came back to haunt her. And that is, may not be something that comes back to haunt the next Democratic presidential nominee. I think it will certainly be something. That Democratic voters will keep in mind when they're picking a candidate in 2028. And if you look at the Democrats who won across the board in congressional elections, [01:34:00] they actually did pretty well. They won all the battleground states except Pennsylvania in the Senate races.

They picked up a seat in the U. S. House of Representatives. We're going to have a very narrow margin in the House of Representatives as 220 to 215 with the Republicans in control. And because three Republicans have moved on to the Trump administration or yeah, in one case just dropped out and disappeared off the face of the earth.

 It's gonna be 217 to 215. So, Democrats know how to win elections and they won elections this year. It was just the top of the ticket where they took it on the chin. And you're right the top of the ticket, that one ad in Pennsylvania, other swing states, about the, they/them really did hurt. And it probably is not something that Democrats are going to be exposed to the next go around. 

SARAH SMITH - HOST, AMERICAST: Maybe they'll be better at stamping on it and saying, it's Republicans who are obsessed with whether or not transgender boys are playing in girls sports and say, look, stop obsessing about the sports team. Don't worry about whether the schools are funded properly, whether the children have got the books to [01:35:00] read and whether they've got I've got enough to eat to be able to learn, and that you're the guys who are obsessed with transgender sports. But yeah, they didn't stamp on it well enough, but it's a mistake, I think, to say that they campaigned on it.

Henry Wallace & the Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party w/ John Nichols - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 5-21-20

JOHN NICHOLS: So imagine this, just within the Democratic Party. In 1968,

the leading vote getter in the primaries they had, and they didn't have as many primaries then, was Eugene McCarthy. He got 38 percent of the vote nationally. The number two vote getter was Bobby Kennedy, who got 31 percent of the vote. And then, um, you know, you had some independent African American candidates and in some other places or African American leaders in places like DC, who also were getting substantial numbers of votes for an anti war civil rights, social justice agenda.

And so when you pull all of these components together, you can say without a question, that, you know, the anti war movement, uh, in those primaries, in that process of choosing a Democratic nominee in 68, it got around 70, 75 percent of the [01:36:00] vote. Hubert Humphrey got 2 percent of the vote in the primaries.

Hubert Humphrey got nominated and he lost. Right. The polls show, the polls show that had they nominated McCarthy, he was well ahead of Nixon. And so there the party chose its status quo. It chose not to embrace movements. It chose not to go forward and it crumbled and at a critical point. And now the movements continued.

And so 1970, who do you see getting elected to Congress? Beating Democratic incumbents, Ron Dellums, a radical out of Oakland and Berkeley, uh, Bella Abso. a radical out of New York City. Two years later, Elizabeth Holtzman beating, you know, one of the senior Democrats in Congress. I mean, you, these movements continued and they continued both in the streets, but also to try and fight for the soul of the Democratic Party.

72, a grassroots movement taking advantage of changes in rules, nominates George McGovern for president United States. Um, he is backed [01:37:00] by a multiracial, multiethnic coalition. It is quite remarkable what McGovern did and immediately. After he's nominated, elites in the Democratic Party, a huge number, we're talking about cabinet secretaries, former cabinet secretaries, governors, senators, members of Congress, mayors around the country, form Democrats for Nixon.

They actively campaign, buying full page ads in newspapers, TV, radio, against their nominee. Because their nominee was trying to move them forward, right? So you saw this incredible battle along the way for the soul of the Democratic Party with the establishment power not giving up an inch. And I mean, fighting as hard as it could.

And I read all about this in the book, how these battles go back and forth. And it's a tremendous struggle. Yeah, 

MICHAEL BROOKS - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I'm sorry. Go ahead.

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah, go ahead. I'd say ultimately, Um, the neoliberals, the corporatists were always looking for a way in, you know, a way to, to do it. They changed rules, [01:38:00] they canceled midterm conferences, they created superdelegates, they began to open the flood of money into the party.

And I would argue that last thing, opening the flood of money into the party, really, tipped the balance, uh, for a substantial period of time, you know, through the 80s into the 90s, uh, toward really a stark neoliberalism, uh, and, and it was, you know, at that period, it can be safely said that for a substantial period of time, uh, the soul of the Democratic Party was lost.

MICHAEL BROOKS - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I think the big concern too is, is, is how did some of these same trajectory, you know, that, that, In parallel to this process that labor unions started to get blamed for Vietnam and bashed for McGovern and, and so this demonizing of the really important and positive legacies of the New Deal of the Great Society that were right and correct, uh, in terms of [01:39:00] economic policies and, and basically if you understood it.

You know, a Philip Randolph's agenda was we're going to get rid of American apartheid and we're going to have a social democracy for everybody. I mean, that's, that's, and that's, I think basically still the thing that if you have the kind of politics we have, you're still fighting against the multitude of forces today.

Cause you have to fight against, you know, the, the, you know, the brutality and the, and the xenophobia and everything else, the Republican party, you have to fight against the, you know, woke nonsense, neoliberals. In the 90s, you had to fight against the Clinton Democrats. So I guess my, my, my, I want to just speak to that too, because somehow it seems like this class that came in, in the 70s in Congress, that some of them were great and they kind of became important, almost like gadfly kind of figures like Dellums was, you know, he would put out a peace budget in the 80s and it was great and it was cool, but he didn't have much, you know, [01:40:00] power.

In the Democratic Party. And then, you know, some of these other folks came in with, again, a certain kind of liberalism and anti Vietnam, uh, sentiment. But, by the time you get to the 90s, they had made their peace with foreign interventions. And, all along the way, they were actually very comfortable with attacking New Deal and Great Society programs and, and kind of embracing Reagan economics.

And, you know, maybe even Joe Biden kind of comes in here because he would be kind of part of that class. 

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, he certainly was at, at periods along the way. Um, that's a terrific question. Because it gets to the real kind of heart and soul struggles that took place. And a lot of my book is devoted to, to that period.

Um, and there are many heroes, right? Plenty of villains, but many heroes. Jesse Jackson fought against this whole thing. When they formed the, uh, uh, Democratic Leadership Council, which was the neoliberal, you know, force, uh, that Clinton and others were [01:41:00] associated with. Um, Jesse Jackson called him Democrats for the leisure class.

And he continued to put forward a vision. of economic and social and racial justice that was deeply linked to peace and that was deeply linked to environmental concerns. Um, and, and here's the interesting thing about again, how the democratic party by closing its door, right, by, by pulling in rather than being open to movements, uh, here they had this amazing thing.

The rainbow coalition came into being and what anticipated the future more than the rainbow coalition, right? This idea of You know, this, this multiracial coalition that brought trade unionists and uh, and civil rights campaigners and women's rights campaigners and LGBTQ community folks that reached out to Arab Americans and said, you too can be a part of these coalitions.

Uh, you know, this was, this was big deal stuff. And in 1988, uh, no less a figure than Johnny Apple, the great, uh, New York [01:42:00] Times writer Um, and, and others, many, many good writers at that time said the dynamism of the 88 campaign was Jackson. He was the guy who really excited people. He didn't get the nomination.

And my book is not about winners always. You know, a lot of times, a lot of people I write about lost. But they, they didn't lose merely, they didn't lose because their ideas were bad. They lost because structural challenges were in their way. And the interesting part was that in 88, Jackson gave what was arguably the best speech ever at a Democratic National Convention.

I would argue his speech to that convention was miraculous. It was amazing. I invite people to go back and listen to it. Um, and it was electric. And what did they do? It was great. they turned around and said, Oh, well, hey, thanks a lot. And, uh, by the way, instead of you, the guy who came in second, very strong, young, dynamic figure with a lot of following, um, who really could expand the base of the party being thought about [01:43:00] as vice presidential candidate.

We're going to choose Lloyd Benson, the Senator closest to bankers, a guy who literally had spent his life fighting against and defeating progressives in Texas. Uh, we're gonna make him the vice president because that's going to be how we win this out. Right? They, this whole concept. Well, what did they do?

They lost Texas and every southern state, right? But they also lost California and Vermont and, you know, all sorts of states that would quickly become very liberal places. And, and in the book, I asked the question, I ran the numbers. What if you put Jesse Jackson on the ticket in 88? You might not have won.

But I, these narrow defeats they had in all sorts of states across the country, I think a very good chance they would have prevailed and you would have had a different course for the Democratic Party. The tragedy of it is, is that I think there are people who at that period were involved in the Democratic Party who were more willing to lose than to give up control of one of the two political parties for purposes of their status quo [01:44:00] vision. Their, you know, maintenance of a conservative, frankly, economically conservative, neoliberal, and often neoconservative vision.

Why We Can’t Play Nice With the Democratic Party - The Bitchuation Room (with Francesca Fiorentini) - Air Date 12-10-24

JONATHAN SMUCKER: Trump's 2024 campaign was weaker than his 2016 campaign, but it's working because the Democrats are so committed to not disciplining any kind of a message about fighting for working class people.

And, and, you know, whenever I say stuff like this, people are like, Oh yeah, but like Kamala had all these great ads in Pennsylvania about raising the minimum wage, et cetera. That's true. There was some good stuff, right? They don't have an ounce of the message discipline that the Trump campaign has. Right?

And I'm not just talking about message, right? Because I think message, it all weaves together. But I'm also not just talking about policy. I think that there's a, there's a tendency. on the left and among liberals to, to be like, wait, how does [01:45:00] this populism stuff work at all? Because if you look at policy, Trump is antithetical and the Republicans are antithetical to the working class.

That's all true, right? I think it's still fundamentally true. I think Michael Moore really got it right in 2016 in his description of Trump is a human Molotov cocktail. That a lot of people who feel left behind by an economic system in a political system that's been rigged for the few against the many, they feel that they can, they can throw that human Molotov cocktail into that system.

And when then Democrats are campaigning on defend democracy. It sounds like defend the status quo. Yes. Yes. And, and, and that every time the Democrats do something good, which honestly Biden did a lot of really good things like Biden broke from neoliberalism in very important ways. Right. But every time vocal Democrats try to fight it and defeat it or, and it, it creates this muddled message problem where.

People don't know [01:46:00] away from it. 

FRANCESCA FIORENTINI - HOST, THE BITCHUATION ROOM: He doesn't plant his flag on the, on the victories that he did have, or he doesn't, when he's, you know, blocked from, you know, sweeping student loan debt relief, like he doesn't, you know, blame these whatever activist judges or like these, you know, astroturfed organizations and, and, and court cases that are trying to undo it all.

Like, and again, and I think we've talked about this before. Many people have talked about it and not being able to squarely say, It is corporate greed that is, you know, causing all of us to suffer and that needs to be reigned. And I'm not afraid of naming that. And of course, Kamala Harris cozying up to things like even the crypto industry, um, and having sort of like the opportunity economy, which is so like if, if Biden was a break from neoliberalism, nothing sounds more neoliberal than saying opportunity economy in my book.

Um, yeah. 

JONATHAN SMUCKER: And I mean, the, the problem of inflation is huge right now. I mean, you talk to, this is in the piece too. My dad's just [01:47:00] talking about like all the people he knows who are struggling to pay their rent and. You know, what Biden and Kamala and the Democrats had to do was to articulate that crisis.

Like have it be less about just the, the, the price of eggs and milk and more about these fundamental costs of childcare and housing and education, um, that have, have taken people to the brink that then when the price of groceries goes up on top of that, right. People are past that point and and and and not just articulate the crisis in a way that resonates with people But name the culprits name the price gouging name the developers and the landlords and the the The thing is she did, 

FRANCESCA FIORENTINI - HOST, THE BITCHUATION ROOM: Jonathan.

Like that's the thing is she totally did. The problem is, and I think this is like the sad truth, is that we didn't really believe her. Like, I don't think [01:48:00] that people, I mean, there's many, many factors that it was the Democrats to lose. There's many factors. Biden should have gotten out, gotten out of the race way earlier, but she talked about housing.

She talked about corporate price gouging. She talked about the cost of She talked about All of these things. But we didn't believe, I think the majority of people did not believe her because again, without kind of a broad vision, without a fighting spirit, without a, the reason we don't have these things is because we keep on doing like, you know, we keep on giving subsidies to these same corporations that I'm allegedly trying to go after that.

We're like, there's no seriousness there. And then you add, obviously, you know, the Gaza, you know, Ridiculousness in terms of not listening to the bass, but yeah. 

JONATHAN SMUCKER: And parading around the country with Liz Cheney and 

FRANCESCA FIORENTINI - HOST, THE BITCHUATION ROOM: 100%. I want to ask you really specifically on the trans stuff and the cultural stuff that I think you're right to say are getting conflated because they're such easy distractions that the right is using.

What do you think? What do you think is [01:49:00] the method to combat that? Do you think you, as I think Kamala Harris did, sort of like tried to not talk about the issues and sort of come with her own message, or do you think you talk about it head on and put it in a framework that can neutralize some of the bite of these so called cultural issues?

What do 

JONATHAN SMUCKER: you think? First of all, you know, some of this, the, the stuff that, that's gone around with, you know, Matt Iglesias and the Pod Save people and, uh, whoever else have kind of like thinking that the Democratic Party has gone too woke. It's absolute bullshit, right? Like one, like there are social movements raising issues.

Um, you know, the, the, the, the article that kind of kicked this off, uh, You know, in name, Sunrise Movement and Working Families Party. These are organizations that have pressured the Democratic Party to take popular positions on things like a Green New Deal, massive economic, um, uh, investment, uh, reigning in [01:50:00] Wall Street, getting corporate money out of, out of politics.

Like these are popular positions and those organizations in particular, Sunrise Movement and Working Families Party, have only pushed The Democratic Party to take on popular economic positions, right? So this piece, we just have to like put this to bed. This is bullshit. The Democratic Party tacked right on these issues.

They didn't listen to a lot of these groups. I mean, especially on immigration and on Gaza on foreign policy. Right. Um, and you know, the, the, the second thing is, you know, the Democratic Party is a broad coalition made up of a lot of groups that have particular grievances based on their identity as people of color, particular, you know, black people, Latino people, um, LGBTQ people, right?

And they join into this coalition because they have a set of issues that are very important to them. And it's not a winning strategy to say, Hey, come to the table, but shut up about the thing you [01:51:00] care the most about. That's not going to get us anywhere, right? That's, that's a politician problem to figure out how you are going to fight for the issues that are important to members of your coalition in a way that is popular, right?

It's not on the social movement groups and the outsider organizations to make it palatable electorally to you. That's on the Democratic Party, right? But they're not going to get somewhere by just throwing groups under the bus.

SECTION C - MOVING FORWARD

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally Section C- Moving forward.

Trump’s Gilded Cabinet - The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich - Air Date 12-7-24

MICHAEL LAHANAS-CALDERÓN: Trump, the individual used the simplest, biggest messages and behind him is the very specific evil policy wonks of Project 2025, going straight down the list of every agency they want to cut, and every government employee they want to harass. 

ROBERT REICH - HOST, THE COFFEE KLATCH: But the point is that Trump campaigned as a strong man. And the unstated premise, and sometimes stated premise, was I will do it. I am tough. I'm a thug. I will break through everything else and I will do it and I'll do it on your behalf. That's what his [01:52:00] message was. It was very simple. 

HEATHER LOFTHOUSE: Also, I feel like if you do polling from people after this whole thing and you say, what do, people have probably done this, but what does Trump, what did Trump stand for? What did Kamala stand for? I mean, this is overly reductionist, but in three words, it would be interesting to see if there was more variation, I would think, on the Kamala side. I mean, to your point about we want to know, we want to feel it exactly. We want to feel that you are pushing things, that you have our backs, and it felt like it almost was piecemeal without a unifying thread somehow. 

ROBERT REICH - HOST, THE COFFEE KLATCH: Well and in fairness, she only had three months.

HEATHER LOFTHOUSE: I know and she was fabulous I'm, just thinking here we are on the... 

ROBERT REICH - HOST, THE COFFEE KLATCH: I think on the debate stage she was the best that I've ever seen. But I think you're pointing out something that is really important Heather and that is that Kamala Harris never said the word inequality. I mean, she never talked about corruption. She never talked about the influence of big money in politics. She never talked about the themes [01:53:00] that really are underlying the dysfunction of our entire system. The themes that get people to, not celebrate the death of a CEO of a healthcare, but at least, not ridicule a healthcare system.

And United Health, and bring out the anger that people have. Trump responded to that anger. She did not. 

MICHAEL LAHANAS-CALDERÓN: Well, I have a question to pose to the both of you then. Because I think this is a question I hear a lot among my peers. Regardless of whether or not Ben Wickler gets 448 DNC delegates who are nameless individuals, party elites that, to the best of my knowledge, I don't really know.

ROBERT REICH - HOST, THE COFFEE KLATCH: By the way 448, just so we're clear.

MICHAEL LAHANAS-CALDERÓN: Oh, 448. Thank you.

ROBERT REICH - HOST, THE COFFEE KLATCH: That's the number of people who are voting... 

HEATHER LOFTHOUSE: On the committee. 

ROBERT REICH - HOST, THE COFFEE KLATCH: February 1st. That's a fairly tiny number of people. Yeah. Okay. I'm sorry. 

MICHAEL LAHANAS-CALDERÓN: Forgive my cynicism in bringing up that number. I think it was, as someone who's not involved deeply in Democratic Party leadership race knowledge, it was kind of surprising [01:54:00] to me. I mean all of this talk you were just saying a minute ago, about how there are no mass membership clubs and no direct involvement with the members, I think that, getting back to my point, this is why so many people feel disconnected, right? Even for us to say Ben Wickler would be a phenomenal candidate to run the DNC, and he would be, I don't know what the mechanism is directly for me to influence that. 

ROBERT REICH - HOST, THE COFFEE KLATCH: And contrast this with the MAGA, the hats and the buttons. And the membership I mean, this is a membership organization. People love to talk about it. It's I'm a MAGA. What do they say with Democrats? Nobody says I'm a Democrat. 

HEATHER LOFTHOUSE: No, they say *whispers* "I'm a Democrat."

ROBERT REICH - HOST, THE COFFEE KLATCH: They say *whispers unintelligibly*

MICHAEL LAHANAS-CALDERÓN: Exactly. But that brings me to the question then, is the Democratic Party still the way forward? I'm not saying I have a strong opinion on that necessarily at this point, but I think that it's a question I hear a lot of my friends ask me. They feel let down, or they feel disappointed, or they're not sure that the Democrats are going to stand up to Trump in this [01:55:00] next administration, even in the way that they did in the first one.

ROBERT REICH - HOST, THE COFFEE KLATCH: Suppose AOC tomorrow was going to say, "Okay, I'm going to start a new party of young people who are progressives, a young progressive party." And here she lists access to housing, and access to college, cheaper access to college. 

HEATHER LOFTHOUSE: Healthcare.

ROBERT REICH - HOST, THE COFFEE KLATCH: And healthcare.

HEATHER LOFTHOUSE: Student debt out. 

ROBERT REICH - HOST, THE COFFEE KLATCH: Student debt. So, what then? Would your friends be excited? 

MICHAEL LAHANAS-CALDERÓN: I think they would be excited to hear somebody who is expressing interest in their, what they're interested in, and what they want, right? And I think that having members on the periphery of the democratic leadership, historically, saying those sorts of things has never felt fully satisfying. And it feels like there's always half measures or attempts to introduce it and say, well, no, well, we can't go too far. You know, we can't, let's not get crazy. We're not going to advocate for it. 

ROBERT REICH - HOST, THE COFFEE KLATCH: Listen, Bernie Sanders in 2016. Now you were not yet born, but in 2016, Bernie Sanders did run for president and he had a very elaborate [01:56:00] and cogent and coherent and powerful platform. And the Democratic National Committee cut him off at the knees. 

HEATHER LOFTHOUSE: Yeah. And what about the people who say that's too, we, the stakes are so high. That's too radical. That's too, we have to be careful. Let's just make smaller steps. Let's do a little of those things that you mentioned, Michael, because they are important, but let's stay where we are. Let's not ruffle too many feathers. 

ROBERT REICH - HOST, THE COFFEE KLATCH: Well, the problem is you sound like you by not ruffling feathers and by being so careful, you are protecting the status quo. You are the establishment, and we, this, the most powerful movement in American politics today is anti-establishment anger at a system that seems rigged against average working people. I mean, that's it.

Reconfiguring the Democratic Party - Woke AF Daily - Air Date 12-4-24

DANIELLE MOODIE - HOST, WOKE AF DAILY: Here's what Democrats are really good at and what they're doing right now which is just a ton of finger pointing a ton of finger pointing a ton of complaining and Just doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result. [01:57:00] Donald trump and maga Upended the political norms 10 years ago and we're still grappling with like what that means and understanding what that means as we're getting ready to go now into a new wave that is now going to finish the job that began in 2017 to decimate our institutions to decimate credibility and in that time span.

It's as if Democrats, not even as if, they haven't learned anything. And so, while people are still saying, Oh, well, Kamala Harris sounded like an institutionalist, Is that because she was coherent? Is that because she showed that she understood how government works? And what people want right now is just to break things?

I guess that's what I'm trying to understand. Because if you're talking about, This vibe check of somebody ushering in joy and truth versus somebody that says, I'm going to break everything and I'm going to make people pay for it. And that [01:58:00] being what resonated. I don't know how, how you would ever combat that because again, we're trying to operate in a place of fact and information and Donald Trump is not, 

DR. JONATHAN METZL: I was on a panel for NPR right before the election and it was with um, Rachel Bitkafer who was saying, we're wasting all our money on positive ads.

We should just be doing negative ads all the time because that's the only way to combat this. And I, I've thought a lot about this. I mean, you know, that's what you do when you lose, when you lose you. Figure out, you know, what the hell, how can we not lose again? Uh, and I, and it's true, we are quite good at that, but also I do think that there's a post mortem that is important right now, right?

I mean, there are different, they're just decisions that we have to make now about how to go forward. And so I don't think finger pointing is, I mean, I wouldn't call it finger pointing. I think that there's a post mortem that needs to happen that is instructive about, I want to know where we went wrong.

And so. I don't know. I mean, [01:59:00] I guess you're right. Like, should we have hired? Should we have just put up somebody? I mean, it's all relative. We lost. So you tell me, how do we go forward? 

DANIELLE MOODIE - HOST, WOKE AF DAILY: I mean, I guess my question is like, well, one, I don't think that we're being honest. I don't think that Democrats are being honest.

And I don't think that there is. Again, I think that you need to look at quote unquote failure in a different way. Donald Trump did not receive a mandate. He did not win overwhelmingly. You're talking about like a percentage point. You're talking about a handful of votes, literally in a handful of states.

And so when you're competing with somebody that is telling you that these people are to blame for your ills. And I'm saying. No, they're not. It's actually the rich, but that's not the message that Kamala Harris had. Her message was, we're going to reach across the aisle. I'm going to put a Republican in my cabinet, but here are the ways in which for black men, for Latino men, I can make life better and offer up these different [02:00:00] opportunities.

I think that people wanted a quick fix. And even if that quick fix is a lie. That's what they went for, and I wonder, though, in hindsight, if Kamala Harris had just hammered home an economic message. Which was that the Biden administration didn't have anything to defend. We have the best economy. You just saw, of course, after the election, lowest Thanksgiving prices, lowest cost for dinner, like jobs have returned, all of these things.

If you had focused solely on that. On a progressive populist message as opposed to linking arms with Republicans that to me is the only thing the message that should have been hammered over and over and over again, and that wasn't and there was still this push to what no longer exists as the center, which kind of made in some ways Kamala Harris seemed like Republican liked.

DR. JONATHAN METZL: Yeah, again, you know, it's just, [02:01:00] I mean, I guess the question now is in response to the Democrats, Go farther left or do they go toward the center? I mean, this is 

DANIELLE MOODIE - HOST, WOKE AF DAILY: there is no center So that like that's my argument now is that like that is a false question to ask because the center doesn't exist So you either continue to follow the extremists over a cliff or you retain?

And reimagine what it is that the progressive base actually wants 

DR. JONATHAN METZL: I was reading an interesting article this morning that asked, you know, would higher turnout have helped Kamala Harris? Was this a question of turnout? And it's just funny because it mirrored something that I've been thinking, which is, it just really felt like Republicans were playing by different rules than we were for this election.

And so, there's something about like, Winning hearts and minds they were doing something else. I don't know what it was. But yeah, I mean, I hope you're right I'm not gonna I'm not gonna push back except to say that I hope you're right. I hope we get a chance to fix this [02:02:00] I hope there's still a system in which we can fix this.

Let's see how that plays out 

DANIELLE MOODIE - HOST, WOKE AF DAILY: I guess the fact is is that it isn't going to play out because I have said for the longest time and I hope to be wrong that I don't think that we actually get another bite at the apple here everyone wants to hold their breath and believe that there's going to be an opportunity in midterms I'm going to disagree with that statement I don't think that there's going to be an opportunity with midterms because I don't think that we're having them and so that being said.

If you have an entire now fascist MAGA movement that has no guardrails, that is completely unleashed, the response to that can't be centrist thinking. And I'm wondering in your mind what it takes then for Democrats to realize that they once again have been chasing the wrong dragon. I 

DR. JONATHAN METZL: mean, again, the rules of everything because of all the dismantling that's about to happen, the rules.

Are going to be totally different. And [02:03:00] so I do worry that we have a lot of institutionalists who are still running the party. And I think what we need right now is outside the box people in a way. And so I don't know, because I don't know there's some plan. I mean, when you have somebody at the head of the department of education and the FBI and every other organization, who's In place to basically destroy that organization as it's been known and remake it the rules are just going to be Totally different.

And so I guess I hope we have people who are nimble and forceful and bare knuckles enough to combat that. I just think that the rules are different and we have to, there's something very responsive about it. So I'm not, I'm not avoiding that question. It's just, we're about to create a new reality here. I mean, I feel it most deeply with health, for example.

I mean, that's kind of where I'm consumed right now, because dismantling All the health infrastructure that Kennedy and those guys are going to do is going to be [02:04:00] catastrophic, and it's going to create new realities. And so to then say, we just need to build things back the way they were is not going to work.

Democrats shuffle leadership in prep for Trump fight; Raskin takes mantle of democratic lodestar - Alex Wagner Tonight - Air Date 12-6-24

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Generational politics is obviously always present in Congress and in the country, but I think what's really happening is that the Democrats, uh, feel that we are in the fight of our lives and we want to deploy and redeploy people to different. positions to get ready for the fight to defend our democracy, our freedom and our constitution.

And I think that's really what's going on right now. 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Is everybody on board with this sort of changing of the guard? If you will. I know that leader Hakeem Jeffries says only the caucus is working its will and we're doing it in a cordial fashion. Now I will say, I know that's supposed to be a non position, but not doing anything about, you know, changing leadership roles is, it's not.

A position in and of itself.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Yeah, well, I think it's true that it's cordial, but it's, um, it's democratic with a small d. That is, it's all based on conversation [02:05:00] and dialogue. I've had hundreds of conversations with my colleagues about how best to arrange ourselves for the coming fight. I mean, you've probably noticed, Alex, that there is a, a robust Republican trifecta right now.

The margin in the House is razor thin and the thinnest it's been in like a century, but they still have a tiny majority. And we need to figure out the best strategies to either pull over moderate Republicans in districts that Biden won or Harris won. Um, to side with us on issues like gun safety and women's right to choose.

Um, and we certainly need to be messaging a lot more effectively to America about what it is we're standing for and what we're fighting for. Um, and so that means we need to be messaging more effectively, uh, to your audience and then even beyond the MSNBC audience to the rest of America and some people who are watching Fox News right now.

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Can I ask, um, you know, [02:06:00] because the news today is that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is throwing her hat in the ring for the, uh, ranking seat on the, or, sorry, the Democratic, uh, top Democratic seat on the Oversight Committee. Do you think she would be a good choice? 

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Um, I think she'd be an excellent choice. Um, I think, um, think that, uh, you know, our colleague from Virginia, Jerry Conley, would be an excellent choice, and they offer, uh, different strengths, um, and, uh, you know, different visions, but they've worked closely together, and we've all worked closely together as a team.

Um, AOC, of course, has been my vice ranking member, so she's very familiar with my style. Uh, Jerry Connolly has been on the committee for a lot longer, and he's familiar with the history and evolution of the committee. So we're gonna have a really interesting conversation about what we want to happen on the oversight committee, both in minority and when we take the Congress back in 2026, what we're gonna do.

with the Oversight Committee to make sure that the government is an instrument for the people and not a plaything for [02:07:00] billionaires. I think we already have a record number of billionaires who have been nominated or assigned by Donald Trump to his new cabinet. Uh, there's a name for that and it's called oligarchy or plutocracy.

It's government for the wealthiest and not for the working people, and I know that was their big pose during the campaign, but America is in for a cold shower here when we see who's really benefiting from the government they're putting into place. 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: Yeah, I think if you take even non Senate confirmed positions in the Trump administration, it's the net worth is like 340 billion to, to your point.

But I do want to go back to something that you said about what this moment demands. And you mentioned, you know, Democrats need to talk to and appeal to people who aren't just watching. our fabulous channel, but are also watching other networks like Fox. And when you think of someone like, for example, AOC, who is an incredible voice in the democratic party and who has, I should note, worked in a bipartisan fashion across the aisle on some key [02:08:00] initiatives.

She's worked even hand in hand with Matt Gaetz, not exactly known as, um, uh, uh, uh, liberal squish. But the impression is that she is, you know, liberal firebrand. And in the context of appealing to more people from across the aisle, you know, does that hurt the broader effort to, you know, widen the aperture, if you will, if you have someone like her sitting atop one of the most powerful committees in Congress?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Yeah. I mean, I think tough questions like that are going to be asked during this process. And I know they were asked, you know, in, in my, um, campaign for the Judiciary Committee position, um, uh, which still continues. We've got several more days before the actual election takes place. Um, and you know, we have to have those kind of hard soul searching, um, soliloquies and meditations as we go through this.

And I think Do you want to have one right now on air? 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: And tell me what you think. [02:09:00]

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Well, you know, the AOC who's in her third term as a representative is very different from the AOC who first entered. Inevitably, you become like that when you're a member of Congress and you've got to deal with the people.

the right-wing Republicans and conservative Republicans and liberal members of your caucus and conservative members of your caucus and a hierarchy and so on. And I'm sure, you know, Jerry Connolly, our other candidate, is a very changed, uh, candidate from when he first began on the Oversight Committee.

And he's somebody who was in a swing district and is now in a very blue district. So, uh, Um, these things change, but I do think that the times call upon us to be able to figure out how to expand the Democratic Party and to make us really the party of democracy because after all, that's what we are. The GOP does not even claim to be standing for democracy anymore.

They are arranged on quasi monarchical principles, and uh, their leader is surrounded by a [02:10:00] bunch oligarchs. That's a very different form of government than what we've got here. And I agree it's more difficult on our side because we really are a party based on pluralism and diversity. We bring in people all across the racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, geographic spectrum, and so on.

And we are traditionally the party of the working class, the middle class, um, in America. So, uh, we got to put, uh, uh, A lot of different elements together to deal in this new environment, which is complicated by really segmented and decentralized media systems. 

ALEX WAGNER - HOST, ALEX WAGNER TONIGHT: You know, President, former President Obama talked, I think quite eloquently about the work ahead, that it's not just for the woke, but for the waking, that this is about a generational effort to begin to trust each other again.

BREAKING: HUGE announcement about Democrats' future - Brian Tyler Cohen - Air Date 12-1-24

BRIAN TYLER COHEN - HOST, BRIAN TYLER COHEN: Ben, what would you change about the way that the DNC is currently run? 

BEN WIKLER: I am really grateful for the extraordinary folks who work at the DNC for Chair Jamie [02:11:00] Harrison. I also think we need more. We need a bigger operation. It'll take more resources to do it, and we're going to need, uh, Those folks all over the country to chip in, to become monthly donors, to support that effort.

And we need more people power because I think the opportunity is for the Democratic National Committee to partner with all the states, to build the kind of plan that we've been executing in Wisconsin and that you've seen in some places in states around the country. We need to do that everywhere to think through not just how we.

Get ready for the midterms and the, and the, and the presidential race in 2028. But to look at things like Supreme court races, if we had, uh, had not lost the Supreme court majority in North Carolina a few years ago, then Republicans wouldn't have been able to gerrymander that state. That cost us three.

Democratic house seats, and we would have had a majority in the U. S. House right now. If it weren't for state Supreme Court losses in North Carolina years ago, I think we need to be winning those kinds of fights. And so I think the big shift is to help to grow the Democratic National Committee's capacity and focus to [02:12:00] be able to engage in planning it for the long term.

In these races that are far from the national spotlight with all of the states so that we can build and fight up and down the ballot in every kind of community in every kind of county in the way that we've been doing in Wisconsin and can do nationwide. 

BRIAN TYLER COHEN - HOST, BRIAN TYLER COHEN: Now you'd mentioned fundraising and I know that this has been a bit of a pressure point here with with Democrats across the country.

So what do you do about the fundraising situation? Because I know a lot of people watching this are tired of the request. They feel that the requests are relentless. Um, and it makes us feel like Pawns in some big money up money making operation where they basically just exist to squeeze every dime out of us until we're no longer Able to give any money and then the relationship turns sour so it's not not exactly a you know What I would consider a healthy relationship here that said I understand that all of this costs money Especially when the other side has someone like Elon Musk who's willing to just write a blank check.

So, how do you reconcile this? 

BEN WIKLER: So I think the beginning of successful fundraising [02:13:00] relationships, both for the people chipping in a few bucks a month and for the folks who then spend that money is trust and respect that that affects how you communicate about what is happening. I think having transparency and having honesty about what you're actually raising funds to do, being able to report back to people about how their funds were used and the kind of effect it had if you fall short.

Talking through what you do differently. And if, if you succeed actually analyzing what things worked, spending money as efficiently as you can. So I think if you run an efficient operation, it is actually possible to make it bigger because people like to, to donate, if they feel like their money is actually being put to good use to have a real effect and that is what we do.

I think the feeling of exhaustion and being hammered and being, you know, pulled apart. It comes from getting a relentless flood of messages, all which are kind of hair on fire and, you know, the polar coaster and, and give people a sense that maybe it's, maybe it's all BS. Maybe it's not real. If you, if you started from a position of, We're on this journey together, and, uh, we need your time as volunteers.

We [02:14:00] need funds to be able to, to hire folks so we can better use your time as volunteers. You know, here are the, here are the fights that we're engaging in. Here's the result of those fights. My experience in Wisconsin, we've raised more money than any other state party in the Democratic, uh, side over the last, uh, Uh, from folks who have been here for the last six years, as far as we've been able to calculate.

Uh, but we hear a lot from donors after elections that they feel really good about having contributed to the work, because they can see the effect that it had and they're hungry for the next fight right now. We have a state Supreme court race in Wisconsin in the spring of 2025. We're, it is urgent that we have the resources to fight there because that will affect the future of the U S house majority.

Wisconsin state led us through the majorities, reproductive freedom, workers rights, public education in our state. It's a big high stakes fight and we're up front about all that and asking people to support it. That's the kind of thing that I, you know, we absolutely, I want to ask folks for support of the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.

And I think we bring that same lens to the national party's fundraising. And I think the DNC should work with ActBlue, with our, with our, uh, partner campaigns and candidate committees to, to, uh, Really rethink [02:15:00] how we do democratic fundraising in general to try to, uh, to, to make a better experience for folks that are investing because people tend to want to do more of things that feel good when they do them.

And it should be a great experience to, to contribute to Democrats to fight for our shared values. 

BRIAN TYLER COHEN - HOST, BRIAN TYLER COHEN: There, there does seem to be something of an issue where there are certain races because they might be higher profile, might be sexier, um, that, that garner a lot of money. And they might be completely unwinnable.

I mean, if you look at, if you look at the amount of money, for example, that went to Amy McGrath, the amount of money that went to Marjorie Taylor Greene's opponent, if some of that money went to other campaigns, other candidates who are running across the country who could have really used it and whose races were Clearly, objectively, much more winnable than going up against Mitch McConnell in Kentucky or Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia.

Um, it, it, how do you view that and is there anything that, that you would look to do as DNC chair that might rectify some of those kind of inequities? 

BEN WIKLER: So, donors [02:16:00] give for lots of different reasons. Sometimes they give to throw up a middle finger to someone that they just absolutely loathe, even if it's going to be tough to defeat them in the, in the election and I get that.

I think that the job of the Democratic National Committee Chair, and, uh, for, for folks in leadership positions in state parties across the country, a key part of the job will be to make what's important, compelling. To make what's effective, also viral. And sometimes that's a cultural strategy, sometimes that's a communication strategy.

But to me, you know, communicating here's, here's what we're going to try to do to win. Here's why this race, here's why this fight, here's why this new approach to data, whatever the thing might be, here's why it's absolutely essential to the things that you and I both care about that can help to, to bring attention to things that, that need to grow.

And I think we've been able to do that really effectively in Wisconsin. We've been able, because of that, to invest, for example, in the state legislative races in this election cycle. Uh, we were able to, to raise and support state legislative candidates with 20 million. And that has put us on track to potentially win majorities in both legislative chambers in [02:17:00] 2026.

Uh, Republicans. I went from a, an 11 seat majority to just having two more seats, uh, that, that Democrats need to win to be able to win a majority in that chamber. Um, and in the state assembly, they had 15 seat edge. Now they only have five. That kind of work in races that, you know, are not the thing that people wake up and open their favorite, uh, you know, uh, uh, micro blogging app, whatever blue sky and Twitter and threads are this month, these days, uh, they might not be the things they think about first, but I do think that.

If we, if we can bring the focus of our movement to the things that, that really make a difference and people throw everything they can at them, and then we win, then we have a shared sense that we did something important together, and that gets people fired up for the next fight. What brings disillusionment is when people feel like, What they did didn't count, or they feel like they did it on false premises and they were, they were focusing their attention and their work and their effort and their hard earned money on things that actually made no difference at all.

That, that is incredibly frustrating. But when you feel like [02:18:00] you're a part of something that, that actually made a difference about the things you care the most about, then it becomes something that you, you want to make a part of your life for years to come.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. 

The additional sections of the show included clips from The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, Garrison Hayes, Stay Tuned with Preet, Pod Save America, BBC News, The Majority Report, The Bitchuation Room, The Coffee Klatch, Woke AF Daily, Alex Wagner Tonight, and Brian Taylor Cohen. Further details are in the show notes. 

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet, Ken Brian, Ben, and Lara for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. [02:19:00] Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. 

And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at BestOfTheLeft.com/support or through our Patreon page. Hurry while memberships are on discount through the end of the year. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with the link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on any and all new social media platforms that you may be joining these days during the Xodus. 

So coming to from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay!, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.com.

Air Date 12/13/2024

Full Notes Page

Download PDF

Audio-Synced Transcript

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast. The most important thing to understand about authoritarian and dictatorial governance, is that it is neither efficient nor competent, contrary to the myth. The problem lies with the need to hire people based on their unquestioning loyalty, rather than any kind of demonstrated ability to do the jobs they're tasked with. The results are, unsurprisingly, chaos. For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top takes and about 50 minutes today includes The Thom Hartmann Program, The Dig, The Muckrake Political Podcast, The Brian Lehrer Show, No Lie with Brian Taylor Cohen, Americast, The Aspen Institute and Farron Balanced. Then in the additional deeper-dives half of the show there'll be more in four sections: Section A- The Lineup, Section B- The Playbook, Section C- Global References, and Section D- Cracks [00:01:00] in Authority.

Fight Trump With Everything You Have! Shocking Warning From Hungarian Democracy Movement - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 11-25-24

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: This is a former Hungarian minister of, member of parliament, excuse me. His name is Gabor Shearing and he notes, he wrote an essay for Politico. And he says "There are numerous similarities between Orban and Trump." You know, both are former presidents who lost elections and then returned to power. And then both are strident culture warriors. And he says Orban deployed both the hardware and the software of autocracy or authoritarianism or oligarchy. The software is, Orban portraying himself, even though, arguably he was a member of the intellectual elite (George Soros paid for him to go to college in England), but he portrays himself as a folksy outsider who is a populist hero of the working class. And the same. They also share an intense platform. Orban has said that immigrants are polluting the blood of Hungarians. [00:02:00] Trump says they're poisoning the blood of Americans.

Just pure, unadulterated racism. And Orban and Trump, they are demonizing immigrants as a way, he says, of dividing and conquering the working class. And this has certainly worked well for Trump. Another crucial piece of that software is something he calls economic nationalism that combines greed with the real, very real frustration that people have had after 40 years of neoliberalism has chipped away at the middle class in Hungary as well as the United States.

Sharing the former Hungarian member of parliament says "Right wing populists glorify makers over takers," which he said resonates with working class voters who value hard work. So, even the plutocrats in Hungary, just like the billionaires, I mean, Trump now has five billionaires and two people worth, seven, eight, nine hundred million dollars in his cabinet.

If you're, or as his advisors, I mean, if you're including Elon [00:03:00] Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. He says they're all, in Hungary, these billionaires, they're all portrayed as hard working value creators as opposed to lazy bureaucrats or benefit scroungers. He said that, now that's all the software of autocracy.

He said the hardware of the far right authoritarian state that Victor Orban has built in Hungary is fourfold. Number one, strengthening executive power. Orban, since he was re elected in 2010, after being out of power for a couple of years, he immediately began consolidating all of the power of the state within the office of the prime minister.

And this is what Trump has declared he's going to do starting on January 20th. Orban has gotten the judiciary under his control. He has appointed enough, authoritarian, right wing, hard right, you know, billionaire loving, fluffing judges that he basically controls the judiciary.

There's no meaningful opposition to him at the level of law. [00:04:00] And, you know, Trump is looking forward to the same, and the Supreme Court has kind of advanced telegraphed that , they're down with that, they're up for that, they're ready to go. He has changed election processes. Victor Orban, he has basically done what we call gerrymandering, only at a federal level.

Making it very, very difficult for him ever not to be reelected. He's started an American style voter registration system, he can get purged from the voting, I mean just, he's basically taking control of the election process. And he's also controlled the media. He, he has changed the libel laws so that he can sue individual writers and newspapers and magazines and newspapers, excuse me, and television stations and radio stations.

And then did so, ran them into bankruptcy, had his billionaire buddies buy them out. And now all of the media, for all practical purposes, all of, certainly all of the mainstream media in Hungary praises Viktor Orbon 24/7. It's like Fox News is the only thing that exists in Hungary. And, this is all, these [00:05:00] are all of the things that Donald Trump has literally talked about doing.

So, what do we do about this? Well, his advice, Shearing's advice to Americans is, fight back at the state and local level. Wage war in the media, and don't back down. Do absolutely everything you can with every tool you have.

MAGA 2.0 w Quinn Slobodian & Wendy Brown - The Dig - Air Date 11-29-24

DANIEL DENVER - HOST, THE DIG: Let's start with the economics where the contradictions of MAGA's politics have been very clearly reproduced in Trump's nominations. First, you have the marquee economic nationalism, these promises of tariffs and trade wars, and that's paired with figures like former U. S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who may or may not return to that role once again. Then you have these various strains of far right libertarianism emerging In particular from Silicon Valley, most evident may be with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's strange new role [00:06:00] at DOGE, the not actual government agency that will be recommending how to make deep, deep cuts in government named after the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. Thirdly, there are these more traditional forms of right wing capital, probably best represented by Trump's picks for Treasury and Commerce, both of which come from Wall Street. Then there's this guy that I was just reading up on, the new appointment to run the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who was a leader of Project 2025, and his thing seems to be destroying the administrative state, and I'm not sure which camp he would belong to, or if he's instead maybe a point of synthesis and connection across the three camps.

There's so many disagreements over monopolies, consumer protections, what to do about the labor market, whether to support American workers or to make the labor market scream, entitlements, whether the government, a sort of chauvinist welfare state has, a principal incentivizing families. 

[00:07:00] Does MAGA economic politics form a cohesive ideology even while it's an internally contradictory one? And if there is a cohesive ideology here, has that ideology taken coherent shape at the level of theory or a self conscious political formula, or does it mostly find its coherency in the individual person of Donald Trump? 

WENDY BROWN: I do think that 'cohesive ideology' is probably not our best friend analytically here, and I think the left probably should give it up. Because we're always looking for it, and it always means we miss really important features of a multi pronged project for remaking the state, and that's how I would understand both the economic and the social project of Project 2025 and Trumpism more generally. I do think, economically, all of these tributaries are projects of remaking the state for capital, from the proposal to [00:08:00] curtail an independent Fed, to building a crypto reserve, to policies toward China, contradictory as you mentioned. The trade and tariff policies can go in several different directions. How to do all of this without inflation. How to cut taxes massively for the wealthy, while funding some new projects for the state, which threaten, I think the figure I saw last was a 13 trillion increase in the debt by the time Trump's legacy is over, which is not four years from now, but maybe a decade from now.

What I do think links them all—and this will be a provocation to Quinn, so this is where I'll conclude—is Melinda Cooper's beautifully titled Extravagance and Austerity, her last book. I don't remember the whole title of the book, but those are the key words: "extravagance" for capital and of capital, and "austerity", obviously, for the people. So, extravagance at the level of deregulation, letting [00:09:00] oil go wide, tax cuts for the wealthy that I've already mentioned, but austerity at the level of education, health care, supportive social services of every kind, from headstart to food stamps. And I think we also need to remember that as wild as Trumponomics promises to be in important ways—and I do think we need to talk about the new OMB head and how much power he's likely to have in building budgets, that's what that office does, it builds the budget for Trump, so we'll maybe talk about that down the road—but as wild as Trumponomics promises to be, it's still supply side economics. Even with crypto and possible crypto reserves, only it's supply side economics with tax cuts, whereas Biden gave us supply side economics with tax credits.

So, there's still some basic trajectories that we can follow here, but I think rather than thinking about it ideologically, we need to [00:10:00] think about the concrete projects of state making and state remaking that Trumponomics is promising that's very different from just imagining the old neoliberal antagonism to the state that is the caricature of neoliberalism that neither Quinn nor I believe in.

A Slew Of A$$hole Nominations...- The Muckrake Political Podcast - Air Date 11-15-24

NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: But, I hate to inform you, Jared, that there might be, again, it's never Trump. He is not smart enough, can't read, doesn't process. But somebody has been going through all the pages of the Constitution.

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: We know who, by the way. It's the think tanks and the institutes that are funded by the people who have put this entire thing forward. 

NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Yeah. So you can picture, like, it's a library and amongst all the stacks and they're like digging, all you see is the one guy, like, the big realization in the movie, 'wait a minute', and he comes running around the hallways and bursts the door open and says, basically, he says, what they're looking for is the Presidential Reorganization Authority. Have you ever heard of this before? 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: I have, unfortunately. And this is one of those moments where [00:11:00] the things that I have as specialized knowledge, things that I never thought that I was going to have to really deal with, I anticipated this. I was worried about this. And now here we are. 

NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Yes. This authority actually grants on a temporary basis, quote, unquote, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more. a temporary basis that the president could basically abolish whole departments if he wants to. And it's stunning to me that this actually exists and that they've even used it in the past.

Because this is the way that he can open up—and this is going to influence how we're talking about the nominations as well—but he'll be able to open up a can of whoop ass, I suppose, if we can call it, and just start redlining things and then crossing them out and getting rid of them. 

You know what the ultimate irony of all this is? Do you know who the last president was that used this for a major reorganization of the government? 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: If I am not incorrect, I believe it was Jimmy Carter.

NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: That's not what my information stands for. I'm talking about major... there's [00:12:00] been little tweaks. I think Reagan used it as well, like in '80-something, '83, for some minor tweaks here and there. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: He used it almost like going in and getting a trim instead of a new haircut. 

NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Exactly. Too much red tape. I get it. It makes sense you kinda gotta cut through this stuff, which is sort of what Musk's whole MO tends to be, right? Because he thinks he knows so much better than everybody else, the pesky laws and the things that protect people. He just wants to get rid of. But the last time we saw it, according to my research, a major adjustment using this authority was Dwight D Eisenhower. And you know what he created? He actually didn't abolish. He created departments from this. You know what he did? He created... 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Yeah, I do actually. Yeah, go ahead.

NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Okay. Well, I'll tell you if you want, but he basically, he created, I wrote it down, the health department, the education department, and the welfare department, the big three. The ones that they've been probably trying to tear down this entire time on the Republican side and the MAGA side. So how crazy is it going to be that the last time we've seen [00:13:00] this use was to establish the exact department...

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: ...that will now be destroyed. And it goes back to one of the things we've been talking about for the past few years, Nick, which is the entire point of this project is to roll back the progress of the 20th century. A reminder that Dwight D. Eisenhower, who is a Republican, was operating within the New Deal consensus, which was the idea that the government should invest in the future of America and also take care of people. And now that we are in the neoliberal consensus, you have to get rid of those things. 

So what are we looking at, Nick? We've already said that Elon Musk has said he wants to get rid of 2 trillion dollars. Elon Musk wants to merge with the federal apparatus and basically funnel any type of money that comes through into his own pocket for his own projects and his own enrichment. On top of that, Vivek Ramaswamy, who, need I remind people, is a bloodthirsty psychopath, and him even being near this thing should absolutely turn your blood cold.

And while [00:14:00] we're talking about it, Nick, not only did they find that loophole, but also they're looking at another strategy to go ahead and make Congress go into recess to go ahead and push forward all of the appointments without any consideration of any of these things. On top of that, we've already seen from Ramaswamy a public acknowledgement that he's open to using another couple of loopholes to cut social security. And by the way, I say 'cut', but I mean deal at a fatal blow, is what it is. On top of that, Veterans Affairs and a bunch of other very, very vulnerable programs that most people would have never considered cutting. 

What is Musk going to do in order to make this happen? Is he going to sit there and crunch the numbers? No, he's going to have a bunch of these sycophants go through and figure out what is going to hurt people the most and where they can make these cuts to, again, deal this mortal blow. Musk though, has to make sure that the Republican party, which has been mostly taken over by this authoritarian movement, that those other people are going to play ball.

And so, [00:15:00] Nick, we've already seen the beginnings of the stirrings of how that's going to happen, including where Elon Musk is now threatening to use his own money and his own resources to blackmail any member of the Republican party who would think about standing up to any of this and automatically bringing to bear a primary challenger that will get rid of them and replace them with a sycophant who will play ball.

NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Right. And because it felt like to me, they would just be using the platform that he now has control over on X to embarrass politicians, which again is sort of that blackmail. Like, if you don't want them to find out that you supported this bill that definitely goes against your people's values, then you're going to have to play ball. It is frightening. So there's a lot of influence here. 

Here's the other thing. It's really kind of galling. Like, Musk, he runs space X. He runs X, he runs Tesla, right? I mean, he's not on the board of Tesla [indecipherable]. He needs to have his posting time, [00:16:00] every hour or two, he posts like... 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Not to mention his time getting acquaintanced with all the substances that keep him going. Sure. 

NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Yeah. So, this is ridiculous to think that he's now going to take this on and have any time. Oh, Vivek will help him, I guess, right? Because, two guys have to do this job instead of one. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Model of efficiency.

NICK HAUSELMAN - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: That is also the most ridiculous thing of all. Because again, if you watch how often he posts, he's not working, he's not working for more than like 20 minutes at a time before he's going to stop and start, because he's not even just posting, he's reacting. So clearly he's scrolling. He's not working. He's just looking at Twitter all day long, which is not unlike Trump who would just watch Fox News. I think the reports, and I believe them, were he'd watch Fox News eight or nine hours a day. Isn't that what he would do? And then he'd golf? This is kind of all sorts of crazy stuff because we know that these people don't have the kind of work ethics that would require anywhere near being able to pull any of this stuff off and we're going to realize that there's a lot of nefarious actors behind the scenes here doing [00:17:00] a lot of other bullshit.

And the other weirdest thing is that Dwight D. Eisenhower, not only was He's MAGA. He is the time they want to go back to. That's his time. That's his happy days. And he's the guy, like Nixon who looks like a complete pink Commie liberal now. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Yeah. And, I want to, by the way, you couldn't have nailed that more. That's exactly how this thing is shifted. What you just said is correct, if you were trying to do this in a way that would make anything better. That it would make government actually work. We need to look at everything and that's how we're looking at these appointments. It's not just saying here's the way they want to make the government work better and it will fail.

The point of all of this is this is a planned demolition. It is to finally eradicate representative government as a regulatory body and to turn it into what it's been turning into, which is a redistributing organ to the wealthy and the powerful. What this government efficiency thing is meant to do isn't to trim [00:18:00] fat. It is to deliver advanced hyper austerity. What they are attempting to do is completely evaporate whatever remains of the social safety net, any regulatory power that still resides within the government, and basically put us into a situation where our standard of living craters. Our economy is going to fall apart while this happens, if they're allowed to do all of this.

And what happens in that situation? People get more scared and more desperate. They'll turn more and more towards authoritarianism. And, in the midst of all of this, the United States is going to lessen in terms of power and influence. The entire purpose of this is to free capitalism from the centralization within the United States, and also more or less turn us into a client state the same way. And I want to be on the record about this, Nick. It's the same thing that we've done to countries in the so called second and third world.

What Pete Hegseth Has Said About Civil War and Whiteness - Brian Lehrer: A Daily Politics Podcast - Air Date 11-27-24

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Another one says, would you please at least mention Hegseth's utter lack of qualifications for the role [00:19:00] of Secretary of Defense and the fact that he would need top security clearance for it. What about the experience question, Abigail? 

ABIGAIL HAUSLOHNER: It's interesting that this was something that I think one of the most immediate, concerns that came up when he was named, that I think frankly has just been overshadowed by these other big issues that have come out, such as the sexual assault allegation and the wokeness plans and so on and so forth.

But certainly, Hegseth has no experience, has never run a government agency, has never run any government office that we're aware of, certainly hasn't managed a military that has 3 million, a workforce of about 3 million people worldwide that includes, service members and civilian personnel at the Pentagon, and the biggest budget of any federal agency in the U. S. [00:20:00] government. And so that, that is a huge, huge task that normally is not given to someone who has never run anything, even sort of a fraction of that size and heft. And so, I think lawmakers do have questions about that. That's something that, when his nomination was announced it took a lot of people by surprise.

 I heard Republican senators tell me, one refrain I heard over and over again was, yeah, I don't know anything about him. People really didn't. He wasn't sort of on this presumed short list of people to be potential defense secretaries. He was a Fox News host for, about a decade.

And he was a veteran, he had served abroad, he had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a National Guardsman. But there are many, many veterans and beyond that. 

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: What was his, what was his highest rank [00:21:00] or what he commanded? 

ABIGAIL HAUSLOHNER: You know what, you'll have to give me a second to confirm that, to check back on our reporting.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: I think I read Major and that he was, he really didn't have any kind of command position. He did, I guess, if people want to push back on that lack of experience, they could say he did run a veterans advocacy organization. Maybe you could tell us more about that and how big a thing that is and that he does have kind of big think whether we agree with them or not thoughts about military policy.

He's written multiple books and whether it's about wokeness or women in combat or whatever it is, he's got a real philosophy of how the Pentagon should be run. So, somebody could say, well, they pick people from academia sometimes to run big departments because they've got the ideas. Maybe they pick Pete Hegseth on that basis as well because his ideas align with Trump's ideas. And he ran a veterans [00:22:00] advocacy organization. And they'll find other people to do the implementation. 

ABIGAIL HAUSLOHNER: And that's actually, something that I did hear from some republicans was, we don't know anything about him. It was kind of a surprise, but, he is a decorated combat veteran.

One senator, Mike Rounds, told me, and that gives him credibility. And then I, asked, Rounds at the time, I said, are you at all concerned that Hegseth hasn't run a government office before? And he told me that, there's never going to be a perfect individual.

And he told me that they're going to be for in these hearings, as they get to know him, and Rounds on the armed services committee, I should say that. So they will be doing the initial kind of assessment of Hegseth. He said that they're going to be looking at what his philosophy is and how he would approach the Defense Department, which, what kind of [00:23:00] changes he would try to make, what his management style would be, and that's, something that they are open to, that they could, Rounds sort of indicated, he could potentially have all the right answers to that, even though he has, doesn't have the more traditional experience.

And then I heard other people, sort of farther to the right, actually say that his lack of experience, was a bonus. Because, there, they were sort of citing this idea that part of the reason in conservatives views that the military is too, quote, woke or too, broken in their mind is that, it's run by all these sort of career generals who have lost touch with the rank and file and who are, at their core politicians, these are their allegations, their perceptions. And that they think you need kind of a rogue outsider to really shake things up and fix this big kind of bloated institution and make it more [00:24:00] representative of their views and less kind of, less connected to what they see as liberal politics.

 

Trump goes off the deep end with Cabinet pick - No Lie w Brian Tyler Cohen - Air Date 12-1-24

BRIAN TYLER COHEN - HOST, NO LIE: You know by now that Donald Trump has nominated Kash Patel to lead the FBI. To give you an idea of who Kash Patel is, I'm actually going to defer to Bill Barr's words here from his book. 

"The President then started advancing the idea of appointing Kash Patel as Deputy FBI Director. Patel, who was completing a stint as Deputy to Acting Director of National Intelligence Rick Grenell, had been a staffer to Congressman Devin Nunes and had served briefly on the NSC staff at the White House under Trump. I categorically opposed making Patel Deputy FBI Director. I told Mark Meadows it would happen 'over my dead body'. In the first place, all leadership positions in the Bureau, except the Director, have always been FBI agents. They've all gone through the same agent training and have had broad experience in the field and at headquarters. Someone with no background as an agent would never be able to command the respect necessary to run the day to day operations of the Bureau. Furthermore, Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world's preeminent law enforcement agency. The Bureau had already had an [00:25:00] exceptionally able deputy, Dave Bowdich, in whom I had total confidence. He was a strong leader with high integrity, he was indispensable as far as I was concerned. The very idea of moving Patel into a role like this showed a shocking detachment from reality". 

That was Bill Barr. That was Trump's hand picked Attorney General. The same guy who straight up lied about the Mueller report in an effort to protect Trump from what the report actually said. For that guy to say that Kash Patel should lead the FBI 'over his dead body' probably gives you a decent indication as to why he is so unqualified, so uniquely unqualified, for this position. And if Bill Barr's warnings don't move you, listen to Kash Patel's own words during an interview with Steve Bannon from just before he was nominated FBI director. 

STEVE BANNON: do you feel confident that you will be able to deliver the goods, that we can have serious prosecutions and accountability? And I want the Morning Joe producers that watch us, and all the producers that watch us, this is just not rhetoric. We're absolutely dead serious. We're not, you cannot have a constitutional republic and allow what these [00:26:00] deep staters have done to the country. The deep state, the administrative state, the fourth branch of government never mentioned in the constitution is going to be taken apart brick by brick. And the people that did these evil deeds will be held accountable. and prosecuted, criminal prosecutions. Kash, I know you're probably going to be head of the CIA, but do you believe that you can deliver the goods on this in a pretty short, in a pretty short order the first couple of months so we can get rolling on prosecutions?

KASH PATEL: Yes, we got the bench for it, Bannon, and you know those guys. I'm not going to go out there and say their names right now so the radical left wing media can terrorize them. But [coughs] excuse me, the one thing we learned in the Trump administration the first go around is we got to put in all America patriots top to bottom. And we got them for law enforcement. We got them for intel collection. We got them for offensive operations. We got them for DOD, CIA, everywhere. And the one thing we will do, that they never will do is we will follow the facts and the law and go to courts of law and correct these justices and lawyers who have been prosecuting these cases based on politics and actually issuing them as lawfare. We will [00:27:00] go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're going to come after you, whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out. But yeah, we're putting you all on notice. And Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we're tyrannical. This is why we're dictators. 

BRIAN TYLER COHEN - HOST, NO LIE: That he'll go after the media for the apparent crime of helping Joe Biden rig the presidential election. In other words, this is the guy up for FBI director who is claiming that Joe Biden lost the election in 2020, which is an outright lie and conspiracy theory, and he's willing to criminally prosecute anyone, from lawyers to members of the media, who correctly reported on or litigated in favor of Joe Biden? This is out and out weaponized government. This is what an actual witch hunt looks like. Claiming that Donald Trump won in 2020 and prosecuting those who acknowledge objective reality. 

If this doesn't scare you about Donald Trump's incoming administration, I don't know what will. But what's telling here is that while Donald Trump's picks for certain roles are pretty uncontroversial—Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, [00:28:00] Susie Wiles as Chief of Staff—the roles that he's swinging for the fences on all have a very obvious throughline. Matt Gaetz and then Pam Bondi as Attorney General, Kash Patel at FBI, his personal lawyer Todd Blanche as Deputy Attorney General—it's the positions where he needs a loyalist to be able to wield the government as a cudgel against his enemies where he's swinging for the fences.

That is where he's spending his political capital. Marco Rubio at State goes to show that Trump does not care what happens in that role. What he is focused on is being able to enact his retribution tour. And the way he does that is with the very people who he's nominated to those positions. Not only will there be no pushback from these people, but they're just as eager as him to weaponize the government.

So, look, I've been pretty clear about what we should do as Democrats in terms of resisting this administration. I've been pretty clear that we have limited capital, and that if we treat everything like a five alarm fire, then really nothing feels like a five alarm fire. This is a fire worth focusing on. This is above Pam Bondi, above Tulsi Gabbard, above Pete Hegseth, insofar as we're ranking them, or we only get a bite or two at the apple. If there's anyone [00:29:00] to raise hell over, it is Kash Patel. This should be our focus in a political environment where we still have the ability to drive the narrative if someone is particularly dangerous.

Matt Gaetz's nomination didn't survive confirmation hearings for a reason, likely because he wants to be the governor of Florida, and he knew that the ethics report would eventually come out in his confirmation hearings, and he didn't want that. But let's be clear, it was Democrats who forced the issue, and we should do the same here.

This is also why it's important not to tune out here. if you're anything like me, you're probably exhausted to some degree, and discouraged to some degree, I get it. But this is a moment where it is necessary to pay attention and to sound the alarms. This is why it's so necessary not to check out, because, let's be clear, the Trump White House will be bad, but it would be so much worse if there's nothing moderating Donald Trump's worst impulses.

The Trump Trials... Cases Closed - Americast - Air Date 11-29-24

SARAH SMITH - HOST, AMERICAST: Justin, Marianne, we should probably just run through where we are with Donald Trump's legal cases, because there has been some movement on this in the last few days in fact.

Of course this is related to the fact that he won the election and that does rather change the whole picture, really, of the criminal cases against them. I'll run you through some of them very quickly. 

The [00:30:00] January the sixth case for obstructing Congress and trying to overturn the election results, that's been dropped by the special prosecutor, Jack Smith. He said that the Constitution pretty much stipulates sitting presidents can't be prosecuted, and they've decided that even though he's not the president yet, he's only the president elect, and he had been indicted when he was a private citizen, nonetheless, they think it would be unconstitutional to try and prosecute him for that.

The classified documents case, all those documents he was hiding in the spare toilet in Mar-a-Lago, that's also disappeared. The special prosecutor is abandoning that one too. And of course the judge earlier had actually dismissed that case, but the special prosecutor was appealing that. Well, that's all gone away as well.

JUSTIN WEBB - HOST, AMERICAST: And what's going on in New York? 'Cause that case did actually come to court, didn't it? And he's awaiting sentencing? Is he still awaiting sentencing? What's going on there? 

SARAH SMITH - HOST, AMERICAST: Well, it might be a very, very long wait for sentencing on that one. So that's the hush money case where he was convicted, you're right, on 34 counts of basically erroneous bookkeeping covering up the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.

So sentencing was set for just after the election, and it was postponed indefinitely, [00:31:00] essentially. Legal arguments are going to the judge, beginning of December he said they need to be in by, and Trump's team are saying, well, the whole thing should be set aside. You can't sentence somebody who's going to be serving as the president.

The defense are saying, no, no, no. You could just set it aside for four years and come 2029 when he's finished his presidential term, then you could sentence him. So. The judge will decide either way on that. But what we do know is, not only is he definitely not going to jail now that he's been reelected, he's not even going to receive sentence for that until at the very earliest he's left office.

JUSTIN WEBB - HOST, AMERICAST: And then the one other one-- 

MARIANNE SPRING - HOST, AMERICAST: The Georgia one.

JUSTIN WEBB - HOST, AMERICAST: The Georgia one.

MARIANNE SPRING - HOST, AMERICAST: Which, yeah, when we were, which when we were in-- 

JUSTIN WEBB - HOST, AMERICAST: We were excited by.

MARIANNE SPRING - HOST, AMERICAST: And that we were in Atlanta. And did you actually go into the courthouse? 

JUSTIN WEBB - HOST, AMERICAST: I didn't get to the courthouse, but I did get to sit down with John Eastman. So John Eastman, being the guy who revved up the crowd on January the 6th, and really got them going, Trump lawyer. And he sat down with me in Atlanta. I think you were doing something else that day. 

MARIANNE SPRING - HOST, AMERICAST: That was when I found the taxi driver.

JUSTIN WEBB - HOST, AMERICAST: Yeah, you found the taxi driver. 

MARIANNE SPRING - HOST, AMERICAST: He was convinced by the AI pictures. 

JUSTIN WEBB - HOST, AMERICAST: But he, I said, sat down with Eastman and I said to him, You're going to jail, aren't you? If this if you're convicted, [00:32:00] you're in real trouble. And I still remember, Sarah, he kind of giggled, actually. He was a very amiable guy, one to one, and he just said, Oh, he said, there's a lot of water to go under the bridge till then. 

CLIP: The president's claim is that these are frivolous criminal cases brought against him in order to disrupt the election or interfere with the election.

JUSTIN WEBB - HOST, AMERICAST: If it goes against you though, you're going to jail. 

CLIP: There's a lot of water to go under the bridge before we get to that point. 

JUSTIN WEBB - HOST, AMERICAST: I was really struck, I remember this day, didn't seem, so it was almost as if he knew that he was gonna, it was gonna be fine. But is he fine? And is Trump fine in Georgia? What's the deal?

SARAH SMITH - HOST, AMERICAST: Trump will be fine in Georgia. So that case got halted because there was this scandal over the fact that the prosecutor, Fannie Willis, had been having a romantic relationship with somebody that she had hired to work on that case. And there was a whole legal hearing about that. And that really gummed things up quite a lot. 

JUSTIN WEBB - HOST, AMERICAST: Legal term for that is screw up, isn't it? 

SARAH SMITH - HOST, AMERICAST: Which didn't do her reputation much good and [00:33:00] he got dropped from the case. So that's why it slowed up. Of course, we've still got this idea that you can't try a sitting president. If that's what Jack Smith in the federal cases has decided, that's almost certainly what a judge in Georgia will decide. It's fanciful to imagine that Donald Trump could be prosecuted over that. 

That doesn't mean his co-accused won't be though. In the hush money case, for instance, Jack Smith has dropped the charges against Donald Trump, not against the two other people that were named in that indictment So I think John Eastman maybe should be a little bit worried that that case may yet go forward, just without Donald Trump. And some people in that case took plea deals already. And it was obvious that the prosecutors really, really wanted people to drop Donald Trump in it. Well, if he cannot be tried, I don't know, maybe the value of their evidence against them goes down and it gets a little bit harder to get out of. I'm no lawyer, but that's what I would be worried about if I was an accused there. 

MARIANNE SPRING - HOST, AMERICAST: And Sarah, just to remind Americasters, so Jack Smith is this role of special prosecutor. What does that actually mean? 

SARAH SMITH - HOST, AMERICAST: So the Attorney General, Merrick Garland, who is supposed to be entirely [00:34:00] impartial, he runs the Justice Department, and that really is at arm's length from the White House. But he is appointed by the President, and so he wanted to make sure that this investigation looked as though it wasn't remotely political. So he appointed a special prosecutor, i.e., an independent outside counsel to come in and do the work. And that's been done many, many times before, precisely when the White House wants it to look as though the investigation and the prosecution is entirely independent. So he was brought in specially to do that, both in the January the 6th case and the classified documents case, because they were federal cases.

The Georgia case is slightly different, of course, because that was brought by the Georgia authorities themselves. And the key thing about that is that the president doesn't have pardon powers over state offenses. So if it gets to it, and say his two co-accused in the documents case do go to trial and are either convicted or sentenced or whatever, he can pardon them because it's a federal offense. So they don't have too much to worry about. John Eastman couldn't be pardoned because that's a state offense and the president has no jurisdiction there. 

JUSTIN WEBB - HOST, AMERICAST: Well, that's a really interesting one because [00:35:00] he'd be very cross if Eastman went down, as would Eastman, no doubt, and his family. And he would do something, wouldn't he? It would be quite tempting for him to do something to try to find a way of getting him out, or at least putting him onto some sort of long term appeal curve, I suppose, that kept him out of jail, if that was what he was facing. 

SARAH SMITH - HOST, AMERICAST: And the one thing we do know about this incoming administration is that they are certainly going to be prepared to try novel things. I mean, there's this whole theory that we've discussed before as to whether or not to get his cabinet appointees through. He could just adjourn Congress and put them through as recess appointments, which, might be just technically within the bounds of the Constitution, but it would be unprecedented, certainly not the way things were intended to be done.

I don't think they'll have any shame in just doing anything that they can, whether or not it looks bad or looks as though it's not what the founding fathers would have wanted. So there are probably all sorts of legal strategies that I don't know about that he could use to get his co-accused -- because they're all close allies of him, the people who've also been charged in the Georgia case.

So, look, John Eastman, I'm sure had a reason for looking so pleased. And of course, at the time, he didn't [00:36:00] even know for sure that Donald Trump was going to get reelected, did he? But, but now he has been, it just completely changes the legal landscape, totally across America. 

And so a lot of people are really cross that these cases weren't brought earlier, that as soon as Donald Trump left office, people didn't start working on this. Because then they might have been through the whole court process already. And you wouldn't look at them having to be dropped because he's been re-elected. 

JUSTIN WEBB - HOST, AMERICAST: Isn't that true.

MAGA 2.0 w Quinn Slobodian & Wendy Brown Part 2 - The Dig - Air Date 11-29-24

WENDY BROWN: So, well, you know, everybody's heard of it at this point, who would listen to your podcast, obviously, and nobody's read the 900 pages. Let's make those 2 assumptions. It's been depicted as the equivalent of a Federalist Society project for the American legal and juridical system, the equivalent for the entire political system. And I think that's actually a smart analogy as people may or may not know it was certainly masterminded by Russell Vaught, now the OMB nominee, a very nerdy looking and very nerdy sounding arch Christian Nationalist.

We need all of those adjectives [00:37:00] in play. It, however, was it involved more than a hundred conservative organizations, some very well known, and some that very few of us have heard of, even who pay attention to right wing organizations. Now that Russell Vought is the OMB nominee who will literally build the Trump budgets, what this will allow him to do is what Chris Ruffo so far not appointed to anything, but I assume he'll be some kind of undersecretary in education or somewhere. He'll be presumably at least hanging around the DOE. Chris Ruffo put it really succinctly what the OMB nominee will be able to do vis a vis Project 2025 is, as Chris put it, fund what we like and defund what we don't.

And we're not just talking about programs like Head Start and Medicaid, we're talking about entire agencies and departments. Project 2025 calls for defunding the Department of Justice, the Department of [00:38:00] Education, the FBI, the EPA, or its successor, various other kinds of agencies and organizations, the weather agency that among other things, reveals the effects of climate change.

And it has in it two crucial instruments that I mentioned by which the Trump regime could do an enormous amount with and to the state. The first one we've already all been alluding to it's reclassifying federal career employees as political appointees. Career employees are all those engineers and nurses and doctors, and, they're not just quote unquote bureaucrats.

They're people with a lot of expertise who run all the federal agencies and keep all the things going that we need. So this would literally transform the nature of government work. If 50, 000 of several million career employees could be reclassified as political appointees, what it would allow the [00:39:00] regime to do is fill positions deep in every agency, not just with Trump loyalists, but with people who won't say, "no, we can't do that. It's illegal or it's inconstitutional or it's just poor, poor thinking." And instead to enact a lot of the stuff that otherwise, these relative know-nothings who are nominees for each department secretary, might not be able to pull off.

But if you can get a deep bench in each department of political appointees, this really changes the game. This changes the state. It will also obviously lead to a number of resignations and could foment what we could call a kind of authoritarianism or a kind of chaos. Or, my prediction, a chaotic authoritarianism, a way of doing administrative work that isn't built on much knowledge or evidence or expertise, but has a lot of what we political [00:40:00] theorists call Schmittian decisionism in it, just power. It means on a substantive level, the FDA being run by non medical people, the DOJ being run by people who don't know the law, the DOE by people who don't have a clue about education. And it means illegal and unconstitutional procedures rolled out everywhere.

So that's one crucial thing, one crucial instrument that the Trump administration is likely to revive and it's crucial to mention that it was the Trump administration that came up with this policy late in the first term, then Biden reversed it and Trump will likely reinstate it. So that's one thing.

And then the other instrument I want to mention is the Impoundment Control Act, more nerdiness. This is a 1974 act that responded to Nixon's overreach with the budget, [00:41:00] and it was basically to prevent the executive power from being able to just fund what they wanted to fund and defund what they didn't like.

So here we get back to Ramaswamy and Musk. Because with DOGE, their plan is to use the Supreme Court to challenge that 1974 Act. And if they are successful, which they hope to be by the time we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U. S. on July 4th, 2026, if they're successful, they can, as one GOP er put it, get rid of all this legislative BS to get things done.

Now that's another strong authoritarian move. I am not one prone to the hyperbole of fascism or authoritarianism in talking about our new regime, but I think Project 2025, both it's [00:42:00] design for America, and what it wants to attack and what it wants to build, but also the instruments that it would use are so deeply assaulting the legislative process for legislating policy and funding that policy, and they are so deeply attacking the administrative process for career officials and appointees in favor of political loyalists.

That's where, instead of Trump won, where Trump got to office, didn't expect to be in office, didn't know what to do at the office, and really blew a lot of capital as a result. Project 2025 was to make sure that that wouldn't happen. And I'll sum it up this way and then stop. The first time Trump was elected, there were those in the GOP who said, "Oh, it's okay. He's a clown, but all we need him to do is sign the legislation." What Project 2025 guarantees is that you don't have to [00:43:00] work with legislation. You can just work with executive power. And that project was a really smart one. It's coalitional. It's got instruments. It's got a design. I wouldn't worry so much about a coherent ideology. It's exactly what the left doesn't do. 

Strongmen Mussolini to the Present - The Aspen Institute - Air Date 8-8-24

CAROLYNE HELDMAN: What are the ways that strong men use the business community and, you're alluding to it a little bit right now, the ways in which they leverage that, over promise things, and then when they don't fulfill those, what happens?

DR. RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yeah. So, one of the concepts I work with in the book is the idea of the authoritarian bargain. And a lot of political scientists and economists use this concept. Where it can be when they are coming to power, depends how they're getting to power, and they strike a kind of accord or a deal with elites. It can be religious elites, it can be financial elites, business elites. And they sign on [00:44:00] and they are guaranteed certain privileges or profits. They can cash out if privatization is on the agenda, they can cash out. In return, they give a kind of unconditional support and they put up with increasing corruption and they have to put up with violence, they tolerate violence, they don't speak out about it. 

Once these bargains are made, they're incredibly durable. Now sometimes in a true regime, it's because it's very dangerous to defect. Very dangerous. You get sent to prison or not. But even where that's not the case, these bargains are very durable. Until, often it doesn't end well. 

And so, for the business community, there have been cases where, again -- a lot of, like Pinochet's Chile, there were incredible -- it became a test case for neoliberal economics. So some people cashed out a lot from privatizations. 

But often autocrats -- and this isn't known enough -- they go after businessmen. [00:45:00] They plunder the economy. And we don't hear about that enough. So Erdogan in Turkey, after the coup attempt against him, the business community was one of the biggest targets. And what they do is they seize your assets. They go after your company. Or if you're not being loyal enough, they trump up a kind of, there's something wrong with your tax filing, or there's something wrong with some other aspect, technical aspect, and they go after you, they sue you.

And so business is quite afflicted in regimes, and one of the biggest cases is Putin, who has gone after, if you have a profitable business, Putin will go after you, because that's a kleptocracy, that's an extreme case. 

And so what it does, it's very devastating, because it creates conditions of brain drains, talent drains. So in Erdogan's Turkey, many entrepreneurs have had to go abroad. Certainly in Russia. 

All the qualities that we think in terms of prosperity, that we think about entrepreneurship and leadership, they [00:46:00] backfire because the autocrat demands total loyalty, and sooner or later, if he's plundering the economy because his corruption is draining resources, he will come after you.

And that is a lesson, that is what breaks the authoritarian bargain, when they have to go abroad or they end up in jail. It's very sad. 

CAROLYNE HELDMAN: You mentioned that they perhaps even encourage violence, or at least they don't speak out against it. I would imagine that's because that adds to the sense of crisis.

And so, as that being an opportune moment that "I alone can fix it," or "I'm the one who can save the country." 

DR. RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Yeah, one of the saddest things, I, try and take the big picture and perspective. One of the saddest things is that people sign on, and it's very rare that autocrats become more moderate. I actually don't know of any who've become more moderate. It's something to do with the dysfunctional nature of their power. As they consolidate [00:47:00] power, they become more paranoid. They need more loyalists around them. They X out anybody who's not a sycophant. And this is called, in my book, the inner sanctum. They create an inner sanctum of cronies, of family members, very common. Sons-in-law. I have a whole paragraph about sons-in-law. Because those are people you trust. And you can actually treat them as badly as you want. And they can be in on your corruption in some cases. 

So this leads these leaders over time to start believing in their own propaganda. They make bad decisions. And this often begins their downfall, or it challenges things. And then they have to respond with more propaganda and more repression. 

So, political scientists in particular, they study how these people dose out the loyalty quotients, the propaganda, the repression.

But the end is that authoritarian governance, one of the biggest myths I wanted to debunk, is that it's [00:48:00] efficient. Behind the scenes, it is a chaos. A constant hiring and firing, constant draining of resources from corruption and violence. Repression is very expensive. Constant loss of income and talent from brain drains.

And so, this is what happens when you have this kind of structures of government that autocrats almost inevitably get to. 

Trump Is Assembling The Most Incompetent Cabinet In American History - Farron Balanced - Air Date 11-25-24

FARRON COUSINS - HOST, FARRON BALANCED: I've repeatedly said that the only silver lining to all of the horrible people that Donald Trump has nominated for cabinet positions is that there is a chance that they are all so grossly incompetent and stupid that they aren't actually able to inflict the damage upon this country that they want to inflict. And I stand by that. I genuinely do believe it. And I will get more into that in just a moment. 

But we've got a question here from YouTube user @hikerSTEA9899, who asks, "Thank you, Farron for the opportunity. My question is, will the incompetence of the incoming [00:49:00] admin help us in any way? I feel it can, or is that just wishful thinking?"

It's not wishful thinking. And here's why. We still have, although it's a little rickety at the moment, but we still have a system of checks and balances. Obviously with Trump in the White House, we're not going to get any checks and balances from a Republican-controlled House and a Republican-controlled Senate. So those checks and balances are out of the way. 

Court system, on the other hand, that's a little trickier, because we have seen conservative judges go against Donald Trump. We have seen his own Supreme Court go against Donald Trump. So they've done it before, they could continue to do it, even if he replaces the two most conservative people on the bench, Thomas and Alito, even if he replaces them with loyalists, that doesn't change anything. So it changes the makeup of the court for years to come, but not necessarily how they would rule, when his people or he overstepped their bounds. 

So the court system is that last check. [00:50:00] And here is why that helps us. Even if these courts do not rule in our favor, it still helps us. Here's how that happens.

Let's say you have Department of Interior, Secretary of Energy, whoever it is, they come out and say, "Hey, guess what? I'm opening up every single land to fossil fuel drilling. You want to frack there? You can frack. You want to oil drill? You can drill. That is my new proclamation. Here it is. Get at it." Not so fast. That is actually not how it works. You do have to go through the permitting process. You have to put the lands up for auction. All of these things take time. And if you do not take those steps, then you will be sued. So before anybody can put that first drill into the ground, you're now tied up in court for months, but more likely years.

That's where it is. The delays that the court system can provide us are the only thing that can [00:51:00] save us, right? The rulings themselves don't matter. Because if we can challenge these things in court and drag them out forever or four years, then we might be able to get somebody in the White House who appoints, I don't know, normal people, smart people to these positions in the cabinet who then say, "Oh, we've still got this litigation going. You know what? Go ahead and get rid of it. Because we're canceling those leases. We're canceling this drilling project. We're not going to do this. We're not going to do that. It's over. You win, case dismissed." That's the only hope. And again, that would happen due to the incompetence of the Trump administration trying to do things that they're not technically allowed to do.

If he puts smart people in there, smart but evil, they would figure out a way to nullify those things before they happen. Luckily, these people aren't smart. And I don't mean that to just be insulting and [00:52:00] be like, these are all dumbasses. They're all dumbasses though. Hey, look at them all. You want to point to any one of these people and say, nope, that is an individual that knows what's going on? No. They're all spineless Yes people. Trump is going to have them do things they can't do. They're going to do them, and then they're going to get sued. And then it'll be years before they have any resolution.

That is our only hope. So, let's hope it happens, I guess.

Note from the Editor on why it's important to stay engaged

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with the Thom Hartmann Program, referencing Hungary to warn about our potential future. The Dig analyzed Trump's cabinet picks through the lens of his incoherent economic policies. The Muckrake Political Podcast, discussed the mechanisms by which they'll attempt to abolish various government departments. The Brian Lehrer Show looked at the nomination of Pete Hegseth to head the department of defense. No Lie focused on the nomination of Kash Patel to head the FBI. Americast discussed the impact of the election on Trump's legal cases. The Aspen Institute compared the coming Trump administration [00:53:00] to the historical reference of Italy's Mussolini. And Farron Balanced hoped that a combination of legal roadblocks and administration incompetence wi ll help limit the damage Trump will be able to do. 

And those were just the top takes. There's a lot more in the deeper-dive sections, but first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, o ften making each other laugh in the process. A quick reminder that we have once again, launched our winter sale on memberships, which obviously make a great gift. They're now 20% off until the end of the year. Discounts and gifting are available both on our site and through Patreon as well. So whichever you think is a better fit for yourself or a giftee, act accordingly. All the relevant links are in the show notes, or just go to bestoftheleft.com/support. 

The reality being described in today's episode makes it understandable that many are taking this [00:54:00] opportunity to check out from politics, but hopefully it is just temporary because we really need their help. For independent shows like ours, the support of every member and simply every listener following along with the show, makes a huge difference. So, if you are still listening, that means you are still in this fight with us and we need your support because our plan is to be here for as long as we can. Again, head to bestoftheleft.com/support or follow the links in the show notes to grab your own membership currently on discount , or snap up a gift membership for someone who would make use of it . As always if regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. 

Now, one quick note to add on our topic today that is really aimed, again, there's a theme, on keeping everyone focused and in the fight. A couple of weeks ago, there was an essay in the New York Times written by someone who lived through the rise of Putin as he began to consolidate power. As it's happening now, many [00:55:00] turned away from politics and began to focus on improving their own lives without much care for the larger political context that they were living in. Or if not care, you know, they thought, well, self preservation. I got to do what I got to do, right? Well, the result was an unchecked Putin and their attempt to stay above the fray didn't last as the invasion of Ukraine sent the country into crisis. 

A couple of key quotes from this article include, quote, "We became insular and lost sight of everyone else's interests." And the second one is, "What I definitely didn't think at that time is that we are now in a completely different time. It was the start of the time where we are now with the war in Ukraine, with a completely destroyed civil society. What I didn't understand was that it was only just the beginning," end quote. 

Not one of the things that the U.S. has going for it in this current time is that we have the examples of [00:56:00] Hungary and Russia to look to. Many people, you included, obviously, will be able to say that they understood what was coming and therefore be able to work more effectively to resist it. But it starts with remaining focused, not losing sight of the bigger picture in an attempt to take care of our own needs while ignoring the larger context. And of course taking action when we can, and when it's effective. We will be here for the long run, so hang in there with us.

SECTION A - THE LINE UP

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics today. Next up Section A- The Lineup, followed by Section B- The Playbook, Section C- Global Reference, and Section D- Cracks in Authority.

Trump Taps Fossil Fuel Ally Lee Zeldin to Head EPA, Push Anti-Environmental Agenda - Democracy Now! - Air Date 11-13-24

AMY GOODMAN: As Donald Trump quickly moves to name his Cabinet, we turn now to look at his pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, former New York Congressmember Lee Zeldin. The Long Island [00:57:00] Republican served four terms in the House, where he earned a score of just 14 out of 100 from the League of Conservation Voters, after consistently voting against critical environmental protections and clean energy job investments.

Zeldin’s nomination came after The New York Times reported Trump’s transition team is discussing moving the EPA headquarters outside D.C. Nate James of the American Federation of Government Employees told Politico many career EPA officials would leave the agency if it moves, adding, “it could be advertised as a relocation, but really it would be decapitation.”

We go now to Judith Enck, who served as EPA regional administrator under President Obama, now president of Beyond Plastics. We’re speaking to her outside Albany.

Hi, Judith. Thanks so much for joining us again.

JUDITH ENCK: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about, as both a former EPA administrator and a person from New York, where Lee Zeldin was a congressmember for years — talk about what [00:58:00] a Zeldin heading the EPA looks like.

JUDITH ENCK: Well, Lee Zeldin at the helm of EPA will be a wonderful tenure for fossil fuel companies, plastics companies, chemical companies. But it’s going to be really bad for people who want to breathe clean air, drink water that doesn’t have toxic chemicals or lead in it. And I’m particularly concerned about what a Zeldin EPA would mean for environmental justice communities, places like Cancer Alley in Louisiana, places like Appalachia and Texas, where there’s a concentration of petrochemical facilities, and today there is not enough environmental protections in place.

I’m glad you mentioned Lee Zeldin’s tenure in Congress, where he had the not very impressive score of 14% voting record when he was in Congress. But let’s go back [00:59:00] even further. Some people don’t know that Lee Zeldin was a state senator in Albany. And his record was so bad that a statewide environmental group gave him the distinguished 2011 Oil Slick Award. And he earned that Oil Slick Award because he introduced bills that would have, for instance, reduced funding for mass transit, provide dirty water in his Long Island district. And he just really stood out when he was in Albany, and then he took that environmental perspective to Washington, where his record was equally bad.

I do want to talk a little bit about his run for governor against Democrat Kathy Hochul, because some people are saying it kind of doesn’t matter what Zeldin’s policy positions are because he’s just going to do what Donald [01:00:00] Trump tells him to do. But make no mistake: Lee Zeldin is in lockstep agreement with the Trump administration anti-environmental agenda.

When he was in Congress, he did a few good things that’ll be interesting to watch, very few. He opposed offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean. I don’t know what that means, though, for offshore wind development. He was a member of the Republican Climate Solutions Caucus, and they never did anything. And in breaking news, he supported protections for shellfish in Long Island Sound. Those are the only three positives that I could dig up on his environmental record. So, I have to agree with the guest from the ACLU who said this is going to be worse than anything we have ever seen at the EPA.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about Project 2025, [01:01:00] that Trump disavowed, but that as soon as he was elected, people were saying, “Of course this is what the plan is.” Talk about the plan including over 150 pages with, to say the least, damaging environmental plans.

JUDITH ENCK: Yeah, this is very concerning. Project 2025 is 900 pages, and 150 are dedicated to anti-environmental policies. Project 2025 calls for disbanding the EPA Office of Environmental Justice. It’s disbanding the office at EPA that deals with enforcement of critical environmental laws. They want to speed approval of chemicals. They want to weaken the Clean Air Act by removing the essential part of the statute which requires the EPA to set health-based standards when regulating air pollution.

The [01:02:00] plan uses phrases like “the perceived threat of climate change.” They want to shut down climate research not only at the EPA, but at a dozen federal agencies. They want to see more fossil fuel development on public lands, not just private lands. So they’re advocating for drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and also drilling for fossil fuels in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Wilderness areas.

And finally, all of us, unfortunately, have learned about the tremendous health damage caused by forever chemicals, known as PFAS chemicals, where EPA plays a major role. Something EPA, finally, recently did was classify PFAS chemicals as a hazardous substance. That was kind of a no-brainer. And this plan wants to reverse that.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, I wanted to ask you about moving the EPA out of [01:03:00] Washington. Is this just a geographic thing, or what would it mean, with so many people, obviously, not moving?

JUDITH ENCK: Well, I think it’s not efficiency. I think it’s an effort to drive out the long-term career employees that work at the EPA office. I want to point out there are 10 regional offices all over the country, but the role of the Washington office is to essentially establish the rules of the road when it comes to pollution, how much air toxics are we allowed to breathe in in Cancer Alley, what toxic chemicals will be in our drinking water. So, I really don’t think this is about government efficiency. I think this is about terrorizing the career staff at EPA, making their life harder, distracting them, and, most importantly, taking them away from their day jobs, which is strictly enforcing environmental laws.

AMY GOODMAN: [01:04:00] Judith Enck, I want to thank you for being with us, former EPA regional administrator under President Obama, now serving as president of Beyond Plastics.

What Pete Hegseth Has Said About Civil War and Whiteness Part 2 - Brian Lehrer: A Daily Podcast - Air Date 11-27-24

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Here's an example of a text that has come in about his tattoos.

It says, I know what Hegseth's tattoos mean. That alone should be disqualifying. So, maybe you could tell us the story of Hegseth being removed from guarding the Biden inauguration and what his tattoos reportedly had to do with it? 

ABIGAIL HAUSLOHNER: Right. So, the Biden inauguration, as you recall, came after January 6th which was when uh, rioters urged on by Trump stormed the Capitol and tried to disrupt the certification or stop the certification of the election results that named Biden president you know, it was a, a pretty violent, uh, uh, there were people who were killed, uh, and injured.

And so after that, obviously Capitol [01:05:00] Police, National Guard Secret Service, everyone was preparing sort of on heightened alert. Uh, I think doing extra security for the inauguration in 2020. And Various National Guardsmen, I guess, on a chat identified an image of Hegseth, who was then in the D.

C. National Guard showing him, him shirtless and a picture of his bicep that showed some tattoos that people in the chat then flagged to National Guard leadership as being problematic, and one was, Uh, the main one are words, Latin words that, you know, you mentioned he has on his arm that say deuce volt which, uh, are kind of a crusades, a Christian battle cry from the first crusade in the Middle Ages.

Though it's become associated often with some extremist groups such as the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and these are groups that participated in the siege at the Capitol on, uh, January 6, 2020. And [01:06:00] so, these tattoos were flagged and Hegseth was subsequently told to stand down from duty that day to not be part of the security for the inauguration.

Now, the National Guard has said that there are multiple things at play, although Hegseth has, you know, really seized on this episode and wrote about it as, formative, and certainly seems to have informed his perception of an overly woke, meaning also in this sense overly liberal military that, you know, restricts conservative speech, uh, in this case his tattoos, and discriminates against, people with Christian, religious, or conservative views.

BRIAN LEHRER - HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: And he is a Christian conservative. He's made that very clear. Interesting that these tattoos are with the Crusades era, which is, Christian military aggression way back then. But also I read [01:07:00] that he wrote in one of his books that American should, be focused on faith and family and that there should be laws that make it difficult for, uh, Uh, and yet part of his personal history, and I don't know if this will come up in the confirmation context, but from what I've read, he was married to one woman.

They had three kids. Then they got divorced after he had an affair with a work colleague. Those two got married. didn't have any kids, then they got divorced when he had an affair with another work colleague, someone from Fox, and then they got married and they've had another kid since. So he's got Reportedly, at least, this serial history of having [01:08:00] affairs while he's married, and in his first marriage's case, while they had kids.

But he writes that the laws should make it hard for people with kids to get divorced. Have you seen all of that? 

ABIGAIL HAUSLOHNER: Hegseth certainly he's been a big proponent of These sort of a lot of big traditional, you think of as traditional conservative values. You know, he's spoken about, you know, women in the military that women you know, he has been very dismissive of women having a role in the military and yes, has promoted these sort of Christian conservative Christian Traditional family values now, the fact that he has had, you know, multiple marriages and affairs and, you know, the assault allegation, you know, and that obviously conflicts with this stated ideology or what you would assume goes with the stated ideology, you know, that, that's hardly unique, [01:09:00] uh, I'm afraid to say on, on Capitol Hill where you find plenty of, plenty of examples.

Of, of people on both sides of the aisle whose, uh, expressed ideology or politics don't exactly align with their actual behavior. So that's not unique but, you know, we'll see. I mean, I think Hegseth, certainly in the confirmation, you know, if he makes it to that point, is gonna get a lot of tough questions from Democrats on all of these things.

On the tattoo, on the sexual assault allegation, on. His view of women in the military on his view of, family values and wokeness and, you know, who he plans to fire at the Pentagon, uh, and so on but, the question that I think a lot of people have is how far will the Republicans go?

How hard are they going to press him with these questions? Maybe they'll get the hard ones out of the way behind closed doors. And that's, that's, that's, uh, Are they, are any of them willing to really take a stand to vote down his nomination? And, you know, I think we'll be looking [01:10:00] particularly at some of the more centrist Republicans and women Republicans uh, including some who have served in the U. S. military themselves to see where they land on this.

MAGA 2.0 w Quinn Slobodian & Wendy Brown Part 3 - The Dig - Air Date 11-29-24

QUINN SLOBODIAN: So this is the national conservatism position that one figurehead like Robert Lighthizer, who you mentioned at the top, could be seen as an important representative of. Someone who managed to attach to the locomotive of Trump in 2017, a totally transformed understanding of what trade policy should do.

He just completely broke, he broke with the kind of shibboleths of free trade that had dominated both parties for decades and said that trade policy doesn't just have to aim at bottom line efficiency and the best sort of international division of labor, but you can do other things with trade policy.

You can try to reach minimum labor standards. You can try to reach economic and political goals of bringing back manufacturing to the Midwest. You can try to diversify the U. S. economic base. This was actually, I [01:11:00] think, a very big deal, and it's not for nothing that Biden and company picked it up and tried to do different things with trade policy, different kind of political outcomes.

So far, I think it's very symptomatic that here we are, weeks into the process of hearing new names, and we haven't even seen Lighthizer's name officially attached to any post yet. The only person who you might consider part of this kind of national conservatism block, the idea of using the state more proactively for an expansionary transformation of the U.S. economy is Marco Rubio, but he gets put as secretary of state, you know, very far from the sort of position in which he could actually affect something like industrial policy, even if he wanted to be true to his word in the last few years. So that post neoliberal Nat Conn position in the Republican Party, which people probably have exaggerated the importance of, so far has effectively no representation in the cabinet that he's assembling. Instead, [01:12:00] we have another group that I think you could call basically the growthers, or just growthism.

These are the people who were drawn from Wall Street. This is the place where, Scott Besent, the nominee for treasury, who was literally, working for Soros and helped him break the pound, and then founded a hedge fund with Soros' backing. And deals in the sort of, at the sort of bleeding edge of speculative investments on new technologies and, you know, sure shot things like carbon driven extraction and real estate, really just run of the mill.

Grother was a Democrat until he saw that the Trump bet could pay off and then jumped over to Trump in 2016-17. The other people around Trump, like Mark Rowan from Apollo Management, even more extreme kind of vulture capitalist, you know, doing private equity deals to basically strip value out of rural hospitals and care homes, [01:13:00] and then sell them off to different parts of the company.

So this is the kind of growth at all costs part of the coalition, which arguably is the dominant part. I think these are the people who Howard Lutnick, now at Commerce, was on the transition team coming from Cantor Fitzgerald. This is, in a way, intellectually and politically the least interesting, even if perhaps, you know, civilizationally the most destructive part of this coalition.

The third is the other one that, you mentioned a minute ago, Russ Fout, who comes from, I would say, the kind of austerian libertarianism, Grover Norquist, right? Shrink the state down so you can drown in a bathtub. Pure think tank blood just flowing in his veins. And there it's just, as you say, get rid of what he calls the fourth wing of the government, which is the administrative state of civil servants.

And for what end? To, you know, produce a crisis in which the federal government [01:14:00] itself cannot function anymore, defund the IRS to the point that there's no revenue at all coming from taxes, I mean, I think that is definitely part of the idea, but then what follows is that, idea of a devolution of all administrative responsibility down in a subsidiarity way to state and counties.

Probably that's part of the idea. That is concerning, obviously, but does seem to be a kind of direction of travel of people who are ideologically committed to decentralization in a way that, I think might even take precedent over the pursuit of the bottom line in a way that the Wall Street faction I think is more focused on.

So that I think the tussle between those three groups is what defined Trump one and it will be what defines Trump two And for the time being it looks like old fashioned Wall Street, mostly vulture capitalists are the ones who are getting closest to his ear 

DANIEL DENVER - HOST, THE DIG: You said that Lighthizer probably represents the least influential [01:15:00] economic current there. What about JD Vance and his paternalist populist welfare chauvinism or the new labor secretary who as a house republican voted for the Pro Act. An appointment that was disturbingly, very effusively praised by teamsters president Sean O'Brien is all of that whatever the work it's doing as a politics and an ideology is that is it all just sort of impossible as policy as long as these various capitalists are actually running the show?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: I mean, I think that's the question of how much power a vice president has, right? I mean, obviously they're important during the campaign as sort of messengers of the intended spirit of the incoming administration.

But after that, how much do we care about Pence's economic vision? How much do we care about, you know, Kamala Harris' economic vision before she became the candidate? I think I have yet to be convinced that the kind of Nat Conn. laborist, [01:16:00] workerist version of the GOP is actually able to translate its rhetoric into any kind of policy except to sideline unions as kind of bearers of blocks of voters and redirect the idea towards individual workers as sort of political actors making their own choices.

But the Labor Secretary is an interesting one. I don't know if you have a thought about her, Wendy. 

WENDY BROWN: I guess I just want to go back to the important point that as long as we're thinking about a coherent economic policy, we'll be stuck down where your question went just now. How is it all going to be reconciled? But it seems to me it is perfectly possible to have an unreconciled economic policy with, I mean, there are a lot of eyes on China, even there, there's going to be several different kinds of moves. Anxiety about what China can [01:17:00] and can't be forced to do. What will and won't be inflationary in trade policy and tariffs with China? But just what products the U.S. can make that could possibly compete with Chinese products.

And so there's a whole bunch of discussion over there that is conflicted and some policy will have to come out of it. But that's different than saying we need one reconciled policy for labor in the US for different kinds of capital for tech capital, finance, capital, and of course, industrial capital.

And I take really seriously Quinn's growthers term because I think that is what binds them. But I think it's possible to imagine I want to say a controlled chaos in economic policy that is disruptive, but above all, aims at transforming the state's relationship to that policy and the state's own engagement.[01:18:00] 

And on the one hand, There's crypto, which promises, if these guys get their way, to bind the state more closely to crypto than it ever has been, if that reserve idea gets legs. And on the other hand, There's the gutting, the potential gutting of a huge number of state functions, which I assume we'll talk about in a few minutes, that would be the effect of Project 2025 and has a couple of instruments, most notably, transforming a bunch of career state workers into political appointments. And that's one instrument. And the other one is impoundment, allowing budgets to come directly from the executive office and take effect and allowing, budgetary moves to not have to move through legislation. And [01:19:00] those things would be huge transformations of the American state, not necessarily bound to one coherent economic policy. 

Maddow Disgrace of Trump nepotism, abuse of pardons far surpasses Biden's pardon of his son - The Rachel Maddow Show - Air Date 12-2-24

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: So there's new reporting today from legendary reporter Jane Mayer in the New Yorker about the man who's been announced as the choice for defense secretary in the incoming administration. According to Jane Mayer's new reporting, before Pete Hegseth was hired to be a TV host at the Fox News Channel in 2017, he had been forced out.

of two small right wing veterans advocacy organizations that he had been involved in. The first one was a group called Veterans for Freedom. They hired him on to lead that organization in 2007. According to Mayer's reporting, by 2008, the very next year, the group's finances had collapsed. Amid concerns about wild spending and quote, sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace.

The group's donors soon folded the organization into a [01:20:00] different veterans group, basically according to Mayer's reporting, in order to get Hegseth's hands off the checkbook. So that was Veterans for Freedom. Then it was Concerned Veterans for America, where Hegseth was in charge from 2013 to 2016, before he was forced out of that organization, too.

From Mayors, from Mayors reporting, quote, a previously undisclosed whistleblower report on Hegseth's tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity, to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization's events.

The detailed report, which was compiled by multiple former employees and sent to the organization's senior management, states that at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk. From joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team from the organization.

The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, [01:21:00] and other members of his management team, sexually pursued the organization's female staffers, whom they divided into two groups, the quote, party girls, and the quote, dance girls. In a separate letter of complaint which was sent to the organization, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.

He was drunkenly chanting at the bar, quote,

Mayor says quote, I spoke at length with two people who identified themselves as having contributed to the whistleblower report. One of them said of Hegseth quote, I've seen him drunk so many times. I've seen him dragged away not a few times, but multiple times. To have him at the Pentagon would be scary.

Adding quote, when those of us who worked at Concern Veterans for America heard he was being considered for Secretary of Defense. It wasn't no, it was hell no. [01:22:00] According to the complaint, at one such CVA event in Virginia Beach on Memorial Day weekend in 2014, Hegseth was, quote, totally sloshed and needed to be carried to his room because he was, quote, so intoxicated.

The following month, during an event in Cleveland, Hegseth, who had gone with his team to a bar around the corner from their hotel, was described as, quote, completely drunk in a public place. According to the report, quote, several high profile people who attended the organization's event were very disappointed to see this kind of public behavior, though the report does not identify them.

Nevertheless, in October 2014, the group instituted a no alcohol policy at its events. The following month, however, Hegseth and another manager lifted the policy, lifted the no alcohol policy, while overseeing a get out the vote field operation to boost Republican candidates in North Carolina. According to the report, on the evening before the election, Hegseth, who had been out with three young female staff members, was so inebriated by 1 a.

m. [01:23:00] that a staffer who'd driven him to his hotel in a van full of other drunken staffers asked for assistance to get Hegseth to his room. Quote, Pete was completely passed out in the middle seat. slumped over a young female staff member, the report says. It took two male staff members to get Hegseth into the hotel.

After one young woman vomited in some bushes, another helped him to bed. In the morning, a team member had to wake Hegseth so he didn't miss his flight. According to the report, quote, All of this happened in public, while Concerned Veterans for America was, quote, embedded in the Republican get out the vote effort.

The following month, in December 2014, the group held an office Christmas party at the Grand Hyatt in Washington. Once again, according to the report, Hegseth was noticeably intoxicated and had to be carried up to his room. The report stated, quote, his behavior was embarrassing in front of the team, but not surprising.

People have simply come to expect Pete to get drunk at social events. The 2015 federal tax filing by Concerned [01:24:00] Veterans for America has an unusual note saying, quote, major problems developed in the last fiscal year were paused. Filing also describes Pete Hegseth as, quote, president outgoing. By the start of 2016, Hegseth was out of his job.

I should tell you, NBC News has not independently confirmed the reporting in The New Yorker. Pete Hegseth would not comment for the piece, though someone described as an advisor to him told the magazine that the claims were, quote, Outlandish, outlandish or not, what Jane Mayer's reporting is describing is how things apparently went with the last two tiny organizations that he ran.

Two very small right wing advocacy groups that had a handful of staff. Now Trump wants him in charge of the largest department in the U. S. government with an 800 billion dollar budget and three million people to be in charge of.

SECTION B - THE PLAYBOOK

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B- [01:25:00] The Playbook. 

Trump goes off the deep end with Cabinet pick Part 2 - No Lie w Brian Tyler Cohen - Air Date 12-1-24

BRIAN TYLER COHEN - HOST, NO LIE: So I wanted to talk a little bit about your area of expertise, which is as we move forward in the Trump administration, something that I've been especially worried about and sounded the alarms about in the lead up to this election was the prospect of Trump enacting Schedule F, which is his plan to change all of the career civil servants in the federal government into a political appointee designation. Would he be able to do this as easily as I think he's planning on doing it, as easily as Project 2025 had anticipated it would be for him to do that? 

MAX STIER: So Brian, you're 100% right to be concerned about this. I think that if you pull out for a second, the key issue here is President Trump wants to convert our current system, which is a government that's there for the public and for the people into a government that is the spoil system, one that serves the winner of the election and not the broader public interest. And Schedule F, as you just described, is an important piece of that.

[01:26:00] So President elect has already stated that he wants to use government authorities to go after his personal enemies. He's choosing people to run agencies on the basis of their loyalty to him, not to their competence and character. And the civil service is the last remaining bastion of representation for that rule of law and the public interest.

And Schedule F was something that he tried in the first term to implement, the very end of his first term. Ran out of time, but that would have done just what you said, which is convert many, many thousands of career apolitical experts into yet more political appointees. I think that he will have difficulty, getting to answer your direct question, in implementing Schedule F very quickly because the Biden team has put in place a regulation that they would have to undo to make that happen. But I think the more important issue is that he can pursue that same goal of upending [01:27:00] the career professional civil service through a lot of other means. And we need to be alert to not just Schedule F, but all kinds of other things like just terrible management that might drive away the experts that we want in our government and enable more politicization, more cronyism and worse government.

BRIAN TYLER COHEN - HOST, NO LIE: Right. People just seeing that there are unqualified, incompetent people at the top of each department and basically self selecting out by virtue of not wanting to work under a Pam Bondi, under a Pete Hegseth, under an RFK Jr., for example. I want to go back to the regulation that you had spoken about before, the fact that Biden had put forward a regulation that would presumably prevent this type of thing from happening.

You would imagine if Trump was actually serious about moving forward with turning the career civil servant, sector into political appointees that his team would just be committed to overturning this regulation. And that would be basically a very small obstacle for [01:28:00] him to have to overcome. Would you agree with that? Is that actually gonna pose some type of a serious barrier for him? 

MAX STIER: So I think it's always dangerous to say never, but government process actually matters. And when you don't understand government process and you work to use that government process to achieve your ends, you often don't get very far. And the truth is that it takes a lot of time to change a regulation that exists to do it right, so that you can actually avoid successful court challenge. Now, it may very well be that the Trump team will simply bulldoze through, not care about what the courts might say or litigation.

But the reality is that it could take six months or a year to do Schedule F. Again, you said it exactly right though. And that is, you don't have to have Schedule F to have the impact of Schedule F. If you chase away the good talent and it's worth stepping back and making sure we understand who these people are.[01:29:00] 

They're the air traffic controllers. They're the food inspectors. They're the 70 percent of the workforce that is involved in national security, keeping us safe. A third of them are veterans. You know, these are people who, overall headcount, I should also add, is the same size today in the federal government as it was in the 1960s.

So, these are people that are serving America. They deserve better. The OMB intended nominee has been taped and quoted as saying that he would like to traumatize the federal workforce so that they don't want to come to work. You do have to worry about how federal employees are being treated because that can lead to effectively the same thing as Schedule F. Great talent leaving, Americans getting hurt because they don't have the best civil servants looking out for them. 

House Passes Nonprofit Killer Bill, Most Dangerous Domestic Anti-Terrorism Bill Since PATRIOT Act - Democracy Now! - Air Date 11-22-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: For more, we go to East Lansing, Michigan, where we’re joined by Darryl Li. He’s an anthropologist, lawyer and legal scholar teaching at the University of [01:30:00] Chicago. His analysis of the so-called nonprofit killer bill was published on Spencer Ackerman’s blog forever-wars.com. It’s headlined “The Most Dangerous Domestic Anti-Terrorism Bill Since the PATRIOT Act.”

OK, Darryl, why? Why is this so significant? Again, it was passed in the House. It now makes its way to the Senate.

DARRYL LI: Thank you for having me on, Amy.

As you mentioned, this bill is essentially a civil rights disaster, that would allow the government, under any administration — I want to be clear that this bill is terrible no matter who is president — but it would allow the government to shut down nonprofits on the smear of being terrorist-supporting organizations.

Now, obviously, the government, after decades of authoritarian “war on terror” policies, already has ample legal tools at its disposal to go after nonprofits, essentially, for any reason that it wishes. What this bill would do in addition, the thing that it would add and the thing that makes it so dangerous, [01:31:00] and actually the most dangerous domestic terrorism law in a generation, is that it would essentially smuggle in through the back door a domestic terrorist group list for the first time. This is something that the United States, to this day, still doesn’t have. We have many, many lists of so-called foreign terrorist organizations, that are overwhelmingly Muslim and/or based in the Global South.

This law requires an accusation with no evidence, but a tie-in. It’s an accusation that nonprofits are supporting a group on one of the existing international terrorism lists. This is important to understand, because it explains why so many people on the right in Congress are comfortable signing on, because the bill is essentially discriminatory by design. Right-wingers and white supremacists in Congress can support this bill, with the assurance that their allies, right-wing extremist groups, are highly, highly unlikely to ever be targeted by this bill, because there isn’t going to — it’s much less likely that they will be smeared with an accusation of being tied to an [01:32:00] international terrorist organization that’s already on one of the government lists. So, that’s why this particular coalition —

 [inaudible]

 — has come together. And it will — oh, go on.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Talk more about the origins of the bill, why Democrats supported the bill, and what it means now that it’s going to the Senate, how organizations are organizing around it.

DARRYL LI: Right. So, since October 7th, we’ve seen a whole bunch of outlandish anti-Palestinian pieces of legislation that have been designed to crush any protest or dissent around Palestine in the United States, while Congress, of course, continues to supply untold billions of dollars in weapons to Israel for its ongoing genocide in Gaza. This particular piece of legislation is the one that has gotten closest to becoming law. And initially, it did have significant bipartisan support, because, of course, anti-Palestinian racism is one of the great bipartisan unifiers in Congress.

With the [01:33:00] efforts of civil society groups to ring the alarm and educate members of Congress about the dangers of this bill, not only for Palestine advocacy, but broadly, for any number of causes, and, of course, with the election of Donald Trump, more and more Democrats have awoken to the danger. So, right now the important thing, now that the bill has passed the House, is to ensure that it does not go anywhere in the Senate. So, it’s extremely important for people to keep up the pressure on the Democratic members of Congress, and especially those in the Senate, to block this bill in the remainder of this session and, of course, if it comes up in a future legislative session.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And, of course, next session — now, this already came up just a week or two ago, and now it has passed in the House. The Democrats control the Senate, but the Republicans will soon control the Senate.

DARRYL LI: That’s right, they will. But my understanding is that they’ll still need 60 votes to pass, so I don’t think the Republicans will have 60 [01:34:00] senators, so there is still a chance that the bill can be blocked. But again, we can’t take it for granted. It requires all hands on deck and as much pressure as possible on the Senate Democrats to ensure that this bill doesn’t go anywhere.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: You know, Darryl, it’s interesting that I’m talking to you here in Baku, Azerbaijan, because there have been scores of journalists, civil society, climate justice activists arrested in the lead-up to the COP. And for those who write about what’s happening in this authoritarian petrostate, they talk about the targeting of nonprofit groups. And that’s the beginning of going after these people who end up in jail. A number have said they’ve been brutalized in jail. Your final thoughts, Darryl?

DARRYL LI: Yeah, so, one thing that’s important for people to understand is that the Supreme Court has already said that material support for terrorism can include speech acts. It [01:35:00] can include so-called coordinated advocacy. So it goes far beyond funding. And this is something that I think, for media organizations, in particular, should really be sort of raising the alarms in terms of the dangers of this bill for their work, in particular.

 

Surveilled Ronan Farrow on the Spyware Technology the Trump Admin Could Use to Hack Your Phone - Democracy Now! - Air Date 12-5-24

KASH PATEL: We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But, yeah, we’re putting you all on notice. And, Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we’re tyrannical. This is why we’re dictators, because we’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Kash Patel, the Trump nominee for head of the FBI, to replace Christopher Wray, who was already called on the carpet around buying Pegasus. So, when not only Kash Patel, because who knows if he’ll make it, [01:36:00] but President Trump has repeatedly talked about journalists, for example, as the enemy of the people, your final thoughts, Ronan?

RONAN FARROW: Trump and his associates have explicitly threatened journalists with prosecution, and specifically threatened journalists who protect their sources with prosecution. That is dangerous for democracy. This is one of the first times — and I’m, as we discussed, someone who’s dealt with a fair number of surveillance and intimidation efforts — that I felt frightened to work in this country.

I think in this incoming administration, we’re going to need the work of journalists more than ever. And we’re going to need the space for journalism, for dissent, for all of the spaces that are shrunk and cracked down on when you have this technology freely used in an unfettered way. And we’ve just seen this horror story play out in one country after another, even where there are ostensible [01:37:00] protections in place. We see how hard it is to get accountability after the fact. We see how tempting it is for law enforcement to overreach and start to target people in a vindictive, politicized way. And then you have these sets of statements, where you have Donald Trump threatening political opponents with military tribunals, for instance.

And as ever, we’re in the media engaged in this debate of what’s a joke and what’s not, but these kinds of appointments, or at least attempted appointments that we’re seeing, are no joke. And this technology that is already at the fingertips of this government, that’s no joke. So, people need to really care. And members of Congress, of whatever party, who remain sane in a context that is increasingly not normal, really need to clock and appreciate this issue.

I have seen, in talking about this film in public spaces, how the public gets it, how ordinary Americans understand that it is scary to [01:38:00] have these spaces shrunk and cracked down on. And I think that politicians who take a stand and realize that the spyware companies in this film who say this is a weapon of war — the spyware companies themselves. We have NSO’s lawyer on camera in the film saying, “There’s no equivalent to the Geneva Conventions for this. And that’s not on us. We’re making and selling a weapon that is largely unregulated.” We’ve got to fix that. And I think people care, is what I’m seeing. And my hope is that political representatives understand that the people care. And this is not a partisan issue. People who don’t want big government, people who have traditional conservative values should especially care about protecting people from this tech.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt O’Neill, you traveled the world with Ronan as you interviewed people almost on every continent. I want to ask you, for example, about Guatemala. In 2022, a group of journalists working for the [01:39:00] award-winning Central American independent news outlet El Faro filed a lawsuit in U.S. court against NSO Group, the Israeli company that operates Pegasus spyware used to monitor and track journalists, human rights activists, dissidents. The El Faro journalists, which is based in El Salvador, allege Pegasus software was used to infiltrate their iPhones and track their communications and movements. Now, you didn’t go to El Salvador. They sued, and one of the heads of it went to Guatemala.

MATTHEW ONEILL: Yes, we went to Guatemala City to interview Roman Gressier, who was targeted by Pegasus spyware. And I think this is indicative of what you see on every continent where Pegasus is in use, is that you’re seeing journalists, civil rights activists, human rights activists who are being targeted with this software. If you’re looking at El Salvador, this tool is only as responsible [01:40:00] as the people using it. So, in El Salvador, they’re prosecuting journalists. In Saudi Arabia, they’re tracking down and executing journalists. If we have this software here, I think people listening at home might be thinking, “I’m not going to be subject to an ICE investigation. The Department of Homeland Security isn’t interested in my selfies or my pictures of my kids.” And that’s likely true. However, if this investigative tool makes it into the hands of people who have an expansive idea about what criminality is or what the reach of their institution is into people’s lives, we —

AMY GOODMAN: Or proudly announce their enemies lists they have.

MATTHEW ONEILL: We will all be caught up. We don’t need to be the target of an investigation. They could be targeting you, and our text exchange this morning would have looped me right into that.

Maddow Disgrace of Trump nepotism, abuse of pardons far surpasses Biden's pardon of his son Part 2 - The Rachel Maddow Show - Air Date 12-2-24

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: Last night, President Biden put out a statement explaining his pardon of his son, Hunter. The statement [01:41:00] said, quote, From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department's decision making. And I kept my word, even if I, even as I have watched my son being selectively and unfairly prosecuted.

Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, or multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. Those who were late paying taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, those people are typically given non criminal resolutions.

The president says, quote, it is clear that Hunter was treated differently. The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Then a carefully negotiated plea deal agreed to by the Department of Justice unraveled in the courtroom with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political [01:42:00] pressure on the process.

No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter's cases can reach any other conclusion that Hunter was singled out only because he is my son, and that is wrong. He says, quote, There has been an effort to break Hunter, who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution.

In trying to break Hunter, they have tried to break me, and there's no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough. He says, quote, from my entire career, I followed a simple principle. Just tell the American people the truth. They'll be fair. They'll be fair minded. Well, here's the truth. I believe in the justice system, but as I'm not, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.

I hope Americans will understand why a father and a president would come to this decision. Father and a president. He says [01:43:00] there's no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.

It is true that President Biden had said he wouldn't pardon his son. And it may or may not be related, but would it change your mind at all if after you made a pledge like that, the incoming next president that announced that he planned to remove the director of the FBI and install in his place someone who has literally published a hit list of people he wants to go after once Trump is back in power.

There are 60 names on this list. This guy published it as an appendix, as Appendix B to one of his recent books. Not his series of books that describe Trump as King Donald, no, those are his three books for kids. No, the one with the 60 names on a list of who he's going to go get in Trump's name once Trump is back in power, that's a book he wrote presumably for adults.

So what would you do? What would you do? What would [01:44:00] you do if after you made that pledge to not pardon your son, that's what the next president said he was going to do to U. S. law enforcement? What would you do? What is reasonable to demand of a man? After what's been done to your son already, right? You ready to put him back in the barrel?

Honestly, maybe what President Biden should have done is not just pardon his son, Hunter, but name him ambassador to France. Right? Maybe then the response, the criticism of the decision would be a little more muted. I mean, consider it, right? Donald Trump, the president elect used his pardon power to give pardons to his longest serving political advisor, his campaign chairman, his campaign manager, his national security advisor.

He gave pardons to seven, count them, seven different Republican congressmen convicted of dozens of felonies. He pardoned the [01:45:00] father. of his son in law. His daughter is married to Jared Kushner. He pardoned Jared Kushner's father. This man tried to blackmail and intimidate a witness in a federal criminal case against him by hiring a prostitute to seduce the witness and lure him back to a hotel room where the guy had staged a hidden camera.

He filmed the sexual encounter and then sent the tape to the wife of the witness. To intimidate both the witness and the wife into not testifying against him. And that is an astonishing thing to do, an astonishing length to go to, to commit the crime of witness intimidation. It is a whole other level of insanity when you consider that the woman this guy sent the tape to was his own sister.

Because it was his brother in law, his sister's husband, who was going to be the witness against him in this criminal investigation along with potentially his sister herself. So this is what he did to his own sister in order to try to shut down the case. In order to try to shut down those witnesses. His name is [01:46:00] Charles Kushner.

His son Jared is married to Ivanka Trump. And so he got a pardon. He got a pardon. Charles Kushner served two years in federal prison, but then I'm sure just on the merits of the case, he got a full pardon from Donald Trump in Trump's first term. And now this weekend, this weekend, Trump just named him that same guy, that ex con, he just announced that he will name him ambassador to France.

And he did that announcement right after he announced that the father of the guy married to his other daughter, Tiffany, he will be Trump's senior advisor on the Middle East. And so, yeah, cue all the hand wringing and gnashing of teeth today about a president using his power, his pardon power, hm, his powers as president, hm, to do something for a family member.

I mean, Trump pardoned a family member and then named him ambassador to France. A man who has no qualifications whatsoever to be America's ambassador to France. [01:47:00] Trump pardoned the owner of the 49ers football team and has now nominated his son in law to be the head of the DEA. The guy is a local sheriff.

He has no apparent qualifications to lead the Drug Enforcement Administration other than being a local sheriff and being related to a rich guy who Trump pardoned. The Surgeon General. Trump just announced she is a random doctor from the Fox News channel who has her own celebrity line of vitamins. She has no apparent qualifications for being Surgeon General at all, other than the fact that she's a doctor, and she's the sister in law of the guy who he just named to be National Security Advisor.

So, sure, obviously, why not? The guy he's just named to lead the Navy has zero experience with the U. S. Navy or with literally anything having to do with any part of the United States military. But the guy did hold a 12 million dollar fundraiser for Trump at his multi million dollar home, which famously features a mirrored floor.

So ha ha, you can see up people's skirts while they're standing in the living room at the fundraiser. You think I'm kidding, look [01:48:00] it up. Trump named someone who the U. S. government once felt the need to put on a terrorism watch list. to be the new director of national intelligence. He named an accused child sex trafficker to be attorney general.

He named an HHS secretary who says heroin, heroin helps him read better, and wi fi gives you a leaky brain. And I'm just going to mention this one more time, he named his convicted felon relative to be our nation's ambassador in Paris. Maybe his French is excellent. I don't know. But yes, tell me more about how outraged we all are about President Biden's pardon for his son.

Because that, somehow, that is the thing that looks bad.

SECTION C - GLOBAL REFERENCE

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Next up Section C- Global Reference.

Strongmen Mussolini to the Present Part 2 - The Aspen Institute - Air Date 8-8-24

CAROLYNE HELDMAN: I want to come back to the present in a minute, but I'd, I'd like you to, you know, Walk us through [01:49:00] Italy, the through line from Mussolini to Berlusconi to Maloney, and vis a vis Hitler and what happened after Hitler in Germany, how Italy is so different, and then let's talk about the United States.

Is that all? Yeah. Go. 

DR. RUTH BEN-GHIAT: And you have one minute. Um. No, you have 20. Okay. So, there are very good reasons, we always hear about Hitler, um, I don't need to tell you what they are but Mussolini is actually more relevant to understanding how autocracy takes hold today. Not always, there's like, there's lots of coups where it's instant.

But Mussolini Um, he got power very quickly. Incredible. And he and Hitler were formed by World War I and the kind of total disruption of everything and crisis after World War I. And he [01:50:00] started fascism as a decentralized militia movement. It's very important. It was a, it was a militia movement. And it conquered power locally.

Like, actually Steve Bannon is a big fan of Mussolini. He was influenced by the way fascism started to have this precinct strategy. That you, you conquer locally, the town halls, the this and that. But he, he did that in 1919. By 1922 he was already prime minister. So Hitler worshipped Mussolini. And his Beer Hall Putsch that failed was an attempt to copy the March on Rome, which was successful of Mussolini in 1922.

And Hitler had this huge crush on Mussolini, and he was constantly writing him. Trying to get his autograph and Mussolini was like, I'm not giving, who is this? And then Hitler went to jail and Mussolini's like, I'm not gonna be writing to a, a convict. And so Hitler increased his, uh, he had a bust of Mussolini on his desk in the late 20s and other [01:51:00] Nazis made fun of him but he, he kept on.

And this was because as you know, Hitler was trying to get to, uh, into power for a very long time whereas Mussolini. And, and he was the one who wrote the playbook. So Mussolini created the first dictator right wing dictatorship because he was going to be prosecuted. He had been outed in a murder of the socialist leader.

And his hands were all over the crime, and he was the, a special investigator was. And he was being asked to resign, uh, or the papers and the journalists and the opposition wanted him to resign. And so he was going to go to jail. So what did he do? He declared dictatorship. Wouldn't you do that? And so he passed these laws, which I've been going back to look at that are called the laws for the defense of the state.

And in those laws is the playbook. So he wrecked [01:52:00] democracy from within. Then he did something very contemporary, which was strongmen will do anything to escape prosecution. In his case, he declared dictatorship. But those laws, they called for things that have been done since by Erdogan, by Orban, and they're also in Project 2025, where you You fire all unloyal civil servants.

You staff the civil service with people who will be loyal to you with ideologues. Right? That was very important because it's no good having a regime or a coup or anything if people will not work for your, to pass you, to write your laws and be the bureaucrats. And he also expanded executive power.

And he had many ways that he made it so that executive decrees could not be opposed by parliament. So by 1926 he had no checks on his rule. And the other thing I'll [01:53:00] mention, because then it connects to Berlusconi. He, well, this was in the late 1920s, he was a huge adherent of great replacement theory.

The idea that non white people were gonna come in and they were procreating so fast that they were going to extinguish the white race. He wrote many things, this is in my book, and he said that, this is his quote, black, brown, and yellow people are having so many babies that the white race will be submerged.

So, Hitler learned from him as well. So he's very, very important for understanding the far right today. And he just doesn't get, uh, he doesn't get noticed enough. So Berlusconi came in at a period of crisis right after the fall of communism, and then there was a corruption scandal, and all of the major parties of Italy disappeared.

This is the early 90s. So he read the political marketplace, and he created something new. He was a [01:54:00] billionaire. He was a sports team owner. He owned all the private networks in Italy. Imagine that. So, he was the first person since Mussolini to have that much control of the media. Now, this was the new, you don't need a direct, uh, you don't need direct old school dictatorship control anymore.

If you either own the networks to yourself, or you get a crony. to, you put them in the hands of cronies. So he was able to do all of that. And the main thing he did, which affects us today, all over Europe too, he brought fascists into the government for the first time since 1945. He brought neo fascists and he made them part of his governing coalition.

So, and then he started, and he rehabilitated Mussolini. And he said famously, Mussolini never killed anyone. In an interview with Boris Johnson, who was then a journalist. So, so there's that lineage. And, in the last Berlusconi [01:55:00] government, he also was a partner of Putin. Berlusconi was the person who made himself the mouthpiece of Putin in Europe.

So he backed everything Putin did. He sanitized everything Putin did. He sold Putin to European allies. And he tried to sell Putin to America, but it didn't work. And during his last government his minister of youth was Giorgio Meloni. And Giorgio Meloni came up as a hardcore neo fascist. So I like to say that Giorgio Meloni has a connection to both Mussolini and to Berlusconi.

And so, she is a superb communicator. People should not underestimate her. She's very effective. Sometimes she reminds me of Mussolini in, in her way, her oratory. And the way she looks at the crowd. She's very skilled. And she's been playing a double game because she's been very pro democratic in her foreign policy.

She supports, uh, Ukraine. At [01:56:00] home, not at all. Anti LGBTQ, anti immigrant suing today's autocrats. If you have a dissident or a critic, you sue them. That's how you financially and psychologically exhaust people. So she's suing people. She's suing a classicist who's been long retired and he's in his 80s because he called her a neo Nazi like many years ago.

But he's being sued now. So we can't really understand the right today without this lineage of Italy, but people don't pay attention to Italy. And I started out as an Italian historian, so perhaps I'm biased, but I've been able to do this work because I understood how these, how, how this functions and how it can pass in history and be be reinvigorated in different eras of history up to today.

Will Trump Turn America Into a Laboratory Of Autocracy w David Pepper - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 12-2-24

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: You've been talking about the autocracy model. Could you define that for us? [01:57:00] 

DAVID PEPPER: Sure. I mean, the, the, I've tried to use the state level, um, autocracies that we've been seeing in my, this book, this one book I've written is called laboratories of autocracy, and I think it's a real preview of what's going to happen in the national level on, on the current path.

You know, what's happened in these states is they basically locked out the voters, essentially through gerrymandering, but also through stripping powers away from courts, changing the way we elect or select courts, the types of stuff we're seeing in North Carolina. The people are kind of cut out of governing these states at this point.

We're living this in Ohio where I'm sitting and what I've tried to describe in, in these books is that once that happens, the aim of um, government honestly is no longer about public service at all. It's about using government to serve certain private interests and the public because of the gerrymandering or the other mechanisms that lock them out really can't [01:58:00] stop it.

And that's what we've seen in Ohio. And you know, this is not rocket science. Academics a lot smarter. I have read about this for years, but what I can do is describe what it looks like on the ground in Ohio and what we've seen in the last 15 or 20 years. very much. in states where they've locked up these statehouses and created a sense of the people can't stop anything is we've seen sort of this broad corruption of government to simply be about serving private interests.

You know, one of the best examples is, um, in states like Ohio, you know, they're giving away the farm, um, public school dollars to for profit, you know, private school models, be it charter schools, be it vouchers. We've seen, you know, the takeover of utility commissions to serve the utilities and not the consumers on and on and on and get on.

It's this broader corruption of public service for private interests. And so when I see that happen here, and I see this new doge or whatever it's called, where [01:59:00] Musk is going to run it with Vivek Ramaswamy, it's going to be the same thing. We are about to see, you know, the federal government put to work for certain private interests.

And as best they can, they're going to want to keep the people from stopping it. So the autocracy model very quickly in states of Ohio has led to corruption and has led to rapidly declining public outcomes. And my worry is that's exactly we're going to see at the national level. And it's what countries like Hungary and Russia have seen as well.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Let me run a thesis by you and get your take on it. Government always serves somebody. It always serves people. principally one group and the way that our government was established in the beginning and the way that it has rebooted itself, uh, you know, post civil war, post Republican Great Depression, is that we decided that government would serve the majority of the people, the, you know, the, in, in a big way, the bottom 90 percent [02:00:00] not screwing the top 10 percent but, you know, serving the bottom 90%.

And then came the Reagan revolution where Reagan. squealing that you're serving people who don't deserve to be served. You know, welfare queens and that young buck standing in front of you in line at the supermarket is buying beer with his food stamps. And and so America shifted and said, Oh, well, I guess we shouldn't be serving The bottom 90%.

Maybe we should do what the Republicans say. And maybe we'll, you know, they'll let us have some of that wealth as we shift to the top 10 percent of the top 1%. And so, you know, then Republicans shifted government so that it's serving the top 1%. I would say it's not serving the top 10 percent of the top 10 percent pay most of the taxes.

You know, the doctor, I have a friend who's a surgeon who makes around 500 a 50, 000 a year, and he's paying 46 percent of his total income in taxes. Um, so I mean, [02:01:00] it's like that. That's not happening. If you're making a billion dollars, a million dollars a year. So we've seen this shift in government where it's now serving the top 1 10th of one And now people are screwed and they're going, what happened?

What happened? And Trump comes along and says, Oh yeah, government is screwing you. I'll, I'll save you. And of course he's lying through his teeth, but it seems like these shifts are occurring in like 40 year cycles. What do you think? 

DAVID PEPPER: Yeah. I agree. I mean, in, in all the attacks on democracy that we're seeing in states and I think we'll see federally are to keep the everyday citizen from being able to stop it.

You're not, you know, in Ohio, you're no longer being served by your government Ohioans. It's serving a very narrow group. That's where the benefit goes of dollars to let's say, you know, educate. It's going to for profit companies more and more other states as well. And when you carve up the state, so people don't have to say it keeps us from stopping, you know, you mentioned the, I'll reference another book and I love that [02:02:00] you're always reading books.

I always go back to this book, but maybe it's hard to see FDR democracy. You go back and read his speeches in the thirties. He was describing exactly. I always go through and read this book because it's both amazing how similar things were, but it's also really instructive that by calling it out bluntly, And the way you just did over and over and over, he won over the American people against the very forces you're talking about.

So it is a pattern and we've seen it recur again and again. And the truth is, if you cut the people out, that's who takes over the very privileged, the very elite, the oligarchs. But when someone, and Trump did it this time, unfortunately, but it shows you that a Democrat can do it too. So if someone comes along and calls it out.

As clearly as FDR did, he was giving speeches in front of Congress that were so blunt about this. And six months or a year later, he was winning 49 [02:03:00] out of 50 states because the people saw it. And I do think it's on Democrats to be, to go back and read who were the most effective at calling out the dynamic we're talking about.

And when they had it, when they nailed it, the people responded. And I read these speeches. And as much as I admire a lot of politicians who are out there today, I don't hear a lot of people who put it is bluntly as FDR did back in the day. Uh, and it really showed that when the people heard it clearly, They saw it.

They responded. 

As Trump’s Return Looms - South Korea Offers a Lesson in Defeating Fascism - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 12-5-24

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: The warning from Seoul, a democracy at risk in the age of authoritarian power. And basically what we saw was President Yoon Suk Yeol, President Yoon of South Korea try for, I believe it only lasted six or eight hours, before parliament basically backed him down, tried to become a dictator.[02:04:00] 

I mean, he just proclaimed military rule, the military is taking over the media, the military, we're shutting down the parliament, congress, and I'm going to rule by dictate, basically. And now this is a guy who had been, he's a hardcore right winger. He had proposed that the work week in Korea, in South Korea, where if you work more than that, you get overtime.

If you work less than that, you don't get overtime. That be raised from 52 hours a week to 69 hours a week. He was proposing changes in the medical system and the way that doctors are trained that had caused a national strike by physicians. Because they were concerned that he was basically coming after the national health care system, which is a pretty good system and works quite well in South Korea.

He's in tight with his corporate buddies. There's [02:05:00] a reason why they call him the Donald Trump of South Korea. Now, here's what the good news is, he failed, and in fact, now parliament is calling for him to be evicted, basically impeached and if he doesn't resign, and I would not be surprised if he resigns in the next couple of weeks.

I mean, we'll have to wait and see how this shakes out. But what's the difference between President Yoon doing this and failing in South Korea? And the possibility that Donald Trump could do this and succeed in the United States, just do the exact same thing, just take Yoon's template and say, hey, I can do that.

Keep in mind, after all, this is what General Mike Flynn begged Donald Trump to do before he left office in 2020. Or an early in January of 2021. He wanted him to declare a state of emergency and declare martial law and thus [02:06:00] prevent the transition of power to Joe Biden. And not just Mike Flynn. I mean, there was a whole cadre of people who were saying, "we need to do this."

Well, Trump didn't do it. I'm not sure he could have gotten away with it then. But that was then and this is now. Yoon, South Korean President Yoon failed to control his party, the PPP party South Korea, the Republicans of South Korea. He failed to have them kiss his, you know, the way that Trump has, seized control of the Republican party. He didn't put his relatives in charge of the party itself.

He didn't line up the alliances that he needed so that when parliament voted on whether to sustain or overturn the state of emergency, 100 percent of his own party voted against him, the president of South Korea. Now that's not going to be the case with Donald Trump. Donald Trump has got [02:07:00] crazies in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives who are eager to see our democratic republic turned into a Hungarian style or a Russian style autocracy. I mean, they're salivating for it. Also, President Yoon, had the equivalent of Fox News in South Korea, a billionaire owned right wing television network in South Korea that just is all right wing all the time, is only a couple years old and doesn't have much of an audience. And there are two public broadcasters in South Korea, the equivalent of, corporation, public broadcasting, op, the television network and the radio network. There are two of those in South Korea and they've been very independent and they give actual news.

And most of the corporate news in South Korea is pretty solid news. So, the Koreans are well informed. That is not [02:08:00] the case here in the United States. Here in the United States, we've got roughly half of Americans getting their news from sources that regularly lie to them. That, certainly lie by omission, don't really fill them in with what's going on.

So I think that, we need to look at what happened in South Korea yesterday as a warning. And I believe that Donald Trump and the people around him are looking at it as a template. How can we do this without the blowback that President Yoon got? So we'll see. We'll see how this shakes out in South Korea. And of course, in six weeks we'll see how it shakes out here in the United States.

SECTION D - CRACKS IN AUTHORITY

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally Section D- Cracks in Authority. 

Maddow Disgrace of Trump nepotism, abuse of pardons far surpasses Biden's pardon of his son Part 3 - The Rachel Maddow Show - Air Date 12-2-24

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: So at the time, it was the most destructive wildfire season California had ever had. Dozens of people died, thousands of buildings burned. And then came the political fallout. Conspiracy websites started falsely blaming the fires on an undocumented immigrant, saying it [02:09:00] was, it was all arson and, and that's who started it.

The sheriff of Sonoma County, California, issued a statement debunking that false claim. But of course, This happened in 2017, the first year of the first Trump administration. And any story that blamed an undocumented immigrant for a blue state tragedy was just too good for Trump officials to pass up, no matter how unfounded it was.

And so Trump's acting director of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a man named Tom Homan, he jumped on it. He criticized the Sonoma County Sheriff, who had debunked the conspiracy theory. He said the Sheriff had left the community vulnerable to dangerous individuals. The Sheriff responded then to Tom Homan with clarity, with a pledge to take care of the people that he served.

He said, quote, ICE's misleading statement stirs fears. It stirs fear in some of our community members who are already exhausted and scared. Despite ICE's misleading statement, we'll continue to [02:10:00] protect and serve our community members. Well, now that same ICE official, Tom Homan, is going to be back. One of the first decisions Trump made after his re election was to announce that he was bringing back Tom Homan, this time to be his representative.

Border czar, whatever that means. But the resolve of California officials to stand up to Donald Trump, that is also back and in a big way. According to the Washington Post, by the end of Trump's first term in office, California had filed more than 120 lawsuits against the Trump administration. California, in Trump's first term, sued Trump over everything from immigration policy, to health care, to gun safety.

Now with Trump back, Set to return to the White House, California lawmakers today opened an emergency special session of the state legislature, specifically for the purpose of funding a new legal fight, starting a new legal fund to fight the incoming Trump administration in court. California Governor Gavin [02:11:00] Newsom has asked the state legislature to set aside 25 million for potential California state lawsuits against Trump's federal government.

California's top lawyer, State Attorney General Rob Bonte, says that he's ready to do that work. 

CLIP: We've been here before. We live through Trump 1. 0, which means we won't be flat footed come January. You can be sure that as California Attorney General, if Trump attacks your rights, I'll be there. 

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: Joining us now is Rob Bonte.

He's attorney general for the great state of California. Mr. Attorney general, thank you very much for making time to be here tonight. 

ROB BONTA: Um, to be with you, Rachel, thanks for having me. 

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: What should our viewers understand about how you're sort of strategizing for the days ahead? Uh, the end [02:12:00] of next month, Trump will be taking power in Washington.

He's, uh, talked a lot of big talk about what he wants to do on day one and what he wants to do right out of the gate. How are you thinking strategically about what? California can do to protect Californians rights and to defend some of the state's policy interests against what you're expecting from Trump.

ROB BONTA: My plan for my California Department of Justice is to hold Mr. Trump and his administration accountable if and when they violate the law. They did it repeatedly, consistently during Trump 1. 0. We. My office took him to court over 120 times. We won and prevailed a vast majority of the times because he was violating the constitution, in particular, the 10th amendment and separation of powers at time.

He was violation, uh, violating the federal, uh, law, including the administrative procedures act. Uh, he was misusing, uh, money, uh, that was budgeted for other purposes than the purpose he was seeking to use it for. We will hold him accountable. When he violates the law and based on what he has said, he would do his inner circle said he would do what [02:13:00] project 2025 indicates he will do.

We have a good sense of where he's headed on immigration on reproductive freedom on common sense, gun safety on environment. So we've been preparing and readying for weeks, months. In some cases, years, we've written briefs that are ready to press print. Uh, just need to dot the I's, cross the T's and file it in court based on the actions he has signaled and telegraphed he will take.

So, uh, we're ready. Uh, we are committed to making sure progress prevails in California, that our forward movement continues and we're not looking for a fight, but if he picks a fight with us, gets in the way of our progress here in California, We'll be ready. 

RACHEL MADDOW - HOST, THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW: This 25 million request to the legislature is obviously a big chunk of money.

It's, it's not, however, the same amount of money that was spent, um, in California. It doesn't actually match the amount that was spent by the state, uh, to bring those 120 lawsuits, those 120 challenges against the Trump administration when [02:14:00] Trump was first in office. Can I just ask you, um, What were the lessons learned off California's strategy along these lines in the first term, both in terms of spending the taxpayers money wisely, but also, um, in in acting most effectively when to act alone, when to act in concert with other states, when to get things into federal court and when to do that?

When to expect that maybe holding back on that might be the better part of valor given the constitution of the federal courts right now. What were the lessons learned from the first time that you had to do this as a state? 

ROB BONTA: Yeah, I'll first say that, um, the 25 million dollar litigation reserve, Is not the same as the 42 million that was spent over four years, but this is year one.

It's a reserve to draw on as needed, as necessary. And what we do will be fully based on and related to the actions that Mr. Trump and his administration takes. If he doesn't violate any laws, unlike he did [02:15:00] in Trump 1. 0, if he doesn't violate the constitution or federal law or misuse. Budget, there will be absolutely nothing for us to do.

We don't expect that based on what he said and what he's done in the past. So, um, there's a couple of things, uh, the return on investment of the additional funds coming to the California department of justice is huge. We were able to save California. Billions of dollars, uh, for example, in striking down the citizenship question on the 2020 U.

S. Census. Uh, our, by our accounts and estimations, it saved California billions of dollars in funds that we received based on getting a accurate count that wasn't suppressed. Uh, there were federal funds, uh, that violated the 10th Amendment because they were conditioned on, um, uh, Providing assistance to federal, uh, immigration authorities on immigration enforcement.

And those were two grants of about 30 million. We sued in court because of those unlawful conditions that violated the 10th amendment. We got those grants. So we, we have, Seeing some of the [02:16:00] patterns in the violations, um, Mr. Crump likes to do what he wants, when he wants, how he wants, regardless of the constitution, regardless of federal law and regardless of the processes in place, regardless of what the budget is supposed to be used for.

He wants to use it for what he wants to use it for. So he can't help himself. He will violate the law and it's our job to be there when he does. Um, we know that it's better to go together. We can go further when we go together, uh, than when we go alone. And so we have been preparing with Democratic Attorneys General other states across the nation, uh, New York Attorney General Letitia James, uh, others in Nevada, Illinois, Delaware, um, Connecticut, um, teaming up, preparing.

We all have different, uh, expertise, institutional knowledge. Deploying our expertise and our talent as is most effective is. Part of the game plan, there will be a lot to do. And we have a lot of members on our team to do it with. We're also working with advocates in various [02:17:00] policy spaces from immigration to reproductive freedom, common sense, gun safety, and working with them for best ideas, getting best thinking, best strategy, best litigation strategy.

So we know what courts to file in and where it's best. And so we've, we've thought it down to the team.

Trump goes off the deep end with Cabinet pick Part 3 - No Lie w Brian Tyler Cohen - Air Date 12-1-24

BRIAN TYLER COHEN - HOST, NO LIE: What about the prospect of legal protections for these career civil servants? If Donald Trump does move forward with his plan to oust them in deference to political appointees, do these people have any legal recourse?

MAX STIER: So they should. But again, if you are in a horrible job where your boss or your boss's boss is intending to try to traumatize you, you may not want to stick around to see through your legal recourse. And that legal recourse might take a very, very long time to work its way through the system.

So it's not enough is what I would say. We need to support our career civil servants. We need to make sure the rule of law is being followed and we [02:18:00] need to do our best to protect federal employees from having to go through that process. They shouldn't have to, they shouldn't be in an environment where anyone is trying to traumatize them.

It should be in an environment where people are trying to help them do their job, which is to help the American people. 

BRIAN TYLER COHEN - HOST, NO LIE: Well, do you think that this would be a little bit of a different situation? Because if you're in, if you work at a restaurant and you have a boss that comes in, a new boss that comes in, that's just like, for lack of a better phrase, just being a dick, right?

That's a different example than all of these people recognizing that Donald Trump is coming in with the express purpose of trying to traumatize them in an attempt to get them to self select out so that he can replace them with political appointees. Knowing that that's the backdrop on which he's coming in, would it be easier for them to recognize, like, the context of the situation?

Now fighting back against this, maybe it's in the form of a class action lawsuit, fighting back against this is more of a duty as opposed to just a normal business in the private sector [02:19:00] where you just don't enjoy your job. I mean, Trump is coming in and we know that he's coming in with the express intent of getting these people to leave so that they do select self select out.

MAX STIER: Right. Look, I think your point is a powerful one. It's also a lot to be asking public servants who are sacrificing all kinds of other things in order to serve the public that they need to stay in order to protect the system. I hope that we do have like, the high quality people decide that they do want to stay.

They're gonna have to make their own individual choice on this. I think the system issues you raise are important, and the reality is that they're there in order to serve the public. They're there for mission reasons and it's still the case that, for many, many, many of them, they can't, in fact, help Americans in the ways they care about by being in that job. And you can't do that any place else. 

BRIAN TYLER COHEN - HOST, NO LIE: No, I'm just, I'm curious here in terms of Trump's ability to be able to enact Schedule F, his plan for Schedule F. Can you talk about what that would [02:20:00] look like and where you think the biggest barrier to him being able to accomplish it would lie? 

MAX STIER: So I think, again, just to, one quick step back once more, and that is that we have a career, apolitical system for our civil service. Because in the 19th century, we did have a spoil system. President Jackson instituted the spoil system. Basic concept was I won the election. Therefore, I get to place people who are loyalist to me in government jobs as payoff to them. And frankly, I can then tax them so that they support my political party and on, and on, and on.

The end result was first and foremost, incompetence in government corruption, and then ultimately, 1883, the assassination of President Garfield. And that resulted in people looking up and saying, this is not the best way to run our government. You really ought to have civil servants who are there, on the basis of their oath of office to our constitution and the rule of law. For [02:21:00] 140 years, that is the system that we have had. President Trump is upending, this is not a partisan issue, he's upending 140 years of Republicans, independents, Democrats, all agreeing that this is the better way to run our government. And it is. Truth is our government does need to be reformed, but not in this way.

And that's a very important point. You asked how is Schedule F going to be implemented? What are the issues that will come up here? And what I would say that the first barrier will be the regulation that the Biden team has put in place that essentially says you cannot do Schedule F. As you noted, what a president can do, a next president can undo.

That's not true for the law, but it is for regulations. It takes a long time. You need to get public comment. You need to go through a pretty arcane process. A lot of people think it may be too difficult to process, but in this instance, it may frankly slow things down. And if you don't go through that process, you open yourself up to procedural complaints in the court, not just substantive ones.

That [02:22:00] truth is that I think that Schedule F could be attacked substantively as well. We have not seen that happen, but again, I'm worried that just the threat of this will create an outflow of really critical talent and we don't need that. 

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today, as always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at (202) 999-3991. Or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from Democracy Now!, The Brian Lehrer Show, The Dig, The Rachel Maddow Show, No Lie with Brian Taylor Cohen, Democracy Now!, The Aspen Institute , and The Thom Hartmann Program. Further details are in the show notes. Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet, Ken Brian, Ben, and Lara for their volunteer work, helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to [02:23:00] Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. 

And thanks to all those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships, . You can join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support or through our Patreon page, now at a 20% discount through the end of the year. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes. 

In addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with the link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on any and all new social media platforms you may be joining these days during the X-odus. So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from bestoftheleft.com. 

Air Date 12/10/2024

Full Notes Page

Download PDF

Audio-Synced Transcript

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast. In a moment of darkness, it's important to not only look for a light, but also to understand how to create your own. Today, we're exploring the philosophy of tragic optimism, the differing frameworks of 'freedom from' and 'freedom to', and the nature of the slow progress of democracy, but also the organizing strategies that are themselves the best coping mechanisms and path to progress.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes includes Dasia Sade, Millennials are Killing Capitalism, Why, America?, The Agenda, and Unf*cking the Republic. Then in the additional deeper dives half the show, there'll be more in just two sections today: Section A: Organizing, and Section B: Coping.

The Tragic Optimist's Guide to Surviving Capitalistic Nihilism - Dasia Sade Part 1 - Air Date 11-29-24

DASIA SADE - HOST, DASIA SADE: Capitalistic Nihilism is that creeping sense of disillusionment when you realize that your life, your value, your sense of [00:01:00] self has been reduced to transactions. It's that feeling that no matter how much you work or how many things you acquire, there's always going to be something that is deeply missing. It's a hollowness the material success cannot fill. We see it all around us. We see it in the endless amount of ads. We see it in "The Grind." We see it in the obsession with hustle culture or pushing for the next paycheck. Or you can feel it in that emptiness that comes after yet another purchase that was supposed to make everything better but it didn't. This isn't just a feeling, it's a symptom of a system that prioritizes profit and productivity over human well being.

A lot of people have been sold the idea that fulfillment comes through what we can buy, or what we can achieve, but the more that we try to fill that void, the larger it becomes. Let's take Fight Club, for example. Fight Club serves as a pop culture mirror into this experience. The main character shares how his life is a series of consumer choices and career accomplishments, but none of it makes him happy.

FIGHT CLUB: [00:02:00] Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes. Working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don't need. 

DASIA SADE - HOST, DASIA SADE: In his disillusionment, he becomes consumed by a desire to break free from that very system that traps him by descending into violence. This is Capitalistic Nihilism in its most raw form. It's the realization that the system was not designed to fulfill us, but rather to keep us endlessly chasing a carrot that's always out of reach.

A very brief history. Capitalistic Nihilism isn't new. So we're going back to the industrial revolution and this is when people were first reduced to mere instruments of labor on a mass scale. Happened very much before then but this is the first time on like a mass scale driven by machinery. We're starting to see more and more documentation of the connection between people and their work beginning to fray as workers were turned into cogs in the industrial machine.

And so no longer was work a source of identity or a source of pride. Instead, it became something that stripped people of their humanity. This alienation, as writers like Dostoevsky and [00:03:00] Nietzsche pointed out, started to breed a profound sense of purposelessness, a nihilism that questioned if any of it mattered if life was only reduced to production and consumption.

Later on in America, James Baldwin took this critique further, highlighting how capitalism didn't just dehumanize people through labor, but also through the racial structures It upheld. And so for Black Americans who had long been stripped of their humanity through chattel slavery, the system was particularly brutal. Not only did it deny them human rights, but it also excluded them economically. Baldwin's thoughts on capitalism and race were pretty clear and striking, but if you actually pay close attention, his ideas go beyond just race. His critique of the American Dream wasn't just about the ways in which Black Americans were shut out of the promise. It was also a warning to the entire nation, to anyone who would listen, about the fragility and emptiness of that very dream. 

JAMES BALDWIN: It's been a breakdown trail of the social contract in Western life. And people are grabbing for things, and holding on to what they think they can get, [00:04:00] and stepping all over their neighbors because they are hammock stricken.

HOST: What, comforting themselves with material things? Saying simple... 

JAMES BALDWIN: Yes. But when people do that, something is beginning to crack. People hoard all this because they don't have anything else, but they don't really believe in it. 

DASIA SADE - HOST, DASIA SADE: Baldwin understood something that the rest of America is only starting to wake up to now, and it's the reality that capitalism's, dehumanizing tendencies are not confined by race. Though race certainly sharpens the impact. When I think of his words, it comes as a great shock to discover that the flag to which you have pledged your allegiance has not pledged allegiance to you. Now, if you choose to listen, it's very easy to see that these words don't just speak to the Black experience, but to the disillusionment that so many are beginning to feel today.

The system was never built for human fulfillment, and now, more people, across all backgrounds, are starting to realize this. And the alienation and despair that Baldwin spoke of in the context of Black life under capitalism are now being felt more broadly as the system fails to [00:05:00] deliver on its promises to everyone.

We see this in the growing disillusionment with work as more people in American society question the value of grinding themselves down in jobs that offer little to no return, especially since the pandemic. Which I personally feel forced them to sit still for a lot longer than most people had for the very first time.

And we started to see that disillusionment again in the rise of quiet quitting, the rejection of hustle culture, where people are now starting to push back against the idea that their worth is directly tied to their productivity. It's fairly clear that Baldwin's critique of America was always bigger than race.

It was a critique of a society that defined success in terms of material wealth while leaving its citizens spiritually and emotionally bankrupt. And so as America wakes up to the reality that the pursuit of profits has hollowed out which really matters; connection, purpose, and fulfillment, we're confronting that same nihilism that James Baldwin warned us about.

The system wasn't built to serve us, but to exploit us. And the American Dream, though once it was very aspirational, it now feels like an illusion. What's [00:06:00] different today is that this disillusionment, once confined to the margins and marginalized groups, is spreading to the center.

Where Do We Go From Here? Featuring Kali Akuno - Millennials Are Killing Capitalism - Air Date 11-10-24

KALI AKUNO: I think we need to number one, be honest that, the type of preparation that was required did not happen. That doesn't mean that some folks here or there, that I know, or you may know, or others in the audience, haven't gotten trained, haven't been doing mutual aid, haven't been doing, trying to build some institutions, food production, some of the things that were mentioned in that last piece. Now, I know that had been going on, had been going on before that warning, just a lot of comrades with a particular political orientations have been doing that. But the piece I'm speaking to is that, the organizing within our communities were to have a political resonance. And for folks to understand the [00:07:00] broad necessity of like, well, why food sovereignty is necessary, why local food production is necessary, why people need to be engaged in it, why people need to convert their front yards, their backyards, things on top of your roof, if you live in New York or someplace like that. That didn't really happen. There was time and opportunity, but it didn't happen. And so one of our first tasks is to just, we need to break this in phases. Let me say that off the top as well. We need to break some of our response in phases. So as of now. We got two months, a legitimate two months before the actual official reigns get passed over to Donald Trump and to, to the Congress. They're already sitting in the Supreme Court. So you got two months to gear up, start making some connections, start building some kind of alliances. We got two months for the initial kind of preparation. [00:08:00] That needs to happen. And a couple of things I think, in addition to all of the points around self defense, mutual aid, low scale kind of autonomous production, all those things people need to be engaged in right now. Right? And start trying to map that out. But the most important and critical thing is starting to get ourselves prepared. For the repression that is going to come. And that will probably come in some ways. If we listen to what they said, and take them seriously, which I do, and which, I've been encouraging folks to take them seriously, about what their plans are and what, how they're going to execute them.

We need to gear up as much legally as we possibly can with some understanding that the law is not going to protect us. You're just kind of trying to use that as a shield ultimately [00:09:00] to, to like buy some time and to make a certain set of moves, that whatever democratic space exists, and that's going to change over time. Let me state that, let me back up a little bit. Cause I think there's a particular orientation that I think folks have to have, to kind of cast away some illusions. Because that's going to be important, to just be very clear about what the enemy is going to do, what they are prepared to do and, how some aspects of what they will do.

So I want folks number one to understand Trump has a mandate. He has a mandate. Now, he barely won more votes than he got the last time, but he won the majority, won the popular vote. He won the House and the Senate. [00:10:00] So they have a mandate from this society and how it plays the game of constructing social power, social and political power. They have a mandate and they are going to use it, understand that. Within that mandate, I would say this is point number two: Do not anticipate or plan on there being another kind of real election cycle, like folks need to jettison that. And I'm already hearing all the liberal pundits around what the Democrats need to do or what a third party needs to do or how we need to get it organized to win the next election or be better prepared. And you're making assumptions without listening to what these, some of these folks have actually said, who are now in a position to execute it, that [00:11:00] there will continue to be some semblance of the bourgeois order as we understand it, right? And we have experienced it for all of our lives to this point, those of us here in the United States anyway.

 Again, I hope I proved to a degree to be wrong, but basically, Trump and his team have said that they were going to shred the constitution. And many times in various different ways, the folks in the House have said pretty much the same thing. The Senate has been a little bit more tight lipped, the members there. And the Supreme Court has made it clear they're going to interpret the constitution in a way that is going to affect basically minority rule, white minority rule, for the future. So they may still make some reference to that as a body, [00:12:00] that gives them some legitimacy. But like the Bible has a million interpretations, they're going to interpret the way they want to interpret it, and they're going to execute power in a way that they see fit to maintain control and build the social order that they want. 

How To Fight Fascism In America - Why, America? with Leeja Miller - Air Date 11-20-24

LEEJA MILLER - HOST, WHY, AMERICA?: Republicans claim there is leftist bias in all levels of government, the media, and higher education. While I think the leftist bias they've been screaming about definitely isn't a concerted effort by anyone to align the talking points or values espoused by think tanks or universities, but is instead just natural conclusions a majority of people come to when they're taught critical thinking skills, I say, okay. They already think there's a huge conspiracy promoting leftist bias. Why not lean into that and weaponize that bias to actually do something good for a change? Sure, they have billionaires, but we already have the major apparati, because the reality is that while there is a wide range of viewpoints that fall left of center, pretty much all of established experts, professional associations, think tanks, and universities, [00:13:00] as well as every other similar country in the world, fall to the left of the fascism Trump is promoting.

So it's time to coordinate. And that coordination, based on what conservatives have been doing for the last five decades, should have five prongs: universities, think tanks, the media, national lawmakers, and local government. And each prong has its own job. 

Universities must promote and publish academics and academic thought that espouses ideals in line with the goals of democracy and government's duty to provide for its citizens. This happens in every educational department, but especially in economics, because people really take that s-- seriously. Promote economists who espouse economic theories that go against the established neoliberal libertarian free market bulls-t. Because in the 40 years since Reaganomics, we can tell that s-t isn't working for 99 percent of us.

Promote economists whose theories espouse ideals that would benefit the 99%. Bring them in as speakers, publish their articles, hire them and give them tenure, allow them to mentor and inspire upcoming [00:14:00] generations. Promote law professors who teach creative lawyering and who espouse theories that promote our end goals of greater democracy and a government that provides for its people.

Bring them in as speakers. Publish their articles. Hire them and give them tenure. Allow them to mentor and inspire upcoming generations.

Think tanks, a category into which I think nonprofits generally can be included, provide jobs and funding for those academics and lend their work greater legitimacy by publishing their reports and pushing them as experts to the rest of society.

These think tanks should push their experts to the media, to talk at universities, to speak before Congress and local government bodies, and to not be afraid to act as lobbyists for their work. These experts should be in the ears of every lawmaker. They should be making public appearances, not just hiding in back rooms analyzing research. Think tanks should be pushing the work of the experts coming out of the universities that espouse the theories and ideals of democracy and government that provides for its people. There should be a constant revolving door [00:15:00] between Washington, D. C. and these think tanks and universities, so those with expertise are advising elected officials, writing policy and laws, becoming elected officials, and building a strong network of people within all of those spheres who believe in these ideals.

They should have a team of communications experts within these think tanks and nonprofits that can package this work in-house and push it to a wider audience. And those communications people should also work with the media. The media should be in constant contact with these think tanks and nonprofits, and with the experts working at the university level to rely on that expertise for their reporting.

They should report on the research coming out of these think tanks. They should write thought pieces about the findings. They should publish op-eds from these think tank and university experts. They should cite to them, wherever possible. 

More news media need to be willing to stand up to far right, hateful ideology; to refuse to give airtime to fascist, right wing bull-- coming out of these think tanks and universities being funded by [00:16:00] billionaires; to stop fearing the accusation of bias -- that terror of being called biased is what got us here in the first place. 

The right funded think tanks and experts to promote their twisted ideology and then screamed bias when the news media didn't legitimize their work with coverage. And so they were terrorized into giving equal coverage and therefore legitimacy to the billionaire-funded, weakly researched, often debunked free market ideology being spewed from these right wing sources. This means fact checking Trump at every turn. It means not legitimizing him or the people he surrounds himself with or right wing experts by presenting what they say as though it has any merit.

This also means supporting and building news organizations with an explicitly left-leaning bias. People on the right have no qualms about presenting Fox News as fair and balanced, despite the fact that, as we discussed on Monday, from the very beginning it was founded to be explicitly right wing and political.

People to the left of Fox News are terrified of appearing biased, and there absolutely does [00:17:00] need to be journalistic standards of fact checking and integrity, but expressly left-leaning media needs to be prioritized as well. This needs to happen in every form: written, social media, video, podcast, talk radio.

One can be a critical thinker and biased at the same time. And our feverish obsession with remaining unbiased, or only consuming that which we perceive is unbiased, means that we've lulled ourselves into the false sense that humans are capable of being unbiased. We are all adding our own personal spin to the stories we tell, whether we have an audience of millions, or an audience of one. Media literacy requires that we reckon with that, instead of trying to place our faith in the idea that there is one beacon of unbiased truth out there. That's not really how life works, and that's not the reality we're living in. Everything has a spin, and the right wing media landscape spin is winning. 

The federal government, lawmakers, and federal workers, and everyone in between needs to be infiltrated by people left of Trump. This means prosecutors who won't go [00:18:00] after immigrants or seek harsh penalties, Congress members who are products of the university and think tank system, willing to take risks to push the agenda through creative law writing, social media PR, and constant contact with the media, and who have strong connections with those universities and think tanks.

This means government lawyers seeking out those loopholes that Jon Stewart talked about and figuring out creative and risky ways to exploit those loopholes. Again, not to the detriment of democracy, but in support of it. Democrats and independents willing to speak truth to power, to get a little rowdy, and to play a little bit dirty.

And local government is where a lot of us can really f-- it up. This is where the experimental laws can be written and tested. Laws that use creative tactics to promote left leaning causes, like ending voter suppression, reversing gerrymandering, promoting non winner-takes-all voting systems, enshrining civil rights, providing universal basic income, graduated taxation, making housing affordable and available, et cetera, et cetera.

These laws can be ones that have never [00:19:00] been tried, but also established tactics, like in the case of increasing voter enfranchisement, universal registration, automatic mail ballots, and other initiatives that make voting as easy as possible. 

Your role in this depends on who you are and what your skills are. Check out my episode from a few weeks ago about how to get involved in local government for more information, but the key is to pinpoint your skills. For me, one of my skills is communication and also being absolutely f--ing annoying. I noticed a fence went up under an overpass near my house that displaced some unhoused folks that don't seem to have been provided any services or alternatives for shelter. So I emailed the Minnesota Department of Transportation, my city council person, and my state house representative, asking why my tax dollars were being wasted on a fence that didn't address the underlying issue of lack of affordable housing. The Department of Transportation email was forwarded with the message, "Can one of you deal with this?" Yeah, I'm going to be a person that my local government has to deal with. Make a fuss. Run for office. Learn the law and get involved with local government wherever you think you [00:20:00] can best f-k up through creative law writing. Take risks. Be willing to make people annoyed at you. Be a little mean. For fun.

The widening gender gap means a growing portion of the left is made up of women. Women who have been socialized to be as likable as possible. Do whatever you can to break yourself of that habit. Join a coven, bathe naked in a river, scream your lungs out at the moon, shave your head, I don't know, whatever speaks to you.

Now is not the time to be likable. Now is the time to be annoying as f-k for the good of your community and your country. White ladies, take your "I'd like to talk to the manager" energy and channel it towards annoying your elected officials to the breaking point so they pass meaningful progressive change that, again, moves the needle towards our shared goals of protecting democracy and providing for all our neighbors.

White men, take your mansplaining straight to your city council or your state representatives and use your place in society to advocate for progressive change. Be annoying. 

And your role doesn't have to just be annoying, concerned citizen. We need everyone, not just leftists and progressive, [00:21:00] but everyone who doesn't agree with the direction Trump is taking this country to look inward at the skills they possess and consider how those might best be used to the benefit of this five-pronged approach. What are you good at? And what do you enjoy doing? That's called your zone of genius, not just something you're good at, but something you thrive at. How can that be used to f-- Trump up? 

Like I said, I love communicating via these videos, providing information, and hopefully inspiration, and also being annoying as f-k. That lends itself well to making these videos and bugging my representatives. Maybe your one true love is getting into the streets and screaming; that's great. Maybe you've got a journalism degree. How can you use that? Maybe you're amazing at research. How can you spin that? Maybe you're great with computers. Someone hacked the Gates report and got their hands on some information that hasn't been leaked yet. I'm not advocating for breaking the law; I'm just saying that's an interesting use of a skill. Maybe you love talking to people and advocating for them. Perhaps it's time to consider running for local office or getting a law or public policy degree.

Maybe you're incredibly creative. There are so many things [00:22:00] creatives can do in these trying times. Look to other creatives throughout history to get inspiration for how to speak truth to power, or inspire others through your art. Or maybe lend your artistic skills to a cause you care deeply about. 

Maybe you're a master gardener and you can provide sustenance for your community.

Like, truly, what do you thrive at? And how can that be used in favor of one of these five prongs of this movement? Focus on that. Let me go crazy reading the news every day and distilling it down for you. I'm here for that. 

In fact, I just launched a Friday newsletter. It's called, Why America? The Newsletter, and you can sign up for it at the link in the description. Every Friday, I'll highlight a story I've been thinking about, as well as other headlines I'm watching this week. It's free, truly just offering it as an additional service in these trying times to help you avoid burnout and overwhelm. 

So, what can you do?

It doesn't have to be a major career change, it can be a small act of resistance every day, but coordinating those acts of resistance towards a common goal will make all of our work that much more effective. 

Timothy Snyder: Is Freedom Misunderstood? - The Agenda - Air Date 10-9-24

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: This notion of [00:23:00] positive versus negative freedom will be a new idea to many people watching or listening right now. So what's the diff? 

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. Negative freedom is the idea that it's me against the world. That the only problem is the world, there's a barrier out there. And the dramatic images, which of course come from history and from real experience, are the concentration camp, the foreign occupation, the barbed wire, the wall.

And of course, it's right that sometimes one has to resist. But at the same time, that's not enough for freedom. So even when the walls come down, there's still the question of who you are. In fact, the only reason why the wall is a bad thing is because it's holding you back. And so freedom from, which is where most people stop thinking about freedom, is really just a part of freedom to.

Getting the barriers out of the way is just the first step towards creating the conditions where you and I and everybody else can actually say, What do we really like? What do we really care about? What do we really love? What do we value? How do we want to change the world? That's freedom in the positive sense.

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: [00:24:00] Why do you think it's important to make the distinction? 

TIMOTHY SNYDER: First of all, I'm doing a very old fashioned thing here, I'm trying to get it right. I'm trying to get it right. I'm not saying what people say about freedom, I'm not talking about how the word is used, I'm trying to say what it in fact is. And I deeply believe that it is the ability to choose among the good things.

There are good things in the world. When we're in a condition or a state to choose among them, then we're free. But the political answer is, if you only believe that freedom is negative, you'll get persuaded that the government is only your opponent, you'll shrink the government, and the government will end up not being able to do precisely the things that it needs to do to help people grow up to be free.

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: Defining freedom is a different ambition, you say, from defending freedom. How so? 

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Well, in my experience, the one ends up leading to the other. So I wrote a little pamphlet called On Tyranny, which I think we might have talked about a while ago-- 

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: We did indeed, yes. And it was more than a pamphlet. That was a book.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Okay, it was a pamphlet in the honorable sense of the word.

 -- where [00:25:00] I was trying to tell people what good practices would be to defend what we have. 

But people rightfully asked, well, what is it that we have? And I think the answer is that freedom isn't something in the end that you can only defend. You have to express it, create it, realize it, spread it, right? 

And so, the reason why I think we need a book like this, or the reason why we have to think about freedom positively, is we have to get out of the box of just defending things and think instead of opening up a political future.

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: You've got it defined here in five different ways, five aspects of freedom, and I'll just list them here. Sure. Sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality, solidarity. In your view, do all five need to be present for a society to truly be free? 

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. So the way the book is set up -- this would take one step back if I could. In the beginning I say what I think freedom is, which is there are good things in the world, they conflict, you have to think about them over the course of a life as you make decisions, you create [00:26:00] character, freedom's positive that way. But it's also positive politically, because we have to work together to create the conditions where people could have that kind of life. 

The things that you mentioned: the sovereignty, unpredictability, the mobility, the factuality, the solidarity, those are the places where the ideas meet the politics, where real life meets the ideas, and we need as much of all of those things as possible, and also in order.

So by sovereignty, I mean the sovereignty of the person, because I think when we talk about freedom, we have to not assume that everybody is already an adult with property and has their life together, we have to think instead about a baby crying. We have to think, what are the things we have to do from the beginning so that that child has a chance to be sovereign, that child has a chance to have the ability to be free.

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: You had a very funny way of describing that in the book, actually, where you say, babies are not born free, they're born hooked up to an umbilical cord and covered in their mother's blood. That's a pretty stark way of looking at it. But you're right. 

TIMOTHY SNYDER: But it's the only way of looking at it, Steve. It's the only way of looking at it. And our whole conversation about freedom abstracts away from that. We assume, [00:27:00] in the tradition of writing in English about freedom, we're assuming that there is essentially a Victorian age British gentleman with a plantation and perhaps some servants or slaves in the background. That's already built into the picture. We have to not do that. We have to be serious, which means thinking about the way life actually happens, from birth to death and all the adventures in between.

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: As we, in Canada, look at your country, we assume you are obsessed with it, and we also assume that you think you have it better than anybody in the world. And it may come as a surprise to some of our viewers and listeners that you actually don't think that. So let's do another excerpt from the book here.

"By no meaningful index are Americans today among the freest peoples of the world," you write. "An American organization, Freedom House, measures freedom by the criteria Americans prefer: civil and political liberties. Year after year, about 50 countries -- 50! -- do better than us on these measures. Our northern neighbor, Canada, stands far above us. The countries where people tend to think of freedom [00:28:00] as freedom to are doing better by our own measures, which tend to focus on freedom from." Okay, here we are again. Let's revisit this again. Like, freedom to and freedom from. Do we understand these concepts well enough? 

TIMOTHY SNYDER: So, first of all, congratulations on getting one of the Canada references into the show.

STEVE PAIKIN - HOST, THE AGENDA: Just doing my job, sir.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: But the serious point is, if you only insist on freedom from, then you're going to get trapped. It's not just that you're not going to think about vacation, parental leave, free kindergarten, child care, in terms of freedom. Which you should do. It's also that in shrinking the government, you're gonna create space for oligarchs, because power abhors a vacuum. So other people will rush in. Social media platforms will rush in. They'll control the conversation about freedom. 

So two things go very wrong if you're only thinking about freedom negatively. If you think about it positively, then you have a chance for children to grow up in a situation where they can learn to think for themselves, control their emotions, have relationships, and have a better [00:29:00] chance at freedom.

And so the funny thing is that if you talk about freedom too much And in the wrong way, you end up boxing yourself in. You end up never thinking about it, which is, I'm afraid, the American condition too much of the time. And countries like Norway, or I'll say it, Canada, where folks talk less about freedom, may have laid the conditions better to actually live free lives.

Neoliberalism Borrowed From Lenin, Why Can’t We? - Unf*cking The Republic - Air Date 11-22-24

MAX - HOST, UNF*CKING THE REPUBLIC: The bad guys today—people think it's these cabinet choices—but it's people like Russell Vought, Johnny McEntee, Paul Danz, Kevin Hassett, Rich Grenell, Eldridge Colby, Doug Wilson, Farris Wilkes. Nate Fisher, Mark Meckler, Bruce Sanborn, John Eastman, Barry Seid, Stephen Moore, James Pearson, Cleta Mitchell, Richard Graber.

Does anybody know who the fuck these people are? Because I'll tell you this much, they are the most influential people in America right now and nobody knows who the fuck they are. And I'm only just getting to know them. I know their [00:30:00] work. I know their work like the back of my fucking hand, but I don't know these people. Mostly men. Mostly White men. I don't know these White men. But we all need to know who they are. 

Now, there's information out there on them, but it's their work that lets you know what their angle is. They all sit on fancy boards and they all come from fancy companies and they all speak at conferences. Or they don't speak at conferences, but they fund the conferences and they're listed as a donor and they have their name on museum walls and hospital walls, and they belong to country clubs. But what they all have in common is they are part of this network of think tanks and foundations that funnel billions and billions and billions of dollars into tearing down our legal system, our education system, our culture, our media—everything. All of those so called pillars that we talked about; the human pillars of education, law, religion, [00:31:00] media, science, healthcare; the structural pillars like the economy, labor, foreign policy, energy, transportation; all feeding into the ultimate pillar that's holding this whole thing together and will begin to crumble more earnestly, and that is the environment.

But all of those pillars, they have a game plan. And these are the men, these are the names that we need to name. And I don't know how to get it out to the public in a way that holds them accountable for this. I know the names of their foundations: Protect Our Kids, Rockbridge, the venture capital company that funds all of the foundations and actually funds businesses, takes the profits from those businesses just to put them into other non profits that do nefarious things, building Christian networks of schools that are highly, highly profitable and really, really destructive.

Building out companies like Palantir that take our data and our information and weaponize that information back against us, but also participates in national security. The fact that all the satellites that we need to communicate [00:32:00] with, the fact that all the satellites that Ukraine needs to position their weapons against the Russian invasion, these are all owned by Elon Musk.

I mean, this guy was already so much a part of our government, it's amazing he didn't already have a fucking cabinet position. But he is the shadow government that we're talking about because we've given these contracts away. The fact that we do have private prison companies whose stocks exploded the minute Trump won, because we're going to create detention facilities to keep people in. Things like the Bradley foundation, which is responsible for Christian fundamentalism and taking over the curriculum in our public schools. And they're really smart because they go after individual specific states. You know where they go after? Swing states. That's where they go after because they knew if I might not get you this election, but I'm going to indoctrinate your kids and your kids are going to grow up and vote and they're going to vote the way that I want them to vote within just a couple of election cycles.

That's how fucking smart and dedicated they are to this. Things like the Noble Foundation, the John Olin Foundation, Donors Trust, the William [00:33:00] Simon Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, the Philanthropy Roundtable, the Badger Institute. And then there's the think tanks: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Jack Miller Center for Teaching America's Founding Principles in History. We know Heritage, Mercatus, Cato, Conservative Partnership Institute, the Alma Center, ALEC, American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. They also have a focus on places like Wisconsin and Ohio. 

But the one thing that they all have in common is that they all have a conservative, right wing, Christian, fundamentalist value set. And their boards of directors are filled by those names that you don't know, that I'm just learning, that I mentioned before and their money comes from just a handful of billionaires and companies that were sold decades and generations ago that gained wealth over trusts over time. 

I was rereading Piketty this weekend talking about the capital return on [00:34:00] foundations and trusts over time is somewhere between eight and a half and ten percent over decades, as opposed to most people's returns, which is in the two to 5 percent and also periodically wiped out. The more money you have, the more money you can put at risk. And so the downturns for people that have foundations in generational wealth are actually a good thing because they can put X amount of dollars to risk, whereas most people can't put that kind of money to risk and their returns are 8 to 10 percent over time tracked. That's why they pulled away from the rest of us. So if you invest $10, you're going to get 2 percent back on that over time. And in your best case scenario, assuming you haven't been wiped out by student debt or fucking healthcare debt, the foundations and the people that really accumulated billions of billions of dollars are starting with a billion dollars and they're making 8 to 10 percent over time.

So what do you think happens to that money? It flows back into the system, into funding places like this that wind up influencing policies that we now live with. [00:35:00] Trump is not the end result of this thing. He's the symptom that we get from pure corrupting of the system. And these are the names, the institutions, and the people behind it.

How do we tell this fucking story? Because they have places like American Spectator, or the Daily Wire, the City Journal, all of talk radio with people like Sinclair Broadcasting, Christian film production companies, Keiton Key Media is one of them. They just produce radical right wing Christian videos. Kirk Cameron's fucking production company. PragerU. Some of these are being now pulled into the actual curriculum of private Christian schools in certain areas, and when they get rid of the Department of Education, which they're going to try and do, they're going to bring these down into the state level curriculum and our kids are literally going to be learning creationism. They're going to be learning about Jesus Christ in the fucking classroom. They're not going to allow anything taught about diversity, about Islam, about Judaism, about [00:36:00] countercultures, anything. They're going to be taught about anything. They're not even going to learn American history. They're just going to learn the regular history. 

One of these papers that I read from Pastor Doug Wilson was about how they infused all of their schools in Ohio with a doctrine that said the best thing that happened to Black people in this country was slavery because it was in partnership with White people and it's the best that they ever lived. If you heard that idea circulating, through the last election cycle, that's where it fucking came from and they started that shit in the 70s. That's how deeply Indoctrinated it is and you are not conspiratorial to understand that it all started with a handful of people that created a Leninist vanguard, attached themselves to money, saying that they can set that capital free so they can eventually take over the world and destroy the government.

That was their aim. So, what do we do? How do we counter that? We counter it through [00:37:00] knowledge. We counter that through language, by naming names, but by also getting really organized. And this is my big lesson, that I want everybody to really understand and to ingest: is that, similar to them, yes, it's going to take a long time, but similar to the way that they looked at it, these revolutionary insights, so long as we have the right people attaching themselves to the right causes can be pulled off even if it's the smallest group possible. You can be part of that vanguard by listening, by learning, by studying. And over this next several year period, by being an upstander, and protecting the people that the system is going to come after. Because, yes, they're trying to distract you, but they're going to distract you by destroying lives in the process. 

So, long story fucking short, what I'm doing right now—and I don't know what [00:38:00] form our episodes are going to take over the next few months as a result of that —is I'm going back to the beginning. There's so many things that I learned along the way that I've forgotten. But it's all right there. And I want to tell this story more cogently, more accessibly, more straightforward, by showing you how they did it. Because we've been unraveling the mystery. I've been learning as we've been going. Together. Now we kind of know. 

So, Kurt Anderson's Evil Geniuses. It's a great book. Dark Money by Jane Mayer. Democracy in Chains by Nancy McClain. They've all got a different story. Piece of the puzzle, but those pieces are really important. And then there's the work that's been done by groups like ProPublica or a number of other institutes out there that track the partisan nature of these organizations and their funding sources.

We kind of know who these people are and there's profiles on all of them. And you can look up their [00:39:00] 990s in GuideStar, and you could put all the money together. You can follow the money. You can follow the sources. You can follow the ideology. I just feel like the story needs to be told in a way that we can retell it to the people that need this information to take over the system.

The Tragic Optimist's Guide to Surviving Capitalistic Nihilism - Dasia Sade Part 2 - Air Date 11-29-24

DASIA SADE - HOST, DASIA SADE: In the face of this systemic disillusionment, I offer you an alternative philosophical framework as a possible antidote to the chaos: tragic optimism.

The tragic optimist's perspective, finding meaning in pain, joy, and impermanence. Life is suffering. Hear me out. Hear me out. Hear me out. Hear me out. Life is suffering. But life isn't only suffering. In the chaos of life where suffering is inevitable, and the world often feels indifferent to our struggles, Tragic optimism offers a powerful way to face the darkness without losing hope.

This philosophy, rooted in the works of thinkers like Viktor Frankl, teaches us that meaning can be found in even the [00:40:00] most difficult circumstances. Yet, to fully grasp tragic optimism, we must also look back to James Baldwin, who understood the deep relationship between pain and transformation. Baldwin believed that our suffering, far from being something to avoid, was something to be used.

Something that could be used to illuminate truths, to fuel growth, and to ultimately find liberation. It was Baldwin who told us, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that's not what's important. What's important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. So with that being said, let us explore the pillars of tragic optimism while also getting clear on the difference between necessary and unnecessary suffering.

We'll also touch on the importance of embracing impermanence. Embracing pain is a teacher. [00:41:00] 

Tragic optimism: 

Tragic optimism is a philosophy, unlike toxic positivity, okay? It doesn't ask us to push away our pain or ignore it. Instead, it encourages us to acknowledge suffering as an integral part of life while still holding space for hope and growth.

This idea was popularized by Viktor Frankl, who after surviving the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp, argued that even in the darkest of times, we have the power to find meaning in our suffering. He believed that while we cannot control our circumstances, we can control our response to them. James Baldwin wrote extensively about how pain can be a source of understanding and personal power.

In his essay, The Fire Next Time, he says, "you think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world". But then you read, this shows us that pain is not something to be avoided or ignored but embraced and understood. It's what connects us to being human. And he believed that through acknowledging the pain, not running and using our pain, we can [00:42:00] transcend it.

He continued on, "you must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people's pain. And insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it. And then hopefully it works the other way around too. Insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you suffer less".

It's probably really easy to tell by now, but Frankl and Baldwin have long been two of my favorite proponents of the tragic optimism perspective. And I've kind of weaved that throughout my own life because they highlight a critical component of tragic optimism, and it's that suffering is inevitable, but it can be meaningful if we choose to engage with it constructively. And probably what I want most people to take away from this video is that nihilism and cynicism in the face of suffering or tragedy is like the downhill flow of water. It's the easiest, most natural, the next in line thing to do. And no one would blame you, if that's [00:43:00] what you chose to do when it comes to navigating your very short time here on this rock, no one would blame you.

But I think the most important aspect to understand is the reality that it is a choice, nonetheless. You still choose that. And should you find yourself making that choice? My very next question would be how is that working out for you? Balancing realism and hope and the difference between necessary and unnecessary suffering.

So one of the key pillars of tragic optimism is knowing the difference between necessary and unnecessary suffering. Necessary suffering is suffering that is going to be required for growth and unnecessary suffering is something that is self inflicted. In Baldwin's work he often speaks of the necessity of facing uncomfortable truths, particularly about race, identity, power, status, health, as a means to personal and societal transformation. There are things in our lives that are inescapable, meaning as a human being on this planet you will deal with them. No one gets out of this. [00:44:00] There is no cheat code or anything like that. You will go through it. So these are things like grieving, the loss of a loved one, taking care of an aging parent, the emotional pain of ending a relationship, personal failure, sickness, death. These are components of necessary suffering. He argued that the only way to heal from the wounds was to confront them head on, no matter how painful the process might be.

This is necessary suffering, the kind of suffering that leads to growth and liberation. However, on the other hand, unnecessary suffering occurs when we resist reality or we refuse to accept life's inherent uncertainties. Missing out on a fun time to study for your bar exam. Is necessary suffering. Giving yourself an anxiety attack leading up to the bar exam because you chose not to study for said exam would be unnecessary suffering. A cheat code to figure is this necessary or unnecessary suffering is if you're suffering and you were to stop doing something like going back to an abusive ex or [00:45:00] eating after 11 p. m. and the suffering that you're experiencing eventually stops, you're probably inviting unnecessary suffering into your life. Tragic optimism teaches us that while suffering is inevitable, not all suffering is productive. And the only way to navigate life is knowing the difference so that when you are inevitably confronted with necessary suffering, you can face it forthrightly instead of being distracted or having additional stress piled on by unnecessary suffering, too.

I went to a 10 day silent retreat and you'd be surprised at what you can hear in the silence, but something that I learned that has shifted my perspective a lot is how we as humans tend to exist in two states, craving or aversion. We're either craving an outcome or craving something we don't have, or we're avoiding something.

We're avoiding Doing something which places is too far outside of ourself by craving something we're probably living in the past craving a time [00:46:00] that we cannot have or craving something in the future or we're avoiding existing in the present, something that we need to address or do. And when we're bouncing in between these two states, we are in our own personal hell.

For example, the pain of trying to maintain an illusion, whether it's the illusion of control, the illusion of something lasting forever, or the illusion of a life free from any hardship whatsoever, it just leads to more suffering. And Baldwin understood this deeply, noting that much of the pain in the world comes from denying the truths that are too painful to face.

JAMES BALDWIN: Otherwise, of course you're gonna despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you gotta remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that [00:47:00] monster. You could be that cop.

And you're deciding yourself not to be. 

DASIA SADE - HOST, DASIA SADE: Running from reality doesn't shield us from suffering. It just prolongs it. In contrast, facing suffering directly allows us to discern what is within our control and what isn't. What suffering is necessary for growth and what suffering we can let go of. That while we cannot escape hardship, we can escape the suffering that comes from our refusal to accept reality.

The path of tragic optimism asks us to engage with necessary suffering, to allow it to shape and refine us, and to let go of unnecessary pain that we're, that we create by clinging to illusions of permanence or control or delusions of grandeur or how we feel things should be. Impermanence and the importance of not running.

Another key aspect of tragic optimism is the understanding of impermanence. The idea that nothing lasts forever. For Baldwin and Frankl alike, the [00:48:00] knowledge of life's impermanence was not something to fear, but something to embrace. It's through this lens that we can better navigate both suffering and happiness, knowing that neither of them will last forever.

Running from this reality keeps us trapped in that space of craving and aversion. Facing it allows us to grow and move forward. This understanding of impermanence frees us from the fear of loss by allowing us to experience life fully without clinging to any moment. Suffering, like joy, is impermanent.

Nothing lasts forever.

Note from the Editor

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Dasia Sade starting and ending the segment with her analysis of tragic optimism. Millennials are Killing Capitalism discussed the need to get prepared for the coming years. Leeja Miller on Why, America? laid out a plan to coordinate progressive action for change. The Agenda spoke with Timothy Snyder about the concepts of 'freedom from' and 'freedom to'. And Unf*cking the Republic described the right wing [00:49:00] change-makers working to make the world worse for the rest of us. And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dives section, but first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring their production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics. And, you know, now I'm a little late mentioning this as we approach the middle of December, but we have once again launched our winter sale on memberships, which I hear make a great gift. Discounts and gifting are available both on our site and now on Patreon as well. So, whichever you think is a better fit for either yourself or your giftee, act accordingly. There are, of course, all of the relevant links in the show notes, or just go to bestoftheleft.com/support. 

Today's episode and, you know, frankly, the subtext of most episodes these days is that the way forward is together. It's our belief that sticking together and staying engaged is actually the best way to [00:50:00] fend off the gloom of an impending second Trump administration. But it also happens to be our livelihood at stake. You've probably heard that many are taking this opportunity to check out of politics entirely. Hopefully, it's just temporary. But for independent shows like ours, that can be a real problem. And that just makes the support of every member and listener all that much more important. 

If you're still listening, that means that you're still in the fight with us and we need your support because our plan is to be here for as long as we can, but we have zero big money backers helping make this show happen. It all depends on people actually listening and supporting the show. 

So again, head to bestoftheleft.com/support or follow the links in the show notes to grab your own membership currently on a 20% discount or snap up some gift memberships for this wintery gift giving season.

As always if paid membership isn't in the [00:51:00] cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. 

SECTION A - ORGANZING

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on just two topics today. Next up, Section A: Organizing, followed by Section B: Coping.

Organizing in Rural America (w/ Luke Mayville) - Know Your Enemy - Air Date 11-27-24

MATTHEW SITMAN: You were very involved with Medicaid expansion there, getting it on the ballot as an initiative. Maybe you could tell us about what that campaign was and kind of how you went about organizing that effort, because the results were different in Idaho than a lot of other places that also expanded Medicaid, you did very well, even in the rural counties, sometimes, you know, overperforming places that went against Hillary Clinton by 40 points or something, right? So could you tell us about the Medicaid expansion campaign and how you went about organizing that effort? 

LUKE MAYVILLE: Well, a few old friends of mine, Emily and Garrett Strzodzic, married A couple, we got together and started this organization, Reclaim Idaho. And our first big [00:52:00] project was the Medicaid expansion. And an important part of the story is, you know, we were people who followed politics closely and in my case, you know, I came with this background in political science and political theory, but we were very much amateurs in politics. I had some amount of experience mainly just doing volunteer work, but beyond that, no professional political work whatsoever. And that meant early on that we had no credible case to make to any donors or anything like that, that we were going to be able to actually get a serious statewide campaign off the ground. And that put us in a really hard position where without any money to really get something going and without being able to just hire a lot of people, especially when you have to, to get something on the ballot, you have to put together a massive signature drive to get the signatures to put it on the ballot. So how to do that with [00:53:00] no money. So what we turned to is the little bit we knew about organizing and theories of grassroots organizing and what we were really motivated by early on was this idea of distributed organizing, where you could go around and find people in different local communities all across the geography. So in this case, all across the state of Idaho, and you could build local teams of volunteers who would work together in support of a common cause. And it's this old idea. And this is something that I wrote about for Commonweal a few years ago, this idea that there are people scattered all over the place, all over the country and in any given community, who are out there who really want to get engaged in politics and they want to do something big and even monumental. They want to really like work hard on something. They don't just want to be asked to send an email or chip in $10. They actually want to be part of some [00:54:00] big positive change. And the challenge of organizing is you've got to get out there and find those people.

And then you have to make the right type of ask of them and set in front of them, the right type of strategy. And a big breakthrough for us was we came up with this idea of touring around the state in an old green camper. It was a 1978 Dodge Ranger RV and we spray painted it bright green and we put the slogan Medicaid for Idaho across the side of it.

And we toured around and some organizers have called this barn storming as a kind of tactic. You show up in a town, you try to get as many people to at least show up to your event, at least get their foot in the door, or in our case, you know, maybe it was just meeting in parking lot or a park right around our RV and just show up.

And then by the time they leave, you want them to be committed at some level, to continuing to be involved in the effort. So we did that and we were able to build [00:55:00] these local teams around the state. That ultimately powered a signature drive that enabled us to get it on the ballot. 

And then once we had an extraordinary amount of momentum, we were able to build a whole coalition of organizations that wouldn't have taken us seriously. And in many cases didn't take us seriously at all when we started, but by the end of it, we had something closer to an actual professional coalition campaign combined with this unique grassroots campaign. And I do credit that combination with how we were able to drive up the vote share so much, especially in all of these far flung small towns and rural areas in the state.

MATTHEW SITMAN: And Luke, before we go any further, what's the timeline here? 

LUKE MAYVILLE: Well, that's an incredibly important question because it was 2017, so it was in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. So we're very much part of that groundswell, that national groundswell, people coming out and wanting to do something. And, you know, like some people have called it huddling, people just [00:56:00] coming together in living rooms, trying to figure out what they're going to do after the 2016 election and feels a little bit different at the moment. I'm not sure what's going to happen this time around 

SAM ADLER-BELL: Fewer huddles. 

LUKE MAYVILLE: But back then it was certainly happening in a major way. And I think a really successful tactic that we had is that we would bring people together in these organizing meetings and something I used to do is, you know, if you had a circle of people, I would go around, ask them to introduce themselves and say something about what motivated them to show up here today. And after the first, like one or two of those, I realize that if you're not careful, like half the people or more, we'll just launch into talking about how much they hate Trump.

So what I started doing is saying, you know, "introduce yourself, say something about what motivates you to be here today and please, if you can, if you were going to mention the president don't, and it's okay. It's okay if that is the immediate thing that [00:57:00] motivated you. But try to dig deeper and actually ask yourself, 'what is it about my values at some level, or my commitments, my deeper commitments that Trump offends?' And just talk about those things, take the president and the parties, the political parties out of it, make it about those deeper values that you have that are being offended in this moment and talk about that." And that was, I think, a really important shift because that actually gave us something really constructive to then build on.

SAM ADLER-BELL: I want to talk more about the texture of that organizing, to give listeners a feel for what it was like to do it, both the signature gathering and then the campaign. But before we do, I feel like we may have jumped the gun a little bit. For listeners who may not remember the history of Medicaid expansion. Obamacare passed and the biggest part of it in the most important part of it, the part that really actually helped the most people [00:58:00] was the Medicaid expansion.

It just raised the threshold to what is it double the poverty line, and that meant that. Many, many, many, many, many, many more people who fell in a crack, who didn't have health insurance could get it through Medicaid. Conservatives didn't like that. And what was it, a court that decided that? 

LUKE MAYVILLE: Yeah. So the big showdown in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012, the Court was considering whether to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act. And the big headline was, you know, John Roberts upholds the ACA, right? That was the big headline. But tucked within that story was a real tragedy, which is the Court said, "well, the Medicaid expansion part is optional for states."

So, the federal government can't simply expand Medicaid programs in all 50 states. They have to leave it up to the local politicians to determine. And when they did that, it broke along partisan lines, where states run by Republicans refused to accept this massive expansion of healthcare in their own states.

SAM ADLER-BELL: Federal money that [00:59:00] was just sitting there. And that's just, that's a really important setup for this story because the places where these kinds of initiatives were taking place on ballots were in red states because they were the states where governors or state legislators decided, no, we don't want to help the poor people here.

And that's why people like you were in this position of having to organize on this terrain that people thought of as hostile to this kind of, you know, expansion of the welfare state, even though, of course, many red states have a very, very high number of people who are not on health insurance and very, very high number of people who are poor.

That's the situation. I just wanted to say that that is the situation. So many places ended up doing it this way, right? By getting it on the ballot and then letting people vote. But they were in red states where this took place. 

LUKE MAYVILLE: Yes, and there were some, as the years went on after that US Supreme Court decision, there were a few exceptions where maybe relatively moderate Republican governors would come forward and say, "okay, [01:00:00] the game's up. Like we've got to accept this money." Like John Kasich in Ohio, for example, came forward and said, we can't afford to just turn down hundreds of millions, or in the case of Ohio, probably billions of federal dollars every year.

And so they accepted it, but they were the exception. And most states run by Republicans refused to accept it. 

MATTHEW SITMAN: And thus getting on the ballot was a kind of end around these intransigent Republican governors.

The Quest for the Offline Left with Cecilia Guerrero: Organizing the South - Fucking Cancelled - Air Date 11-3-24

I'm very curious about what it's like trying to organize in the South, right? Cause it's got this like reputation as being very conservative and reactionary and so on. I imagine in some ways that would make it very difficult in certain other ways.

I can see it being. Almost helpful because the liberal establishment has had less of a foothold to like fuck everything up for you. But yeah, tell me about being a socialist in the South. Uh, yeah, I mean, it is, it is definitely kind of. A shit show. I I was organizing in Massachusetts and although the laws of the area where I I [01:01:00] was, were technically very progressive, it was, you know, I was also living in an area where not a lot of people that you will call, like actually working class were able to live in just like a very more academic more, you know, middle class area, right? And so I first came to the south in 2019 after the largest ice rates in U. S. history. So, during the Trump presidency three poultry plants were raided by ice about 800 people were detained and separated from their families. I was part of the team that was being part of the ground efforts to for the community organizing the community into a response into committees, trying to get the information on the ground of what had happened.

And I just, Realize that there was a lot to do here and that, if I wanted to call myself like a serious organizer, I have to be here instead of [01:02:00] fighting for very symbolic policies and symbolic legislations in an area with where, like, actually working class people could not really afford to live in.

And so I, I came here it's been almost five years. It's been a shit show. I mean, I am originally from Mexico, so like I am familiar with you know. It's definitely more close to home than being in Massachusetts, but like you said, one of the great things is that, it's either socialist or fascist here.

Liberals have zero chance of winning, like, no, no, for real, like, it's socialism or barbarism. And there's definitely like the NGO liberals and Democrats who kind of hate your guts and definitely do try to undermine the efforts. But in general, there's just a lot of working class people. And even when you talk to a lot of Republicans, even like Trump supporters they might get maybe 50 [01:03:00] percent of the things right.

Or 60 percent of the things right, right? Like there is a real frustration with the establishment. They'll bring up like, the economic issues, which, you know, a lot of Democrats really shy away from they'll say like, well, the politicians are just there to listen to the corporations.

And so like, you have actually a lot of things to work with and actually spend some time in redirecting that energy. If folks actually wanted to talk to everyday people, right. Which is a, it's a big problem right now in the lab. Yeah, absolutely. And did you have connections to Nashville before you moved there or did you move there literally just for like political reasons?

Uh, I moved here for political reasons. Primarily I'm honestly I met some organizers from Tennessee while I was in Mississippi that were also organizing after the ice raids of 2019. Heard there was a worker center hiring. I heard there were some unions hiring. So I [01:04:00] applied to different jobs and I ultimately picked the one that I felt most aligned with.

Um, , and that, Became a little bit of a nightmare, but then I also eventually I learned a lot and now I am here. Amazing. Well, we'll talk a bit later about some of the lessons that you may have learned along the way. I'm interested in the organization the, I guess you helped to start called, um, a Luta which I guess is a mix of Spanish and Portuguese.

And it means the struggle continues. Is that right? tell me about this organization. Cause it's described as like an incubator of other organizations which I. I really love that idea. And we've had people on the show before from an organization called C's here in Montreal, that is also an incubator, less of a sort of like radical less trying to incubate radical organizations and more trying to incubate workers cooperatives.

But it's a similar kind of strategy where you have like one kind of like [01:05:00] central organization that does its best to help create other ones that are useful. So anyways, tell me about, and what you guys do and why you started it. Yeah. So the way that we describe it is, you know, I look, I see it is a, an incubator of mass based projects led by workers and youth, aiming to serve like the working class here in our region. Why an incubator for many reasons, right? So one, we are actually a nonprofit. So we got our nonprofit license early, like at the beginning of the year. And as we know, nonprofits are not designed to be democratic organizations, revolutionary organizations and they're also not designed to be organizations where you can actually build Like worker power.

You know, I know that there might be some organizations that are doing good work and that do have a base of workers But in reality if you look at the whole like non profit sector, I mean, there's just a lot of legal [01:06:00] limitations with that Yeah For example during the Trump presidency, right, like a lot of worker centers that were actually doing real work were accused of being unions.

And we're because they were engaging direct worker organizing. So when you see a lot of worker centers they're organizing is kind of lame. And it's not just lame because Often is because it might be lame, but also it is lame because there's actually real limitations on the kind of organizing that one can do.

And, on top of the fact that the culture in the left and so much, but so much of what we know as the culture in the left. As cancel culture as postmodernism, it comes from the non profitization of of social movements, right? Like around the 80s and 90s capturing the the energy from the 60s and 70s which already have some issues right to begin with and so what we're trying to do is to use this structure as a way of you know [01:07:00] Nonprofits can still get funding.

It's really difficult for you know, I am I am not I do not come from either like a very even a middle class background, right? So there's not a lot of ways that you can really raise funds to actually have some kind of organizing being done. But also we're trying to break from the traditional like nonprofit structure in which you have workers come in.

The campaigns are basically decided by the staff are micromanaged by the staff. And so we try to see, hey, what if we identify leaders within working class sectors and that are actually committed and ready, like they're fed up, they're ready for a change. And we just take some time, take it slow, and actually train them to lead their own organizations, right?

Which actually requires us to break from the cycle of non profits of like, let's rush [01:08:00] into applying for grants, let's rush into campaigns because we need some wins right off the bat to get some grants. You know, let's do all these things and then just tokenize a few workers use some like identitarian stuff and, you put them in photo in like in photo ops and you get your money, right.

And keep reproducing the same, the same culture. You know, why don't we take it slow? We are. We don't have funds for a while. And start with a group of very committed people train workers really well to run their own organizations and then let them take full ownership of these organizations, and we've seen that he has worked.

So, like, right now we have we have a youth organization, the Southern Youth Solidarity Network, which is a group of young people and young students That have aligned their movement alongside the working class, right? Realizing like, hey, maybe student power is not really a progressive [01:09:00] demand.

Because students are not a social class. So let's align ourselves behind the working class. We also have Poder Popular or Nashville People Power, which is an immigrant worker organization that organizes tenant unions and worker committees, primarily in construction, the construction industry.

And we have the Tennessee drivers union, which is it's the largest Uber and the union in the South.

SECTION B - COPING

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now Section B: Coping.

Let This Moment Radicalize You - The Bitchuation Room (with Francesca Fiorentini) - Air Date 11-30-24

I would look at what's happening in the United States as part of this global disease that's happening, that's infecting worldwide. And that's called the student pop marks, but also, yeah. Yeah. So, uh, I don't, I wouldn't waste my, I wouldn't encourage people to waste their time looking at, you know, posters and things like this right now, at this point, we really have to look at the, crisis of legitimacy of the liberal democratic.

The liberal progressive project, which I think has been defunct and been a [01:10:00] zombie is like anything in those shows that you really like, you know, the walking dead and stuff. I mean, they've been walking dead for a while. Why do we keep watching and supporting them? Well, you just said the crisis of legitimacy is something that, I mean, we just spoke to in the previous segment around, you know, Even these like institutions of justice being unable to hold account, hold their own accountable almost not by flaw, but by design.

I mean, there are so many norms that are just norms. They are not laws. And even when they are laws, you cannot even enforce them. Um, and as we said, you know, I mean, not that Brazil is, uh, incredible on all fronts, but did bar successfully Bolsonaro from running for reelection for eight years.

And so that crisis of legitimacy is being felt so much that I've been saying, you know, we should really let this moment radicalize us, but I want to ask you like how do we deal with these feelings of like numbness and anger and [01:11:00] despair. Like, how do we navigate that? While we're also bracing for very concrete attacks on us, our communities, our speech, whatever it is.

Well, if I had the answer to that, I'd be a richer man, be a therapist, university professor's salary. But that said, what I'm doing personally and what I encourage my students and people to do is Firstly and foremost, you have to embrace reality. We're here because of the abandonment of reality by by the society at large.

I mean, fascism, contrary to MSNBC, is a bipartisan project at this point in history. If you look at, say, for example, the genocide in Palestine, you've been watching in real time the slaughter of a people. That's unprecedented. In history, genocide isn't, but the watching it in real time is, and the [01:12:00] cultural effects of having a society conditioned to embrace and accept genocide is, I mean, there has presidents in the industrial age and the rise of, film in Germany and stuff, but nothing like the real time streaming of genocide and the cultural, moral, psychic effects are deep.

So we have to kind of look at reality, but like Perseus, you know, we have this Medusa like figure. I don't want to, it's a misogynistic trope and myth, but it's useful in terms of having a mirror that Perseus had to be able to slew the Medusa. You can't look at reality right now, the way it's being given to you and fed to you by the corporate media at this point.

The corporate media has proven itself completely complicit, not just with genocide, but with the mass dumbing down of the society with the acceptance [01:13:00] of fascistic immigration policies like those. Fostered by Obama, continued by Trump, continued by Biden, and now going to be expanded by Trump. So it's a continuum of bipartisan enabling of the fascist project that the Saudis, that banking interests, that Pfizer, that all these corporate interests are more than willing.

to accept as long as their bottom line is met. Trump means the elites are willing to accept fascism. They will tell you that. But we need to psychically and intellectually frame this because I mean, I'll just tell a story like from the book where I was dealing with Central American Children who were caged and separated by Obama.

One kid I remember in particular had seen his uncle's brains. because he got shot a child of six years old. So I was working with the psychologist and asking them, Hey, how do you deal with a [01:14:00] child that's a bit exposed to this? And so the psychologist told me something I think is relevant for all of us right now.

And that's that, um, you always have to remember that there's an indestructible part of you. 

I know this from having experienced war and having dealt with children and mothers and families who have seen what I can only call apocalyptic reality that leaves anything we're dealing with right now in McDonald's because it's, it's, so when you're dealing with the psychologist in treating that Children and other people like them told me that what they do is they help them tell stories about themselves that are connected to that indestructible side of themselves.

That's the place, I think, to begin and end with. If you're going to really, really try to continue practicing what I call sustainable struggle, we have to think not just about a sustainable environment, but a sustainable [01:15:00] internal environment. Sustainable struggle that's connected then to other people. In a sustainable struggle for us, a more sustainable planet.

We we haven't been trained or conditioned to understand what we're dealing with. And I think I hate to diss, um, these apocalyptic children, but they're really, I think, doing more damage than good at this point because they decided imagination to trying to find solutions to real, real serious shit.

What are our kids gonna face? What do I tell them? They normalize it. They normal. They're like, okay, yeah. So, um, democracies have fallen. Countries have collapsed. There's already been like a World War three and four, and we're in this dystopian and , sort of entertainment wise it conditions you to be like, we're all just sitting here waiting for the collapse as if we don't have a role to play, as if we are not actors, as if we don't have agency. And so there is [01:16:00] this fatalism and cynicism that I think leads to electing strong men obviously. Only in name but strongmen like Donald Trump or like in El Salvador, Nayib Bukele or, these cynical turns in Argentina voting for you know, Javier Mele, who is a model right now for the Trump administration that I wanted to ask you about also, because, um, Javier Mele is destroying the social welfare state of Argentina.

The only thing that kept it from being plunged into like deep, deep, many people in the middle class, plunging them into poverty, getting rid of institutions like the funding for public universities, which truly was made the country prestigious in Latin America, because many people from all over especially South America would go to Buenos Aires and see it.

study at the Uber. And it also was a leg out of, you know, not out of but a solid middle class kind of existence. And he's destroying that. And now you [01:17:00] have, you know, we're going to talk about Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, who are like salivating to do the exact same to this country. So, anyway, I'm just interjecting there, but there's also resistance that we can learn.

Strategies of resistance from Latin America that we can also learn. Absolutely. I'm glad you're bringing that up because, again, you're not going to get that on Rachel Maddow, who, you know, wrote a book, managed to, you know, just, the deep intellectual work to write a book about fascism that barely touches upon capitalism, one of the pillars of which fascism is the maximum expression.

This is the kind of like enabling function that the liberal progressive project plays for fascism. It is a contrary to it. It is an enabler and the degree to which we are clear about that and abandon the project for something yet to be created, except in the mind and in the heart [01:18:00] is the degree to which we will start kind of being able to think outside of the boxes of neoliberal capitalism and techno network fascism.

So, I mean, when you mentioned me, I was just in Argentina in the summer. and South America. And yes, I saw the university. I visited universities. I talked with journalists. I everywhere I would go, there would be people who are being displaced by by the budget cuts and stuff. But everywhere I went, there were also protests.

They were also organizing. They were also chanting, singing, being together in struggle. The Americas Indigenous people in the Americas, indigenous people around the world have had to deal with, I would say, apocalypse for a very long time. But to some of us, this reality is now coming home to roots because what [01:19:00] they're doing in Argentina, they're now going to do and are doing.

to the state of the United States. They're dismantling. Project 2025 is just an accelerated version of what Biden, Obama, Clinton, Bush, Reagan were doing with the dismantling of the welfare state. We forget that to our detriment.

How To Spot Authoritarianism — and Choose Democracy | Ian Bassin - TED - Air Date 6-18-24

IAN BASSIN: We still have the time and the power to prevent that playbook from succeeding. How? By exercising the one thing that democracies guarantee that autocracies take away: the power to choose. Because underneath it all, democracy lives or dies based on choices, right?

In big moments like elections, sure. But also the countless choices that citizens make every day as participants in a democracy. That's what I learned from those binders, right? Choices made in the spotlight, choices made when no one is looking. They add up, and [01:20:00] they either fortify democracy, or they chip it away.

So, how we doing on this front? Well, we have made some good choices that are cause for hope and some not so good ones that are reasons for real concern. And so I want to give an example of a democracy-saving choice, an example of a democracy-destroying choice, and we'll end on choices we all can make to be the difference.

So first, the democracy-saving choice. Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shay Moss stepped up to serve as election workers during a pandemic to help their fellow citizens in the state of Georgia vote in 2020. And they did their jobs with honor and integrity, never imagining what was going to happen next.

An autocrat and his allies, desperate to hold onto power, falsely accused them of stealing the election from him. Their lives were turned upside down. They became the subjects of vile, [01:21:00] unrelenting, unthinkable intimidation and harassment. They received racist death threats. Ruby was forced to flee her home on the advice of the FBI for her own safety.

After what happened to them, it would have been entirely understandable if they had decided to slink off into their private, quiet lives. And had they chosen to do that we would have moved that much further away from protecting democracy. But they made a different choice. They chose to stand up.

Represented by our organization, they brought multiple lawsuits against the people and organizations who defamed them, depriving them of their reputations and their safety. They testified before Congress about how a former president and his allies, rather than protecting them as public servants and citizens, targeted them, putting their lives in danger. And because they [01:22:00] chose to invoke our laws and our courts and our institutions in democracy's defense, they are establishing a deterrent against anyone doing to others what has been done to them. 

But not everyone is making such good choices. And most worryingly, people with far more institutional power than Ruby and Shay are making choices that are as bad for democracy as Ruby's and Shay's were good. So, a brief lesson from history: between World War I and World War II, far right authoritarian parties were rising across Europe. In Belgium and Finland, the mainstream center right parties saw those on the right flank for what they were, threats to the very foundations of their democratic systems. And so they did the hard thing. They chose to unite with their traditional opponents on the left to block the autocrats from power. 

In Italy and Germany, the mainstream center right parties made a different choice. They calculated that they could ride the energy [01:23:00] of those on their far right to power and then once there, sideline the extremist leaders. We know how tragically that turned out.

Well, in recent years too many on America's center right have made a similar calculation that they too can ride the energy on the extremist right to power and then sideline the extremist leader. They still have time to make a different choice, because protecting democracy requires people who disagree about politics and policy to put those differences aside when the very foundations of self-government itself are at risk.

Now the choice that Ruby and Shea made, and the choice too many center right electeds have made, are representative of thousands of similar choices that are being made on each side of the pro and anti democracy ledger. Add it all up, you basically get a draw in which our democracy is teetering on the edge.

But, therein lies our opportunity to tip the balance, because we all [01:24:00] have choices to make as well. Yes, to vote, and we must do that, but just as importantly, choices about how we relate to one another as citizens. I know it may seem like a quaint notion, but how we act towards one another is fundamental to democracy.

These are the habits of the heart. that Alexis de Tocqueville credited as being responsible for the maintenance of a democratic republic in the United States. Because how our elected officials behave and how our government functions is almost always downstream of how we act as citizens. If we meet our neighbors differences with suspicion and fear and hostility, our elected officials are likely to do the same. And authoritarians thrive on that sort of division and hatred.

Autocrats want to feed our fears, because when we're afraid, we're more likely to see a strongman as a necessary means of protection. But if we make a different choice, we choose [01:25:00] to meet our neighbors differences as opportunities, for curiosity and for connection, our elected officials will eventually follow suit as well.

And then we put democracy on home court advantage against authoritarianism. But right now, I'm kind of acting too much out of fear, right? Fear our democracy is dying, and that's causing us to be hostile to one another. And I will admit, I am guilty of this, too, right? So I want to share something I've been reflecting on that is helping me reorient how I think about and approach this moment.

It's a verse from a Leonard Cohen song, appropriately titled Democracy, and it goes like this. "It's coming to America first. The cradle of the best and of the worst. It's here we got the range and the machinery for change. It's here we got the spiritual thirst. It's here the family's broken and it's here the lonely [01:26:00] say that the heart has got to open in a fundamental way. Democracy is coming to the USA." You know, we tend to think of the moment we're in in negative terms, as a dark and scary time, portending the end of democracy. But in our long journey as a nation and a world, in our long quest to achieve the thing we've aspired to but never had, a truly inclusive, multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious democracy, each major advance towards that goal has been preceded by a crucible of crisis and conflict. When brave Black Americans marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to secure the right to vote, there's no downplaying the pain, suffering, cracked skulls that they endured. But they led our nation to the fuller democracy on the other side. [01:27:00] 

I think we're living through a similar moment. The last gasp of an old order making its final stand against the future. And if we do as the lyrics suggest, if we open our hearts in a fundamental way to each other, on the other side of this crisis, democracy, true democracy, I am confident, is coming to the USA.

Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood: What Led to Trump II, and What to Do About It - Speaking Out of Place - Air Date 11-12-24

 So where is there hope? How do you make it through the day? How are your, how is your affect going and how do you manage? And then where do we see possible sources of hope and solidarity? We've touched a little bit on it by like close out with, yeah, yeah.

I'm reviving this thing I did back in the Trump year, the original Trump years of reading Eliza and she like expresses distress and taught me not to talk like this. So I'm trying to keep myself under control for Trump too. Yeah, I needed to have some. Boundaries during [01:28:00] the first Trump administration, because I write about politics, I spent a lot of time thinking about it and I just felt that at least like maybe after dinner, like I shouldn't have to think about it anymore.

But there's always a fresh horror. This is like every hour, there's a fresh horror. This is hard for Doug to log off and stop talking about after dinner. So I don't know what we're going to do about that. I stopped myself last night. You did. Yeah. That's not how I remember it. It could have been much worse.

Believe me, it could have been worse. Like so many things that could have been worse. This is, this sounds really silly to say, but you did ask. So in the, in the first Trump administration, I. Returned to a long abandoned habit of reading novels and just have ever since then, basically from 2017 to the present, I've made sure that I'm always reading a novel [01:29:00] and that's something that I do in the evenings and I don't go on the internet as much as possible.

Also, uh, for me, it's important to get outside, be in nature, wherever you are, it's beautiful to know the wildlife and the mangrove. It's beautiful to see the birds in the park. Yeah, absolutely. No, I get it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Every now and then I try to go back to my old habit of reading poetry, but I think the internet is strong.

So I can't, that's, it's not, yeah, poems are short because they do require an intense degree of concentration. So I'm really, that's where I'm going to just go and sit in the corner and read Wallace Stevens or like we go out and go see art. Yeah. We do. Yeah. Yeah. We just, yes. And, but above all this is, and this is really the most important thing.

And I think I'm not the first person who's saying this, but getting together with people in the community, just we really need to. Hang out with our friends, [01:30:00] we need to organize and be in community that way, but we also need to be with people. And I have found that as really has been helping. Yeah, well, I'm, I'm pretty active with, uh, our local DSA political education committee and that's also, it's nice to have comrades be doing something constructive and you love search.

of interest in DSA after a bit of languishing, so that's good. Yeah, huge interest. Yeah, many new members, a lot of interest, a lot of activity. And the fact that the Democrats showed themselves to be not up to the task. Yeah, it encourages people to look to the left. Exactly. That's encouraging. Yeah, it's just nice to have a feeling of comradeship and being part of this.

Well, that's doing our best to fight the horror. What I did. So these are real bright spots. If we think back to the first Trump administration, as awful as it was, actually DSA grew a lot. We had a complete revolution in our state [01:31:00] government where the most reactionary Democrats were voted out. And we have a much more progressive state legislature that has remained in there.

Many of them DSA endorsed since then. And that we do have a terrible mayor. We have a terrible, hoping to do something about that next year. Yeah, exactly. We're working on that. And so I think that it's been, we were, the Trump administration was so awful. We can't possibly think about going back. But then.

It's interesting how some of the good things that have been happening in the last few days, like there's a bit of interest in DSA, this resurgence of people engaging with the union have actually reminded me that time wasn't as completely bad as I had remembered the first time that Trump doesn't put us in jail.

Yeah, but, but I feel like that's compared to how much some people are actually going to suffer. I don't know. So that he did promise [01:32:00] and the pro Palestinian movement on campus, whatever that means, but I guess he could have used federal aid as a weapon. The Democrats also would have loved to have done that.

Exactly. And he's probably gonna happen up probably. But it's hard to compare the stance of repression toward that movement is so bi partisan, I, I can't, I feel like I can't put all that on, but it's the opposite of things can be worse. Things can always get worse.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave us a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from Know Your Enemy, F*cking Cancelled, The Bitchuation Room, Speaking Out of Place, and a TED talk from Ian Bassin. Further details are in the show notes. 

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to [01:33:00] Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet—Ken, Brian, Ben, and Lara—for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to all those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today—at a discount—at bestoftheleft.com/support or through our Patreon page. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with the link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion and don't forget to follow us on any and all of the new social media platforms you may be migrating to during the exodus these days. 

So, coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, [01:34:00] my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.

Air Date 12/3/2024

Full Notes Page

Download PDF

Audio-Synced Transcript

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. At a time when there are very legitimate concerns about men's place in society, the manosphere has stepped in to fill the gap in the cultural discussion to give an answer —not a good answer by any stretch, but an answer—to young men about modern masculinity, which included a strong push to vote Trump. 

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in just over 50 minutes today includes Why Is This Happening?, Straight White American Jesus, Factually! with Adam Conover, It's Been A Minute, Gettin' Grown, and WordPress. Then, in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in four sections: Section A: The Media Landscape; Section B: Men Are Not Okay; and Section C: What We Can Do.

The Role of the Press in This Moment with Matt Pearce - Why Is This Happening - Air Date 11-19-24

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: I guess let's just open it up. What do you think about how the information environment is here in our current [00:01:00] 2024? 

MATT PEARCE: I don't review it positively. And I also have a lot of those same thoughts that you do where I'm just like, am I just -- is this because I'm getting into middle age that I'm starting to get anxious about media being consumed in a new way that I'm not familiar or comfortable with or don't understand? And, to be honest, I, can't eliminate the possibility that's true. 

But I actually do think there have been a few major phenomena that have happened over that past decade. And I think you're totally correct. I think there was a decade in which social media was this environment that was significantly shaped with, and in part by, major media institutions like the kind that we had in the 20th century, something like MSNBC cable news, something like the LA Times, the newspaper. 

But we've entered, I think, what comes after [00:02:00] that, which is this new space where we still have social media and we have even newer things that are less social versions of social media, actually, and they're not influenced as much by what traditional media covers. Those of us who are in the journalism industry and in the profession of fact finding and truth seeking or whatever you want to call it, are really, really starting to roll that boulder uphill because we're working with platforms that have become monopolies in the space that we're talking about, Google and Meta. We're talking about companies that had once shifted from the anybody who posts, you know that your post is going to appear in a timeline; we've shifted to algorithmic sorting of information, so there's now much more curation and selectivity from these platforms that we're using to consume information, which is broken. This direct connection between media [00:03:00] or content creators like us and consumers. 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Wait. I want to stop. Can we stop right there? Because actually that alone I think is worth taking some time with. 

So the point you're making there -- and let's go back just as a comparison of 2014 -- what would happen on Twitter is you would find people that you would follow. And you would choose to follow or unfollow them based on were their posts good or funny? Which a lot of that was that. 

But then sometimes something would happen; it would be like you would find someone who was an expert in something, who genuinely was, right? And there was a way of figuring this out; you could see what their bio was and often the verified check would help you a little bit with that. But It's like "I run a company that does shipping logistics and there's a barge stuck in the Suez and here's what is going to happen" and you wouldn't just credulously if you or I say, oh whatever they say is true, but you would follow and you start to be like, oh, this person actually has some chops. You might even contact them. And there was a relationship, a direct relationship of [00:04:00] capital and credibility that would build up with individuals. That now the algorithm -- so that's the follower method that has been supplanted by the algorithm method, in which you don't know who's showing -- there's some random person just showed up saying "Oh, HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Oh, here's a cute new miniskirt. Here's -- oh look at this: Caleb Williams missed this open throw on third down." It's like the non-algorithmic version, at least there were these trust relationships you could establish with the individuals you chose to follow. The algorithmic version, there's just stuff being thrown at you. It's like, I don't know who that dude is, if they know anything or not, I just saw it on the feed. 

MATT PEARCE: You've landed on also one of the major features that's changed here, which is that the internet used to be more work. You have to put in a lot of your own work to figure out what you wanted to see and who are you going to follow and who you're going to listen to and what you were going to share. The onus was on you. And [00:05:00] what has happened, essentially these last five and 10 years in particular, is that we have shifted to this more passive version of consumption through all of these platforms.

And it's once you think about it, and once you look for it, you see it everywhere. And it's not just from something like the For You page for TikTok, which has this brilliant black box. Nobody knows really what influences it, but it's excellent at figuring out what kind of stuff you'll linger on. And they'll serve you up an incredibly random slurry of content that is not necessarily timely. I say slurry because-- 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Slurry is exactly the right word. Someone just put it in a blender, and then you just put the hose in your mouth, and they just pump it into you. 

MATT PEARCE: There's been a breaking of chronology that has happened here, actually, because news used to be timely; you turn on your cable television and it would be what is happening right now. But that's also one of the new dislocations, which is that you pop open X, the Elon app, or TikTok, and what you're [00:06:00] looking at could have been from last year or six months ago or whatever. 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: And you have no idea, like nothing is -- I was going to say postmarked, which is a funnily antiquated term.

This really struck me the other day because I didn't quite realize how much that had happened with Instagram. But it occurred to me the other day, I had a moment of realization of how non chronological the Instagram feed has become, because a day or two after the election, I'm scrolling through Instagram and it's showing me all these people excitedly going to vote on Tuesday. And " let's go do this," showing me their "I voted" sticker. I'm like, no, I do not want this content. Why are you showing me this? 

MATT PEARCE: Oh, if you looked at the other Meta product Threads, which they created as a Twitter killer or a Twitter replacement after Elon bought X, it was one of the single most bizarre user experiences that you could have in an app exactly because of this dynamic where the election was basically [00:07:00] over on election night. Donald Trump was elected president effectively. And for a day or two on that app, at least, because of this platform decision to prioritize this kind of ambient rather than timely information, you would get all this stuff about the early returns and people being excited to go out and it just emphasizes how much that you're not quite living in the same information reality as the other people using the exact same service as you, because you're time traveling a little bit in a weird way.

And it's just, that's so unique because all the trends and information and media development for what, the past two centuries, had been to bring the news to you faster and then even more timely versions-- 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: More timely, more logical. Yes.

MATT PEARCE: There was this whole phenomenon, up to the minute, and it drove everyone crazy when CNN was created, Ted Turner, it was this whole phenomenon that you would have a 24-hour news cycle, which was not a thing before then. And it was really [00:08:00] disruptive to elected officials who suddenly realized that they had to be on all the time or that there was a story all the time and it'd be different from what the story was in the morning. 

So that had been the single direction of technological development up until that point. And it is really weirdly suddenly broken recently. 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: It's so weird that we have -- yes -- that after all these developments towards live, up-to-the-minute, up-to-the-second, to now break into this non-chronological universe -- which by the way, I just want to be clear why that's happened. It's happened because eventually you run out of things that are happening, but the algorithm still needs your eyeballs. So you have to break away from chronology because not enough stuff is happening. So you reach a terminal point of stuff happening. The chronology you've gotten up to the second, but you still need growth after people know everything that's happening every second. So then you have to be like, here's a clip from the taxi sitcom from [00:09:00] the 1970s. Like here's a football highlight from 1997 because I got to keep you here. I just, we're just, we got to throw you stuff. So it is a market incentive that broke it. Because once you hit the hard limit of "it's as up to date as it can be," and you still need to throw content at people, you have to just depart from it.

The #MenToo Election Catholics, Latinos, and the Manosphere - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 11-11-24

BRAD ONISHI - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Well, you go from the Women's March to #MeToo. And you have these years, 2017, 2018, 2019, where there is just intense backlash against the culture of sexual abuse. You see celebrities, not only Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, but you also see the likes of Louis C. K. or Aziz Ansari or whoever may be also, come under intense scrutiny. Celebrity after celebrity, high profile person after high profile person, people being accused of untoward behavior, of unwanted sexual advances, of sexual abuse, of sexual [00:10:00] harassment. And it just seemed to be ubiquitous.

The point I'm trying to make is that that first Trump presidency inaugurated what I think was a systemic dismantling of some of the foundations of patriarchy, misogyny, and assault in places like Hollywood, but also places like political offices and so on and so forth. Matt Lauer's another one. I'm just thinking of others that really got caught up in scandal and accused and taken down. 

I think what we saw in the 2024 election was a backlash to that backlash. And I don't think it's right. I don't think it's good. But I think it's something that we have to take into account as a factor of what happened here in 2024.

For the record, it seems, according to the data that we have now, that Trump's resounding win was largely about the economy, that [00:11:00] the 2020 election was a backlash election to the pandemic and to Trump's mishandling of everything related to the presidency and also his -- the scandals, the failures, the racism, all that stuff. Okay? People turned out and got him out of office, barely. 

But four years have gone by, and inflation has been a constant factor. People are having a hard time buying homes, buying milk, buying eggs, going on vacation, even though everyone supposedly has a job, according to the data that's there. So I don't want to overlook that. And we're going to just keep thinking about that and what that means here over the next couple of months. 

But there's another way to think about this bro vote that Trump tapped into, that it's a backlash to the backlash. That if 2017 kicked off the #MeToo movement, then 2024 was the #MenToo election.

It was the election where young men who have moved to the right [00:12:00] and found a new political niche and are now ensconced in their own media enclaves have emerged, and made their voice heard. 

One of the things that happened after Trump was elected the first time is many of us discussed and analyzed and talked about media silos and echo chambers. And a lot of that was focused on our parents. Hey, the boomers are all over there watching Fox News. How do we get them out of that little echo chamber? 

Well, I think one of the things that we're now understanding is that 18- to 29-year-old men have their own version of that. And it's different, but the same in some ways. 

So how did Trump reach out to young men and how did he cultivate his favorability among them? Well, as many of you probably know already, he went on a just slew of bro sphere podcasts. This is according to Olivia [00:13:00] Craighead at New York magazine. In the lead up to election day, Trump went on a slew of massively popular podcasts, catering to right-leaning young male audiences. That demographic: white men, ages 18 to 29, wound up voting for Trump by a 28 point margin. 

As it turns out, the mastermind behind this plan might have been Trump's 18-year-old son, Barron. So there's a bunch of pieces out today that are -- today and the last week -- that are talking about Barron Trump as a behind the scenes figure and connecting Trump to the bro culture and the manosphere and all of these podcasts.

So if you read these pieces at New York Magazine, and at Newsweek and at the Wall Street Journal, what you'll find is that there's this sense that Barron was the testing field. Ask Barron what podcasts he listens to. Ask Barron who are the guys he likes and maybe we'll go on those.

The other one is a consultant who's connected to J. D. Vance and that's Alex [00:14:00] Brusovitz, who is the guy who chose Tony Hinchcliffe, Kill Tony, the comedian who made the Puerto Rico joke, to appear at the New York rally. 

So these are the two kind of folks that Trump and his older campaign team decided to ask about where Trump should go.

And, Brusevitz called Barron and Barron started talking to Brusevitz, and here we go, we're off and running. 

So Trump went on a bunch of these podcasts. And we've talked about this in the past. He was with the Nelk Boys, Patrick Bet David, Will Compton. He of course went on Joe Rogan. He went on Logan Paul's podcast. And that just led to tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of views.

He connected with people that these young men, 18 to 29, are tuning into on a daily and weekly basis. Joe Rogan is probably the one that you are most familiar with out of this group. But there's somebody else who [00:15:00] was behind the scenes that kind of is a figurehead of bro culture and this whole kind of movement, and that's Dana White.

Dana White is the head of UFC and he's appeared numerous times at Trump rallies and other places. But he was somebody who was a key cog in this whole effort to connect Trump to these young men. "I want to thank some people," UFC CEO Dana White told the crowd during Trump's victory speech in Florida in the early hours of Wednesday. "Real quick, I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Vonn, Bussin' with the Boys, and, last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan." This was Dana White basically saying thanks to the bro sphere out there for making this happen. For helping us to get Trump back to the White House.

"Dana's very much into this world," Trump told Adin Ross. "Dana's a young guy, sort of. Dana's into this world, like he could be an 18- or 20-year-old. He knows more about you and the Nelk Brothers, the Nelk Boys, and [00:16:00] he asked me to do their show. I'll tell you, I got a tremendous response. You do some of these big shows like 60 Minutes, nobody cares."

And there it is. Think about what he just said. You do some of these big shows like 60 Minutes, nobody cares. What he's saying there is, it doesn't move the needle. And going on these shows, these shows that the likes of Barron Trump and other 18- and 22- and 25-year-old men listen to, does move the needle. And we saw some of that in this election. 

I will admit that the Friday before the election, I was skeptical. I didn't think that the frat guy who likes to play beer pong and video games and hang out, was going to make it to the polls, stand in line, take 45 minutes, plan his day so he could do that. And again, I'm not saying that the bro vote was the deciding factor here, but I am saying that for the first time in four elections, this demographic broke for Republicans, and it goes in line with trends we've covered on the show: the religious nature of [00:17:00] young men, the ways their political views have shifted, their reactions to things like gender and to issues surrounding gender and reproductive rights and sexuality. 

Here is a passage from the Wall Street Journal on this very issue. "To Blake Marnell, a 60 year old from San Diego who's gained his own MAGA fame for attending rallies, in a suit whose pattern resembles a brick wall, the manosphere is an organic phenomenon that grew out of terrain abandoned or overlooked by traditional media outlets. It has some of the DNA of now defunct lads magazines and raunchy television shows from a previous generation, like Jackass or The Man Show. Unlikely to be greenlighted in today's culture, it loves crypto, energy drinks, and Elon Musk." 

 

Inside Elon's Twitter Takeover with Ryan Mac and Kate Conger - Factually! with Adam Conover - Air Date 11-13-24

KATE CONGER: And Twitter's always been such a canary in the coal mine when it comes to online speech. It's easy to forget that it's a deeply unpopular platform, right? 

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Even the people who use it don't like it. 

KATE CONGER: Snapchat is far more widely used than Twitter, and we never think about what's going [00:18:00] on on that platform, right?

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Yeah.

KATE CONGER: It, everything that happens on Twitter ends up happening months or years later on other social media platforms. And so it's always been a really interesting spot to cover, especially if you're interested in online conversation and how to moderate that and what sorts of movements are starting online.

Twitter has been kind of the beginning of that, and then it spreads to bigger social networks. And so I was really interested in the political influence that Twitter had, despite being so small. And always found that fascinating. And I think that was one of the things that we saw that really drew Elon to it.

He saw the influence, he found a way to tap in and dictate broader conversation from the platform. And so it was just a really interesting kind of step jump in his own power and influence and especially in politics. 

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Yeah. It's interesting that, I made fun of him a lot on this channel for the deal [00:19:00] being a money loser, at least at the moment I made the video. But he did it in order to gain power, right? Is that your contention? 

RYAN MAC: Yes and no. I feel like he, he in some ways bumbled into it. It was his favorite thing in the world. We chronicle his progression and use of it. Through the years and like a decade ago when he first joined it, he like hated it.

Like he, he like was tweeting very normie things. He was like, I'm at the ice rink with my kids and like, I'm hanging with Kanye at the SpaceX factory. I mean, that's not very normie, but, he like didn't grasp like the purpose of the platform. And at one point he was like, I don't know if I can do this anymore.

And then like slowly through the years, you start, he starts to realize like the power of it. That he can reach his fans directly. That he can push back on the media. That he can shitpost essentially at all hours of the day, and he comes to love it. And so by the time we get to him making the offer, It's his favorite place in the world. You know, in a way that a [00:20:00] billionaire might buy a super yacht or the Clippers or, an island or whatever.

He bought his favorite thing and, you know, he had enough money to do so. And so we approach it from that first. I don't, there wasn't like a, 3D chess plan to be like, if I buy Twitter, I can then influence the election two years later. But certainly he's gained a lot of power since then by running the platform, even in spite of the financial issues, you know?

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: I like the comparison to the Clippers to like a billionaire like Steve Ballmer, and you know, Steve Ballmer often to me seems like the happiest billionaire in the world. Like, he's just, he did Microsoft whatever, maybe he's a good guy, maybe he's a bad guy, I don't know, he's just running a fucking basketball team.

He's like, "YAAA!" And he's like, you know, that energy. 

RYAN MAC: He has his arena, yeah. 

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Yeah, his energy found the right home, you know? Like, he used to chant "Developers, Developers," now he chants "Clippers, Clippers." Great. Good for Steve. Is it really [00:21:00] that, was it that energy that brought Elon into it? Like just the enthusiasm for he just wanted to buy the roller rink or what?

KATE CONGER: It really is. And, you know, he said in the beginning that he didn't care about the finances of the deal, and obviously it's brought pressure to him since then. And he started to worry about how much money the company loses. But, you know, I think it was just his favorite place to be and, I mean, you see it.

He spends all of his time on X now. If you turn on notifications for his posts, your phone is buzzing all day, all night. And you know, I think he also really objected to the way the company was being run by its former management. He didn't agree with a lot of the content moderation decisions and kind of wanted to get in there and put his thumb on the scale. 

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Is that the thing that like triggered him into doing it was content moderation?

Like I, cause I remember being sort of a slow roll of him being, I'm thinking about buying Twitter and I mean, he's clearly the kind of guy who operates by whim and then his whim starts rolling downhill and picking up speed [00:22:00] and picking up its own force. But was it spurred by content moderation initially?

KATE CONGER: It was one of the big concerns that he had. He was really outspoken about objecting to the ban of President Trump's account when that happened. And then right before he came in and made the offer to buy Twitter was when Twitter banned The Babylon Bee, which is like a right wing satirical site that he finds really funny.

And there's text messages that he was exchanging with one of his ex wives at the time talking about, you know, he should buy Twitter to bring back The Bee. And it sounds so silly, but one of the first things he said to Twitter employees when he came into the company that night when he acquired it was that he wanted to reinstate The Babylon Bee's account.

So it is these really kind of small, seemingly inconsequential content moderation decisions that really kind of needled him and got under his skin. 

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: I mean, The Babylon Bee is like, I understand it's popular in conservative circles. But it's just an Onion rip off website, like, of which there are dozens on the internet.

There's like, The Hard Times, there's Reductress. There's like a model that like a bunch of, so [00:23:00] just to, and the website still existed. He still could have gone, I'm sure they had a mailing list. He was just mad that he couldn't see the Tweets from his favorite right wing humor publication? I guess comedy really does have power.

We debate that a lot in comedy. But I guess comedy really does influence the world.

KATE CONGER: Yeah.

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: That's insane. I mean, how much was it? You said he sort of bumbled into it. And I remember that being a big part of the narrative that he said he was going to do it and people started egging him on.

And then he, you'll tell me the real version of my memory is he made an offer, then tried to back out and then Twitter forced him to take it. 

RYAN MAC: So let's rewind a little bit, which is initially he quietly was buying stock in the company without telling anyone. And he blew past this disclosure role that you have with the SEC, which once you hit a 5% threshold, you have to disclose your ownership stake.

Well, he didn't do that and amassed about a 9% stake in the company before he went public and was like, you know, I've become a [00:24:00] large shareholder in Twitter. I love the platform and I bought all these shares. And so when that happened, Twitter's Board freaked out. They thought, you know, what's the best way we can wrangle him a little bit.

So let's offer him a board seat. They offer him a board seat. He goes back and forth. He thinks it's a good idea initially.

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Can I just ask why? Why do they freak out? Like he, he owns a bunch of stock. Just break down for me what the threat is to them at that point. 

KATE CONGER: Well, so they had had an activist investor in the stock, maybe two years prior to this, who came in and tried to force out Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO at the time.

So it was like, they had just kind of been burned by that experience and they had spent the next year and change appeasing that investor and trying to gently edge him off the board and limit his influence in the company. So they had just kind of cleared the slate on that. And then lo and behold, they have another activist coming in and it's just like, Oh, my God, we don't want to go through this again.

RYAN MAC: Or potential activist, but more of a chaos agent, right? You don't know what this guy is [00:25:00] going to do. He pops off. At any hour on Twitter, you know, what if we bring him in and make him our friend? You know, he can be one of 10 or so voices on the Board. 

ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Make him feel important.

RYAN MAC: Make him feel important, make him feel listened to. We got this, you know, he's going to be our guy.

And so that it gets announced. And then within a couple of days of that, he's already arguing with the CEO. He is unhappy with the direction of, product launches with, content moderation decisions, you name it. He's in the CEO, Parag Agarwal's DMs or text messages and just lighting them up.

And at one point it's just like, you know, fuck this. Like, I don't need to be on the Board. I'm just going to buy the whole company. And that's when you get the kind of start of the whole thing.

The #MenToo Election Catholics, Latinos, and the Manosphere Part 2 - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 11-11-24

BRAD ONISHI - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Now this brings me to a point that I want to make about this new mediascape that is attending to young men and [00:26:00] really cultivating their interests and their politics. If we think about this comparison that he makes about Jackass, for example, I grew up in the 90s and I remember Jackass. I remember when it came out and I remember what it meant to like suburban kids looking for transgression, trespass, ways to be edgy and so on.

To run a shopping cart full speed ahead over a curb or to do something else that was just ridiculous. Okay, that's one thing. But here's the thing is, Jackass and even The Man Show were not going to cultivate politics. They weren't going to, they weren't going to be the things that shaped how people voted or how they thought about really important issues like reproductive rights.

Now we also used to have folks like Rush Limbaugh. And Rush Limbaugh would, of course, get on and talk politics for hours and hours a day. But the two were separate, right? If you have Jackass and you have Rush [00:27:00] Limbaugh, you have two separate things. And you're going to capture two different audiences. And some folks may listen to both and they may be fans of both and all that, great.

The point I'm trying to make is that we now live in a situation where if you want to win a presidential campaign, You might go on a show like the Nelk Boys or Theo Von's podcast and you'll talk politics and you'll then go to the very tip top of the mountain, which is Joe Rogan, who always mixes politics with culture and politics with conspiracy theories and reality TV and celebrity gossip and everything else.

 Joe Rogan is the epitome of mixing what might've been the Jackass lane and the Rush Limbaugh lane into one. Now is he Rush Limbaugh? No, he's different than that. And I'm not trying to roll over all those differences. I'm trying to make a point here is that this bro vote is one that exists in a new media landscape.

And so we can make comparisons to bygone [00:28:00] decades. We can make comparisons to Rush Limbaugh or Jackass, but I think we have to recognize the dynamism of these podcasts, these pundits, these talking heads, these YouTube channels. The streamers, the folks on Kik, the folks on Twitch, and so on. Here's Steve Waldman writing at Politico.

Biden won 18-21 year olds by 60-36%. Harris won by 55-42%. So now we're in a very specific range. New voters, 18-21. This is their first time voting. Biden wins them 60 to 36. Harris wins them 55 to 42. A noticeable drop. Waldman says, "There's no group where the information consumption has changed more than young people."

3% of seniors get their information from social media. 46% of 18-29 year olds get their information from social media. So if you're 18-29, there's about a 1 in 2 chance that you get your information from [00:29:00] TikTok. Or from any other social media site. Waldman continues, "The reliance on social media as a news source among those groups is probably a bigger factor in 2024 than 2020.

In part because a new cohort of voters raised on social media as teenagers entered the electorate. And Latino voters are disproportionately young." So now he's bringing in Latino voters and the ways that young Latino voters voted. And I'll get to, I'm gonna spend time on Latino vote, the Latino vote in general here in a minute.

 In 2020, 23% of adults got their news from YouTube. In 2024, 32% did. Think about that friends. Just think about adults in general. One third of adults now got their news from YouTube. The portion on TikTok, getting your news from TikTok is 17%. We're at a place where like, you know how you were worried about your parents and them listening to Fox [00:30:00] News and Newsmax, young folks are basically relying on TikTok and YouTube. And it's not just young folks. I mean, all adults, but, it skews disproportionately to those who are 18-29, Waldman keeps going. "The nature of these platforms has changed too, as more of their users come to rely on them for news. In 2020, 28% of regular Instagram users got their news there, and 2024, 40% did, according to Pew Research Center. In 2022 per 22% of TikTok's users got news there, and 2024, 52% did."

I can keep giving you numbers and, I'm not necessarily, I'm not a data scientist and I'm not a numbers person, but what these numbers say overall is this: even since 2020, the amount of people getting their news from TikTok or Instagram or YouTube has gone up consistently. The other big factor, Waldman says, that changed is that one of the biggest platforms, X, formerly Twitter, [00:31:00] has gone on, at least its owner, went all in for one candidate.

Here's the kicker, you ready? These studies reveal an interesting fault line. While most women get their news from TikTok, most young men get their news from YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit. This confirms that men and women often act on different sources of information. Yet, while we spill many words analyzing whether New York Times headlines normalize bad behavior, we know very little about what news and information rises to the top on Reddit and YouTube.

And finally, if you read a newspaper, odds are 3 to 1 you voted for Harris. So if you read traditional newspapers, if you read The New York Times, The Washington Post, or the LA Times, Star Tribune, whatever it is, on a regular basis, 3 to 1 you voted for Harris. Couple takeaways before we take a break. One, there was a deliberate effort by the Trump campaign to reach out to young men 18-29.

That's true. The campaign [00:32:00] believes it made a difference because they shouted out those folks on election night. Dana White was the lead in that whole effort. Joe Rogan kind of the king of the pile. And then there was all these other podcasters and YouTubers and others that, that really cater to the Barron Trumps of the world.

And what we see is that those young people, uh, the younger the voter is, the more they rely on social media for their news. That's an issue we have to address. We talked about this in 2016 and 17 about, "oh my gosh, all our parents are watching Fox News, what are we going to do about it?" Now we're in a place where young people don't know how to get news, other than on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or Reddit.

And if you're a young man, there's a good chance you learn a lot of your politics from Joe Rogan, or from the Nelk Boys, or from anyone else that you might be listening to in your earbuds or on YouTube. Those [00:33:00] who read traditional news sources. What's left of journalism seemed to have voted for Harris in a big way.

We could break all that down in more detail, but I just want to conclude this by saying this was the Men Too election. It's sad. It's really hard to say that out loud. Me Too was about dismantling decades, centuries, millennia, time immemorial of men taking advantage of hurting, of assaulting women. Using power to take advantage.

There's been a backlash to that, and there's been a backlash to that in a certain media silo that is really catered to young men. We know the trends. They've moved to the right, they're more religious, and this is a big challenge going forward. I think full stop, for the Democratic Party, sure, but just for our society in general.

Make America Male Again Fifteen years of aggrieved men - It's Been a Minute - Air Date 11-19-24

HANNA ROSIN: I mean, it's funny because the traditional male [00:34:00] female stereotype is like, the longer I am on this earth, the less it makes any sense to me, even though it's like so powerfully ingrained. I mean, the hierarchy between men and women is the most consistent hierarchy across history, across cultures, across continents.

It gets replicated over and over and over again all the time. Kind of men above women, men above women. Why? Like, why are the traditions this way? Like, I would ask the guys who I was reporting about in the book, like, why can't you just get a job teaching? Nope. Why can't you get a job in the hospital? Nope.

That's woman's work. Why? Why? Like, what would you lose? Because if you think, one of the things about women is that they have, for the last century, think about how many stereotypes of femininity They have busted through for one reason or another, like how you dress, if you work, if you're allowed to work when you're married, are [00:35:00] you allowed to work when you have a small child. 

BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: Right.

HANNA ROSIN: Are you allowed to be a boss to a man? Are you allowed to run a thing? Like they've kind of trampled all of these old stereotypes. But men, I can't say they're not shifting. They're definitely shifting. I mean, you know, men down the generations shift. Let's take a father who's 30. In a certain social class, there are different expectations of fathers now, I think than there were 2 generations ago.

BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: Oh, fathers who are in their 30s presently? Yes. Yes. Way different. 

HANNA ROSIN: I do think maybe we can take some hope in that, that in the current moment, some of the stigmas around how you have to be as a man are fading away. Like in the things we talk about, like a Trump rally or January 6th, maybe there's some very loud theatrical ways in which they're not fading, but maybe there are some subterranean ways in which they are fading, like they're just, you know, what you are expected to do at home, how you can express yourself, how, I mean, I have to [00:36:00] say, I've been surprised at the different corners where I come to see men starting to recognize how important it is to understand your emotions, talk about them, how it holds you back if you can't, like, that's the thing that's sort of trickling wider than, than I expected it to.

BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: I want to put a metaphor to you. Do you know about like the strangling tree? Do you know about that? So there is this tree that grows up and around the an existing tree, molding itself, like around the contours and structures of the original tree. And then slowly over time, the strangling tree overtakes and suffocates the other tree.

Do you see that as maybe perhaps a good metaphor for what's happening with men and women right now? Like women have had to adapt and grow around men, while men have been able to maintain [00:37:00] their status quo. But in the process now, you know, we've gotten to this point where women have advanced. And I mean, metaphorically, of course, men, you know, metaphorically, of course, have, you know, slowly but surely suffocated to a kind of

HANNA ROSIN: Oh, Brittany, that is really 

BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: I mean, I can't

HANNA ROSIN: That is good imagery because I have long been thinking, like, there is this sense where women are like hustlers and they're immigrants. They'll take any job, they'll go to the community college. I'm just talking statistically. 

BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: No, and that came through statistically, but that also came through in so many of the narratives of your book. 

HANNA ROSIN: Yeah, like they're just hustling. It's like, Oh, I got to take care of the kid. Oh, I got to be a pharmacist. I got to go to school. I got to do this. I got to do this. And then all of a sudden, they've strangled this tree in the middle. That's kind of like stood still. You know, I think that's a really, really, really good imagery for this current moment. The only problem with that imagery is that the top leaves of the tree like if you [00:38:00] take the tree still it's like being strangled, strangled down at the bottom, strangled towards the middle, but then when you get to the very top, that center tree totally dominates the canopy, so, that's how I'm going to complete your metaphor there.

I just don't want to, you know, I don't want to be stupid about it, that is also part of the picture that at the very, very tippy top are men. And that at some point you do encounter the mother penalty, and that is very real. Like the caretaking mother penalty still exists and is still around.

BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: Men also have had. And still have immense power and privilege. How much are they actually in trouble? And how much is just them losing some of the power they once took as a given? 

HANNA ROSIN: That's the central question. Because, you know, they're losing their position as head of the household. They're losing their economic privilege.[00:39:00] 

That's all true. Like that is happening. I guess the question is, what if you just said, so what? Like, what if that was okay? What if all those things were happening and you redefine them as necessary recalibration as opposed to an absolute disaster? Like if you just shifted your brain 20 degrees, you could solve a lot of the problems.

 

Misinformation, Disinformation, Malinformation ( Feat Esosa Osa)- Gettin' Grown - Air Date 11-12-24

TYKEIA N. ROBINSON - CO-HOST, GETTIN' GROWN: I'm really excited by the work that you're doing because you know, we all use the internet. Most of us use the internet every day and it's sort of known. I mean, I'm going to take us way back black to the past from my, I'm going to just step fully into my auntie for a minute. And I remember. That, you know, it was originally called the information superhighway. Like, that's how people used to characterize this as this place where we have all of this information at our fingertips.

And I don't think that we've ever had real conversations about vetting information, about thinking about what [00:40:00] information we are seeing may or may not be true, how to get into that. And so even these terms: misinformation, disinformation, malinformation. I would say that these are not terms that I hear heavily in the media, and in the onslaught of things that we get all of the time.

So can you talk a little bit about sort of the utility and the significance of you know, why it's important for everyday people like us to think about our information through these lenses, especially in the climate that we're in. 

ESOSA OSA: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think that, you know, you're absolutely right, Keia. We are seeing that the correlation between content and credibility really crumble and deteriorate. 

TYKEIA N. ROBINSON - CO-HOST, GETTIN' GROWN: Oh say that louder. Content and credibility. Everybody with a microphone has credibility these days, which is wild, but I'm sorry, I cut you off. 

ESOSA OSA: No, [00:41:00] no, no, no, no. Look, at the end of the day, it's just credibility is being determined by following in a lot of different respects, right? And that's a very dangerous environment because we all know that there are tons of people out there with millions of followers who just fundamentally don't know what they're talking about. 

TYKEIA N. ROBINSON - CO-HOST, GETTIN' GROWN: Fundamentally, truthfully.

ESOSA OSA: I spent four years in finance trading stocks and bonds to start my career. And when I see some of these folks, you know, just decide to be, investor, you know, consultants online, essentially. Telling folks to, you know, put 40% of their earnings into the stock market. I'm like, this is dangerous. Like who's doing this? This is... 

JADE VERETTE - CO-HOST, GETTIN' GROWN: And that's all their content is, it will be blocks and blocks of them sitting and talking to a wall, giving you all the advice in the world. And it just never seems viable. [00:42:00] How do you decipher what's what? Like when you're putting this study together, because this is what you're doing, how are people supposed to pay attention to this kind of stuff? Cause some of it is quite convincing. 

ESOSA OSA: Oh, a hundred percent. And first, to answer the back half of Keia's questions, we got to understand why disinformation is so dangerous, right? The reason that disinformation is so dangerous and effective is that a lot of our brains, most of our brains work in a very similar way. And that is that the more times we hear something, the more likely we are to believe it's true. And the more likely we are to believe other people believe it's true as well, right?

Our brains substitute repetition for truth. This is how we teach little kids everything, right? This is how our brains still work. And so in the current social media environment, if disinformation is an amplification problem at [00:43:00] its core, then the current social media environment is making the spread of disinformation kind of hyperbolic.

Most of these platforms are created, the underlying algorithm is coded to put information in front of you over and over and over and over again. And so, the ability to persuade, to make folks believe that something is true, has never been more potent. If the President of the United States came out every single day, right, and told us all that the sky was green. Think of the level of repetition that we get on cable news, local news, social media, we would all eventually step outside and just be like, 'I'm not, I'm not sure.' Right? And so regardless of your background, your income, your education. That's how you can get whole countries to believe propaganda that's fundamentally not true, right? But in terms of what we can do to fight back, we've [00:44:00] got to rethink what our social media consumption looks like, and what our social media guardrails are. When we are on these platforms, we've got to get one, very comfortable with checking our sources before sharing content, right?

You know, we put up a website, kind of "factcheckthebs.com" where you can go, and if you need five different fact checking websites, there they are for you, right? But we've got to be able to take a step back before we potentially push incorrect information, especially right now as we're getting very, very close to an election and we're going to reach a fever pitch of the amount of disinformation that we're going to see here in the next few days. Especially when content is making us hyper emotional, either extremely mad, what have you. [00:45:00] That's exactly when we need to just pause and double check that that is correct because that's often where how disinformation can go viral, so easily. And then, you know, we want to make sure that we're constantly telling our friends and family to make sure that they're careful here as well, and that they are checking their sources because we do know that telling someone to check their sources before they share content online makes them less likely, significantly less likely, to share bad information. Unfortunately, for only 72 hours.

So it's gotta be. Something that we constantly are saying or, and then we've got to hold people accountable when they are wrong and when they are loud and wrong and repeatedly wrong. Right. We cannot continue to allow these types of things to, move forward. 

How the Fediverse can make social fun again - WordPress - Air Date 8-12-24

DOC POP - ASSOCIATE, WORDPRESS: Let's talk a little bit about what is the Fediverse. How do you describe this to new users? 

BART DECREM: [00:46:00] You and I, we both came here for the original promise of the Internet, which is anybody can set up a website, you can go anywhere in the world, you can meet people, you can discover your community, your tribe, wherever it is, and that's the magic of the Internet circa 1990, right?, when it first got started. And so you end up with a model where people build blogs and websites, and then they start meeting friends and connecting with them. And it's all sort of disparate. And the original superpower of the internet, it's decentralized. Nobody controls it. There's a protocol underneath it called TCP IP. And anybody can build up a thing and you can find anything and connect with anything. 

What happened over the years is that people go, Well, we can make that more user friendly and we can make that easier and especially as the iPhone comes into play, you start having these walled gardens. And so one big one is Apple another big one is Google another big one is Twitter and Facebook and so on. And so what they do is they say we're gonna get you going in four seconds. Just download the app, [00:47:00] give me access to your address book, and I'm going to tell you all of your friends that are already here and you're up and running and that's great because it delivers a really good user experience.

But what you end up doing is you end up shutting out and little by little the internet starts looking more like AOL. It's a walled garden, it's a shopping mall. You're at the mall and the mall is great and safe and convenient but there's a big wall around it. These giant tech companies have slurped up all the market share, have slurped up all the attention. And they deliver addictive user experiences—and some of those are great, and some of those are just addictive—and they have massive adoption. And social systems have a big network effect. The more people there are, the more valuable it is, right? So you get entrenched markets power. 

And so over the last 10 years, we've sort of lost our way and we've gone farther and farther away from the original promise of the internet, which is nobody controls it. Anybody can set up their own spot and then anybody can go anywhere. And so we've lost sight [00:48:00] of that. And the Fediverse at its core, it's going back to the original promise. Can we go back to the original promise of the internet that anybody can set up their homestead, you know, their own place, can own their own piece of real estate on the internet, can connect with whoever they want to, but can we learn from the last 20 years and can we learn some new tricks? 

And so as we do that, and anybody can set up an app or a website or a service, can we make it so that there's a social frame that comes with that? So that you don't have to start completely from scratch when you build your website. The login, the connections, the social engagement metrics, they can go along with that. So the Fediverse is an attempt to go back to the promise of the Internet of nobody can still controls it, anybody can find their tribe and express themselves and go wherever they want to go. Let's go back to that and away from the model of walled off gardens by five or six or seven companies.

And so as we think about the open internet, what are the building blocks? What are the [00:49:00] foundations of that? Well, there's the email protocols, you know, SMPP and IMAP and all that, right? And another important open protocol is RSS, and podcasts are built on it, and newsreaders used to be built on that. And so when you have these protocols that are open standards, then people can go build on that and then anybody can build user experiences, whether that be an app like Mammoth or a destination website or whatever it is.

And so the way I think of the Fediverse is these are our cousins, man. It's like RSS and podcasts and email and SMTP, you know, that's the world that we live in. And so can we go rebuild the social web on those foundations of open protocols that include email protocols and RSS, very much so, but add the social protocols from ActivityPub.

DOC POP - ASSOCIATE, WORDPRESS: I want to hear more about what you are going to work on next. I know the Mammoth is the first project and you seem very excited about the Fediverse. What else are you working on? 

BART DECREM: Well, Mastodon has been the killer app for the Fediverse. It's been the killer app for [00:50:00] ActivityPub and it still is. And so we thought the biggest problem with Mastodon is making it approachable to newcomers, right? And so we're going to keep doing that. But the really cool thing that's going on right now is that there's these other things blossoming on the Fediverse. You know, Automatic with WordPress has some really cool projects going on. Flipboard is on the Fediverse. There's a newsletter platform called Ghost. Meta has joined with their Twitter alternative, which is Threads, and they have 130 million people there. Those 130 million people, well, the ones in the U. S., which I think is about half, are now federated. So if you're on Threads, you're part of the Fediverse, or you can go to your settings and just flip one button and you're part of the Fediverse.

And so what's going on this year that's super exciting is that we're going from just an alternative to the three or four big social media companies to an alternative to the web that's taking shape. And so what I think is very exciting is that broadening of the space. And that's the Fediverse. So this year, [00:51:00] we're in conversations with other people that are building here and saying, what do we need to do to get a million websites on the Fediverse? What do we need to do to get a hundred million people on Mastodon or on WordPress or on Ghost or on Flipboard, whatever the other apps are on the Fediverse. What are the core building blocks that are yet to be built? Do we need a login system that's unified? How do you bring money into the Fediverse so that you can have creators earn money? Is it microtransactions? Does it look like newsletter subscriptions and all of that? 

So there's a lot of work to be done to lay the foundations for a Fediverse with 100 million people on it and then a billion people on it. I think we're going to get there because people want an alternative. People want a place where it's real people and it's real publishers. And the AI stuff, it's cool, but what about the web that we came here for 20 years ago? And so that's the opportunity. So this year, we're going to launch a major new initiative. That's more about [00:52:00] ActivityPub and the Fediverse going beyond Mastodon. 

DOC POP - ASSOCIATE, WORDPRESS: I think it's super important if we get this critical mass, I think companies no longer will be able to trap us in our walled gardens. We made a mistake somewhere 20 years ago, maybe 25 years ago. And this is our chance. It's like, we're rewinding time. I seriously feel like some DeLorean's going to come out, like, Hop in, we're fixing the internet, and that's our chance to do it right now. 

BART DECREM: Yeah. It's about the network effect. It's about social discovery, but these words are all sort of complicated and super nerdy, right? And sort of tech bro Silicon Valley. But, discoverability is, Hey, I've got a newsletter and I want people to read my newsletter and subscribe to it and hopefully pay for it so I can make a living, right? That's how you end up with a healthy media ecosystem and creator economy. And so what you need is you'd be able to find your stuff.

We found ourselves in a world. with walled gardens because Twitter and Facebook and TikTok is like, We'll take care of all that. You make a good video and we'll get a hundred million people to watch it. The only problem is now you're stuck in our [00:53:00] platform and we capture all the upside and we extract all the value from that. And so the great thing with ActivityPub, we're like, how can we develop a system that lets you create content and people enjoy that content and the content be found, you know? How do we make it so that you, Doc, can find a really great blog post or creator or website and then tell me about it and I find out about it and make that fun, user-friendly, and competitive? Like, can we create a world where The Verge—and this is one of the companies that's actually working on this—they have a news site and, historically, news sites like The Verge have been really dependent on Google and Facebook and Twitter for their distribution. And then that doesn't end well because they end up, extracting all the value and taking it away from you, right? So, a site like The Verge is like, Hey, we need people to come to our website and then we're going to have a full experience there and we want people to come back and we want people to leave comments.

But what if I'm reading a story on The Verge and then I leave a [00:54:00] comment and then the people that follow me on Mastodon can read that, within their Mastodon app? Now we're letting you find out about stuff that I've discovered and I can make recommendations for you for stuff to read and that's the alternative to the walled gardens that we're building here.

Note from the Editor on the slow process of fixing our broken internet

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Why Is This Happening? looking at the modern media landscape and the rise of algorithms. Straight White American Jesus explained the election and bro culture as a backlash to the #MeToo movement. Factually with Adam Conover went over Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. Straight White American Jesus looked at the evolution of the media landscape that targets young men. It's Been A Minute examined the evolving nature of the gender dynamic. Gettin' Grown discussed the detrimental effects of mis- and disinformation on the internet. And WordPress looked toward the future of the fediverse. 

And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dives section. But first reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring the production crew here discussing all [00:55:00] manner of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process, sometimes just to avoid crying. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Members also get chapter markers in the show, but depending on the app you use to listen, you may be able to use the time codes in the show notes to jump around the show, similar to chapter markers. So, check that out. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.

Now, before we continue on to the Deeper Dives half of the show, a quick thought on the role of the tech companies in bringing us to the state we are in. Famously Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook had the motto "Move fast and break things", and I'm sure I am not the first to point out that while [00:56:00] Facebook scaled, along with all the other social media networks, to reach and mediate the discussions between billions of people online, they managed to break some things. Maybe not irreparably, but definitely broken. And frankly, it would be surprising if they didn't. 

Now, in that last clip that we just heard from WordPress, the title image—so, you couldn't hear it, it was only visual—that they used for this video was an old computer monitor—you know, like old school hacker might've used it—with a sticker on the front that said "move purposefully and fix things". So the hope is that better ways of communicating online are not only possible, but preferable to the vast majority of people. 

So if better social media networks are built. People will likely gravitate toward them. That is sort of happening right now. There's the Exodus away from X. Bluesky is the current beneficiary of that. [00:57:00] I don't have a strong opinion about how good Bluesky is. I think they could still end up being terrible, but structurally speaking, I know that they are much less likely to be terrible. And what we can say for sure is, they're trying. So, you know, progress. 

But, we don't just need new platforms. We also need regulation of any site that uses algorithms to suggest information, be it images, text, video, or audio. The reason is that there is absolutely no hope—none—in appealing to the humanity or civic duty of anyone who works at companies like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter, when the profit motive drives them to tune their algorithms for engagement rather than quality. Now, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act [00:58:00] regulates these platforms as though they are passive conveyors of third-party information. They just provide the platform and other people provide the content. But the algorithms they use to display that third party information to its users makes them anything but passive in the distribution of that information. Humans employed by those companies make decisions about the functioning of their algorithms. Those decisions, change what people see when using their platforms that should open them up to legal liability for what is shared in a way that could force them to entirely rethink the structures of those algorithms. 

Currently that is not the case, but it could be. In August, a court found that the mother of a little girl who died after taking part in the blackout challenge that had gone viral on TikTok, was allowed to sue TikTok because their algorithm [00:59:00] was considered their expressive speech, which should not be shielded by Section 230. The algorithm is the functioning of corporate speech. So, that is not passive. That is them taking an active role in the distribution of information. 

So, there is that legal pathway that's happening. That is not all that needs to happen. There also needs to be proactive regulation, but these things combined really could fundamentally change the functioning of our algorithmically-driven media online. The nature of the world is that those who want to break things will always be able to move faster than those looking to thoughtfully build systems that are good for people. But there's no rule that says that the early movers who break things get to add the last word.

SECTION A - MEDIA LANDSCAPE

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on three topics. Next up, Section A: The Media Landscape, followed by Section B: Men Are Not Okay, [01:00:00] and Section C: What Can We Do?

The Role of the Press in This Moment with Matt Pearce Part 2 - Why Is This Happening - Air Date 11-19-24

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: I think, again, if we're thinking of this Ferguson era, which I think is really useful, like the 2014 The decade that was, there was a understanding of some symbiosis between the platforms and the media outlets, the platforms amplified the work of the media outlets, amplify their reach and in the case of Facebook, particularly less so Twitter.

Could drive traffic that could be monetized. So you had this ecosystem in which each part was kind of getting something out of it. It wasn't really, it didn't feel zero sum. Is that a fair characterization for at least the contemporaneous understanding back then of how it was working? 

MATT PEARCE: Yeah, it was, it was, it was like, What would it be like?

It would be almost like a free trade agreement where, you know, you have this, you have this old country of old media that suddenly got access to this brand new, vastly, rapidly growing market of social media [01:01:00] users who, you know, if you're the LA Times, you know, that means that you can suddenly reach people who are outside of Los Angeles, Southern California, California, you could talk to people in Missouri, New York, Canada.

Yeah. the United Kingdom. Um, you, we sort of globalized media, uh, in a way that I think even the internet before social media hadn't really accomplished because it wasn't as if people were just sort of sitting there at their browsers at home and, you know, 2005 being like, I'm just going to go wander over to, you know, you know, look at the Guardian or something and see what's going on in Britain.

That wasn't the way that most people were exactly using media and at least not at scale. And social media changed all that. It gave news companies access to this huge new market of consumers. And you saw investment piling into the media industry, which had been struggling for decades. This form of these like venture capital funded firms and, and like buzzy digital news startups like BuzzFeed Vice, and they were Partially premised [01:02:00] on this idea that, you know, digital media is kind of this new thing.

It's transmitted to the public in this new way. We're going to try to meet the platforms and create stuff that's going to be really good and go viral on social media. I mean, the BuzzFeed logo is literally like an arrow that like, goes up. It is. It is the number go up media outlet that was created to try to capture this concept of what People thought the internet was going to be and then then it all kind of fell apart I think for a variety of reasons and there have been some other journalists who have kind of chronicle a little more closely how the relationship between places like BuzzFeed and You know, Mark Zuckerberg collapsed and part of it was that when your platform is serving up a lot of hard news and political content that those publishers tend to also want to get paid for producing that stuff.

And, you know, I think the mentality of the platforms mentality of companies are like Google are like, well, you know, we're a we're [01:03:00] a marketplace. We're not like You know, we're not the newsstand that needs to, like, buy copies of your newspapers so that we can sell them to people. You need us more than we need you, and I think that's been the mentality that has driven a lot of these hostile architecture changes, um, uh, from these companies, because it's not I don't think they see the whole scope of the world because these are truly global companies.

They see the whole scope of billions of potential users and customers who are looking at their digital advertisements. And they're like, we actually don't need these legacy media companies that are producing all this like complicated information and demanding money for it. Because first of all, it doesn't seem like the consumer demand for that information.

Is necessarily all that significant if we stop featuring it so much. 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Yeah, and basically right what was symbiotic became a kind of clientelist relationship 

MATT PEARCE: We are a captured industry to be clear 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Yes, like and it shows up in the bottom line of journalism outfits shrinking [01:04:00] bottom lines More economic scarcity.

It's harder to make a profit more dependent and you get more and more dependent on whatever tweak they do the algorithm so they can make some change in the code in the black box that sends a lot of traffic your way, which is what Facebook basically did because they wanted to compete with Twitter and that lasted and then they could take it away.

And once it went away, the relationship to the readers had been so intermediated by the feeds, by the platforms that people were going to the platforms, they weren't going to the, you know, the outlet. And then the platform can be like, well, we'll just show them dance videos and talk shows. And people were like, yeah, that's fine.

I don't. Yes, 

MATT PEARCE: yes. I mean, the consumers are the other part of the story, which is that we do have these monopolistic platforms that make design and sort of political economy decisions that dramatically affect us and the kind of information we get. But it is in partnership with users who love to be served.

slurry. I mean, that is, [01:05:00] that is, that is a big part of it. And that's one of the big challenges. 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Well, and part of it too, is that the, there's a few things going on. I mean, one is that journalism is a business, but it's a business that is endowed with a bunch of values and a role in democracy that makes it different than like restaurants, you know, like restaurants, there's only going to be restaurants.

Restaurants are a hard business. Lots of restaurants go out of business. It's really hard to make them work, but there's always going to be restaurants and restaurants are a key part of like urban and civic life and life in general, but they're not enshrined in the constitution and they don't, they don't play a central role in self governance journalism is a business that is a business, but also just functions differently in the, in the constitutional fabric.

And it also functions with a different set of like, Principles like people like and again, this is where I sound fuddy duddy But when we get things wrong, we correct them, but that's just not true for [01:06:00] a enormous world of people That are feeding people information without that Like, without this sense of, I don't know, responsibility?

What's the right word? 

MATT PEARCE: I think what you're describing is that journalism and publishing, unlike other businesses, has this unique labor tradition that has a kind of anti commercial bent that doesn't really make sense. I mean, Yeah. Talking about like the role of local restaurants in the economy, restaurants are very important in the economy, you know, their owners and employees will vote in elections and maybe they'll make political contributions or lobby or whatever, but a restaurant's not going to go take down the Pentagon.

Um, Your dominoes is probably not going to be publishing the Pentagon Papers because it thinks that, um, you know, Lyndon B. Johnson's doing something wrong, uh, in Vietnam. I mean, over the past century in particular, I mean, there's always been a history of expose journalism in the [01:07:00] United States and, um, that started with publishers.

But if you look, uh, back to the, uh, 60s and 70s, which was our sort of modern era of accountability journalism, That attitude of having an adversarial approach with government, of engaging in investigative reporting, which is not super efficient and sometimes not very popular, um, that was inculcated by groups like the Investigative Reporters and Editors, uh, Membership Association, which I've been a proud member of longer than I've been a member of my own union.

Um, and you have this weird, this bizarre phenomenon. It's such a bizarre sociological phenomenon, which is that Over the last several decades, the practice of investigative reporting spread across corporate newsrooms in the US at companies that like, you know, like Gannett or whatever that, you know, normally a lot of us are yelling at because we don't think they're very responsible as newspaper owners.

And yet, in these same companies, which are very much commercial enterprises, you would have, would have in these newsrooms, these very [01:08:00] kind of like commercially inefficient. Kind of economically irrational acts of journalism happening that are very much cloaked in the First Amendment and the idea of holding the government accountable and essentially acting as an anti authoritarian institution.

Um, and especially if you look back to, you know, Watergate, uh, the Pentagon Papers, a lot of what investigative journalists are writing about are abuses of power. With the kind of authoritarian character. It's, it's the keeping the national security state in check. It's keeping an eye on local law enforcement, which has the power to kill and sometimes does.

Unpacking American Extremism - In The Thick - Air Date 11-14-24

MARIA HINOJOSA - HOST, IN THE THICK: Karen, you know, we're hearing about the specificity of the attacks on the trans community and how much fear there is there. You know, you write for the Washington Post, right?

It's all about Washington politics. What do you think this victory means for the future of our democracy? 

KAREN ATTIAH: Yeah. Look, I think this country is a young democracy. I don't [01:09:00] think a full democracy is anything but a country that gives protections and voice to the most marginalized. I mean, I think, you know, as a journalist, we're seeing definite attacks on the press.

We're seeing attacks on organizers. I think it's not a coincidence to me that that after platforms like Twitter were so instrumental in making so many of these issues, whether it was racism, police brutality, Me Too, so visible and forcing those issues of America not holding up to its promise for Black people, for women, for trans people.

To me, it's not a surprise that the tech broligarchs came in, bought up these platforms. We now have Zuckerberg saying, we're not going to do politics. We're not going to do [01:10:00] news. And to me, it, it is also, I think this question, you know, not just of our elected officials, but again, of our ruling class, which yes, includes.

The Elon Musk, the Peter Thiel's, the Mark Zuckerberg's who have an insane amount of unaccountable power over what we see, over what we consume, over what we believe to be real, who have leaned to the right, who have, I mean, Elon tried to tilt this election in favor of Trump. And I think this is going to be something that we're going to have to really figure out and grapple with as we're moving in this increasingly mediated space.

I mean, what does it mean? For a handful of men, of white men, a couple of South African immigrants who have decided that they want to reshape this country into a country that silences the press, that wants to elevate high testosterone men, white men, [01:11:00] into power. Right. When I look at democracy, it's not just about elected officials, but it's about the class of wealthy, ultra rich billionaires that we have actively working with the fascist government and or caving.

So what does it mean for us to fight back against that?

There's a lot of news deserts, right? This media environment is now less diverse than it was in the 90s. It is not an accident that newsrooms have been slashing the news staff of people of these different backgrounds, black, Latino, trans. So the fact that everybody's dumbfounded about what's happening, like, yeah, no shit, because the people whose job it was to interpret and to give voice to these issues, y'all let them go because you want [01:12:00] to quote unquote appeal to your core slash white audience.

MARIA HINOJOSA - HOST, IN THE THICK: You know, one of the things, Imada, obviously, the reason why In The Thick came into existence was to have an independent analysis of the politics from a non white perspective, right? We were all, the three of us, basically yelling and screaming, this is not a normal election. This is not a normal party, not a normal So, final question, what has been the role of mainstream media in helping to make this all happen?

IMARA JONES: Oh boy. I think that if you see yourself as a part of the establishment, then your role is to preserve the established order. If you see yourself in the role of preserving the established order, that any perceived threats to that order will be preserved. marginalized, period, full stop. And I think that one of the issues is that [01:13:00] a part of the established order is that there are two parties, you treat them a certain way, and you don't actually listen to the content of what they're saying.

You know, there's a president, whoever the president is, you report on them in a certain way. So you're just actually publicizing and lifting up the conversation that the established order tells you. So when you have a major party that's captured by an extremist movement. You just keep doing the same thing.

And what you've ended up doing is to legitimize those extremist views. Cause you just cover them like everything else.

Misinformation, Disinformation, Malinformation ( Feat Esosa Osa) Part 2 - Gettin' Grown - Air Date 11-12-24

TYKEIA N. ROBINSON - CO-HOST, GETTIN' GROWN: I was gonna ask, um, so I think your report, which I love by the way, um, and I think I've said that before, but I'll probably say it again. So just like, um, so the black online disinformation landscape, what I think is so Masterful about it is that, you know, it's very clear that you've done a lot of, uh, research to help us to understand a, the dis, what a [01:14:00] disinformation landscape is and sort of its implications, particularly around, um, you know, uh, voter engagement, uh, narratives, political narratives, just sort of all of the things that, you know, You know, would encourage or facilitate or even discourage someone to engage in the system.

And so many of us have not been even socialized to think about it in that way. Uh, and so I would love if you could just, you know, I'm going to encourage everyone, we'll put the link in the description box, but if you could just for anyone who's listening, who's never heard of this report, never heard of Onyx Impact, um, you know, tell us, tell us what the report is from, you know, as the, as the author and as you know, your organization, like this is what you've done, you know, give us a summary of what is in it and how we could leverage it, especially in this, in this critical time.

ESOSA OSA: Yeah, absolutely. So what this is. [01:15:00] Is a, a landscape and what I mean by landscape is, is like a, a, a plotting out like on a map, a mapping of who the main actors are writing false or misleading information is and what the main narratives, uh, the main false or misleading narratives happening in these spaces are.

And lastly, Uh, how they interact with each other and how they become viral. The reason that it's important to, to, to start with this is because you can't really begin to address the problem unless you know what the problem is. And unless you know how the problem spreads, this is the case in most research.

And I think what is most important for folks to get out of this report is an understanding of the importance of what we call. Kind of gateway influencers and platforms of [01:16:00] these legitimate black, uh, staples of news and culture, right? Who are honestly the, the, the main places where black folks are getting a lot of their news and information from right now, especially young black folks.

You know, we did a study on its impact, uh, recently 15 percent of young black folks are going to cable news to get, uh, and use information. Seven, seven, uh, relative to 73% of them who are going to some type of social media platform, right? And so, uh, we did seven focus groups and, uh, national focus groups of black folks and every single focus group named the Breakfast Club as a place they get using information from.

And so if you're. If you are, so regardless, I hear y'all and 

JADE VERETTE - CO-HOST, GETTIN' GROWN: you don't have to, it's okay. This is my [01:17:00] views. These do not reflect the views of his Sosa. Okay. Also, these are my views. But that shit is scary. Okay. Sorry. No, but just as someone who reads like, 

ESOSA OSA: you know, just as a person, you know, we would talk to read newspapers and I mean, even just read books and to develop a perspective.

Like, you know, it's kind of scary that that's sort of been watered down to the comments, but in the captions, that's my soapbox. You're not wrong. And I, but I don't think we're necessarily going back to that. Right. So we've got regardless of your, of your views on. On the breakfast club on the shade room on, you know, a lot, a lot of these other, uh, platforms, if this is where folks are going to get their information from, then we need to, um, make sure this is where we're also putting good information, right.

You're not wrong. Building a healthier black information ecosystem is going to take steps, right, is going to require us [01:18:00] amplifying and creating larger platforms for folks who are telling truthful information to be investing in these, in, in new black media opportunities, new black podcasts, new black radio show, all these types of things.

Uh, and in the meantime, In the meantime, making sure that we are engaging with platforms where black folks currently are. And so, uh, that's, that is the most, I think, important. And that's actually why, you know, we put this, we put this out in June, like, uh, very, our number one piece of strategic guidance, like y'all got to engage in these gateway platforms and influencers.

And unfortunately, you know, it took a change in the presidential ticket, um, to start. Start seeing someone, uh, go on to these platforms, right? Uh, repeatedly start talking on these platforms. And when I tell you that is the only time that we have seen any, uh, positive [01:19:00] content about the Democratic candidate, like, uh, uh, Pierce, any of these faces.

Right. Um, and so it's, it's, it's more important than folks realize. And it's, and it's why we put that at the top of our, our strategic guidance for this, this particular report. 

SECTION B - MEN ARE NOT OKAY

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Men Are Not Okay.

Make America Male Again Fifteen years of aggrieved men Part 2 - It's Been a Minute - Air Date 11-19-24

HANNA ROSIN: The story of men and women, just to give us the gender binary for a minute, of the last 40 or 50 years, is a story about Like, the world moving very quickly, and women doing a better job of, like, sort of keeping up with it.

With a lot of struggle. Like, think of it as an actual treadmill. Like, just the world moving more and more, like, the treadmill's going faster and faster, and women are struggling, but kind of keeping up. Like, they're just kind of adjusting, or, or figuring out how to go to college, or like, if marriage is, and they figure out, like, how to take care of the kids, and how to stay in the workforce.

BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: Yeah.

HANNA ROSIN: [01:20:00] And men just. Not able to like shift or keep up. It's not about total numbers like men sinking, women rising. It's about women rising and men like not quite able to rise or keep up. And so I think there's something real about that for men and the anxieties. There's something real about like, I don't know who to be without the structures.

I don't know. Who to be in the world without marriage, or I don't know, like who to be in the world without the provider role or the husband role. It's like without these traditional man roles, I feel really discombobulated and lost. Whereas I think women have been rolling through the collapse of roles for like a century.

Like the roles collapse and they just kind of like keep on moving and there's lots of theories about why that is. Like some of it is about your brains develop. earlier. Some of it, some of it is about skills like organization skills. Some of it [01:21:00] is because like the kids are there and women have to take care of the kids.

So there's all sorts of reasons why women are able to kind of find stability as women, whereas men have a harder time finding stability as men. 

BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: Hmm. Hmm. In talking about some of the challenges that men Maybe facing or dealing with in our current society. Uh, let me describe a man to you. I'm into this.

Yeah. I'm into it. We'll call him Luke. Let's call him Luke. Luke. Luke lives in a large town. That's a little more rural than suburban Pennsylvania. He's middle aged about 45 years old. Uh, he's divorced. He doesn't see his children often. Luke is white and he makes around 40, 000 a year. 

HANNA ROSIN: Mm

BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: hmm. And he recently faced bankruptcy.

If I told you this man stormed the Capitol building on January 6th, 2021. Would that surprise you? 

HANNA ROSIN: No.

BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: Why not?

HANNA ROSIN: Because this is the big change that happened between the time I wrote [01:22:00] the book and now this is the biggest change that happened. People did not identify as aggrieved men. They just kind of lived that way and were embarrassed by it.

So the Lukes, the Lukes who appeared in my book, I'll tell you about one Luke who appeared in my book. He lived in one of these towns, a little more rural, just like you described, and the factory shut down. This is totally typical white American story. It was a black American story, sort of 34 years before in the cities, then it became a white American story in the rural areas.

And so Luke's wife was still working. She was still working in the schools. And she would put her. Paycheck down on the table and then Luke would go cash that paycheck. Hmm. And there was a sense of shame around it. Now 15 years later, Luke is wearing a T-shirt saying, the end of men. Like he's not embarrassed.

He's like part of some [01:23:00] big political movement slash community of like, we are aggrieved too. So that's what I watched happen in the 15 years where like the Lukes who were like. quietly suffering started like really loudly suffering and that upended our politics and our culture in so many ways. Hmm.

That's interesting. Cause I bet underneath your question maybe is like, should I feel sorry for Luke? Is that what you're trying to? No, that is, that's actually, that's, that 

BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: is

HANNA ROSIN: not

BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: one of the questions that I have. I mean, I, I, I mean, I got to come clean. Luke is not. a real person, but his characteristics were all ones pulled together from people's lives that actually did storm the Capitol.

Yeah. On January 6th. Yeah. And I brought up this kind of composite character, Luke, because I think that that character is a good way to think about how Gender anxieties can actually be an expression of other anxieties in our lives. What do you think about that? [01:24:00] 100%. 

HANNA ROSIN: I think it's the most powerful, most concrete and most persistent expression of generalized anxiety.

I mean, I was at a Trump rally and the number of times The people use expressions like we don't want beta males. We want alpha males. We, I'm telling you, we want a world where men are men and women are women. And I'm thinking. The world is changing really fast like the world around gender and all over the place because it's it's happening in urban places in rural places like the way a younger generation thinks about what gender is and what their own gender is.

It's really shifting radically and and how that is just genuinely terrifying. To people or it just becomes like a like a split like the country splits in two and one part of the country has really like rigid traditional ideas of gender and the other goes and like totally the other direction. 

BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: I mean, it's interesting [01:25:00] because like when it comes to sort of like the make America great again era, you know, like the past nearly 10 years, there's these like two competing gender ideals butting heads against one another.

What do these two mentalities say about what we as Americans value? Or in other words, like, What hopes and fears do we unconsciously put inside of our views on gender?

HANNA ROSIN: I feel like I'm in some kind of Buddha mood or something. I mean, the immediate answer that comes to me is Go for it. The world is an unstable and scary place and people have lost a lot of their Grounding, whether because fewer people are getting married, because jobs are less stable, because the climate disaster, sort of for all sorts of [01:26:00] reasons.

And I think some people are grasping for stability. Kind of backwards outside themselves, like make America great again, go back to the other time when things were like this and I recognized them and everything didn't seem out of control. And some people are looking for stability kind of inside themselves, like self determination, who I am, my own identity, I get to decide.

Like, what I want to be, and I think that's very grounding and empowering. So I think everybody's experiencing similar instability and just looking for answers. In different places. Yeah, finding their comfort in, in different ways. 

Barron Trump & the ‘Bro Vote’ Helped Sway the Election. What Happens Next - CNN - Air Date 11-9-24

CLIP: It's been a big week for the manosphere. Figures from this proudly anti feminist section of the internet, made up of influencers, Dreams come true guys, Trump's in the White House. pundits, comedians, streamers and podcasters are still reveling in Donald [01:27:00] Trump's triumph, and claiming they played a big part in helping him win what is being called the gender war election.

I need an abortion. Get fucked. Many of them have spent the days since Trump's victory mocking female voters. Guess what? Guys win again. It's your body, my choice. As a president who was found liable for sexual abuse, ponders whether to radically redraw abortion rights across the US. I'm president. I want to protect the women.

I'm going to do it whether the women like it or not. Yet as the dust settles, the Republican Party has a problem. Oh, yeah! What does it do with the tide of angry young men who sent them back to the White House?

Though plenty of women voted Republican, The gender war election framing has been pushed by some of the world's loudest voices. Elon Musk, [01:28:00] Trump's biggest supporter in recent months, tweeted, The cavalry has arrived. Men are voting in record numbers. They now realize everything is at stake. The top reply came from the notorious influencer and accused rapist and human trafficker, Andrew Tate.

His summary of the election? It's men versus gays and chicks. We have a new star. A star is born, Elon. Many have criticised the world's richest man for stoking the fires of gender conflict, and some have pointed out that more young women voted Trump than they did in 2020, with support increasing for Trump.

From 33% to 40, yet the increase in young men voting for Trump was even higher, jumping from 41% to 56%. Trump's support is strongest among young Republicans, gen Z, and young millennials giving him a crucial edge in what's been described as one of the most consequential elections in US history. 

DANA WHITE: Fuck Kabbalah Trump 2024, [01:29:00] 

CLIP: and Trump's secret weapon in securing the So-called bro vote.

appears to have been his gigantic, chronically online, 18 year old son, Barron. Barron Trump. Hey, you're pretty popular, right? He might be more popular than Don and Eric. Barron Trump, along with his MAGA influencer best friend, Beau Loudon. The strategy is reaching an audience that, you know, maybe isn't being recognized.

Joe Rogan obviously picked President Trump. I helped set that up too. Definitely talked to some people about that. We're tasked by the Trump campaign with helping to reach out to Gen Z men. Donald J. Trump! And they did it through their favorite influencers, many of whom were name checked live from Trump's victory podium by UFC boss Dana White.

DANA WHITE: I want to thank the Nellboys, Aiden Ross, um, uh, uh, Theo Vaughn, Bustin with the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan. 

CLIP: Aiden Ross is one of them. A 24 year old streamer, whose career [01:30:00] highlights include being the man who sniffed Andrew Tate's chair after interviewing him, and hosting a live stream with the incel and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

Uh, dude, it's actually like a pleasure to talk to you, bro. A close friend of Barron, Aidan Ross hosted Trump on his stream in August of this year. My son Barron says hello. He's a great young guy, but he's a big fan of yours. What's up Barron? Yeah, Barron's awesome. Barron also appears to have close links with the notorious influencer Andrew Tate, after the two were linked to a failed meme coin cryptocurrency.

I'm gonna text Barron. Him and I talk quite often. In private messages acquired by Vice, Senior members of Tate's misogynist network The War Room speculated for years that the 2024 election would be a gender war where the nuances of identity politics would fall away, leaving a direct battle between men and women.

To ensure the result they wanted, Tate Ross, the Nelk Boys, and a whole host of alpha male influencers spent election day telling their followers to go [01:31:00] out and vote for Trump. If Kamala's in charge, we're one period away from global destruction. We need a man in power, we need a man in charge. When Donald Trump was announced as the next president, those same online figures were quick to gobble up the credit for galvanizing the so called pro vote.

Bring down the temperature. Despite outgoing President Joe Biden asking Americans to unite and set aside their differences, Trump's victory looks likely to kickstart another four years of division and rancor. It was always bigger than Trump. If you take him out now, it won't even matter. Seven people will replace him, bro.

Women across the US are vowing to stop dating, marrying, having sex, or having children with men. Inspired by the 4B movement in South Korea. We are just really sick of men's shit. This is the consequence of toxic masculinity. An offshoot of Me Too formed after the murder of a soul woman in 2016 has grown in response to concerns including revenge porn and digital sex crimes.

Pressing topics in the US, with [01:32:00] women reporting an extreme uptick in online misogyny since Trump's win. And it's like, You're a fucking retard. In response, Nick Fuentes, popularizer of the inflammatory slogan Your Body, My Choice, has been doxxed, with social media users posting his home address. He's already run into trouble with the law, after macing a 57 year old feminist on his doorstep.

DANA WHITE: Hi.

CLIP: Oh my god, what, what are you doing? Even within

the MAGA camp, the celebratory tone adopted by people like Fuentes and Tate is causing division. Hillary Crowder, a trad right political commentator, has encouraged the Republicans to disavow the red pill manosphere nonsense. The question of whether they will or not looks set to define the next chapter in US politics. 

Why did young men shift to Trump 'Aspirational masculinity', says Scott Galloway - VICE - Air Date 11-15-24

MICHAEL SMERCONISH - HOST, CNN: Joining me now is NYU Business School Professor Scott Galloway. He's the host of the podcast, Professor G. Great to have you back. We've all heard of toxic [01:33:00] masculinity. What is aspirational masculinity?

SCOTT GALLOWAY: Good to be with you, Michael. Um, aspirational, feeling good about being a man. Um, believing you, uh, are entitled to more economic opportunity than is currently presented. Look, we, you referenced this. I feel like most of the stats I was going to discuss, you've already kind of stolen my thunder. But essentially, this was supposed to be the election, uh, the referendum on bodily autonomy.

This was the testosterone election. Look at who Trump went on, look at who and what he went all in on. Crypto, Elon Musk, rockets, cars. Uh, you talk about podcasts? There's a difference between being right and being effective. Whether, we can discuss whether his policies are right or not, but gosh, talk about effective.

That number you mentioned, a total of 55 million people listen to or watch the Rogan podcast. The average [01:34:00] age is 34, skews male. Just to talk about broadcast television, some of the best shows on MSNBC, seen as a left kind of leaning network, get a million viewers and the average age is 70, and it skews female.

So what would be more effective? 1 million 70-year-old women, or 45, 50 5 million, 34-year-old, uh, men in your state. The swingings of swing states young men were nine points towards Biden in 2020, and then 18 points toward, um, Trump in 24. That's a tectonic shift, and it all comes down to my opinion, to the same thing.

A 30 year old man or woman isn't doing as well as his or her parents were at 30 for the first time in America's history. And if your son isn't in a relationship, can't afford to buy a home, is anxious, is depressed, are the rights of Palestinians territorial sovereignty of [01:35:00] Ukraine or trans rights? Does that even register on your screen?

This was the testosterone podcast election.

MICHAEL SMERCONISH - HOST, CNN: I want to say that you've spoken of these issues, we've spoken of these issues before there was a 2024 campaign. And I can remember having conversations with Scott Galloway going back two or three years, some of them here on CNN, some of them on SiriusXM, wondering why, and I wasn't thinking Donald Trump, but why doesn't someone champion this cause?

And really, he was the first to step forward and do so. 

SCOTT GALLOWAY: He went right, he went, he flew right into the storm. And he embraced this, the manosphere. He talked about the need crypto, right? What is more ground zero for kind of young men and economic opportunity, whether you believe that or not, then crypto. And let's look at some of the stats.[01:36:00] 

40 years ago, the average age of the first time homebuyer was 36. Today, it's 54. Pre pandemic, the average home was 290, 000. Post pandemic, it's 420 with an acceleration interest rates. You're looking at the average mortgage has gone from 1, 100 to 2, 200. 40 years ago, two thirds of people under the age of 30 had a home.

60 percent had a child. Have all of a sudden young people opted out of having a home and a child, or maybe they just can't afford it. And unfortunately, The Democrats weren't able to square the circle of the fact that the economy is actually quite good, and some of Trump's policies, whether it be deficit spending or tariffs, will likely result in more inflation and greater interest rates and taxation on the young, but they weren't able to communicate that.

They, in the podcast medium, can't be understated here, Michael, because some of the offensive things that we Democrats thought, that joke is offensive. The Zeitgeist and Podcasts. Is it softens people podcast [01:37:00] hosts aren't looking for a gotcha moment They generally want to present the individual in their best light and it's more got the vibe of can't you take a joke?

And if you look at the nine of the top 10 podcasts Uh, eight of, uh, uh, they lean right, and Trump went on six of them? I mean, there's going to be a lot of forensics here, but not acknowledging the struggles of young men as a broader theme will be a very big issue when we look at the autopsy that failed Harris campaign.

And also, simply put, she should have gone on a plane to Austin. The demographic group that swung most violently towards Trump was young people. The second most violent swing was their parents, age 45 to 64. All of the social engineering, all of the righteous social issues, weren't, didn't even take a back seat.

They weren't even in the car. Because what people see is their, their kids not doing well, specifically young men, and Trump went right into this issue. 

MICHAEL SMERCONISH - HOST, CNN: I want to display what you're describing. Put up the [01:38:00] Edison research exit survey data. This was published by the Washington post. I don't know if Scott can see it, but it shows that among 18 to 29 year olds, she had the edge.

But as we've documented, he gained significantly among young men. But now look at the 45 to 64 category. It was the best category for Donald Trump. You just made reference to this, but who are those people as they relate to young men? 

SCOTT GALLOWAY: I hear from them every day, Michael. When I started talking about the struggles of young men three or four years ago, there was a gag reflex.

I understood it because a lot of people who entered that void were quite frankly thinly veiled misogynists. The conversation has shifted and the people driving this conversation and the most emails of the demographic I get the most emails from are the following. Single mothers worried about their sons.

Are you focused on international affairs or the rights of special interest group when your son? My daughter's in Pennsylvania [01:39:00] at Penn. My other daughter's in PR in Chicago, and my son is in the basement vaping and playing video games. And you want me to worry about Ukraine? You want me to have empathy for this zombie apocalypse on campuses, which is seen as very democratic?

No, I want my kid out of my house, and I want him to have the same opportunities my generation had. The, the second biggest swing here, or the The, the portion of the female vote that swung most aggressively away from Harris and towards Trump was one demographic, mothers. 

Why Men And Boys Are Struggling - On the Media - Air Date 11-20-24

Micah Loewinger: Which I think sets us up to talk about some of the discrepancies that you've observed in the labor market, where men's participation fell by seven percentage points in the last 50 years. That's 96% employment to 89%. Notably, the largest drop has been among young men ages 25 to 34. That would be my age group. [chuckles] You point out that one in three men with no more than high [01:40:00] school level education are unemployed, which is a staggering five million people. What happened there?

Richard Reeves: It used to be true that men could actually do pretty well even without much education for all kinds of reasons, including sexism, but also just because there were a lot more jobs around, or sometimes called strong-back jobs. You had high school education, you could go to a factory, et cetera. Those jobs just aren't there in the numbers they were anymore before, and so less skilled men in particular are really struggling in the labor market. Those are the ones also whose earnings have dropped so that even if they're in work, we've seen a stagnation of male wages in the middle and bottom half of the distribution.

Micah Loewinger: Sometimes this is crudely framed as like the brawny jobs versus the brainy jobs.

Richard Reeves: The Bureau for Labor Statistics actually has a measure of jobs that require physical strength. The number of jobs that require any kind of serious physical strength has now dropped to below 10%. It's not that there are none, but it used to be closer to 30%.

Micah Loewinger: Alongside this is a pretty [01:41:00] striking mental health crisis. Young men are four times more likely to die by suicide. According to Pew, drug overdose deaths among Black men in the US more than tripled between 2015 and 2020.

Richard Reeves: I was very struck by a study published in The British Medical Journal by a scholar called Fiona Shand, where she and her colleagues looked at the words that men use to describe themselves before suicide or attempted suicide, and the two most commonly used words were useless and worthless. This sense of like use and worth, I do think it's an uncontroversial statement to say that it's a pretty universal human need to be needed. Your family needs you. Your employer needs you. Your community needs you. You have a specific role in society.

I see suicide rates and other mental health problems as symptoms of a deeper malaise which is, for many men, a loss of purpose, a loss of meaning, a loss of a sense of how should I be in the world. That's a crisis that we should take very seriously. The solution is not to say, [01:42:00] yes, let's go back to the old world where men were heads of the household and the primary breadwinners, and that worked really well, because, guess what? It didn't work very well.

Micah Loewinger: Speaking of turning back the clock, now that we have a snapshot of these disparities, I want to talk about our albeit broken political conversation and how it's metabolized some of these data points. I think it's really clear how the American right has capitalized on this big time.

Senator Josh Hawley: "I want to focus tonight on the deconstruction of men. Not because I think men are more important, but because I believe the attack on men has been the tip of the spear in the left's broader attack on America."

Micah Loewinger: That's Missouri Senator Josh Hawley speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in November 2021.

Richard Reeves: It's pretty clear what he's doing here. He's taking this sense that men are struggling. Many boys are struggling in school, many men are struggling in the labor market, many dads are struggling to be in their kids' lives. Those are facts, true, and in many cases, getting worse. What Hawley is doing and many others are doing [01:43:00] is channeling that and helping to turn it into a grievance, and then saying, yes, we see you're struggling. Guess whose fault it is? It's the fault of the left because they don't care about you. In fact they think you're toxic. They think you're the problem.

They think, to borrow a phrase from a lot of men's rights activists, that women have problems, men are problems, and they're turning that against the left. My take of this is that if real problems are not addressed by responsible people, by mainstream institutions, they metastasize into grievances. Once they become grievances, they can be exploited for political ends without any tangible solutions. The best that he can do or has done so far is to say we should bring back marriage and bring back manufacturing. Okay. Good luck with that, Senator. There hasn't been a single marriage promotion policy that's worked in the US, and bringing back manufacturing is a pretty tough thing to do.

Even Donald Trump couldn't talk manufacturing back into existence. It just goes [01:44:00] against many of the trends in the global economy. That doesn't matter. The point is not to offer solutions that are actually workable. The point is simply to activate the grievances. Reactionary politicians around the world - it's not just in the US. Look at South Korea. Look at East Germany. Look at Brexit - are actually really working with the grain of this male malaise and turning it to their political advantage, but there are no policies. The cupboard is bare in terms of actually doing anything.

Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, you believe that the left is basically in denial that this is even a problem. That there are these systemic issues affecting men. This is not the language that you often hear in the left, you believe.

Richard Reeves: I think the problem is that the response from the left has largely been one of an echoing silence. The left really hasn't engaged with these issues very much at all. It almost seems intellectually impossible for those on the left to say, "Well, actually, there are some inequalities going the other way now as well," and take [01:45:00] seriously the issues of boys and men. I get it. There's this kind of visceral reaction. There's a reflex. Even perhaps among people listening to our conversation, there'll be this reflex, like, "Really?"

Micah Loewinger: Well, we're both white guys and we're speaking on behalf of all kinds of people in this conversation.

Richard Reeves: Sure. That "Really?" response is entirely appropriate. They say, "Yes, really. Look at these data points and then we can discuss it and so on, but don't suggest that it couldn't even be possible that there are these inequalities going either way." If the right is trying to turn back the clock, to some extent, on women, I think the left are too often turning their back on boys and men, or worse, sometimes suggesting that if there are problems that boys and men are having, it must be their fault. This is the rare occasion when the left is willing to use very individualistic diagnosis of what's happening.

Typically, the left is more comfortable with structural suggestions as to what's happening. There's this sense from the left of like even if we agree you're struggling, well, they're going to say it's your fault, you just need to shape up. Maybe you're a bit toxic as well.

Micah Loewinger: You've used that term "toxic masculinity." [01:46:00] I'm sure it means different things to different people. I'd like to know how you define it and why you don't like the term.

Richard Reeves: It used to be quite a useful term in obscure corners of academia. It was used by people looking at very violent offenders, men, for whom their idea of what it meant to be a man had become psychologically very strongly connected to violence. Then it broke out into the mainstream in about 2016. My problem with it is twofold. One is it's just used completely indiscriminately to describe any kind of behavior that the user of the term disapproves of.

The other big problem with it is just by putting the word toxic next to the word masculinity, it gets very close to the kind of Puritan ideas of original sin. There is something toxic within you. It allows, again, reactionary. It allows us on the right to be able to plausibly claim, "Look, they don't like you. They're not on your side. They think you're toxic."

Micah Loewinger: I think my favorite version of the toxic masculinity critique, which you cite in your book, comes from YouTuber ContraPoints, aka Natalie Wynn, in her [01:47:00] 2020 video titled Men. "We say, look, toxic masculinity is the reason you don't have room to express your feelings, and it's the reason you feel lonely and inadequate. While feminism tells women 'You hate your body and you're constantly doubting yourself because society did this to you and needs to change,' we kind of just tell men 'You're lonely and suicidal because you're toxic.' Stop it. We tell them they're broken without really telling them how to fix themselves. I think what we need--''

 In your book, you also point to moments where the political left, the Democratic Party, has missed opportunities to proudly use government to help men. Perhaps, as you argue, because of fear of what celebrating men might signal.

Richard Reeves: President Biden signed the infrastructure bill into law. More than 2/3 of the jobs from the infrastructure bill will go to men, predominantly working-class men, and a little bit disproportionately, working-class men of color it looks. Did the administration say that? No.

Micah Loewinger: Which would have prompted [01:48:00] questions, you know?

Richard Reeves: Yes, but let's have that conversation. On the other hand, student debt cancellation was described as a gender justice issue because 2/3 of student debt is held by women because women go to college much more than men. The college debt thing was going to, by and large, help upper-middle-class women. The infrastructure was going to help working-class men, especially Hispanic working-class men.

It seems to me that it should be possible for an administration to say there's all kinds of problems. Some of these problems affect different groups. Actually, working-class men have not been doing very well in America in recent decades, and the infrastructure bill is going to help working-class men.

SECTION C - WHAT WE CAN DO

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section C: What Can We Do?

Why so many have left X, and where everyone is turning to - DW News - Air Date 11-15-24

ANCHOR, DW NEWS: . So, we've got Stephen King. He's joined the Exodus, just like the British newspaper, The Guardian. But, there's nothing new about the concerns over what X has become since Musk took over.

So, why are they leaving so late? 

ZEVE SANDERSON: Yeah, it's a good question. So obviously this isn't a trend that's just starting now. Um, that being said, I sort of want to note that there's not [01:49:00] much precedent for an owner of a major social media platform to be as partisan as Musk, uh, and, and to sort of, you know, be as active, you In in the platform and and content moderation as Musk has been, um, you know, likely what we're probably seeing is is an impact from the election and Musk's very active role in trying to shape the information environment around the election in order to to nominate Donald Trump.

Um, now what effect this will exactly have on either X or other platforms is yet to be seen. Uh, but my guess is, you know, it's largely driven by, by Musk's sort of attempt to, to, you know, support Trump during the election. 

ANCHOR, DW NEWS: And for those people, unlike Stephen King, who choose to remain on the platform, the terms of use they changed today, um, directing all legal challenges to a conservative leaning court in Texas.

Now that's away from where X is based near Austin, what do you think that's going to mean? 

ZEVE SANDERSON: Uh, I mean, in [01:50:00] practically it's unclear what it's going to mean. Um, clearly this is just trying to move, uh, X sort of away from being held accountable, uh, for its, its actions here towards, you know, uh, a legal jurisdiction or with, with a specifically, um, a judge that is going to be, I think a little bit more open, uh, to some of Musk's, um, uh, Um, you know, sort of culture war politics, uh, but you know, my, my background is more in political science and studying the information environment.

Uh, and I've made the mistake exactly once of commenting too directly on, on, on legal dynamics. Um, so I'll sort of end there, but yeah. 

ANCHOR, DW NEWS: Let me ask you for your take on this then. Um, Musk is already suing the watchdog media matters in, in this new court for X, because it alleged that advertisements appeared next to pro Nazi Sites.

Have you ever seen anything like this on a social media platform? 

ZEVE SANDERSON: No, I mean, certainly not a major social media platform. And right. There is, there's an irony here that [01:51:00] when Musk bought X or at that point, Twitter, um, that in part, you know, his, his, his rhetoric around why he wanted to buy the platform was to make it more transparent.

And an important part of transparency broadly is, is research on the platform that holds the platform accountable for its actions. Um, so, you know, I'm not the first certainly to, to make this point. Um, but, but it is disappointing to see sort of further litigation in this regard. Another important terms of service change that, that occurred recently, um, was that he's, you know, made it increasingly difficult for, for academic researchers like us to be able to, to access platform data either directly from the platform.

Or by by collecting it, the sort of automated means. So I think we're just seeing sort of continued push into less transparency, not more transparency. 

ANCHOR, DW NEWS: I got to ask you another question about litigation. Musk is suing companies such as Unilever, Mars, Orsted, and there are others for violating antitrust laws and for keeping billions of [01:52:00] dollars of advertising money away from him.

I mean, he says that they Now we have the ear of president elect Donald Trump. Should those companies, should they be worried? 

ZEVE SANDERSON: So I think that they could, you know, when it comes again to litigation itself, it seems pretty well established that companies have First Amendment protections. Um, and where they spend advertising dollars falls under corporate speech.

So I would be very surprised if, if this actually went very far in the courts. Um, I think what we're going to see here, uh, is just another four years. of sort of direct engagement with, with culture war issues, uh, and, and with trying to hold institutions, um, sort of from, from the right accountable for, for speech that, um, that contradicts, um, uh, their perspective.

So, you know, again, when, when it comes to direct impact of litigation, um, [01:53:00] I'd be relatively surprised if there was an effect. But I think that this is just going to be part of, of what, you know, the next four years of, of a second Trump administration looks like. 

ANCHOR, DW NEWS: Yeah. We started with Stephen King. Let me wrap this up with Stephen King.

He's asked his followers to migrate to threads with him. Blue Sky is currently the most downloaded app on the app store in the United States. Number two right now is threads. I mean, there once was a migration to Mastodon that fizzled out. Do you see any of these emerging as the dominant? Twitter X replacement.

ZEVE SANDERSON: Yeah. So, um, you know, in, for, for studying social media platforms, we refer to this as network effects, where the value of a platform is essentially because everyone else is there. And the more people are there, the more valuable it becomes, you know, um, it's, you know, it's tough to prognosticate, as you said, this has happened before.

I think what we're likely to see. Is not a single X or Twitter replacement, we're not going to see a single sort of short form [01:54:00] text based, uh, platform that replaces what Twitter was a few years ago, but I think what we're likely to see is the social media environment continue to look more like the traditional media environment where it's heavily fractured, and you see a number of different platforms, um, you know, end up becoming relatively robust and permanent, um, but I think it's, you know, It's probably unlikely, especially given how many right leaning accounts are going to remain on X for there to be a wholesale replacement of what Twitter used to be.

The Role of the Press in This Moment with Matt Pearce Part 3 - Why Is This Happening - Air Date 11-19-24

MATT PEARCE: I mean, the real question here is, are we talking about the Internet as it's likely to be or the Internet as it ought to be? Because 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Well, let's establish what "ought" is like, what would the "ought" be? What do you want if you can make the world? 

MATT PEARCE: So I think that we have at least a couple trillion dollar internet companies that we need to break up. I think Google is a monopolist probably many times over [01:55:00] to the point that It's like infrastructure of the internet when people are just looking at something, they just mindlessly go to Google to try to find it. And I think having monopolies has been bad for innovation. I mean, it's so ironic when we talk about tech companies because they do represent in many ways the forefront of the economy and they're developing new things.

But like in the media space, like what's remarkable about the homogenization of media? It's not a homogenization of content, it's like a homogenization of form. Where Google has a certain way that like, it likes your websites to look if you want to be featured on their algorithm. Which again is a black box and people fight about it and you know they want to be on the top of the 10 blue links like Google's you know, overwhelming force over connecting people with web pages has shaped what web pages look like, and I think that's given us like an extremely narrow idea of even [01:56:00] what a web page should look like. 

Meta, it's own, you know, hostility to linking these days is gonna result in people trying to create a bunch of native content on an app that is never gonna surface it. Unless you, you know, are engaging in engagement bait to try to like troll people into having responses on sort of like nonsensical issues.

You know, TikTok, it's going to require you to shoot your videos in a certain way to get people's attention in the first, you know, literally half second of a video before people move on. Like all these things are, it's the classic Marshall McLuhan, the form produces the content and the content produces the form, which is that, you know, we have this existing ethic and journalism of going out there and telling the truth and getting in people's faces, even when it's not very popular.

And even when it's not very commercial, and we're trying to shove it into these, you know, text sized boxes that weren't really made for us. And it's very, and I want to be clear that like, you can totally do journalism on TikTok or [01:57:00] YouTube or Instagram or whatever. 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: And there are people are, I also don't want to be like, I don't want to be like annoyingly disparaging about influencers. Like there's lots of people doing fantastic stuff in all those places. Like genuinely, there is great stuff, smart people, conscientious people, people surfacing and bridging stuff. Like, I don't want to sound like you're not doing real journalism, which people, what people used to say to us when we were like writing blogs, like there are tons of people doing great stuff.

MATT PEARCE: No, and I completely agree because, you know, basically having been a content creator myself as a journalist who was also like big on Twitter for a while, like I get it. The problem is, is that The people who should be replacing us in these new mediums, are basically far more exposed to the massive power of these companies and they don't have the ability to push back because they're not attached to these existing institutions like newspapers and publishers and broadcasters that at like, a firm level and at like, the sectoral level had some kind of bargaining power to essentially like negotiate with companies over like 'Hey, it would be great if your platform featured news. Like, here's what that would look like, and here's how you could place [01:58:00] it, and here's what compensation would look like.' There was some countervailance when tech companies were smaller that I think has totally broken down in this sort of monopoly era. And that's just, that's not, non existent at all for users.

Like, users have no bargaining power whatsoever with the platforms that are serving their stuff, and the algorithm change can destroy your entire, your entire livelihood. 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Yeah. So, one thing is there's too much power concentrated in these big tech firms. The platforms have this kind of monopoly or oligopoly, I guess it would be because there are a few of them and you think they just need to be broken up because there's no way for like, I mean, it's interesting in some ways it's the same when you, when you're talking about how all the internet now looks like websites that Google will rank, how stultifying the formal constraints of the big platforms is.

It's almost like, it's almost like its own version of "central planning" versus "free market," you know, where there's these, there's this kind of central planning of the algorithms of the big tech firms, and [01:59:00] you can't allow like flourishing experiments and genuine entrepreneurship, which is like different things to happen because everything's happening within this fiefdom, whereas what you need, and one of the things I care deeply about is like some return to what we would call the open non commercial internet. Like the whole point of the World Wide Web originally was that no one controlled it. It was all there. Anyone could put up a website, anyone could respond to a website. Like that ethos, I feel like okay, break up the big tech firms, but then recreating or creating a new version of the open internet, the non commercial internet where the platforms don't control what you see and how you connect. That to me is the next step as well. 

MATT PEARCE: Yeah, I think. I think it has to be, I mean, to bring it back to Louis Brandeis, who's one of the early and great champions of antitrust in this country. I mean, this was actually a version of a conversation that was happening during the trust era, you know, in the United [02:00:00] States more than a century ago.

It's like whether the trusts and having massive, gigantic companies that essentially control each feature of the economy, you know. Maybe that was more efficient. Maybe that was a good thing. And then people realized, I mean, in Lina Khan, the paper that made FTC chair Lina Khan famous, the Amazon Antitrust Paradox, I think is one of the skeleton keys to this conversation. Because it really kind of gets at this problem that Brandeis mentioned, which is 'the curse of bigness,' is that there is a point where companies get so massive that, you know, the real antitrust problem isn't necessarily like price gouging their customers, which is the common standard that we use to evaluate whether something's a monopoly or not that's breaking the law.

But it does all sorts of other things. It influences our politics in a way that's really nefarious and bullies other companies and kind of just creates this private sector kingship that seems anathema to the way that we live as Americans, which is to be free people in theory. And [02:01:00] like Brandeis thought was that, you know, maybe we should have this kind of wilder, more, you know, 'yeoman, small business person' economy where people had the freedom to run small businesses and maybe they weren't giant, productive firms. But they were something that gave people more freedom closer to ground and let the country be a more interesting place to flourish. And, you know, for people to practice their civic virtues rather than just being, you know, captured by giant companies. And I think the internet's in the same place too, because I think that there are all these people who are capable doing so much more interesting things with the technology that we now have.

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Yes.

MATT PEARCE: That, I think if you broke up these companies, some really interesting stuff would start happening. And we wouldn't even, we wouldn't even realize it until then what we've been missing for all these years. 

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991, or simply [02:02:00] email me to [email protected]. 

The additional sections of the show included clips from Why Is This Happening?, In The Thick, Gettin' Grown, It's Been A Minute, VICE, CNN, On The Media, and DW News. Further details are in the show notes. 

Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet—Ken, Brian, Ben, and Lara—for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular [02:03:00] podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with the link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on any and all social media platforms you may be joining these days. 

So, coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com

Air Date 11/26/2024

Full Notes Page

Download PDF

Audio-Synced Transcript

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. 

In a world of infinite information but a finite amount of time to check your facts, we're living in the logical conclusion of an online environment that favors false information over truth. And the most popular online media reflects that reality, perfectly. 

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today includes All In with Chris Hayes, The Bunker, Why America?, On the Media, The Kavernacle, Breaking the Habit, and a TED Talk. 

Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there will be more in four sections: Section A. The Joe Rogan experience and the media; 

Section B. Trust and belief; 

Section C. Centrism; and 

Section D. Roots.

Aaron Rodgers moment perfectly sums up how fake information spreads - All In with Chris Hayes - 11-14-24

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: Offer a little parable for our age, and I'm gonna use sports for a minute here. So indulge me. I promise I'm going somewhere with it. So this week on Sunday night [00:01:00] football, Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff, generally very good quarterback, was having a terrible game against the Houston Texans. Goff threw four interceptions by halftime, meaning he threw the ball, the other team caught it taking possession. That's bad. It's a turnover. You don't want to do it. At halftime, someone posted a surprising statistic to social media. And it started going viral. Here it is. This is now Jared Goff's seventh career game with at least four interceptions. His record in those games? 6 0. 

Now, for those of you who don't follow football, that is an extremely shocking, improbable, indeed, it turns out, ridiculous claim. Four interceptions a game is exceedingly rare. Winning six games where you did it? Okay. But it just kept circulating. The original poster even shared what appeared to be a graphic from a well known sports statistic website to back it up.

It looks like stat news. And that was apparently enough for folks to just parrot the claim unchallenged. It went everywhere. Even people who should know better like ESPN host Pat McAfee and Aaron Rodgers, the conspiracy theorist quarterback for the New York Jets, who RFK [00:02:00] Jr. apparently wanted at one point as his running mate.

AARON RODGERS: I love Jared, I'm sure he'll bounce back. Amazing stat though, is this a true stat? That he's done four more picks seven times and he's won every single one of those games? 

PAT MCAFEE: Yes, yep, 7 0. 

AARON RODGERS: That's wild. I mean that's why stats are for. What did Big Mike used to say, age?

HOST 2: Stats for losers. 

CHRIS HAYES - HOST, ALL IN: They're for losers. Is this true?

It's true. You can probably tell where I'm going with this. The statistic is not true. It was a total lie. Just take it from the guy who made it up in the first place. Quoting: "If you've ever wondered how easy it is to spread fake information, I made this stat up while laying in my bed at halftime of the game."

And this random Twitter football guy actually makes a pretty great point there. Thankfully, this is a totally harmless prank example of disinformation. It doesn't matter. The only consequence was [00:03:00] McAfee getting embarrassed and having to walk it back on air. But what happened in that exchange, between Pat McAfee and do your own research Aaron Rodgers, is kind of the entire story of our age, of our information environment right now.

These are the guys, those kinds of guys that are doing the vetting of what's true and not in our current information environment. That's it. Those are the guardrails. They are doing their own research, if you will. And it's not just sports. This problem translates across our political culture. I mean, everything.

Lies and misinformation and intentional slander about immigration and immigrants and the economy. They're spreading on this kind of terrain where the anti vax quarterback just parrots an unvetted statistic he saw on Elon Musk's website to millions of people on the ESPN. I saw this stat. Yeah, it's true.

That's it. That's the whole problem in miniature. A miniature version of the [00:04:00] enormous problem that we all face that has gotten us to this point. That the rest of us gotta try to find some way to solve. And I will be the first to say, we do our part here, but I don't know the answer. I don't know the answer, but boy, oh boy, are we gonna have to come up with some.

Why is everyone suddenly an expert? (Even when they’re not) - The Bunker - Air Date 5-20-24

ROS TAYLOR - HOST, THE BUNKER: This is the second edition of this book, I think the first one came out in 2017. In the first, you thought things that might improve if there was a major crisis and Americans had to rally round and understand the importance of expertise. And there was that major crisis, as we all know, in the form of COVID, and they didn't. In fact, they got worse. Why was that? 

TOM NICHOLS: Yeah, boy, experts hate being wrong, book authors really hate being wrong. Yes, please buy my book, because I was wrong. But we definitely had three crises. I said in the book and in subsequent lectures about the book, look, a war, an economic crisis or, pandemic [00:05:00] would probably snap people out of this and say, "listen, we need people who know what they're talking about." We had all three of them. War broke out, the largest war since World War II in Europe is raging in the middle of Europe, and yet experts, diplomats, have managed to keep this thing from exploding into World War III. Remember the Russians rolling westward was the thing that kept Cold War strategists, up at night and waking up in a sweaty panic. And somehow we've managed to do this and contain this, and yet that hasn't seemed to dent at anybody's thinking about this very much. 

We had an economic downturn that turned into a soft landing. Here in the United States it's been a lot better than you've fared in Britain. And I'll just bring up the experts warned about Brexit, and that was another case of, the ordinary folks listening to yeah, it was I think it was Michael Gove who said, " we're tired of experts!" Now you have, 60/40 split wishing that it hadn't [00:06:00] happened. 

But economically here in the United States we have sustained the longest stretch of unemployment under 4 percent since 1953. And yet people, they don't think that matters very much and they don't seem very aware of it. And they don't seem inclined to think that expertise had anything to do with it, political or economic. 

And of course, then the pandemic, and why was the pandemic so divisive? I would argue that the one thing I should have known that I didn't was that pandemics are inherently divisive because you don't go into the streets to help your neighbors. It's not like an earthquake or a fire or a natural disaster. Pandemics by their nature, make you shut your door and lock it and treat everyone as a potential threat, and that's inherent in pandemics. 

But the other thing that I could not have counted on was that an entire American political party would make opposition to science a fundamental plank of its platform. And that the president of the United States would be [00:07:00] the cheerleader for basically rejecting science and, simply distrusting basic science about everything. That had a toll and we paid the price for that. 

ROS TAYLOR - HOST, THE BUNKER: It wasn't just a case of anti vaxxers ignoring experts. You write about how the partisan backlash against those people minimizing COVID also did damage. Tell us about that because it's not a narrative that gets much attention in the UK. 

TOM NICHOLS: Absolutely. One of the things I decided to write about in the new edition of the book was to do what experts ought to do, which is to say, look, where did we go wrong? Trump's failures, the craziness of the Republican Party and the right-wing ecosystem, that's been well documented elsewhere. What did doctors do wrong? What did health experts do wrong? And there were a couple of serious mistakes. 

One is that health experts tried to step into the vacuum left by the irresponsibility at the top of [00:08:00] the political elected political officials. And so you had health experts, including some that worked for the government, like the Surgeon General, trying to fill the void on should you wear a mask.

Most people wanted to do the right thing. And they said, "okay what should I do?" " Well, don't go buy masks," because of course, now the doctors were worried that there was going to be a run on masks. And so instead of saying, "Hey, we got it wrong, this is an airborne thing, stay away from each other, but don't go buy masks until we tell you to, because the people in hospitals are going to need them first." they just didn't say that they played this game back and forth of buy them, don't buy them, put them on, don't put them on. Would bandana work? "Maybe, we don't know. Go ahead. Try it." now, some of that. Is that the public just doesn't understand how science works. That science is trial and error experimentation, competing hypotheses, but the health experts were not ready to [00:09:00] step in to being political leaders, and they shouldn't have tried. They're not good at it, they didn't communicate well, and they hurt their own cause. 

The two other things that happened that I think really damaged expertise in the United States were the debates over school closures. And I supported all these, by the way, I was all about, telling people to mask up and closing down the schools. At the time, I was 60, pre existing health conditions. I didn't want to sit in a 14 person seminar breathing in each other's faces. But when it came time to reopen the schools, a lot of people on the left just dug in because it got to the point where anything people on the right said people on the left at the opposite of. And you did have permanent pandemic people, which wears people out. It makes them not want to listen to expert advice anymore because when everything's a crisis and if I've alarm fire forever, then nothing is. 

And the last thing that happened that I think the medical community and a lot of people on the [00:10:00] left don't want to talk about that was really damaging was the George Floyd protests, where doctors who had said, listen, you can't go to church, you can't have weddings, you can't sing in a choir. And then you had 1500 doctors signing a letter saying, but if you want to go march and sing, and be together, in tight, big crowds because of this one political issue, then we think that's important enough to say, go ahead and do it. 

You had a lot of people in the country who said, and in other words, this isn't disinterest in science, this is these are regulations that only apply if your cause is not judged good enough by the doctors. And it was a legitimate complaint. And it was not just a complaint among people on the right-wing, you really did have a lot of ordinary Americans saying, I can't hold a funeral, but the doctor say this is okay. And I think that was a massive self inflicted wound. 

There were only two [00:11:00] options. The protests were going to happen no matter what. And and public officials were in a jam here because they certainly weren't going to make the protests not happen. The horror of that video meant that, This whole country was going to be convulsed and protests were going to happen. But if the doctors thought that masking up and drinking water and staying far away from each other and all of that stuff during the protests would work for the protests, then they should have told everybody else that it would work for them if they needed to get married. Or if this wasn't really necessary and they said, as many of them did afterwards, there was really no spike in COVID, then they're basically admitting to millions of people. Yeah, we didn't know what we were talking about. 

To his credit, Anthony Fauci was the one who said, "I have real concerns about this. I understand it's going to happen, but I just think anything like this is a vector for spreading, COVID. And I just hope people wear masks and, try not to, be too close together." And he shrugged and just said, "but as a doctor, I have real concerns about this," and I think that was the smart [00:12:00] path and there were a lot of doctors who publicly wouldn't go down that road.

How Right Wing Media Took Over America Part 1 - Why America? with Leeja Miller - Air Date 11-18-24

LEEJA MILLER - HOST, WHY AMERICA?: Before we get into who's bankrolling this bullshit, I think it's worth taking a step back to understand what we mean by right-wing media and how it became so powerful in the first place.

Many factors have contributed to the ecosystem we see today, including media fragmentation in the digital age, increasing political polarization, and the massive profitability of rage bait and the culture wars. But what makes the conservative content ecosystem uniquely powerful is that it's simultaneously isolated and unified.

Unified because even though these outlets compete amongst themselves for clicks, when it comes to reinforcing the GOP's narratives, they're marching in lockstep. And isolated because conservative outlets are first and foremost contrarian. They define themselves in opposition to the mainstream press. And that's why it feels so impossible to get through to Trump voters. They exist in a sealed feedback loop and fundamentally distrust the sources the rest of us value. And that's thanks to a decades long [00:13:00] conservative crusade against the media and educated elites. Because you can't go to war without first defining an enemy. 

The Republican obsession with liberal media prejudice Dates back to at least the 1950s, but didn't properly boil over until the 1970s. See, ol Ricky Nixon didn't much like the press. Forever a paranoid, from early in his career, Nixon believed reporters were out to get him, and as president, he had a plan to fight back. Aiming to undermine the press's credibility, the Nixon administration started pushing a new name for them, "The Media". Apparently, The Press sounded too dignified and serious for Nixon's liking, as though The Press implied a sacred duty to, I don't know, be a watchdog serving the public's best interests by overseeing government affairs or something. The Media, on the other hand, had the perfect ring to it, calling to mind manipulative, slick and slimy Madison Avenue types.

A popular book also helped push the narrative. In 1971, The News Twister hit shelves, claiming, despite weak at best methodology, to have scientific proof of liberal [00:14:00] media bias. By the time Nixon went to war with the Washington Post over Watergate, many conservatives were primed to see the president's downfall, not as the righteous result of his own crooked actions, but as a coup orchestrated by The Media against a beloved twice elected Republican.

As the 70s gave way to the 80s, this distrust in The Media, as it was now known, began to faster. Americans trust in media peaked in 1976, when 72% of the population said they trusted mass media a great deal or a fair amount. By 1996, that figure had dropped to 53%. So what the fuck happened in the 20 years between 1976 and 1996? Well, at least four major things. CNN, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, the rise of Rush Limbaugh, and the birth of Fox News. 

In 1980, CNN launched the first 24 hour cable news channel, changing the speed of breaking news forever, and arguably taking reporting outside the realm of the public good and into the realm of rage bait [00:15:00] for profitability. As a cable news station, CNN had far fewer restrictions than broadcasters using the public airwaves. Public broadcasters like CBS, NBC, and ABC were considered public trustees with a duty to serve the people. Part of that responsibility included the Equal Time Rule, also known as the Fairness Doctrine, which required newscasters to air competing views on important issues in approximately equal measure.

The doctrine was written to prevent broadcasters from abusing their power and setting a biased public agenda. Doesn't that sound nice? In the 1970s, the Federal Communications Commission called the Fairness Doctrine "the single most important requirement of operation in the public interest." And then in 1987, Ronald fucking Reagan ruined everything.

In 1987, the FCC voted 4-0 in favor of ending the Fairness Doctrine, claiming that the policy hurt the public interest and violated free speech rights. Broadcasters had complained that the Fairness Doctrine was overly burdensome and actually inhibited their ability to cover issues of public importance, which on a certain level sort of [00:16:00] makes sense. The Fairness Doctrine ultimately required broadcasters to decide which issues were important to the public and then decide which perspectives should be presented in equal measures. But the FCC preferred to instead leave it up to broadcasters to decide what to air based on how the marketplace reacted, because, as we know, the market always knows best.

Furthermore, broadcasters argued that the rise of cable TV made a diversity of viewpoints available that hadn't existed in previous eras, meaning people could seek out sources aligned with their interests rather than expecting the Big Three broadcasters to cover every conceivable viewpoint on the nightly news.

The problem is that this logic eliminates the notion of a single source of truth. If nobody is required to even pretend to be fair and balanced in the public's interest, then the line between news and editorial starts to blur really fast. 

Many members of Congress agreed that eliminating the Fairness Doctrine was a slippery slope. They criticized the FCC for trying to flout the will of Congress, and said the decision was "wrongheaded, misguided, and illogical." They even [00:17:00] managed to pass a bill codifying the Fairness Doctrine. But Reagan vetoed it, and they couldn't get enough votes to overturn his veto.

The Manosphere Celebrates a Win. Plus, M. Gessen on How to Survive an Autocracy - On The Media - Air Date 11-8-24

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: How did the former host of the network reality show Fear Factor become a political kingmaker? For one, he was an early podcast adopter. Rogan realized that there was a deep hunger for alternative media that doesn't tell you what to think, or at least presents itself that way. A hunger for discussions that aren't bound by broadcast time constraints, stuffy talk show decorum, and editorial guardrails that favor mainstream experts and centrist politics.

JOE ROGAN: The thing that **** television, the thing that **** entertainment, in general, is money. They were selling advertising, so everybody has to say certain words. Don't say certain words. Don't bring up certain subjects. You can't just express yourself because you're expressing yourself to someone who's selling advertising space.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Joe Rogan as a guest on an internet talk show in 2007, which seems like the [00:18:00] precise moment that he discovered the potential of podcasting.

JOE ROGAN: You just need to keep doing this. We need to figure out how you make money from this.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Definitely figured that out.

 

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Spotify has signed a multi-year, $250,000,000 deal with Joe Rogan.

JUSTIN PETERS: Rogan somehow caught lightning in a bottle.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Justin Peters, a correspondent for Slate, profiled Joe Rogan.

JUSTIN PETERS: His podcast began with him generally just interviewing fellow comics, standups that he'd met on the road. He went into interviewing MMA fighters because he's a big mixed martial arts guy. Then at a certain point, he started bringing on academics, evolutionary biologists, sociologists, people from the tech world. I can't stand the guy, but I also have to acknowledge that his podcast can be incredibly entertaining.

JOE ROGAN: Boom. Thank you. Thanks for doing this, man. Really appreciate it.

ELON MUSK: Hey, welcome.

JOE ROGAN: It's very good to meet you.

ELON MUSK: Nice to meet you, too.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: This is [00:19:00] Rogan's 2018 interview with Elon Musk. That time they smoked a blunt on camera.

ELON MUSK: Is that a joint or is it a cigar?

JOE ROGAN: No.

ELON MUSK: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: It's marijuana inside of tobacco.

ELON MUSK: Okay, so it's like pot tobacco posh?

JOE ROGAN: You never had that?

ELON MUSK: Yes, I think I tried one once.

JOE ROGAN: Come on, man.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: I'd argue this was when Musk's hyper online man of the people shtick took root.

 

JUSTIN PETERS: I think you're right that this was the moment where Musk started really trying to reach out for the alt-right intellectual, dark web appeal. Smoking weed with Joe Rogan was the turning point. Certainly, I'll buy that.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: For Rogan, politics were a bit more complicated. Even as he hosted buddy-buddy interviews with Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and the like, he was still reaching a politically diverse audience. He was saying stuff like this on his show.

JOE ROGAN: I think I'll [00:20:00] probably vote for Bernie. Him as a human being when I was hanging out with him. I believe in him. I like him.

JIMMY DORE: Look at you progressive.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, I've always been.

JIMMY DORE: What? Everyone says you're a right-winger.

JOE ROGAN: I've never voted right-wing in my life.

JIMMY DORE: Really?

JOE ROGAN: Never. Never. I voted Democrat except for independent. I voted for Gary Johnson because he did my podcast.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Rogan in 2020. Part of a montage of clips that resurfaced on social media this week.

JOE ROGAN: 87% of scientists said that human activity is driving global warming. I'm very pro-choice. I'm very women's rights, civil rights, gay rights, trans rights. I'm even universal health care. Obviously, this protected status is driving me crazy. This thing that Trump's doing with children that were born in other countries and then brought over here as children, and then they're talking about--

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: How did Rogan the liberal end up endorsing Donald Trump? I've heard several explanations. One is that Rogan gave up on the Democrats after they dumped Bernie Sanders in 2020. Another is that he's been slowly [00:21:00] red-pilled by his guests.

JUSTIN PETERS: When someone keeps on saying, I'm a liberal, I'm a liberal, and then people with whom he talks speak incessantly about the evils of cancel culture, who talk about how the mainstream media is suppressive, and so on and so forth, then you're not actually a liberal. You're wearing a costume. I think what's happened over the past five years is Rogan has finally taken off that costume and revealed himself for who he was all along.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Since 2020, Joe Rogan has become a lightning rod for controversy and criticism. The kind of scrutiny that comes with the territory when you're the most popular podcaster in the world. There was that time a couple of years ago when he had to apologize after the Internet discovered that he'd used the N-word repeatedly in old episodes.

JOE ROGAN: Look, I can't go back in time and change what I've said. I wish I could. [00:22:00] Obviously, that's not possible, but I do hope that this can be a teachable moment for anybody that doesn't realize how offensive that word can be coming out of a white person's mouth in context or out of context. My sincere and humble apologies.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: There was his interview with so-called vaccine skeptic Dr. Robert Malone.

DR. ROBERT MALONE: These mandates of an experimental vaccine are explicitly illegal. They are explicitly inconsistent with the Nuremberg Code. They're explicitly inconsistent with the Belmont Report.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Over a thousand doctors, scientists, and health professionals are calling out Spotify over false claims about COVID aired by its most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Rogan would double down on the vax stuff and even went on to endorse his friend RFK Jr. after he came on the podcast. Then there was this.

JOE ROGAN: Ready for this? My friend, his wife is a schoolteacher [00:23:00] and she works at a school that had to install a litter box in the girls room because there is a girl who's a furry who identifies as an animal.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: He had to walk back this totally bogus story in 2022 saying he must have misunderstood his friend or something. More recently, he told a guest that Joe Biden faked the State of the Union address.

JOE ROGAN: The State of the Union was not live.

JRE GUEST: Yes, it was.

JOE ROGAN: No, no. Did you see that they found out that it wasn't? Someone zoomed in on his watch and his watch was the wrong time.

JRE GUEST: How could that even be? I don't think all the Republicans would agree to it, too. They're all there.

JOE ROGAN: [crosstalk] They knew. They're all there live while he's doing it.

JRE GUEST: Yes.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Rogan had his producer do a mid-interview fact check. They pulled up an article debunking a photoshopped image of Biden's watch.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, there is a fake image. They got me.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: How do you fall for this stuff?

 It's been [00:24:00] pointed out by many of his critics that Rogan doesn't seem to prepare enough for his interviews. He exercises poor judgment. Rogan says he's a victim of cancel culture. I think that's a big reason why he likes Trump.

JOE ROGAN: There's probably no one in history that I've ever seen that's been attacked the way you've been attacked and the way they've done it so coordinated and systematically. When you see those--

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: This is how Rogan set up his three-hour interview with Donald Trump last week, by telling their shared story about the media and the political establishment. "They hate us not because of our behavior, but because we threatened them.'

JOE ROGAN: Did you just assume because people loved you on The Apprentice they were going to love you as a president? 

DONALD TRUMP: Well I figured it would be so easy. You know it was very interesting. 

 

JOE ROGAN: Well it probably would have been if the media didn't attack you the way they did. If they didn't conflate you with Hitler. Even today, like Kamala was talking about you and Hitler. They're going to take what you said about Robert--

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: We'll never know whether Rogan's endorsement moved the needle on [00:25:00] Tuesday. Whether Kamala Harris's appearance would have made any difference. But all the spilled ink about it this week says a lot about where it feels like political influence is headed.

RYAN GRIM: I hope that this is the last Democratic nominee who says no to Joe Rogan. Like, even if you have to go to the studio.

MEHDI HASAN: I would go further than that, Ryan. You need your own Joe Rogan is the bigger point. That's your bigger problem.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: One of the closest analogs to a left-wing Joe Rogan is 33-year-old Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer and political commentator. He's big and burly, fluent in memes and gaming culture. He gets the Internet. But as a socialist, he's likely seen as too radical to be embraced by mainstream Democrats in the way that Republicans have harnessed their right-wing influencers. I watched Hasan Piker deliver the results on election night with some 200,000 concurrent viewers. As the news began to set in, he started raging against Trump supporters who joined his chat to rub in the loss.

HASAN PIKER: [00:26:00] Donald Trump winning the presidency is not going to improve your life. It's actually going to continue making it worse because there are major material issues that you are experiencing and neither party is actually providing any adequate solutions to that. But owning the libs is not going to improve your life. It is a way for Donald Trump and the Republican Party to distract you away as they pick **** your pockets and rob you blind.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: For years now, he's been sounding the alarm on the rise of the manosphere.

HASAN PIKER: There is a massive amount of right-wing radicalization that has been occurring, especially in younger male spaces.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Here he is speaking on Jon Favreau's podcast Offline.

HASAN PIKER: If you're a dude under the age of 30 and you have any hobbies whatsoever, whether it's playing video games, whether it's working out, whether it's-- I don't know, listening to like a history podcast or whatever, every single facet of that is just completely dominated by right-wing politics.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: As he watched Dana White shout out the [00:27:00] podcast bros during that victory speech we heard at the beginning of this piece--

DANA WHITE: Adin Ross, Theo Von, and last but not least--

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: Hasan Piker reacted on his live stream

DANA WHITE: -the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.

HASAN PIKER: No.

DANA WHITE: Thank you, America. Thank you. Have a good night.

HASAN PIKER: What is this country? We're done.

MICAH LOEWINGER - HOST, ON THE MEDIA: The news monoculture of old is dead. It seems that, to many, the New York Times, a company that employs 2,700 journalists, is just one source of information and perspective. Joe Rogan, another. The incoming administration has shown us that it will lean on a new generation of personalities and media networks to spread its lies and shape hearts and minds.

We DON'T need a LEFTIST Joe Rogan - The Kavernacle - Air Date 11-14-24

THE KAVERNACLE - HOST, THE KAVERNACLE: Just because Joe Rogan had left wing people on doesn't mean this podcast ever turned people to left wing politics. And also Joe Rogan is just a bit of an idiot, right? He would just agree with anything people said. He had Cornel West on once and agreed with so much of what he said. Joe Rogan does not believe in the same things as Cornel West.

He does [00:28:00] not believe in the same things as Bernie Sanders. And Joe Rogan's podcast always skewed conservative. Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, just every single right-wing person has been a regular on the Joe Rogan podcast, far more than any progressive people. Like, you know, I have a Kyle Kulinski tweet up here.

He used to go on Joe Rogan sometimes. I've seen, like, Cenk on Joe Rogan. I've seen a couple people, but you never get, like, loads of socialists and communists on it. Bernie Sanders is probably, like, the most left wing person who has been on the Joe Rogan podcast. And I don't think Joe Rogan is as influential as people think.

And also a lot of people who now watch Joe Rogan are actually going to him because of his conservative audience and conservative guests, while a lot of people who used to watch him have left. So he is attracting conservatives to watch his podcast more than he's turning an established audience into conservative.

And also, let's remember, it's just one demographic. Which also a lot of them in this demographic don't even vote in the first place. So [00:29:00] blaming Gen Z men for Trump winning is just stupid. It just doesn't work out like that. I know not all of his audience are Gen Z men, but they're saying that Joe Rogan is like a symptom of this.

Gen Z men, Millennial men, Gen X men, they all listen to Joe Rogan and that's where they'll hear conservative politics. Now I do agree there is a problem more broadly, with the conservatives having domination in the media ecosystems. And I would say in the UK it's a bit different, where we have centrists dominating them, you know, they are pretty much conservatives, but they aren't as far right.

Where in the US it's more like, just the far right dominate all these things. And that is important, like, how much does Fox News play a role in helping various Republicans get elected? Including George Bush stealing the 2000 election. Yeah, of course, that is important. But I want to point something out as well. Because I focus on the social element, like let's say you listen to Joe Rogan, you agree with him politically on social things, trans people in sports, I don't know, all the other [00:30:00] bullshitty pedals.

There's something you need to remember is that people mostly vote for their material conditions and this is something that always stuck out of me because it's absolutely fucking insane. But I think it proves everything, right? So there's been a narrative around the election that Latino men don't vote for women because they're misogynistic. But firstly, that's just a huge stereotype which isn't really true considering Latinos and Latino men voted for Clinton more than they voted for Republicans. And also when they're talking about Mexican men, yeah, the two candidates for the Mexican leadership this year, or the presidency, were both women.

So this is a culture that has a problem with women. But there was this article that came out in the 2008 presidential election, I couldn't find the original one now, but it's the Guardian reporting on the article, called Racists for Obama, and I just wanted to read it for you quickly, to just show you how people, even when they're bigoted, and even when they might be watching Fox News all the time, to rot their brain, people fundamentally [00:31:00] care about material conditions more.

This is an extreme example, but I wanted to read it because it's extreme. So, Sean Quinn of the site FiveThirtyEight has been driving around the Middle Atlantic. Yesterday, he was in a town called Washington, Pennsylvania, about 40 miles north of M Town. I know this turf quite well. Obviously, we called Washington Little Washington to distinguish it from Washington, D. C. which was close enough to be a familiar destination. Anyway, Sean heard the following story in this town where Obama just got slaughtered by Hillary Clinton. A canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure.

Has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, "We're voting for the 'racial slur,'" meaning Obama. The woman turns back and says, as a matter of fact, that we're voting for the 'racials' though. I've heard similar stories from West Virginia in which people openly [00:32:00] use the N-word while saying they're voting for Obama.

It's important not to read too much into this, it's mostly a reflection of the economy. McCain's ridiculous response to the crisis, Palin's presence, and clearly part of it must be, Obama has come across to these folks as smart and steady and someone who will use good judgment in office. I still doubt that Obama will carry West Virginia, but he's a lot further along with these voters than I'd thought back in April or May.

So Obama did lose West Virginia in 2008, but I'm highlighting that because fundamentally, the conversation about a left wing Joe Rogan or a liberal Joe Rogan to help the Democrats win another election just completely misses the point, right? It's all about economic issues during an election. And rather than focusing on making some sort of liberal media empire and going to meet the youth in Gen Z, promising people things economically that will impact them the most is the way to go.

And with America, [00:33:00] right? Their social safety nets, their healthcare system, they're so bad there are so many things you could do and campaign big on to win an election. So Obama of course campaigned on a lot of things, which made him a good candidate, and he campaigned on vibes, and he campaigned on policy.

That's how you get people who are actually racist, like insanely racist, voting for Obama. Because they thought he'd be good on economic issues and stuff like that, right? So, in that, if someone like Kamala Harris, or just any Democrat, campaigned on, literally like, I'm gonna give you universal healthcare, it's time.

The UK has had it for, like, 70 something years. Most of the developed world have it. We have to have it too. Too many people die every year from not having health care. We need to modernize and stuff. Or I need to do something economic, right? Some big economic policy to help people's everyday lives, instead of the Democrats pretending, oh, because inflation's not as bad anymore, people love us for the economy.

They don't. [00:34:00] Because everyone's like, gas is going up, everyone's bills are going up, everyone's rent is going up, and you're not doing anything about it. So if they're not going to vote for you, they're just going to blame you. And if they don't think you can handle these economic things, then they're not going to vote for you.

And that's the fundamental point. The conversation completely misses for me. The Democrats and just any, like, liberal left political organization, they don't need a Joe Rogan to target young men. And I would say focusing on loads of people who don't vote is also important, including young people. But, elections are lost on policy, not on the Joe Rogan podcast.

Stop Having an "Open Mind" - Breaking In The Habit - Air Date 5-31-24

CASEY COLE: In our world today, there may not be a more important value than having an open mind, or a more hurtful insult than to be called closed minded. We applaud people that are always asking questions, always seeking, always open to new things, and look down on those who are stuck in their ways, who refuse to change.

Frankly, I think that it might be our most toxic quality, and it's destroying our society. Let me explain. [00:35:00] On the surface, having a so called open mind is not a bad thing. Removing our biases and preconceived notions, looking at the world as it is rather than how we want it to be, taking in new information, and adjusting our opinions, these are all good things.

What I love about the idea of an open mind is the desire to always be seeking and learning. Especially as a Christian, I know that a thousand lifetimes could never exhaust all that there is to learn about the unimaginable mystery that is God and the beauty and wonder of his creation. To sit back, unimpressed, to be content with where we are, seems like a sin against the gift of reason that God has given us.

Seeking is a good thing. Wondering is a virtue. Welcoming new information is essential for all Christians. We must have an open mind to all that is true, beautiful, and good so that we ourselves may be transformed by all that is true, beautiful, and good. I don't have a problem with any of this. No, the problem I have with much of our world is not that it insists on an open mind per se.

It's that it never allows for an open mind to reach a conclusion. Tell someone that you're a seeker, that you're someone who stares out over the [00:36:00] ocean and wonders how it all came to be and where we're all going. And people think that you're deep and interesting. Tell someone that you're a Christian?

That you believe that the ocean and all of creation are the works of God, and that everything should fulfill its purpose in giving God glory? Well, you know the response. How can you know this? What arrogance? Who are you to tell me that my ideas are wrong? As a society, we value minds that question, but belittle minds that claim to have answers to questions.

I think of it a lot like the cliche often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. It's not the destination that matters, but the journey. At first, it seems wise. It reminds us that how we get somewhere matters, that we should care about the process, the ways, and the means. And that's true. We don't want to lie or cheat to get somewhere.

We don't want to get to our destination having lost ourselves along the way, for what good would the destination be at that point? But the opposite is true as well. What good is a journey if we never actually reach a destination? If we never even have a destination in mind? If all we do is wander around forever, never reaching a place better than [00:37:00] where we started?

The journey is not all that matters. That's ridiculous. The destination is the purpose and fulfillment of a journey. While there may obviously be enjoyment along the way and lessons learned on the road, the reason we set out in the first place is not for journeying itself, but to get somewhere. When I look at our world, what I see is a society that is always on the road, but never getting anywhere.

It insists that people head out on a journey, that it asks deep questions, ponder life's mysteries, keep an open mind, but never get anywhere. Those who reach their destination, who stand by an answer, who say that they have found what they are looking for and do not want to journey any longer, are scoffed at and belittled.

While there is always a need for intellectual humility, and we should be cautious of speaking dogmatically about every little thing, the idea of living life without any dogmas, without any moral imperatives, without any belief that is beyond change, is a life that doesn't stand for anything. The dirty truth of the matter, is that nobody actually lives this way.

As much as people demand open minds and decry any sense of dogma, [00:38:00] there isn't a person on earth that doesn't hold some truth beyond questioning. Are we to keep an open mind about genocide, always giving an opportunity for the other side to convince us otherwise? No. Must we stay open to the idea that the Earth may actually be flat? That NASA and every scientist in the world for the past 2, 500 years has been involved in a conspiracy? Please. Should we treat the love we receive from our parents, spouse, siblings, and friends with skepticism, mindful of the fact that we cannot know for sure if they're being honest, and so should protect ourselves in case they're lying? I hope not. 

The fact of the matter is that there are certain things in life we have to either accept, or not accept. Some things have a mountain of evidence to support them, making doubt more difficult, while other things must be accepted simply on intuition, but the point remains. Eventually, we have to choose one way or another.

Do we believe, or do we not? To journey our entire lives without reaching a destination, to seek and to ask without ever coming to a conclusion, is a sad, uncourageous life. To remain open to everything is to attain [00:39:00] nothing. At some point, we have to take the risk, even if just temporarily, and make a claim. What a waste to live your entire life as an agnostic.

Sure, you're never going to be outright wrong, but you're never going to have a chance of being right either. You're never going to find fulfillment, purpose, direction, or any sense of meaning if you remain open to everything. What a waste to live your entire life not sure if your partner is "The One." Sure, you're never going to be heartbroken, never have to deal with a messy divorce, but you're also never going to experience the sort of love that comes only with commitment and vulnerability.

We could continue down this line of thinking for everything. A career choice, vocational discernment, political positions, which movie to watch on Netflix. With every decision in life, the end goal must always be to actually make a decision. It begins with an open mind. It starts with seeking, questioning, removing biases, doing everything you can to come to the truth.

But at some point, you must come to the realization that you will never have enough information, that you will never exhaust everything that can be learned, but must make a decision anyway. [00:40:00] Now, I'm not suggesting that we must make a dogmatic decision about everything, or that we should never change our minds once we've decided something.

There is a sense in which an open mind is still a very good thing. What I'm suggesting is simply that an open mind is a means to an end, not the end itself. It is the thing that gets us where we're going, not a quality of a good person. The irony of being open to everything, of never settling on anything in particular, is that you'll never actually know when you found the right or wrong answer.

We must be willing to take risks, to put ourselves out there, to stand for something rather than be open to everything. Maybe we'll come to realize that we were wrong, but at least we'll have found something, and we'll be closer to our ultimate destination than when we started. Commit to something. You may never know the right or wrong answer beyond a shadow of a doubt, but what sort of life is it if you never even try?

Birds Aren’t Real? How a Conspiracy Takes Flight | Peter McIndoe -TED - Air Date 9-13-23

PETER MCINDOE: I grew up in Arkansas, in Little Rock, where I was homeschooled on the outskirts of town. The community that I grew up with was [00:41:00] hyper conservative and religious, and almost everyone that I knew believed in some form of conspiracy theory, whether it was that Obama was the Antichrist, or that there are microchips in the vaccines.

During my entire life, I always felt like I was on the fringes of normal society. So, as you can imagine, when it became time for me to play a character, The Conspiracy Theorist was a pretty easy one for me to tap into. During the years in character, I used the same cadence, logic, and arguments as those I grew up around. Just with a different theory swapped in. I was really dedicated to playing this character as convincingly as I could, as method as possible. So I spent days sometimes in character, a lot of time out in public with the van there, just talking with strangers. It led to hundreds of interactions with strangers who thought that I was a real conspiracy theorist.

I'd often be out there, cowboy hat on, handing out fliers that said things like, [00:42:00] "If it flies, it spies." We had another flier that said, "Birdwatching goes both ways." And during these times, as I'm handing out fliers and talking with people, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of instances over the years where strangers would approach me. You know, they'd see me in public, and I'd see them notice me. They'd walk up to me with complete disdain on their face. They thought that I was a real conspiracy theorist.

And time and time again, they'd come up to me, look me right in the eyes, just as close as I am to you right here, and they would tell me how stupid I am. They'd tell me I was uneducated, that I was crazy, that I was the problem with this country. When this happened, I didn't feel the emotions of the character that I thought I would.

My out of character [00:43:00] self may interpret these interactions as a funny response to someone that fell for the comedy project, but instead, I felt the emotions of the character. I felt emboldened, and I felt sad and angry, like they didn't even take the time to know me. They instantly condemned me, judged me and othered me.

I'd found myself on the opposite side of this equation that I'd grown up around. The normal and the fringe. And in those moments when those people were talking to me, they could not have been more ineffective at what I would assume they really want: less conspiracy theorists in the world. These experiences, hundreds of them over the years, watching how people interact with those on the fringes of our society, gave me an entirely new perspective on our approach to conspiracy theorists.

Whether it's how we frame them in the conventional [00:44:00] media, to how we deal with those in our own lives. If our goal is to live in a shared reality with our neighbors, what if our current approach isn't bringing us any closer to that? What if by talking to conspiracy theorists like they're ignorant and stupid, we're actually pushing them farther away from the truth that we want them to see?

Because what happens when someone tells you that you're stupid, you're all wrong, you're the problem? You'll feel judged and dismissed, and most importantly, you'll feel othered, which may lead you to look for safety in those who are like minded. To do what they have been doing for you. Affirm your selfhood, give you a sense of identity, belonging.

These are some of the most basic human desires. We have to consider that conspiracy theorists are not just joining these groups for no reason. They're getting rewards out of these, things that we are all looking for. A sense of purpose, [00:45:00] community. I grew up with the internet, and during my time with this project, especially out of character, people have talked to me about the misinformation age and this, you know, terrifying problem of online echo chambers and conspiracy theorists, but I want to remind us that there are humans behind a lot of these screens.

It's not just numbers. Everyone's unique experience influences their own narrative about the world, and there's no blueprint for how to deal with this yet. But I do not think that online echo chambers of conspiracy theorists are this inevitable symptom of life online. The internet is about 30 years old, and things are changing quickly, and I think it'll be very important that we develop new solutions for these new problems on a fundamental level.

What if, by addressing belief before belonging, we're starting the conversation at the wrong place? Instead of sitting in collective bewilderment and [00:46:00] frustration about how these people could believe these things, these crazies, what if we first looked under the hood and thought about what made them vulnerable to this information in the first place?

What might they be getting out of this that they're not getting in their everyday lives? How much does it have to do with a different truth? Or how much does it have to do with the community that that truth brings? We need to think about people's circumstances and reference points. To see them as fellow human beings who want to believe in something and want to belong, just like all of us do in this room.

Because if we continue with our current approach of arguing on the level of belief, it's not going to get us anywhere. We're going to end up with more echo chambers, more disinformation and more polarization. Instead, we can do the harder work of looking into what is fueling the need for an alternate truth.

Not only would this lend us more empathy for those who think differently than us. But I really think this might be the only actually [00:47:00] productive means, productive means of moving toward the shared reality that we all want to live in. Let's direct our energy toward the crisis of belonging. And then maybe we will understand the crisis of belief.

Note from the Editor on the nature of skepticism and open-mindedness

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with All In with Chris Hayes looking at just one case of disinformation spread. The Bunker discussed the decline of trust in expertise. Why, America? looked back to the destruction of the fairness doctrine under Reagan. On the Media tracked the evolution of Joe Rogan. The Kavernacle took a deeper dive into Rogan's potential impact. Breaking the Habit discussed the downsides of having an open mind. And finally, a TED Talk about the "birds aren't real" satirical conspiracy theory. 

And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section. 

But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring their production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often making each other laugh in the process. To support all of our [00:48:00] work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support -- there's a link in the show notes; through our Patreon page; or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. Members also get chapter markers in the show, but depending on the app you use to listen, you may be able to use the time codes that we put in the show notes to jump around the show, similar to chapter markers. So check that out.

If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. 

And now, before we continue onto the Deeper Dives have to show, this is just a quick share of a realization that I had while prepping this topic. I got thinking about the title of Joe Rogan's show, The Joe Rogan Experience, and it kind of pondered the literal words. It was like the Joe Rogan experience. What is the experience to be Joe Rogan? And I realized that it's [00:49:00] a quite perfectly named show, because Joe Rogan and his audience really do seem to be having a very similar experience, and it goes kind of like this, I realized. 

Number one, you start out being genuinely curious, let's say, a commitment to open-mindedness, looking for new information. Great. 

Number two, you listen to people, talk for hours and hours and hours. So far so good. 

Number three. Remain so open-minded that you effectively learn nothing from what you've heard. 

And number four, repeat. Day after day after day. 

So if you would like to experience what it's like to be Joe Rogan, you can listen along and have that experience yourself. 

On a related topic, I became aware of the skepticism genre many years ago. with shows like The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe and Skepticality, and there might've been more. And I never got into them because I had a gut level aversion to them, but I [00:50:00] couldn't explain why at the time. And to be clear, this isn't an actual critique of the shows. I didn't listen to them. I don't know if they were good or not. I'm just giving a window into how I navigate these sort of judgment calls. Arguably, if I was going to judge them, I should've listened to them. I think maybe I did, dipped in and it was like eh, not for me, or more likely, not a good fit for research for this program in particular. 

Anyway, I think I can explain now what my gut was opposed to back when I first came across those kinds of shows that based their whole identity on being skeptical, because the trick of course is that I think being skeptical and critical and questioning are all good things. So why would I feel an aversion to media focused on those positive ideas? The problem isn't about being skeptical. It's basing your identity on being skeptical. That skeeves me out a little bit. Just like [00:51:00] being open-minded is a positive attribute, but defining one's self, identifying as open-minded, can lead to taking those kinds of identities to an extreme in a sort of devil's advocacy feedback loop. Instead of just being thoughtful, you're Skeptical with a capital S. You question everything, trust no one. Taken too far, that kind of thing will drive you into conspiracy world, ironically.

But the same kind of goes in the other direction: open-mindedness, which feels like the opposite of skepticism, being eternally open to the possibility that anything might be right, also basically leads to a sort of unthoughtfulness that opens a person up to conspiracism. And you're like, well, it's an interesting theory and we can never know. So I'll keep an open mind. 

Like with so many things, a little bit of a good thing is a good thing, while too much of a good thing stops being so good. Being [00:52:00] open to new ideas is good, as long as one maintains a thoughtfulness that engages skepticism when warranted. Not everything needs to be questioned, nor does every idea deserve credence at all. 

And again, I'm not trying to call out those shows I mentioned. Maybe they're all great at drawing that line on what deserves questioning and what deserves trust and, using science and reason to follow it. I'm sure they're fine. I just can't help but get a little bit of the ick whenever a strong identity is formed around a narrow idea, like skepticism. Or atheism is another that sort of comes up in that genre. 

And, basically it's just that you don't want to get yourself boxed in with a narrow idea. You need room to pivot when you grow and learn new things and inevitably your perspective shifts. 

Now, funnily enough, I've heard stories of people getting the same sort of feeling from the title of [00:53:00] this show. But in my experience, exploring all different parts of the left has given me plenty of latitude to shift my perspective over time. And if you went back and listened from the very beginning, you would think that it is a very different-sounding show then when I started, coming up on, unbelievably I think, 19 years ago. 

So I'd say that, if there was someone out there thinking that "the left" is too narrow of an idea to base a show on, then, I'd say they should probably be a bit more open-minded.

SECTION A - THE JOE ROGAN EXPERIENCE AND THE MEDIA

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics. Next up section a the Joe Rogan experience and the media followed by section B trust and belief, section C centrism and section D roots.

How Right Wing Media Took Over America Part 2 - Why America? with Leeja Miller - Air Date 11-18-24

LEEJA MILLER - HOST, WHY AMERICA?: Once tiny blip websites posting fringe conspiracy theories like Breitbart can grow and be used as a tool to shift the overall conservative conversation nationwide. These days, while Fox still reigns supreme on cable, podcasts, YouTube [00:54:00] videos, sub stack newsletters, and boutique platforms like Rumble have become the go to sources for the most extreme right-wing perspectives.

And there's a revolving door between Fox and these more extreme platforms. Many conservative celebrities who rose to fame while working for established media organizations have continued leveraging their profiles after leaving those outfits often in disgrace. Kelly, Bill O'Reilly, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon, whose podcast The War Room was named the top source of misinformation in 2023 by a Brookings Institution study.

The relevance of trusted individual commentators over actual news gathering organizations speaks to a unique moment in American history, at which trust in mass media has reached an all time low. As of this year, only 3. 31 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll said they felt a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.

So instead, Americans are putting their faith in individual content creators who sometimes say things their audiences want to hear. You probably [00:55:00] wouldn't be tuned into this show right now if you didn't understand that impulse. And it never ceases to amaze me how many comments I get from people calling me out to be a for being biased and not presenting fair, equal, and unbiased reporting, despite the fact that I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be, a fair and balanced source of journalistic reporting.

I'm not a journalist. I care deeply about the factuality of my sources, but this isn't live on the ground reporting. I condense the work of real journalists into easy to digest content and provide additional context that news sources don't, including my legal knowledge as a lawyer. That's the value I provide to you, and I hope to God that in addition to watching my videos, you also read actual news articles from a variety of sources.

But the prevalence of people confusing YouTube commentators for fair, unbiased journalists is indicative of the consequences that happen when you have a deeply divided populace with a poor education system, whose distrust in the news means there's no single source of truth. So they seek the truth out in alternatives.

But the very important difference between me and the right-wing commentators [00:56:00] we're talking about is that not only do I genuinely care about facts, But also that my sponsors don't get to tell me what to say. The same apparently cannot be said for commentators like the Tim Pools of the world. In September 2024, Tim Pool and half a dozen other conservative content creators came under fire after a DOJ indictment alleged that they'd been sponsored by Russian propagandists.

to spew disinformation to their social media audiences. Allegedly, two employees of the state controlled media outlet Russia Today orchestrated a 10 million scheme to distribute English language videos consistent with the Kremlin's goal to weaken U. S. opposition to Russian interests like its war in Ukraine.

Though the DOJ didn't allege any wrongdoing by the influencers and commentators, noting that they were actively deceived about the source of the company's funding, let's not let them off the hook entirely. Because regardless of who was paying, the conservative commentators were still perfectly happy to accept money to spew disinformation.

This wasn't talking points about quality in an ad for a mattress, this was disinformation about current events presented as truths, and [00:57:00] none of these commentators bothered to check the facts or give two shits about what they were actually saying in exchange for money. Allegedly. One of the commentators allegedly created 130 videos for this fake Russian company.

And our collective distrust of news sources that have proven over decades to be credible in exchange for relying on independent, third party, non journalist internet commentators means our media landscape is more vulnerable than ever to the influence of nefarious actors. And the 10 million dollars the Russians stole from us Spent buying out a handful of influencers is small potatoes compared to the kind of funding being pumped through the broader right-wing media ecosystem at any given moment, even with explicit foreign policy goals in mind.

For example, the popular conservative news website, the Epoch times is just one of the U S news outlets aligned with fallen gong, a religious movement that opposes the Chinese state since launching in 2000, its publications, which aim to foment anti CCP sentiment have promoted conspiracies about Democrats, election fraud, and communists.

Though it's ridiculously easy to [00:58:00] make a buck off of right-wing conspiracy peddling and fear mongering, profit isn't always the main driver anyway. It's influence. Because when it comes to controlling the media and the message, Republicans have long understood the importance of having their own media to push their propaganda.

As the conservative movement began to coalesce during the second half of the 20th century, its operatives had a big picture strategy to control the full continuum of information production from universities to think tanks to media outlets. A 1997 report by the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy revealed how conservative organizations had aligned their grant making around a three pronged mission designed to help political conservatives shape public and elite opinion.

Prong one, developing right-wing media outlets. Prong two, developing conservative public affairs programming on public television and radio. And prong three right-wing media critics to exert pressure on the mainstream media into covering the rights political and policy agenda. And it worked. By 1995 before Fox News even entered the [00:59:00] chat media references to conservative think tanks, far outnumbered references to center or left of center research institutions by nearly seven to one.

Even so, Republicans have remained convinced that the liberal media monster poses an urgent, existential threat that must be stopped, and thus continue pumping funding into alternative news organizations. And like political donations, the media money can be difficult to trace. My fantasy of giving you a cute little flowchart, Went out the window when I realized how many non profits, PACs, and donor advised funds are involved in the whole scheme.

That said, some players are significantly more committed to the media influence angle than others, and I think it's worth naming and shaming at least a few. First up is David D. Smith, executive chairman of his daddy's company, Sinclair Broadcast Group. Today, the right-wing media empire is best known for gobbling up local television news outfits and forcing anchors across the country to spew identical Republican talking points.

In 1995, when the company went public, Sinclair had 13 TV stations and 8 markets in its portfolio. Today, it controls 185 [01:00:00] stations in 86 markets. The acceleration point came in 1996, when the Telecommunications Act loosened some restrictions on media ownership, allowing Sinclair to more easily expand into new markets.

Most of Sinclair's holdings are local TV news stations with immense, built in trust with their loyal audiences. And that trust is ripe for abuse. Studies have shown that when Sinclair buys a station, its coverage of national politics increases significantly and the tone of all coverage shifts to the right.

For example, Sinclair stations have followed Trump in characterizing crime as a grave threat, despite violent crime decreasing significantly in recent years. Next up, Philip Anschutz. When he launched the Washington Examiner in 2005, his goal, like Murdoch before him, was to create a conservative alternative, in this case, to the Washington Post.

Anschutz insisted that the Washington Examiner's op ed content was to be produced by conservatives and conservatives only. Today, Anschutz houses the Washington Examiner and his other media properties under Clarity Media Group, a subsidiary of the Anschutz Corporation, which also owns multiple [01:01:00] hotels, oil and gas wells, and, obviously, Coachella.

Yes, the music festival. Next up, Ferris and Dan Wilkes, a pair of evangelical Christian billionaire brothers whose fortunes derive from oil and gas fracking, who have each poured millions of dollars into right-wing media companies that promote climate change denial and push anti LGBTQ dogma. They've given at least 8 million to PragerU alone, the unaccredited edutainment platform with video titles like Prager U was recently approved for use in Florida schools and is angling to appear in more states, including the Wilkes home state of Texas.

In 2015, one of the brothers put up nearly 5 million to help Ben Shapiro launch The Daily Wire. According to scholars who've studied the influence of big oil in the conservative right, the Wilkes brothers have played an outsized role in funding and shaping the conservative and evangelical right in Texas and nationwide.

Because they, like so many Republicans, are keenly aware of how important it is to put your money into your megaphone. And then there's hedge fund billionaire and former computer scientist Robert Mercer, who was [01:02:00] the single biggest donor to Trump's 2016 campaign, throwing 13. 5 million behind him even before it was cool.

Mercer rarely speaks in public and never to journalists. But his spending makes his beliefs clear. He gave 10 million to help Steve Bannon usher in a new era at Breitbart. He's a major donor to the Media Research Group, an organization that calls itself a media watchdog on a mission to correct liberal media bias.

And he has a 10 million stake in Cambridge Analytica, the company famous for collecting personal data from millions of unsuspecting Facebook users to target political ads for Trump's 2016 campaign. Yikes. Next, there's shipping supply magnet Dick Uline. This Tea Party Republican was the top conservative donor for the 2022 election cycle, to the tune of 82 million.

And his foundation supports conservative media outfits including Real Clear Media, which has 14 sub brands, including the polling aggregator Real Clear Polling, and the right-wing news site The Daily Caller. Both of those outlets are also supported by numerous other major conservative donors, but if I kept naming and shaming individual billionaires [01:03:00] funding right-wing media, we'd be here all day.

So instead, let's round this out by looking at a vehicle instead of a person. Donors Trust is a donor advised fund that's been called the dark money ATM of the conservative movement. It's given money to the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and Leonard Leo's 85 Fund, to name just a few. Donor advised funds are basically charitable giving middlemen.

Instead of giving directly to a foundation, rich people put their money into a donor advised fund, which then takes their advice, recommendations, donor advised. about where the funds should go. It's a win win for the rich person who gets to claim the tax deduction immediately, whether or not the money has actually been distributed yet, avoid the administrative aspects of giving, and duck capital gains taxes.

Perhaps most importantly though, it puts a smokescreen between the rich person and their priorities, because donor advised funds aren't required to disclose their donors. In 2021, Donor Trust took in more than 1 million. And most of it came from just two anonymous donors. So though we can name and shame, we don't even know how much some of these people have [01:04:00] actually given.

Jen Senko on The Brainwashing of My Dad - CounterSpin - Air Date 9-20-24

JEN SENKO: My parents, in 2010, they moved to a senior community and somewhere in the, in the move my dad's radio. Broke and he put it in the garage and it just sat there and he didn't fix it.

So immediately he was sans his three hour lunches with Rush Limbaugh. So. He kind of actually mellowed a little bit right away, and we didn't want to remind him, you know, you've got to fix your radio, whatever. So, that was a really, really, really big, big thing. Probably, I'd say that maybe the first biggest thing.

Then the second thing that happened is, I guess it was a few months later. The TV in the kitchen that they watched during lunch, uh, was very old and my mom got a new one and she programmed the remote and they had stickies all over them, you know, do this, do that, do that. So my dad didn't bother. He just.

Left on what she [01:05:00] had on. I think she watched MSNBC or just different, you know, various news shows. They always watch the news and then might have been a year later. I'm not sure. Sometime later, my dad went into the hospital for a kidney stone and he was there for a week. And they had these really old computers, and my mom was afraid that the computers were getting clogged up, and she asked me to delete some of his email.

I said, look, they just, they just keep coming. You have to unsubscribe them. And I don't have time to do that. So she did it, but she added something. She not only unsubscribed him from all this vile email from, I mean, dozens of hard rate Republican organizations. She. Subscribed him to what she was reading, independent, more progressive media emails, [01:06:00] like alternate reader supported news, truth out, that kind of thing.

And when he got back from the hospital, I don't think he noticed they were just political emails, and he was reading them. You know, he had a little bit of both, whatever. And then one day. It was after lunch, I think he had been watching Obama on the news. He said to my mom, I like that guy. You know, he's pretty good.

And lo and behold, he ended up voting for him. Okay. So the point isn't that. His politics became aligned with ours. The point was that my dad was like free and happy and singing and, and not angry and not hateful. And. It was the last few years of his life, and we became really close where it had really kind of [01:07:00] damaged us and damaged relationships before this media is so potent as it's meant to be.

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, longtime FAIR analyst Steve Rendell, who along with FAIR founder Jeff Cohen, Well, here's in this work, Steve is an expert in talk radio, and he would often describe its power as having to do with the way it was consumed, which I think your experience just underscores, you know, um, in the case of your father, he started listening on a long solo commute to work for other folks.

It's going out to the barn with their brother. But. You know, it has to do with the way certain kinds of media, not just the way they talk to you, but the way they talk to you in a sort of isolated format. And, and this is where I think the book helps people see that this isn't accidental, that the messages that we're coming through, uh, It wasn't just your father.

There was a game plan. It wasn't an unintended effect. The effect that it had on your father, making him angry, making him hateful and making him [01:08:00] particularly hateful towards particular groups. All of that was intentional. 

JEN SENKO: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Say it or not, Hillary Clinton, she was spot on in 1998 when she said there was a vast right-wing conspiracy.

But, the conspiracy wasn't just against her husband. Basically, far right libertarian Republicans, you know, starting back in the 2000s, 50s, actually, after Brown versus Board of Education figured out that in order to affect the change they wanted, which was basically one party rule by billionaire white men, they would have to create distrust in mainstream media and one.

Major way to do that was they had to label it as liberal, and that changed a lot of things right there. It was a very successful campaign. Mainstream or corporate media fell right into [01:09:00] the trap. They folded, they leaned right, you know, they bent over backwards to not be labeled liberal media, and it's stuck today, and it's like they were like abused spouses, like, uh, I'm sorry, what did we do wrong?

Right. But they didn't know that or understand that there was this plan. So. Control over the media was an easy peasy way to get ordinary citizens into voting against their own interests and in line with billionaires. But eventually, of course, it metastasized to what it is today. Like a weed, it took over the whole garden.

But the plan, if you 

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: want me to go into some detail and mention some of the points, pick some highlights, you know, there, the book does go through a number of landmarks in the creation of this right-wing media machine. We're talking about history here and not guesses about things. These are things that are documented, but there are a few things that stand out as, you know, Important and moving us toward the situation [01:10:00] we have now, right?

JEN SENKO: So, in 1969, after Goldwater lost to Johnson read, Irvine started aim, accuracy and media supposed media watchdog group. It was really more of a media tactic. Dog group. They still exist today. They were the ones that first took on, um, this goal to discredit the media as liberal. Interestingly enough, that same year, Roger Ailes, the creator of Fox, he was working with Nixon to improve his television image.

And anyway, the following year, he submitted a memo to the White House, which had a scheme to create a new show that would put the GOP in a good light. Later on, then, that. Came in handy when Rupert Murdoch hired him to create Fox, but then the next year was Lewis Powell memo. This was monumental and it was secret.

At first, until a journalist discovered it, but nobody [01:11:00] paid attention to it because it was just, it was like Gerbil said about the big lie. Like, you can't believe that people would actually do this, but it basically outlined steps to take for the vast right-wing conspiracy. It was designed as a anti New Deal blueprint to undo, like, the New Deal and squelch all the social changes that were going on at the time.

You know, they were going to influence college campuses, the pulpits, the media, corporate influence over scientists, and to create and fund think tanks, basically, to push the free market philosophy. Right. And then there was, in the 80s, the creation of the CNP, which was Christian based, and thus the marriage with evangelicals happened.

So the group got bigger. Then Reagan made Rupert Murdoch a citizen. Then he killed the Fairness Doctrine, and then the next [01:12:00] year after the Fairness Doctrine was killed, we had Rush Limbaugh go national, and he reigned for decades, poisoning the minds of, I think his following was like 20 million people, not to speak of, they caught him in the military, so poisoning Their minds too, but then the final big blow came with Clinton and Gingrich and their telecommunications reform act of 1996, which opened up media ownership and cross ownership.

So all the big media companies got even bigger and squeezed out. Any, like, independent ownership, and then after that, just eight months later, Fox News was hashed. That's it in a nutshell. I do go into a lot more detail in the book. 

JANINE JACKSON - HOST, COUNTERSPIN: The book covers a lot of this history, and I just want to underscore the book and the film are not negative, they're colorful and engaging and they're forward looking, you know, which I think is, is maybe [01:13:00] the most important thing.

And, and so maybe to bring us up, you know, to now, I know a lot of listeners will be listening and thinking, Oh, you know, Fox fired Tucker Carlson. And so, you know, maybe that means things are going in a good direction. But you and I know that whatever Carlson was fired for, it wasn't for years of Sewing hatred against black and brown people against, uh, it wasn't years of punching down because that has been his stock in trade for years.

So, you also, and not alone, suggest that what we are learning around Fox's admissions, which are still coming out, around the lawsuit, around Dominion and the voting machines, that that ought to remind us that Fox is not caring about its own viewers in the same way that it didn't care about your dad and that it doesn't care about Lots of other folks.

"Burn The Boats" is a Funeral for Joe Rogan's Comedy Career - The Elephant Graveyard - Air Date 8-11-24

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: I gotta say, this special is terrible and beyond salvaging.

Possibly career ending. 

JOE ROGAN: You can't just put lipstick on, now you get shit in the women's room. Like, oh my [01:14:00] god, I'll send it to hate rally. 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Yeah, actually, kinda is. Doesn't help that this guy looks exactly like Mussolini. 

JOE ROGAN: I'm not prejudiced! I think it's China. I think they got us with TikTok. Craziest thing is they make our phones.

That's supposed to be our enemy, and they make our phones. Do you know how dumb that is? I just want to say, honestly, I admire what they've done. 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: A lot of people missed this, but the Joe Rogan Spotify deal was in part financed by the Chinese Communist Party. Spotify is owned in part by Tencent, whose CEO, Pony Ma, has openly vowed to uphold the goals and desires of the CCP.

So it's odd that Joe would complain about this TikTok China stuff because he is most likely, whether he realizes it or not, a weapon of propaganda used by the Chinese government to sow chaos in America. All you gotta do is follow the money. That's the one good thing I learned from Joe's podcast. And now something starts to happen that, and I can't believe I'm even saying this, but Joe actually goes full Brendan Schaub with this wonderful Chinese voice he does here.

Uncle! 

BRENDAN SCHAUB: [01:15:00] Look, there's Harry! Mr. Schaub, I have to numb your lip. You need many, many stitches. This'll be worth paying your life. With all his big criticisms about our infrastructure! Well, 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: that is rough. But at least he's not straight up copying Brendan's jokes, right? 

BRENDAN SCHAUB: My life would be so much easier if I was just gay as shit.

I wish I was gay. It 

JOE ROGAN: looks way easier. 

BRENDAN SCHAUB: We'd like play video games all day. We'd work out. At night we'd fuck each other. You're hanging out with only guys? No one can get pregnant? 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: That is a low that is so low where I never expected Joe to go. Stealing from Brendan Schaub. My god, if that is not the death knell of a comedy career, then I don't know what is.

Brendan Schaub quit comedy after releasing that special, and it only stands to reason that if Joe is stealing from it, then he ought to do the same. Ugh, he just won't stop screaming. This joke doesn't need to be yelled. If everything is yelled, then you can't emphasize anything. So this whole thing just kind of becomes white noise.

It all [01:16:00] just flows and blends together meaninglessly. It's stimulating, but meaningless. Which is basically what his podcast is, a screensaver for the brains of failed warehouse forklift operators. Sat at home chewing on oxys and collecting pogey. Alright, what else did Danny Benito say here? 

JOE ROGAN: If you're getting your vaccine advice from me 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Oh, great.

JOE ROGAN: Is that really my fault? 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Next he goes into his routine of I'm just a shithead comedian, don't take me seriously. 

JOE ROGAN: I'm a professional shit talker, okay? Don't take my advice! 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: This special is just PR now, this is not comedy. He knows nobody normal listens to his show anymore so he can't reach them on his podcast.

But Normie's watched Netflix, and a lot of them are gonna be checking out what that guy who's podcast they can't believe they used to listen to and have to try and remember to whom they admitted listening to it and Cringe with pure embarrassment about that. They yeah, they want to see what that guy is up to. So this is Joe's chance to get some good damage control in 

JOE ROGAN: They tried to use that quote as proof that [01:17:00] I'm homophobic 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: He's literally just reenacting one of his many Instagram apology soliloquies.

And, it is just so fucking tedious to listen to. He gets into his famous n word controversy. And sorry to say, he's still doing that propaganda where he tries to convince everyone that he only said it when quoting other people saying it. Which obviously is a lie, here's a clip from the first ever Joe Rogan podcast.

Once, once I get the internet to do it, I'll make it. I'll make it HD so you can see how ugly I am. That n a's ugly. They forgot to delete that one during Spotify's extensive Operation N Word cleanup. 

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, nobody gives a fuck about context! So, I'm not racist, but if I was gonna quote Oh, 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Joe, you should have just let this one go.

This PR is embarrassing. 

JOE ROGAN: I'm not a racist. That's what's so insane about this. I thought everybody would understand. Here's the thing about these words, you can't say them. 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Damn, six years of honing this material and he's gotta pad the back half of the special with PR. Oh, that's bad. But he still [01:18:00] doesn't stray too far from the gay stuff, as that shadow continues to seep out.

I love gay men! Joe's shadow is now in total control, and is just leaking all over the place. And now, with the shadow in control here, he's gonna steal another joke, this time from Bill Burr. 

JOE ROGAN: And the light turns green, but the scooters keep coming, and you just want to go to jail! Yeah, I have a lot of fucked up thoughts, man.

I do. You ever drive down the street and see like 30 people up on a sidewalk, and you just think 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Now that's at least two stolen jokes in this special, so that's bad. And this is the guy who got fired. If someone steals a riff from 

JOE ROGAN: a song, that shit's in the news constantly. Motherfuckers steal shit and make it on HBO.

Netflix. Put it on television. 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Not only did he steal material from Brendan Shaw, but he really just became the new Mencia tonight. I can't believe it. Talk about full circle. The shit hero's journey. So who is going to step up and be the new Joe Rogan to the new Carlos Mencia? I nominate Joe List. [01:19:00] Come on Joe, stand up for comedy.

Go after Joe Rogan aggressively, please. 

JOE ROGAN: I send my wife pictures of other dudes dicks. 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: This is, uh, please Joe, please, we don't need to know this. And as his deepest secrets are spilling out against his will, Joe is fully lactating now. Leaking both psychically and physically. 

JOE ROGAN: San Antonio, I love you to death, very much!

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: And now it's all over. It's finally done. Six years. And they really dipped into the budget for this closing credits music. Which sounds like it's ripped straight from the Ken Griffey Jr. game for Super Nintendo. Well, I guess if I had one sentence that could sum this thing up, it'd be, 

JOE ROGAN: I hate dumb people that are confident, you know.

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: Try again. I 

JOE ROGAN: hate dumb people that are wrong and confident. 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: And now that that's done, every comic on every podcast is going to spend the next six months raving about how Joe murdered and killed and massacred and chopped up all the bodies into little tiny chunks, threw them in the Austin River, whatever [01:20:00] that's called.

BRENDAN SCHAUB: Laugh out loud. Yeah, dude. I like it because the him saying the N word. So funny. So funny. It said the N word. Oh, it's so good. It was so good, man. That's good. That's good. It's so good. Yeah. Watch. And then he is talking about the word retard. 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: They'll kiss the ring for that podcast invite and the cycle of comedy shit will go on and on and on.

But like we've discussed here before, everything has its cycle. Joe has completely run out of ideas. And his mind is ruined by social media. It can happen. It can. Joe has never been very good at comedy, but somehow he gets to be the number one guy, the big gatekeeper. He's our era's Johnny Carson and getting the invite to Joe's podcast is the new bringing you over to the couch or whatever.

This special will go down as Joe's last. He's like 60 or 70 years old and it's clear that his heart isn't in it anymore. This thing was just a greatest hits montage of the worst era of this guy's podcast, condensed into an hour. Every grade [01:21:00] has their final moments, and sometimes we don't even realize it's a final moment until it's already passed us by.

Wayne Gretzky had his final goal, his final shift. Michael Jordan. His final dunk. There 

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: he is, back in the back 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: door! Elvis. His final song.

The last time you ever pick up your son. Your final summer sunset. And Joe Rogan. His final stool hump. Gotta go back to 2016. We didn't even realize it at the time, but we were witnessing Joe's final stool fucking. Gotta appreciate every moment like it's the last, guys. He didn't mount that thing once during this special.

So disappointing. You gotta play the hits, Joe, come on. And now he's this sad Charles Foster Kane figure. All the money in the world and never satisfied. All his decent friends scared away. The only friends he has left [01:22:00] just kiss his ass and tell him he's amazing. That's the only explanation for him thinking this was his greatest set of all time, leading up to this live stream.

No real friend would allow Joe to gringo poppy himself. Now this Netflix thing is getting panned by just about everyone. And despite Joe insisting that he doesn't read comments, it's obvious that he does. And the feedback from this thing is going to wound him deeply. And the weird thing is, he didn't even need to do this.

He's got more money than he knows what to do with. He just did this because he still wants people to think he's funny. This guy literally cries when he talks about becoming a stand up and getting passed at the comedy store. He wants to be a comic so bad, and he's just getting torn apart out there. 

JOE ROGAN: Who knows what kind of bullshit act I would have had.

If, uh, I didn't run into Mitzi, if I didn't get past this door. One of the reasons why she passed me is a trick that we all used to do. I learned from the Todd. He would sit in the back of the room and he would sat next to Mitzi while Mitzi watched me and he would laugh hard. I [01:23:00] went up there and I did my set and he laughed really hard.

Mitzi just grabbed my arm and she goes, You're really funny.

Wow. Call in for spots. You're paid regularly. Wow. That was more important to me than any TV show. Like, the TV show was just a lot of money. It was like, I couldn't sleep that night. I was like, I'm a paid regular. Like, I'm a real comedian. I'm a real comedian. I'm a real comedian. I'm at the store. I'm a real comedian.

I'm at the comedy store. Dude, I always knew I was going there. It was a religious call. And the comedy store was terrible. And there was all these people that she passed that were like, I'm telling you. Talentless. January 6th, lock em up, lock em all up. 

ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD - HOST, THE ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD: The sad thing is, despite it being the meaning of life or whatever, Joe's legacy will not be his comedy.

He will be remembered as the stool humper who won the entertainment industry lottery, then voluntarily let the world collectively watch him go insane [01:24:00] on the internet over the course of thousands of hours of podcasting. A cautionary tale of money chasing, Dunning Kruger, and unreconciled childhood trauma.

SECTION B - TRUST AND BELIEF

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B trust and the belief.

Barron Lerner on challenges to physician expertise and restoring trust in the medical profession. - NEJM Interviews - Air Date 8-14-24

STEPHEN MORRISSEY - HOST, NEJM INTERVIEWS: Dr. Lerner, at what point in history and for what reasons did physicians initially begin to benefit from trust in their expertise and authority? 

BARRON LERNER: I would say the huge rise in physician authority and trust occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

That's when the germ theory of disease became established and various technological innovations came into medical practice. Things like vaccinations and antibiotics. And all of a sudden doctors could really accomplish a lot for patients who had various diseases. Prior to that, there were some effective treatments, but not a lot, and patients often chose to stay away from doctors and hospitals.

But the big change really comes when you've [01:25:00] got scientifically proven interventions that can truly help patients and get them better. 

STEPHEN MORRISSEY - HOST, NEJM INTERVIEWS: And then, as you explain in your article, social movements began confronting the medical field and rejecting medical expertise in the 1970s. So, what were those movements pushing back against, and in what ways did the medical field undermine its own authority?

BARRON LERNER: The social movements I was referring to outside of medicine would be things like the Civil Rights Movement, anti Vietnam War protests, and second wave feminism. And if you think about all those social movements, they all challenged people in positions of authority, whether it was men, whether it was soldiers, whether it was white people and said, you need to do better.

And that is the exact sort of change that happened in medicine. It would make sense that patients, research subjects, and other activists began to look more closely at doctors and the practice of medicine. And what they often found, much to their [01:26:00] dismay, were things that weren't very good. Treatments that were done based on not enough scientific evidence, evidence of coercion to be in research trials, and most ominously, instances where there were with sexism and racism done by the medical profession to its own very own patients and human research subjects.

STEPHEN MORRISSEY - HOST, NEJM INTERVIEWS: And then more recently, what's been the effect of the internet's empowering patients and promoting access to both information and misinformation? 

BARRON LERNER: Well, the internet changed pretty much everything. I think any practicing doctor knows that these days for good and for bad. Let's start with the good. The good is I'm all for empowered patients being involved in their medical care.

I think the days of paternalism, when patients went passively into doctor's offices and just took their information and did what they were told is gone, and that's for good reason. It's good to have patients who are engaged, who want patient [01:27:00] autonomy, and one way to do that is to learn about your diseases, and the internet can be a very good way to do that.

So I am glad when patients come in and challenge me and say, I read this on the internet, what do you think about it? And oftentimes there's stuff that I don't even know about that I can look into. That's the good. The bad is the flip side, which is what is on the internet is of unbelievably variable quality.

And so for every good article that's written that suggests something, there might be five or ten even that portray things that are not true or very speculative or downright unfair to doctors and medical practice. So I think most patients know that. But it's hard to sift through it, and certainly patients who are very sick or very desperate will understandably latch on to things they read online, even if they're not true.

STEPHEN MORRISSEY - HOST, NEJM INTERVIEWS: And then, how did challenges to the Medical Professions Authority affect the response to [01:28:00] COVID 19 and the public health measures that were taken at that point? 

BARRON LERNER: COVID was really interesting. Even as someone, as a historian who's looked at the doctor patient relationship over time in public health interventions, I was surprised at the degree to which seemingly reasonable measures that, certainly at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, were questioned right away, were rejected.

I think public health officials were surprised. This exact sorts of suggestions that had been made for past epidemics, like masking, and separating people, closing schools, staying home, that there was no grace period, almost, in which all of those things got accepted, at least for a little while. And from the very beginning, People were challenging the authority of doctors to say this and the validity of what they were saying.

And I think that built on what we were talking about before, that there has been this growing suspicion [01:29:00] of things that doctors have done, and the medical profession has sort of fallen off its pedestal. And when COVID came in, that was often the response that occurred, a skepticism, a mistrust. As opposed to saying, Oh my God, there's a terrible pandemic here.

We'll do whatever the public health officials say. So it really turned things on its head. 

STEPHEN MORRISSEY - HOST, NEJM INTERVIEWS: So finally COVID taught us that the usual response to a crisis, providing the best scientific information was no longer adequate, what steps can physicians take to better understand their patients values and connect with them in a way that could help restore the trust that we need.

BARRON LERNER: There's a number of types of things I think that doctors can do and I urge people to take a look at my perspective because I'm not an expert on this type of intervention, but people are talking about things like trust. Things like values, things that don't necessarily get talked about in doctor patient interactions.

So, as you alluded to in the old [01:30:00] days, it was, what's the science, tell me doctor, and I'm going to do what you tell me because you're an expert and you're an expert in the science. But now I think we need to talk to patients better. We need to understand what it is that influences their decisions. Whether or not they're decisions that we disagree with or even agree with.

What is it that patients bring to their medical encounters? What are their values? What things are important to them? This means oftentimes asking very broad questions instead of narrow questions. Things like, are there past instances in which you thought doctors may have violated your trust? What are positive things about your life that you value that medicine can participate in?

Do you have particular religious or moral opinions about the type of medical care that you get? Those sort of very broad questions, non judgmental, and I think [01:31:00] that this can open up much better channel of communication between doctors and patients. All the time, but particularly when we're discussing things like the COVID vaccine, other sort of early or experimental interventions that are not proven, that are new, and just step back and try to have a dialogue about what's important.

What are the values? And in that way, I think we can gain back some of the trust that we've lost. 

Democracy Dies in Disbelief - Steve Shives - Air Date 11-10-24

STEVE SHIVES - HOST, STEVE SHIVES: Years ago, when I first started doing YouTube videos, I was active in the online atheist community. And if there's one thing the online atheist community taught me, it's that most of the people who got internet famous from it were huge pieces of shit. But if there are two things the online atheist community taught me, it's a fairly decent layman's understanding of logical fallacies.

Atheists, particularly of the Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, New Atheist type, love [01:32:00] logical fallacies, and it's not difficult to see why. Logical fallacies are neat, they're simple, they're basic contradictions in the thinking underlying an argument. What you're saying can't be true because of this. This position is nonsensical.

Because of that, your argument is invalid. Appealing to logical fallacies is like a shortcut to proving someone objectively wrong. They're easy, and that's why so many people in the online atheist community favored them, because the online atheist community was overflowing with smug, stunningly lazy intellects.

But I'm not here to talk about the online atheist community. I'm here to talk about logical fallacies, and one logical fallacy in particular, and how it relates to the presidential election we just had here in the United States. The fallacy I'm talking about is called the argument from incredulity, and it's pretty simple.

When someone commits the argument from Incredulity Fallacy, they're saying that something can't be true [01:33:00] because they can't believe it, or because they can't understand it. This sort of argument pops up a lot in Conspiracy Theorist, thinking, People landed on the moon? I don't believe it. The Twin Towers fell because a couple of planes crashed into them?

How gullible are you? One shooter fired all those shots at JFK? Yeah, right. What makes this a fallacy is the fact that reality is not contingent on our capacity to accept it or to grasp it. What happens, happens. What is true, is true. Whether we can bring ourselves to believe it or not, there's a lot of incredulity flying around in American politics at the moment.

For the past few years, the most obvious examples of it have been coming from the right Donald Trump refusing to accept that he lost the 2020 election. Joe Biden? How could I have lost to this guy? There's no way so many more people voted for him than for me. That's an argument from incredulity. It's fed by toxic ego and [01:34:00] narcissism and entitlement, but ultimately that's what it is, an argument from incredulity.

I didn't lose, because I can't imagine any way I could have lost. But at the same time, there was quite a bit of incredulity on the left, as well. How did this guy get the nomination again? Why are so many people still supporting him? Since Trump won the election last week, that kind of incredulity has only been amplified.

And here are two important points I want to make. First, there's nothing inherently wrong with incredulity itself it's an emotional response to a surprising or overwhelming situation. It's fine to be incredulous at the election of Donald Trump. It's fine to think, how did this happen? How could this have happened again?

I'm right there with you. But here's the second point we need to remember. Our incredulity won't protect us. The incredulity of Democrats and Progressives leading up to the election was not a factor in our favor. [01:35:00] He can't possibly win again, can he? After everything he's done? After all the horrible things he's said?

After the criminal prosecutions? The national disgrace that he's become? The American people can't possibly be this dumb! And yet, the incredulity from our side since the election isn't helping, either. Harris got ten million fewer votes than Biden did in 2020? That can't be right! Someone must have hacked the voter machines to steal the election for Trump.

Okay, Hey, if compelling evidence is uncovered indicating that actually happened, I'll certainly have no trouble believing it. It's not that I think Trump or someone on his side wouldn't do that. But I don't need to believe they did do it in order to account for the election result, and neither should you.

So, what country have you been living in? You know the most dangerous expression of incredulity I've heard in the wake of Trump winning the election this time? [01:36:00] This isn't who we are. And you know what makes that so dangerous? It's the same thing that was said by many of the same people when Trump won in 2016.

Being incredulous in the aftermath of a shocking event is understandable, but when that same event happens over and over again and you still can't believe that it happened, it's time to open your eyes. If we want to turn this around, if we want to win the next election assuming there is one, but that's a whole other problem we need to shake off our incredulity and accept some uncomfortable truths.

One of those truths is that Donald Trump's message our problems are easily solved, immigrants and other outgroups are to blame, I will fix everything is genuinely appealing to a lot of people. You and I may find it pandering and disingenuous and juvenile, not to mention bigoted, but that message is compelling to many people in a nation of easily frightened [01:37:00] fools which is what we are.

The incredulity of Republicans, and others on the right, won't protect us, either. When people on our side express fear and anxiety about what could happen during a second Trump administration, the response we often get from their side is, oh, calm down, he's not even going to do most of that stuff. Yeah, he said he was going to be a dictator on day one.

He said he was going to use the federal government to go after his enemies. He said he was going to deport 20 million people. He's not actually going to do it. That attitude didn't stop him, did it? It didn't stop him from trying to implement a ban on Muslims entering the country? It didn't stop him from appointing Supreme Court justices who ruled to overturn Roe v.

Wade. It didn't stop him from trying to steal the 2020 election after he lost it. If someone voted for Trump because they thought he would lower the price of milk and eggs, and they hand waved all the fascism he has repeatedly promised to do because they don't [01:38:00] believe he's actually going to do it, they're one of those fools I was just referring to.

Speaking of fascism and when we speak of Donald Trump, fascism is always the subject there's another statement of incredulity that if we hope to survive these next four years and come out of them in a position to begin repairing the damage that's about to be done, we absolutely must guard ourselves against.

It can't happen here. I think this might be the most threatening form of American exceptionalism. A lot of people who support Trump argue that he isn't a fascist because, well, he can't be. This is America. We don't do that here. Trump and his incoming administration are going to take advantage of that incredulity and use it as a shield as they attempt to impose fascism, because they know what they are, no matter what they choose to [01:39:00] call it.

Our institutions won't protect us. An institution is a group of people that's all it is, a group of people operating according to rules and norms made by people that can be changed by people or ignored by people. Trump and his people have shown that they are willing, even eager, to light those institutions and their rules and norms on fire.

They're about to get another opportunity to do just that. I don't tell you this to discourage you, or to bum you out. I'm telling you to remind you, whether you need the reminder or not, that you refusing to believe things will get that bad isn't going to stop things from getting that bad. If you care, and you should, if you don't want Trump and his allies to succeed in destroying our democratic institutions and replacing them with autocracy, oligarchy, plutocracy, and you shouldn't, then you need to get involved.

Jonathan Rauch: A Defense of Truth Part 1 - The Commonwealth Club of California - Air Date 7-31-21

JONATHAN RAUCH: Humans are bad at sorting out our biases, correcting our errors.

We [01:40:00] believe what makes sense for us to believe in terms of our identity, our social status, what gives us pleasure. We even perceive what helps our status. The result of that is if you just leave it to people in an unmediated marketplace, you get this hate speech, propaganda, ignorance, and so forth. And this is, this is a well known fact.

You need more than just sort of open exchange. You need structure. You need this guy. Of course, this is James Madison, uh, the leading architect of the U. S. Constitution. It turns out that most of the same principles that make the U. S. Constitution work to create a democratic republic that survived, what, 250 years and now has 10 times the population, I'm sorry, 100 times the population of Madison State, you need a lot of structure, you need institutions.

You need norms, you need incentives for people to behave in pro social ways. You know, stuff like if you lose the election, you're willing to live with that. Well, the same thing is true in the realm of knowledge. Around the same [01:41:00] time as Madison, we set up a regime to settle our differences of opinion, figure out what's true.

Um, most of the first half of the book is all about that. This is not just an analogy, not just a metaphor. The Constitution of Knowledge is not written down like the U. S. Constitution. It has rules that do a lot of the same things. Checks and balances, forces compromise, distributes authority, uses impersonal rules instead of personal rulers.

Builds institutions that regulate behavior and prevent chaos. And the result of that's what I call the reality based community. We're part of that today doing the session. Bruce Kane is part of that at Stanford. I'm part of it at Brookings. Reality based community is a global network of people and institutions who use impersonal rules to hunt for error.

We're talking here big for our science and research and academia. That's number one. Number two, journalism. Number three, government. That's everything from statistical agencies to administrative law courts. [01:42:00] And finally, number four, the law itself. The concept of a fact originated in law, and jurisprudence is all about finding facts in adversarial ways, showing where these are the things that keep us as a society anchored to truth, tethered to reality.

They keep us out of constant warfare with each other or going down the route of of Jonestown, uh, where we split off into separate realities. There are a lot of advantages to the constitution of knowledge. Objective knowledge is the result of the constitution of knowledge. It fills our libraries, our databases, if all humans died out. Aliens could come to this planet, reconstitute it all and use all that knowledge.

It exists independently of us. This is a transformative technology for humans because it allows us to make knowledge, build on that knowledge, accumulate it, bequeath it. That's what's made our, our ability to transcend our small tribes. Point number two. So what's going on today? You're being manipulated.

You know, you hear [01:43:00] a lot of people say they talk about polarization and cynicism and hostility toward institutions. And they say, well, is us, where do we go wrong? Is it stagnant working class white wages? Is it the decline of religion? Is it the decline of unions? Is it Vietnam? And. Watergate and inflation and the 2008 crash.

Well, I want to focus on something else. Those are all conversations we have, but I want to focus you on information warfare. That's propaganda and disinformation that organizes and manipulates the social and media environment for political advantage. The goals of doing this to dominate, divide, Disorient and demoralize the target population.

The methods are to weaponize cognitive and social vulnerabilities. For example, our tendency, um, to rise to our defense when we're outraged or insulted, or our tendency to find explanations [01:44:00] when things go against us, even if they're wrong, our tendency to use social coercion, to silence people. We don't like our ability to get confused.

If we're swamped with too much information, all of these can be weaponized.

I'm going to just focus because I think it's the most important one right now on a single aspect of this. There are many more in the book and they're all important to talk about disinformation and a specific type of disinformation or class of disinformation. This is Stephen Bannon. He was an advisor to Trump.

He worked in the administration for a while. His famous quotation here, the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone, flood the zone with. Well, that doesn't sound very sophisticated, but it turns out it's a propaganda technique that was perfected by the Russians.

It's called the fire hose of falsehood. Now, time is precious, but it's still worth spending a minute to listen to a [01:45:00] Soviet KGB, senior defector explain how this works. I think you'll find it chilling. 

FORMER (?) RUSSIAN SPY: But in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my, uh, opinion and opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85 percent is a slow process, which we call either ideological subversion, or active measures. KGB, or psychological warfare. What it basically means is, to change the perception of reality, of every American, To such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.

[01:46:00] Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Uh, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures. 

JONATHAN RAUCH: It's pretty chilling stuff. It's very psychologically sophisticated.

It works. This is the Russians using it in 2018 when they sent operatives to poison a defector in the UK. Uh, they had explanations for that. In fact, they had a lot of them, Britain poisoned him, Ukraine poisoned him. It was an accident, suicide, revenge, not a nerve agent. Russia didn't produce a nerve agent, a different nerve agent.

They fling up swarms of falsehoods, concocted theories, red herrings intended not so much to persuade people as to bewilder them. This creates cynicism, mistrust. People don't know what to believe. They become open to demagoguery, [01:47:00] cynicism, polarization. It's good stuff or maybe bad stuff. Well, who else does that?

This is 2016 political campaign. The numbers are the same. If you go through the end of the campaign, according to PolitiFact, 26%, about a quarter of what Hillary Clinton said was mostly or entirely false. That's too high. But that meant most of what she said was true. The equivalent figure for Donald Trump, 71%, at least mostly false.

If the man was opening his mouth, he was probably telling you something that was entirely or mostly false. Why would he do that? Some kind of weird psychopathy? Some just sort of craziness? No, I don't think so. This is his presidency. We've never seen anything like this outpouring of false or misleading claims over 30, 000 over the course of his presidency.

And look at the run up. Before November of 2021, that's the Stop the Steal campaign. [01:48:00] That's the unleashing of a misinformation, of a disinformation campaign on a scale we've never imagined before in the United States. It starts in April of 2020 with the attack on mail in voting, which is irrational from the point of view of maximizing Republican votes, since lots of senior Republicans vote by mail.

But very rationally, if your real goal is post election to inflect the media, media environment because you expect to lose. This is Donald Trump's Twitter account. I just picked a random day. This is December 10th. These are seven tweets. Uh, sorry. Uh, yeah, seven tweets. The election is a fraud. Doesn't end with Donald Trump.

This is my hometown of Arizona, the veterans Memorial Coliseum, where I sat and saw many sons games as a kid. That is a so called audit of the vote going on. It's not only unnecessary, it's being done by an unqualified firm called cyber ninjas, which has. Whose president has devoured that the election was stolen using unorthodox methods.

It's pure propaganda [01:49:00] theater. And as you can see from the headline here, the goal here is to spread a conspiracy theory and use this as theater to do that. And it's working Republican officials are making pilgrimage to figure out. How they can replicate this in their own state. This is very sophisticated stuff, right?

And it's never been deployed in America. We are in an epidemiological sense, a naive population, meaning that we don't have any antibodies against this kind of warfare. That's how we get to 75 percent of Republicans believing the election was stolen. And notice in this kind of information warfare, you don't have to convince everybody that something that's false is actually true.

You're happy if you just confuse them. And it turns out that 40 percent of independents also are unsure who won the election. They say, well, we don't really know because they've heard so much of this stuff. The deliverables of this kind of campaign are cynicism. Like the woman who says there's no real news sources anymore.

I don't trust anything. [01:50:00] Demoralization. I guess I would have to say that I'm completely confused as to who is lying and who is telling the truth. I just feel helpless. If you make people feel helpless, if you demoralize them, you demobilize them. They cannot work against you. You can dominate them.

SECTION C - CENTRISM

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Up next section C centrism.

How "Moderates" Serve The Right - Second Thought - Air Date 12-17-21

JT CHAPMAN - HOST, SECOND THOUGHT: Over time, movements that start out on the left, like liberalism, republicanism, or even parliamentary monarchy, become solidly right-wing movements without ever changing their ideology because they replace the old right and become contested by the new, more radical left. In such a position, Centrism becomes nothing more than a conservative ideology.

Its prime directive is resistance to change. And as a result, it's not, as they claim, neither left nor right. It's just right-wing. It might have been on the left in yesterday's society, but now that the goals of the old left are the established order and have become the new conservative right, preserving present society with only incremental and [01:51:00] moderate reform, which is what centrists believe in, becomes a profoundly conservative worldview.

And it makes sense that this is where moderacy settles. Because it has to compromise between two completely opposing ideas. Changing society in a new way, or keeping it the same. Think about classic centrist statements like, we just need a mix of socialism and capitalism. An idea that makes absolutely zero sense when you understand the two ideologies and that their base disagreement about the ownership of the means of production makes them fundamentally incompatible.

Okay, this all might seem a little confusing. Let's get away from the the theory for a second and look at something concrete, like the Biden brand of centrism. 

JOE BIDEN: I know how to make government work,

because I've done it, across the aisle, to reach consensus, to help make government work in the past. I can do that again with your help. For me, to me, as itself [01:52:00] is not

a dirty word. Consensus is not a weakness. It's the only way our founders down the road there thought it was the only way we could govern. It was necessary. It was designed the way the Constitution says it. It requires consensus. This speech is Biden's free bird. Biden, like pretty much every centrist, is a big fan of compromise.

JT CHAPMAN - HOST, SECOND THOUGHT: Reaching across the aisle to get past political gridlock is the doctrine of American centrism. And when you hear him talk about it, you can kind of get sucked into the idea that this form of compromise is what makes politics, and therefore society, progress. It appeals to our vision of the democratic ideal.

A society in which everyone gathers around the table to discuss an issue, and then comes to a mutual decision that compromises on the various interests represented by the assembly. And, if after all, nobody compromises, we might very well not get anywhere. In American politics, this is anything but democratic, [01:53:00] though.

And far from leading to the progress we're promised, we get a government that stagnates or actively pursues regressive, reactionary politics. Take immigration. For over a year, we heard just about every democrat call out the very real, fundamental far right policies enacted by the Trump admin at the Mexican border.

One of these was the invocation of Title 42, a policy choice that might as well be called oh, it really is just that easy. At the start of the pandemic, the Trump administration used the pretext of national health and COVID 19 To close the southern border pretty much completely. Nobody comes in and a whole lot of people go out.

It was a brilliant success for conservatives and reactionaries and a massive step back in immigration law. And to this day, title 42 still stands, no, sorry. That makes it seem like people aren't paying attention to it. The Biden administration is defending it tooth and nail in the courts. True to the spirit of compromise, Biden changed the [01:54:00] application of the rule so that it would no longer apply to unaccompanied minors.

But on the back end, has used it to expel around 700, 000 migrants, far more than the Trump administration ever achieved with its paltry 450, 000. Simultaneously, Biden has also continued the construction of the border wall, has led the infamous Do Not Come campaign, and left untouched migrant detention facilities.

You'll remember them as concentration camps during the Trump presidency. Now, it's not that Biden has done nothing for progressive immigration politics. He's reinstated DACA and done work to reunite separated families. But the majority of his platform has been tweaking Trump era policies in the spirit of compromise.

rather than reversing them entirely and treating them like the indefensible right-wing policies that they are. Centrism isn't incremental progress in these circumstances. Malcolm X said it best. 

MALCOM X: Do you feel, however, that, uh, that we're making progress in, in this country? No, no. No, no. [01:55:00] I'm, I will never say that progress is being made.

If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. You pull it all the way out, that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow, that the blow made. They won't even admit the knife is there. 

JT CHAPMAN - HOST, SECOND THOUGHT: When reactionary and far right politics are so dominant in a society as the U.

S., and so regularly find their way to institutions of power. Or are baked in right from the start. The centrist stance of compromise and incremental retroactive change allows for politics to jump to the right without ever really coming back. How many politicians today pretend that there's a reasonable compromise between the we need healthcare left and the we need an ethnostate right?

Title 42 still stands because the myopic compromise of moderate ideology fails to take into account longer political trends. There are, of course, some exceptions to the rightward shift of American politics. But the attachment to moderation at all costs makes any left wing legislation a blip in [01:56:00] what is otherwise a sea of reactionary bravado.

But most centrists don't like this, and that's not how they think about themselves. They don't like the idea that they're just a mushy average of the left and the right, or a simple tool of conservative politics. Instead, moderates describe their stance something like this. I don't care whether something comes from the left or the right.

I just look at the idea and judge it on its own merit. Here, the tricky centrist thinks he's gotten us. We couldn't possibly disagree with the idea of sensibly considering multiple options and forming an opinion based on rational cost and benefit analyses. And he's right, but at the end of the day, centrism falls right back into the same place whether it sees its role as averaging out the left and the right, or picking and choosing from each side.

And that's because the Overton window is so small and so skewed in the US. The choices centrists make. are limited by the acceptable politics they are contextualized in. And the American political spectrum being so stunted toward the right, with only figures like Bernie [01:57:00] Sanders and his social democratic politics even approaching the left, means that centrism will by default fall into the conservative, liberal, stagnatory, or even regressive role.

There just aren't that many options to choose from, and they're mostly on the same side anyway. Even if the centrist voter is a careful and considerate pragmatist who doesn't blindly follow the party line and thinks entirely for themselves on every topic and political debate, the inevitable fact that they will be picking and choosing policies from the fascistic Trumpism in the Republican party and the neoliberal capitalism of the Democrats, to the extent that they can even be differentiated at times, means they'll never actually consider the full range of political debate because the left isn't prominently represented.

The result is the center conserves far more than it progresses. And when it chooses to conserve something built by the right, it actively engages in regressive, reactionary politics. There's also the issue that politicians who call themselves the center [01:58:00] aren't really doing so in good faith. While they may represent the center between elected officials, the actual center of the American people is far more to the left on many key issues than the center of the American political class.

Just look at this clip featuring celebrity centrist Joe Lieberman. 

MEHDI HASAN: Your new book is called The Centrist Solution. Uh, you were a famous quote unquote centrist senator. Uh, and yet my issue with that word is that centrist doesn't necessarily reflect the American people's views. I want to pull up, uh, some polling.

Here are some of the measures in that Build Back Better bill that quote unquote centrist like Manchin and Sinema want to get rid of. Here's how popular they are, hugely popular across the spectrum. 83 percent support, 84 percent support, 73 percent support. And yet you and Joe Sinema oppose many of those measures that the American people overwhelmingly support.

So the question is, how in the world does that make you a centrist? Surely based on that polling, Bernie Sanders is closer to the center of American politics and public opinion than you are or Joe [01:59:00] Manchin is. 

JOE LEIBERMAN: Yeah, I don't, I don't think so, but it's a great question. question. That's not happening enough now.

We could probably get some of those good things done on that list if people, instead of trying to push it through, would sit down and talk to each other and agree. 

JT CHAPMAN - HOST, SECOND THOUGHT: And here we get back to that MLK quote. It's absurd to think that any moderate Democrat or any Republican would ever agree to any of these policies that have overwhelming support among Americans if the only difference was that they were sat down and talked to as opposed to having things pushed through. There is no way that moderate Democrats like Manchin, Sinema, or Biden are going to be convinced by good argumentation presented politely when that is contending with the massive sums of money changing hands to make sure they remain spoilers.

MLK made it very clear, the moderate's role in politics is to slow things down to a trickle. Justice gets delayed further and further, never actually realized despite decades [02:00:00] of promises, allowing for millions of people to continue suffering injustice and hundreds of thousands more to be brought into the fold.

It's trite, but justice delayed is justice denied. The issue we're going to have to figure out is how we do anything about this.

Aaron Rodgers Slobbers Over Tucker Carlson in Brain-Melting Exchange - TYT Sports - Air Date 5-16-24

AARON RODGERS: What about you though? Cause you, you did one of the most controversial, somehow, not to me, most controversial interviews in the last, I don't know how long, when you went to Russia and did Putin. How did it feel coming back? Cause like anybody who watched the interview was like, number one, it was awesome.

Number two, Putin came off as an interesting, thoughtful, smart individual. 

RICK STROM - TYT SPORTS: Where to even begin? First off. Tucker Carlson's interview was critiqued rightfully for his softball style. Even local journalists in the country said Tucker's pro Putin accusations were baseless. Tucker even laid off Putin's regime, which has a history of unaliving media members, imprisoning them and censoring them.

Historians say the [02:01:00] litany of claims made by Putin are nonsense, representing nothing more than a selective abuse of history to justify the ongoing war. In Ukraine, Sergei Rodchenko, a historian at the Johns Hopkins school of advanced international studies would go off on Putin saying the leader is trying to construct a narrative that is backwards, where he states Russia as a state began its development in the ninth century.

You could equally say that Ukraine as a state began its development in the ninth century, exactly with the same kind of evidence and documents. He's trying to use certain historical facts to construct a state centered narrative that would favor Russia. as opposed to any alternative agglomerations.

Another falsehood of many that was spewed in this interview between two knuckleheads was this. Putin claimed that Poland, which was invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 39, collaborated with Hitler. He said by refusing to cede an area of Poland, calling the Danzig Corridor to [02:02:00] Hitler, Poland went too far, pushing him to start World War II by attacking them.

Anita Prasmowska, a professor emerita, would rebuke this. Saying that there were diplomatic contacts between Poland and the Nazis. The first treaty Hitler signed after coming to power was a non aggression pact with Poland in 34, Putin is conflating diplomatic outreach to a threatening neighbor with collaboration.

The accusation that the Poles were collaborating is nonsense. She would add. I think the question is this, why is Aaron Rogers falling for Vladimir Putin propaganda? Ask yourself that question. 

AARON RODGERS: You had the live case numbers. You had, um, just the fear mongering and then anybody that stood up to it was canceled.

You mean all the Twitter files that got released when Elon took over that show the collusion between the alphabet, uh, companies. 

RICK STROM - TYT SPORTS: First off him saying the alphabet companies is different than what he said [02:03:00] previously, which was the alphabet mob, which had a direct correlation and a Bullhorn of a whistle to say that you are anti gay rights.

I suppose it's somewhat of a positive for splitting hairs here that he corrected himself. However, referencing the Twitter files as a source. I mean, let's revisit. It was promoted by Musk to Bari Weiss, an idiot, and the like, to put out an idea that showed Twitter's bias against conservatives, as well as interference by the U.

S. government to censor certain posts and users. When in reality, the released info showed former Twitter employees engaging in fairly even handed, basic content moderation found on almost any social medium. Nevertheless, Elon curated the narrative. And broke through with conservatives and his fans. There were even congressional hearings held.

Remember those? Reformer employees shared just how much was missing from Musk's chosen [02:04:00] documents. Rogers once again is proving how dense his approach is. When discussing his guy RFK, he said this. 

AARON RODGERS: He's spending millions of his own dollars on private security, um, which he has to because. He's a threat because he's not, you know, bought and paid for.

RICK STROM - TYT SPORTS: All right, hang on. He's not bought and paid for? Do we understand the legalized bribery that happens in this country in the form of campaign donations? As a matter of fact, RFK's biggest donor is the biggest donor to Donald Trump. Per Newsweek, Timothy Mellon, the heir to the Mellon Banking fortune, gave a Trump aligned Super PAC 5 million, plus the same figure to an RFK aligned Super PAC.

His VP, Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy tech entrepreneur and lawyer, donated 4 million to a pro RFK junior Super PAC in efforts to fund a Super Bowl ad. But hey, keep politics out of sports. The New York Times reported dozens of VCs. Tech execs, real estate builders, investors with [02:05:00] varying political alliances contributed to RFK's PACs.

Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock, and one of the most prominent supporters of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, gave 100, 000 in Bitcoin to Common Sense, another PAC supporting organization. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Abby Rockefeller. I mean, let's continue. Why not? A daughter of the investment banker, David Rockefeller, who runs a cannabis farm in upstate New York, gave 100K to American Values 2024 PAC.

Then there's Gavin DeBecker, who also donated to a pro Kennedy PAC. His security firm has been paid 1. 5 million by Kennedy's campaign. Becker has reportedly provided security for A list celebs like Cher, and Jeff Bezos. One thing Rogers will undoubtedly cling to is, oh, he doesn't need it. He can fund himself.

And that's a great thing because that's the moral way to do it. Hang on a minute. [02:06:00] Saying that there is no corruption because someone can benefit from their own wealth misses the reality that wealthy candidates typically already Represent a special interest the business and industry that got them or their parents rich wrote the Brennan Center more generally studies show that the Affluent have different policy views than most Americans.

For example, they unsurprisingly tend to oppose higher taxes on the wealthy.

AARON RODGERS: But I don't know if you saw this, but Bobby recently came out and said, uh, in the summer months at some point he wants to do a 50 state poll with like 20, 000, I don't know what the exact number is, votes in each of these states and whoever polls lower between him and Joe Biden has to drop out of the race.

Because in his own analytics, he's found out that if the three of them run, uh, Trump is most likely to win. If he goes against Trump, he wins. If he goes against Biden, he wins. If Biden goes against Trump, Trump wins. [02:07:00] So in fact, the F so he said, Hey, listen, I'll drop out if you pull higher than me in these 50 States.

Um, but if I pull higher than you, 

RICK STROM - TYT SPORTS: you're out. What fantasy land are we living in here for real, for real? 

AARON RODGERS: Yeah. Here's more. Bobby's a main player in this. 

RICK STROM - TYT SPORTS: Let's play this clip one more time. And it's of Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and others. who will dispel this in their own words. 

ROGER STONE: So I'm a great admirer of Robert Kennedy.

He's a friend of mine. I am a fan of Bobby Kennedy. So I want people to know that I actually look at him and I think he's one of those like, um, I actually think I have a lot in common with him because I'm a former Democrat. I just changed my party affiliation two years ago. If I were a Democrat, I'd certainly vote for him.

If I had any money, I'd send him a contribution, but I don't. 

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: I think RFK Jr is doing a great service to our country. I am disappointed that his party is so corrupted. I mean, he's the perfect example of [02:08:00] a true American Democrat, a true patriot who loves this country. 

ROGER STONE: I think he is potentially an extraordinarily, uh, attractive candidate.

At the end of the day, however, um, I believe that his candidacy. May serve the purpose of softening Joe Biden, or whoever the Democratic nominee is for the candidacy and defeat by the man who will clearly be, no matter what the courts do, the Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump. 

RICK STROM - TYT SPORTS: Son, your boy is playing, spoiler.

He is the foil. Stop the cap. They are telling you right now that he is. in the race to help Donald Trump win. One of his, one of the members of his campaign staff was seen in an uncovered video that they were indeed playing spoiler to ruin Joe Biden's [02:09:00] chances in order for Donald Trump to take the presidency.

This man is not a big brain thinker. He is a big idiot. I am amazed at the things we have learned about this guy since COVID, because I truly believe he, like many. have had their brains wrecked by falling down a million and one rabbit holes, and it changed them completely, unfortunately. We all have that one person, friend, family, work friend, associate, boss, doesn't matter.

We all have someone in our lives who we have noticed a seismic internal shift after the coronavirus pandemic, where everything they started to believe could be fact checked into oblivion and were blatant lies. Yet Rogers Because of his status, now a Putin apologist, who ran out to start this [02:10:00] NFL season with an American flag, is now telling you, once again, exactly who he is.

Why "Neither Left Nor Right" Just Means Right Wing | Bonapartism - Second Thought - Air Date 3-18-22

ANDREW YANG: I have done the math, it's not left.

It's not right, it's forward, and that is how we're going to beat Donald Trump in 2020. 

SIMPSONS: But tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward, upward, not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom. 

JT CHAPMAN - HOST, SECOND THOUGHT: Bonapartism works because it's confusing. Bonapartist politicians, both those who actually embrace the label and those who prefer to hide it a bit more, have a pretty specific strategy for muddying the waters on politics.

Pretending like there's no such thing as the left and the right, but only strategically in order to usher in a more reactionary, or at the very least conservative, political program cloaked in the symbols of progressive politics. Let's take a little trip to France to see what we're talking about. Ah, très bien, une baguette.

Ahem. French people love [02:11:00] Napoleon. Here's French President Emmanuel Macron commemorating him on the 200th anniversary of his death. And here's far right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen making him a fan cam for his death day. These very same politicians are the ones who will use the messaging of the neither left nor right slogan for their own political interests. Neither left nor right has been lap pen's strategy since 2015,

and here's a room of Macron supporters chanting at the same time. The president's own quirky, unique way of saying he is at the same time from the left and the right of the political spectrum. Now, it's obvious to most people that Le Pen is a far right candidate, and that Macron's presidency has been one of right-wing liberalism.

What with the cutting taxes on the wealthy, violently beating down protests, and abusing executive powers to force through legislation. Classic right-wing authoritarian stuff. So then, why are they so keen on telling us they're neither left nor right? The obvious answer is, because they're lying and abusing a political system that offers little to no accountability once you're in [02:12:00] power.

But there's more to it than that. The point is that a lot of French politicians really dig Napoleon. But most importantly, they especially like his strategy. Napoleon, and later his nephew Napoleon III, were masters of counter revolutionary and anti democratic reactionary politics, but were also very skillful propagandists.

They were both incredibly capable of When it came to convincing the masses that rallying behind a single leader above the left right, worker owner divide was better than continuing with the messy and difficult exercise of democracy and revolution. This leader could claim to be above the left and the right, but then of course use his power solely for right-wing policies and turning back the gains made by the revolutionaries.

Like universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and the nationalization of labor. In the spirit of, quote, defending the republic, and making that very clear by celebrating it with all of its symbols like the blue, white, and red French flag, and the revolutionary anthem, La Marseillaise, [02:13:00] Napoleon cut down the gains made by French revolutionaries over time, and de facto reinstituted the monarchy, overturning the revolution's most central victory.

Basically, left wing symbols, but right-wing politics. Both leaders were able to use the revolution's comparatively more democratic institutions for their own benefit to turn around and tyrannize foreigners and their own people. Specifically, Napoleon I pushed his way into office with a coup, but then leveraged his support from the French people as a famed military general to go from first consul to first consul for life and finally emperor, all with a massive amount of public support.

His nephew did the same thing. First as President of the Second French Republic, then seizing power in a coup d'etat and calling himself Emperor. Both leaders became dictators, all the while constantly evoking the spirit of the Revolution and the defense of the Republic which they had themselves destroyed.

These were men who conquered, who warred, who controlled all organs of the [02:14:00] press, who stripped women of their rights, who reinstated slavery by brutally repressing slave revolts, and who disempowered the parliaments. Generally speaking, Bonapartism takes all the ways in which people previously expressed their political power through local governments, associations, unions, parliaments, revolutions, Basically, any semblance of democracy, and thins out politics until all that's left is the quasi universal support of the great, enlightened leader who unites the nation.

It is a politics of strength, of peace by force, of law and order, and of deeply reactionary logic. Ultimately, it is a politics based on deferring authority and decision to powers above the democratic body. There's the way in which that's literally happening with the nation's single leader with all the power.

But there's also the more metaphorical way this happens behind the scenes. Markets are a great example of this kind of power above democracy. Both Macron and Le Pen, though different in their execution, are both [02:15:00] ultimately allowing markets to decide what the correct way to organize society is. These leaders are more than happy to delegate the power they are granted upwards to let market forces ultimately be the way by which politics are decided.

For Macron, it's the classic neoliberalism of the third way politicians that preceded him, like Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK. Basically letting international markets run loose, deregulating and privatizing all over the place, and fixing things when they inevitably go wrong with austerity politics.

For Le Pen, it's the same thing, but with domestic, not international capital markets. Relying on French capitalists to just treat their employees better, because they're both French, and that's what matters at the end of the day. It shouldn't be surprising to learn that that does not happen. Back when it was the two Napoleons doing this, there was a guy who looked at what was happening and said, But man, this blows.

In his book The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx saw all of this unfolding in real time, figured out [02:16:00] what Bonapartism was about, and correctly identified that the French peasantry, disunited and without common interest, happily accepted the all powerful sovereign. But that it was ultimately the French bourgeoisie, divided among itself and unable to rule effectively, that gave up its crown to save its purse.

It gave the powers of the executive to a popular leader that would leave them alone, free to exploit the French working class that had started making too many gains during the first two republics, so that they, the bourgeoisie, The upper class could keep making their profits. That's the purpose of neither left nor right discourse, a way to unite people behind one guy or one idea that'll take politics and democracy out of their hands and into the hands of a few capitalists.

We don't hear about it as much here in the US, but Yang's platform gives us an idea of what it could be like. Andrew Yang's, not some far right authoritarian. Nothing about him really gives us that idea of a vaguely fascistic unifying leader the way a lap pen or a Macron can be [02:17:00] despite whatever this is 

DUMB SONG: Yang Gang 2020 Yang Gang.

JT CHAPMAN - HOST, SECOND THOUGHT: But Yang is still applying the same principles as the bona artist with roughly similar goals. He's using this idea of unifying the left and the right, getting rid of all the silly polarization and commotion of political life. to give more power to markets and what he calls human centered capitalism.

He's using a universal monthly check as a permission slip for capitalists to do whatever they feel is fair. Workers be damned. Deregulate and privatize everything, including social safety nets. Let the market do it at once. Just toss back enough crumbs that people won't want to change things themselves or have an actual place at the table.

If he can present himself, and his very conventional neoliberalism, as the politics of change, and turn around and cast the quote, extremism, of the left wing of the democratic party as nothing more than political stagnation, that's all the better for him. He's defending democracy while [02:18:00] turning back the clock on its gains.

Not for any personal political power, but for that of capital markets. And if you're thinking I forgot about the guy who I literally cannot make a joke about without sounding like Colbert, Trump's strategy wasn't very different. His was just more personal, more closely related to the imagery of kings and monarchs, based on an appeal to an imaginary nation that never existed except in some racist white guy's fantasies.

That distinction doesn't make him substantially different. It was still just a way to let the wealthy do whatever they want in the background. But it's what prompted a lot of observers to analyze him with the Bonapartist model, though usually stopping short and using the more en vogue populist label.

And here we find part of the reason why some people who talk about populism can get politics so wrong. Equating someone like Sanders to someone like Trump makes a lot less sense than equating a Trump and a Yang. Because even if both Trump and Sanders are both known for bold, loud personalities and a very vocal grassroots support, their [02:19:00] politics are so radically different in the way they treat democracy and what people want, that putting them on the same level misses the point entirely.

Yang isn't a populist, really, but it doesn't necessarily matter. Trump and Yang, like Napoleons I and III, have figured out that people think democracy stops at the ballot box. These people are perfectly happy with a system that gets them public support and lets them use it to act as protectors of the capitalist economy.

An economy that lets the few people who own entire industries decide for the rest of us what's right and what's wrong. That is not what democracy is. Democracy is not just letting your favorite guy do whatever. Especially not if that means giving power to a wealthy group of capitalists to continue exploiting you.

That's not democracy. That's Bonapartism.

SECTION D - ROOTS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally section D routes.

Jonathan Rauch: A Defense of Truth Part 2 - The Commonwealth Club of California - Air Date 7-31-21

JONATHAN RAUCH: If there's one new idea in this book that I'd like to leave people with, apart from the idea of the constitution of knowledge that we have one, it's something that we're not used to really [02:20:00] thinking about, which is what I just described.

Russian style, disinformation and propaganda is very different in terms of its methods and who's using it and what ideologies it's attached to at the moment from what we call cancel culture, a term that didn't exist when I started the book. But they are both in fact, forms of information warfare. That is they attempt to organize and manipulate the social and media environments for political gain.

So cancel culture does it differently. Before that term came along, I called it social coercion or coerced conformity. So here's the idea. You can do an experiment. You put eight people in a room, you give them a simple test that says, it's just, The answer is obvious. You ask them which of three lines on the right matches the same length as the line on the left.

You make it blindingly obvious that it's impossible to get it wrong. Put eight people in that room, but there's a catch. One is the experimental subject. The other seven are actors. The right answer is [02:21:00] B, and it's obvious. And when people are left to their own devices, they always get it right. But in that room at that time, seven of those people will say, see, they create a false consensus in the room.

What is the eighth person? The actual subject to a third of the time, they actually go with. The wrong answer. They go with the group answer, whether because they want to conform socially, whether because they really think they might be wrong. Maybe this is an obstacle optical illusion, and I'm not getting it.

Maybe they have genuine doubt. A third of people, um, a third of participants do that. And, uh, in 75 percent of the time, a person will do it in at least one trial in multiple trials. So now flash forward to the present, suppose you've got a community like a university, suppose a group, a small group of faction, you know, maybe 20 percent of the university or 10 percent or whatever.

Supposedly are very motivated activists [02:22:00] who want to impose a point of view, manipulate the environment for political advantage, intimidate, silence their opponents. Well, you can weaponize social media, you can weaponize course evaluations against professors, you can use rules against harassment to launch investigations.

You can just use denunciations of people as racist, so that people who hold certain points of view or want to ask certain points of questions will feel very reluctant to do that. It becomes very risky to go anywhere near these topics. They become chilled, and indeed, polls now find that two thirds of university students say that they avoid expressing their real political views for fear of social consequences.

I've talked to many professors, they're quoted in the book, including, by the way, many, many progressive professors who say they don't feel safe, um, teaching the way they want to teach. They're worried about social consequences, investigations. So this has two results. One is the obvious result, which is you can shut down the people that you don't want to be heard.[02:23:00] 

But the second result is you're actually playing with people's minds, right? Because you're creating a false consensus. It looks like everyone on campus believes, for example, um, well, take your proposition. We won't get into it. Everyone believes that. Anyone who doesn't believe that is isolated, shameful, stigmatized.

That plays with our brains. That makes us think we're in doubt. We're ashamed of ourselves. We must be wrong. So that can go on in a university environment. Then it turns out social media makes that quite easy to organize and do in a public environment. So now we see cases again and again of social media campaigns being used to isolate shame.

People go after their employers. People are now fired if they become controversial on social media, demolish people's reputations if they're called racist, so that's what comes up on Google. Secondary boycotts, big part of that, that's where you go after their friends, their professional associates. They say, Bruce Kane, how can you associate with Jonathan Rauch?

You know he's a racist, right? So now you're going to have to [02:24:00] denounce me. You're going to feel intimidated. You'll be drawn into the same denial of reality. So that worked in the Soviet Union, although they use cruder methods for the most part. They just, you know, sent you to Siberia, but this can allow a minority, meaning a numerical minority to sustain a false consensus and impose its alternative vision on reality on a society really for quite a long time.

We now see that happening nationally, 60 percent of Americans say that they're reluctant to state their true political views. for fear of social consequence. A third of Americans say they're worried if they state their true political views that they will lose a job or job opportunities. And that, by the way, Bruce, this is a new and important development that is now just as true of progressives as it is of conservatives.

So Houston, we have a problem. 

BILL KANE: So do you see this as primarily a kind of Problem of a new technology of communication and combined with some sort of culture of going public. It just seems people want to go public with [02:25:00] their views a lot more and in other words, is it possible that there was always this danger, but it's just the fact that a so many people are now easily Part of the public dialogue that they're confronting what normal political figures always had to confront.

Uh, in terms of castigation, et cetera. 

JONATHAN RAUCH: Yeah, that's, that's such an important question. There's a bunch of historical material in the book, but it's, it's a perfect storm. It's new technology, um, new ideologies and above all new actors. So we know cancel cultures, ancient, um, we saw it in the Salem witch trials.

We saw it in 1835, Alexis to Tocqueville. That's a name you'll recognize came to America and says the biggest threat. To freedom in America is not from the government. It's from what we now call canceling. If you get on the wrong side of a received opinion, you can lose your livelihood, your friends. So you'll submit, you'll just be quiet.

In 1859, John Stuart Mill says exactly the same thing is the case in, in Victorian [02:26:00] England. Um, the disinformation tactics, the fire hose of falsehood that dates over a century, uh, Hitler. And Goebbels used that, Lennon used that. So why do we have this new problem in America right now? Number one, we have the technology we've talked about, which have made it trivially easy to spread disinformation, to target disinformation, uses, uses bots to do that.

You can test disinformation in seconds. You put it out there. You see what spreads virally. Bots automatically are programmed to amplify that. You can exploit vulnerabilities in social media. You know, it used to be very hard to do this. A KGB agent would have to plant documents on like a shipwreck In order to make them seem authentic.

Well, you know, now you just claim to found stuff on a hundred Biden's hard drive and you send it through social media. So you got technology, you have ideologies, which is for example, emotional safetyism, which is useful for counselors. Cause it says if, um, that emotional damage. AKA offendedness [02:27:00] is equivalent to physical damage and that's a violation of my rights.

So that's useful on college campuses to suppress alternate viewpoints. And then the, I think the most important, I know this sounds partisan. I'm not a partisan person. I'm center right. I've voted for and supported many Republicans. I just think this is the truth. The facts right now, you have new actors, you've got trolls on social media.

That's anti vaxxers. It was gamer gate. Um, new publications. You've got conservative media, which is in many ways in its own epistemic environment. Most important, you have Donald J. Trump. Um, Bruce, we have never seen a situation before when a presidential candidate and then a president with all the, uh, the capabilities Of his office and his genius.

He is a disinformation genius. He's the best since the 1930s plus conservative media plus the Republican Party have all been used as an [02:28:00] institutional organ of disinformation propaganda. We have just simply never had to deal with that in America before it is it is new when you add those three things together.

Yeah, you get it complicated and and worrisome situation.

Obedience and Mass Education - Against the Grain - Air Date 11-18-24

SASHSA LILLY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: I can imagine some listeners might hear your description of the origin of education.

mass primary education and say, well, that sounds so different from education now. Education now isn't about control. It's about giving children the tools to expand their potential in the world or to see the world critically or to become good citizens. When you look at the origins of mass education, primary education and look at the present.

Is there such a stark contrast between the origins and what we see today across schools, especially schools [02:29:00] that primarily serve non elite children? 

AGUSTINA PAGLAYAN: I wish there was, Sasha. As you know, I'm, I'm a professor. I teach university, uh, students, and One of the things that I did to examine whether the origins of education look very different from today was I gathered, along with a large team, data on the prevalence of indoctrination efforts and the prevalence of efforts to teach critical thinking skills across 160 countries from 1945 to the present.

And when you analyze the data, what you see is a very high prevalence of efforts to instill a specific set of political values that substantiate or justify a particular type of social and political order, and those efforts being more intense than [02:30:00] efforts to teach critical thinking. And this is important.

Problematically, also true of democracies. Now, of course, I'm sure we have some listeners who think, Well, my education looked quite different. Well, my education also looked quite different. I had the privilege of going to schools that did cultivate my critical thinking skills. Probably wouldn't be where I am today if that hadn't been the case.

But even then, I think it's important to recognize that The opportunities that I had are not the norm, that they are the kinds of opportunities that are available to people who were lucky enough to be, to live in a more affluent community, or Um, how have the ability to access that type of education. But when you look at the norm, the most prevalent type of education and particularly the type of education that a lot of low income Children in the U.

S. And around the world have access to itself. It's an education that focuses very heavily on discipline. You have entire charter [02:31:00] schools, uh, franchises that are Zero tolerance. That's kind of the way they brand themselves, right, as, as strict on enforcement of rules. And I just, I wish, again, that things were different, but the data don't suggest that things are looking that different today.

Um, there has been, according to this data that I'm telling you about, some growth over time, particularly in democracies in the extent to which schools teach critical thinking skills. But again, how much emphasis they put on doing that pales relative to how much emphasis they put on teaching kids to accept the existing status quo and, um, just think of just how many kids, when they're five year olds, pledge allegiance to the U.

S. flag and the republic for which it stands, uh, for even though at five year olds, um, they have no idea what a republic means, right? [02:32:00] 

SASHSA LILLY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: Sure, and I wonder if you could talk about that thread of, you know, a word that seems highly charged for us, indoctrination, you know, agenda of indoctrination in schools. And yet, as you point out in your book, Raised to Obey, we actually use a different term to mean the same thing, which is socialization, that making a child ready for society is, you know, one of the values that schools.

But what does that actually mean in terms of this longer history of schools as a vehicle for maintaining the social order? 

AGUSTINA PAGLAYAN: The history of the term indoctrination in the United States is quite, um, interesting because Up until World War I, education reformers, Horace Mann, and you name it, um, they talked about education and indoctrination as interchangeable terms.

Again, this goes back [02:33:00] to what we were talking about earlier, that they thought of education as indoctrination. They didn't have the ideas we have in mind today. Now World War I comes in, and the US and Germany are big enemies, and that's when the US wants to differentiate itself from Germany in terms of, Everything that Germany is doing.

And so that's when education reformers start saying, Oh, indoctrination is what Germany does. What we do is socialization. But interestingly, if you look at the term indoctrination on the dictionary, what it means is a process of teaching people to accept a set of beliefs uncritically. And it's not about which specific beliefs you're teaching.

You can teach someone to accept uncritically that the Nazi regime, for example, is a legitimate regime. Or you can teach someone to accept [02:34:00] uncritically that republican institutions are the best, uh, type of institution we should have. Or you can teach them to accept uncritically that, uh, institutions are biased against racial minorities.

Or you can teach them to accept uncritically the opposite, that institutions are not biased against racial minorities. And so there's the point again is that Schools in the United States teach kids a lot of ideas that do not, um, get taught in, um, in a way that enable kids to question what they're being taught.

They're being taught something, they need to memorize it in order to do well in tests, get a strong GPA, be able to go to college. And that's, that's what I see in the classroom as a college professor, that kids come with very strong GPAs. And yet, they, they don't have the capacity yet, because they haven't been trained to do so, [02:35:00] to question the things that they're reading, to question the things that I'm saying.

Because they've been, they've been told that the teacher knows what's right, um, in some ways. And so, um, it's, it's sad, I think there's a lot of room for improvement, and it kind of would require overhauling. education systems, um, to, to depart completely from what they were designed to accomplish and thinking, rethinking dramatically, how would we design schools from scratch if we were to use schools with the goal of promoting critical thinking, promoting creativity, equipping people with the knowledge and the tools to be autonomous individuals who have the capacity to impact society, pursue their dreams, advance their ideas.

It would look like, not like what we have today. 

SASHSA LILLY - HOST, AGAINST THE GRAIN: And yet there's a whole discourse around schools [02:36:00] that schools are failing, that schools fail to teach children, and this is often in the primary level, basic skills. And yet what it sounds like you're arguing is that that's actually how the system has been structured from the beginning.

teaching children to obey, teaching so called values is actually a higher priority than teaching children at, you know, the very least skills and then even more so critical thinking because that is not what these institutions were set up to do. 

AGUSTINA PAGLAYAN: Exactly. So the, the, I think the main argument of the book is that a key reason why Education systems today in the U. S. And around the world are failing to level the playing field are failing to equip children with basic skills of reading and math as well as more advanced [02:37:00] critical thinking skills is because those schools that we have today, were not designed to accomplish these goals. On the contrary, they were designed to teach children to accept the status quo, to accept their place in society, to accept and be satisfied with their material condition.

And so even well intended, um. teachers or education reformers today, they have to operate within the constraints of systems that were not designed to accomplish this. We still have teachers standing in front of the classroom as an authority and kids sitting in rows and having to raise their hand every time they want to speak and so on and so forth.

There's, there's just so many aspects that we take for granted as normal as the usual business that are part and parcel of The design of the systems to infuse obedience on that's kind of the challenge is to move away from that.

Matt Gaetz And The Clown Car Crash Into The Justice Department - Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Air Date 11-16-24

DR MARY ANNE FRANKS: If you think free speech meant that we were on the [02:38:00] side of the oppressed or the side of the people advocating for democracy, you need to understand that throughout history, that's never been true, right?

It's something we tell ourselves as kind of a comforting, you know, bedtime story that, oh, yes, and you'll even see civil libertarians doing this now to say, yes, this is free speech or the First Amendment is why the abolitionists were able to advocate against slavery. It's the reason why the suffragists were able to advocate for women's right to vote.

First Amendment didn't show up any of those people, right? It wasn't even on the radar for most judges or litigators to even think that the First Amendment had anything to do with that. And when we finally got at the turn of the 20th century, you finally got some understanding that maybe, yes, that's what the First Amendment should do.

Every one of those dissenters lost. They went to jail, right? And so we've only recently had even a beginning, I think, of a formal review defense of those kinds of radical ideas that are radically democratic that have been defended by the First Amendment. So it's important to understand that our history isn't what we think it is.

But yes, when I try [02:39:00] to get to the, the heart of what we would need as a kind of reorientation for our free speech discourse, isn't so much to say we shouldn't protect free speech and whatever that means. It's oftentimes to ask first, what do we mean by free speech? Because once we realize, That it's about picking winners and losers.

It's not about saying we're going to take all comers that the government is allowed to say things like we're not going to let you say, you know, conspire to commit a murder. We're going to not allow you to engage in defamation full stop all the time, right? It's always a question of what speech is going to be protected in the hierarchy and which one isn't.

And my point is to say that if we're going to have a coherent. Theory of speech, the things that should be at the very top are the things that challenged government, challenged power, challenged the people who have so much more than everybody else. So it's a sliding scale of protections, right? And the way that we need to weight those, because we're weighting them whether we actually acknowledge that we're doing it or not.

And I'm saying let's acknowledge it. And when it comes to conflicts between [02:40:00] people who are trying to advocate for the expansion of democracy, who are. Actually trying to defend equality. That's what belongs at the very top of our free speech protections and the people who are advocating for harm to other people should be quite a bit lower on those protections.

It doesn't mean they need to be put in jail. It doesn't mean that, but What the ancient Greeks talked about in that distinction between parousia and istigoria is the distinction between a kind of conception of free speech where everybody just gets to say whatever they want. And there's a lot of really fascinating ancient Greek theory about how that's actually in many ways kind of counter to democracy.

Because people who don't care about the consequences of their speech are actually going to make it harder for people to coexist. By contrast, the people who are willing to speak fearlessly are the people who are speaking truth to power in a really meaningful sense. And when the French philosopher Michel Foucault gives his gloss on what he thinks this fearless speech concept really entails, [02:41:00] he picks out these characteristics that are, I think, so meaningful for our time.

And the first one is that you have to be candid, as in, You have to be speaking for yourself. You can't be pretending to play a role. You're not a devil's advocate. You're speaking from your own identity. And then what you have to be saying is something critical about someone more powerful than you, or some system or institution more powerful than you.

And the reason why that's important and it's called fearlessness is because, because of that, that power asymmetry. You are taking the risk that you are going to be punished for speaking against power in that way. Everything else, you know, speaking down to someone else or trying to create harm to somebody else, all of that might need to be protected or it might need to be tolerated, maybe, depending on the circumstances.

But it's not fearless. It's not at the core of what we would think we needed to protect as a means of checking power. And so that's the distinction that I think we really have not spent enough time with. And again, it's not as though. The neutrality [02:42:00] doctrine that we've been told has ever been true.

There's always some kind of calculation that the courts are doing to say, we're going to balance the kind of harm from the speech. I mean, think about the 1980s, uh, child pornography case, right? The court is saying, this is free expression of a sort, but we think it's really harmful. And so this is why we're now going to protect it.

That is the kind of calculation we should be doing all the time openly. And again, thinking about the kinds of speech that are actually trying to expand that promise of democracy and the ones that are actually trying to exclude people from it. We can make those distinctions, or another way of putting it is, if we're not making those distinctions, what are we even doing with our legal theory?

What are we even doing with this concept of freedom of expression? 

DALIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: That Foucault template is really useful, Marianne, just because, again, you're sitting in Charlottesville as we're talking, and I'm remembering the civil suit that was brought against the Nazis and the white supremacists and the Klan, all of the defenses they tried to mount were sort of efforts to insulate their speech from this construct you just [02:43:00] posited, right?

So, like, we're just joking, right? It's just Pepe the frog. We're punching up. We're We're not punching down even as they're like, literally, you know, carrying flaming torches. It's interesting because in order to kind of create the carve out for free speech and to call yourself the victim, every single one of those tenets of what you're describing as fearless speech has to be deconstructed.

And part of, I think, your critique is that we allowed that deconstruction to happen without even thinking very hard, A, about who was being harmed, but B, about what it means to hide behind, you know, I'm just retweeting this Nazi. I'm not supporting it. Like, we really literally constructed a way to work around every single thing that you're describing as the hallmarks of what should be protected speech.

And I think, As you say, we did that in some ways thinking like, because the end [02:44:00] game here is to protect all speech, as opposed to think about what kind of speech is really speech. I feel like I have to ask you about Elon Musk. Um, it pains me and I feel like I have to ask you about Elon Musk before it becomes illegal to ask you about Elon Musk.

Um, he is the world's richest man. He is a. sent a billionaire. If you look up at night, you will see some of his almost 6500 and counting Starlink satellites. You may own one of his electric cars. He owns one of the biggest social networking sites in the world where he has, as we just said, endorsed anti Semitic conspiracy theories and great replacement theories.

Technology writer Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic wrote last week, quote, X is no longer a social media. a white supremacy problem, but a white supremacist site with a social media problem. Um, in addition to this, we've got Musk pouring, you know, millions and millions of dollars into electing Trump. He joins Trump on [02:45:00] the congratulatory phone call to Vladimir Zelensky.

On Tuesday of this week, Trump announced that Musk would help lead what is going to be a brand new Department of Government efficiency to dismantle bureaucracy. Have we ever in thinking about speech encountered, even in the Gilded Age, have we encountered an oligarch who owns the airwaves, who owns the president, who owns our speech, and who has the power to do all these things under the guise of 

DR MARY ANNE FRANKS: freedom?

I don't think we've seen it in the United States. I think maybe other countries have seen something somewhat similar. When you've got someone who's in charge of administering propaganda for the state and has so much control over what everyone thinks, right? Someone who's going to be part and parcel of a movement that's already been in place for many years, to attack educators, to burn books, to move people away from, you know, Places where you might [02:46:00] actually critically reflect upon power and history, I'm afraid we have seen it.

I think Europe has seen it. I think we're about to experience exactly how bad it can get because this is supercharged in the age of social media. But we began by talking about the marketplace of ideas. And when Musk bought Twitter. Well, he was himself saying, well, I'm going to turn this into the public square.

You know, actual free speech is going to exist here. And so many people were praising him for that. And when he started to basically just kick off anybody who might criticize him, a few people who had praised him before were like, well, we're not really sure if that's what is a very free speech protective way.

But what I really think is interesting, and I mentioned this in the book too, is to say He's actually doing exactly what power does when it invokes free speech, that that is not different from what they do. That is, we've been telling ourselves that in this country, in the United States, with the First Amendment, we're protecting, you know, everyone equally or even protecting the powerless more than the powerful.

It's never [02:47:00] been true, right? It's always been the case that our government has managed to preserve a space for itself and the kinds of power and privilege that have been cemented from the beginning. And it's no There's no coincidence here about why it is that this attack on education that we've seen for the last 20 years has been attacking concepts of history of racism of misogyny to tell Americans you can't learn about that, right?

You can't learn how racist and sexist our history is. That's the most dangerous idea out there as a way of trying to re educate the public. What you really see with someone like Elon Musk before he's now I guess going to be officially part of the government was he gave you the trial run. I mean, the marketplace of ideas looks like Twitter.

It's, it's Elon Musk's ex is the marketplace of ideas overrun with white supremacists overrun with misogyny. Yes. Technically can other people speak there sometimes if he doesn't actually eliminate you from the platform, but you're never going to be able to speak in the same amplified way. As the people that Elon Musk [02:48:00] likes, that power likes, literally Elon Musk changed the algorithm so that it would boost his posts more than anybody else's, tweaked it so that it would boost right-wing content far more than other types of content, although that was already happening before Musk, I should say.

That's what free speech looks like. That's what the marketplace of ideas looks like. That's what you get. And now that he's going to be in government, it's literally going to be what we all get.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. 

The additional sections of the show included clips from Why America?, Counterspin, The Elephant Graveyard, NEJM Interviews, Steve Shives, The Commonwealth Club of California, Second Thought, TYT Sports, Against the Grain, and Amicus. Further details are in the show notes. 

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton [02:49:00] for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet: Ken, Brian, Ben, and Lara for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to all those who support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at BestOfTheLeft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on any and all new social media platforms you may be joining these days. 

So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay!, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the [02:50:00] members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.com.

Air Date 11/20/2024

Full Notes Page

Download PDF

Audio-Synced Transcript

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast. We live in a deeply racist and sexist society, nearly devoid of people willing to admit to being racist or sexist. In a sense, this is a sign of progress. We're in the phase where prejudice still exists, but it has become socially unacceptable to openly express it. But to deny the impact on our politics, just because people don't admit their prejudice would be to completely misunderstand the nature of the issue. 

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top takes in about 50 minutes today, includes Democracy Now!, The New Abnormal, Reveal, and MSNBC. Plus during my editor's note today, I'll discuss the tectonic shifts happening in the world of social media, with a few tips on how you can navigate them. And regardless of my analysis, find all the links to follow Best of the Left on your preferred platform in the show notes. 

Then, in the additional deeper dives half with the show, there'll be more in four sections: Section [00:01:00] A- A Mirror for America. Section B- White Supremacy for the Win. Section C- Reverberation. And Section D- What Now?

The Racism of MAGA Is as American as Apple Pie Nina Turner on Trump & 2024 Election - Democracy Now! - Air Date 10-31-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: We turn right now, also on the presidential race, to Nina Turner, former Ohio state senator, founder of We Are Somebody, which has been out talking to voters in Ohio about early voting, voting hours, voting the whole ballot. She is a senior fellow at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy here at The New School. Her new piece for Newsweek is headlined “Calling Trump a Nazi Is Giving Our Own History a Pass. The Racism of MAGA Is American.”

Nina Turner, unlike Bishop Barber, you have not actually endorsed your party’s candidate, Kamala Harris. But if you can explain why and then explain this piece, why you’re saying what’s happening in this country is uniquely American?

NINA TURNER: For [00:02:00] me, in this race, it’s important to give the voters the depth and the breadth that they need to be able to make their own decisions. As you know, I was on a presidential campaign twice, in 2016 and 2020, so I was actually out there stumping for my candidate, which was Senator Bernard Sanders. In this particular race, I mean, I’m feeling just as frustrated as most of the voters and the people that I’ve had the opportunity to talk to all over this country. People are really tired. They are exhausted. And we are going to have a lot of work to do after this election cycle. I’m more exhausted now than I was in 2016 and 2020, mentally and physically, although I am not on the campaign trail.

In terms of my piece in Newsweek, it was important to set the stage that the MAGA movement itself, and not to say that all people in the movement are white supremacists or bigoted, but President Donald J. Trump has certainly set a stage by which the unfulfilled promises of this country, the [00:03:00] undealt-with anti-Blackness and other types of racism and bigotry have not been dealt with sufficiently. And so it bubbles up to the top when you have someone like him that spreads that kind of stuff. And no one should be surprised.

But I think when people lay this at the feet of Nazi Germany, oh, no, no, no, wait a minute — that’s really what the crux of my piece was, is, “Oh, no, this is just as American as apple pie.” And also, when they do that, you diminish what happened to millions of people in Nazi Germany, and, more importantly, you diminish the Black liberation struggle right here on this soil, where a type of fascism, apartheid-type activity, chattel slavery itself, that deprived generations of Black people from living out their greatest greatness, from rapes to lynchings to generational chattel — you diminish that, and you say, “This is not us.” That piece was to say, “No, it is us, and we need to deal with it and not [00:04:00] push it off on some other nation.”

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what are you hearing, Nina, from voters that you’ve been speaking to? What are their principal concerns?

NINA TURNER: The economy. I mean, that is the thing that I hear about the most. And I know now some numbers have come out. Gas prices are mysteriously lower now. Imagine that. I’ve had voters say that to me. But it really is the economy and how inflation has really siphoned off any advantages that working-class people from all backgrounds have been trying so hard to change their material conditions, but they have not been able to get ahead.

Some Americans Are Already Living in Trump’s Purge - The New Abnormal - Air Date 10-1-24

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Yeah. They don't. No one deserves this. And the fact of the matter is that if Donald Trump and JD Vance become president and vice president, this will be the norm. Because what I remember is Donald Trump throwing people in Puerto Rico paper towels for their massive devastation from a hurricane during his administration.

What I remember is the last time that he was president of the United States, he [00:05:00] denied North Carolina federal funds for two weeks while they were dealing, again, with the impact of a hurricane. So in my mind, like, there are some people. Donald Trump's base and constituents that don't care what they don't have access to, so long as Donald Trump is denying the same people that they hate.

And that to me is fucking wild. But that's where those folks are. 

MATTHEW SELIGMAN: This is one of the many things that will become, well, it's the norm now. It will become much, much worse if Trump and Vance get into office. And along those lines, I'm assuming you are familiar with, even if you haven't seen the series of movies called The Purge.

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: I don't watch horror films because being a political analyst is enough, but please go ahead and tell the audience what The Purge is. 

MATTHEW SELIGMAN: Okay. I watch horror films to cheer me up, Danielle. But so the conceit of The Purge is that for I think 12 hours, basically all laws are suspended in America [00:06:00] and you can do whatever you want to anyone else.

It's dystopian. It's not portrayed as a good thing. So Donald Trump over the weekend decided that what he thinks will solve crime —and again, he was spouting his nonsense about crime and violent crime being up when the exact opposite is true—but what he said was that he was speaking in Pennsylvania and he said, Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Mike Kelly should be put in charge for "one really violent day".

And then he went on to say "one rough hour". And real rough, the world will get it out and it will end immediately. End immediately. It will end immediately. So he basically wants a version of The Purge. And that comparison has been drawn by a lot of people. 

But I think it's also important to note that in The Purge, this applied to all Americans. Any American could go out and loot and murder and do horrific things. What Trump is saying here is basically he wants one person in charge of this. And then basically it would be like The [00:07:00] Purge, but only for law enforcement. So basically giving law enforcement one really violent day to do whatever they want, which is, some might argue that's pretty much what we have right now. 

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: I was gonna, like, I'm sorry, give me a headline that's different from where law enforcement is now without full immunity. I'm confused. 

MATTHEW SELIGMAN: Yeah. But no, and Danielle, I'll toss it over to you, but it is basically, he wants to give qualified immunity. He wants to basically, or replace that with complete immunity for law enforcement for six hours, or sorry, for one day or one rough hour, whatever it is. Danielle, does this remind you of anything? Besides The Purge movies. 

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Yeah, actually it does. And thank you so much for giving me that softball toss over here, which is, while folks are comparing this to a horror film that they want to believe could never possibly happen in these United States, let me remind you that over the course of history in this country, [00:08:00] there have been a number, a number that we couldn't even imagine, of White supremacist led mobs that would storm into segregated areas, Black towns, Black cities, and destroy them. Murder, rape, lynch, beaten, killing children, babies. And it was all okay. Because Black people in this country for nearly a hundred years lived under Jim Crow. And no, this was not just in the South. This was everywhere in the United States. Some places were more segregated and more terrorized than others. But let's not create this narrative that the North was somehow some utopia for Black people. It was just less bad. 

And so when I think about what Donald Trump is saying, I think about the Tulsa Massacre that people in Oklahoma just learned about [00:09:00] in the last couple of years. But Black people in Tulsa have always known the story of what happened in the middle of the night where over 300 Black people were murdered. An entire prosperous city. town, Black town, was destroyed and that they never received any reparations, any money back from the government. And basically it was pretty much government sanctioned. So Black people in America and Indigenous people in America already know what the fuck The Purge looks like, because it has happened time and time again.

So, for folks that want to compare this to a horror movie, it's not a horror movie. It is very real American history that continues to be swept under the rug as if people can't imagine the horrors that people have done at the hands of White supremacy. So, when I heard that, Andy I didn't chuckle as some people [00:10:00] did on social media. I didn't shrug and just say, Oh, he sounds insane. He sounded like Bull Connor. He sounded like every other racist that was in a position of power to actualize their White supremacist fantasies. That's what that was like to me. 

MATTHEW SELIGMAN: Oh, absolutely, I think i've said this before but it's insane that... look, I would never claim to be the smartest person in the room, but I am what would be considered well educated and I read a lot and all that stuff. I had never heard of the Tulsa Massacre until I'm sitting there watching an HBO show called Watchmen. And then I immediately just started reading about it. I was like, how was I not taught any of this? Or how did I just not even come across it in, like I said, I read a lot. It is amazing to me what we don't teach in this country.

And like you said, what we sweep under the rug. And, which also ties directly into what Ron DeSantis and other Republican governors and Republican-run localities are trying to do, or are actually doing in our [00:11:00] public schools, is trying to prevent people from learning about stuff like this. But yeah, I, no, I agree with you.

I don't have a problem with people making Purge comparisons and saying 'Trump is insane', because yes, to both of those. But also this, as you said, there's nothing funny about this. This is fascism. This is, I don't know what else to call it. Even if you want to take race out of it, which I don't think you can, but even if you want to, the idea of giving cops complete immunity to act for one rough day, one rough hour, whatever it is, that's pure unadulterated fascism.

And I don't want to go off on a media rant here because we do that a lot, I know, maybe too much, but cover this shit. Stop, again, stop with the sane washing and everything else and report that this is what this guy is saying. And don't say he was just joking or he was exaggerating. I don't care.

He's running for the president of the United States. There are certain things that I'm sorry, you don't joke about if you're [00:12:00] running for president of the United States. Also, I don't think he's joking. 

Why You Shouldnt Buy the Election Narrative About Black Men - Reveal - Air Date 10-23-24

VOTER: As far as President Obama, lecturing or chastising Black men to vote, I don't think it was with malicious intent. I do think that it is a tactic that does not work. I think we should be addressing why Black men are either voting for Trump or not voting at all. 

His most recent comments around Black men are definitely disappointing because when you look at the stats, like when you look at who came out like the last time a woman was a Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, after Black women, Black men were with a segment of the population that voted for her the most. And so I feel like this critique against Black men is like a bit unfair. 

GARRISON HAYES: And while it may look [00:13:00] like Black men aren't doing their part to uphold and bolster Kamala's strong Showing, as much as Black women, what they are doing, though, is something that is supremely American, and that is to hold candidates accountable for their promises and making them take notice. And I think that's what Obama did. He took notice and he spoke to them. 

VOTER: I think Obama was correct. I think it's solid for me. I think when I first started this, my vote was against Donald Trump, but now it's for Kamala. 

GARRISON HAYES: If Obama had made the same comments to a room full of Black men, and there were no cameras around, we wouldn't care. But this is at least the second time that I know of, the first time being Morehouse's convocation, where he has Taken on this kind of condescending tone towards Black men and Black people in our choices. And I, I want to say, 'brother, read the [00:14:00] room. He really doesn't know how to read the room.

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: So Barak admonishes Black men on the campaign trail, but then, a couple days later, Kamala comes out with a plan specifically for Black men, which, I have to say, I don't think I've ever heard of a candidate coming specifically with a plan for Black men. It felt like Barack was acting as the stick and Kamala was acting as the carrot, that it was a planned thing to move Black men that are on the edges or possibly thinking about voting for Donald Trump.

GARRISON HAYES: And so in some very real ways, Kamala Harris is taking a political risk in releasing an agenda specifically for. Black men. What this agenda for Black men does is it contextualizes her existing policy proposals, the things that she's been running on for the last 70 something days. And it places it within the context of the way these proposals will impact or will potentially impact Black men.

Black people, [00:15:00] Black men specifically for so long. Politicians have been afraid to talk to and about the Black community. They've been afraid that if they frame their policies as something that will help Black people specifically, it will create a kind of racial resentment in the majority culture among white voters and it may turn them off from supporting them.

And so they've walked around with this Hey guys, I'm for everyone. And I think if politicians do much more of the framing of their plans for Black communities, particularly we'll have voters who are better informed and able to make the right decision for them. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: On the flip side, Donald Trump also tried to connect with Black men earlier this year, or at least that's what a lot of people assumed he was trying to do, when he started selling a shiny gold pair of sneakers called Never Surrender High Tops.

COMMERCIAL: That's the real deal. That's the real deal.

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: So I don't think that I've heard anywhere Trump saying that specifically the sneakers were for Black men. Black men and Black [00:16:00] people and this is his outreach to Black men and Black people. I just felt like that's the subtext of it And I gotta be honest like I was offended because if you think you got to buy my vote with sneakers No, it doesn't. No, sir. Please give me policy over sneakers. 

GARRISON HAYES: Yeah. I know that they framed those sneakers that way on Fox news, that this was something that was designed to serve as outreach to the Black community, because obviously Black people love their sneakers. Like that was the idea.

NEWS CLIP: This is connecting with Black America because they love sneakers. They're into sneakers. They love the, this is a big deal, certainly in, in the inner city. So when you have Trump roll out his sneaker line, they're like, wait a minute, this is cool. He's reaching them on a level that defies and is above politics.

GARRISON HAYES: I think more than the sneakers, Trump has repeated multiple times that his mugshot has helped him with Black people, Black voters particularly, and I can only imagine [00:17:00] as folks disproportionately represented in the car serial system that, that he means Black men in particular. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: A lot of the young people that I have spoken to, I had a good conversation with my son, who is, my youngest is 20, and him and I were talking about who his friends were voting for, and he was telling me that a lot of them, like Trump He also said, they're not actually going to vote, but they like Trump.

And I was like, why do they like Trump? And he said that they like Trump because he's tough because he acts tough because he's because things like that picture of his mugshot or the picture of him getting shot at and him throwing his fist up in the air For their generation, for a younger generation, that's like Tupac getting shot and throwing, the middle finger in the air, right?

Like that, for my generation, that was like classic. That was defiance. That was like, you can't take me out. And so Trump basically took a page from Tupac. 

GARRISON HAYES: Yeah, I definitely think that's true to a [00:18:00] degree. I think for younger generations, I'm not sure if the framework of toughness, I think for millennials and maybe older, I Toughness really is kind of part of that, that quoi that Trump has as an appeal to Black men, I think for younger generations, especially those who came up in kind of the internet age, it's his lack of care.

It's the unscripted, unwilling to bow to social norms and that element, that kind of trolling element, I think is what kind of endears him to the, to Twitch streamer generation. He is in that reality TV vein that we see a lot of folks adopting on TikTok and YouTube and streamers on Twitch.

And so he comes off as this untouchable kind of guy. He just says what he, the term is based, he just says whatever it is that he wants to say and he gets away with it and he's rich and he has all this stuff. And I think that kind of. countercultural affect is actually what endears him to younger generations, even if they don't have the [00:19:00] language to necessarily put to it.

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: I think it all comes down to is that what Black men are looking for is action. They need to see change because the Black vote has been taken for granted by Democrats, Black people, Black men specifically. They need to see that you're actually doing something they need to connect the possible future Harris administration to actually something changing in their lives.

That's right. And I want to end with just a question to you that I will also answer. Do you believe the hype that Black men are leaving in mass to the Republican Party? And go into Trump. 

GARRISON HAYES: I don't believe the hype, Al. I think Black men will show up in majority numbers for the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.

I think the number that we will see grow are those [00:20:00] who don't show up to vote at all. Those folks who Terrence Woodbury at Hit Strategies frames as rightfully cynical. Folks who have been, Thinking about the political landscape and coming to the conclusion that this just ain't for them, that the politicians aren't working for them, that this country really isn't working for them, and that their vote really doesn't matter.

Trumps Nazi Rally at MSG Perfectly Reflected Republican Values - The New Abnormal - Air Date 10-29-24

ANDY LEVY - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: So, Danielle, I feel like I've opened the show a couple of times recently talking about how I have a browser tab that just says Nazi shit. Today's a little different, because I have a browser tab that just says Nazi rally. 

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Oh, that's nice. 

ANDY LEVY - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Yeah. Shout out to Donald Trump and the Republicans for letting me get out of my rut, I guess. 

But obviously I'm talking about the rally that was held here in New York City at Madison Square Garden Sunday night, which was, I would say, every bit as awful as expected, if not possibly more. I guess let's just take it in order, because it started with a comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe telling jokes [00:21:00] about black people and watermelon, and then moving on to describing Latinos as basically mindless breeders, making a joke about that, and then calling Puerto Rico a, quote, "floating island of garbage."

This, needless to say, got a lot of play. And Danielle, I'm gonna guess you don't have strong feelings about any of this. It's just a sense that I have. This doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that really-- 

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Rubs me the wrong way? 

ANDY LEVY - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Yeah, yeah. But prove me wrong. Debate me, bro. 

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Okay, I'm gonna try and get through this without just doing a primal scream, which is how I felt watching the coverage of this Nazi rally that took place at Madison Square Garden.

First off, I think that this was one of the most notable [00:22:00] signs of terrorism from this campaign that I think that we have seen since it started. Donald Trump and Republicans have alluded to white supremacy and white nationalism, have been a bit nuanced over the course of the last several years and how they frame their commentary. When Donald Trump is asked about white supremacy and to disavow it, he famously told the white supremacist militia to "stand back and stand by." When the march happened in Charlottesville, where the Nazis were screaming, "Jews will not replace us," Donald Trump embraced them and said that they were good people on both sides.

He has sat down to dinner with Nick Fuentes, a known white supremacist, and Kanye West. He has said to a group of Jewish people that if he does not win re-election, the [00:23:00] Jews will be to blame. 

Donald Trump and every single one of his followers want a white nationalist version of America that is deeply rooted in their twisted and warped ideas regarding the Bible and regarding evangelicalism.

And what was on display was just unadulterated hate. There were no jokes that were said, so I don't even want to create this notion that because somebody puts on their resume that they're a comedian that anything that comes out of their fucking mouth is funny, right? And that's some way to soften the absolute vitriol that that motherfucker was spitting the entire time that he was on stage.

It's not a joke. Nothing that Donald Trump has said over the last nine years is a joke. Stephen Miller being up on that stage as another known white supremacist that he wants to put in charge of quote unquote their [00:24:00] immigration deportation plans isn't a comedian. 

So I think that this was probably the biggest display of white terrorism, domestic terrorism, and hatred that we have seen since January 6th. But January 6th, you could have even said like, oh, well, that was about the election and they were hopped up on the election lie and that being stolen from them. 

AOC was on MSNBC and she was very clear and articulated very clearly that this was about priming Donald Trump's audience and base for a wave of violence following this election.

And it was disgusting. And, yeah, those are my initial thoughts, Andy, without me screaming full fledged into the microphone. 

ANDY LEVY - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: No, I actually think you did a really good job. I 100 percent agree with everything you said. [00:25:00] I am finding it, I'm gonna use the word, funny. Except I'm not laughing when I say this, but I'm finding it funny that there are now a bunch of Republicans scrambling to disassociate themselves with the things that were said about Puerto Rico.

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Not the watermelon joke though, right? 

ANDY LEVY - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: No, no, no, I haven't heard anything. 

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Yeah, so they're very specific about their denouncements, but it's only about the slate of voters that are very prevalent in the actual states that they want to win. But black people and their overt racism, they are fuck that, they're good. Got it. 

ANDY LEVY - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Correct. Correct. And the reason I wanted, when I intro this, the reason I wanted to bring up the watermelon quote unquote joke was because I do feel like it's being completely forgotten about and overlooked and I don't think it should be. 

I want to talk about a congresswoman in Florida, Republican congresswoman named Maria Elvira Salazar. She tweeted that she was disgusted by Tony Hinchcliffe's comments, and then she said -- I love this phrase -- she said, "This [00:26:00] rhetoric does not reflect GOP values." 

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: [Laughs] Give me a break! 

ANDY LEVY - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: And I've seen that numerous times now, since the rally. I have seen numerous Republicans out there, saying exactly that. And honestly, I think these -- Bedlam was a famous psychiatric hospital in England, and it did all kinds of horrible experiments to people back in like the 19th century and earlier than that. I really do think that if you are at the level of delusion to think that this rhetoric does not reflect GOP values, you are very lucky you're not living in 19th century Britain, because you would have had horrible experiments done to you in Bedlam. Because you would have absolutely been locked up as a delusional maniac.

And they can't be allowed to get away with it. And that's why I want to highlight it. Because nothing that was said at that rally last night, not a single thing that was said at that rally last night, not a single disgusting, hateful, racist, bigoted thing that was said [00:27:00] does not reflect GOP values. Those are GOP values in the year 2024. We know this. 

And to sit there and try to say -- even the Trump campaign now is -- you know things are bad when the Trump campaign has to come out and say that what Tony Hinchcliffe said does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign, which again, well, that's a lie. And that's a lie right up there with this rhetoric does not reflect GOP values. Of course it does. And of course it reflects the views of President Trump and the Trump campaign. 

But the fact that they have had to come out and say that, I do think gets to something that happened with that rally last night.

“The Confederacy Won” Why Donald Trump’s Reelection Is a Win for White Supremacy, Xenophobia & Hate - Democracy Now! - Air Date 11-6-24

Professor Anderson, let’s begin with you. If you can respond to Trump’s victory?

CAROL ANDERSON: The Confederacy won. When you begin to really think about [00:28:00] what he advocated, the kind of racism, the kind of xenophobia, the kind of hatred, all wrapped in a sense of honor and gallantry, and how that resonated with such a large, wide swath of the American public, that begins to tell you that you’re seeing the backlash to what they call the great — you know, that you’re seeing the backlash to what they fear was the great replacement. And so, this feels like the kind of last stand of white supremacy.

And it’s going to put so many of us in jeopardy. And it’s also part of the drug of American exceptionalism, where those who voted for him believe that they’re going to be safe from the policies that he’s going to rain down. And so, that becomes part of the amnesia of not seeing how he handled COVID, not remembering how he handled COVID, of not remembering his tariff wars that basically almost [00:29:00] bankrupted farmers in Iowa, and the kind of chaos that he brings, the kind of divisiveness that he brings. It’s like living in a reality show and believing that it’s not reality. It is — this is a dark day for America. I think of Thomas Jefferson when he said, “I tremble for my country, because God is just,” because that’s what we’re looking at. I’m trembling for our country right now.

JUAN GONZALEZ - CO-HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And, Professor Anderson, the vote that Trump got, right now it’s at 71 million. It will probably go up 1 or 2 million more as other states are counted in and absentee ballots. But it’s still roughly about the vote that he got certainly last time. But the big drop appears to be in the vote for Kamala Harris. She’s at around — the national vote is 66 million now, significantly [00:30:00] below the 81 million that Joe Biden got. Why do you think there’s been such a disparity in her vote totals this time around?

CAROL ANDERSON: I think part of what we’re looking at, because she was explicit about policies, and so the language that she just needs to explain her policies is hokum. It’s that it is — we’re looking at the misogyny and the racism and the fear of what it meant to have a Black Asian woman who’s married to a Jewish man sitting in the White House, that this was not the kind of vision of America that that large swath that voted for Trump believe is America. It is the fear of what a multicultural, multiracial, multilingual, diverse America could mean. It means — and so, you’re seeing the backlash to her very being.

It’s a sad day for America. It’s a sad day because there was a — [00:31:00] really explicit about the horrors of Project 2025 and what that meant for Social Security, what that meant for Medicare, what that meant for education, what that meant for equity. All of that could not override the depth of the misogyny, the depth of the racism that fuels the MAGA movement, that fuels Trump.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yeah, I’d like to bring in professor Michele Goodwin into the conversation from Georgetown University. Professor, your reaction to the results?

MICHELE GOODWIN: We have to understand this as a Project 2024. So, the response, which I think was so eloquently put just now, is an amalgamation of a number of things. If we look at what the election results were based on race, it paints a picture in the United States. It paints a picture with regard to [00:32:00] how people think about electing a woman, how people think about electing a woman who is Black and of Asian descent. It paints a picture policywise about what Americans are willing to embrace. And in that way, it’s a Project 2024, it’s a Project 1619, in terms of what Americans are willing to accept, to the extent that we know that Donald Trump is willing to fulfill on what it is that he says. He said that he wanted to criminally punish women. He said — in 2016, 2015, he said that he wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. After that occurred, he took full credit for that. There were a number of things that he had hoped to dismantle. This was a president who right after coming into office had a Muslim ban, was responsible for kids at the border being placed in cages, being fed frozen burritos. This was an [00:33:00] administration that had its lawyers fighting to deny those children soap and toothpaste, arguing before federal judges that those children who were locked in cages in federal custody did not deserve soap, did not deserve toothpaste. This was a president who failed on COVID, who made sure that he had medications for himself, vaccine, and then also sent to others, including, what has been alleged, to Russia and to Putin so that there would be access to the best of what we had for COVID at that time, but for Americans, did not do a good job at all in terms of collaboration, cooperation and leading with regard to COVID, and instead had suggested that perhaps injections of bleach and other things might be the way to respond to COVID. And one could really go down the list in terms of what that presidency represented. And Americans [00:34:00] overwhelmingly voted for that.

But is that something that is new? I think that one of our challenges in our country is to really understand the arc of who we’ve been and the arc of who we are. We tend to think that we actually had our own truth and reconciliation, such that we have confronted what have been the thorny, horrific parts of our past. And we haven’t. We’ve not done the work of a South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, right? We’ve not looked and said, “How could we tolerate systems where women were denied citizenship? How could we tolerate women being denied the right to vote? How could we tolerate women being denied the opportunity to become lawyers?” And I’m talking about Supreme Court cases. “How could we tolerate women being denied from serving on juries? How could we tolerate women being denied the opportunity to have bank accounts in their own names, have their own checking accounts in their own names?” And [00:35:00] that’s a modern iteration.

And then we can unpack what this means in terms of Jim Crow and slavery. How could we be a nation that tolerated children standing on auction blocks and being auctioned off, bid upon? Not for a horrific day, where we wake up and say, “My goodness, what was that all about? Bidding on children in shackles and chains?” No, but not practice that lasted a day, a week, a year. A year alone might have been waking up and saying, “How in the world could we have tolerated that?” But to see that flow into centuries and then to create patterns of justification and narratives for that, that then flowed into Jim Crow, a time in the United States that was marked very narrowly by what happened to Rosa Parks, but more fulsomely the denial of people being able to walk in the parks, swim in pools, go into motels, stay at hotels, live where they wanted to based on their race, and a practice that lasted for generations upon [00:36:00] generations, that then required federal intervention.

So we have to ask ourselves: How could we have tolerated all of that? And in part, the answer is what we see in the election yesterday, is that we’re willing to tolerate more of that. And then we have to ask ourselves: Why? What is behind that?

Trump campaign was built on 'hate' which has contributed to 'racial terror' NAACP exec - MSNBC - Air Date 11-8-24

CHRIS JANSING - HOST, MSNBC: And I want to go back, Charles, to what he said about the ubiquitousness of information that's out there.

But, I was struck by the fact that so many of the recipients were young, that they were college students, high school students, middle school students, who, before their parents would ever want to, may have to sit down and have a very serious conversation. But from a legal standpoint and the search that's going on for who might be behind this, does that tell us anything about the type of person, the group that might do this, or is this just what people, horrible people do and how they think they can [00:37:00] get it out there. 

CHARLES COLEMAN: Well, certainly, Chris, there is a profile of a person who is a horrible person who engages in this sort of behavior, a White supremacist, someone who is on the far right, but make no mistake about it, regardless of the illegality of this—and the FBI has the tools necessary to make those assessments and to identify and characterize who they need to, in order to do their investigations—there was one thing that you said in your reading that I had a problem with, and it was the characterization of this as shocking. It's disappointing. It's upsetting. But it's not shocking. And the reason why these individuals who have been targeted are oftentimes younger is because the people who are sending these messages want to send a very clear message as early as possible so that folks understand where we are going and what this is.

And as we have this conversation, it's incredibly important that we realize that for those people who are expressing a little bit of hesitancy, a little bit of reticence, a little bit of unsurety around whether they are going to [00:38:00] continue to be in lockstep around our coalitions, this is why. Because this is a real fear, and as Jonathan talked about, this cannot be put in the same breath as wondering whether you'll be ostracized for people not knowing how you voted.

No, this is a safety issue that Black people in America are not going to be able to escape. And so it is a false equivalency for us to say at this point, we should all just come together and be able to move forward. 

CHRIS JANSING - HOST, MSNBC: Take a breath. 

CHARLES COLEMAN: Take a breath, right. Because this is something that is affecting us, our children, our families, our livelihoods, in ways that other people simply cannot understand.

CHRIS JANSING - HOST, MSNBC: And Patrice, the president of your organization, CEO at Derrick Johnson condemned these texts, but he also said something I think to Charles point, these actions are not normal. And we should refuse to let them be normalized. Talk about that and what can be done about it. I feel like every time I have [00:39:00] you on, every time I have somebody from the NAACP, every time I have Charles on, cause we talk a lot about civil rights cases, I'm asking this question: What do we do about it? And here we are again. 

PATRICIA WILLOUGHBY: Well, Chris, thank you for having me on. And this is a critical point that leadership and the tone is very important. Elections have consequences and the president-elect's campaign was built on hate and grievance, which has contributed to an environment of hate, racial hatred, and racial terror that the NAACP has seen since its inception in 1909. 

As Mr. Coleman has indicated, there is a great deal of empowerment and joy among young Black Americans. And these messages are meant to tamp that down. But their proliferation is the evidence that when you don't denounce [00:40:00] hatred and you actually promote it, there are consequences for fellow American citizens.

These text messages are disturbing, but they are only beginning. We saw this going back from the enactment of the 14th Amendment and the rise of Jim Crow and the rise of racial terror. This is simply the latest iteration of that strategy. 

CHRIS JANSING - HOST, MSNBC: Jonathan, one mother whose daughter received one of these texts told your paper, and it's related to Charles' point, she said, "I'm disappointed, but I'm not shocked". Is this a new world for Black Americans, or a continuation? I guess maybe the better question is, is this a continuation or an escalation of the world that Black Americans were already living in? And I should say by that I've also had other people of color reach out to me and say that they have also had the same kind of reaction given where we are right now in this moment 

JONATHAN CAPEHART - HOST, MSNBC: It [00:41:00] is a continuation. And I think a lot of the fear, especially as a result of these text messages is, is this the beginning of an escalation? I mean, there was a reason why people were in the streets four years ago after the murder of George Floyd, but George Floyd was not the first Black person killed by law enforcement, unarmed Black person killed by law enforcement. People had been marching in the streets for generations. What's concerning here is we don't seem to learn the lessons—by we, the American people—don't seem to learn the lessons of the past. And when we—meaning Black people—talk about our concerns, talk about, you know, fill in the blank person who has just been killed by law enforcement, just been killed by vigilante, set upon by White supremacists that suddenly, when we [00:42:00] ask for our leaders and ask for our government to take our lives seriously, suddenly it's you're catering to the far left, that you are not paying attention to other issues. When all we're asking you is to, can you pay attention to our dignity? Can you pay attention to our lives?

We are very much a part of the American fabric. And so when we say to you, we don't think it's right that law enforcement has done this to George Floyd, that you take what we're saying seriously, especially since we have been saying the same thing for generations. Ms. Freeman, who is the woman you showed at the beginning of this segment, that conversation she had to have with her child as a result of getting those text messages, that's the conversation that Black parents have been having with their children for generations. Unfortunately, because of text messaging and social media, [00:43:00] she wasn't able to have that conversation on her timetable. Painful timetable. She had to have that conversation because someone decided to weaponize her child's identity, 

CHRIS JANSING - HOST, MSNBC: And we know, as you said, that information is out there on all of us, but it's not hard to find out details of a person. Charles, is this a hate crime? 

CHARLES COLEMAN: It is unquestionably, and I think that one of the things—I don't use this word very often, Chris, but the notion of being terrified. As a civil rights attorney, I am terrified when I think about where we are right now, meaning that, this is November; by January, there will be a new Attorney General and there will be a new person heading the DOJ's Office of Civil Rights. Kristen Clark will no longer be there to do the amazing job that she's done. This investigation, wherever it goes, will likely end there. And then what happens? What happens to the people who are responsible for perpetrating these wrongs? What happens to the other people [00:44:00] who feel emboldened at that point? Because we can almost guarantee that under a Donald Trump DOJ, whomever he decides will be the AG, the level of attention that is paid to civil rights cases will not be what it was under this past administration. And that is what terrifies me. Because there will be no guardrail. There will be no stop. There will be no legal repercussions to even stop these actions as they have been identified as illegal and as hate crimes. And that's deeply problematic and something we have to stay keeping our eyes on. 

The Hard Truth About Why Harris Was the Wrong Choice for America - The New Abnormal - Air Date 11-6-24

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Yeah, the thing is, and there are a lot of people, particularly Black women on social media right now, that are saying, I'm done. I'm actually tired. I'm tired of being on the front lines of America's war with itself, America's reckoning with its racist and misogynistic foundation that they choose to ignore, and saying, where I am going to be is taking care of myself and my community and my family and leave the 50 percent of [00:45:00] white women who voted for Kamala Harris to do the work, leave the rest to do the work.

What do you say to that? Because I understand that the path ahead is going to be, I don't even actually -- I don't even think I've wrapped my mind around it. But what do you say to those that, particularly for black women that have been carrying the burden, I'm not doing it anymore? Because this is already going to be damn near impossible for me.

So you're on your own. 

JARED YATES SEXTON: I'm glad you brought it up this way. And the first thing that I would say is that I'm terribly sorry. I am terribly sorry, not just for the circumstances that have led us to this point, and have inundated the lives of vulnerable communities and populations that have been targeted and discriminated for forever.

But I also want to apologize for something else. In the past eight years, since Donald Trump became a political figure in the United States of America, what black women in other communities that we're discussing, what they have experienced are the aesthetics of support and [00:46:00] allyhood. They have seen on social media a lot of people who post a lot of things, who say a lot of things about what they care about and what their principles are. And a lot of that was delusional. And a lot of it was dishonest. And it wasn't backed up by anything that actually meant anything. 

And we're now seeing all of these DEI and diversity statements at universities and corporations that are going away. And this entire thing about quote unquote "wokeness", there are people who have woken up to the actual circumstances and those people are your allies. But we also need to understand that a lot of people saw a financial and political advantage to using those things as a costume, and using those things as a marketing opportunity. 

So the first thing I would say is I'm sorry. And the second thing that I would say is this: right now, people are tired, and part of the reason they are tired is because some of them have put their blood, sweat, tears, and livelihoods on the line, and they were betrayed. And they were not helped by people who purported to help them, or who purported to [00:47:00] be their allies. And I understand that exhaustion. 

The other part of this is a lot of people were misled by politicians. They were misled by online influencers. They were misled by a lot of people who told them, Hey, we're almost done with this thing. It's going to be totally fine. And I want people to imagine. -- and I hope this metaphor resonates -- I want people to think about being on a road that is many, many miles long, and you're being pursued by wolves as you're on that road. It is exhausting. You think that you only have another mile left to go after many, many miles, and then you suddenly realize that you have another 5, 6, 10 miles left to go. That disappointment and frustration and exhaustion is natural. 

And I would invite people to take the moment of rest that we currently have. We have a few months until this thing actually takes off. This is a time to fortify yourself, to catch your breath, to drink your water, metaphorically [00:48:00] and literally, to actually get yourself in a position where you are ready for the fight that is coming.

Some people aren't going to be able to do it. But guess what that means? You and I and the other people listening, we have to pick them up and help them. We have to do our part. And that's what actual solidarity is about. It's about going on a journey and understanding that sometimes you are going to carry others, and sometimes those people are going to carry you.

And the only way that we can actually make that happen is to build trust and intimacy and solidarity. And if there's anything that the United States of America is missing right now, and we are missing many things, it is trust, intimacy and solidarity. 

I understand why people feel like they're not going to get picked up. I understand why people feel alone. That is part of the abuse of authoritarianism, which is systematic abuse which is supposed to crush your spirit and kill it.

And by the way, that's what it's about. You're supposed to reach a point in which you have no [00:49:00] hope and you either put the armband on and you goosestep down Main Street, or you close your door and hope and pray it doesn't come to your door. I have bad news for everybody: It's coming for your door. And putting that armband on is not an option. 

So the whole point is we need to fortify ourselves. We need to find trust. And we need to find hope and solidarity and intimacy that has been missing. And that's the only way we're going to make it through this thing. 

Note from the Editor about the shifting landscape of social media

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Nina Turner on Democracy Now! discussing the very Americanness of the white supremacy endemic in the MAGA movement. The New Abnormal described historical and current threats of violence at the hands of white supremacy. Reveal discussed both the political targeting and scapegoating of Black men. The New Abnormal focused on Trump's Madison Square Garden Nazi rally. Carol Anderson on Democracy Now! described the election as a victory for the Confederacy. MSNBC discussed the racist text messages that were sent out to mostly young Black people in the immediate wake of the election. [00:50:00] And Jared Yates Sexton on The New Abnormal described our current state and the importance of supporting, and being supported by community. And those were just the top takes, there's a lot more in the deeper dive sections. But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestofleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Members also get chapter markers in the show, but depending on the app you use to listen, you may be able to use time codes that we put in the show notes to jump around the show, similar to chapter markers. So check that out if you like. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you. Shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of [00:51:00] hearing more information. 

Now, before we continue on to the deeper dives half of the show, speaking of the importance of depending on community, there is an interesting shift happening online as people are making moves between social networks in large numbers. This isn't the first time this has happened or threatens to happen. There were a lot of people who wanted to leave Twitter after Musk's acquisition. And of course some did, but the forces of network effects are strong. And so many people stayed put or, like us, many created accounts on new social networks, just in case, but then didn't end up actually engaging on them. Now, thanks to Musk's heavy hand in the election and close ties with Trump combined with all of the new policies turning X into an explicitly right-wing haven, this time feels different. And the exodus to alternate platforms is more substantial than before. As one headline put it, "'I'm going to Bluesky' is the new 'I'm [00:52:00] moving to Canada.'" 

So, regardless of where you go, you can follow us on Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads. Those are the big three right now. And if you have any sense, like you may want to be dabbling in more than one, I recommend the app Open Vibe, which consolidates posts from all three of those platforms and lets you cross post to all of them, creating a unified experience. 

As for a couple of tips specific to Bluesky, Bluesky is the big one that is, I think, enjoying the most benefit from people actively leaving Twitter right now. I've been using a tool called Sky Follower Bridge, which helps you track down accounts that have migrated from Twitter to Bluesky. So you use it to find all of the accounts that you followed or who followed you on Twitter, who have now migrated to Bluesky and lets you reconnect with them by following them on the new [00:53:00] platform. 

Finally, the last tip is from Bluesky, which has this next tip built right into their system, no extra apps or plugins necessary. In Bluesky, you can create starter packs of accounts that you want to promote. So naturally Best of the Left has a starter pack of progressive writers, activists, and organizations, so you can follow them all in just a couple of taps. That means you can also create your own starter pack. I would certainly hope that you would include Best of the Left in your starter pack, if you were to do that. And you should also encourage other individuals or activists or, you know, organizations, people with trust with existing networks to create their own starter packs, to help people get started on the new network. 

Obviously building a community from scratch is a daunting task and this is a major tool to help you do that much more quickly. So check the show notes for all of those links.

SECTION A - MIRROR FOR AMERICA

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to [00:54:00] dive deeper on four topics. Next up section a a mirror for America. Followed by section B white supremacy for the win. Section C reverberation and section D what now?

American Coup Wilmington 1898 Film Examines Massacre When Racists Overthrew Multiracial Gov't - Democracy Now! - Air Date 11-12-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: The trailer for American Coup: Wilmington 1898. We’re going to speak to the director, but first this clip lays out how Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina in 1898. Black people held many positions in government alongside white people.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: The removal of troops from the South ushered in the end of Reconstruction, and white supremacists are once again able to regain power.

LERAE SIKES UMFLEET: Democrats and Republicans of 1898 are not the Democrats and Republicans of the 21st century.

CAROL ANDERSON: Remember, what we had coming out of the Civil War was that Lincoln was a Republican, and the Republican Party was founded on an [00:55:00] anti-slavery platform.

LERAE SIKES UMFLEET: That meant that most African American voters were going to vote for the Republican candidates.

CAROL ANDERSON: The Democrats were the Klan members. The Democrats were the slaveowners, the enslavers. They were deeply committed to the denying citizenship rights to African Americans.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: The Democratic Party holds the state in the 1870s throughout the 1880s. It’s really not until the 1890s that you begin to see the Democrats again lose their power. There’s a depression that takes place in 1893. White farmers are suffering.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: These white farmers felt that the Democratic Party was beholden to the banks and the railroads and the moneyed interests.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: And they bolt from the Democrats and join the [00:56:00] Populists, which is a third party.

LERAE SIKES UMFLEET: Neither the Republican Party nor the Populist Party had the voting power to unseat Democratic Party candidates if they were running in a tripart election.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: So they form an alliance, white Populists and Black and white Republicans. This became known as fusion.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: We see a political alliance between African Americans and working-class white people.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: The Populists were as racist as any of the members of the Democratic Party, but their economic interests were so strong that they were able to set that aside.

CAROL ANDERSON: It’s not some kumbaya moment. We’ve got to be really clear about that. It was a pragmatic moment.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: So, both in 1894 and in 1896, this fusionist coalition of Black and white men are able to sweep the North Carolina General Assembly.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: North Carolina elects a [00:57:00] fusion governor, Daniel Russell. They send George White to Congress. And they start to pull back all the things that the Democrats did to reduce democracy. So, for example, the positions that were once appointed in Wilmington are now turned into elected positions, which allows Black people to run for office.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: It created, really, a situation in Wilmington that was unique. You had Black men in positions of authority and power.

CRYSTAL SANDERS: So we see Black and white men on the Board of Aldermen. We see Black and white men serving in various municipal offices.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: Ten of the 26 policemen were Black men, the city treasurer, the city jailer, the city coroner. John C. Dancy was the custom collector at the port, which is a federally appointed position. He made $4,000 a year, which was $1,000 more than the governor made.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY: The mayor of [00:58:00] Wilmington is also a fusion candidate. It’s not the majority of Black, it’s the majority fusion that makes the difference.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: So, with Wilmington by 1898, African Americans had still held on to a lot of the rights and privileges and the institutions and the power they had enjoyed.

CAROL ANDERSON: It was a land of possibility, a land of hope, a different vision of what American democracy could be, that it could actually be multiracial and work.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: That last voice, Carol Anderson, Emory professor. And this is another clip from American Coup: Wilmington 1898 that describes an editorial in Wilmington’s Black newspaper, The Daily Record, before the coup.

DAVID ZUCCHINO: Rebecca Felton, she was the wife of a congressman in Georgia. She gave a speech to the agricultural society condemning white men for, in her mind, not doing enough to stop the Black beast rapists and this supposed rape epidemic [00:59:00] in Georgia. There was no rape epidemic, but she created one. White supremacist newspapers in Wilmington realized they could make something of this, so they reprinted her speech in August of 1898. And as soon as Alex Manly saw that, he sat down and wrote an editorial in response to Mrs. Felton.

KIERAN HAILE: “Mrs. Felton from Georgia makes a speech before the agricultural society at Tybee, Georgia, in which she advocates lynching as an extreme measure.”

ALEX MANLY: [dramatized] Experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that women of that race are not more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men that are the white men with colored women. Meetings of this kind go on for some time until the woman’s infatuation or the man’s boldness bring attention to them, and the man is lynched for rape.

Every negro lynched is called a big burly black brute. When in fact, many of those who have thus been dealt with, have [01:00:00] had white men for their fathers, and were not only not black and burly, but were sufficiently attractive for the white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them.

KIERAN HAILE: “Tell your men that it is no worse for a Black man to be intimate with a white woman than for a white man to be intimate with a colored woman. Don’t think ever that your women will remain pure while you are debauching ours.” Alex Manly editorial, Daily Record, August 18th, 1898.

CAROL ANDERSON: This was blasphemous. You know, to say that a white woman could actually desire a Black man? What?

DAVID ZUCCHINO: The other point he made was that for generations, white men had been raping Black women with impunity, and that had been going on forever, and nobody talks about that.

CAROL ANDERSON: Alexander Manly’s rebuttal to Rebecca Felton was absolutely courageous. He didn’t say it behind closed doors while he’s talking with his friends. He did it in an [01:01:00] editorial published in The Daily Record that has white advertisers. I mean, so he’s really putting himself out there. You had some members of the Black community who were like, “Oh, Manly? Manly doesn’t speak for us.”

CRYSTAL SANDERS: There were many who perhaps, even if they believed it was true, thought that it was, you know, too inflammatory to be printed. We also see prominent Black men in Wilmington urge Manly to recant the editorial, to apologize, in an effort to avoid conflict. He refuses. He sees himself as someone who has done nothing wrong. He has spoken a truth that he believes has gone unspoken for too long.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: American Coup: Wilmington 1898 premieres tonight on PBS and will also stream online.

The Hard Truth About Why Harris Was the Wrong Choice for America Part 2 - The New Abnormal - Air Date 11-6-24

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: You're nicer than me. I think that it's absolute bullshit to blame this loss on the Harris Walz ticket. In a hundred days, they put together one of the most formidable [01:02:00] campaigns we have ever seen. This had nothing to do with her. This is the thing that gets me. about racism and misogyny is that it has you questioning like yourself.

This had nothing to do with perceived deficiency on the part of the Harris walls ticket. And I know that people will love particularly Democrats as they run and leap to move to the right. We'll love to have this conversation and do this autopsy about all of the ways in which she was wrong. The only ways in which she was wrong for America is that she is black and Asian and a woman.

That is how she was wrong. And that's the reality. Just the same way, like, I could look in a very conscious way and say, here are some of the things that Hillary Clinton in 2016 took for granted and did wrong. This campaign knew all of those things from 2016, took that, took also the things that they learned from 2020, and applied them.

What we have to understand [01:03:00] is that there were going to, there was never going to be a facts and figures case that was going to be presented to racists and to misogynists that were going to have them let go of their perceived power in the goal of trying to help other people. That was never going to be the case.

So while we could sit down and tell folks the ways in which Donald Trump is going to be bad for them as well, they do not care so long as he is going to be worse for people that they don't like. And that's the rea so there's no like, rationalizing with people that are inherently racist. And see their position and their power in this country being challenged by the perceived other.

Whether that other be black people, which it often is, and always is. Whether it be now too educated and too lippy of women and too free of women who don't know their place and will be put back in it. Like, so, whether it's [01:04:00] gay or trans people that, like, have the audacity to say, to want to live inside of their own skin and not operate on this false binary.

To me, the analysis is really a critique of America and how far we have yet to come and probably will ever come because we don't really want to have the hard conversations about embedded racism and misogyny. Which is what won this election, along with the help of American oligarchs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, who used their platforms to either suppress information, depress information, or spread misinformation.

NICHOLAS GROSSMAN: Yeah, absolutely. And look, I want to talk about another thing that I've seen a lot of people sort of hitting about Kamala Harris, and that they say that she should have distanced herself more from Joe Biden. Yeah, absolutely. And here's how I look at this. That's first of all, that's easier said than done because she [01:05:00] was his vice president.

Second of all, Joe Biden did a pretty damn good job. The problem is that because of misinformation and disinformation, people don't know that, I guess, or see that. The third problem is. Why do I feel like if she had tried to distance herself from Joe Biden, the response to that would have been, who does this uppity black woman think she is?

Like that was the first thing I thought of. Like the first thing that they will say is who is this ungrateful black woman that Joe Biden elevated and now she's out here. distancing herself from him, and I just find it hard to believe that we wouldn't have seen that from a lot of places. I sort of feel like she was, that was a real lose lose situation for her.

And look, one of the things that's been written about, that was something I really didn't pay much attention to, is the strong anti incumbency feeling all across the And if you look at, you know, in Europe and here and how many [01:06:00] incumbents were tossed out this year, and it really is staggering. I think it's almost every incumbent party was thrown out of office this year.

It feels like there was just this wave of anti incumbency. And look, for all intents and purposes, she was the perceived as the incumbent, even though she's not Joe Biden. So I get why the argument is she should have distanced herself from him. I'm not really clear where, though. Should she have distanced herself from record low unemployment?

Should she have distanced herself from record high stock market? I mean, look, people are going to bring up Israel and Palestine. I don't care what side of that you're on. I don't think that means anything. A hell of a lot to the majority of American voters. Anyway, that's how I feel about that, because that's one I've seen thrown around.

Everything I've seen mentioned, well, she should distance herself from him here. I'm like, really? But it almost always comes down to the economy. And I'm like, I don't know what to tell you about the economy. Like, by every, normal metric, the economy is in good shape. And [01:07:00] the economy is particularly in remarkably good shape, considering where we were four years ago, even though there are so many Americans who seem to think they were better off four years ago, because as someone tweeted, Americans, and I think this is true of humans in general, have no sense of object permanence.

And somehow, They remember a completely crashed economy under Donald Trump as being good. I don't know how you fight that. I honestly, I don't know how you fight people who simply believe things that aren't true and won't be moved from that belief when you show them how. actual real facts. I don't know how you fight that.

And that's the wave that Donald Trump rode. 

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Yeah, a hundred percent. Like I said, you can't argue facts and figures with people that have told themselves that Donald Trump is the second coming of Christ. Like you can't, you can't show facts and figures to people that believe that he is the Messiah. He is, you know, a, an [01:08:00] unusual tool that which, you know, to, to wield in order to exercise, like the policy.

that they have been foaming at the mouth for, for the last 50 and 60 years. So there, to me, there was no appeal that she was going to offer to these people that are formulated, have formulated their, their lives in a scarcity mindset that believes that there just is not enough for all of us. And some of us should have nothing right like should like are deserving of nothing and not even are deserving of nothing but on top of that are deserving of pain so like that there there's like there's no what what would the slogan have been to try and bring those people over you try to link arms with more thoughtful and conscientious Republicans who believe in democracy if not if agree on nothing else right And that didn't work.

Like, oh, you don't have to align yourself with this guy over here. Here are some people that share your same values, but they [01:09:00] also believe in the value of democracy. I believe that white America, they decided in this election that democracy no longer works for them. Because democracy means adding more people to a table that they say there is not enough.

That exists for them already. So don't pull up those chairs. This is all mine. And if the way that I keep it mine is through authoritarianism and autocracy, then that's what I'm gonna do. That's what they voted for. 

NICHOLAS GROSSMAN: Donald Trump got up there at a debate and said that they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats.

And the only possible response to that is No, they're not. And that was the response, but it didn't matter. And that's the truly sad thing. That's the truly frightening thing. It didn't matter that the Haitian immigrants who moved to Springfield, Ohio and took jobs in factories took jobs that were sitting vacant.

They didn't steal those jobs from white people. And they improved the [01:10:00] economy of Springfield, Ohio. Radically. And none of that matters. Because Donald Trump got up there and said, they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, and people were like, yeah, we got to get these people out of this country.

There's no way to fight that other than the way that was tried. Would you say that? Well, that, that's, that's just not true. He's lying. You know, he's making shit up to try to scare you. It didn't matter. That's what people believed when they walked into the voting booths on Tuesday. Uh, that's what they believe today, and apparently that's what they want for at least the next four years.

American Coup Wilmington 1898 Film Examines Massacre When Racists Overthrew Multiracial Gov't Part 2 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 11-12-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: We’re joined by the co-director, Yoruba Richen, award-winning filmmaker.

Yoruba, welcome back to Democracy Now!

YORUBA RICHEN: Thank you, Amy. Thanks for having me.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Yoruba, I wanted to start off by asking you — the Manly editorial became the basis for the first attack of the white supremacists, when they burned down his newspaper. Can you talk about — and [01:11:00] again, they were spurred on by the editor and publisher of the white-owned News & Observer. Talk about the role of that publisher, as well.

 Absolutely. So, the editorial that we just saw was used as the spark to, you know, go into action. But this coup had been planned meticulously in the months leading up to it. It was planned by a group called the Secret Nine, otherwise known as the Chamber — you know, very prominent members of the Chamber of Commerce. And they were self-styled, self-called white supremacists. And it was led by Josephus Daniels, who was the editor of The News & Observer in Raleigh. And the newspaper had published [01:12:00] continually this idea, this racist idea, of Black men raping white women and of bad government that Negroes were in charge of, and that if we continued — you know, if they continued to let this happen, white women would be debased and continue to be raped, an epidemic of rape.

And that’s what you saw, you know, the Rebecca Felton newspaper — her speech reprinted in the newspaper, and Manly responding and saying, “No, that’s not true,” and debunking that. And it was that editorial that was — that they said, you know, “Look what happens when Negroes are in rule. Look at the things that they can say. We’ve got to get rid of them. We’ve got to get rid of this newspaper.” And that was the spur for the attack. But it had been planned [01:13:00] many months before the actual events happened.

JUAN GONZALEZ - CO-HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: JUAN GONZÁLEZ: 

And in making the film, you not only went into the archival records, but you made a decision to locate and interview both white and Black descendants of families that were involved in the events at the time. Could you talk about that?

 

JUAN GONZALEZ - CO-HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Absolutely. My co-director and I, that was one of the first things that we knew we wanted to include in the film. We found out that a group of Black descendants and, really, one white descendant had been meeting for about a year before we started the production, through an organization called Coming to the Table, which is a national organization that deals — that brings Blacks and whites together dealing with racial issues. And they had been meeting. And we were able to meet them through that organization, attend those meetings and start to create a relationship [01:14:00] with some of the descendants who you see in the film. And then we did work to find more descendants, particularly more white descendants, because they were harder to locate or to invite to come and be a part of the film. And we’re very grateful for their participation.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And one of the white descendants was the descendant of the newspaper editor, right?

YORUBA RICHEN: Absolutely, yes.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And he and the other descendants took down his statue.

YORUBA RICHEN: Yes, yes. So, The News & Observer, up until the 1960s, was the paper that we saw in 1890s. And then there was a change. And the family recently took down the statue, I think in about 2020. And, you know, Frank was a part of it. He is in the film admitting to what his ancestor did and the harm that it produced not only to North Carolina but to the nation.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And what happened, actually? [01:15:00] What did all of this lead up to? How many people died?

YORUBA RICHEN: So, you know, we’ll never know the numbers, the exact numbers. They weren’t — you know, they weren’t taking it down. But it’s said that it was maybe 200 to 300, but it was probably more than that, you can imagine. Black people were run into — ran into the swamps. One of the — Alfred Waddell, one of the leaders, said, “We’ll choke Cape Fear with their bodies.”

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: We have 10 seconds.

YORUBA RICHEN: And then it returned to — and, sorry, then it became a majority-white city. And two years later, Jim Crow was instituted, and there was not another Black person elected from the state of North Carolina ’til 1992.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Wow. It is an amazing film, and I encourage people to watch it. It premieres tonight on PBS and also live-streamed. Yoruba Richen is co-director of American Coup: Wilmington 1898. That does it for our show. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. This is Democracy Now!

Is Trump Who We Really Are America’s True Face Revealed w Rohn Kenyatta - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 11-11-24

ROHN KENYATTA: Tom, I've kept my powder dry for this last almost week since Donald Trump's election, which is absolutely no surprise to me. But what I am astounded by is that, uh, it is. It is such a [01:16:00] surprise to other people on. I find that very just, uh, on an ominous reality. And if I might, I know that you don't, uh, cotton to pardon the phrase people reading.

On your program, the author of this piece, which is about to be published in a few moments called the man in the mirror. I'd like to, uh, if I could read a paragraph from it, uh, for it. Donald Trump won because he is a true reflection of what the United States is. He is a reflection in the spiritual and social mirror of the United States.

Republicans figuratively, if not literally, embrace and adore the grotesque, selfish, entitled, greedy, racist, obese, vile creature that they see in the mirror. While the Democrats would rather lie to themselves and say, that isn't me. [01:17:00] Ah, but it is the mirror mirror on the wall, as in Snow White, racist tropes will always be the trump card.

Pardon the ridiculous pun. In the United States, we saw it from the times of the Civil War. To, uh, super Predators and the Crime Bill to Willie Horton ads to, uh, black people from Haiti eating cats and dogs. And the media was complicit in this time when Donald Trump and during that debate with Kamala, uh, Kamala Harris, uh, you know, made.

That ridiculous statement. The media jumped on weeks instead of just saying he said something ridiculous because you see, immigration and the border was is, you know, repeatedly, he said that is his central issue. [01:18:00] And as long as that and until we understand that, and I know it's uncomfortable for people who probably many in any event, Um, have good hearts, you cannot get past it.

Racism is always going to be, especially anti blackism, the sexiest thing in U. S. politics. It has been repeated over and over and over again. What Donald Trump did was a tried and true strategy. Yep. And he won on it. And he didn't, you know, and I, you know, I went so far as to say right after within a week of Joe Biden's, uh, State of the Union address this year in March, within a week, He's called the State of the Union 2025.

And I'm not, you know, I'm not plugging myself. I'm simply saying that I'm not, I'm not understanding how [01:19:00] this is a surprise to anyone because I'm not that, you know, I said this to you before. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I'm in the dull ones and and And how no one could see this coming really is worrisome to me.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Well, when you look at the people who voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, and then voted for Donald Trump this time around, do you really think they just just suddenly became racists? 

ROHN KENYATTA: Oh, and I, and no, and I'm glad you said that because you know what, 

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: I mean, I, I agree with you that, that, you know, racism is, is more endemic, more deeply entrenched, more vicious than, and frankly, I ever imagined.

I, I, I'm totally with you on that, but, 

ROHN KENYATTA: well, I was actually going to quote you, uh, from a few weeks ago, maybe a month. You said that, you know, and, and you're a very well traveled. Very intelligent person, uh, and a historian to boot. Uh, you said that, [01:20:00] you know, uh, with your vast experience, the idea that the United States was as racist and white supremacist as it is, that's not a surprise to, to me.

Yeah. You see, I know. And when you talk about, when you talk, when you talk about Joe Biden, pardon me? 

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: I said, I know we've had this guy before. 

ROHN KENYATTA: Yeah. Yeah. And when you talk about Joe Biden, uh, and the people that voted for him in 2020, let me tell you something, uh, Donald Trump right now is telling people, um, that particularly he's saying that I won three times.

Okay. You know, he sees this election as a validation of Of, you know, uh, what he called the, the steal. 

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: No, I get that. But to my question, you've got enough people who voted for Joe Biden last time [01:21:00] to make him president who voted for Donald Trump this time to make him president. What happened with those people?

I don't, you know, do you, do you think it's race that they suddenly decided, Hey, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll be even more racist? I, you know, I, I think s like I said, I think there's more going on here, and I think that. The demonization of trans people had something to do with it. I think the, the, the quality of the campaign that Kamala Harris ran in some cases, you know, lacked, uh, she, she failed to embrace economic populism.

I was talking about all these tariffs that Joe Biden has put into place that she not, not only didn't mention, but ridiculed, um, you know, I, I, I think that there are other pieces to this, although I agree with you, the foundation of Donald Trump's candidacy. And that's been the GOP since Richard Nixon talked about the silent majority, which we all knew was code for white people.

And Ronald Reagan gave his first speech of his official campaign in Philadelphia, [01:22:00] Mississippi. 

SECTION B - WHITE SUPREMACY FOR THE WIN

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B. White supremacy for the win.

“The Confederacy Won” Why Donald Trump’s Reelection Is a Win for White Supremacy, Xenophobia & Hate Part 2 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 11-6-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: very quickly, Professor Goodwin, the historic ballot measures enshrining the right to an abortion passed in seven of the 10 states that they were introduced, passed in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Montana, Maryland, New York and Missouri, where voters backed a measure that will overturn one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation that prohibits abortion even in cases of rape and incest. The significance of that, and yet at the same time Kamala Harris loses?

MICHELE GOODWIN: Well, again, if we parse this out, what we can see is that white women overwhelmingly voted for the former president, but yet also voted for the constitutional protection or statewide protections of abortion rights in their state. So they were able to parse these issues out, even though Donald Trump has articulated wanting to criminally punish women and wanting to — [01:23:00] in the past appointed federal judges and justices on the lower courts, as well as the Supreme Court, in order to make it very difficult to access reproductive healthcare. Yet they could parse their vote. And it’s not just them. It’s men, too.

And I want to make one clarification, too. In Florida, it’s being articulated that women in Florida rejected the ballot initiative there. No, overwhelmingly, the majority of people in that state voted for that initiative, except it was required that there be at least 60%. And what we know is that it’s been over 57, 58% that voted for the initiative, so it failed by a small percentage. But it’s worth noting that that was a requirement that meant more than a majority had to vote in support of that initiative.

Separation Anxiety Part 2 - This Week In White Supremacy - Air Date 11-13-24

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: A hundred percent. A thousand percent agree. And you know, well, that comes to this, you know, we need trouble. You know what we need. What do we need? Clearly, we need another [01:24:00] Women's March, isn't that right?

I'm not about to crush 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: you out on this podcast. The Women's March organizers. I'm not trying to get fired. 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: The organizers are planning another big march. It says the Women's March event organizers say they're preparing a, quote, comeback tour. A 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: comeback tour? There's no fucking tour. This is not a celebration.

People are going to be dying. A comeback tour? Like, what are we, Justin Timberlake? You know what we need right now? A tour. Pussyhats and marches. A parade. No, this is why, after all of the other conversations, they pushed out the leaders of the actual Women's March. Yes. Samika! Carmen and Linda because they were radicalizing and training women about their rights, about policies, about the need to fight and organize a tour.

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: Yes, 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: a tour. 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: You're not going to take our joy says Rachel O'Leary. 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: I am tired of. Go back. [01:25:00] Why we wanna be I so bad, man. I'm tired of people making, when we talk about joy being radical, we're talking about using joy to fight for a future and, and, and build the community. We're not talking about just having like a party.

We're talking about finding joy and solidarity, finding joy in the fact that we haven't been broken, finding joy that there are people who are. still fighting for a better tomorrow, fighting joy, and the fact that we have tears that we can share with people who've gone through the same things and understand that there is a better day ahead.

When we're talking about joy being radical, we're talking about joy being something that drives us to organize, to fight back, not just to go march and have a parade and these. 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: Women. 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: You know, I don't, 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: I don't 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: support all women, right? I don't believe all women are right. Yes. And when we talk about a tour, what type of, no, what do you go?

Oh my God, there's going to be a tour on January 6th. Like what? No, there needs to be, there needs to be a riot, there needs to be a [01:26:00] protest. There needs to be a strike. When we're looking at what our, our, our mothers did, they took to the streets. Even if you want to talk about the, you know, the women wearing white, the suffragettes, they weren't just outside, but we're going to have a tour.

Y'all know they were organizing and there were some racist people, you know, out, but they were organized and mobilizing women to actually get up and do something. 

TREBLE NLS: Yeah. And this, I feel like this is like a, This is a call to action to people, right? It's like the same way that we on this podcast and like encourage you to question your politicians and question those in power.

We also would encourage you to question your organizers and the people that are putting these things together, question the, the intention behind what they're trying to organize question. How this will actually help towards your liberation and if it'll actually help towards your liberation, or if it's just smoke and mirrors and, and, and identity politics or just like, you know, parading.

This false [01:27:00] concept that doesn't really lead to any true liberation. 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: You mean like wearing a blue friendship bracelet to show that she didn't vote for the safe one. It says in response to presidential election results, some white women are crafting blue friendship bracelets on social media that signal that they did not vote for Donald Trump.

The movement seemingly began when a content creator posted a viral tick tock asking fellow white women. How are we signaling to each other which side we are on and the video racked up 4. 2 million views. I'm not mad at it, 

FAROOQ AL-SAID - DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. 1HOOD: but at the same time it's like very centralist. It's very look at me ish. No, it's not.

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: The problem is y'all gotta learn whisper campaigns. 

FAROOQ AL-SAID - DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. 1HOOD: The reason 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: why you've made this whole like normal thing happen and we know y'all lie. 

FAROOQ AL-SAID - DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. 1HOOD: That's a fact. 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: Right. We, we, we know that y'all do not tell the truth. Yes. The numbers do not lie. They don't lie. Right. Unless you know, they do. And it's like, oopsie, my bad.

But so you need to start like a whisper [01:28:00] campaign. Who did you vote for? Let me, did you screenshot your ballot? What proof do you have? Right. Then you get this little bracelet. And then next, why are people wearing these braces? You'll find out soon enough. Right. Have you seen, then you give it to your circle and you do it like that.

You got, you organically, uh, Move people, you can't put stuff on social media because that allows people to fake the funk. And I, we've seen before, like there are people, I guarantee you, there are people who have a immigrants are welcome here sign that voted for Trump. There are people who have a black lives matter sign that voted for Trump.

There are people who like all are welcome here who are calling ice right now to report people. And so again, when you try to do these. Symbols, these symbols are great. It's like, yes, do something, but it's also like, you got to learn to organize better. 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: Somebody said, this is one of the widest things I've ever seen.

And I'm white. 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: I mean, yeah, I do think that [01:29:00] the simplification of what white women's protest needs to be studied, but it's like this idea that at some point you're going to actually have to do something. 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: Right. And you could like, how about donating to 100 media? Like, why not like put your money where your mouth is or volunteer somewhere or, you know, do something like that.

Why don't you do that?

Some Americans Are Already Living in Trumps Purge Part 2 - The New Abnormal - Air Date 10-1-24

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Also, can we have the media. Stop saying like, Oh, it was a joke. Oh, it was a, he's not a fucking comedian.

Like he's not a comedian. So the only person that I give a shit is somebody that is actually paid to do fucking standup. That's not what this is. And it is a lie. And it is just a, an abdication of duty for journalists to turn around and not report on like, and all I'm saying is. Just report on what is being said.

This is what Donald Trump said. You don't want to add your fucking opinion into it. You don't want to, you know, provide any deeper analysis. Then just run the goddamn transcripts for the love of God. 

MATTHEW SELIGMAN: [01:30:00] There were so many of those. Just in this, uh, just, just over the weekend, you had Trump saying that Joe Biden became mentally impaired.

And then he followed up by saying, Kamala, although he mispronounced her name, cause he loves to do that. He said, Kamala was born that way. And I mean, again, like this is a Republican nominee. for the President of the United States saying this about the Democratic nominee. And I'm tired of being told that, like, Oh, that's Trump being Trump, like, like, like you said, Danielle, or, you know, that's just Trump.

He needs to be held accountable for shit like this. There were so many other things. He was talking in, I think it was in Pennsylvania, and he was talking about immigration. And then there was a fly. He saw a fly. And he was like, Oh, I wonder where that came from. Two years ago, that fly wouldn't have been here.

And he was talking about an influx of immigrants. And he was basically saying, look at these dirty immigrants. They bring, you know, flies and disease, et cetera. This shit is not funny. This shit is not acceptable. It is stuff that [01:31:00] has to be. It is stuff that has to be denounced. And yeah, I get it for the media and for people who cover politics.

It's like, it's a full time job to do that. Well, that's the job you chose. 

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: Right? It's a full time job. I'm like, ain't that your job? 

MATTHEW SELIGMAN: I mean, because that's, that's where we are now. That is the political situation. I don't want to read about Harris is up one in Wisconsin or Harris is down three in Wisconsin.

Reporting that is not journalism. You know, reporting what the candidates are saying is journalism, and this is the kind of stuff, I mean, those are only a few of the examples of the nutty things he said over the weekend. 

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: That comparison of human beings, human beings to flies, when Donald Trump then said a couple of months ago, That they were vermin?

Yeah. This is the language of a dictator and a fascist and that is why you just had recently a group of hooded mass fucking cowards show up in Springfield, Ohio with [01:32:00] a banner that said that Haitians are not welcome here. Meanwhile, there was a very brave woman. Who was driving in her car, stopped her car to scream out her window and say, you are not from Springfield.

Like, we love all people here. The Haitian population is welcome here. Like, take your hate and go someplace else. And it was a non Black woman who was doing that. And I was just like, that's what we need to see more of. More people who live in these areas, who are from these towns. That J. D. Vance and Donald Trump are lying about, are creating hysteria around, are turning into dangerous places because of the escalation of bomb threats and school closures and buildings closing down.

That the real people who are being impacted of all races need to link arms and say, Not in our [01:33:00] town. Like, not, like, stop using our town's name for your political points and your, like, hate mongering because that is the only time that people are actually going to see that they're full of shit. And not only are they full of shit, but that they're dangerous.

MATTHEW SELIGMAN: Yeah, I don't know if you saw, uh, there's the, uh, I guess he's a factory owner or businessman in, in Springfield. And he spoke out in an interview, he said, of the Haitian immigrants who he employs, he said, they come to work every day. They don't cause drama. They're on time. I wish I had 30 more. Take a guess as to the responses he got.

Here is as reported by the New York Times, because this is actually a case of the New York Times doing journalism. People were leaving messages on his company voicemail. The owner of McGregor Metal, that's Jamie McGregor, the guy who said this, the owner of McGregor Metal can take a bullet to the skull and that would be 100 percent justified.

Another one said, why are you importing third world savages who eat animals and giving them jobs over United States citizens? Uh, another one said stack [01:34:00] all 20, 000 Haitians inside Jamie McGregor's factory at once and forced him to praise the benefits of foreign labor while being crushed to death by black bodies themselves being crushed to death.

Uh, and he is sitting there and he's basically saying, I have to buy a gun now for my home. His exact quote was, I have struggled with the fact that now we're going to have to have firearms in our house. Like what the hell? And he said, they're now taking classes. They're going to shooting ranges. This is unbelievable.

Because he said that, hey, these people that he has hired have been great employees. So this violence and, and, and, and so this traces back all the way, you know, we can, we can go back to the quote unquote purge comments to, like you said, the constant description of immigrants as vermin, as animals, saying that they're bringing flies and bringing disease with them.

That's where all of this leads. And And Donald Trump knows this, and JD Vance knows this, and this is what they want. 

WTH Trump Wants REPARATIONS for WHITE PEOPLE Who Were 'VICTIMS' OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION - Roland S. Martin - Air Date 11-13-24

ROLAND S. MARTIN - HOST, ROLAND S. MARTIN: Donald Trump is saying, white people, [01:35:00] I'm coming to you with reparations. 

CLIFF ALBRIGHT: This country was founded on identity politics. There's never been an era that hasn't been defined by identity politics, by white identity politics, by white male identity. It was literally identity politics is literally enshrined in the constitution.

Y'all said only white men, property owners could vote. That's the original identity politics, and every decade since then has been defined by that identity politics. 

ROLAND S. MARTIN - HOST, ROLAND S. MARTIN: And fact clip, here is Donald Trump touting identity politics today! 

DONALD TRUMP: And getting their money's worth. Furthermore, I will direct the Department of Justice to pursue federal civil rights cases.

Again, schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination and schools that persist in explicit unlawful discrimination [01:36:00] under the guise of equity will not only have their endowments taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them find up to the entire amount of their endowment.

A portion of the C's funds will then be used as restitution for victims of these illegal And unjust policies. Policies that hurt our country so badly. Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hard working taxpayers. And now, we are going to get this anti American insanity out of our institutions once and for all.

We are going to have real education in America. So, Donald Trump is saying, 

ROLAND S. MARTIN - HOST, ROLAND S. MARTIN: White people, I'm coming to you with reparations. For more UN videos visit www. un. org 

CLIFF ALBRIGHT: Exactly. And, and that was written into everything that he just said is a part of project 2025. Yep. You know, the project 2025 that he said he didn't know anything about, [01:37:00] but before the, the, the, or before the votes are even counted in this election, he's already rolling out the project 2025 policies and his, his transferring or, or transforming.

The department of justice and office of civil rights from something that investigates and deals with anti black racism, he is now redefining it as dealing with anti white racism, anti white discrimination, which doesn't exist. But that's the identity politics. And that's from Jim Crow through the Southern strategy, right?

Which was identity politics defined to Ronald Reagan, to Pat Cannon all the way through through this person. That's all they do is identity politics. In fact, even the economic anxiety argument, even the economic anxiety argument is really another form of identity politics, because when they talk about the working class and economic anxiety, they're only talking about the white working class.

But as if black folks [01:38:00] ain't working class, that's identity. It's all this country knows. 

Separation Anxiety - This Week In White Supremacy - Air Date 11-13-24

DONALD TRUMP: If we don't have free speech, then we just don't have a free country. It's as simple as that. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple, just like dominoes, one by one, they'll go down.

That's why today I'm announcing my plan to shatter the left wing censorship regime and to reclaim the right to free speech for all Americans. And reclaim is a very important word in this case because they've taken it away. In recent weeks, bombshell reports have confirmed that a sinister group of deep state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, Left wing activists and depraved corporate news media have been conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people.

Maybe they have collaborated to suppress vital information on [01:39:00] everything from elections to public health. You can, you can pause the censorship. 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: Um, It's very interesting when people talk about free speech, because it's like what free speech we're talking about, because like you censor a lot of stuff when it's stuff about trans people, stuff about black people, stuff about Palestinian people, stuff about immigrants, that gets censored everywhere.

But if you want to tell people to drink horse medicine to save a virus, that gets pushed out. So I'm very confused about what we're talking about here. Well, 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: I think that's the question because he was on record as saying like, CBS should get their, their license revoked because they fact check them, right?

I think ABC, he was calling that they're the worst network. So he has been saying these things about other net, like threatening them. And so again, like does free speech mean Like we have the ability to say whatever we want to say, because remember, even Elon Musk, who was supposed to be like, I'm a free speech, whatever absolutist, whatever word that he called.

But then when he bought X or Twitter, the first he started [01:40:00] to take out or kick off accounts, including the one that followed his private jet all around the country. Right. And so again, like free speech, but whose speech is considered free. What I hear you saying is. White speech, right? Any speech that bigs you up or that is white supremacist speech.

That's cool. But like you said, miracle, any speech that threatens that white supremacist structure probably is going to be in some way defunded or shut down. Is this something that we as producers of media should be concerned with? 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: I mean, what's a little, what's a little shut down, state violence, statesmanship to be worried about?

But I will tell you, like, when you have, we're having these questions. Conversations and your immediate thought is like, well, what have the Democrats said they're going to do to protect free speech? And when you don't have an answer that shows you the state of survival that we [01:41:00] really need to be in. And I do think that people are now trying to create their own media, thinking about the Tik TOK ban and how our government tried to under a democratic government.

Ban tick talk and ban our access to information. And so now is really the time to think about the ways in which we're able to connect, how we're able to put out media. We're going to have to start doing like projectors, you know, talking to our elders and figuring out like, what do they do with the radio, going back to radio stations, all these different things.

But I do think there is some cause for concern. You know, even today with, you know, 9495 possibly being passed, I do think that we're going to have to start to organize and mobilize a lot more, but You know, who knows? Because it seems like he has a hit list and we may not be on his hit list. He may, you know, review our episodes and be like the MAGA Muslims like me and he may, he may let us go.

We may be, I mean, 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: you did, you were his [01:42:00] lawyer in New York City. I mean, he'd be like, 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: I don't hate free speech. I support, you know, this week of white supremacy. Like I let them go, who knows? But I do think the way that we have, um, Come to know the world is going to radically change because people decided not to fight for the world that we have.

I did just want to 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: say before I come to you trouble that you mentioned house bill nine four nine five, which is the stop terror finance and tax penalties on American hostages act. And basically what this bill, if this bill passes, it would give the United States the ability to just terminate any like taxes in the tax exempt status of any quote unquote terror supporting group.

So by, so if this passes, somebody could say, Oh, you know, one hood, we saw y'all show up at this rally. and supported Palestinians. Therefore we're taking away your nonprofit status, [01:43:00] right? No video up at a rally. I'm just saying it could, this could be, this could be something that could happen, right? We saw it could be right.

We saw you at this rally supporting against police. We saw y'all organized against the police in Pittsburgh. Therefore, we feel like you're supporting terror. Y'all got Muslim names, you know, y'all wearing all types of Palestinian stuff on the show. Y'all got Palestinian nails. 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: I wonder who he's talking to.

I wonder who he's talking to. Palestinian nails is crazy. I wonder who he is talking to and who he's talking about. And luckily, you know, as an individual, I express and I fight for people who are oppressed and oppressed. Come on, come on, I try to use your fashion 

FAROOQ AL-SAID - DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. 1HOOD: as a faction in my activism. Let's go. No, 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: I'm just, I'm not, I'm not 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: coming 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: at you.

You didn't see any one hood stuff when I was out here fighting for freedom. We do have a red, black and green one. That's RBG. 

FAROOQ AL-SAID - DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. 1HOOD: Again, again, revolutionary. Right. But that's all this is in the platform. So 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: [01:44:00] let it out. And any other, any other things of note that I've done that you forgot to mention? I'm not saying 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: it's you.

I'm saying us, us collectively miracles. I told you what my price was talking about you have a contract, you can't leave. 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: Wow. 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: So anyway, that's what the bill means. And if this bill passes organizations like ours, organizations that do this type of work that strive to be also a radical in many ways, that radicalism, remember it was like, remember under Trump, it was the, what was it?

The black. Black identity extremist, black identity extremist, right? That could mean our tax exempt status can be taken away under Trump, particularly if you're a dictator on day one. That could happen just right 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: on day one, all across the board. Just want to say it doesn't have to be radical organizations.

They could just basically say any organization that talks about birth control, any organization that talks about abortion, any organization that talks about interracial marriage. Like I think a lot of times we think when we hear terrorism, we think of violence or [01:45:00] Muslims or, or Islam, but we got to remember that what they have been talking about is a, a false narrative.

Fight for men's rights. And it's talking about women and feminists have been terrorists. So we are not even thinking about all these other nonprofits. 

SECTION C - REVERBERATION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Up next section C reverberation.

Why You Shouldnt Buy the Election Narrative About Black Men Part 2 - Reveal - Air Date 10-23-24

BARRACK OBAMA: You're coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses. I'm speaking to men directly. Part of it makes me think that, well, You just aren't feeling the idea of having a woman as president.

GARRISON HAYES: Wrong approach, wrong tone, wrong message. This is the reality. The 

NEWS CLIP: party has to stop scapegoating black men. Black men are not the problem. And then 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: In this election cycle, the spotlight has turned on black men. And it's complicated. To talk about it, I invited my colleague and good buddy, the great Garrison Hayes.

Garrison, how you doing, man? 

GARRISON HAYES: I'm always doing well when I get to hang out with you and, and I, you know, I'm just hoping not to get into any trouble today. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Well, as a great John Lewis would say, we can get into some good trouble. [01:46:00] So let's do it. So you just reported an episode of reveal called red, black, and blue, which is all about black Republicans.

GARRISON HAYES: I spent the better part of the last year reporting on Black political power. You know, even the title itself, Red, Black and Blue, is all about putting Black people at the center of our kind of political discourse this election cycle. And I learned a lot throughout the process. I focused primarily on conservatives, Black conservatives, because I thought that they might represent some of the dynamism.

Which feels like perfect for this political moment, but I had a lot of conversations with a lot of folks all across the political spectrum in the black community. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Listeners, if you haven't heard it, go back and listen to his reporting. It's excellent. And today we're going to hash out what's happening on the Democratic side.

for your time, Farron. Now, there are some recent polls suggesting that fewer Black men might support Harris than came out for President Joe Biden in 2020, and that 20 percent of Black men might vote for Trump. And with those [01:47:00] numbers, there came a lot of hand wringing and finger wagging from Barack Obama and others about whether or not Black men are going to turn out and vote for Kamala Harris.

GARRISON HAYES: I do think there is something Uniquely frustrating about a conversation that skulls or looks down on, um, the second most reliable group of people for this party. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: And the first constituency being black women who resoundingly vote Democratic. 

GARRISON HAYES: I mean, we looked at the gubernatorial race in Georgia. We look at Hillary Clinton back in 2016, um, black men showed up for that woman candidate.

And so I guess. There's a little bit of frustration at the same time. It's created a national discourse It's created at the very least a conversation in the community that's showing up today on this show 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: So Garrison and I wanted to kind of bring our group chats to you So we got some of our friends to weigh in on this.

This is my buddy a day 

FRIEND OF SHOW: This [01:48:00] idea that black men are leaving the democratic party to vote for Donald Trump, uh, this election cycle in large numbers is absurd. I mean, it's, it's absurd. It's propaganda is propaganda that's being pushed by both Democrats and Republicans. And I think that Democrats are pushing it so that they can use black men as a scapegoat, uh, in case Ms.

Harris doesn't win the election. I do think that black people in general. Are having issues with the Democratic Party and how they deal with the black community, but also, uh, how they treat the people that have supported them since the late sixties. So I do think that this is a time of reckoning for the Democratic Party and its black supporters.

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Garrison, what resonated with you about what Adaye had to say? 

GARRISON HAYES: I do think that a point was made about scapegoating. I mean, you know, we know the racial history of this country. We know that the history of this country is one that [01:49:00] often looks to place blame on Black people, and they do that to Black women and to Black men in different ways.

But one of the ways that we've seen every single election cycle is that there's always this conversation about, Whether or not black men will, you know, show up and quote unquote, do the right thing and vote along with black women and in every single election cycle, black men do to some, to some degree, sometimes it's at basically 90%.

Sometimes it's closer to 80%, but they do every single time. And yet the very next cycle, we're having a conversation again. Um, and I do think we, we need to kind of interrogate that a bit as, as kind of like media professionals, as the, the quote unquote media, we, we need to ask, why do we continue to do that?

Um, and what is the utility? Um, but I think that politicians also need to ask, why is it that some black men don't feel represented by their, Parties. I think that answer comes a little easier for black folks when looking at conservatives or republicans There's the [01:50:00] anti dei anti woke anti crt stuff just blatant racist and the literal blatant racism You know what?

I mean? Like that's definitely kind of a turnoff to black folks. I just had to burp. I don't know why But it's a headline. It's just kind of a turnoff. It's a headline. Read extra, extra, read all about it. Black people don't like racism. Right? I mean, like, I, I don't know. So I I, I'm, I'm with you on it. I, I would say, I, I, I wish the listeners could see me right now.

'cause as you were saying that, like, I'm, I'm doing my hand like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Exactly, exactly. 

Separation Anxiety Part 3 - This Week In White Supremacy - Air Date 11-13-24

DONALD TRUMP: Every gang street crew and drug network in America, every single one of them will be dismantled. We already know where these turf wars and drug dens are. We know who the people are. I'm going to charge them and charge the culprits with every crime that we can find. We're going to be fair, but we're going to be tough.

We also need the death penalty for drug dealers. So important. Consequences. 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: So somebody tell Waka Flocka that right now, [01:51:00] but this is very much in the Philippines that happened in the Philippines and they just used it to kill young men and this is what this is going to do. So now is also the time if you know, people who are straight pharmacists to try to reroute them into, you know, different, different avenues.

But I also want to point out that white supremacist biker gangs, you know, Are the ones out here flooding the streets with this poison and y'all think it's just like urban gangbangers. 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: But are those, are those gangs going to be the ones targeted? No. And that's the unfortunate reality is it's like we're moving from mass incarceration to like mass execution.

Because we know when a white men say gangs, and we're talking about dismantling gangs, that these white people think crips bloods, they think like MS 13, they think like the Mexican mafia. They're not thinking about the white biker gangs, right? They're not [01:52:00] thinking about those angels and these type of, these type of gangs, right?

Or sons of anarchy, right? They're not thinking about that. They're thinking about, yo, we voted for this man because he told us he was going to You know, this is about punishing black and brown people. To me, ultimately, this is about you seeing a country that. Black and brown people like having babies and birth rates rising.

White people's birth rate are not remaining stagnant or going down. And you want somebody that's going to get all of these people either out of the country by mass deportation or literally execute black people. And again, now that the police understand that they have this power, right? We want to dismantle these gangs up until the death penalty.

We want And, and, and they have a president in place that saying police immunity, what do we think the out, the outcome is going to be apparent according to what we've heard recently of Michigan state police shot and killed a young man recently. So [01:53:00] are we going to see more of this? 

FAROOQ AL-SAID - DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. 1HOOD: You know what's interesting?

Like the, the irony of all of this is sickening because we're acting like Trump didn't have 34 felonies, right? We don't, we acting like his entire cabinet in his last administration was all people he built out of jail and got pardons and like, they wasn't out here breaking the law. Yeah. Like they was like, we act like he 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: like runs a criminal gang.

He has like 

FAROOQ AL-SAID - DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. 1HOOD: this motherfucker. Wasn't impeached twice. Yes. You know what I mean? Like he wasn't on the suspicion of. Trading sensitive information with other countries like he wasn't looking at you know Flushing down nuclear launch codes all that Mar a Lago under the toilets and all that. Yes Like what are we really talking about here?

Yeah, I mean like oh It's, it's, it's scary hours right now in the States, man. Like it's really spooky out here. It 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: is, it is really, it's like we have to brace, right. And particularly like if you're black and brown, because you know, Trump also is [01:54:00] naming, you know, Stephen Miller. Who we know is like, really like, you know, one, like, I think, how old is Stephen Miller?

He's like 35, but it looks like 

FAROOQ AL-SAID - DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. 1HOOD: man. So how, when you were a bigot, man, you aged like milk. Yeah, he looks, 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: he looks, but anyway, Stephen Miller is somebody who is, was the architect of Trump's family separation plan, right. Where he was separating families. And then Trump named a new border czar. 

FAROOQ AL-SAID - DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. 1HOOD: Crazy. 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: And this borders are is on record.

What's this man's name? Oh, Tom Hammond is his name. He did prior to being elected borders are or named borders are by Trump. He did an interview on 60 minutes. We'll play a clip of that interview. 

FAROOQ AL-SAID - DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. 1HOOD: This is, yes, this is foul talk, man. If it'll queue up, there we go. 

CLIP: We have seen one estimate that says it would cost 88 [01:55:00] billion to deport a million people a year.

DONALD TRUMP: I don't know if that's accurate or not. 

CLIP: Is that what American taxpayers should expect? 

DONALD TRUMP: What price do you put on national security? Is that worth it? 

CLIP: Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families? 

DONALD TRUMP: Of course there is. Families can be deported together. For 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: That's such a crazy scene.

One estimate. 

FAROOQ AL-SAID - DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. 1HOOD: He talking heavy families can be supported together. So can I, can I say what I had said yesterday on social media? So what did you say? So what I had said yesterday was the overwhelming majority of the 55 percent of the other races that voted for Trump. Yes. Right. And the Latin for Trump movement being so powerful.

Yes. No one was surprised about Their resurgence in this election, right? I think that for me, what was interesting was the 55 percent of [01:56:00] other races. Like Arabs, Asians, everybody else. Yes. But the question I have is what do you lot plan to do when your chickens come home to roost? What are you going to do with those eggs?

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: I mean, they're going to have to go back to their country 

FAROOQ AL-SAID - DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. 1HOOD: with them. Eggs. I mean, what can they do? Like, yeah. You know, so it's like, you know, you're voting, you clearly were suckered into voting against your self interest and now the immigration is probably going to be the forefront and the number one thing that they, this administration starts to enforce when they resume power in January.

So you. Absolutely have family members that are undocumented a thousand percent have siblings. You have people that are close to you that are absolutely undocumented. So you voted for what to, to eliminate them. Like there's 

JASIRI X - CO-FOUNDER, 1HOOD: a clip I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm putting this clip and it really, this clip kind of sums up the mentality.

Mind you, this is a Latino man. That has a Trump hat on. They 

CLIP: let in hundreds or thousands of people who already have criminal records. If [01:57:00] deporting them creates a mass deportation, I'm all for it. But what if rounded up in all of that are people who work on a farm? If they're doing the jobs that Americans don't want to do, does that worry you?

That wouldn't be fair. Of course, you know, they need to make sure that they don't throw away, they don't kick out. They're on the poor people that are, that are family oriented, right? So it's this idea of like, Oh, I'm a good, I'm one of the good ones. But 

FAROOQ AL-SAID - DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. 1HOOD: you were, you, you bought into that dream. Like the thing is, it's like.

It doesn't stop or start with you. You're part of the collateral damage. Like, you're not exclusionary in this. Like, there's no, there's no exemption for you. It's the fact that you voted for an America that does not include you. Right. In any shape or form, you are not included in this election. Doctrine.

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: But again, like, and it's funny and they told you, don't vote though. Immigrants who are undocumented can't vote. Right. Right. So when we're talking about what this is, what you voted for, people who are going to be deported did not vote for this. [01:58:00] Correct. And I think that's very important. Number one, number two.

I know twinning 

FAROOQ AL-SAID - DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS. 1HOOD: besties, 

MIRACLE JONES - DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND POLICY: you know, it's the toxicity that just like, but I think that's very important. Right. But also when we're talking about why these, whatever for Trump's existed, we've said before the elasticity of white supremacy brings people in and it kicks people out and it makes people think that they're special.

Like they're the chosen ones. They're going to be protected. And that man said, no, you, your family. Yes. And the citizen that you are connected to can all get the F on it. Your anchor baby, all you niggas can go. And so I think that is something that we have to think about. But also for me, my question is, does that mean the sanctions end?

Does that mean Cuba can finally be free? Does that mean Venezuela can finally be free? Oh, probably not. Talk about this, these mass deportations. What are we now going to do when that's going to cause social unrest [01:59:00] in other countries where their anger is going to be targeted at the U S 

Racist texts sent to Black Americans appears to be 'phishing scam' Louisiana AG - MSNBC - Air Date 11-8-24

CHRIS JANSING - HOST, MSNBC: We are just getting some new findings in the investigation into where a deluge of racist text messages are coming from the recipients as young as middle school. Those messages largely target black Americans and warn them to prepare for a return to slavery. The FBI and law enforcement in at least two dozen states, including Louisiana are investigating right now.

I'm joined by Louisiana's attorney general, Liz Murrell, among those. into this. So I underst some preliminary findings What can you tell 

LOUISIANA AG LIZ MURRILL: us? Wel that these text messages

Virtual private network server that's that's located in Poland. So, you know, that that doesn't tell us where the person is, or the group, or the organization is that's actually pushing them out. [02:00:00] It could be from the basement of a small town in Louisiana, or it could be coming from Bangladesh. We don't we don't know that yet.

CHRIS JANSING - HOST, MSNBC: So tell me about what you folks are doing and what kind of cooperation, as I said, there are at least two dozen different states. Now, I think initially they were saying maybe these were received in 10 states. Now it's up to 24 25. Who are you talking to? Who are your investigators cooperating with? 

LOUISIANA AG LIZ MURRILL: Well, of course, we are, um, talking to the FBI.

Um, it is a national problem, not just a state problem. That's that's limited limited to Louisiana. I can tell you it's not just text messages. I received 1 of these directly to my personal email just this morning. So they are going out fairly broadly. Um, it is very much. It looks a lot like a phishing scam, and there is what appears to be a hyperlink in it.

So we really want to caution people not to click on it, uh, delete it. [02:01:00] Um, you can report it to your local to your attorney general. If, um, if you're in another state or to us in our state, and you can report it to the FBI, but we are all trying to get to the heart of it and figure out where they're coming from.

But it behaves like a phishing scam. It can. It can get into your network and perpetuate itself through your 

CHRIS JANSING - HOST, MSNBC: network. And it also has had a real impact on people, um, the emotion that comes from getting something like this, the fear that it engenders. Um, I wonder if you had an opportunity to talk to anyone else, particularly, um, black Americans, black Louisianans, and what impact you're seeing or hearing about.

LOUISIANA AG LIZ MURRILL: You know, I haven't had that conversation with, I think that, you know, I received one of them. They're vile, they're racist, um, they are certainly not from any official source and, and, and I think every official that has seen them or heard about this has condemned [02:02:00] them. Um, so, you know, our, our main message right now is not to be victimized because we don't know whether, uh, Uh, that's a it is some kind of phishing scam there.

It does appear to be a hyperlink in it. So we don't want people to click on it. Um, and we would just urge people to, um, to delete them. You know, they are intended to be offensive. Uh, they are intended to be divisive and we need to, um, reject all of that. 

CHRIS JANSING - HOST, MSNBC: What went through your mind when you saw that you got an email like this?

LOUISIANA AG LIZ MURRILL: Uh, you know, I was surprised that it was in my email box. I mean, I don't think that Any of us know exactly how they access these locations. Some people get them through their telephones, which it feels very personal when that happens. You know, I think that, um, when you see something that lands in your text message box, you're used to texting back and forth with people that you know, um, or that you have some familiarity with, and then this comes through.

And so you wonder, you know, how did [02:03:00] they get my phone number? Um, and, and I think you feel the way when it comes into your personal email box like it did for me. Um, but I think there are a lot of ways that they can access this particular kind of information. Um, they can, uh, they can also piggyback on other people's networks and an email list.

The text messaging specifically, in our opinion, is coming through an email server. So it is really an email. It's just coming through your phone and your text messages, but it's coming through an email server. Then that's, um, so it's also coming through people's email boxes, but. It's offensive. 

CHRIS JANSING - HOST, MSNBC: Yeah. I was just going to say we have literally just 30 seconds left, but, um, you know, how, um, sophisticated some of these folks can be.

Uh, they route through, as you, you point out, they can route through servers all over the world. What is your level of belief that, uh, someone, whether it's the FBI or anyone else investigating, we'll get to the bottom of this. [02:04:00] 

LOUISIANA AG LIZ MURRILL: You know, it's hard to say. Um, we are going to try and continue to investigate and figure out where they're originating from.

Uh, we have been very successful and chasing a lot of criminal activity that occurs in the dark web. And so I actually have a fairly high degree of confidence that we will eventually find out where these are coming from. Um, but it's, it's, you know, like a lot of scams, you're right. They can be routed through a lot of different pathways.

Um, this 1 is mainly appears to be intended to, uh, offend people. And, uh, at this point, we aren't sure whether it has more nefarious effects, but that's why we're saying don't click on it. 

SECTION D - WHAT NOW

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally section D what now? 

The Hard Truth About Why Harris Was the Wrong Choice for America Part 3 - The New Abnormal - Air Date 11-6-24

JARED YATES SEXTON: well, I mean, to get him at midterms would mean having a workable strategy and it has now been proven that there was never a strategy to begin with and we now have to cobble together an actual strategy.

And I want to be very intentional as I answered this [02:05:00] because we have entered into a new era. And, you know, I, I've been warning about this for years, and one of the things is the time to stop this has passed. The time to actually make sure that some of the worst case scenarios come to pass, that's gone.

And we had that opportunity, uh, back in 2016. If you think about the idea of you're living in a gated city and there is an army coming towards you, the time to lock the doors in order to ward them off is before they get there. They're now in the city. And as we look at this, we have to wrap our heads around a couple of crucial facts.

And to be frank, and this is some hard love, there are a lot of people who are going to have to grow up very quickly. They need to get away from some very, very delusional self serving fantasies that have been motivating them for years, that this was all fun, that everything was going to be fine, that they could meme their way out of it, that they could, you know, simply engage in a lot [02:06:00] of these soothing behaviors.

Bye. The truth is this. We are now engaged in an all out war, and that war has been coming towards us for a while and the time to ward it off is gone. This is now going to be the work of our lives. Even if there are elections in four years, even if we are able to elect a Democrat or at least keep a Republican from getting elected, this is going to be the fight that defines the rest of our lives.

That's the truth of this thing. If you can think about it in terms of a disease, you can either detect the disease early and mitigate the consequences of it or you can detect the disease later when it has metastasized and you have to take care of the radical consequences of that. So what we're actually talking about right now With Project 2025, with Elon Musk having control, unchecked power over the budget, I'm already thinking about what they're going to do.

What we're actually [02:07:00] talking about, Danielle, is we are talking about the culmination of a strategy that has been playing out for decades. The Republican Party, on behalf of their billionaire donors, have been working to destroy the progress of the 20th century, to get rid of all the social safety nets, the regulatory power of the federal government, everything that was put in place to actually serve citizens.

They've been going after that, education, science, reality itself. Now, all of a sudden, we are a couple of minutes from midnight on that. They have the apparatus in place that can actually deal a final blow to it. should have been answered with the 2024 election. And quite frankly, it should have been answered with the Joe Biden administration.

It should have been answered with the 2016 election. And to be frank, it should have been answered before the 2016 election. We now find ourselves in the reality of the moment, which is we are in the middle of a battle that is going to last the rest of our lives, and it's [02:08:00] going to define our lives. And quite frankly, for anyone listening to this who has children or grandchildren, it's going to define the lives of their children and their grandchildren.

All of this is not to make people feel powerless or hopeless. This is to talk about the facts of where they are and to start leaving behind childish delusional notions that we are not dealing with what we are actually dealing with. 

DANIELLE MOODIE - CO-HOST, THE NEW ABNORMAL: You laid it out so beautifully and so perfectly. This is defining who we will be now, moving forward.

And I personally think, Jared, too, that the time for pointing fingers or Democrats doing what they normally do, which is let us do this autopsy and then move vigorously to the right. And forget about the base of black women. Forget about the base of progressives. We need to move dramatically to the right, uh, so that we have a fighting chance.

I think that the reality is, is that the fighting chance was 2024 [02:09:00] and that is now past us. And so my question to you is then, what does resistance look like moving forward? Because none of us Inside of these United States, we have not lived in an autocracy or a dictatorship before, so we have no idea what resistance looks like.

In the terms of this new context, we've only ever known go out and march, go out and protest. Well, Donald Trump wanted to shoot people back in 2020 for doing so. He's already talked about operationalizing our military against the American people. So, Jared, what does it look like? What do you think it looks like to resist inside of a country whose rules are now completely and totally thrown out the window?

JARED YATES SEXTON: Well, I would like to start by Probably reframing the way that some of the people listening to this podcast are thinking about American politics look at politics, you know, you were talking about pointing fingers and we could talk all day about the [02:10:00] results from the election and what they show us about politics moving forward, but that's not actually what we're talking about right now.

I need people to understand that 2024 was the moment that we could have possibly mitigated some of these consequences. And we could talk about the tactics of the Harris campaign, the Democratic Party, all we wanted. I want to talk about the, uh, the, the consultants and the, uh, the strategist and the operators within the Democratic Party.

We now know that billions of dollars were spent on this election. And by the way, that we had one grifter political action committee after another that raised tens of millions of dollars. Basically to enrich themselves and all of this is to point out that what we have done is we have outsourced resistance we have expected politicians and Operators to take care of it for us almost like hiring a contractor to take care of a leak or something going wrong in your house those notions Are no longer true and it's time we left them behind because we've been betrayed by these people And [02:11:00] they are going to be fine because they have made millions of dollars and they have lined their pockets You know, they went ahead.

They sold their soul for the silver and that's where things are now If we actually want to make a difference, what we need to do is on a personal level, we need to take a look at ourselves and decide what it is that we actually want, where it is that we actually want to go, what do we want this country to look like.

I understand that you oppose Donald Trump and the Republicans, and that's a great starting point. You need to understand why you oppose them. What is it about this agenda that offends you so much as an individual? When you decide that, You start figuring out your principles and principles are not about supporting a party.

They're not about sharing things on social media They're not about proclaiming what it is. You believe It's determining what it is that you want to live for and what it is that you're willing to die for That is one of the first rules of surviving in a dictatorship or an autocracy You have to decide i'm not going to go along with this I'm not going to put my [02:12:00] head in the sand when you're able to do that You're going to be able to talk to other people and what I want to challenge people to do besides healing in themselves the ways that authoritarianism and capitalist oppression has leaked into them, it's to start reaching out to other people and having real conversations to actually talk about how you're treated in your workplace, whether or not you think it's right that people are being exploited like this.

And I'm not just talking about coworkers. I'm talking about immigrants. I'm talking about vulnerable communities. Once you start dealing with these issues, those things, and we're talking about actual material conditions and experiences, you can start to form coalitions. And Danielle, what you just said is exactly right.

We are entering into a period where intentionally state power has created apparatuses in order to stave off protest. And I'm not just talking about the Gaza protest in which we saw students being absolutely decimated by law enforcement. I'm also talking about what happened during the BLM protest. I'm talking [02:13:00] about surveillance.

I'm talking about all these things that some people have said, Man, this is awful and then turned a blind eye to. The reason that we need to be with other people is because we need to recognize the interdependence of our situations, how I rise or fall based on what happens to you and what happens to people that I have never met and will never meet.

And when that comes together, all of a sudden there's a lot more people in the street and, you know, all you have to do It's look at China, you look at Iran, you look at actual social movements, and if this resonates with people, look what happened with civil rights. It wasn't that Martin Luther King made a speech that resonated with people.

It's that they got in the streets and actually stressed the system until the system had to look at its own privilege and make decisions. Liberals did not suddenly decide to pass civil rights legislation. It wasn't out of the kindness of their hearts. It was because they were confronted with the reality of their privilege and the oppression that came from that privilege.[02:14:00] 

And so what is going to happen if we are going to get to a place where things are actually going to get better is a lot of people are going to have to be made uncomfortable. And that is the basis of modern America, is comfort where you can find it. That's why it's a premium. You have to pay extra to be comfortable in America, right?

Whether it's a gated community or to live in a blue state away from the oppression of the red states. People are going to have to take a look at what the actual conditions are that underline their own comfort and their own privilege. And you don't get a Donald Trump, you don't get the Republican Party, you don't get an autocracy or an authoritarian regime if people have not been living comfortably at the expense of Of others and so this is going to take a spiritual political Cultural and social sea change and if what i'm saying sounds hard and daunting it's only because it's hard and daunting But the alternative to it the alternative to it honest to god [02:15:00] Is a type of tragedy that I don't think most people are ready to really wrap their minds around but quite frankly The time to wrap your your mind around it is now 

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today as always keep the comments coming in. I'd love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at (202)999-3991. Or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from Democracy Now!, The New Abnormal, The Thom Hartmann Program, This Week in White Supremacy, Roland Martin, and MSNBC. Further details are in the show notes. 

Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet: Ken, Brian, Ben, and our new addition, Lara, for their volunteer work, helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member [02:16:00] or purchasing gift memberships. 

You can join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player, . You'll find that link in the show notes, along with the link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion and don't forget to follow us on any and all new social media platforms you may be joining these days. 

So, coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from Bestoftheleft.com

 

Air Date 11/12/2024

Full Notes Page

Download PDF

Audio-Synced Transcript

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award winning Best of the Left podcast. It's easy enough to look into one industry at a time to see what's going wrong. That's what we usually do. But today we're looking at what is often lurking in the background of higher prices, lower quality goods, and services, and ultimately many failing businesses: private equity. 

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top takes in about 50 minutes today includes The Plain Bagel, Wendover, The Chris Hedges Report, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and More Perfect Union. 

Then in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there'll be more in three sections: Section A: How it works; Section B: Power; and Section C: Solutions.

Why Does Everyone Hate Private Equity? - The Plain Bagel - Air Date 9-20-24

RICHARD COFFIN - HOST, THE PLAIN BAGEL: Most people have never heard of these companies before. Blackstone, the largest private equity company with over 1 trillion in assets under management, might be a more well known part of the group in part because people just keep mixing it up with the much larger Blackrock, but other [00:01:00] companies like KKR, Carlyle Group, Apollo, and a number of other large players in the space have all managed to maintain pretty low public profiles, despite the fact that many of these companies each individually manage hundreds of billions of dollars, really contributing to this dark, ominous image of a secret puppet master corporation operating everything from the shadows. And with the area having grown over 10 fold since the 2008 financial crisis, they've come to control some pretty prominent brands, including Baskin Robbins, Dunkin Donuts, Michaels, and even Ancestry. com, which raises a number of questions. Who exactly are these companies? Are they really as evil as people say they are? Should I be concerned that they've been collecting spit samples from over 3. 5 million subscribers? And most importantly, should I invest in private equity? Because these days there are services rolling out that bring private equity offerings to retail investors. 

Well, that's all what I'm going to try to sort out in today's video. And in the past, I have tackled the more conspiracy-esque theories around [00:02:00] large asset managers secretly controlling the world or trying to destroy given companies. And indeed private equity does come up often as a sort of filler villain for especially meme stock style theories. But to be clear, that stuff aside, the bad reputation around private equity is still pretty well deserved, with one National Bureau of Economic Research paper even arguing that private equity ownership of nursing homes has contributed to over 22, 000 additional deaths over a 12 year period. So, among other things, I'll also try to explain why it is that private equity can't seem to stop getting in trouble. 

Now, as you might know, when we talk about private equity, we're really referring to private equity firms, or funds, which are groups that specialize in helping clients invest in these types of companies. Private equity itself is just an asset class or type of investment that encompasses all privately owned businesses. So basically any company that's not a publicly traded stock is technically private equity. And private equity or PE firms specialize in [00:03:00] helping their clients buy these types of companies since doing so is a lot more complicated than just buying a stock in Robinhood. With PE firms pooling client money together, employing teams of lawyers, analysts, and operations experts to take over these companies, and then trying to employ best practices or what have you to make the business more profitable, to earn themselves and their investors a return. 

Now within private equity, there are a bunch of different strategies that a group might focus on. For example, there's venture capital where you effectively invest in startups. But the most popular and controversial strategy is the leveraged buyout, which represents roughly 28 percent of all private market AUM, inclusive of debt oriented strategies as of June, 2022. With this typically involving the PE fund, borrowing a bunch of money, typically 80 to 90 percent of the company purchase price, using that to acquire a usually mature business, saddling the debt onto the target company, and then trying to use the higher profits from the turnaround to pay down the leverage. Something that, when successful, can be very lucrative for investors, given how little capital is being put up front [00:04:00] to try and own this business. 

Which touches on why private equity has been such a popular asset class. Because in addition to this sort of high risk, high return strategy, they've often been presented as being a superior asset class in terms of return, given the illiquidity premium, the higher barrier to entry, which leaves more opportunities for realizing returns. And in addition to all of that, they're argued to be less correlated to public markets, meaning they might not fall when everything else does, which offers diversification benefit. And they're often presented as being less volatile, meaning they don't swing around in price as much. I'll be able to get to those points later. 

Now, the asset class does have its drawbacks. Some of the strategies are higher risk. It can be pretty illiquid, meaning that it can be difficult to get your money out of the investment, with some funds being able to gate or otherwise block investor withdrawals. And the superior return they offer does come at a pretty hefty price, with most funds charging two and 20, meaning a 2 percent annual fee based on the value of your investment, plus 20 percent carried interest or a [00:05:00] performance fee that pays out 20 percent of profits above a given threshold. But despite this private equity has continued to be a pretty popular strategy, which is why the investors who ultimately own the 13 trillion dollars being managed here include the likes of pension plans, endowments, and even country sovereign funds, which all sounds pretty good.

But then what's the problem? Well, there are a few, and they typically involve other stakeholders, but even investors in PE funds face a number of issues, with one of the more public problems being the layoffs that typically follow a PE acquisition, with this seemingly being a favorite tool in the arsenal of PE firms to try and squeeze more profits out of the companies they acquire.

In fact, one 2021 paper that looked at 6, 000 buyouts from 1980 to 2013 found that employment at target companies shrunk an average of 4.4 percentage points in the first two years relative to a peer group when omitting post buyout acquisitions and divestitures, with retail sector, in particular, receiving the short end of the stick here. With the area [00:06:00] expected to have lost 600, 000 jobs as a result of PE firms and hedge funds taking over companies over the last 10 years.

Now, layoffs can make sense when company is overstaffed and could use further optimization. But these layoffs and other cost cutting measures are often blamed for hurting the quality of products and services offered by these target companies. Which sucks when your morning honey cruller isn't as fresh as it used to be, but is particularly concerning when it comes to the other, more critical industries that private equity has gotten involved with.

Most notably, healthcare. With private equity having come to own 8 percent of private hospitals and 5 percent of total nursing home facilities, with one ASPE study finding that private equity investment in the latter resulted in a 12 percent relative decline in RN hours worked per resident day. And as you'd expect, it's had some negative impacts, with private equity owned private hospitals, seeing a lower CMS star rating and nursing facilities seeing a 14 percent increase in their deficiency score index, lower overall [00:07:00] inspection and staffing ratings, and even as cited earlier, a higher mortality rate among residents. 

Now, in addition to healthcare, private equity has also caused a ruckus with real estate for managing funds that exclusively go around and buy up single family properties, with the goal of renting them out to tenants, which as you can imagine during a real estate affordability crisis is not cool, man. With advocacy groups arguing that not only are private equity firms taking inventory from other buyers, but that they also have a tendency to hike rates, evict tenants, and overall neglect their properties more than other ownership types in the pursuit of profits. 

So, already you can see why some people aren't all that fond of private equity. But perhaps the most frustrating aspect here is that despite the layoffs and the deterioration of the products and services they offer, the companies that these firms promise to turn around still fail pretty frequently. Whether it be Toys R Us or, again, the more recent bankruptcy of Red Lobster, private equity's high risk approach has a pretty high failure rate [00:08:00] with a space accounting for 16 percent of us bankruptcy filings in 2023 and the first four months of 2024, in one study, even suggesting that companies held by leveraged buyout firms have a 20 percent bankruptcy rate in their first 10 years, 10 times higher than that of a control sample. Which is actually part of what contributes to the high unemployment that seemingly stemmed from private equity activity. And as you can imagine, for again, those critical industries, these sort of bankruptcies and failures can have pretty severe implications for many other stakeholders. 

Which all brings us to the question: Why are private equity companies seemingly so reckless and aggressive? Don't they want to have a better rate of not failing? Well, part of it is that private equity firms tend to have a pretty short time horizon of anywhere from three to seven years, meaning that they often have an exit strategy that focuses on short term profitability, rather than long term sustainability. For example, a pretty common strategy for private equity firms is to take all of a company's real estate holdings and sell it to the market only to then rent [00:09:00] back those positions so that the PE firm has access to a sudden pool of capital, even though long term that just forces the company to now pay rent in addition to trying to pay down their massive debt balance. 

But a more controversial aspect here is that private equity firms don't inherently need their companies to succeed to make money, thanks largely to how their investments are structured. When a private equity fund carries out a leveraged buyout, as mentioned, they often saddle that debt onto the acquired business. Meaning that there's a degree of separation between the fund and the liability for the debt they've taken on. If that company fails and is unable to pay back the debt, the fund is not often liable for the amount owed. So, beyond their initial investment, which again is often only 10 to 20 percent of the company's whole purchase price, there's not much financial liability that the funds face for their companies failing, with this lack of liability even sometimes extending to legal matters, with companies often able to dodge responsibility for the actions of the companies they effectively run thanks to their complex ownership structures. 

In fact, according to federal prosecutor, [00:10:00] Brendan Ballou, we've even seen examples of PE firms abusing bankruptcy laws, using the mechanism to extinguish things like pension liabilities, which, mind you, represents money owed to employees, only to then reacquire the business after bankruptcy under a different arm to ultimately end up in a better financial position. And while the investors of these PE firms might lose when the companies they hold go bankrupt, because the private equity firms are often charging both their investors and the companies they manage fees, they can still benefit and end up positive while everyone else in the situation loses, with PE firms often criticized for benefiting from any of the cost cutting actions they've carried out, regardless of how intense they are, while leaving their portfolio companies to deal with all the consequences 

How Private Equity Consumed America - Wendover Productions - Air Date 5-7-24

SAM DENBY - HOST, WENDOVER PRODUCTIONS: Structurally, private equity firms are not complicated. Their cores are the general partner. General partners typically know the right people. It is not an entry level job. 

To take the example of a rather random, rather unremarkable firm, JW Childs Associates was founded by general partner John W. Childs [00:11:00] after a long and successful stint at Thomas H. Lee Partners, founded by Thomas H. Lee. Thomas H. Lee founded his firm after a long stint at the First National Bank of Boston, where he rose to the rank of Vice President. Other examples of private equity general partners include Mitt Romney of Bain Capital, who was also the 2012 Republican nominee for President, and Stephen Schwartzerman of Blackstone, the 34th wealthiest person in the world.

These connections are crucial thanks to step two in the process: raising money. Typically, general partners start by throwing in a couple million of their own money to set the stakes, then they'll go around pitching investors on why they're the best person to manage the investors' money. Often it has something to do with having particular experience in a particular industry that is particularly attractive for particular reasons.

In the case of J. W. Childs, he likely went around arguing that he had a particular knack for investing in consumer food and beverage companies, since at his prior firm, he had helped arrange the buyout of Snapple for $135 million in 1992, which his firm sold two years later for [00:12:00] $1.7 billion after massive revenue growth. And he likely argued that food and beverage companies are great for investment since people have to eat and drink, and therefore the sector is less subject to the cycles of the market than something like tech. 

This sort of stability is particularly attractive to the massive institutions that make up the core of private equity investors. In John W. Childs's case, insurance companies like Northwestern Mutual or employee pension funds like the Bayer Corporation Master Trust. Individuals can theoretically invest in PE funds, but only if they hold enormous wealth. It varies dramatically, but many funds have minimum investments upwards of $25 million.

Meanwhile, the way private equity firms themselves make money is remarkably consistent. They just take 2% of it. 2% of all money each year is taken as a fee regardless of whether or not the firm actually grows the investments. But then to incentivize returns, the firm also sets a benchmark called a "hurdle" that they're aiming to beat in year over year investment growth, say [00:13:00] 7%. Any money earned on top of that hurdle is then subject to a 20% fee that goes back to the firm.

So, say if a fund was originally worth $100 million but grew to $110 million, $3 million would be subject to that performance fee, and so 20 percent of it, $600,000, would go back to the firm. 

In practice, what's earned from the 2 percent base fee is fairly consistent, since there are generally restrictions as to when investors can take money out of the fund, so the sum does not generally fluctuate rapidly. Therefore, firms typically earmark this base fee for covering basic operating costs like office rent and analyst salaries. 

But how much is made from that 20 percent fee varies enormously. Some years it could be nothing, others it could be yacht money, especially since the gains from that fee are generally distributed primarily to the general partner.

This is how general partners like John W. Childs become billionaires. And even better, the money from these fees is not considered traditional income by the American tax authorities. It's considered capital gains. Despite the fact that [00:14:00] these earnings do not truly come from investments by the general partners themselves, the IRS treats them as if they do, and therefore only about 20 percent goes to taxes, versus the 37 percent they pay on traditional income.

So, considering it's the primary source of their wealth, the general partner is massively incentivized to maximize their firm's gains, and to supercharge this to the next level, they almost all rely on one simple trick. They don't actually invest their own money, at least primarily. Now, if a $100 million fund bought a $100 million company and increased its value by 25%, they'd gain $25 million. But if a $100 million fund bought a $400 million company and increased its value by the same multiple, they'd gain $100 million. They'd 2x the fund's value. 

And, believe it or not, a $100 million fund can buy a $400 million company, as long as they have a friendly banker. This is what's referred to as a leveraged buyout. The fund puts in some of [00:15:00] their money, but primarily relies on borrowed money to pay the seller, just like a homebuyer with a mortgage. This magnifies the potential earnings, but in turn, of course, the potential losses. But it's worth considering what this does for the general partner. In a $100 million fund buying a $400 million company with 75 percent borrowed money, very small margins of growth can make all the difference for this one individual.

With a 7 percent hurdle and 7.5 percent growth, 20 percent of the margin above 7 percent on that $400 million company would earn this individual $400,000. But if instead, the company reached 7.75 percent growth, the general partner would earn $600,000. Because of this amplifying effect, every quarter of a percent growth, a rather small difference, earns the general partner another $200,000 in income.

It's also worth considering that it really doesn't matter exactly how this value is created. For every [00:16:00] miraculous Yahoo turnaround story, there's a Marsh Supermarkets. At no point did Marsh reach the size or level of national ubiquity as Yahoo. If you aren't from Indiana or Western Ohio, you've likely never heard of Marsh Supermarkets. Yet, while confined to just two states, Marsh Supermarkets and its private equity takeover exemplifies a pattern that spans all 50. 

The first Marsh opened here, a small local grocer catering to specific local needs in Muncie, Indiana, in 1931. The simple concept took. Weathering the Great Depression, then outlasting World War II, the budding Indiana institution began to expand. By the 1950s, there were 16 Marsh locations across the state, by 1952 there was a Marsh distribution center in Yorktown, Indiana, and by 1956 the store was expanding into Ohio. 

As demands changed in the 60s, the company adjusted. Marsh FoodLiners became Marsh Supermarkets, growing in size to accommodate one stop shopping.

Diversifying as decades [00:17:00] progressed, the company also established its own convenience store, the Village Pantry, its own bargain bin store, Lowville Foods, and eventually purchased its own upscale grocers in Omalia Foods and Arthur's Fresh Market. Blanketing urban and suburban Indiana and western Ohio, Marsh and Marsh properties were a mainstay through the 90s and 2000s. 

And it was at about this time that Sun Capital became interested in the company.

Today, there are zero Marsh locations. In 2017, unable to keep up with rent payments and struggling to pay vendors, the company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, closing every last location and liquidating all remaining assets. Like an empire spread too thin, Marsh had reached its territorial epoch before collapsing in on itself within just two decades, all on a timeline that rather neatly lines up with the brand's time under Sun Capital's ownership.

Now, Sun Capital Partners didn't instigate the regional grocer's fall from grace. Prior to the sale, Marsh had [00:18:00] expensively failed to expand into Chicago, it had felt their revenue squeezed from encroaching box stores, and it watched Kroger's parade into its grocery market. In response, the company began to fall behind, failing to modernize its stores or products, backing out of sponsorship deals with the Indiana State Fair, and opening itself up to the possibility of selling.

In an atmosphere of supermarket consolidation, though, there wasn't much interest in the struggling chain. Not until someone noticed in a footnote in the company's financial report that the company held a rather robust real estate portfolio, a $325 million purchase point then became more palatable. And in early 2006, Sun Capital jumped, paying $88 million in cash and assuming $237 million of debt.

To Sun Capital, the deal was a can't lose proposition. Either they'd turn around and flip a bloated business, or they'd sell the assets -- assets which, just in real estate, have been estimated to be worth $238 to $360 million. 

[00:19:00] Under new ownership, things changed quickly. They pared management, they sold the company jet, and with the money saved, they renovated storefronts. Sales went up. Then came more maneuvering, but less the kind that would help bump sales. Almost immediately after Sun Capital took over, store locations went up for sale; this one for $750,000, this one for $2.15 million. and this one for $1.2 million. They'd stay operating as Marsh Stores, but they'd now be paying a lease while Sun Capital would collect an unspecified commission on the sales.

They even went as far as selling the company headquarters for a reported $28 million before then straddling the grocer with a 20-year lease increasing on a 7 percent clip every five years. This maneuver is called a sale leaseback, and it's quite common in private equity because, at least on paper, it makes sense for both parties. Marsh supermarket properties were no exception, as they could boost dividends or provide capital for [00:20:00] another leveraged buyout for Sun Capital, while also helping the grocer to pay down debt and provide investment flexibility in the short term. But as for the consequences accompanying that long, escalating lease on company headquarters, along with cost saving moves like carrying name brand products, cutting staff, and contracting out more and more services, well, Sun Capital just hoped it wouldn't have to deal with them. 

As of early 2009, news bubbled to the surface that they were trying to sell the grocery chain. But to the dismay of Sun Capital, the new, leaner, streamlined Marsh just wouldn't sell. Ultimately, the new owner business boost was short lasted, and in 2017, the grocer would go out of business with Sun Capital at the helm until the very day it filed for bankruptcy. 

Tucson Capital, failing to sell was a missed opportunity in a company overhaul that they would deem a loss, as the group ultimately came $500,000 short of recouping their investment into the chain grocery store.

But even in a loss, the private equity firm won. They still collected their management [00:21:00] fee each year of ownership, after all. They also collected their commission on sold assets as the company spun off its property at seemingly every turn. Really the only loss was that they just didn't win more. 

The same couldn't be said about the consumers or employees, though.

Deeply embedded in Indiana and Ohio's urban areas, Marsh locations provided healthier, fresher alternatives in areas at risk of fading into food deserts. Beyond nostalgia, residents who lost their local grocery and pharmacy were mad, confused, and lost with the disappearance of a long-time local institution.

Then there were the people that worked for Marsh. According to Washington Post reporting, at the onset of Sun Capital's ownership, only one of three retirement plans was agreed to be fully funded by the new ownership -- unsurprisingly, the executive's plan. As for store employees, their pension went underfunded by some $32 million, which fell not on Sun Capital to even out, but to the government insurer.

As for warehouse workers, Marsh owed [00:22:00] some $55 million at the time of bankruptcy to their pension, which was already struggling to pay out full checks. 

Ultimately, Marsh Supermarkets as a business and Sun Capital as a private equity firm are relatively small potatoes, but their ill-fated eleven years speak to a larger pattern in American life.

How private equity conquered America - The Chris Hedges Report - Air Date 3-1-24

CHRIS HEDGES - THE CHRIS HEDGES REPORT: You write that they operate in secrecy with hidden ties to companies they control. The wreckage they leave behind is often difficult to track back to its origins. And I want to raise another point that you do in the book and I thought it was important: Many Americans who are being assaulted this way know something’s wrong, but they don’t quite know what is wrong. It’s tied to this, almost invisible, hand. Explain that. And then I want you to talk about their political clout because it’s significant. They get [00:23:00] the tax breaks, they corrupt the system enough to essentially grease the skids for them to continue to operate.

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: Absolutely. Absolutely. So the secrecy is important. One of the reasons that we wanted to write this book is to let people know how pervasive this business model is.

CHRIS HEDGES - THE CHRIS HEDGES REPORT: Well, you write at one point that all of us, although we don’t know it, are engaging with private equity firms. So talk about how extensive it is and then talk about that secrecy too.

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: I write in the book that the coffee and donut that you pick up on the way to work, the child care entity where you drop your son or daughter off, the nursing home where your mother or father lives—it is cradle to grave, literally, you’re impacted by private equity, but you don’t know it because these are just companies that are buying and selling, but you [00:24:00] don’t know who the real owner is behind the scenes. And they like it that way, they want to keep it that way because they operate best in secrecy. They’re private companies. They don’t have to make filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, so a lot of their business and a lot of their practices are hidden from view, and that is by design.

One of the things that I think could improve our perception or educate people about how pervasive private equity has become is to force these firms to identify themselves as the owners; So it should be the Carlyle nursing home or the Blackstone donut shop or whatever, just so you are aware of who you are dealing with and whose [00:25:00] pocket you’re putting your money into. 

Now, the secrecy is one thing; the political clout is, as you say, immense, because they have so much money. Their tax treatment is an outrage and many presidents have tried to change it, but have not been able to do so.

CHRIS HEDGES - THE CHRIS HEDGES REPORT: Explain the tax part.

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: Their fortunes are enhanced by the fact that they pay a fraction of what you and I pay on our incomes every year because it’s called carried interest. It’s not considered ordinary income. The ordinary income tax rate is, what, up to 35%? What these people pay is around 21% on the income that [00:26:00] they receive from their operations. That’s something that’s been in the books for decades but it really has created a skewed system where they make fortunes, billions of dollars. The government loses because they’re not generating the tax revenues that they should on those billions. It’s just, it's nuts. 

Now, the last time someone tried to change this, Kyrsten Sinema was a holdout, the –

CHRIS HEDGES - THE CHRIS HEDGES REPORT: Because it was good for the people of Arizona.

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: – right, the lawmaker from Arizona. She, I think, received $1.5 million from the private equity world to stand up and say no, and she scotched it. So, getting them to pay their fair share of taxes would [00:27:00] be a good thing. It would help the government, it would generate more income, and it would take away this unfair aspect of their business.

CHRIS HEDGES - THE CHRIS HEDGES REPORT: You write, “Routinely lionized in the financial press for their dealmaking and lauded for their ‘charitable’ giving, these unbridled capitalists have mounted expensive lobbying campaigns to ensure continued enrichment from favorable tax laws. Hefty donations have won them positions of power on museum boards and think tanks. They’ve published books on leadership extolling ‘the importance of humility and humanity’ at the top while eviscerating those at the bottom. Their companies arrange for them to avoid paying taxes on the billions in gains that their stockholdings generate. And, of course, they rarely mention that the companies they own are among the largest beneficiaries of government investments in highways, railroads, and primary education, reaping massive perks from subsidies and tax policies [00:28:00] that allow them to pay substantially lower rates on their earnings. These men are America’s modern-age robber barons. But unlike many of their predecessors in the 19th century, who amassed stupefying riches by extracting a young nation’s natural resources, today’s barons mine their wealth from the poor and middle class through complex financial dealings.” 

These people, not just control politicians, but they serve in government. You have several examples of that. So explain a little bit about how they dominate the political system.

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: Jay Powell, our head of the Federal Reserve Board, he was a Carlyle executive. They’re really everywhere. Again, it’s this pervasiveness. But even if they’re not on the job, say, in the [00:29:00] government, they are behind the scenes absolutely manipulating outcomes so that their businesses will benefit. They’re so powerful and so wealthy and, you know, Chris, better than anybody, how money is so central, unfortunately, to how our government works. 

You just have not had enough attention to this wealth grab by these people. The one thing we did have—the activity, the practices were so outrageous that it got Congress to act, and that was on the surprise medical bills that you mentioned a bit ago. This was a creation, the brainchild of a company called Envision, which is owned [00:30:00] by KKR. And what Envision did was it went into emergency departments and started running many of those emergency departments in a hospital. It wouldn’t own the hospital, but it ran the emergency departments.

Envision decided that what they could do is they could make the emergency department a separate entity outside of the insurance coverage that the hospital’s patients would normally have. So you’re in your town, you go to the emergency department, you’ve broken your arm or whatever, you naturally assume that yourinsurance – which covers your normal hospital stay or treatment – you naturally assume it’s going to cover your emergency department bill.

Well, Envision carved themselves out of that so that you would have to pay more. And this was something that was so [00:31:00] crazy and impossible to think that it could happen, that Congress did something about it and changed and curbed the practice. They didn’t eliminate them, but they curbed it. And guess what? Envision went bankrupt after that because its business model required them, … its business model was based on ripping people off.

Warren Calls for Ownership Transparency for Private Equity in Health Care - Senator Elizabeth Warren - Air Date 7-12-24

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: Mr. Chairman, and thank you and Ranking Member Braun for holding this hearing on price transparency. For almost every other type of service, you can look up the price before deciding whether or not to purchase. But when it comes to health care, it is virtually impossible, even though Americans are paying more for health care then at any other country in the world. 

So when patients need health care, they should be able to easily find out the price of those services. Here's something else they should be able to find out easily: who [00:32:00] owns the hospital or the physician practice that you or a loved one may visit to receive that care? Today, nearly 80 percent of doctors are employed by corporate entities, including private equity firms. And once in control, these firms raise their prices and cut corners to line their own pockets, while the quality of care suffers. 

So let me start with you, Dr. Whaley. You are an expert on private equity in health care. If a patient wanted to find out whether a neighborhood hospital or a primary care practice was owned by private equity, how hard would that be to do? 

DR. CHRIS WHALEY: Senator Warren, I think it's virtually impossible for a patient to know whether or not their doctor's office is owned by a private equity company. 

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: Yeah, so virtually impossible. Because private equity firms don't have to report ownership, it is nearly impossible to find out if the doctor's office you visit is owned by one of these corporate [00:33:00] vultures. 

Well, let's ask about the workers. How hard is it for the workers to find out? Ms. Upsal, you lead the health fund at Labor Union 32BJ. If one of your members wanted to find out if a potential employer of any kind was owned by a private equity company, how simple would that be to do? 

CORA OPSAHL: Similar to what Dr. Whaley said, next to impossible. And I would even say as the employer or as the sponsor of the plan, I don't know who I'm writing my self funded checks to, as well.

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: Okay, so next to impossible, virtually impossible. I'm, sensing a trend here. Patients can't find this information. Workers can't find this information. Even antitrust regulators have a hard time finding this information. These are the agencies that are responsible for cracking down on anti-competitive behavior, and they can't get their hands on these data. And it matters, because [00:34:00] private equity ownership has real consequences for the families and the workers who need help here. 

So Dr. Whaley, once private equity firms take over health care companies, what happens to health care cost and quality? 

DR. CHRIS WHALEY: Several studies have shown that when a private equity company acquires a healthcare practice, whether it be a physician or a hospital or other type of healthcare provider, prices increase quite substantially.

We've also seen evidence, particularly in nursing homes, that quality goes down, again, quite substantially. 

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: I just want to relate this to the earlier line of questions, where he said, people are using higher price as a signal that they're going to get better care. And yet, the data show us that when private equity takes over, price goes up and quality of care actually goes down. Is that right, Dr. Whaley? 

DR. CHRIS WHALEY: That's what the host of studies that have examined this question.

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: Yeah, so not just one [00:35:00] study. You see it across the board in all of the studies that have looked at this. 

I saw this first hand in Massachusetts after private equity drove Steward Health Care into bankruptcy. And that is why I introduced the Corporate Crimes Against Health Care Act, which, among other things, would require private equity-owned health care companies to publicly report mergers, acquisitions, changes in ownership and control, and financial data. So at least the information would be out there.

Let me ask: Dr. Whaley, would these data help state and federal regulators prevent crises like the Steward failure in the future? 

DR. CHRIS WHALEY: I think having accurate and transparent data on ownership is incredibly important, and can help both state and federal regulators monitor healthcare markets and get ahead of what's happened in many cases.

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: Yeah. It is shameful that these firms can hide in the shadows while [00:36:00] patients and workers suffer. My Corporate Crimes Against Healthcare Act would shine a light on private equity's most parasitic practices. It would also claw back compensation from private equity executives that drive portfolio companies into bankruptcy. It would impose criminal penalties on executives when their failures result in patient deaths. And it would empower regulators to prevent crises like Steward from ever happening again. There's a lot of work we need to do here.

BlackRock: The Conspiracies You Don’t Know - More Perfect Union - Air Date 9-15-24

ADREINNE BULLER - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: I spoke with Benjamin Braun, a professor of political economy at the London School of Economics. He's written a bunch of studies on asset managers' role in our economy and society. 

BENJAMIN BRAUN: The fees you earn if you're BlackRock increase when the market value of the assets you manage increases. You maximize your assets under management by winning over new clients and by getting the clients that you already have to give you more money.

ADREINNE BULLER - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: When you have 10 trillion dollars, you have to put them somewhere, [00:37:00] and eventually that somewhere becomes everywhere. 

BENJAMIN BRAUN: Universal ownership refers to holding shares in the entire universe of firms listed on the stock matket, the big three asset managers: BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, hold a sizable, but still relatively small, stake in all listed corporations.

ADREINNE BULLER - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: BlackRock is a 3-10% shareholder in all of these companies. This may not sound like a lot, but it's enough that selling all of it at once would likely crash that entire stock, locking them into the whole not selling passive thing. 

BENJAMIN BRAUN: 5 percent in any individual company is actually very significant because if and when shareholdership is dispersed, 5 percent makes you, in all likelihood, the single largest shareholder in that company.

That's why, for example, in a lot of academic studies, 5 percent is taken as a threshold for control. There's almost no difference between Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street, and [00:38:00] even a bunch of other asset managers in terms of their business model. So then you can start and wonder, okay, so if the big three together hold 25% of the shares in any individual company, then you're definitely above the threshold.

ADREINNE BULLER - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: Let's zoom in on Amazon. The big three owns 16% of all outstanding Amazon shares. Jeff Bezos only owns 9%. 

BENJAMIN BRAUN: In theory, universal owners should have an interest in maximizing profits in the long term across the entire economy. And that is not how they operate in practice. 

ADREINNE BULLER - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: The amount of stock you have determines the number of votes you get.

BlackRock is almost always in the top three, maybe five if they're feeling broke. So that is a lot of votes. And let's not forget, It's not BlackRock's money that's invested. It's your dad's pension fund and your insurer's massive pile of savings. It sounds crazy, but when you put your money in a pension fund, you sign away your voting rights to the pension fund manager. And then when the pension fund manager puts all their pension [00:39:00] funds under an asset manager's control, they sign away all those votes to the asset manager. Kind of pyramid scheme vibes. 

And how do they actually use those votes? A 2017 study found that asset managers almost always voted with what the company executives recommended. And why are they always voting with company management? Back in the 80s, company managers used to spend company money on company things, like corporate jets, fancy offices, or occasionally paying their employees. And this made the investors sad, because they wanted those profits. So they started offering company managers, in addition to bonuses and benefits, stock options. Executives' total pay was now forever tied to how much the company made. 

BENJAMIN BRAUN: They can push managers, corporate managers, to act more in the interest of shareholders, meaning in the interest of corporate profits, and do more to maximize corporate profits. 

ADREINNE BULLER - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: This funnels money back to investors, who now include management, and away from any hope of making companies work better, or including employees in the [00:40:00] profits that their labor created. Back in the day, like, my grandparents' day, more regular people had stocks, and the idea was that every shareholder could vote on things like board elections, mergers and acquisitions, executive compensation, and once in a while, wages. Sort of like democracy for people with disposable income. 

RONALD REAGAN: Government is the people's business. And every man, woman, and child becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid. 

ADREINNE BULLER - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: In 1945, 94 percent of stocks were owned by households. But that's not really how it works anymore. Today, households have more like 40 percent of the stock market, and about half of that belongs to the top 10%.

Today, the top 1 percent own 50 percent of corporate equity and mutual fund shares, while the top 10 percent own 86%. [Referring to chart in video] Did you think this yellow part was everyone else? Nope. The tiny green part on the bottom is the least wealthy [00:41:00] half of Americans. 

BENJAMIN BRAUN: You often hear this argument that what is good for shareholders is good for everyone because, especially in the U. S., where retirement assets are overwhelmingly invested in corporate equities, everyone is a shareholder. But that's simply not true. The bottom 50 percent virtually owns no shares at all. The vast majority of shares are held by the top 10%, and within that even, shareholdings are quite concentrated within the top 1%.

ADREINNE BULLER - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: And while the strategies corporations choose (because asset managers vote for them) affect everyone, they only benefit half the population even a little bit, and frequently hurt the other half, those without any shares at all. Take the example of worker pay. BlackRock and other asset managers play a huge part in wage stagnation.

BENJAMIN BRAUN: If you're a corporation, you can increase profits only in so many ways, and you can always, in the short term, increased returns to shareholders [00:42:00] by squeezing workers. 

ADREINNE BULLER - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: So this kind of uber monopolization really hurts working people, consumers, and even small businesses. And this is where it gets interesting. There's evidence that this type of universal ownership is in part responsible for why everything is so expensive these days. For example, they have significant stakes in Nike, Adidas, Lululemon, and Under Armour. If one outperforms the other, it's the same from BlackRock's point of view. And sometimes it can even lose investors money altogether if companies were to start lowering prices to compete.

BENJAMIN BRAUN: That's the universal ownership logic in action, but it's also an anti competitive logic in action. The fact that all five airlines, all the major banks, for example, in the U. S. have the same large shareholders, creates a danger and a risk that these corporations will not engage in competition in the same way they would if they each had different shareholders, because in that world, each shareholder would root for [00:43:00] their company and would help to outperform the market by the company they waged a bet on.

ADREINNE BULLER - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: It's sort of like a neo monopoly where companies don't even have to merge and buy each other anymore because they all send profits to the same guys no matter what. And their large stakes in basically every company affords them friends in high places. 

From just 2014 to 2015, BlackRock performed over 1, 500 private engagements with the companies held in their portfolio. BlackRock reportedly believes that meetings behind closed doors can go further than votes against management. And they typically give management a year before voting against them. They also have a lot of friends in the government. There's a sort of revolving door between BlackRock, the government, and the international bodies that create monetary policy. Things like the U. S. Treasury, Federal Reserve, the central banks of Canada, some European countries and Sweden, as well as the International Monetary Fund and the World Economic Forum. Since 2004, BlackRock has hired at least 84 former government officials, regulators, and central bankers worldwide. 

LARRY FINK: The [00:44:00] intersection of politics and business has never been more ongoing.

ADREINNE BULLER - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: Larry Fink himself is on the board of the WEF and even tried to get himself selected as Hillary Clinton's Treasury Secretary in 2016. And in 2008, they got themselves a pretty sweet deal. 

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Traders say this is the craziest day they have ever seen in these markets. Veteran traders say they've never seen anything like it.

ADREINNE BULLER - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: In the aftermath, the government created the Financial Stability Oversight Council to oversee entities like BlackRock that control a lot of money but aren't banks. The FSOC pointed to BlackRock as an organization that's so big that its failure could cause another collapse and tried to put additional oversight on them.

But BlackRock doubled their political lobbying spending, including running a super targeted ad campaign on the D. C. metro, and managed to dodge the oversight that other large financial institutions received. And let's come back to that loophole they like to call passivity. The people who decide if they're passive enough to continue not to be overseen by the government is BlackRock themselves.

Basically, BlackRock and other asset managers have to submit annual [00:45:00] letters to self certify that they've been compliant with the terms of passive investment. That's like being allowed to write whatever you want on your taxes and then audit yourself, except if you also had 10 trillion dollars, which, unless you're watching this and you're literally Larry Fink—hey bestie—I'm gonna safely assume you don't.

The part that really blows my mind is that while this one company already has their eggs in basically every basket and is making money off seemingly everyone, it goes even deeper than that. The biggest investors in BlackRock are Vanguard and State Street. And the biggest investors in Vanguard are BlackRock and State Street. And the biggest investors in State Street are, you guessed it, BlackRock and Vanguard. 

BENJAMIN BRAUN: Asset managers are the shareholders of asset managers. And this is true for all financial firms. And not only, in fact, for stock market listed firms, but private equity firms, buying a private insurance. 

ADREINNE BULLER - HOST, MORE PERFECT UNION: So the financial sector effectively owns itself. The biggest companies that they own, own them back, creating this loop that sucks money in and never seems to [00:46:00] spit it back out. They play all sides of the game because at a certain point, you can't lose when you play against yourself. 

So, going back to our original questions: Does BlackRock own everything? No. But do they control everything? Kinda. They profit off of every bit of your life, while controlling just the minimum amount they need to make sure they can continue profiting off of every bit of your life. And they get paid by teacher's retirement funds to do it. And they get away with this by constantly exchanging money for power and utilizing legal loopholes.

It's worth being pedantic here for a second. They don't own everything. They own shares in everything, which gives them an outsized amount of control. So while they're not necessarily the ones making all the nitty gritty decisions in every company, it is their influence and this giant structure of universal ownership that continues to make their pie bigger and ours smaller. It's the ultimate endgame of the Investor Management Alliance. 

Regulating them much further is going to prove difficult, and this is a solution to one part of a much larger problem. [00:47:00] We no longer have the old system of shareholder democracy. We have something more like a shareholder oligarchy where the people with the most power over where our money and stuff goes are incentivized to make that stuff worse and more expensive and not work for us.

But BlackRock didn't create this system, they just used it to their advantage. And I think we deserve a better one.

Notes from the Editor on getting through this together

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with The Plain Bagel explaining the basics of private equity. Wendover highlighted the case study of the Marsh grocery chain. The Chris Hedges Report looked at the revolving door behind the scenes of private equity. Senator Elizabeth Warren looked at the impact of private equity on healthcare. And More Perfect Union broke down our shareholder oligarchy headed up by BlackRock. 

And those were just the top takes. There's a lot more in the deeper dives section. But first a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process, even in these trying [00:48:00] times. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Members also get chapter markers in the show, but depending on the app you use to listen, you may be able to use the time codes in the show notes to jump around the show, similar to chapter markers. So check that out. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. 

Now, before we continue on to the deeper dives half of the show, just a quick comment on the post election recovery period we're in right now. Now, as a straight White guy with full citizenship, I am aware that I am certainly not near the top of Trump's enemies list. But presumably, because I care about how other people will be impacted, as well as caring about how my own [00:49:00] mental health will be affected by the stress that comes along with President Trump-driven news alerts, I'm definitely having a sort of anticipatory anxiety that is impacting my sleep patterns and appetite. All of which is to say that I can hardly imagine what others who will be more directly affected are going through right now. And yet, at least to varying degrees, we are all going through this together. 

Now, nothing is going to make the current situation feel good, but I hope that there is at least some comfort in being reminded that the feelings you're having are not just yours alone. To that point, I mentioned toward the end of our post election round table discussion that I'd been having some thoughts about how to rework and relaunch our activism segments we used to do more often. Before I'd even given more details on it. Alan, from Connecticut called in and sort of preempted my plan.

VOICEMAILER: ALAN FROM CONNECTICUT: Hey Jay, it's Alan from Connecticut calling in. I skipped [00:50:00] ahead to the last episode here—and, uh, bonus gone mainstream, if you will—and in the end you were talking about activism and how you wanted to rethink that because It gives a laundry list of things that we're not doing. I have to tell you, I love hearing that stuff, even if it's not something that I'm able to do or doing knowing that it's out there, knowing that somebody's doing something is really good for my mental health, even if I can't participate, or even by the time I hear about it, it's over, knowing that it's happening is really, really helpful. So, put the different spin on it if you want, but do know that knowing what's going on out there is helpful. And if you put it at the end of the show, people can always speed past it or whatever. But I find it helpful. Anyway, thanks, stay awesome, and for whatever we can do, keep the faith. 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now in all honesty, one of the major reasons we drift away from doing those segments was that we were very unsure of how effective they were on multiple [00:51:00] levels. We were unsure of how effective the actions were in general. And we were even more unsure of how much action we were actually driving from listeners with those segments. So, we sorta got discouraged in the sense that we didn't know if the effort we were putting in was really amounting to anything. 

Now, the rethink I had just after the election was exactly what Alan just laid out. The biggest benefit from those activism segments probably never had anything to do with driving action. The biggest benefit was likely driving inspiration. So, the hope is to gear back up in a way that incorporates activism into the show, but with a clearer understanding of what it's there for, and to have that be part of the communication in each of those segments. The idea will be to make people feel good to help people's mental health and to potentially spur inspiration, whether to take action on what we're talking about or [00:52:00] something else, it doesn't really matter. But that is the idea at least. Give us some time to sort that all out because of course we're still not eating or sleeping well, so it's not exactly the best time to stretch ourselves even further.

SECTION A - HOW IT WORKS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: For now we'll continue to dive deeper on three topics. Next up Section A: How it works; followed by Section B: Power; and Section C: Solutions. 

Why Private Equity SUCKS for (almost) Everyone - The Market Exit - Air Date 9-8-22

ANDRES ACEVEDO - HOST, THE MARKET EXIT: How come the handful of people who are partners at private equity firms gets so immensely wealthy? The answer to that is simple. As the recipe prescribes, the magic PE sauce must include life changing incentives, which means that the fees that private equity firms charge must be out of this world. First, the private equity firm charges an annual management fee, usually 2 percent of the money that the investors put into the fund.

This is a fee that they get irrespective of how the fund performs. Second, the private equity firms Many private equity firms also charge a performance based fee, [00:53:00] which is for some reason called a carried interest. This performance based fee is usually 20 percent of the profits that the funds make. And in addition to the management fees and the carried interest, many private equity firms also charge the target companies that they buy various fees with creative names, such as deal fees, service fees, and advisory fees.

As if all of those fees to the private equity firm wasn't enough, there's a lot more that the investors have to pay for. Leveraged buyouts are really complex transactions, and private equity firms don't know how to do them. So they take in hordes of extremely expensive consultants to do the transactions for them.

Lawyers, management consultants, bankers, accountants, etc. All billing handsomely by the hour. If you average out all of these fees that the investors have to cover, you'll find that investors have to pay between 6 and 7 percent to invest in private equity. [00:54:00] To compare, hedge fund investments cost around 4 percent, active mutual funds around 2 percent, and passive mutual funds less than 1 percent.

If you have capital to deploy, private equity is an extremely expensive way to do it. So why do investors, such as our pension funds, still invest in private equity? Why do they accept that so much of their money goes into the pockets of a few private equity partners and all of their consultants when there are cheaper investment options?

Surely that must be because private equity clearly outperforms everything else that is out there. And for sure, the private equity firms and their lobby organizations, such as the AIC and the SVCA, will tell you that yes, private equity does outperform other investments and that the life changing fees private equity firms are charging are not only worth it, they are a key reason for why private equity firms perform [00:55:00] so well.

Also the consultants who build by the hour to enable the buyouts, the lawyers, the bankers, the accountants, the management consultants will gladly attest to how much value private equity firms can create. But many independent experts are quite certain that That private equity does not clearly outperform other asset classes.

The University of Oxford professor of finance, Ludovic Falippu, and several others, makes the case that private equity funds do not clearly outperform other asset classes. Instead, private equity has given investors performance that more or less matches the public stock market indexes. And if that is true, then anyone who invests in private equity will pay around 7 percent per year when they could have paid way below 1 percent per year for a similar return.

But even if private equity would clearly outperform other asset classes, I still find it difficult to accept that these fee levels are necessary. [00:56:00] Should we really believe that private equity partners wouldn't go to work unless the investors, in other words, our pension funds, are there? Give them billions of dollars in fees.

Clearly, there is something foul about the incentive ingredient in the magic pea sauce. But unfortunately, also the other two ingredients smell a bit funky.

When private equity firm Accel bought the Jon Bauer school group, they loaded it up with a mountain of debt. Immediately after the acquisition, Jon Bauer had to start paying huge sums in interest And as long as John Bauer kept expanding as much as Excel had expected and projected, everything was fine.

But when John Bauer no longer was able to attract as many students and failed to increase revenues, things got tough. John Bauer had to start cutting costs to afford its interest payments, and scandals soon started piling up. And in 2013, John [00:57:00] Bauer had to file for bankruptcy. Remember that backbreaking debt is a key ingredient in the magic pea sauce.

The private equity firm borrows around 80 percent of what it costs to buy a company and makes the company responsible for that debt. And why do they do that? Well, this debt, or leverage, increases the private equity firm's potential return on investment. In other words, how much profits they can make. But the debt also serves other purposes.

First, it lowers the target company's tax liability. Second, it supposedly makes the target company more disciplined. The company must keep its costs low and revenues high in order to afford the debts. Otherwise, it fails. But this debt that the private equity firms load onto its target companies also makes the target companies much more vulnerable, increasing the risk of failure, which is what happened to the John Bauer school group.

The beautiful thing for private equity firms is that when that [00:58:00] happens, when their target companies that they've bought out succumbs to their debt obligations, it's not the private equity firm's responsibility to repay any of that debt. When their investments do well, the private equity firm reaps astronomical gains, but when their target companies fail, the true losses fall mainly on other stakeholders.

The company's employees, its customers, its suppliers, its creditors, and the community at large. A fate that John Bower's teachers and students had to experience firsthand. The third ingredient in the magic pizza sauce is that the brilliant private equity partners take full control of the target company so it can unlock value thanks to the private equity firm's superior management skills.

But it should go without saying that a private equity partner with little or no experience from a particular industry cannot improve the actual products with actual services of a [00:59:00] target company. All this private equity partner, this glorified financial intermediary can do for its target company is to deploy the bluntest instruments that capitalism has to offer.

The private equity firm helps the target company cut costs through layoffs. Offshoring and asset stripping. And the private equity firm helps the target company increase revenues by deploying state of the art methods for price increases. In other words, what private equity firms do is to help target companies focus more on financial engineering and consumer exploitation and less on improving the company's products and services.

Or as the author Matt Stoller has expressed it, private equity firms act as disease vectors for price gouging and legal arbitrage. But to extract value from the target companies, some private equity firms are not satisfied with only firing people and raising prices. [01:00:00] Some private equity firms have bigger plans for their target companies.

Market domination.

This right here is Ryds Bilglas, a Swedish car glass repair chain. This chain was founded in the 50s and was in 2016 acquired by the private equity firm Nordic Capital. In a leveraged buyout. Immediately after the acquisition, Rydsbyrglas initiated its strategy of market domination. When a private equity firm acquires a company on a fragmented market, in other words, a market where there is a lot of competition, Then the private equity firm will inevitably try to destroy as much of that competition as it can, so that it can start raising prices.

After Nordic Capital took over Rydsbyglas, it initiated a wild shopping spree, acquiring, on average, one new company per month. In theory, our competition and antitrust laws should prevent [01:01:00] the private equity companies from going too far in their attempts to destroy competition. But in practice The private equity companies can often get around the competition authorities with the help of stealth consolidation, as the University of Chicago professor Thomas Woolman has called it.

Stealth consolidation is possible when each separate acquisition is small enough to fly under the competition authority's radar. Either the authorities are clueless as to what's going on, or they lack the weapons to defend. And this is particularly common in the retail sector. The private equity firms have also, with some help from their lawyers, built a whole nomenclature to obfuscate the true purpose of their consolidation strategies.

Private equity firms doesn't monopolize. It acquires a platform and then makes add ons and bolt ons and tuck ins. Private equity doesn't destroy competition. It makes the market more efficient and private equity doesn't do price increases, it does margin [01:02:00] expansions. If, and when the competition authorities finally wake up to what private equity has been doing

below its radar, it's often already too late. After a few years of extremely aggressive consolidation, Nordic Capital last year sold off its control stake in Rydsbygglas through an IPO. And in the IPO prospectus, Rydsbygglas even brags about its successful stealth consolidation and how it has created market entry barriers that will make it difficult for small competitors to stay relevant on the market. 

So does private equity own everything? - Good Work - Air Date 9-22-23

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Outside of healthcare, you can find lots of examples of private equity getting all up in things that are commonly thought of as public services.

Like when water bills rose 28 percent in Bayonne, New Jersey following KKR's acquisition of the town's water system. Or when pandemic relief money found its way to PE firms despite being attended for small business support. Or when the state of California had to evacuate dozens of boys from an abusive Michigan rehab facility for troubled youth that was owned by a Bay Area private equity firm.

But if we look at [01:03:00] all of these troubling examples of private equity's massive growth and entanglement into public services, one thing remains clear. These guys f ing rock at making money. 

PAUL KEIRNAN: 2012, private funds as a whole, a lot of which is private equity, managed 9. 8 trillion. Now, 10 years later, it's 27 private funds industry, which again includes hedge funds and VC, is now bigger than the commercial banking sector.

Sector. according to Gensler, 

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: indeed, private equity has had an even more meteoric career rise than euphoria. Haie Jacob, all lordie. But what besides Ivy League grads burning desire to own a helipad yacht has contributed to this industry's startling growth, 

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: low interest rates, zero cost of money. Big reason.

Huge. Okay. Easy. can borrow at low rates. 

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: a cheap source of debt, w for leveraged buyouts. Co that private markets hav The industry has been [01:04:00] able to expand pretty much unchecked. 

PAUL KEIRNAN: So you've got this really big part of the economy that is more or less operating in the shadows because there's not really systematic.

There hasn't been systematic disclosure on it. 

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: So why does the government ignore these asset managers? It's not like there's some annoying aspect to it. public school teacher asking for money to buy a protractor that works. The 

JEFF HOOKE: SEC or the government's first response would be, okay, we supervise the public markets where we have to protect widows and orphans.

They don't know what they're doing, so we got to protect them. 

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: There's also lobbying. Private equity spends more time in Washington, D. C., than the worst kid you went to college with. For example, the industry spent 70 million on lobbying in the run up to the 2020 presidential election, while they donated 262 million.

Directly to political campaigns and it turns out that private equity in Washington have a few mutual linkedin connections as well 

JEFF HOOKE: Lawyers that work at the sec. They don't want to work at the sec They want to work on wall street make triple what they're making now How are you going to [01:05:00] get a job on wall street if you're a pain in the ass that you prosecute PE firms? You know, that's not the way you get a job on wall street 

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Looks like the revolving door between washington and private equity is gonna need some maintenance Because it revolves a lot. Jerome Powell, the current Chief of the Federal Reserve, was a partner at the Carlyle Group. And three months after finishing his stint as Donald Trump's SEC Chair, Jay Clayton became Apollo's first ever lead independent director of its board of directors.

And those are just the head honchos. Private equity's money and political influence is so immense that it's been difficult for regulators to square up with. 

JEFF HOOKE: The government is reluctant to bring a case against the big name like Blackstone or Carlyle Private Equity because they think they can't win a case.

They just don't think they got the horsepower to go up against these gigantic blue chip Wall Street law firms. 

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: So you're saying that the SEC feels less powerful than some private equity firms? And as you might imagine, this unchecked growth [01:06:00] in private equity has also somehow correlated with the unchecked growth of P.

E. Executives bank accounts. In 2000 and five, there were three multi billionaires among the P. E. Executive class in 2020. It was 22. 22 multi billionaires. Just think of how ass their group chat is. You can chalk all of this up to the way the industry pays itself. Regardless of how investments perform, a private equity firm will charge a management fee of about 2 percent each year.

So a fund with 2 billion in management will baseline make 40 million annually. But the real clams come from this second thing called The performance fee. Unlike the management fee, the performance fee is 20 percent of a firm's annual profits, and it's taxed as capital gains, which means it's taxed as an investment you've held for over a year instead of income for your services.

This performance fee is more famously known as carried interest, and it's one of the biggest tools PE executives use to maximize their earnings. In fact, this carried interest tax rate is so important to the private equity industry that this spike [01:07:00] in lobbying spending in D. C. happened the same year that Congress first started having hearings about it.

JEFF HOOKE: Income tax, if you're really wealthy, might be 35 or 40 percent plus state tax. And the capital gains tax would be half of that. So there's a big, what you call benefit from having a capital gain as opposed to income. 

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: But for an industry that generates such an exceptional amount of wealth for its practitioners, surely they must get a great deal for their investors as well.

The answer isn't as obvious a yes as you might think. In July, the Wall Street Journal reported that for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis, benchmark private equity returns turned negative for the reported fiscal year. But since the government can't regulate private equity very effectively, it's pretty difficult to figure out what the industry's finances are.

Act actually look like even if you're an investor in the fund. 

PAUL KEIRNAN: In terms of regulation and I'll contrast this with like mutual funds You go to vanguard's website and you look at one of their mutual funds. You'll see a semi annual Report that's [01:08:00] got maybe 28 pages and it's got their expenses and that's required by regulation What is currently required by regulation is basically no disclosure, by funds, by private equity funds to their investors.

JEFF HOOKE: The investment process would all be hush hush, and for the private equity industry, you know, that's good. They can keep a lot of their fees hidden and their returns, which are mediocre at best, secret. 

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: And while there are studies claiming that private equity as a whole offers better returns than the stock market, there is reason to be skeptical about their numbers.

WARREN BUFFET: We have seen a number of proposals from private equity funds where the returns are really not calculated in a manner that, well, they're not calculated in a manner that I would regard as honest. 

CHARLIE MUNGER: Warren, all they're doing is lying a little bit to make the money come in. Yeah, that sums it up. 

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Those garbling muppets raise a good point.

One of the reasons why the returns can be tough to trust is that they're often calculated by people who are [01:09:00] hired by the firms themselves. For the most 

JEFF HOOKE: part, there's no outside party going in and doing a smell test. To some extent, the auditors might do it, like Pricewaterhouse or Coopers and Libra. The problem with them is they're getting paid by the PE fund itself.

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Are you sure? Are you sure? Okay. I'm receiving breaking news against all odds. The Southeastern Football Conference has announced the most significant regulations to private

I am sorry. The Security and Exchange Commission has announced the most significant regulations to the private equity industry in years. That makes much more sense, Dan. 

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The SEC imposing changes on hedge funds and private equity firms on fee disclosures. The move is meant to curb preferential treatment of certain investors.

There's the disclosure on a quarterly basis. of performance in a way that right now is not required per se. There's a element that prevents special deals. 

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: So, everything's fixed, right? 

JEFF HOOKE: So it's about 15 or 20 years too [01:10:00] late. You know, the train's left the station. The plutocracies become too powerful.

They'll be able to ride roughshod over these if they don't even try to get them thrown out in a car. 

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Well, the new rules have to mean something, right? Like, how fast could they sue them anyway? 

BRYAN CORBETT: So there are really three reasons why we're suing the SEC. 

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: Touché, suited egg man. That's Brian Corbett, CEO of the Managed Funds Association, one of the many groups that lobby for hedge funds and private equity firms and are currently suing the SEC for its recent regulation.

BRYAN CORBETT: We think the SEC in this final rule has exceeded its statutory authority. 

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: So as we stand today, private equity is mobilizing their cinematic universe of lawyers while the SEC tries to rein them in. for the first time in many years. So what does this mean for the future? Not just for private equity, but for us, everyday people whose lives have been, in one way or another, tied to this industry.

JEFF HOOKE: If I was a union employee looking forward to retirement, and let's say I can pose a few questions to my union representatives on the board of trustees of these [01:11:00] gigantic funds, I'd ask my representative, Hey, look, have you taken a closer look at this? 

GRETCHEN MORGENSON: I think it's a moment to really see Okay, what kind of capitalism do we want?

Do we want the kind that really benefits the, a broad array of people? Or do you want to have a system that benefits a tiny, tiny fraction of people at the expense? Of a lot, a lot, a lot of people. 

DAN TOOMEY - HOST, GOOD WORK: What type of capitalism do we really want? Do we even know the type of capitalism we already have? If investigating private equity teaches us anything, it's that powerful, profit seeking forces are indeed all around us.

In every part of our lives, in places we wouldn't even think to look. Wait a minute.

This YouTube channel is owned by Morning Brew. Morning Brew was bought by Business Insider in 2020. Business Insider is owned by Axel Springer, who is 43. 54 percent owned by private equity megafund KKR, which means For [01:12:00] good work, I'm 43. 54 percent private equity. 

How Private Equity Is Making Your Health Care Worse - The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder - Air Date 4-15-23

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: When did private equity really start to dip its toe into the healthcare industry, which is 20 percent of the United States economy, something like that? 

LAURA KATZ OLSEN: It's definitely 20, it's not only 20 percent of the U. S. economy, but it's a significant, Medicare and Medicaid, for example, are significant percentages of the federal and state budgets.

So, Willie Sutton says, why do you rob banks? Because that's where the money is. And that's why private equity is going into healthcare, because that's where the money is. 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Lots of money, unfortunately, I mean, on our show, we're Advocates for single payer... 

LAURA KATZ OLSEN: Let me answer your question, which I didn't. They did a little bit in health care [01:13:00] in the 1990s and a little bit in the early 21st century. But since 2015, they've just been accelerating dramatically and as they have more and more, what they call a dry powder. should I explain what that is? Yeah, go ahead. Okay. public pension funds, university endowments and nonprofit endowments.

So they started to get more and more dry powder, which is the money that these, investors are giving them and they have to spend it.

And so this money is growing and growing and the money is sitting there. And they finally decided that, hey, healthcare has a lot of benefits to it, including the fact, that it's very profitable. So, by about 2015, [01:14:00] they started, investing seriously in the healthcare sector. 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And this is, probably around the same time that some of these pension funds begin to move more into the stock market and into the investment sphere, is that correct?

LAURA KATZ OLSEN: Well, these pension funds started moving away from the stock market to private equity, right? 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Okay. That's yes. Gotcha 

LAURA KATZ OLSEN: Okay, I do I just read this morning that there's an average of about 14 percent of their and this is just an average Of their pension fund money now is in private equity and they keep investing more and more money.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Is it because they perceive it as less risky? 

LAURA KATZ OLSEN: It's definitely more risky. 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Right, but the perception might be that it's less [01:15:00] because, but based on your research, it definitely seems more risky. 

LAURA KATZ OLSEN: No, it's definitely more risky. And another problem, it's illiquid. You know, the private equity fund keeps this money for decades. But the reason they're investing more and more is because they believe, and I emphasize the believe that they're getting high rates of return. there is growing number of studies now showing this may not be the case anymore. It's very, very hard. private equity is very secretive. It's very hard to get any information, including the investors get very little information.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Right. Well, you were struggling to, to get anyone to give you, More information for your research as well On this side. I know you wrote a bit about how secret secretive they were and you trying to [01:16:00] get in the process of your research 

LAURA KATZ OLSEN: Well, they make all of the businesses that they buy sign nondisclosure and nondisparagement clauses and at the risk of losing the money that they were given.

So, people are very, very reluctant, obvious, obvious reasons to talk about the, um, the problems that they experience that once they've sold their small business. A lot of these small businesses in health care. Uh, whether it's autism or eating disorders or drug and alcohol rehab centers, a lot of the original owners really care about the issue and really care about their patients.

And they don't understand, there's a lot of naivety among physicians, for example. They don't really understand what they're getting into. Because they're, they're told that what the private equity firm is going to do [01:17:00] is take care of the annoying stuff and there's lots of annoying stuff with, uh, rules and regulations and, uh, handling, uh, you know, patient, uh, times that they're coming and all of that.

That's all going to be taken care of the private equity by the private equity firm, so as to allow the, let's say, physician or provider to practice what they want to practice. It's a big thing. They let physicians practice medicine, but the reality is they are totally controlled by the private equity firm.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Can you talk, uh, expand a bit on the, the point about how private equity is targeting, uh, places like eating disorder centers, uh, re, rehabilitation clinics, autism treatment, uh, facilities, because [01:18:00] they're a little bit, there's a little bit less, uh, government oversight into, uh, Into some of those, those facilities and they've, I think been, and correct me if I'm wrong, um, targeting them for that particular reason.

LAURA KATZ OLSEN: Well, one of the reasons that they're targeting, uh, healthcare obviously is because that's where the money is. Uh, that's where the profits are. Uh, the aging population, Um, the affordable care act, which put more patients on the, but also, uh, healthcare is fragmented. I mean, lots and lots of small agencies, mom and pop shops that they, then they, they, they, what they'll do is they'll buy, um, what they call a platform, like a flourishing [01:19:00] company.

And then they will add on to that company. By taking on these fragmented, these small mom and pop shops or agencies, buying those companies and making it larger and larger, which increases the value exponentially, but also gives them local, regional, uh, state and sometimes national monopolies so that they can control the costs.

Gotcha. Gotcha. And, um, can I just, can I just say one thing, which if I don't get in, it won't, because this is one of the most important things when they buy a company, the private equity firm puts in about 2 percent of the value, only 2%, the pension funds and endowments [01:20:00] put in about 38%. And the rest of that is paid for by debt.

Now, the debt is paid back by the companies they bought. So whether it's the large company, which is the platform, or the add ons that they buy, it's the companies, not the private equity firms, that pay back the debt.

Sociology Ruins Private Equity Part 1 - Sociology Ruins Everything - Air Date 11-1-21

EILEEN APPELBAUM: You have private equity firms, you probably have heard of some of them, Blackstone, Carlisle, Apollo. These big firms sponsor investment funds. What that means is they recruit investors for their fund. The private equity firm looks for institutional investors. To put money into it. And so what do I mean by an institutional investor? This will be a pension fund, a university endowment, a foundation of some sort and sovereign wealth funds.

Those are the main institutional investors and they recruit them [01:21:00] to put up the equity in the private equity fund. So that's where the equity comes from. And it's important to know that the private equity firm itself puts up one to two cents for every dollar. The other, uh, investors in that fund put up the private equity firm calls all the shots.

It has something called a general partner, which is not a person. It's a committee made up of principals in the private equity firm. So that's the decision maker, the general partner. And then you have all these other people that they've recruited to put money in. They're called limited partners. They are the private, we'll just call them private equity investors.

Those are the investors. Okay, so that's the equity and that's where the down payment comes for buying a company. So the private equity fund does make a down payment and then it finances the rest of the acquisition with debt. [01:22:00] And, uh, it's one thing for you to put down 20 percent on your house. It's 20 percent on a multi million or even billion dollar company and raise the rest.

In debt. It's a huge amount of debt. And now the interesting twist, which nobody can believe the first time they hear it is that the private equity firm owns the portfolio companies that are being purchased with this equity down payment in debt. But the debt has to all be paid back by the company they acquired.

So, to just say it over again, you have this investment fund. It does have money in it that came from the limited partners, and that becomes the down, that's the private equity fund, and that becomes the down payment on the business. And all the rest of the financing is in the form of debt. And the interesting and unbelievable fact is that while the private equity [01:23:00] Firm owns this company.

The company has to pay back the debt, and if it can't pay back the debt, the private equity firm and the private equity fund and the general partner in the private equity fund who made the decision about how much debt to put on that company, they get away scot free. They have no responsibility for paying back any part of this debt goes into distress.

The first thing it does is it squeezes its workers. It's trying to find money to keep to keep them business. So that make the payments on the debt. And if it can't do that, then it goes into bankruptcy. Sometimes bankruptcy ends in liquidation, as was the case with Toys R Us. And sometimes bankruptcy, uh, ends with some sort of restructuring of the company.

It depends on the creditors. That's the point at which it depends on the creditors. So you have, okay, all this debt was put on the company. Somebody loaned them that money. [01:24:00] And the lenders of that money took a look at Toys R Us and said, we have a better chance of getting some of our money back. Certainly they're not going to get it all back, but getting some of our money back.

If we have this, we liquidate the company, get rid of all the employees, sell off all the stores for other uses and take that money and pay ourselves back for all this debt. Other cases, they may look at a situation and say, well, if this company just restructures them this way and that way, we'll take a haircut on the debt.

In bankruptcy, the company always gets to reduce some of its debt. Uh, so the creditors are going to lose money on it for sure. But they look at the situation and say, we have a better chance if this company keeps operating. So that's how it turns out that sometimes they liquidate and sometimes they just restructure.

But the interesting point is that the folks who decided to put all that debt on [01:25:00] that company have no responsibility for paying off that debt. 

MATT SEDLAR - HOST, SOCIOLOGY RUINS EVERYTHING: How did you get into this particular line of research? 

EILEEN APPELBAUM: So, I've been studying private equity since, uh, 2010, when I first became really aware of how much what we thought was negotiations between labor and management really was, management was really not able to speak for itself, that there was, uh, someone behind a curtain pulling the strings.

And, uh, we wanted to know more about it. Uh, so this is work I've been doing with Rosemary Bott, a professor at Cornell University. I was at Rutgers when we started. We had the idea that this would just be something small and quick and easy to understand. And so we offered to write a small volume, just a little, a monologue, monograph rather, on private equity for 25, Four years [01:26:00] later, a few hundred pages later, we had our book private equity at work when Wall Street manages Main Street, in which we lay out a lot of the private equity model that came out in 2014.

Of course, there have been many developments since and Rose and I continue to write about private equity and all the new, all the new bad things it's doing. So, so just to be clear, there are. Thousands, probably 8, 000 private equity funds out there, and most of them are smallish funds. And these private equity firms that sponsor these funds by smallish companies.

When you buy a smallish company, one thing you notice is there are not many assets to mortgage. And consequently, they don't use excessive debt, not because they wouldn't like to, But because they can't, and because these are small, usually family owned companies that they take over, uh, there's a lot of room for operational improvement.[01:27:00] 

There's room to put people on their board of directors who understand business strategy and can help them make inroads where they haven't already done that. And these are really the success stories. And so we talk about them in the book, Private Equity at Work. We try to be even handed and to say that there are.

Many cases among those 8, 000 funds, uh, where this is going on, but this is not where the bulk of the money goes. The bulk of the money, overwhelmingly, the money that goes out to private equity firms that sponsor these funds. There are 300 private equity firms worldwide that, that get most of the funds, uh, that have these huge.

investment funds and can't take on small companies because the transactions costs are too high. So they go out and buy big companies. And the, the size of these is just growing tremendously. So Carlisle announced that it was going to [01:28:00] raise a 27 billion fund, 27 billion. It used to be that a 5 billion fund, which is the definition of a mega fund was rare.

Now 5 billion funds are becoming common. And we have Carlyle going out for a 27 billion fund, and not to be outdone, a few weeks later, Blackstone just announced that it's going out for a 30 billion fund. Well, when you have funds that big, all you can do is invest them in really Big companies, uh, and those companies have, uh, very, that they already have modern accounting systems.

It wouldn't be worth a couple of billion dollars if they didn't already have modern accounting systems, modern IT systems, good business strategy, good operating, uh, the strategies or the policies. So there's not much left to do to make money with them beyond some sort of financial engineering.

SECTION B - POWER

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Power.

The Sporting Class: Why NFL Owners Want Private Equity Cash - Pablo Torre Finds Out - Air Date 8-29-24

PABLO TORRE - HOST, PTFO: The NFL, [01:29:00] this week, took a vote. A vote on a subject that we've covered on this show previously, more generally, but specifically to them, it's about taking private equity investment.

And so, the proposal was 10%, up to 10%, which is not as much as the other leagues, which we're talking about 30%, uh, but David, to you, Private equity money in the NFL, landing in this way, the top line understanding that you have is what? 

DAVID SAMSON: Well, private equity money is very important as a source of capital. And what that means is when you are putting together money to buy something, you, uh, Have to find owners.

You have to find individuals to put in money, to buy a team. Sometimes you run out of individuals. You have to go to the capital markets, which means you go to a bank to borrow money, or you find a syndicate of banks to borrow money. Or if that doesn't work because you're tapped out, then there are these firms that are willing to invest in your company, except they require a heightened [01:30:00] rate of return.

So when you borrow money from a bank, You pay an interest rate. When you get money from a private equity firm, it comes in the form of an equity investment, but it's like a preferred equity investment which means that upon a monetization, upon a sale, they get back their money and a rate of return on their money before anyone else gets a rate of return on their money.

That's how private equity firms make money. And it is an amazing thing to be in a private equity firm because you invest in different companies. And you make a lot of money. And 

JOHN SKIPPER: With an amazing, favorable taxation rate. 

DAVID SAMSON: That is also true. I can't deny that. 

PABLO TORRE - HOST, PTFO: Which is a feature of American capitalism. 

DAVID SAMSON: Which is, which is, well, it's all, it's all in the code.

It's not illegal. Oh, sure. I didn't suggest it was illegal. It may not be moral. 

JOHN SKIPPER: I wouldn't even suggest it's immoral. I would suggest it's unfair. 

DAVID SAMSON: It is unfair, it's unfair in the way it is unfair. 

PABLO TORRE - HOST, PTFO: A bug, arguably, morally, but a feature financially. It is a [01:31:00] tiny bug. 

DAVID SAMSON: But what the NFL is doing by having this vote, they're the last league, and I think we should point that out.

MLB, the reason why MLB allows private equity investment to end the NBA And the NHL. Is they want their Value of the teams to keep going up. So if you're buying the commanders for six billion dollars, Josh Harris had to come up with six billion dollars between the people he knows and the banks he does business with.

It's hard to do that. 

PABLO TORRE - HOST, PTFO: But, but John, just to make this even more plain English here, what these teams and these leagues are realizing is, there aren't enough players. Super, super, super rich people to keep pace with the idea of a single owner of a super, super, super rich asset. 

JOHN SKIPPER: Well, and you've also got the realization by owners that most of the benefits of owning a team don't require you to own more than 50.

1%, right? You get to sit in whatever seats you want. You get to pick the personnel who run your team and do things if you choose to. Uh, [01:32:00] And so why should they put 6 billion in when they could put 3. 1 billion in, get all the benefits of ownership other than the, they're giving away half the upward valuation.

And as David pointed out, the private equity guys will actually get a favorable return. But that's not why most people own teams. They own teams because they're the greatest trophies you can have to display your importance and your wealth. 

DAVID SAMSON: But that's changing now, John. And these PE firms are not doing it because of the trophy.

They're not. Well, I know. And that is where some rub may end up coming in. Big time. So what's, what's changing? Why is this happening? So the PE firms, if they're going to invest, what they do is they've got a, uh, picture you having, uh, A hundred million dollars, just for fun, Pablo. And you're deciding how to diversify Let's take a break while Pablo and I consider that.

PABLO TORRE - HOST, PTFO: Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna recline here for a second. 

DAVID SAMSON: Oh, thank you. That was really great for the audience. For YouTube on the DraftKings 

PABLO TORRE - HOST, PTFO: Network, I was chewing on a pen [01:33:00] like a guy with nine figures. 

DAVID SAMSON: So

Come on, buddy, you can do it. I was gonna use a different amount. I was gonna use like a billion dollars, but I decided to bring it down to a number that I thought that you would be okay with. Oh, 

PABLO TORRE - HOST, PTFO: I'm sorry, David is unimpressed. I'm impressed by the hypothetical. 

DAVID SAMSON: Right, the hypothetical doesn't even make sense.

This is why, this is Rich Guys Only fans. It's not, it's math. But we're good. Back to a hundred million. You've got a hundred million to invest. You want to find different sectors. You want to diversify your investments. What these firms have said is, you know, sports teams keep going up in value. We keep buying corner grocery stores and widget stores.

I think we ought to be investing in sports teams because they do well. We don't need good seats. We don't need to stand on the stage when we win a Super Bowl. But man, it seems like when you buy a team and sell a team, that's one hell of a return on investment. 

PABLO TORRE - HOST, PTFO: So this is quite different from previous minority owners, right?

Big time. So previously, what is it like to be a minority owner 

DAVID SAMSON: of a team? [01:34:00] Previously, because the numbers were lower, it's called a CPI. That is a Cocktail Party Investor. That is someone who puts in a little shtuple of money into the team. 

JOHN SKIPPER: This is an industry term, the CPI. This is, this is. I thought that was Consumer 

Price Index.

DAVID SAMSON: I always say that it's the Cocktail Party Investor because they get to go to cocktail parties and say, Hey, I own. The Marlins. Oh, I've never heard of you. Yeah, no, I'm one of the owners of the Marlins. And they put in 250, 000 bucks, and they get to tell everybody that they're an owner. The numbers have changed significantly.

To be a CPI, it's not an ordinary CP that we would be invited to. It is now for the super, super wealthy individuals. And we're pretty much out of those parties, which is why you start with PE. 

PABLO TORRE - HOST, PTFO: So, John was explaining the upside of being an owner Uh, an owner in any form of these teams as, as essentially, yes, the CPI dynamic, the court side.

I get to be, uh, the owner of this precious piece of art, a [01:35:00] single, a symbol and a signal of exclusivity. Um, the NFL, of course. Is the apex predator of all of these leagues, right? And so here are the numbers over the past 20 years, the NFL's total value has risen from 23. 46 billion to 190 billion, 710%. The S& P 500 by contrast has risen about 660 percent during the same time span.

JOHN SKIPPER: Which does kind of prove the fact that all for almost any ordinary human being, the best way to invest your money is to put it in the S& P 500. 

DAVID SAMSON: If people are out there asking what do I do with my thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars or a hundred thousand dollars Put it in an index fund and then forget about it like revisit in 50 years But it's funny that that is the difference but in any case the NFL as the apex predator what's interesting is is what they're talking about in the NFL, however, is totally different than what the other leagues do.

The other [01:36:00] leagues took votes with owners, and they approved private equity investments in order to keep valuations rising. But for the NFL, it wasn't good enough. 

PABLO TORRE - HOST, PTFO: Right. So the NFL doesn't have the same problems of other leagues because the Cowboys, the Dallas Cowboys, uh, their valuation in 2019, John, was 5.

5 billion. Now, as of August 2024, from Sportico, 10. 32 billion. Uh, you go down the list, the Rams 7. 79, Giants 7. 65, Patriots 7. 31, you can go It's These are all, all, uh, so much richer, so much more expensive, valuable than their equivalents in other sports. And so the NFL, what do they want here? What's, what's the, what's the, what's the reason why they're approving to do this vote?

DAVID SAMSON: They want those numbers to be real for starters, and I'm not yucking on Sportacus Yum or on Forbes, but those valuations were never really looked at within baseball. We never could go to a bank for that. And bring out the Forbes article [01:37:00] and say, Hey, lend us money, our team is worth blank. We never were able to use that.

How did you get the 1. 2 billion, David Sampson, that you got for the Florida Marlins? Having nothing to do with Forbes, clearly, the way we got it is when supply demand. It's when you have two people who want the same trophy, they're going to bid up the price of that trophy. It's really that simple. And I love the fact that I get credit for that transaction, but I feel as though that my Beagle could have done that.

Well, it's, it is not my fault. You can't blame a seller when a buyer overpays for an asset. I don't believe. 

JOHN SKIPPER: Yeah, and you could question even the overpaid, if they are happy to pay 1. 2, and they get to sit in the seats they want, and it makes them happy, they didn't overpay. 

DAVID SAMSON: They're despondent beyond repair, and they're losing money hand over fist, and they'd sell it for 1.

2 in a heartbeat if you want to buy a team. You can buy the Marlins today. All you have to do is give them their money back, plus the losses they've incurred. But getting back to a broader subject, the NFL wasn't satisfied with just being like the [01:38:00] other leagues. And that's what fascinates me.

Project 2025 is All Trick, No Treat (with Peggy Bailey) - Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer - Air Date 10-29-24

GOLDY - HOST, PITCHFORK ECONOMICS: Recently, you took a bullet for the rest of us in that you’re not just looking at the type of policy that you want to do, but you actually went through the Republican proposals, including the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025. If you could just, I don’t know, broadly describe what the Republican agenda would be if they had complete control.

PEGGY BAILEY: Sure. So right, in addition to making sure we’re four things, we need to make sure to point out the things that people really need to fight against, especially those of us who are interested in helping people with the lowest incomes be able to live lives that are not just stable, but to be able to thrive. And so the overriding thing to understand is exactly where you were headed, that Project 2025 [01:39:00] is part of a suite of Republican proposals that all have the same themes, have the same policies, and are moving in a direction that really benefits the wealthy and wealthy corporations and shifts a lot of the burden to low and middle income families.

Big picture, there are a few ways that we’ve kind of organized the elements of Project 2025. The first thing to know is that these proposals would cut benefits, benefits that people have right now and benefits that they rely on, whether it’s cutting access to health insurance, cutting access to food, housing, blocking people who are immigrants from being able to come to this country and live the American dream. There are ways that the proposals would seriously undermine people’s ability to keep benefits that [01:40:00] they already have.

The second thing that these proposals would do is shift costs from the federal government to state’s governments. We know that when the federal government doesn’t live up to its responsibilities, it’s states and localities that then bear the burden. One example of this is in the homelessness space, where the federal government doesn’t provide universal rental assistance and therefore many people are living on the streets because they can’t afford a place to live. It’s states and localities that are trying to address that problem when the federal government really does need to step up to put its resources behind that problem.

The third thing that it would do is shift the tax burden from wealthy corporations and wealthy people to middle and low income people by continuing and making deeper the tax cuts to [01:41:00] the wealthy that were included in the 2017 tax bill while not providing any positive tax relief to low and middle income families.

The fourth thing that the proposals would uniformly do is simply undermine the federal government in totality, getting rid of agency’s wholesale, hurting our ability to provide safe food, safe water, healthcare, protect fair housing rights, things like that would be undermined with the lack of investment. One thing that’s overarching everything that you can’t shy away from is the racism and discrimination that is inherent in all of these proposals. They may look colorblind, but their impact is most definitely not and would disproportionately impact people of color.

PAUL - HOST, PITFORK ECONOMICS: One of the rebuttals I’ve heard to conversations about Project 2025 is that every presidential candidate makes promises and they [01:42:00] don’t follow through on them. Do we have confidence that these are policies that Trump would pass in a hypothetical second term, or if Trump wins the presidency and there’s a Democratic House, would that offer a check to the proposals?

PEGGY BAILEY: Well, that’s why it’s important to understand that Project 2025 is just one data point in the overall extreme Republican agenda. In our report, we highlight the Republican Study Committee’s budget proposals, we highlight the House Budget Committee’s recent resolution. Those three things put together along with evidence of recent legislative activity, show that this isn’t about the current presidential election so much as part of a steady strategy that extreme Republicans have. If you think about the Dobbs decision and the reversal of Roe, that was a 50-year march to get to the [01:43:00] place we are today. We should think about these proposals that would punish people with low and middle incomes and benefit the wealthy and wealthy corporations as part of that same sort of consistent steady march that we need to work against.

GOLDY - HOST, PITCHFORK ECONOMICS: And to be clear, this isn’t about fiscal responsibility. It’s not like, “Oh, we’ve got to make the tough choices in order to balance the budget and get our books in order.” It creates massive deficits at the same time that it defunds the federal government, disinvests in the American people and just makes cuts, and we’ll go into some of the details, cuts to programs that people just take for granted, but it’s just huge deficits come out of this due to the tax cuts for wealthy and corporation side of this.

PEGGY BAILEY: Exactly. Another piece that [01:44:00] has to be considered is the lack of raising revenue in any of these strategies. The three proposals that I highlighted would repeal parts of the Inflation Reduction Act that call for increased spending in the IRS as an example. So it’s not only cutting taxes for the wealthy and wealthy corporations, but cutting the federal government’s ability to enforce the tax rules that are on the books. And that’s just one way that these agendas don’t think about the need to raise revenue because it’s just unfathomable to think that in the wealthiest country in the world, we can’t take care of people with low incomes.

We know that it isn’t their fault necessarily that they have low incomes. They’re working, they’re not getting paid [01:45:00] wages that allow them to afford to meet their basic needs or they face inabilities to be able to work and federal benefits like Social Security don’t pay high enough for them to afford their basic needs. Therefore, it is the government’s role to fill in that gap until we do create the structures to have living wages in either through work or through public benefits. And so that mindset of the pie is only so big so we can’t afford to do this. Just really when you think about the wealth in this country and the disproportionate way that economic justice shows up, we can make the changes if we want to.

Matt Stoller: Monopoly, Medical Care & More - The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow - Air Date 10-21-21

MATT STOLLER: So, you know, the Reagan quote, you know, the nine most dangerous words in the English language. Um, today, if he were saying that he said the nine most dangerous words in the English language, or I'm from Comcast and [01:46:00] I'm here to help. I got a whole conference of libertarians to laugh at that. So, They know what's going on. Like, they might think, Oh, yeah, yeah. But like, in their bones, you know, if you if you laugh at that joke, it means you know, that the corporate bureaucracies are just massively problematic.

And I don't want to like let it's not that the government bureaucracy isn't a problem, because it is it in fact, they are linked, because what you have with it. You know, the, the, a lot of the bureaucracies in DC is that they are, they have this kind of symbiosis with big, big corporate, uh, big corporate actors.

And when you, you know, it's like, it's pretty easy to regulate small banks, right? Cause small bankers are, they're focused on just their communities. And when a regulator comes the, they hand over what they need, they fix things, whatever. But when you go to regulate a big bank, You don't even get to really deal with the bankers is what I'm told by regulators, like you get, you have to deal with a special group, which [01:47:00] is, you know, we'll give you maybe PowerPoints on what they're thinking of doing and they will fight you and they will go to, you know, up a political level.

And so you never really get to see have any visibility into what the bank is doing. And it's just easier not to fight that. And that's a function of scale. And you see that across the economy. It's safe. I guarantee you that, like, you know, Pfizer gets a better hearing at the FDA than some, like, random company that's, you know, making something that might be competitive, like, it's true kind of across the board.

You have this, like, you know, it's a club, um, at, at every one of these agencies. And the reason that it's got so bad is, you know, is because We have these concentrations of private power. If you broke up these companies, if you had, then you wouldn't like, they wouldn't have to, they wouldn't spend their time thinking about how to capture politics.

They would spend their time trying to beat their competition and providing better products. Like that's what, that's why like, fundamentally, the reason you don't want concentrations of private economic power [01:48:00] is because that becomes That's just power. That's not it's not private economic power. That's just an accumulation of power.

It becomes political power and it fundamentally becomes authoritarian power. And when you're dealing with CBS, right, and you're trying to deal with with them, um, effectively threatening your health, right, and putting stress on you, you're dealing with an authoritarian, government in that sphere, right?

That's what, that's authoritarianism. It's just in this very narrow sphere. So yeah, you have democracy, you can go to the voting booth, you can do all these things, you have free speech, right? We can complain about this, but in that particular area, in terms of the access to medicine that you need, you are dealing with a dictator and that like with very limited rights.

And that's a very, very significant political problem as more parts of our society. Get consolidated under the hands of these mini dictators. We start to look around and we start saying, wait, are we actually a free living in a free society? And we sort of we mostly are right. We're [01:49:00] not. We're not in a dictatorship.

I don't want to overstate it. 

RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: Right. 

Speaker 17: But, you know, corporatism is not a totally free society, and the more corporatist you get, the more you kind of bleed over, um, into what we're seeing. 

RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: And it's certainly not democratic in the sense that, I mean, take my medication, for example. If it had been a policy decision of, uh, you know, the Centers for the CMS or whomever that, uh, uh, that this should not be a covert drug, I could, you know, write my congress representative, I could write, uh, the White House and say, look, you know, this is a autocratic unfair decision and, you know, maybe they won't listen, but if a hundred thousand of us did, maybe they would, et cetera, et cetera.

The government had nothing to do with this issue. 

Speaker 17: There would be public debates about it, too. There would 

RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: be public 

Speaker 17: debates? It's like, like, Congress, like, argues a lot about Obamacare, right? But when CVS [01:50:00] bought, or Aetna, CVS bought Silverscripts, right? That was just a, the decision, the debate happened in two boardrooms.

And the public had no access to it at all. 

RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: And the decision not to cover this drug, which effectively means to deprive people of it, was made in boardrooms. It was not, you know, and there's no recourse, you can't, you know, write your congressman about it because the government has outsourced this very important policy decision to a corporation.

Speaker 17: Right into a monopoly, right? Because you had a lot of insurance companies and a lot of, you know, and, and they, if there were alternatives, it would be different, but they know that, that, um, that there aren't, right? And all of it's based in, you know, and I mean, that's where the network of commercial bribery and kickbacks comes in because that helps, you know, The reason they're, they're using, um, these kinds of, of tactics, um, is to exclude [01:51:00] competitors, right?

That that's the other thing is, is that, you know, that's why like Aetna says pony up if you want to be on our formulary. Right, 

RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: right. And you know, there's a last thing on the health care maybe is, uh, of course, they, they keep the system afloat with the mythology of being a smart health care consumer, right?

This is the mythology as if, as if, you know, one individual up against a monopolistic https: otter. ai Uh, situation is going to have any difference. Well, you know, first of all, you can't know what conditions you're going to develop in the next year. So you don't know your needs, but secondly, you know, in fairness to me, I was a smart shopper on this one.

I looked, I checked, they covered it, but you can't be a smart shopper if they get to change the product halfway through, which is also to me, a characteristic of monopolies, isn't it? 

Speaker 17: Yeah. Um, Yeah, I mean it that it's a it's a version of [01:52:00] dominance and you know, it kind of loose. It's a loose, loose type of fraud.

And You know, look, fraud happens in every business, uh, and every line of business. It doesn't, it's not unique to monopolies, but the difference is that when you, when somebody cheats you and they're a monopoly, you have to go back to them. Right. So it's like, it humiliates you and she eats you, but you don't have a choice, but to go back and fight with them for, 

RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: you know, if 

Speaker 17: I get, if I buy something, you know, and it's not a good product and I can, I can, you know, find a different.

Version of that from a different manufacturer. I will, but that's, that's not a, um, an option here. So, yeah. 

RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: Right, it's like, you know, if I buy a shampoo and it's terrible, I can say, your shampoo sucks, I'm gonna buy a different one, but, you know, maybe not the best example in my case, but, you know, no, it's, you gotta use this shampoo forever.

[01:53:00] So, that, that to me. Is the essence of all of this, and I guess we may never get to the Cantillon effect, Matt Stoller, but I 

Speaker 17: can do a really short version of that. 

RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: Do a short version, and then maybe I'll have a last, ask you for a last thought on conservatism, but okay, go ahead. 

Speaker 17: All 

RJ ESKOW - HOST, THE ZERO HOUR: right, so 

Speaker 17: the Cantillon effect is based on a 17th century or 18th century French economist, sort of one of the first economists.

Um, and he, what he said, his name is Cantillon. And what he said is that when, you know, when you have a gold mine, right, if then the people near the gold mine get money first, and then people far away from the gold mine get access to that money because money was gold. Later on. And that has a distortionary effect on inequality and on inflation.

Um, to bring it forward to today that we don't have, we don't use gold, but the, the fed is Prince money. And so whenever we have a bailout and I wrote the piece on the country on fact, during the [01:54:00] March, 2020 bailouts, although we'd saw bailouts much earlier than that as well, 2008, nine, the closer you are to wall street and the fed, the faster that money reaches you.

So this was a way of explaining. Why, uh, you know, private equity, why the big banks got money very quickly, why rich people got money very quickly, because they are very close to Wall Street. They have accounts with The people that deal directly with the Fed, um, and why small businesses who have to work through a rickety system of small banks that have a very poorly staffed agency, the Small Business Administration, why it took them much longer to get access to that safety net.

And then why individuals also had problems as well, because our main connection to the government is through the IRS. And that is also underfunded and rickety. So it's about, you know, it's about the institutions of money creation. And we have traditionally assumed that money is what's. called neutral, which is that if you put some money into the economy, it hits everyone equally at once.

In fact, that's not true. The money is, [01:55:00] is not a neutral commodity. If you want it to be neutral, it flows along the institutional frameworks of our society. Right now, the institutional links between the fed and the, the, the wealthy and dominant firms are much stronger than the institutional. Additional links to everyone else.

Um, so money is is not neutral. It didn't used to be this way from the thirties to the seventies. We actually had a pretty neutral set of systems. You had a whole bunch of different financial institutions that did connect people to the Fed into our centers of monetary power. So money was more neutral, but we sort of have systematically taken Apart.

So that's the continual effect why Wall Street gets a bailout and why you don't.

How Private Equity Ate Britain - Bloomberg Originals - Air Date 6-7-24

MADIS KABASH - HOST, BLOOMBERG ORIGINALS: To understand what's been going on here, we're going to look at Morrisons.

For much of its existence, it was family owned. And until recently, it was one of the big four supermarket chains. 

Speaker 61: Well look and you'll know, our prices are low, whenever you shop at Morrison's. 

MADIS KABASH - HOST, BLOOMBERG ORIGINALS: Look at this chart. It shows how Morrison's valuation compares to US retailers as a multiple of their earnings.

That's just a way of comparing companies on a [01:56:00] like to like basis, even if the firms aren't the same size. And in the years immediately after Brexit, the valuations were pretty comparable, until the pandemic came along. Then look what happened. The US retailers recovered with the post pandemic spending bump, Morrison's did not.

ABHINAV RAMNARAYAN: Morrison's valuation was cheaper compared to U. S. payers, making it quite attractive for an external buyer. 

ELEANOR DUNCAN: So in 2021, we're just coming out of COVID lockdown, and there is a bidding war for Morrison's between private equity firms. 

MADIS KABASH - HOST, BLOOMBERG ORIGINALS: The American firm Clayton DuBillier Rice emerged victorious, paying about 7bn in October 2021.

Just a few months earlier, Morrisons had been valued at four and a half billion pounds. But even that inflated price seemed worthwhile because low interest rates meant it was easy to borrow a lot of money. And Morrison's wasn't alone. Private equity piled into Britain in a big way in the years after Brexit.

ELEANOR DUNCAN: Post Brexit, there was a lot of uncertainty, um, in the UK economy. Um, I [01:57:00] think that was compounded by the effects of COVID. 

ABHINAV RAMNARAYAN: And suddenly these American private equity companies were looking at British assets that were valued far less than they were just a few months ago. Between 2016 and 2023, private equity companies spent nearly 200 billion buying British companies.

That compares to about 81 billion in Germany and 36 billion in France. Essentially, you walk down any UK high street and the chances are you're going to be looking at private equity owned firms on either side. 

ELEANOR DUNCAN: The Body Shop, Pizza Express, Wagamamas. 

MADIS KABASH - HOST, BLOOMBERG ORIGINALS: In fact, there are scores of high street brands that are now controlled by private equity and similar investors.

And that was because British companies in general became a lot cheaper. You can see that in this chart. Publicly traded American companies simply became a lot more valuable than British ones after Brexit. A British firm that makes a dollar of [01:58:00] profit is, on average, given 11 of value. American firms get 20.

So remember that little shop we talked about earlier and how its purchase was financed with a lot of debt? 

ELEANOR DUNCAN: In the case of Morrison's, it was something like 6. 6 billion. 

MADIS KABASH - HOST, BLOOMBERG ORIGINALS: Here's the important bit. When CDNR bought Morrison's, interest rates were low. But since then, they have increased. 

ELEANOR DUNCAN: Around half of Morrison's debt, that's around 3 billion, is affected by interest rates going up.

So that debt is now much more expensive. 

MADIS KABASH - HOST, BLOOMBERG ORIGINALS: The reason that's a problem is that Morrisons competes with other supermarkets on price. And now it has to pay hundreds of millions of pounds more each year in interest payments. 

ABHINAV RAMNARAYAN: They were just about making enough money to pay their debt, which meant that when Aldi and Lidl came in during a cost of living crisis and cut prices, Morrisons simply couldn't keep up with them.

MADIS KABASH - HOST, BLOOMBERG ORIGINALS: That's helped Aldi overtake Morrisons as the UK's fourth biggest supermarket. To deal with the [01:59:00] suffocating debt load, Morrison's has sold assets, including a 2. 5 billion deal for its petrol stations in January. It's hoping that will let it offer lower prices to shoppers. These problems are besetting a lot of the businesses that private equity has bought.

ABHINAV RAMNARAYAN: All of this really matters because private equity backed companies employ 1. 9 million people in the UK. And their suppliers employ another 1. 3 million people. 

ELEANOR DUNCAN: So when these deals go wrong, it can have real world impacts. So it can mean higher costs of goods for consumers. And we can also see jobs lost.

This is something that a number of politicians are already quite concerned about. 

CHARLOTTE NICHOLS: How could you ensure the increase? Cost of borrowing won't be passed on to consumers. 

MOHSIN ISSA: We are not about sweating assets at all. Our customer experience, CSI, is improving as we speak today. And we are absolutely focused in delivering value for our customers.

ELEANOR DUNCAN: We've seen the owners of Asda, which are the billionaire Issa brothers. And [02:00:00] TDR being hauled in front of a parliamentary committee recently, where they were questioned about, you know, kind of so called price gouging. 

ABHINAV RAMNARAYAN: The Bank of England has been worried about increased private equity ownership of British companies.

They're worried about increased debt levels. And they're worried about the impact it will have on the British economy. 

MADIS KABASH - HOST, BLOOMBERG ORIGINALS: But with a general election on the horizon, the solution may not be as simple as imposing higher taxes on private equity deals. 

ABHINAV RAMNARAYAN: It's difficult for politicians to really crack down on private equity companies because after Brexit, Britain has been searching for external investment and options are thinning on the ground a little bit.

ELEANOR DUNCAN: Proponents of private equity firms say that The money that they bring into the UK economy is super important because there's just not that much foreign investment coming into the country right now. And I think that's the line that the Labour Party, if they do come into power, is going to have to tread very carefully.

SECTION C - SOLUTIONS

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally Section C: [02:01:00] Solutions.

Sociology Ruins Private Equity Part 2 - Sociology Ruins Everything - Air Date 11-1-21

MATT SEDLAR - HOST, SOCIOLOGY RUINS EVERYTHING: You're working on a project right now, the Private Equity Employment and Earning Inequality Project.

What is your research question? 

DYLAN NELSON: The research question is, How do private equity leveraged buyouts affect workers in different positions within the firm? 

MATT SEDLAR - HOST, SOCIOLOGY RUINS EVERYTHING: Obviously you can't speak about your results yet, but are you testing a particular hypothesis? 

DYLAN NELSON: Yes, I'm looking at four hypotheses right now, and This is comparing education on the one hand and the leverage in the buyout deal on the other and then interacting those two factors.

So education is giving you workers as a proxy in different positions within the firm and the cost of debt. In the general economy is giving you the proxy for the leverage in the deal and what I'm hypothesizing as I bring these together is that private equity buyouts of public firms [02:02:00] mostly are negatively affecting non college educated workers while actually benefiting.

College educated workers, but that this difference disappears somewhat when you look at these very high leverage deals, which mostly happened in the lead up to the great recession and to the 2000 recession. And what you see there is the effect on the higher educated workers actually moves negative and the effect on the lower educated workers moves even more negative.

MATT SEDLAR - HOST, SOCIOLOGY RUINS EVERYTHING: Sorry. So I'm trying to understand. It's this idea that as the debt ratio changes, there's a different effect among workers and education. 

DYLAN NELSON: Yeah, so the theory gets back to this idea of the conception of the firm and the conception of the restructuring process. When we have normal private equity buyouts, when the cost of high yield debt is very high, These are more focused on operational engineering and operational engineering brings skill bias, technological change, outsourcing, other factors that [02:03:00] increase earnings inequality based on education.

One of the things I'm showing in the paper is that when the cost of debt falls low and the leverage increases in the deals, the conception of the restructuring is more focused on financial engineering, and this ends up. Leading to a greater likelihood of bankruptcy and it leads to more job cutting and other Intermediate factors that reduce worker earnings after the buyout.

MATT SEDLAR - HOST, SOCIOLOGY RUINS EVERYTHING: So what is your methodology? I know that private equity data sets can be hard to obtain. So what are you using? 

DYLAN NELSON: This is a big question and it's one of the reasons that we haven't made a ton of progress on private equity. We know it's this important macro organizational phenomenon, and I know you've talked with Eileen about the amazing effects that private equity is happening, yet we often are not able to observe companies prior to and post being bought [02:04:00] out by private equity companies, and especially the workers under those different conditions.

So I'm using quantitative methods. To study these earnings effects of private equity buyouts. I'm using census data, which are collected by states and aggregated in the census department. And this allows you to do a couple of really interesting things. One, you can follow companies through restructuring and you can follow workers over time, because it's all linked through the social security number to you can see companies.

even when they're not public. A lot of the quantitative research in economic sociology uses the Compustat data, which is SEC filings for public firms. And three, you can look at workers actually moving between firms over time. You can use that for identification and also to ask research questions, including on the classic labor mobility questions of the 70s [02:05:00] and 80s, for which we didn't have actually a lot of evidence.

MATT SEDLAR - HOST, SOCIOLOGY RUINS EVERYTHING: For sociologists starting work in this area, what is a good jumping off point in terms of literature? Like, where do you start? 

DYLAN NELSON: I would start first with the Private Equity at Work book by Eileen and Rose. It explains basically the way that private equity works, it gives interesting case studies, and it reviews some of the literature on employment.

In terms of the broader private equity literature, it's mostly in finance. And I would recommend sociologists interested in these topics to look into those papers, because ultimately finance is a very sociological, uh, domain of the economy in terms of the institutions, uh, the relationship with government.

The flows of workers and change in the financial sector over the last 30 years. So some of those would be the Steven Davis project, [02:06:00] which has a number of papers over the years using census data to look at employment effects. And there are some other kind of newer research using administrative data from different companies.

Lily Fang at INSEAD. Olsen and Tagg are economists. They have some work on, uh, Nordic countries. In terms of sociology, Neely and Carmichael have a short article in the American Behavioral Scientist about Shadow banking, which they include private equity under that and the Oxford handbook of sociology of finance, which is useful to get started.

Matt Stoller: Goliath - War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy | 054 - Just Another Mindset Podcast - Air Date 2-7-23

ISMAEL VON DER GATHEN - HOST, JUST ANOTHER MINDSET: Why are monopolies the biggest threat we have in our economic system?

MATT STOLLER: Yeah, so if you want to, you know, people look at, at inequality or, um, as kind of a, um, You know, on the left, people look at inequality and they say, Oh, my gosh, there's so much inequality. Look at so and so has worth 100 billion and there's a lot of people in poverty. Um, and you can see that between, you know, [02:07:00] rich countries in the global South, there's like lots of ways to understand that problem.

You can also look at, you know, corruption and say, Oh, there's all this corporate influence over how our governments work. And, um, and you can look at it the other way as well. The, you know, conservatives would say, Oh, there's this collusion with government. Right. controlling corporations. All of that are, is a description of the consequences of what's happened.

Not, it's like you're describing the symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself. The disease itself is the consolidation of private power in the hands of the few, right? So the reason that someone is worth a hundred billion dollars, say, is because they have a over a vital Trade or service, and then they can charge effectively a private tax.

They own a important, um, uh, toll booth over a vital part of the economy. So you could look at like someone like bill Gates, you know, Microsoft controlled [02:08:00] access to the personal computer through Microsoft windows. Um, Google controls. access to the internet, right? When you're searching, um, and, and so on and so forth, right?

You can look at any industry and, and, uh, and if there's a tremendous inequality, it's because there is one Entity that's controlling the terms and the pricing in labor conditions. And if you want to address that, the obvious way to, to, to deal. So if you, if you want to address it on the backend and say, we need to deal with inequality, you might say, Oh, tax and redistribute or, um, or various other mechanisms to do something along those lines.

But if you want to address the heart of the disease, what you will say is. Let's not just have one, let's have two, or three, or four. Let's break their power. And if you can't do that because it's something like an electric utility when you're not going to lay [02:09:00] Multiple wires, you know, two wires to a house doesn't make any sense.

Then you just either have public ownership or just pricing rules from the government that says you're not going to be able to exploit this monopoly infrastructure, but either way, the symptom, uh, the, the disease is a consolidation of power in the hands of a few. That is essentially unregulated by any democratic system.

So that's, that's where we are. And, um, uh, yeah, I mean, there's a lot that we can talk about, but that's the, the fundamental, um, social, like, and this problem also caused a lot of, um, like a lot of the social concerns that I think we have, uh, the, the, the feeling that people don't have control over their, um, Over their, their community, their political system, the, the, the really really deep inequities between urban areas and rural areas.

The, um, General sense that that [02:10:00] there's a lot of speech that is kind of like incendiary and sort of out of control. All of these things are a function of this consolidation of power. And if you just look at the symptoms, then you'll go for things like censorship, you know, or you'll go for things like subsidies to maybe to rural areas or instead of what's really happening, which is there's this.

Massive appropriation of property by monopolists. And all you really have to do is stop that. And then you'll have a much more healthier, egalitarian, what's not going to be a perfectly equal society, but it'll be a society where everybody has the same political rights and people can control their, you know, have some control over their own communities and politics will be able to function in terms of being able to craft a society as opposed to sort of the weird, out of sense that everyone has today.

ISMAEL VON DER GATHEN - HOST, JUST ANOTHER MINDSET: We talk about addressing the disease, and one [02:11:00] factor I really like about your book is that you talk about monopolies and the consolidation of power over the past 100 or so years. Another question that I want to ask you is who was Wright Pettman? And why should everybody know about him?

MATT STOLLER: Yeah, right. Pat, that's a good question. So, so the book is about, Goliath is about, um, you know, the fights over a hundred years. It's not a sad story. It's a story about, it is certainly a story about why things are so screwed up today. And I, the reason I wrote it is because I was working in Congress during the financial crisis and I wanted to understand why I'm a Democrat, why my party engineered a foreclosure crisis and facilitated massive wealth redistribution upward.

Cause that's not why most, what most Democrats think of themselves. And we didn't do that like when we had similar crises like we did in the 19 late 1920s that foster the Great Depression. We didn't do that in the US, we did the opposite. We broke the monopolist. That's what Franklin [02:12:00] Delano Roosevelt did in the New Deal.

It's a book that's focused on the U. S. It does have some implications globally, because the U. S. is sort of a very powerful country and structured a lot of what happened. But, um, uh, but I was sort of, like, trying to figure out why did the U. S. do that? Why did we do what we did under Obama? And it's not really about Obama at all, but I was just trying to figure that out.

That's why I wrote the book. And what I found is, is this, there's, there is a series of fights. And one of the main characters is this guy that we've, we don't really know about today. His name is Wright Patman, who was a congressman who was elected first in 1929, 1929. And he was in Congress until 1976. In 1975.

And in 1929, he was elected and he immediately started fighting The kind of then monopolists who were very powerful that the secretary of the treasury was a guy named Andrew Mellon, who, um, was basically a billionaire back then when a billion dollars was a lot of money, uh, obviously it's a lot of money today, but it's a massive amount of [02:13:00] money in, in the 1929 and, uh, owned, I think he was on the board of 99 banks.

He was also the treasury secretary of the United States. So this is like a very powerful guy. Um, or at least he had been on the board of 99 banks before he took that job. And he and Patman got into a fight over how to handle the Great Depression. And eventually Patman filed articles of impeachment.

Mellon resigned. And then over the next 45 years or so, Patman went after bankers and monopolists. Those were the two things that he, those were his two kind of main goals. And he was very successful. He also helped build the administrative state. And then, and he was from a rural area in Texas, which is today very Republican, but he was a very partisan Democrat, very kind of left wing guy, but a populist, not a socialist.

And, um, and that tradition of populism, which in Europe, I think is considered a bad word, but is in fact, Not bad at all. It's just like, [02:14:00] if you mean fascism, you should say fascism. The reason people in Europe and in the U. S. say that populism is a bad word is because they don't like democracy and they're afraid of democracy.

And so they've misconstrued populism to mean fascism, but it's not, it's just normal people saying we don't like how bankers are running things. And that's what Patman was. And he eventually became the chair of the banking committee. And then in 1975, Uh, so in the, in that, you know, the, that period of time, like from really from the 30s until the 1970s, there was kind of like this period where the middle class in the U.

S. expanded dramatically, and then after World War II, that was global phenomenon. Um, and that was because of these anti monopoly policies. And then a new generation of leaders, this is kind of the Bill Clinton generation. emerged and they had a different intellectual tradition. And in 1975, they actually overthrew Patman.

So they kicked him out of his banking committee chair. And these were Democrats. This was not a Democratic Republican thing. This was a [02:15:00] fight in the Democratic party. And it was an intellectual fight over how do you build a good society? And the Democrats who emerged in the 1970s and afterwards thought the way you build a good society is You trust technocrats and experts and billionaires, and that's what they did.

And so since really the mid 70s, we've seen the emergence of, um, the growth, uh, massive, uh, massive growth of, of large multinationals and the domination of every one of our industries by monopolists. And I think you've seen similar trend driven by the same ideas, in some cases, the same people all over the world.

Um, And so Pabman, Pabman was kind of written out of history, even though he was very important. He was written out of history because the idea that you'd have A populist who has modern views of the economy was very, a very impressive thinker and, you know, not, not at an authoritarian at all, but just very, you know, democratic and the [02:16:00] method of addressing inequality was to address, regulate wall street, break up wall street, and also break up large firms and constraint constrained chain stores.

That's a very threatening, uh, idea. Uh, Because it gives the public a way to actually do things that doesn't sound crazy, but sounds very normal, because it is, right? And that, and Patman, I think, some of the laws, he wrote a law that constrains chain stores in 1936, it was called the Robinson Patman Act, which says that you're not allowed to sell goods and services, actually just goods, to large stores at better prices than to smaller stores.

You're not allowed to price discriminate if you're, if that would facilitate consolidation or monopolization. And this protected local stores and it protected the local, local economies all over the, the, the US. And that law, they just stopped enforcing it in the 1970s. They say roughly the same time that they overthrew Patman because they thought, Oh, chain stores are [02:17:00] good.

Local stores are bad. And today. The, uh, we're reversing the choices that we've been making since the 1970s. So the sort of Patman idea, Patman's philosophy is coming back. So the current chair of the federal trade commission, her name is Lena Kahn. She's bringing back and trying to enforce what's called the Robinson Patman act, which was written by Wright patman. Um, and this is going to have significant changes in the economy in general, but that idea that we want to constrain large firms who are engaged in, you know, Anti competitive or, um, unfair conduct is a, you know, it's coming back, um, pretty aggressively in the United States and somewhat in Europe as well.

And that's, I think, a reversion to the ideas that Patman had. And those ideas go back to, you know, you could take, take it back to the 1600s if you want to.

Private Equity and Healthcare with Senator Elizabeth Warren plus ANNIE! with Laura Tretter - Oddly Specific with Meridith Lynch - Air Date 5-15-24

MERIDITH LYNCH - HOST, ODDLY SPECIFIC: What motivated you to take a stand against private equity?

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: Well, think of it this way. Look, if somebody [02:18:00] wants to come in and invest in a business and grow that business, triple yoo hoo for them. I'm happy about that. That is not a problem. What I'm concerned about is the business model that much of private equity is used. where they pay what sounds like some fabulous amount of money, let's just say 100 million to buy this business or this chain of stores or whatever.

And then instead of that money going into the business to make the business stronger, to expand it, to clean it up, to freshen it, to do all those things. Instead, That money goes only to the investors who had owned the business and the new investors who are going to run it and suck value out of the business.

I, I think of it kind of like an old car. You've got a car, it's running, it's going on down the highway and what private equity does is it looks at it and says, Hmm, I think we could make money [02:19:00] off the tires and the engine. So they buy it, They pull out the engine and sell it to one group. They take off the tires, sell it to someone else.

And then they just leave what's left to rust by the side of the road. But they don't care, because they got their money back out of it. And the executives who originally owned that car got their money out of it. And you know who's left behind? Who's left behind are the employees, the retirees, the customers, the communities that counted on that business.

They're all gone. And this is just one more example of the The guys who understand financialization come in and they figured out how to make the rich richer and leave everybody else sucking air. And that's what I'm fighting here. 

MERIDITH LYNCH - HOST, ODDLY SPECIFIC: Senator Warren, what specific concerns do you have about private [02:20:00] equities involvement in healthcare, especially as exemplified by the situation with steward healthcare?

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: Yeah, boy, that's the right question. Hospitals are super duper important. Important to patients, important to employees, important to communities. Think of it this way. When private equity comes in and hollows out and destroys Toys R Us, I admit, I'm still pretty bummed about that. When they do that to Sears, oh, no, really?

When they do it to Kmart, darn. But when they do it to a chain of nine hospitals in Massachusetts, where that's the closest hospital for people who have a heart attack, for, you know, a mama who's trying to get a kid who's gashed her head on the playground and needs to get in and get stitches. Shorter. All those things where people need access to their hospital [02:21:00] immediately, private equity, when they destroy these hospitals, that has the potential to go away.

And there's the special twist, because when private equity comes in and hollows out a hospital, They know that there's a good chance that the local folks will not let the hospital close, so it will end up costing taxpayers money because they will have to infuse the cash back into the hospital to keep the hospital up and running, and that's what makes it particularly dangerous when private equity starts diving into the healthcare space.

MERIDITH LYNCH - HOST, ODDLY SPECIFIC: Yes, and you know, I have read that the mortality outcomes of private equity backed hospitals are actually lower than publicly owned hospitals. 

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: One of the things we know is, for example, uh, back during COVID, There were [02:22:00] nursing homes, some were private equity owned nursing homes, and some were privately owned, some were for profit, some were not for profit, but when you make that comparison, private equity, non private equity, the private equity owned nursing homes had a 40 percent higher mortality rate.

Just just absorb that for a minute. People literally die because of private equity. And why does that happen? Because private equity cuts staffing, because private equity cuts access to expensive medications, because private equity, as much as this one is going to shock you. I talked to some of the nurses.

Hospitals that have been taken over from private equity, and they talked about things like linens, whether or not there were enough clean linens to go around in the hospital, whether or not the hospital had continued paying [02:23:00] so that it had access to the To the database that tells you if a patient is taking drug A and drug B and you prescribe drug C, what is the likely interaction?

I mean, these are things. that directly affect the health and the health care of the people who come to these hospitals. And nobody hangs a giant sign out front that says, Private equity has taken over this hospital. So you better understand they may not have the equipment they need. They don't have the staffing they need.

And that's just fundamentally wrong. You know, this is a time you when we have to change the underlying laws and say that private equity cannot come in and just hollow out these businesses, suck up all the value for themselves, and leave behind a disaster for the employees, for the patients, for the customers, and for the [02:24:00] communities.

MERIDITH LYNCH - HOST, ODDLY SPECIFIC: Thank you for saying that. I tell people all the time when they say, Why are you, why do you care so much, Meredith? And I say, at the end of the day, It's truly a safety thing. If it isn't affecting you, it's going to affect your grandmother. It's going to affect your mother. So thank you for even bringing these conversations to light.

Cause they've been living in the dark. And so my next question for you is you have advocated for legislation that would claw back the compensation from the healthcare executives and wall street investors. How exactly would this work and what outcomes do you hope to achieve with that? 

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: So you'll figure out much of the answer from the name of the bill in Wall Street looting.

It's what we've named this thing. And the idea is just to put in place some curbs on private equity. Doesn't say that nobody can ever make any investments in these businesses or in these hospitals, but it says specifically, for example. If you are one of the investors who comes into one of these [02:25:00] hospitals and sucks all this value out and then the hospital implodes, you have to give back the money.

And that money can be used to rebuild the hospital. And, and I want to be clear, and same thing for Toys R Us, if you come in and suck the money out and then the business implodes, then you didn't buy this business. To help it. You didn't buy this business to expand it. You didn't buy this business to keep it going.

You bought this business to take the value out, sell it for parts, and leave the rusted shell behind. And that is not a business practice. That we want to advance. So partly it's about the executives and their own incentives. And by the way, I hope everybody understands right now, now that you and I are talking about private equity, that private equity actually gets special tax breaks.

that are not available to anybody else. So you [02:26:00] start your own small business, good for you, but you pay your taxes straight up. You go in under private equity and suck out that value. Right now you get special tax breaks, you get taxed at a much lower tax rate, and that means in fact all the rest of us are subsidizing private equity, the very entity that is hollowing out our hospitals, for example, and leaving the rest of us to pay to try to keep those hospitals back up and going.

So from my point of view, the Stop Wall Street Looting Act is just some common sense restrictions that say you want to invest in a business, good for you. But we're not going to help you hollow them out. 

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [02:27:00] [email protected]. 

The additional sections of the show included clips from The Market Exit, Good Work, The Majority Report, Sociology Ruins Everything, Pablo Torre Finds Out, Pitchfork Economics, The Zero Hour, Bloomberg Originals, Just Another Mindset Podcast, and Oddly Specific. Further details are in the show notes. 

Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet—Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew—for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to all those who support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no [02:28:00] ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion. 

So, coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com.